A favourite of mine from Neil Gaiman. I’m not sure about putting it all here, so I’ll link to the full thing:

That day, the saucers landed. Hundreds of them, golden,

Silent, coming down from the sky like great snowflakes,

And the people of Earth stood and stared as they descended,

Waiting, dry-mouthed to find what waited inside for us

And none of us knowing if we would be here tomorrow

But you didn’t notice it because

That day, the day the saucers came, by some coincidence,

Was the day that the graves gave up their dead

And the zombies pushed up through soft earth

or erupted, shambling and dull-eyed, unstoppable,

Came towards us, the living, and we screamed and ran,

But you did not notice this because

On the saucer day, which was the zombie day, it was

Ragnarok also, and the television screens showed us

A ship built of dead-man’s nails, a serpent, a wolf,

All bigger than the mind could hold, and the cameraman could

Not get far enough away, and then the Gods came out

But you did not see them coming because

…the rest.

Yesterday’s IE7 problem came back this morning, after Vista apparently reset ‘protected mode’ overnight (I hate this - why didn’t it do so in three restarts yesterday?). I’ve turned off UAC for now, but I’d like to find the exact cause. Is silly. Might have to resort to asking in newsgroups.

The only detail I had before arriving was ‘Internet Explorer won’t start up’. And so it proved. Double-clicking the icon produced a helpful Vista error message with no further details, and event viewer had the same info. The first port of call with IE problems is to disable third-party add-ons, and there’s a helpful “run without add-ons” shortcut hidden in the start menu. This crashed too. Hmph.

I reset the entire configuration from the ‘advanced’ tab of Internet Options and this fixed the problem. Once. After closing the browser it wouldn’t open again. On the basis that maybe the add-ons shortcut was lying, I tried disabling all non-MS add-ons. Nothing. Something was obviously getting its hooks into IE after the initial load, but I couldn’t find anything.

Much resetting later I found a fix: turn off ‘protected mode’. This was far from ideal, and not really addressing the issue. Vista’s IE7 ‘protected mode’ is designed to prevent IE from altering things it shouldn’t, and is a useful setting to enable on any machine which kids can access. Quick googling suggested some something must be trying to access a protected area on startup, killing IE in the process. I considered disabling the many MS ‘add-ons that run without requiring permission’, but they all looked necessary for IE to function at all.

I found another solution: disabling UAC. I haven’t used Vista much and UAC is already annoying the crap out of me, what with blanking out the screen for no apparent reason, supplying messages that I barely understand, let alone the average user, and generally whining about every other mouse click. I’d certainly disable it on my own PC, but I was reluctant to do so on someone else’s. Eventually I realised it only worked because turning off UAC automatically disables protected mode, so wasn’t helpful.

The machine is a couple of weeks old, and was working fine until yesterday, when Office 2007 and Norton 360 were installed. I suspect Norton, but then I’d probably suspect Norton if they’d only passed it on the shelf, such is my dislike of that program. I tried removing it, including running Symantec’s stand-alone uninstaller, but it made no difference.

I cleared out folders, ran the system file checker, scanned for spyware. Nothing helped. On XP I’d have reinstalled IE7, but there’s no way to do that on Vista short of reinstalling the entire OS. In the end I left it with protected mode disabled, but it’s niggling me. Even with the main shortcut working ‘no add-on’ mode still crashed, so it’s clearly still messed up under the surface. Annoying. Can anyone think of anything I missed, or a debugging technique I could have tried?

Two days of promotion on Radio 2 and I’m completely won over by Amy Winehouse’s cover of The Zuton’s’ Valerie. Everybody else knew this a year ago, but wow, the woman can sing. I like how she says ‘myself’.

The ’shuffle’ page on portrait-photos.org is lovely.

I have to expose a roll of black and white this week, ready for developing on Friday. Haven’t loaded a film in six years.

I thought I understood why more than 3gb of RAM has little value in modern machines, but it turns out I was wrong. Dan explains nicely:

Large areas of the memory between three and four gigabytes are cordoned off for system devices in exactly the same way that chunks of the Upper Memory Area were purloined in the old days.

*shudder*. I remember struggling with memory areas as a kid, and never really understood what was happening. It wasn’t until my A+ exam a few years ago that I finally got to grips with it. I think I’ll recommend memory-hungry clients top out at 3gb for the meantime - there doesn’t seem to be an easy way around it without going 64-bit, which brings many other difficulties.

The technology behind the content-aware image resizing video I linked to last month is now available as an end-user product at rsizr.com. I haven’t had a proper play with it yet, but it looks fun! Photojojo have links to a (free) plugin for The GIMP and a (not-free) plugin for Photoshop.

I’m fed up with not writing on my blog. There’ve been all sorts of things I’ve wanted to type up recently that haven’t made it out of my head, and it’s usually because I want to do them justice. That doesn’t seem to be working, however, so I’m going to try the less-coherent-as-written-late-at-night-but-at-least-there tactic.

With this in mind, here’s me this evening:

Neil Gaiman is one of a few fantasy authors I really rate, but it’s interesting how much more often he turns up in my thoughts and writings relative to the others. I think it’s because he’s a strong and accessible personality, and this ends up inextricably linked to his work. I’ve been thinking about it today, and I don’t think it’s any surprise he’s good friends with Jonathan Ross. They’re both very open about their lives, give every impression of being entirely decent people, and their characters are a strong part of everything they do. A Jonathan Ross show will always make use of his particular presenting style that (unless he’s an extremely good actor) is his genuine personality; a Neil Gaiman novel isn’t an anonymous fantasy text, it’s very much his style - his books of short stories contain explanations for how he came to write each of them, and when reading I feel like I’m becoming familiar with him as a person, and not just his writing. Neil Gaiman also writes daily on his blog - he’s written something about this evening already - and his family life has been a regular feature of my daily reading for over a year.

I booked tickets for an interview with him at the Criterion Theatre a few weeks ago. They were only £5, and with the train ticket at £10 there seemed little reason not to take a trip. I arrived in good time, and the theatre wasn’t quite full.

He started by reading an excerpt from Stardust. It’s always a bit nerve-wracking listening to authors read their own stuff - they’re writers, not public speakers, and it can be cringeworthy. In this case I realised after thirty seconds that I was completely engrossed in the story and barely aware of his reading at all. And I’ve read the book before. That’s some skill.

The Guardian’s literary editor asked a few questions about his past, and then it was opened up to the floor. The first person asked for a kiss, which got a good laugh, and plenty of interesting questions followed. Had he ever shelved a story with religious themes due to fear of offending people¹? Who would he want to play him in a film of his life²? What happened at the end of the (recent, and excellent) Steve Ditko documentary³? There was a quick draw for the winner of two tickets to tomorrow night’s Stardust premiere, and then it was over to the local Waterstone’s for a signing. I got lost.

It’s only 100m away, and I got lost. I tried to follow the crowd, forgetting that London is one big crowd. I found it a couple of minutes later, but by this point was near the back of the queue. I got chatting to a nice guy called George, and together we shuffled forwards in the evening drizzle, until finally getting through the doors about 45mins after arriving.

We were unsure whether there’d be books near the signing table, so headed to the graphic novel department to pick up something appropriate. There was nothing there - everything was near the signing table - so we went back downstairs and found ourselves the last two people in the queue. Which was fun Not long after this I started worrying about time. It was 2100, the queue was 100 people long, and the last train was at 2200, fifteen minutes away. We crept forward, and I could see it was going to be close. Waterstone’s was closing shortly, and before we reached the table they cleared the books away. I was very close to leaving, but in the end decided I’d get a coach home if necessary - I didn’t want to miss the opportunity, since I was by this point only 10 people away!

I finally reached the front, and this happened:

I explained that I hadn’t a book of his as they’d been cleared, but I did have this one on photographic theory and it’d be wonderfully surreal, and entertaining for my classmates, if he’d sign it. To be honest I can’t remember exactly what he said in reply, but I recall it as brief bemusement followed by a smile and something along the lines of ‘no problem’. ‘Not written by Neil Gaiman’ was a nice touch, especially considering he’d been signing books for over two hours solid by that point. George then quickly took a photo and I said thanks for all the hours of entertainment. It was a nice little moment. He gives every impression of being a very decent person in interviews, and in person practically exuded friendliness. Definitely a cool guy.

Then we ran, George not actually needing to but in solidarity with me, and we split at Piccaddilly Circus. I wish I’d given him a moo card as we got on pretty well. I reached Marylebone at 2203, and it turned out that the last train was at 2210. So I made it. Jammification!

1. no, although one story involving ‘feotal dreams’ never made it as he was worried some sadist would use it as anti-abortion material [↩]
2. anyone, providing they had Dylan Moran’s hair [↩]
3. they chatted with him for a while [↩]

I wasn’t ready to drive to London late on Thursday, so headed straight to the Harrow campus on Friday morning. After a full day of lectures I met up with Abi at half 6, then we headed off on the supposedly twenty-minute journey over to our friends in Kilburn. Having never really driven in London before, I came to this conclusion: I have no clue how people do it without dying.

It was mental. I’d wait for the exit to clear at a yellow box-junction and have three people overtake. People jumped red lights as I was trying to turn right in front of them, then took umbrage at my being in their way. And don’t even mention roundabouts. We reached our destination an hour later, then set off for Devon at about 2000. We arrived at 0300, after hitting two major traffic jams on the M4.

I’m normally ok in long queues of traffic, but watching the SatNav’s ETA tick over into the early hours was a little depressing. So, I kept the others and myself entertained with classy music, and taught them the Norbert Dentressangle game¹, which I’m sure they greatly appreciated. I, of course, won the latter
Next morning it was up at 0700 for the wedding, and it turned out to be a lovely day indeed.

1. three points for the first person who shouts ‘nooooooooooooooorbert dentressangle’ on first sight of a truck [↩]

So should be house-trained and post-toddle. Far, far from maturity, however.