This little pocket rocket of a Staffie is called Red, and at the time of writing, he’s available for adoption at BCDH. Pant-pant-pant!

Five blogs for the price of one, following an open invitation from Ian (who was himself inspired by Matt, Alice, Ben and Dan)…

What can it do? Run software, dumbass…
Mention or dumbly hand an iPad to a non-geek and they’ll ask you what it can do; a geek would never do this because a geek knows that it runs software. And with software, the more useful question, especially in the context of Apple’s controversial App Store, is “what can’t it do?” Non-geeks will show surprise when they learn than you can, say, watch TV on an iPad, and would struggle with the – yes, esoteric – concept that it’s not ‘TV’, but bits of data flowing from, say, tvcatchup.com; it’s not ‘doing’ TV, it’s just doing software. (This is why Apple’s advertising – not “hey, it’s a smartphone” but “hey, you can book a find a table at a nearby restaurant” is clever.) And as for what it can’t do? You forgot about “yet”.

Magazines are good
I am, yes, a magazine journalist, but credit me with enough integrity to make this point without it being interpreted as “of course you’d say that”. Fact is, I think magazines are great. The price is right for a little treat – though I suspect many of us now would drop that cash on a few apps instead – the shape, robustness, disposability, flickability and sheer information delivery mechanisms are fantastic. I have been surprised at how much I enjoy reading magazines such as Wired on the iPad, and there’s lots that magazines do wrong (often because that’s just how we’ve always done them) but I genuinely struggle to envisage a world in which sheets-of-paper-fastened-together-down-one-side are no longer a significant part of the way many of us consume media.

Fragmented work patterns
Too often these days, I ⌘⇥ to my email client, say, to find I’ve opened a new message, typed “The best thing we” and then gone to do something else. Or I turn from my iMac to my MacBook Pro to find I’ve opened a new tab but not entered a URL. Or pick up a pen to write something in my notebook only to find, when I refocus after answering a colleague’s question, I have no idea why I started to write “Fol…”. Hell, maybe it’s early-onset dementia, but I am genuinely concerned about my ability to focus. (I’m not alone in this, right?) I need to retrain myself. Or just wear headphones and play whalesong.

The perfect font for writing
What, for you, is the font you write in? Lots of people are font-blind and either don’t notice or don’t care. I’ve recently switched, though, to the classic Franklin Gothic, and it’s gorgeous. It’s smart and workmanlike, but with just enough flair – the squat (not old-style) numerals are very clear, and the double-storey lower-case g is lovely – to make things interesting. It has a kind of Rhapsody-in-Blue, New-Yorkey kind of busy authority to it, and it lends a perhaps-unwarranted authority to whatever I write. I use it at 10pt, at 200% with 1.2× line spacing and 6pt after a para.

Knee-jerks and smart arses
Increasingly, I tire of the habit so many on the internet (and possibly in meatspace too, though I’m certainly exposed to it less) seem to be developing of forcing a polarised, black/white, rocks/sucks reaction instantly to everything that happens, and also of the habit of showing the fuck off. I’ll often make a throwaway remark on Twitter and someone will ping back with a rebuttal, a tangent, a wilful misinterpretation or a random criticism. That’s all well and good when it’s in the spirit of debate, but so often it comes off as merely an attempt to demonstrate knowledge and garner attention. It’s taking the fun out of it.

Your turn.

(I’ve also been thinking a lot about my wife. She’s swell.)

Genghis Khan – he of the floppy ears – has become my regular companion at BCDH, and, though the picture above was taken last week when I was on my own, Mrs P and I both went up today to give the young mutt a bit of exercise. We actually managed, after an hour’s walk and a half-hour frantic scamper around the paddock in pursuit of his rubber ring, to tire him out to an extent that the carers thought most un-Genghis-like.

It’s glorious up there these days; Summer is at full strain, and the greenery is just stunning.

Wired has launched a true digital magazine for the iPad. Some thoughts, from the perspective of a geek who works in publishing:

As a turbo-charged magazine, it’s very good…

…but better can be done.

What is a magazine? In the issue, there are reviews of glasses for geeks, with a beautifully-shot picture of them. It would be cool to let you virtually try them on using a photo from your library, but you can’t. And there is, as yet, no exploiting of, say, location-awareness or the always-on internet connection to parse data from the web for live charts. But is this the role of a magazine? To what extent can we play with its definition and still deliver something that makes sense and that, crucially, the public will ‘get’ enough to buy into?

Interactivity ≠ tapping a button to play a video full screen.

Yes, it’s a big download. Perhaps ironically, some of that heft comes from advertisers’ videos, the stuff buyers don’t actively want. (But if advertisers want to, they can take advantage of the fact that the line between editorial and advertising seems peculiarly blurred here, and create ‘advertising’ with genuine ‘editorial’ value.)

Flickability is poor. Despite the nav, it seems to focus you to a linear reading style. The print magazine format is still peerless for browsing.

Whether as a consequence of the low-res screen (forcing large point sizes) or the fact that content ‘reflows’ when the orientation changes, I don’t know, but there’s a real rash of ugly hyphenation. (I assume the pages are static, flattened graphics, and that text isn’t in any real sense reflowing; the level of layout and typographic control Condé Nast surely demands would be difficult to the point of impossibility with truly dynamic content, I suspect.)

I dislike, as I have begun to in some traditional utility apps, that the content changes depending on orientation. Not just the layout; some content only appears in particular orientations. While gamers might like this hidden feature malarky, it gets right up my tits. One reason magazines are good is that they’re finite; they curate, unlike the constantly-fed web, and you can ‘finish’ one. I have never in my life finished a game (actually, I could end that sentence there, but let’s carry on) and felt the need to go back through it to ‘collect all the coins’ or whatever; I have no desire to reread a magazine in a different orientation solely to see a few fragments that I might have missed the first time round.

If you believe £2.99/issue is too much,

• you are an American who has had your reasonable perspective on pricing trashed by the American market’s ad-driven (rather than coverprice-driven) model, or
• you have no idea of how much work goes into the production of a print magazine (or that you need to square it for a layout that can change, and cube it for anything that includes even basic interactivity or multimedia content), or
• you’re a moron

(And I can’t think of even a good business reason, never mind a good UX reason, to sell individual issues as discrete apps.)

It is, ultimately, the best digital magazine on the best platform yet for digital magazines. Don’t dismiss it, but don’t hold it up as a paragon either. I’m sure Condé Nast is delighted with what has been achieved; I’m equally sure it recognises it has built a 1.0 experience.

Of all the breeds we’ve walked, none have been as strong as the German Shepherd. Combine this with their relative indifference to us hoomans, and they haven’t been a particular joy to walk. Still, Tess was a sweet big lunk. (‘Big’ being the operative word.)

It’s been quiet on the dog-walking front recently, partly through pressure of work, and partly because I’d been working with dogs y’all had seen before. Today, though, I was determined to get up to BCDH, and we walked a very, very sweet Rottweiler called Jazz. She goes proper batshit-crazy when there are other dogs around, but once she’s out and walking, she’s one of the most good-natured mutts you’d ever meet. I mean, look!

Today marks the release on DVD and Blu-ray of the BBC’s superb astronomy series, Wonders of the Solar System. It’s superb not just because it’s beautifully shot, edited and directed, but because of its presenter, Professor Brian Cox. That he can make science relevant, accessible and even a bit rock and roll is unquestionably a good thing; society needs more role models like this for the sciences if we’re to engage the next generation.

So thoroughly delighted with Wonders am I, and so keen to share it with everyone, that I’m giving a copy of it away. To enter, all you have to do is retweet my tweet about the competition; there’s no cost to entering, anyone can enter worldwide, and I’ll pick the winner at random. I plan to give away a copy of the Blu-ray from Amazon.co.uk – it’s not clear if it’s region-coded, but it’s probably safer to assume it’s region B – but if the winner would prefer the DVD edition, they can request that.

I’ll pick a winner at 9am on Wednesday 14 April 2010.

So it turns out that Ellie has a reserve. So after taking her out for a run about in the paddock with me, she went out with her putative new owners, and I ended up with a crazed shaggy lurcher, Genghis Khan. I assume his ears have been docked, though I could be wrong. Regardless, they are most diverting company when walking:



And here he is just having a sniff around:

So I bought myself a Canon Pixma MP640. It’s just about the perfect multi-function device, with stellar print quality, separate ink tanks – including a second black for text – Wi-Fi (and Ethernet and USB), duplex, and the ability to print onto CDs and DVDs. It doesn’t have a document feeder, a fax, or the dedicated grey cartridge of its big brother for beautiful mono photos, but for around £140/$160, it’s a sodding brilliant device.

There’s just one problem: the installer doesn’t like Snow Leopard, at least if you want to use it on Wi-Fi. It’s easily remedied, however, and in fact, even when Canon gets round to updating the installers, I’d still recommend this method simply because it doesn’t clutter your Mac with relatively low-quality Canon ‘value-add’ software. It’s likely that this process will work with all recent Wi-Fi MFDs from Canon, but I’ve only tried it with the MP640.

01 CONFIGURE THE PRINTER FOR YOUR WI-FI NETWORK After you’ve unpacked the printer, installed the print head and cartridges, and run through the calibration process, use the Easy-Scroll Wheel to go to the settings menu on the printer, and join it to your Wi-Fi network.

02 PLUG IN OVER USB Snow Leopard has a new (Windows-like; shhh!) feature that will automatically grab printer drivers; plug the (switched on) MP640 into your Mac over USB – don’t worry, this is only temporary – and when the OS pops up a message asking you if you want to download and install the software for it, click Install.

03 ALLOW THE MAC TO INSTALL THE DRIVERS Will take it a while to find, download and install; be patient!

04 ADD THE PRINTER Now launch System Preferences and click the Print & Fax icon. You can delete the newly-added printer from the list (and disconnect the USB cable) unless you also want to be able to print/scan over USB as well as Wi-Fi. Click the + icon and up pops the window below; ignore the Bonjour scanner for the moment. Wait a few more seconds, and a second entry will appear, this time of the kind ‘canonijnetwork’. (The name for yours will be different; I changed the Bonjour Service Name prior to starting by connecting to the printer from Safari’s Bonjour browser; this is unimportant, however.) Select that printer then click Add.

05 WI-FI SCANNING You can also scan over Wi-Fi. You don’t actually need to do anything extra here. You can fire up Image Capture and, after a few seconds, your MP640 will appear under Shared devices. You can, though, repeat step four, selecting the Bonjour scanner in the screen above, which will give you a wireless scanner ‘app’ – complete with pretty icon for the Dock – that you can double-click to launch from the Print & Fax pane, then choose optionally to keep in your Dock. It’s actually reasonably accomplished, too, though the full proper scanner driver – part of the MP Navigator EX program, that you may be able to install separately; I didn’t try – offers more control over variables such as descreen.

BONUS TIP One thing you might miss from the official package is the ability to print directly onto CDs and DVDs. (Well I say “miss”, but Canon’s CD-printing utility is dreadful.) Happily, Disc Cover from the Ukrainian geniuses at BeLight Software is compatible, and it is a joy to use. If you don’t already own a copy, it’s $35 well spent, but if you have a recent version of Roxio Toast, you probably have a lite edition already; have a look in your Toast Titanium folder. In my testing, using some printable Sony CD-Rs, I got better results – less bleed, in other words – by picking Printable Disc rather than Standard for the Sizes option, but once you’ve designed your label, you just have to choose Direct to CD/DVD printing, and the Canon Tray Type F,G (CD Tray) preset. (Look at the CD tray that came with the printer; it’s got a big G at the bottom left.)

Overall, though, I’m delighted with the MP640; I installed from the enclosed CD on a Mac running Mac OS X 10.4, another running Mac OS X 10.5, and a PC running Windows XP without incident. And, like I say, I actually prefer the purity of my two Snow Leopard systems, which are free of Canon crapware.

Please do Digg, Stumble, tweet and, best of all, link to this post so that anyone having trouble can easily get their MP640 up and running with 10.6 on a wireless network!

Today is my birthday. And not just any old birthday; today is my 30th. I am officially no longer young. But so-the-fuck what? Thanks to friends in Bath and London, family, and to my utterly fabulous and sexy lady, I’ve had the best birthday ever. Thanks, all.

I am horrified at the sight of people vomiting up reactionary, unconsidered or plain wilfully ignorant rhetoric about the iPad, especially when a vanishingly small fraction of the world’s population has actually seen one. To quote, um, myself: if anyone tells you that the iPad “is” anything – especially if they tell you that it “is just” anything – they’re a fool, a cretin and an arsehole. Or, perhaps, merely a bit egotistical, a bit unimaginative, or just ever-so-slightly desirous of generating revenue from the contextual advertising that accompanies their masturbatory ramblings.

Two things strike me as sufficiently important (and sufficiently non-self-explanatory) to warrant my time to write and yours to read. The first is that while that part of the industry – hacks, devs, users, retailers and sundry analysts – which is possessed of adequate humility, imagination or integrity is quietly positing a future in which less time is spent using computers to tend to computers, Apple itself was peculiarly restrained in its stated vision for the iPad. We weren’t told that this was a new computing paradigm. We weren’t told that this was a shift from Old World to New World computing, regardless of how logical that shift might seem. I’ll entertain as plausible the idea that this was because the notion of telling people that ‘the Mac/PC is dead’ is too big to sell – especially to investors – or that, as it stands, Apple’s implementation of the iPhone OS ecosystem is simply too immature to serve as a convincing replacement even for those relatively simple tasks it excels at. But still: it’s notable that it’s the industry that is even debating the future of the personal computer paradigm, not Apple. (Caveat: …at least publicly.)

The second point develops the argument so well-articulated by Steven Frank. (Not familiar with it? It’s impossible to summarise without ripping out the nuance, and that does the thesis a disservice; make time to read it. It’s not dazzlingly original – in a good way; it’s a statement of fact, and facts have only a limited quotient of original – but the case is better made than I’ve seen most people achieve.) And here’s my flourish, my addition to the discussion: for once, technology is decreasing in complexity from the user’s perspective, while increasing in complexity in the absolute. My example of this is a button in the National Rail application for the iPhone, marked ’Next train home’. Tap this button, and the iPhone works out where it is, where the nearest station is and, knowing which is your ‘home’ station, tells you what time the next train you can get is, displaying delays on services as it does so. Think: that’s a colossally complex task. Monumental. Herculean. Involves billions of pounds of infrastructure, enormous gouts of code, uncountable man-hours of work on making sure that this cog works with that cog; alloying just staggering – and staggeringly-different – technologies together.

There has always been a drive to make the complex accessible, to abstract away the mind-buggeringly difficult, and present just the bits we need to see in order to control. (I know how an internal combustion engine works in theory – couldn’t build one – but I can make a car go by pressing the accelerator. I know how the internet works – couldn’t build it – but I can buy a new lens for my SLR by going to Amazon.) The National Rail app, however, is emblematic of a tempo change in this push towards accessibility, usefulness and merit.

I would be disappointed if, by the time I retire, even this use of highly complex and interdependent technology to present a simple, human-centric – ‘human-parsable’ – result is seen as anything other than dreadfully old-fashioned, yet I say again: if the iPad represents a future in which the highly complex isn’t merely made less so, but is mashed up with other stuff to create usefulness far in excess of its constituent parts, then that’s something worth feeling happy about.

Further reading
Steven Frank: I need to talk to you about computers
Fraser Speirs: Future Shock
My post at MacFormat: Is the iPad a computer or a peripheral?
Tom Royal: There are two ways to reduce complexity
John Gruber: Various iPad thoughts (Aaaargh, car analogy!)
Craig Hockenberry: iPad liberation (Describes what I usually refer to as ‘sitting forward’ and ’sitting back’ computing. Has resonance for me as a journalist, as I suspect that one of the reasons e-mags remain niche is because the dominant paradigm for computers is ’sitting forward’, requiring thought and attention, and reeking of work.)

I was slightly wary of Ellie the Weimaraner, having been told she was ‘in here for a reason’ and being warned that she was dog-aggressive, but as it turned out she was sweet as pie. When we encountered other dogs, I’d just stop, keep her on a short leash, and keep a gentle touch on her head to remind her I was there and I was calm. And in fact, once we were out into the fields, she was nothing short of lovely – very playful, though desperate to be off her lead, and affectionate. And just look at those big floppy ears! More pictures – including her Queen of the World™ pose – on Flickr. (What is Dog of the Week?)

If you know me or follow me on Twitter, you’ll be in no doubt that I own a Kindle 2. (Disclaimer: I love it, though I’ve detailed its shortcomings, especially in the UK, in numerous reviews for titles within Future. Also, affiliate links throughout.) I’ve shown it to many people, and they all ask the same handful of questions. Some ask other questions as well, but the following three almost always crop up within 20 seconds of holding one in your hand. The questions, and the context and implications behind them, are, I think, more interesting than the answers.

Does it do touch?
Damned iPhone. These days, everyone expects handheld devices to have touchscreens. Less than three years ago, despite touchscreen PDAs and some smartphones’ relative popularity with the alpha geeks, very few people would have asked that question at all, never mind as an initial reaction to a new piece of kit. People are disappointed when they learn that the Kindle doesn’t do touch, and that’s remarkable; how did we get from ‘no mainstream devices do touch’ to a position where people feel (not necessarily think) a device is technologically retarded if it uses buttons?

Some research has suggested that devices with touch interfaces create a stronger bond with their owners simply because of their inherent tactility – a geological instant separates an ancestor who would stroke its mate’s fur from a Hoxton metrosexual paging through his contacts by stroking his iPhone’s screen – but I am delighted that Amazon chose, even in the second (and third) iteration of its ereader, to shun touch. Not only does adding a touch substrate, as in the case of Sony’s touch-capable model, decrease the contrast of a screen already a bit muddy compared to an LCD, but the fact that the next/previous page paddles on the Kindle fall naturally under your thumbs as you’re reading means you don’t have to stretch a digit or involve your other hand just to swipe across the screen to turn the page. (Annotating and more general computing tasks are a different matter, perhaps, but for reading, the paddles are perfect.)

[Actual answer: no]

Is it colour?
Again, I think that the implication here is that if it only monochrome, it’s shit. Which implies, more broadly, both that people simply expect colour displays these days – fair enough, I guess, if a bit unimaginative – and also expect their gadgets to be general purpose, good-for-everything devices. Interesting.

Colour E Ink is in development, and I can see its value for magazines, websites and some technical manuals or richly-illustrated novels, but I’m perfectly happy with monochrome for reading novels – and that, after all, is what the Kindle’s for. (It’s very good at it, too, though it’s much, much less good at non-linear media such as newspapers and websites. The developers have tried, implementing clever nav elements for newspapers, say, but the experience is still sub-optimal. Sometimes, simply taking the time to adapt to a new way of interacting with media reveals the new system to be either as good as, better than, or merely different to the old paradigm, but in this case, the linearity of the reading experience on a Kindle just can’t compete with the inter- and intra-page flickability and serendipity of a physical mag or paper.)

But if colour E Ink is so far away, why not just use traditional LCDs or even those OLEDs that gets the geeks priapic with anticipation? Because they’re the wrong choice for this platform. Not only do both consume significantly more power than E Ink – the battery on my Kindle can last weeks between charges, depending on how much reading I manage to fit in – but they’re also both much less pleasant to read. Honestly: E Ink is a revelation, and it’s considerably gentler on the eyes, especially after a working day spent bathed in LCD backlight.

[Actual answer: no]

Can you read your email on it?
Curious; the question’s not usually “Can it browse the web?” but “Can it do email?” I don’t know whether this is because as a primarily text-based device, people associate it with messaging, because people perceive it as a potential productivity tool, because we just plain want our devices to be capable of email, or because this is another test, another enquiry designed to ascertain whether this new thing is, in the abstract, ‘good’. Regardless, it’s another example of how, apparently, we’re starting to shun single-function devices, and place a greater burden of ability on the personal technology that companies want us to buy. Perhaps that’s blinkered; perhaps it’s only now that people are even imagining a multi-function device is feasible; the ten-year-old me didn’t even think to ask the question ‘can this Discman make phone calls?’ because it was so utterly obvious that it couldn’t. Stick a big bitmap display on something, now that components are small, the internet exists, and wireless bandwidth is ubiquitous, and it really is now a question of ‘what can’t this device do?’ rather than what can it.

[Actual answer: yes, though some webmail interfaces, if you’re in a territory where Amazon allows you to access any web site through the built-in browser; in the UK, for example, since the Kindle is a US device roaming internationally, for which Amazon is paying the data bill, you may only access the English-language version of Wikipedia.]

None of these questions presage especially dramatic wider social shifts in and of themselves, but I was struck by how significant the Kindle felt, how it focussed – and sometimes, with good reason, ran contrary to – many of the trends in consumer technology. Speaking on the PC Pro podcast, David Fearon, the magazine’s rather brilliant deputy editor, commented (and I’m paraphrasing) that the Kindle felt somehow important, like it felt like something – a product, a service, a model – was trying to take shape in your hand. I’ve no idea what that something is, but I feel it too.

(If you buy the international edition of the Kindle 2 or the larger Kindle DX from these links, I get commission from Amazon.)

This is Teenie, a Doberman with an inexpertly-docked (hence, still not healed) tail.



The snow makes her go a bit mad.



(Man, I really shouldn’t put Lightroom-tweaked raw photos from a DSLR next to video output from the iPhone 3GS. Bleurch.) More pics on Flickr. (What is Dog of the Week?)

One of the highlights of visiting the folks’ for Christmas was meeting their two new cats, Buddy and Lennon. Both ginger toms – they’re not brothers, though they’ll snuggle down together and wash each other – they have very distinct personalities. When I got home, sadly, I found that I only had pictures of one, the more timid Lennon, but aww, just look!

What bigs eyes you have!


What big teeth you have!


What a pink nose you have!


What fluffy paws you have!

This sad little chap is Spike, an American Bulldog who was rehomed from the Bath Cats and Dogs Home and later dumped again at Weston-super-Mare to be found as a stray and picked up by volunteers a second time. He’s thin, timid and tired.



I’m not overly sentimental about animals, and on the scale of human cruelty, I guess that dumping a dog for whatever reason barely registers, but I’m utterly at a loss as to why someone, having taken an animal from a rescue home – and having been given the education that is insisted on there – would still think it acceptable to pull up in a car, push a dog out, and drive off. They know that the rescue home exists, and while I’m sure you’d feel like a heel returning an animal to a centre after trying to home it, that’s surely preferable to betraying its trust and dumping it to fend for itself. Bah.

He wasn’t the most demonstrative dog – though latterly he warmed especially to Jenny – but he was very gentle and sweet with his big paws and his droopy jowls and his big heid, and he was delighted to see his carer again. I suspect he now sees the Bath Cats and Dogs Home as being his safe and loving place, which, though true, is still sad.

Meet Lennie – “a Labrador’s temperament stuck in a Staffi body”, his carer says – who I walked today. He didn’t care much for hoomans, though he warmed to me by the end of the walk, but it was lovely to get back up to the home after work had kept me away for two months. A couple more photos – not that they really add much – on Flickr.

Before Tired, unshaven, dejected, stressed, over-committed, not blogging


After Freshly-shaven, cared-for-by-wife, gurning like an knob, probably still not blogging

It's a good job that MacFormat's photoshoot with our car took place yesterday…

IMAGE COURTESY OF FUTURE PUBLISHING LTD/JOBY SESSIONS

...as today an MPV reversed into us and now Carlos has a squished nose:

Though Marley and Digger are apparently best friends, Marley – the Staffie cross – has a rather worrying habit of just walking on Digger, the Daschund cross. Sweet pair, though actually very nervous of other dogs. They're new additions to the home, having just arrived yesterday. Shot some video too; will edit and upload later.

Oh, look; we walked a lovely big Akita Inu teddy bear from Hamleys. More photos here, though you should also watch this video of an Akita Inu puppy. (What is Dog of the Week?)

My wishlist is filled with books I want to buy, but I don’t want to buy them until I own a Kindle. (I can’t really articulate why; it just feels that way. Partly it’s a love of the tech, partly it’s that I’m becoming increasingly frustrated with the book as a medium; too bulky, too limited, and too wasteful of resources all along the manufacture and distribution process.)

But it’s an odd experience, to deny myself stories and knowledge until a new format arrives. Wonder if anyone ever thought “No, I don’t want to hear the troubadour recount the latest must-hear tale; I want to wait till I can read it in one of these book things. They have so many advantages over the old oral tradition.”

I’ve got nothing in the way of evidence to support the claim – though this post by Jason Kottke prompted me actually to post this – but I’ve long thought that if I read a book or watched a programme that told me that today’s smart, connected, profit-orientated business models meant that, like many indigenous peoples, all parts of a pig, say, were used after its slaughter*, I wouldn’t be in the least surprised.

* In this case by many different companies in many different industries, for many different purposes; less direct than the make-a-water-gourd-from-a-bladder approach, but certainly more effective than the in-the-West-we-kill-a-pig-just-for-a-couple-of-chops-and-throw-the-rest-away-and-isn't-it-a-crying-shame mindset that seems to prevail among a few of the more determined crusties.

Meet Daisy, the dog who lived in the house to which our little holiday gîte was attached. She's pulling that rather alarming face because she's in the middle of masticating one of the many figs that fell from the tree at the front door. You haven’t lived until you've seen a Staffie cross chow down on a series of sticky, slightly fermented figs. Now, you might think that eating dozens of figs wouldn't be good for a small dog, and if you did, the spate of mournful farts she let out in our company would seem to lend credence to your theory.



And, as always, there are a bunch more photos from France on Flickr. Not terrific shots, I must say; the weather was against me, and, worse, the muse just didn't seem to be with me.

Ma and Pa Phin came to visit a couple of weekends ago, and we went up ensemble to walk some dugs. We got Jess (top) and Monty, a couple of very, very sweet Collies. Monty, unless, as above, you were tickling his tummy, was a real ball of energy, and we were all exhausted when we brought them back to the kennels. More pictures on Flickr. (What is Dog of the Week?)

Meet Barnaby, a lazy St Bernard with a fondness for tummy rubs. We remain suspicious that he was not, in fact, a real dog, but was a man wearing a suit created by The Jim Henson Company. Such a big softie, he just stood there with a hurt expression while a family, who were out walking a muzzle-less Buster, let their dog take lump out of Barnaby’s big fluffy tail. (Special shot of the feather duster that he calls his tail shown in the second picture, below.) There are more shots of Barnaby getting some attention on Flickr.




And last week, we walked Kizzie, a sweet old Rottweiler whom we’ve walked before. We actually got her by mistake, as I got her confused with the much livelier Rottweiler, Cassie, that I’d had the week before. But then, after we’d walked Kizzie, we spotted Cassie in her kennel, and when I walked up to say hello, she bared her teeth and started barking at me. I’m going to go ahead and assume this was because she was feeling nervous, enclosed in her kennel, and that I’d just been too presumptuous in walking straight up to her, because she was very well behaved when I had walked her the week before. Plus, I was wearing sunglasses, and she might have been freaked by not being able to see my eyes. (What is Dog of the Week?)

Jenny’s cousin and thoroughly, delightfully batty aunts came to visit. We painted crockery...



...got Sheila and Isla convinced that Wii Tennis was a great game...



...and, with the power of OldBooth on the iPhone, turned Sheila into a man:

I’ve been mucking about with virtual machines a lot recently, and in order to get Windows 95 to install, I had to dig out my USB floppy drive to make an image of the boot floppy. Young whippersnappers may never have heard the satisfying clunk and whrt-whrt-fud-fud-fud of a 3½″ floppy drive, so I’ve preserved it here for all eternity. May we never see its like again. (I am, as an aside, just old enough to remember 5¼″ floppies, and weird enough even to remember the weird, chunky 3″ models used by the Amstrad PCWs my family had.)

On this day four years ago, Wife and I hired a band, invited a bunch of people round, and told them all that we each thought the other was a pretty nice person, all things considered. Today marks our fourth anniversary, and we toddled off to the Michelin-starred The Bath Priory for lunch. Such a glorious experience, and rounded off beautifully with this rather lovely selection of petit fours. Marriage rocks, by the way.

Yesterday’s dog was Cassie, a Rottweiler who, unlike Kizzie, was decidedly not arthritic. She was strong, and it took us while to get to know each other, but by the end of walk, I had her sitting at heel like a good girl when we stopped and waited for other dogs to pass. (Of particular note since she lunged madly at the first few dogs we passed.) A combination of heavy sporadic rain and wanting to give her more attention than any of the other dogs I’ve walked to date meant that the only usable image I have of her is the tiny clip below, but I think it’s worth sharing to show that even Rotties are just big puppies underneath. (I was struck again by how alike dogs are; despite knowing that they share a common ancestor only a handful of generations back, it’s still striking to me that a stocky great lug of a beast like Cassie would sniff at a scent in the grass with the utmost delicacy and care, and that she’d respond to the same commands, affection and body language as any other.)



We also went to Cardiff to see Cope, and though we had to leave early today so I could get back and get some work done, we took time to visit the bay and stop into the Assembly building. It’s a stunning piece of architecture, and the use of wood and slate is a sympathetic yet bold mix of traditional materials and techniques married to uncompromisingly modern aesthetic. The openness and welcoming nature of the place is also striking.

What’s more, though the shots below – the brick building is not the Assembly, though I forget its name and use now – have been Photoshopped (sorry Adobe), they’re the first in-anger pictures I’ve taken with the iPhone 3GS, and they are at least passable.

Trudy – a cross between a collie and a lab, I think – was described as ‘very boisterous’. Quite. Still, after the first twenty minutes of mentalness, she settled and would even sit well – until the very last lungey second – as we waited to let other dogs pass. More pictures on Flickr. (What is Dog of the Week?)

Despite the 5am start, today’s visit to Brighton was wonderful. Met up with some of the dudes from Realmac for brunch, then caught up with The Nicest Man In The World® Simon Handby. Man, it was lovely to see him again. Then it was time for The Dave & Mendy Hour™, and it was all kinds of wonderful to see the little pair of scamps again. The most surreal moment – apart, possibly, from the tale of the glow-in-the-dark paint in the marital bedroom – was when a random biddy came up to our table in the middle of an anecdote to ask us if we could send a text message on her phone for her. Fair enough. Bemusedly, Dave complied, as the other three of us fought hard to avoid eye contact.



It would all have been fine, even though she then just started randomly telling us facts about her life and basically just not buggering off again after the message was sent, but for one odd little postscript to her rambling. It could have been ‘the gays’, but I think she was actually complaining about all the coons, and how they get everything and we get nothing. It’s apparently why she won’t go to London. At this point I made it clear somehow – it may have been by saying ‘goodbye’ with uncharacteristic firmness – that we were done talking, and she ambled off. The bigoted old trout.

Some people take pictures of their first born. Some takes pictures of the amazing places they have been privileged to visit. Me, I use photography to immortalise such epic meals as tonight’s risotto, which looked so fine in the evening sun as I brought it through from the kitchen that I thought it deserved capturing, uploading to Flickr, Twittering, posting on Facebook, and blogging here. It was that good. Good job, Wife.

Stig, my most favouritist of the nutjobs from the Bath Cat & Dogs Home, is shortly to get a new home. It’s not ours, sadly, so we took him for a last walk today. Man, I love this dog.

It was a Venn diagram intersection of serendipity: I wanted to muck about with some portrait photography, and Wife fancied some up-to-date shots. So off we toddled to Westonbirt with my cheap-but-lovely f/1.8 lens and a bag full of shrugs and egg yolk to take some pictures. Much fun was had there and in Lightroom, and further results can be seen on Flickr.

[SKIPPABLE INTRODUCTION I’m late to the Darwinpalooza, but I want to say something about evolution. Good little child of the enlightenment that I am, I accepted evolution as fact from whenever I was aware of the idea, but it wasn’t until early teens that I really got it. I can’t remember if there was a particular book, radio programme or whatever that caused the Damascene moment or whether it had just been ticking away in the back of my head, but to this day I understand the basic idea of evolution as follows below. I’m recording it here because in all the Darwin stuff that we’ve seen in this anniversary year, I haven’t seen it explained like this, and either I am therefore a genius, or I’m fundamentally misunderstanding the process. Or both. Comments in the usual place, please.]

Detractors of evolution say that you can’t see it happening. Supporters of evolution say that that’s not bloody surprising because the effects take millions of years to be readily discernible. I say bollocks; I say, you can see the process of evolution happening every time a baby is born. Let’s take humans, because we can – unsurprisingly, and not a little punnily – relate to them. If a Caucasian man and a Caucasian woman have a child, the child will be Caucasian, yes? Let’s take a more specific example: If a man with an enormous nose fathers a child, that child too has a chance of having a similarly Brobdignian schnozzle. The child inherits – not exactly, not perfectly, but it inherits nonetheless – some of the traits of the parents. And if those traits are useful or desirable, children who inherit them grow up to be big and strong and will have nookie and will make new babies to whom they will pass these traits.

(Note: nobody – save perhaps Hitler and other eugenicists – consciously decides what constitutes useful or desirable. It might be a slight resistance to malaria – in which case the child will have a better chance of reaching sexual maturity and being physically able to reproduce – or something less quantifiable. The mechanism isn’t perfect, and we may prize characteristics that have no apparent evolutionary pay-off – why, for example, do gentlemen prefer blondes? – but it keeps poking away, pushing and thrusting in different directions to see what works.)

It takes so long both because the process is inexact – we don’t create clones or even averages of two parents when we reproduce – and because we don’t practice eugenics. We may think that a genetic propensity for baldness, myopia or a pot-belly are undesirable traits, but, as your humble narrator can attest, they’re not sufficiently debilitating in the short-to-medium term to stop people growing up and bonking. That species go extinct suggests that evolution is simply too slow to accommodate changes to the environment – both in the ‘trees and clouds’ and the ‘animals and shit around you’ sense – and I wouldn’t be surprised if folks were to show me examples of where evolution has pushed a species down an awkward road from which it can’t retrace its steps, but none of that argues against the basic mechanism. Look at a child, see how like its parent it looks, extrapolate a little and apply your understanding of basic reproduction, and evolution, I think, looks inevitable. The theory of evolution isn’t tied up neat with a bow – there is, I’m told, lots still to work out – but I remain puzzled at how the contentious the observable facts are; we pass on characteristics, and if they prove useful to a species, they stabilise and flourish, and shape species over their lifespans.

Marvin was, despite his angelic looks – brought to you here courtesy of my review iPhone 3GS – a bit of a Bad Dog. He was very young, pumped full of Collie madness, and clearly not dealing well with kennel life. Still, that was no excuse for jumping up, grabbing my t-shirt in his mouth, and tugging at it. It was all in play – no damage to the material, even – but never have I issued a ‘No!’ with such force. Bad dog!

Jamie came to visit us from that London place this weekend. Many and varied japes were had, including a visit to the Bath Cat and Dogs Home this morning to walk a sweet-natured lurcher called Flora and a young German Shepherd who rejoiced in the world’s chavviest name, Bacardi. Here is young Mr Malcolm displaying his dog mastery.



We also went out to Lacock; it’s only half an hour’s drive west of Bath, and it’s utterly entrancing. We’d been to the village before – where at the moment filming for Cranford is taking place – but never to the abbey. If the cloisters below look familiar somehow, it’s because it’s where many scenes for the Harry Potter franchise are shot. Lovely place, and if you’re local and haven’t yet been, floor tiger judges you.

Last week, we walked an arthritic Rottweiler called Kizzie, and a mental Staffie cross called Oxo. I forgot my camera. This week, I walked Oxo again, and forgot my camera again. So instead of photographs, Oxo will today be represented by an audio recording made on my iPhone of him as he snuffled around in the undergrowth. Click here to listen to him – we’re not sure if his obsession with spending minutes at a time sniffing an apparently insignificant patch of grass means his nose is hypersensitive or dulled beyond use. We just know that it takes twice as long to cover a set distance with him. (What is Dog of the Week?)

I may be a technology journalist, but I trained as a graphic designer. I was always a geek, and when, a few weeks after graduating, I saw an ad for a Labs Assistant for MacUser, I applied. I got the job and the rest, as people have an egotistical habit of saying, is history. I was planning on applying for design jobs, though, and had even got as far as designing and prototyping the little bit of direct mail I had intended to send. I found it the other day:


Wife insists that this was originally her idea; this may be* technically true.

*is

Stig may be the daftest dog ever born. When he found this stick, he couldn’t decide if he wanted to chew it or carry it, so opted for walking along, head tilted back, attempting to eat the stick at the same time. This was, it scarcely needs saying, doomed to failure, and the stick was frequently dropped. He would also, adorably, throw the stick for himself, tossing it away with a flick of the head then bounding the two strides to where it had landed before gumming it up again.


This is Stig on a log, trying to walk in seven directions at once, and chew his own lead. Like I said: daftest dog ever born. More pictures on Flickr. (What is Dog of the Week?)

This is Cara. She is mad. We wanted to keep her. (What is Dog of the Week?)

“Hey,” people say, with their faces and their shoes and their lattés and their trombones; “don’t go abroad for your holidays, yeah? Holidaying in the UK is, like, really green, toadally cool, and don’t you find, yeah, that you never really appreciate what’s on your doorstep?”

People, eh? Well, I’ve long wanted to visit Shetland or Orkney, and since we’ve booked off some time in July, and I have an uncle who lives on Shetland, we thought we’d bloody well just go. OK, it’s hardly Paris, but it’ll be beautiful, bracing and budget-friendly. Hey, The Internet, how much would it cost to get to the stunning Scottish islands?

Return train fare to London                  £98.00
Sleeper service to Aberdeen                 £246.00
Actual berth in said sleeper service         £76.00
Return flights from Aberdeen to Sumburgh    £222.20
Train fare, Aberdeen to London              £246.00
                                            -------
GRAND TOTAL                                 £888.20

On the other hand, a quick visit to lastminute.com suggests:

Flights + three nights in Paris             £396.16

Even if you add in the cost of driving the short distance to the airport and parking the car, that’s half the price, and we hadn’t even added luxuries such as accommodation or perhaps a hire car while on Shetland. Vive l’Écosse!

Stig was huge, and was on two leads. He liked to stand on his hind legs with his front paws on my shoulders, and to chew his chain lead. He was, however, a sweetheart, and I was given some treats to help train him; if he got too boisterous, you gave him the ‘sit’ command while holding a treat at shoulder level. He’d immediately drop to his haunches – good boy! – and sit waiting for his treat which you’d then drop for him to clop out of mid-air. (He did at one point try to clop a bumble bee out of mid-air, but missed, luckily.)

I forgot to put a card in my DSLR, so the above picture is courtesy of the iPhone’s appalling sensor, heavily Photoshopped.

Today we went in a hot air balloon; we took off from here and landed here. It was brilliant; I hereby declare it my ambition to be served chilled champagne at 3000′ at least once a month, while floating serenely above some (surprisingly vocal and unsurprisingly spooked) farmyard animals. Wife kindly pointed out that I was taking more photographs than the rest of the group combined, but I did manage to get some nice shots; a few were well-suited to my tilt-shift technique that fools the eye into thinking you’re looking at a scale model:



And some non-novelty pictures too, such as this one, below. There are lots more, ripe for the desktop-in’, on Flickr.



I know; I’ve completely overcooked the colours. The crazy slab of shadow is real, however.

New Laptop finally here, and despite SuperDuper acting like a martinet, the backup has finally restored. Now to get on with all the work* that has been piling up while I’ve been laptopless.

* And Spore.

Another Sooper Sekrit project at MacFormat has kept me occupied for a while, but that’s all done and dusted and the only thing* keeping me from blogging more regularly is, y’know, the actual day job.

Never mind; it’s all good. I have new laptop, our dishwasher will soon be plumbed in, and we have all sort of japes planned for the end of the week when I shall be celebrating the final birthday of my second decade.

We bin walkin’ some dawgs, too, though I’m not going to dwell on this because the dog we walked last week, Shadow, managed to cut her nose while trying to wrestle her muzzle off, and the thought of this makes Wife sad. Here she (Shadow, not Wife) is, looking chipper, though; she was so utterly dedicated to straining at her (new; we finally bought one) leash that for most of the first half-hour she was walking at this ker-a-zee 45° angle.


And today, I went up and took a mastiff cross called Maurice (Maw-REECE) out for a spin. Very aggressive towards other dogs, he also had a worrying habit of lunging at small children too; a short leash, to put it mildly, was called for.

Once we were about in the fields, though, he settled down and was a real sweetie. Occasionally he’d block me, snooking his head around my leg so I couldn’t move it forward. He’d then stare dolefully up at me and give a small wag of his tail until I hunkered down and gave him some love. If I dropped something and had to stop, he'd trot solicitously back; “Oh, hello, hooman, you appear to have dropped something. I have no opposable thumbs, but I'd like to help. No? OK, what about a wag? What about leaning against you; I’m not particularly heavy?”


* Apart from all the other stuff. And Twitter.

On Friday we had a Poringe First: we were visited by a little person. The Family Brennan came to visit, and that meant that for the first time we see young Niamh in the flesh; boy is she a cutie. I mean, look at those teeny little hands next to Wife’s; someone pass me the chilli dipping sauce!

More photos of Baby Brennan on Flickr.

Following slebs on Twitter is a slightly odd experience. Seeing them talk to each other – as if they were normal human beings, no less – is downright disturbing. And all for reasons that a) I cannot yet articulate and b) tell you much more about me than them.

Yay, the weekend. Christ, I was ready for it this week, and to celebrate I took myself off to Bath’s RSPCA cat and dogs’ home. Crazy deadlines over Christmas plus a general disruption to our routine meant we had got out of the way of the weekly walk, and I’ve been itching to get back into it.

Today’s companion on the walk was Alfie, ostensibly a Staffie though he looks a bit too gracile to me. I thought from that grey muzzle that he’d be a bit docile. Bollocks; he was fast and determined to follow only his route. I was originally resistant to this, but then I relented when He Found A Stick. Or rather, as you can see, a log-ette. He carried this for over a mile, and it was only when we were about to head back into the home – with me thinking they might be none too impressed – that I took a firm grip on it and said “give”. And he did. Given that I’m such a gamma male in real life, it’s astonishing how quickly dogs seem to identify me as the leader of the pack.




In other news, we bought a knife sharpener and a new iron today. They can, respectively, be summed up as “magical” and “badass”. The iron is black, yo, and has a two-stage anti-calc system. Respect.

San Francisco = current location
Up for = more than 24 hours
Internet connection = shitty
Me = too tired to write proper sentences
Below = some night time pics from SF
Flickr = not updated yet
Wife = missed

And so we threw our Jenny’s-birthday-cum-winterval-cum-we-haven’t-had-a-party-in-far-too-long Party, collectively known as the Buon Natale. Prosecco was chilled, fancy meats were bought from the ridiculously middle-class deli in Bath, the ConGen 8000* was cranked up, and a fine old time was had by all. We hope. The Copes drove through from Historic Cardiff™ – cursing this country’s odd little badly-lit country lanes – and the redoubtable Mr Thomas brought his lovely lady along from, um, a few minutes down the road.

As is now traditional at parties, Mrs Phin and I were loud and boorish, though in an ‘entertaining’ fashion. The food was nom-worthy, the music swingin’, and, most importantly of all, the guests utterly charming.

I did manage to make myself ill at the end of the night – tiredness? my cold? too much alcohol? that one little cheroot? – and I strained my poor sore throat so much that I really can’t talk today and have to communicate with Jenny through sign language and email, but it was still much fun. Thanks, Copes and Thomas-Passmores!



* The ConGen 8000 was a box wrapped in tin foil, featuring a door and a fake handle, that was filled with facts, ‘would you rathers’ and questions, authored by my mildly psychotic wife.

Do you ever do that thing with your significant other where you wonder what it would be like if you swapped jobs for a day? Wife and I pretty much did that today, with she on her second day of life as a Futureite, and me on the first of three days teaching some lovely folks at the company how to use Apple’s presentation app, Keynote.

It was strange, going home together and comparing notes on our day that sounded like the wrong person was saying them; her concerns were all editorial, and mine were all about teaching, learning objectives and assessment. Still, it was fun, and I’m looking forward to the next two sessions – intermediate and advanced – over the coming days. (Picture included below simply because I think posts can look a bit bereft without images, but it’s just a static PNG; no free Keynote training for you, Jimbob.)



While you’re here, why not pop over to my ma’s Picasa page and witness the demolition* of my childhood home?

* It’s not actually being demolished; only the manky modern extension is being knocked down, and in its place a phoenix† will arise.
† A smarter new extension with lots of storage and an en-suite, I meant to say.

I’m reviewing a little USB microscope, and it’s feeding my macro obsession. Yes, the pictures it takes are hardly medical-grade, but who can fail to love something that produces close-up images of the world around you. Wife, after spending half an hour quite literally poring over her skin in minute detail, proclaimed it to be the best piece of technology ever; suck on that, Hubble. Anyway, I’m still all full of mucus and can barely see the screen, so here’s a little microscope quiz for you:






If you get them all right, you could win either a Mars bar or the chance for me to put three objects of your choosing under the microscope and have me email the images to you. In the event of a draw, the prize will go to the person who most specifically identifies each object. Wife, of course, is not permitted to enter.

When I last tinkered with Linux a few years ago, it was more of an academic exercise than a realistic attempt to embrace open source or switch to a new operating system. On the old G3 I was using at the time, I couldn’t get the graphics card to output at anything higher than 1024x768, installation was courtesy of a slightly terrifying text-only interface, and Wi-Fi was more a theoretical ideal than anything that I could actually coax into operation. (I’m quite sure the res and Wi-Fi were fixable, but I ran out of patience before I fixed them.)

Fast forward to now, however, and Things Done Change. A slightly newer 500MHz Power Mac G4 in our study is now dual-booting into Mac OS X and Ubuntu, the Live CD’s installer was a joy, the screen’s at my display’s native res, and it’s connected to my WPA-protected wireless network courtesy of a Broadcom Wi-Fi card fitted in a PCI slot. I’ve even connected to my iDisk – yes, of course I am; it’s just a vanilla WebDAV volume – and am working off that in a rich text editor that puts Word to shame. And all for free.



All this is possible not just because Ubuntu is a very user-friendy distro that has come a long way, but because my knowledge of computers has increased as well. (I had to fetch the Broadcom firmware before my Wi-Fi card would work; ‘Broadcom’ and ‘firmware’ are moderately complex notions, and editing the yaboot.conf file to define the default boot OS is something many would balk at, so it’s not mass market yet.)

But – and excuse me as I saddle up my hobby horse – technology these days doesn’t have to get simpler for it to have mass-market appeal. It’s like has happened with me and Linux: where a downward-curving ‘complexity’ line meets an upward-curving ‘ability’ line lies the point at which technology and humans get along. ‘Win’, in other words. We no longer have to make technology simple enough for those who in the 80s were famously unable to programme a VCR. Sure, it’s nice to have simplicity and intuitiveness as a target – and Mac OS X gets this right better than any Windows or Linux flavour that I’ve used – but the great thing is that for people of my generation and for those coming up behind us, the language of computing is so instinctual and ingrained that a smidge of complexity doesn’t panic us.

A netbook running Windows sharing the screen over the internet of a Mac mini booted into Mac OS X 10.5, itself running a virtualised copy of a Boot Camp’d Windows XP in Parallels Desktop for Mac’s Coherence mode:



And all so I can have Stephen Fry in America ready to watch when I get home. I like to think he’d be tickled by this.

Some children dream of being firemen. Some of being astronauts. I dreamed of having business cards.

I didn’t, just to be clear, dream of having a business. I just wanted to have the cards. Thinking about it sensibly, I suspect this was largely because in the films of my childhood, the ultimate moment of cool was when the be-shoulder-padded gent reached into his inside pocket and flicked out a small rectangle of white card, and said, with that special intonation that’s impossible to capture in text: “my card”.

As a troubled teen, I’d design cards on my Amstrad PcW10, print them onto special pre-perforated sheets of A4, then allow them to moulder quietly on a pile. I was, after all, a teenager, and didn’t have anyone to give business cards to.

Recently, though, I’ve found myself genuinely in need of cards that have some of my details on them. Of course I have cards for MacFormat, but that’s not always what I want to give out, and in any case they don’t have my mobile number on them. And so I designed something and got them printed up properly. The idea, because I’m ostensibly someone who writes for a living and who revels in verbal wit, was to have a card that narrated a little story, telling folks a bit about me, and that, for example, they could call me on this number, but that I prefer to get email at this address. I’m happy with the way they’ve turned out, with lots of little typographic attention to detail and crisp, publication-like black-on-white text; the one thing I’d have done differently with hindsight is to have orientated the cards vertically, the more closely to mimic the magazine pages that I help produce.

The toilets in Future Towers recently sprouted some signs. They read:

To Avoid Blockages, Please Only Put Toilet Tissue Down The Toilet Pan

Clearly, there’s some weirdness with the <twat>wonderfully vernacular</twat> setting of the type, and the persistent Crazy Caps™ are a bit odd as well, but the thing that stands out most is that it lends itself to a particularly anal kind of, if you’ll excuse the pun, piss-taking, of the “Oh, so we can’t put bodily waste down the toilet now?” stripe. And every time I visit, my mind wanders and tries, vainly, to reword it so it’s concise but immune from gags.

So here’s your task, web peeps: reword this sign, presumably from scratch, so it is both elegant English – nothing cutesy, please – and not open to any kind of punning abuse from work-monkeys. Go!

And so the Smith-Graham-Smith’s party was lots of fun. The theme was 70s, and as usual Mrs and I went a little bit over the top with costumes. Memo to self: stop basing sense of self-worth on how well you do any given task; no-one is awarding marks.

As the Mateus Rosé flowed, it occurred to me that nothing marked us out as uncultured heathens more than the reaction of the other guests to the little bowls of pink stuff Lise put out to accompany the Monster Munch, Twiglets and Crispy Pancakes. For us, this was, clearly, Angel Delight. But we’re common; everyone else assumed it was taramasalata. I had never heard of taramasalata before the age of 23, and it’s not hard to see why. “Haw, Jimmy; Ah canna get this tarry massey latta tae stay in wan bit lang enough tae deep-fry it.”

More photos, including one of Mrs P’s get-up, on Flickr.

Oh, and thanks, all, for the rockin’ book recommendations in the comments thread on my post below; keep ’em coming.

I’d very much like y’all to offer me some recommendations for reading, please – just an author’s name and perhaps a suggestion of the first of their books you think I should read – and so, partly just to give you an idea of the kinds of books I enjoy, and partly because I’d like to offer you some recommendations in return, here’s a selectionette of some of my very favourite books:

Use of Weapons Iain Banks
You’d probably want to have sex with me if I said that my favourite writer was Camus or Chekhov, but for me it’s Banksy every time. Yes, this is sci-fi, but ignore the label; it just gives Banks the chance to work against a different – and awesome – backdrop. This is simply a classic yarn, told with conviction and flair. My copy is well thumbed; it’s one of the few books I can happily re-read, and it’s worth buying just to see the craft of storytelling practised so well. The fact that he shares a surname and beard with one of MacUser’s illustrious columnists and all-round dudes just makes him all the more rockin’.

A David Lodge Trilogy David Lodge
The thing that Lodge does so well is to get you inside the heads of his characters and show you their motivations and neuroses. The clever bit, though, it that he usually alternates between different characters and sometimes an omniscient narrator, so you get to see how a situation looks from different perspectives. OK, not ‘clever’, but at least ‘well done’. Get the trilogy – ostensibly about the world of academia – as you have the added bonus of some characters popping up as cameos in later books. They’re described as the current characters see them, but because you’ve known them from earlier books, you know the stories behind these impressions. It’s basically fiction for nosey people, but done with gentle wit and a kind of very British understated panache.

The Science of Discworld II Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen
I’ve given up pretending that I’m too cool to like Pratchett. And besides, at their best his books can be very well-done satire and parody with all the power they have to make you see reality in a different and often more illuminating way. But if the sheer silliness of the Discworld has put you off up to now, try this. Every second chapter is a pretty normal Pratchett tale – featuring the wizards of Unseen University – but alternating with these is a bit of pop science, explaining how the mind works, concepts of phase space, and why storytelling is so important to us as a species. The fiction and fact weave together very well – Christ knows how, logistically, the three authors got everything so neat – and each leavens the other.

And because I can’t stop at just three, you should also check out The Road to McCarthy – the man can out-Bryson Bryson – Raymond Chandler – yes, his books sound like they’re being narrated by Frank Drebin – and anything by David Sedaris, Augusten Burroughs or Kyril Bonfiglioli. And now, I have to go and pack for our Carrie-Bradshaw-meets-Jack-Kerouac-meets-Tom-and-Barbara weekend away in London. Oh, and bonus props to anyone who can complete the line that’s the title for this post without Googling it.

Now it’s your turn, dudes and dudettes: I need new books to read!

Wanky disclaimer All the links to books on Amazon contain my affiliate link. (Was that even necessary?)

Being a list in no particular order of stuff that we already know but that this weekend has confirmed.

• Jenny cannot drink more than one glass of Kir Royale without becoming utterly and amusingly drunk. No other drink has this effect on her.
• It’s not a weekend unless you visit Sainsbury’s at least once for every day of the weekend. Bank Holiday Mondays are included in this.
• There are only three basic plots for Sex and the City. (In this it’s very similar to Scot-wean-toon Oor Wullie, but with more, um, willies.) A Men are bastards/unnecessary B Women are sassy C Maxing out your credit card every episode is consequence-free.
• It’s impossible to buy a REDACTED in Bath, no matter now often you visit the REDACTED shop, largely because it’s never fucking open.*
• We could eat kedgeree for breakfast and dinner. In fact on Monday we did just that. We ♥ kedge. Bonus fact: when I first knew her, Jenny hated fish, rice and curry. Getting her to eat all three in the same dish for breakfast is proof, were any needed, that you can change someone.

* Censored so that D&L don’t have any inkling of the amazing† costume that I’ll be wearing to their 70s party on Saturday.
† Lame and overworked

I really am having a great time with my new DSLR, getting to grips even with doing stuff on full manual rather than relying on Program AE or Av/Tv. I’m loving the creative control of my f/1.8 lens; the selective focus in this photo of Jenny and her dad is intentional.

And today we went to Dyrham Park, a National Trust property near Bath. Though there were some beautiful landscape shots to be taken, my attention was caught by the selection of old wooden wagons and agricultural implements in the outhouses.



High-res and other shots, comme d’habitude, on Flickr.

I like that I’ve finally got iChat, my instant messaging application, house-trained:

What do you do with £500-worth of high-spec digital camera goodness? Why, take slow-mo shots of an aging Staffie eating grass, of course.

Well that was fun, wasn’t it? This is my ninth day off in a row – a record, I think, since starting at Future – and it has been all kinds of fun. What was originally planned as a week of Cornwall camping was cut short a little by the weather; though we were actually very lucky – the evenings were calm and dry – we did get caught in the car in some torrential downpours, and spent the second night in the tent fearing that we were about to end up in Kansas as the wind whipped around us. The campsite we stayed at, however, was rather lovely; it had a river running through the middle of it, and campfires were allowed. We were quite tentative on the first night (picture below) but on the second we got a real crackler going. It was all very ‘man make shelter; man make fire’. Props to wife for not being too grunky throughout the whole affair.

But we’ve had all sorts of fun back in Bath, too. There have been DVDs (hey, Cloverfield is good, isn’t it?), cinema visits (hey, The Dark Knight is good, isn’t it?) fancy meals out and trips to Westonbirt Arboretum where I played about with my cheap-but-rather-rewarding new Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II lens. Since I took some photos for Mrs P’s Arts Week at the end of term, a couple of her colleagues have asked if I would take some portrait shots of them and their families, and I wanted a lens with a nice wide aperture to let me work in low light and to get some nice bokeh going on. (I’m never sure how to pronounce ‘bokeh’, which I know is an anglicised spelling specifically designed to make it obvious how to pronounce the Japanese; how should a gaijin pronounce ボケ味 so as not to appear like a twat, oh Japanese-speaking-brother-in-law?)

Despite having lived here for well over a year now, it was only this week that we went to the baths for the first time. We’d been to the Roman ruins a couple of times before, but this was out first visit to the new Thermae Bath Spa. It. Was. Idyllic. The rooftop pool is paradisal, and by lying on your back with your ankles tucked over the side and one of the big floaty foam tubes wrapped around you, you can soak up the sun in near-silent bliss.
No dog walking today as some manner of sporting event prevented us from find anywhere to park up at the university. Never fear: the relentless, pitiless and pointless stream of pictures-of-dogs-you-don’t-know-taken-by-someone-you-probably-only-know-a-little will resume next week. Stay tuned!

Finally we got a tent that was easy to put up. So easy, in fact, that our conviction that the first one we bought was actually faulty has only been strengthened. Having given it a dry run in the back garden this afternoon, we’ll pack up the car and head for deepest Cornwall on Monday. I’d like to get as far down as Land’s End – having been to John o’ Groats as a child – but given that the forecast for next week is a little rocky this may be a vain hope. We may be ‘forced’ to ‘endure’ the ‘lack of adventure’ to be found in a cosy, family-run B&B.

I’d like to take this opportunity, too, to make it clear that my technique for folding up a tent – doing a roly-poly along its length to get all the air out so it rolls up tight – is perfectly legitimate and not at all embarrassing. To me.

I will have my laptop with me next week – I have some freelance to polish off; it’s not that I can’t live without it* – but we’ll probably both be offline by choice until 2 August. Keep an eye on my main Flickr account and the photoblog account as we might throw some photos up there.


* No, really. I’d have my iPhone anyway.

Pretty, pretty Sandy! Pretty boy! Look at that pretty face! He’d been in isolation and this was one of his first walks; he was literally jumping with excitement – bounding up to shoulder level – when he was brought out of his cage. He was very bright; though initially foxed by some of the swing-gates that we encountered – trying in the first instance to poke his head straight through the bars – by the time we were on our way back he knew just how to snake through them. Pretty, clever boy! Flickr pics here.

Since my iPhone is in iPhone hospital being nursed back to iPhone health, and since neither of the O2 shops I went to had any loan phones, and since I gave all but one phone of my past mobiles away, and since that one remaining mobile is missing a charger and is in any case locked to Vodafone... deep breath... I bought this little guy on eBay.

I had one when I were a lad, and really liked it. I’m enjoying rocking the retro vibe – BT Cellnet, for fuck sake – but WTF is with no predictive text, monophonic ringtones and, of course, no pissing web access? I can’t, as Aston was wont to comment, work in these conditions. Roll on Friday...

Meet Ozzie, the most doleful of Staffies. From his gummy eyes to the bald tip of his tail, this walking tragedy was nevertheless a real sweetheart who, whenever Jenny or I fell behind, would turn round and stare mournfully until the whole pack had caught up.

And now, excuse me while I fall asleep face-first into my keyboard. Despite taking Friday off, this has been a prodigiously busy weekend and I’m pooped.

What ho, stout traveller! Think you’ve read everything there is to read on the internet? Rubbish! Here’s a list of links that keeps me amused all the live-long day. Some are perennial favourites, some one-off del.icio.us bookmark scraping, a couple are probably NSFW but all are at least mildly diverting. Have fun.

spEak You’re bRanes If you don’t know about this site — which comments on the braindibble left behind by the Great British Public™ on the BBC’s Have Your Say pages — go and visit it now. I guarantee it will take forty minutes out of your life. Read the archives too.

Rehabilitating Mr. Wiggles [NSFW, kinda] A filthy comic strip about a foul teddy bear.

Top 10 TED Talks Not, as someone dear to me thought, ten talks by a man called Ted, but the most-viewed short videos from the TED conferences. Go and watch Jill Bolte Taylor's stroke of insight which I only recently saw even though it’s been doing the rounds on t’internet for ever; I’d be fascinated to see if the kind of disconnected young people we pin so many of society’s ills on would be able to point and laugh at a woman in such an odd emotional state, given her utter conviction. Mathemagic is cool too, and the colour-changing octopus in David Gallo’s talk is mesmerising.

Fazed Slightly pot-luck-ey, given that you don’t really know what each link is, but it’s usually worth clicking on.

Digg Folks knock Digg, but poking around the front page usually throws up at least one link that’s worth your while. Also try the Upcoming page so you can be ahead of the curve and say “oh, yeah, I saw that yesterday; good, isn’t it?” with conviction. This means ladies will want to have sex with you.

Wulffmorgenthaler [NSFW, kinda] Another ’toon strip. Of variable quality, but when it’s funny, it’s fu-neee.

xkcd After years of seeing occasional strips from this ’toon popping up all over the web, I decided to RSS the sucker. Very worthwhile, even if there’s a good 32% of the gags that go straight over my head.

Photoshop Disasters Wonder, as thousands of pounds-worth of cutting-edge hardware and software are wielded by chimps and fucktards.

The Big Picture I know, I know, everyone’s linking to it, but it is genuinely good; big pictures with usually very useful short captions.

ProCon Feeling virtuous after all that frippery? Go and read up on controversial subjects at ProCon.org.

I do, by the way, apologise for so much doggy nonsense on this blog, but the way I figure at least I’m posting something. Without our weekly walkies, this site would be terminal, and not in a Unix-ey kinda way.

Robbie — another Staffie since we find ourselves loving their compact, brassy charm — was a-dore-able. While for the first half of the walk he was all about the forward momentum, once he’d tired himself out a bit he became much more affectionate and would roll on his back to have his tummy tickled, submit to all sorts of velvety-wonton stroking, and even jump up next to me to have a cuddle when I sat on a log. He was the most outwardly affectionate of the dogs we’ve walked, and though he was happy to trot back into the home — and was delighted to see his carer again — when we walked away after giving him back, he tried to follow us. Bless.

He was a hugely muscled dog, and though small, he was capable of really tugging on the lead. His shoulder and hindquarters were just pure, solid muscle, of the kind that makes my flabby, sedentary body weep with jealousy.

In photography news, I need to start taking more control of shutter speeds. Lots of the shots I took today were too blurry, not because of ISO, aperture or available light but just because the camera was deciding that a slightly sluggish shutter would suffice. Tv mode needs more investigation, I feel. Some of the better shots are up on Flickr.

Yes, Gabriella was foisted on us again today, looking more dishevelled than ever from rummaging about in the long grass. Every day is a bad hair day for Gabriella. She was joined by Titch, and seemed much more lively than she had been in Troy’s company. They were quite sweet as a couple, actually, with Titch refusing to walk on if Gabriella was busy engaged in some post-sniffing or grass-munching.

The damp weather doesn’t auger well for this evening’s Crowded House gig at the Arboretum, but it did give me the opportunity to take some pretty, pre-release-Leopard-default-desktop-rip-off photos of dew on grass; download a desktop picture pack, here, licensed as . Lots more pictures of the dogs too, as always, on Flickr.

Or: Take two dogs into the shower? A moment of heart-stopping panic today when Troy (left) slipped his harness and went careering into an adjoining woodland; we could only hear him rustling around in the undergrowth. Just as I was about to call the home and tell them we’d lost one of their dogs, he popped his head up further along the wall and Jenny dropped everything – including Gabriella’s lead – and harnessed him back up again. Gabriella, bless her, just sort of stood there looking on and occasionally munching grass; no mad dash for freedom for her.

Troy’s boisterous-yet-lovable nature – he slipped his harness a second time, and was a wilful little bugger – led us to christen him Oliver Reed, and Gabriella’s grizzled old lady looks earned her the name of Elaine Paige. The naming-of-random-animals-that-don’t-belong-to-us continues.

Left my 400D in the office on Friday, so pictures are courtesy of my PowerShot S70; found it more difficult to process the RAW images to give me a pleasing finished image than with the 400D, and I’m still not entirely happy with the finished result. It’s a bit flat. Hey ho.

The perfect magazine, for me, should be just like a roast chicken* – bear with me on this, and excuse the crunching gears of metaphor and reality.

• There should be a real feeling of anticipation before you begin reading.
• You should be excited about getting started on a nice bit of breast – the big main coverfeature that attracted you to the magazine. And it should be mighty satisfying...
• ...but there should also be delicious legs and wings – smaller features that are just as delicious as the main ones but that you didn’t necessarily buy the chicken for.
• And even when you think you’ve finished, there should be a few little regular treats – the oysters, say, or bit of crispy skin – that you tend to forget about before you actually start eating the chicken, but that when you remember about, you’re really glad the chicken’s, um, editor, implemented them some years ago.
• Even then – after the breasts, legs, oysters, skin and everything else have been eaten – there’s still some enjoyable picking to be done. Captions to be read, sidebars to be enjoyed, letter to be read; that sort of thing.

I think that I should start an editorial and management consultancy course where I espose various ‘x-as-x’ food-based analogies for every kind of product imaginable. Except food, which I would of course compare to magazines, cars and luxury cosmetics. Who’s with me?

* Assumes you like chicken, and that, like me, you’re a breast man.

Ladies and gennelmen, the pride of the 9-year old me: a Legoland (Denmark) driving licence. The look of glum, detached resignation on my face belies how pant-wettingly exciting it was for me to drive a tiny, blocky electric car around a fake road system, stopping for red lights like a good little Scandinavian.

Today, we walked a greyhound. I say ‘walked’. I mean ‘stood in close proximity to while she rolled around in the grass and snuffled into the undergrowth’. It was ironic that of all the dogs we’ve walked, the greyhound’s circuit took by far the longest thanks to Nelly’s insistence on flopping her butt down with a thump and rolling around in the long grass.

She clearly hated the kennels, and for the first time we felt oddly guilty about handing a dog back to the (very nice) staff. The other dogs we’ve walked seemed to have a pretty stoic attitude – “OK, well, thanks for that walk, friends; no hard feelings OK? I’ll just be here in this cage if you need me...” – but we really got the impression from Nelly that every time she gets taken out for a walk, she hopes she’ll never be taken back; we felt like we’d betrayed her just a little.

In the last month, Receding Hairline has had visitors from 148 countries, including countries I blush to confess I hadn’t even heard of. (Kyrgyzstan? New Caledonia?)

This is by way of being a completely manufactured introduction to a rather pretty little question that formed in my head the other day: what accent do people ‘do’ when they do an accent of your country?

Let me give you an example: when people do a Scottish accent, chances are it’s going to be a Glaswegian, or at least broadly-west-coast-of-Scotland accent. I blame the big yin. And so I’m imagining that when people do a generic American (Cope, I’m looking at you) accent, it’s usually specific to a city or at least region of the States. Ditto for Welsh (you saw that coming, huh?), Irish (Susan?), German and so on.

So given that I have so many international visitors, I’m hoping y’all will oblige me in letting me know in the comments what city or region tends to define the accent that represents your country when people do an impression of you and your compatriots talking. Rope in friends, enemies, colleagues and those with whom you have never worked before. I’ll do a special page somewhere on the site if I get enough responses.

A little guidance

1. It’s not about what accent actually is the most representative of your country; it’s about listening to the accent that people from outside your country ‘do’ when they’re being Scottish or French or whatever.
2. This is about national accents, not about ‘what people sound like who try to do a Brummie accent but fail’.
3. For a given value of ‘national’. In my world, ‘Welsh’ is national, rather than ‘British’. You decide.
4. This only really works in my mind with places where English is spoken natively, but I’m assuming the same will hold true for other major languages spoken in different countries. What does a Québécois think a Parisian sounds like doing an impression of a Québécois? Of course, I’d love to hear that British people speaking English with a mock German accent all sound Bavarian on whatever, so just have at it in the comments.

(The only one that I’m thinking is probably going to be difficult is ‘English’ itself. When I were a lad growing up in Scotland, an English accent was always an unbearably posh RP-meets-early-Queen-Elizabeth-II, but that was probably as much to do with a tiresome background anti-Englishness than any notion of a coherent English culture. But knock yourself out in the comments.)

This old lady's most endearing physical characteristic was the two little head-mounted leathery wontons that she calls ears. Her most endearing personality trait was her slightly grudging and undemonstrative affection; I lay on my stomach at one point to take some dogs-eye view shots and Jade walked straight towards me, tucked her head against my shoulder, and just stood there leaning against me.

Note, we'd have to change her name if she was ours. We'd go with ‘Gloria’.

A big shout out to my brother-in-law for supplying so many of the stickers that make an appearance on my MacBook; I thought it was about time I posted pics since it's getting pretty complete and since the old iBook got so many positive comments. More stickers, as always, gratefully received.

Mrs P and I slipped smoothly into roaring twenties mode at the weekend, courtesy of a parental-sponsored weekend away at Bibury Court Hotel. I was born to order afternoon tea in the drawing room of a quietly mouldering country pile, and I did it with aplomb. I also filled my memory card with shots of the achingly-picturesque Cotswolds landscape, though unfortunately the weather only started to pick up once we were on our way home. There are a few below, and there are more on Flickr. I apologise in advance for my floral, depth-of-field-ey macro obsession.

Things we've learned about Big Dogs from Fraser, today's walking companion:

1. We lack upper body strength.
2. Big Dogs do Big Shits.
3. Some dogs don't really care much about hoomans; Buster and Fraser were more disdainful towards our presence than any cat we've ever been snubbed by.
4. We really want to walk – and photograph – a dog that doesn't need any sort of face furniture; we completely understand why Buster had a muzzle and Fraser had his face-strappy second lead arrangement, but you can't help but feel sorry for the little guys.

In other news, I appear to be unable to post a photograph without trying new ways to create a subtle vignette effect, a thing photographers have been trying to eradicate with better optics for years. I wonder if there are support groups I can go to; “Hi, my name's Chris and I put an archaic low-end photography effect on any picture I take with my expensive semi-pro camera.”

How many Newton users does it take to change a light bulb?
Foux! There to eat lemons, axe gravy soup.

(Apologies for this gag's vintage; I've just read it for the first time and it made me giggle.)

So you're walking along and you notice that one of your shoelaces feels a bit loose. So you bend down and retie it nice and tight. Straighten up, and then three steps later you realise that the other shoe, which until you retied its mate felt perfectly snug, now feels ridiculously flappy-aroundey. God, I hate that.

* Whenever I get irritated about inconsequential stuff like this, the image of Mr Brennan, looking on with a mixture of pity and wonder that any one man can contain so much petty anger, comes unbidden into my mind.

I can't get a chance remark of Jenny's out of my head; yesterday she observed that roses are at their most beautiful just before they die. It sounds incredibly trite but it's no less true because of that, and the vase on our windowsill is just on that cusp of bloated, straining beauty she's talking about. It sounds like a great lyric; now I only need the talent, time and money to turn it into a song.

But it would probably end up sounding like Phil Collins.

There are seaside towns populated by clean-limbed and bronzed Adonises. There are seaside towns that have a faded Victorian charm, all peeling paint and rusting iron railings. There are seaside towns that slumber quietly, nestling up against the crook of an inlet.

And then there's Weston-super-Mare. Which is as depressing a fly-ridden cesspit of a town are you're likely to visit before making your one-way trip to the nethermost reaches of hell. And so this is a public service announcement: under no circumstances think "Oh, I know what would make a nice bank holiday Monday day out: Weston-super-Mare!" It will only end in tears. And a possible car-wide suicide pact.

Blargh. Here's the equation of my life at the moment:

One dead hard disk + One chipped front tooth + One inexplicably painful y-ligament + Piss-poor + (Long nails + showering quickly + a painful nip in a surprisingly intimate area) / (Walking a dog + Making two huge lasagnes) = Meh.

So yes, not sure what's going to happen with my chipped tooth (and no, I have no idea how it happened) as I'm having a hellish time finding a dentist in Bath. The hard disk has been swapped for a rather lovely 250GB Western Digital Scorpio, so that's a bit of all right. There's bugger all I can do about the cash situation – apart from whoring myself out to sister Future titles for freelance – and the lens from Mrs P's glasses spontaneously popped out today while watching telly.

Never mind. Today we went up to the Bath Cats and Dogs Home and walked a long-legged Jack Russell cross called Buster. He was a cute little thing, though he had to wear a muzzle as he's 'dog-aggressive'. I refused to go and see the cats as I'd have been unable to walk away without secreting some old and mouldering puss somewhere about my person. More dog-walking is in order, I reckon, and I have a horrible feeling that we're on the brink of physically threatening our octogenarian neighbour-landlord until she agrees that we can keep a bugfuck crazy retirement-age pet.

We do also, however, have some fun things planned. We're signed up for Crowded House at the arboretum, Ben Folds at the academy in Bristol and, perhaps best of all, a hot air balloon flight at the end of May courtesy of an almost year-old housewarming present from my folks.

Oh, and my lasagnes promise to be fucking epic.

Sooo, yeah. If you're anything like me, every day when you pick up your mail at home or work, you think how nice it would be if somebody just decided that day to send you a really nice, big-ticket gift. A couple of days ago, that actually happened to me: a satisfyingly chunky box turned out, upon opening, to contain my dream camera, a Canon EOS 400D. It was a present from my mum to mark her retirement from teaching* and it has totally reawakened my passion for photography. I'm tingling at thought of all the stuff I have to learn, opportunities I can take and accessories I have to know about.

I started looking through my late papa's film SLR bag, and found that although the lenses are the wrong mount system (FD rather than EF; apparently non-optical adapters are available for about £27 on eBay – any experience, folks?) the flash (semi-)works in the hotshoe, so the missus and I had fun taking big washed out stylised portraits. I might get one of the adapters after payday partly because I like the idea of using my papa's stuff from his AE-1, and partly just because one of his lenses is a sweet-looking 200mm telephoto. The 400D means that I'm shooting in RAW really for the first time, and, um, it's quite good, isn't it? I'm loving the flexibility, but hating the disappearing gigabytes. I think the time may be ripe to migrate to Aperture or Lightroom, but I need to talk to people who know more about the two before deciding which one to go for.

So, yeah. I know that this sort of stuff is neither big, clever, nor particularly difficult to achieve, but I'm still really loving it.

A reminder: I have two Flickr accounts. My cameraphone account is out-and-about snaps, while my main account will hold all my 400D shots.

* Yeah, I don't know why her retirement was a reason to buy me a beautiful DSLR, but don't draw attention to this, mmm-kay? Particularly since she very sweetly also bought Jenny a 32GB iPod touch as well. Yay, my mum!

Having taken a sneaky day off work, Mrs P and I decided to slope off to Longleat Safari Park; all manner of safari-themed japes and scrapes ensued, and the day was proclaimed a success by all concerned. The highlight of the day (apart from the rhinos, which were fucking cool, by the way – I totally want to come back as a rhino) was a terrified-but-excited Jeff feeding a deer some of the special Longleat deer food. The stoopid deer didn't seem to understand that it was supposed to wait while I put some of the little pellets into my wife's hand before she moved her hand out of the car to feed it, and so kept thrusting its very fuzzy and adorable head inside the car to get at the cup of pellety goodness. Amid much excited shrieking, the task was eventually accomplished: one fed deer, one wife-hand covered in deer-spit. Witness the tongue-lashing she's getting below. More animal magic chez Flickr.

Some people see God's face in crisps, some see the Virgin Mary in slices of tomato. At the moment there's a slightly spooky face formed by clouds and the sun showing on my EarthDesk desktop.

Incredibly short, incredibly compelling TED talk about what Leonardo da Vinci looks like. Healthy scepticism is a good thing, but it's difficult to argue with the conclusion, particularly when it's put across with such understated confidence.

Grammar nazis are so last century. Welcome, friends, to the brave new world of the typography nazi. Below are ten mistakes that everyone makes, an explanation of why each is wrong, and details on how to fix them. At least, you'll see how to fix them on the Mac; under Windows, you'll need to dig through tables of Alt characters. Have fun. (If you decide it's time to be more accurate with your type on the Mac, get PopChar.)

Such typographic faux pas are not as potentially dangerous as grammatical fuckups – there's little chance that using a period instead of an interpunct will obscure or confuse your meaning – but they are nevertheless wrong, at least for the time being. The large-type heading for each section contains an example of a typographic mistake; if you can see what's wrong in each one before reading the explanation below, give yourself a pat on the back. Then examine your life priorities.

One last disclaimer before we get started: by ‘mistakes everyone makes’, I include my lazy-assed self and exclude you if you're a professional typographer. Or just someone who care about the little things in this amoral pit of a world…

"What's wrong?"
OK, an easy one to start. Yup, those aren't proper quote marks; they should be ‘sixty-six and ninety-nine’ quotes. The mistake happens because typewriters, pushed for space, decided to have only one neutral quote on the keyboard, not dedicated opening and closing quotes, and the convention stuck.
THE FIX: alt-[ and alt-shift-[ for double quotes; alt-] and alt-shift-] for singles.

New in iWork ‘08!
Of course, now we have word processors that do smart quotes for us automatically, everything's cushty, right? Wrong. If you type the above sentence in Word or any other modern app, it will think that because you type the first ‘apostrophe’ in a sentence, you want an opening, ‘six-style’ single quote. Instead you actually want a ‘nine-style’, closing apostrophe, so you have to enter it manually – or type two and go back and delete the first – so that the sentence reads New in iWork ’08!
THE FIX: As above.

I am 5' 10" tall
So those 'straight' quotes aren't for proper quotes, but they represent feet and inches, right? Wrong. They're not actually for anything. Feet and inches should be represented by primes, which look a bit like straight quotes tilted slightly to the right. If your browser supports the characters, the above statement should read: I am 5′ 10″ tall.
THE FIX: Sorry, but this is a bugger to fix. If you're in InDesign or QuarkXPress, use the glyphs palette. Otherwise, OS X's Character Palette – check the International pane of System Preferences – is your only salvation.

10.5″ x 9.4″ x 4.5″
You fix one problem, and another one just bloody well comes along. So, hurrah for getting the primes right, but using a lowercase X for the ‘by’ character is another lazy I-can-see-it-on-the-keyboard-so-I’ll-just-type-it thing. Correctly rendered, the above measurement should be 10.5″ × 9.4″ × 4.5″, not 10.5″ x 9.4″ x 4.5″.
THE FIX: Again, a tricky one. You'll need to break out the character palettes.

14º and overcast
This is a really subtle one, but that degrees symbol you see up there isn't a degrees symbol at all. It's actually an O ordinal, used, inter al, in Italian, Portuguese and Spanish to denote masculine gender.
THE FIX: alt-0 gives you the ordinal, while alt-shift-8 is a true degrees symbol; alt-K is a ring above accent. [thanks, silverpie!]

Some - indeed most - use hyphens incorrectly
A hyphen – the kind of short dash you see above – should really only be used when linking words such as ready-made. It shouldn't even be used mathematically to represent a minus, as there's a dedicated character for that, too [thanks, Dash Nazi!]. Most other uses mandate an en dash – as here, for example – or when planning meetings from 1–2. Changing fashions mean the the long dash—this one, called an em dash—is rarely seen, but where it is, it's usual to render it without the spaces on either side or with special hairline spaces instead.
THE FIX: alt-hyphen for an en dash, alt-shift-hyphen for the em.

Only £17.99!
Again, laziness and the democratisation of typesetting mean that we've lost the use of the correct interpunct in prices. £17.99 should be correctly rendered £17·99. After decimalisation in 1971, a period was only supposed to be used if technical limitations meant that a middle dot couldn't be printed.
THE FIX: shift-alt-9 types an interpunct [thanks, Nic!]

Nobody cares...
Quite probably. But what you see above is just three periods, not a true ellipsis. Want a proper ellipsis? OK then… (In this font, three periods looks like this, much more tightly packed...)
THE FIX: alt-; types a proper ellipsis.

These (honest!) are brackets
No, those are parentheses. Brackets [like these ones] are used to add in information missing from a sentence you shouldn't change – such as a direct quote – or to add information outside the voice of the original text. And don't think you're smart using angle brackets to replace quotation marks when writing French; <en français> is horribly wrong, and you should instead use proper guillemets if you want to write «en français».
THE FIX: Just be aware of the difference, and don't call parentheses brackets! [Note that Lise makes a very good case for me being wrong in the comments, but I'm not so sure. More research is needed...]

3 1/2″ and 5 1/4″ disks are obsolete
Though complex fractions have to be created individually, most mainstream fonts have the characters for a quarter, a half and three quarters. 3½″ and 5¼″ not only look better and are more accurate than the use of the forward slash, but they're clearer too. 3 1/2 looks like ‘three and one or two’, and you obviously need the space in there otherwise it becomes 31/2. In this age of decimalisation, 3.5″ or 5.25″ are, of course, alternatives, but there are some uses where a proper fraction is more sympathetic to the source or context than a forced decimal.
THE FIX: You're going to need your character palettes again. You didn't just tidy them away after the last time, did you?

Well, how did you score? Do you have your own typographic bugbears? Or am I just an insufferable busybody who will hasten myself to an early grave, getting my panties in a bunch about stuff that doesn't matter a damn? That's what the comment box is for…

I might just order one of these puppies. It's a neat Canon all-in-one, and though it's entry-level, it's Canon entry-level and it's the from the current range. The real clincher, though, is the price. With £20 cashback, it's £17.99. And given that my otherwise-excellent Canon i6500 needs ink, this is justifiable as a money-saving exercise...

£17.99, people!

I suggest you all buy one now. And if you buy it through this link, you get Amazon's free delivery and I get a smidge of commission. Cashback offer ends April 13th.

“I was a producer of materiality and I am ashamed of this fact”
“Everything I designed was unnecessary”
“Design is a dreadful form of expression”

So says Philippe Starck. Christ on a bicycle. [via]

So a while back we got a letter from our friendly neighbourhood council informing us that we had strayed into a bus lane in our car.

They're right; we had, though Bath is a bastard of a city to navigate round, and it's all too easy to do this by mistake. We know, we did it; so of course I paid up. A small, spiteful but ultimately tit-numbingly stupid part of my brain, though, wanted to force the council to rescind the fine, because if you look closely at the bottom right of the frame showing us pootling along in our car, you see the legend Evaluation period has expired. Please buy the Elecard MPEG2 Video Deco[der]. Thieves and brigands the lot of them.

To add insult to injury, we'd been snapped on Mrs P's birthday, a day that even before this letter arrived we had agreed had been something of a birthday-tastrophe. Ah well.

In other news, we briefly visited Liverpool yesterday for the world premiere of Karl Jenkins' Stabat Mater in the city's Anglican cathedral, and I was absolutely entranced by the cathedral building. It's incredibly masculine but without being repressive and bullying – a real feeling of benevolent, trustworthy authority. A few (quite poor) pics on Flickr.

I've never formally been assessed, but I'm quite sure I have a mild case of OCD or would fit somewhere on the autistic spectrum. Witness the work of a day: our newly-optimised big-set-of-shelves-with-telly setup. It might not look like much, but it gives me a warm glow of satisfaction. So, let's have a look at what my OCD has wreaked, shall we?

The big black box at the bottom left is a Drobo, basically a big, extendable hard disk. It stores all the programmes recorded by the Mac mini (just below the telly) and those DVDs that I have ripped to H.264 to be watched using the mini's Front Row feature.

The DVDs you see represent only a fraction of those we own – we didn't have TV in London for years and so bought far too many – but they're arranged in a particular way. They're not sorted alphabetically but rather by colour; both Jenny and I have visual memories and find it easier to remember the colour of a DVD spine rather than whether we filed Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire under H or G. All those that have been ripped to the Drobo have a little black sticker dotted onto the top of their spine so that if we go to watch a film and it has a black dot, we know it can be easily accessed from Front Row. I also know which ones I still have to rip.

The Mac mini is hooked up for sound to my beloved, ageing Technics stereo, and the balance is adjusted to give true stereo even though the screen is offset from the centre.

My brother-in-law bought a PS3 when he was in Japan but can't currently use it, so you see it sitting up next to the speakers, with its wireless controllers on the shelf beside my collection of Penguin 70s. Currently I'm being shit at Colin McRae: Dirt, and the young lady and I are rockin' out to SingStar; I really want to get some Blu-ray movies and try them out on our shiny Samsung TV, but that particular luxury will have to wait for a) a little disposable income and b) some decent movies on Blu-ray that I don't already own on standard def. (The TV, incidentally, has two HDMI inputs, so both the mini and PS3 are hooked up over sweet, sweet digital connections.)

The router – that nice pre-N Netgear model – is on the shelves too. It's positioned beside the Penguin 70s, on the shelf just above the stereo, in such a way that its blinking lights are hidden from Jenny when she sits in her usual place, but I can keep an eye on it from my seat.

And the finishing touch was added with an hour of backbreaking contortion with a hammer round the back of the unit, tacking all the wires in place so it all looks neat.

Now wasn't that interesting?

After no fewer than four visits from an 'engineer', we finally have a working fridge again, and I thought I'd share with you this line from the wife's email bringing the joyous news.

“Man said it would take 24 hours to cool down/freeze up properly and gave the helpful advice of ‘put some ice cubes in it to help it along’. Oh yes. Let me just get this tray of ice cubes I've been keeping up my arse.”

The ’Format Crü were chez Phin today for a photoshoot – very Homes & Gardens – and while everyone including Jenny was hard at work, James and Graham indulged in a little Blues, caucasian-style.

Our eighties-themed Philm Club was all kinds of fun, but Jenny gets the prize for best party idea by getting us to make top hats – chocolate, marshmallow, Smartie – which I then supplemented with the chocolate/corn flakes concoctions much beloved of nursery schools. Add to that lunch at the Marlborough Tavern, cream teas and my nouvelle cuisine extravaganza on Saturday, and the three of us were required to waddle slightly when we visited the actual baths.

Remember – the next Philm Club is Sideways on March 1. It will, of course, be wine-themed, but we won't be drinking any fucking Merlot. Wanna come? Let us know!

You know that thing? Like, when the Jehovah's witnesses turn up at your door and you screw your best polite smile into place? I'm quite familiar with that look now, as I've been seeing it quite a lot on people as I eulogise about the iPhone. Here's the sort of thing that gets me quite so evangelical:

If you bring up the keypad on the phone and punch in a number that happens to exist in your phone book, it will display the name of the person on whose card it appears. So what? Dozens of other mobiles do this. But as you'll see above, if I tap in my home phone number – which is listed for me and for Mrs P – it will elegantly display that it's the home number for 'Christopher or Jennifer Phin'; if anyone else had done this, I can guarantee that at best you'd have got 'Christopher Phin/Jennifer Phin'.

Utterly beautiful UI design, and a perfect example of why, as someone who is happy enough in Windows or Linux, I'm still a Mac user. Or to put it another way, Apple FTW.

In the British parliament, as Eddie Izzard has observed, the most entertaining it might get is honourable friends waving their papers, shouting 'Toilet paper! Toilet paper! Toilet paper in our times!", but the Italians have much more fun. I stumbled across this 'in pictures' story on the Guardian the other day and felt a bit like Bill Bryson reading about Australian politicians drowning in mysterious circumstances; why don't we hear more about this?

The background is the passing of a vote of no confidence in Romano Prodi, but that's not the fun bit. No, that comes from reading the captions and looking at the pictures. During this sitting, we learn of one politician who was called a lump of shit and a cuckold before bursting into tears and collapsing, see politicians throwing water all over the chamber, and – the crowning glory, this – stuffing mortadella in their mouths as an act of political satire.

Click here to see all the pics.

In describing the appeal of the antics of the sealions at San Francisco's Pier 39 today, Alex suggested that they were like a cross between dogs and penguins – with all the charm that that implies – and frankly I think that's such a good way of putting it that from now on I shall be claiming that description for myself. Sorry, old chap.

* Please excuse the language; old MacUser staffers may recognise it as a Penfold saying. With the possible exception of Penfold himself, as I may have just imagined this episode.

Just signed up for MacHeist II – a great bundle of Mac shareware worth almost $500, yours for only $49. There's some phenomenal stuff in there, but for me this year it was all about Wingnuts 2 – a hugely fun top-down shoot-em-up that looks utterly gorgeous. It's downloading now, and I suspect I'll be late in my bed tonight as a result. You can get more info about the bundle at the link below – and if you're clever enough to buy it through that link, I get licences for another couple of apps. Be quick, though; the whole promotion only runs for another three days.

https://www.macheist.com/buy/invite/96433

San Francisco is proving much more enjoyable this year than on past trips; partly it's just that I have more time – a clear two and a half days before work proper starts – partly it's because Mrs P is here and I feel more up for doing touristy things, and partly it's because I've been here sufficiently frequently now that I have a decent idea of the geography of the place and of where's fun. Photographic shennanigans follow.

And not a sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll teenager at that. Oh no; something much less palatable.

Further wallowing in Old Technology Nostaligia™ the other day, I bought on eBay the 100th issue of PCW Plus magazine. It was the first magazine I read with any regularity, and it helped me with my first computer, an Amstrad PcW 10. Plus, it's an old Future mag, so there was a second connection.

Turns out there's a third: in this issue not only had I written a letter that had been published, but I'd also submitted a design to the magazine's inaugural Readers' Gallery and won a £5 voucher for, um, the application I'd used to design the thing. The fact that the design is one for the cover of my Standard Grade Physics folder perhaps tells you everything you need to know about Teenage Chris.



Or maybe that doesn't paint a clear enough picture for you of a 14 year-old me. In which case, I present Exhibit B: my letter that appears just above my masterpiece.



"Insufferable little shit" just about covers it, don't you think?

Mrs Phin, bless her, will tell you herself that she's not one of nature's nursemaids. I, on the other hand, quite like taking care of poorly wives. The differences in our approach to spouse-care were highlighted last night when, as Jenny pointed out, her stellar performance over the duration of my first cold of 2008 largely consisted of:

A allowing me to watch as much Top Gear as I liked
B not shouting at me when I blew my nose
C merely gritting her teeth and taking a deep breath when I sneezed

I basked in this unprecedentedly luxurious standard of care.

She would no doubt appreciate it if I pointed out that she thinks my nose-blowing and sneezing are louder than the average. The average pachyderm, possibly. But then again, she smells of wee, so it's all swings and roundabouts, really.

So after seven years of our relationship, Jenny finally got the baby photos tour when we were home for Christmas. Strangely, I'd never seen the photos either, so it was as novel for me as it was for her. Bizarrely, I was an incredibly cheery baby; there's hardly a photo of me where I'm not grinning like I'm on smack. Here's a sampling of some of the more entertaining ones for your mocking amusement.

I dressed better then than I do now; check out those pseudo spats!


This looks like a picture you might find in a picture frame when you buy it from Habitat.


Jenny hyperventilated at my expression in this picture. Can't think why.


One word: insouciant. Three more: where's my dignity?


I've never seen a picture of this old puss looking so young. Still miss her.

JENNY: DID YOU SPEAK TO SOMEONE SPECIFIC?
ME: NO, I CONVERSED WITH AN AMORPHOUS NOTION OF HUMANITY.
JENNY: YOU ARE HILARIOUS.

In other news, it's cold up in the Auld Country:

Guys! Are you balding? Do you want some facial fungus options that can help mitigate the effects of your receding hairline? Then have we got the handy guide for you!

Option 1: The baby-face

The classic look for the baldie in your life. Fully shaved with what hair remains on the heid buzzed down as far as it can go.

Option 2: The gangsta

Not to be confused with the Village People, team this look with a cigar for the full effect.

Option 3: Jaaaaaz

Add a goatee, sideburns and a far-too-small vintage chapeau perched jauntily on your bonce, and you have all the ingredients in place for a generic jazzy, beatnik-style look.

Option 4: The wine ponce

It took us ages to work out why this look was so clearly a wine ponce look, but we've just two words for you: Paul Giamatti. Requires a phenomenal amount of upkeep.

Option 5: The Wild Man of Borneo

The Full Beard™ offers the maximum distraction from your backwards-leaping hairline, but it's a delicate balancing act. You run the risk of looking simply like you couldn't be arsed shaving, or like you should simply be selling big shoes*.

So there you have it, folks; five looks, each as ridiculous as the last, and all of them designed to ease the crushing sense of mortification you carry as a balding, tubby gentleman. Laugh through the tears, folks; laugh through the tears.

* The Big Issue. Seller in Scotland are wont to call out "Big ishu! Bigi shu! Big shue" as you walk past.

I have no affection for soap operas, but I couldn't help but have the feeling that we've moved from the epicentre of the universe once more forced upon me when I realised this morning that our old flat appears on the map of London shown in the title sequence for EastEnders. It's only just hanging on, but extensive scientific testing* has proved that it's definitely there. How often does the Bath flat appear on national television, eh? Eh?



* Laying a screengrab of a Google Maps satellite projection over a frame capture in Photoshop, and setting the former layer to Multiply.

Christmas in Bath is adorable. Lights are strung across alleys, the entire city seems to be running on Glühwein, and the population swells as befuddlement after befuddlement of old folks gets bused in from surrounding villages to 'do a bit of shopping'.

And yet.

All this makes it a phenomenally stressful place in which to actually live. My seething temper, never far beneath the surface, regularly erupts as socially-inept hordes fanny their way around the shops, regularly pooling into gaggles of mediocrity. Entire clutches of children – the very verb that would best describe what ought to be done to their necks – roam like vapid, brutish meerkats, while oxygen thieves insist, against all the laws of common sense and physics, on attempting to push triple-decker prams along cobbled streets.

The very epicentre of this fuckwittery, it would appear, is Marks & Spencer. Take one part Wether's Originals, one part KFC and three parts mermaid, compress to a quantum singularity, and you have the apparent effect of one regular-sized M&S to attract the old, the chav and the plain suggestible.

Today, a mother-and-daughter duo were walking side-by-side, their combined bodies plus a hip-mounted basket each taking up the entire width of the aisle, as the mother repeatedly vouchsafed to her daughter "I wish it was in brown! Yeah, I wish it was in brown!" Seriously, she said this four times, each time taking the time to stop, make eye contact with her spawn, and clutch – there's that word again – her by the arm just to make sure she really got the frigging point that – all together now – she wished it was in brown. Needless to say, I killed them both.

Feel free to judge me.

I had to use a VCR today. It was horrible. One word: tracking. Another three: fucking horrible quality. It joins my little laptop in Retro Corner™ on my desk.

Apologies for the lack of updates and the disappearance of the webcam; I was hit with Fasthosts' password nonsense and was locked out of my own site. I didn't have a chance to sort out the webcam before leaving work this evening, but it should be back on Monday. Put a red ring around the day in your calendar.

Are you creepy? Do you want to see what I do all day? Then you'll enjoy the recently-insigated webcam; there's a link over there on the right.


The krazy kids at Dennis are obviously enjoying it. Here, accompanied by the note "Future Publishing forced to ban Tippex after staff bullying incident" is Barry's effort.


Nik wasn't to be outdone.


And then came this from Ross. "Ooooh. You should really nail that page furniture down more securely. Imagine if that had been an ACME anvil, for example."

It's not like they have magazines to publish or anything.

They say that every man has a book in him. By that measure, I only have two thirds of book left in me, having contributed heavily to Jason Simmons' tome for designers. A copy arrived on my desk the other day, and very swish it is too. It covers everything from theory to practice, and, though I say it myself, it's a damned fine resource.

There are some sample chapters up for browsing at the publisher's site, and if you want a copy – it's only £15 – you can buy it from Amazon; click here or on the graphic in the sidebar, and I'll get a little slice of commission from Amazon.

In other news, I tottered through to London on Thursday for a press briefing which was held at the O2. I now more than ever regret not making it down to Greenwich when 'the O2' actually was the Millennium Dome. It's a phenomenal building, and I'm really looking forward to next weekend's trip to see the Foo Fighters performing there.

Michty. After the madness of the Mac Live Expo – during which I had so many meetings set up that I didn't buy a single meal myself – young Mrs RH and I drove down to the coast for a little R&R. We went down via Stonehenge – maybe I'm suggestible, but I always feel like something special is happening at these places – to Lulworth cove, and though it was blustery and later rainy on Sunday, Monday morning was bright and beautiful, perfect weather for the walk along the coast to the Durdle Door.



There are more photos from the trip on .Mac and Flickr.

And this morning we wandered through to Bristol and I plunked down some hard-borrowed credit card money on a proper Samsung 32" LCD telly. Annoyingly, it won't be ready for collection until Thursday, but it's all very exciting.

That's is, folks; the final whistle, the last shout, the death knell. When Marks & Spencer starts using a grocer's apostrophe – or, more accurately, the opposite of a grocer's apostrophe, omitting one where one ought to be – you know that it's only a matter of time before Western civilisation implodes and we all revert to apathetically rolling around in the muck, splitting infinitives and just not caring.

Hey, have you met my wife? Not only does she write the back-page column for the mighty ’User, but she teaches, embroiders and can act as an impromptu nursemaid when you're struck down with some mucus-centric lurgy. This much we know. But to coincide with the soft-relaunch of her own website, recedinghairline.co.uk is delighted to be able to share with you its Top 5 Secret Jenny Facts!

She's writing two novels
Oh yes. Not just one, not just one and half, but two. Two, two novels! A-a-aaaa! They're each at only about 15,000 words long at the moment but they're both phenomenal. It came as something of a pride-pricking surprise – I'm the professional writer, dammit, etc – to learn that she is an incredibly talented author; far, far better than me at non-technical writing. I know writing can be hard work for her, but when you read her fiction, it seems so effortless. I had no idea she had this talent, and in fairness I don't think she realised it either. These two novels are my pension. And I'm only half joking.

She worked in a coathanger factory
Oh yes. For en entire summer, she worked three days on–three days off–three nights on–three nights off at a Mainetti coathanger factory, working amongst noisy heavy machinery that fired red-hot needles. I'm sure there was a reason for the red-hot needles other than simply to motivate the workforce – “Ah, the old carrot-and-red-hot-needles approach” – but it has temporarily slipped from my recollection. Incidentally, I recommend against clicking on the above link for Mainetti; it will simply raise more questions than it answers, such as “How, for fuck sake, is it more than just a hanger? Surely ‘a hanger’ is precisely what it is, no more, no less?” and “What qualifies a hanger as a randy hanger, and for what might such objects be used?”

The 6pm brewski
We had to go to the recycling centre recently as the kitchen surface would no longer support the weight of all the empty Grolsch bottles. I had drunk maybe four of them. That said, it certainly does take the edge off. Oh yes.

She lived in Skye
Oh yes. While I spent my entire conscious life in one little village, Mrs RH, having been born into the Silver City with the Golden Sands – Aberdeen, but don't let on; its nickname is so much prettier – moved about a fair bit, and spent a few years living on the quite astonishingly pretty Isle of Mists. She can count from one to ten in Gaelic and sing songs. In Gaelic, like. I'm not just pointing out that she can sing. Though she does have a beautiful singing voice, it must be said, and plays guitar and violin. And writes songs. Can you blame me for loving this woman?

She once sat on some cakes
Now, you might not think this is worthy of an entry all to itself – and indeed I've had to leave out so many other fascinating facts just so this one can be here – but it is worth it. Y'see, it wasn't just that she sat on some cakes – it was a box of six Waitrose mini Victoria sponges, since you ask – but rather that she was sitting on the sofa already, then sort of jumped up, moved sideways and bounced back down onto the box with a distinct crrrrump sound. We spent the next ten minutes hyperventilating with laughter. Quite what precipitated this quasi-Tourettes leap is now forgotten, but if you ever bring cakes near her, bear in mind that there is the danger of crumpage.

BONUS FACT!
While working in the classical section of HMV Oxford Street, she served Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio and, unfortunately, the credit card system decided to do a random check at that point. Asking a moderately major Hollywood star to prove their identity must be a sobering experience, but apparently Mastrantonio took it in good spirits.

So there you have it, folks. For more Jenny-related paraphernalia, go and visit her site. It's at www.ribbledoot.com* and has just been completely redesigned. Over the coming months, creative tutorials, videos and more will be being added, so be sure to bookmark it and visit again soon. As an added incentive, her blog is now password-free and damned funny. See for yourself why people as varied as Dave Stevenson† describe her as “irritatingly gifted”!


* A chewy cookie to the first person who can explain the etymology of this rather odd URL. Jenny, you're not allowed to enter.
† And they don't come much more varied than Dave, as he'd be the first to admit.

I want a new iPod. I have had a classic from Apple for review for the past week, and they want it back. Bastards. Please just buy me one, OK?

I am in Pareeee for the expo, and, as usual, using my pretty convincing French accent and Gallic shrugs to fool waiters into thinking I can actually speak the damned language. I can usually make myself understood, with many crunching gears as tenses and verb endings are treated more as Platonic ideals than actual grammatical rules, but the problem with translation is not necessarily understand what the individual words say, but a grasp of idiom as well. Take this poster as an example:

I understand that the top line translates as “Your new best friend”, so I'm assuming the French call dogs man's best friend too. I understand that in response to one dog's question “But what does it have that we haven't?”, the other answers, “Dog, Oscar, dog”, and I imagine that there is some hilarious play on words there – ‘chien’ meaning both simply dog and something else – but without knowing what that ‘something else’ is, the whole thing takes on a surreal quality which is only heightened by how dazed I already am from this whole expo thang. Bleh.

Today, folks, marks the final phase in my transition to a normal person – or ‘norm’ as we like to call them in our contemptuous way. We now have all the accoutrements of adult life: as well as a filing cabinet, small economical hatchback and washing machine, we now own a dining table. For the first time since either of us left home. No longer will we have to squat like Neanderthals in the floor, scooping food into our gaping maws with our fingers* but can sit like fully-fledged members of Western society on chairs and use cutlery and everything. Note that we even plumped for rattan chairs. Rattan for chrissake. Plus, note the peace lily on the windowsill. What has become of our mock-indie credentials? The table even extends so we have dinner parties. I think I need to have a lie down.

* Never actually happened. Though I think that if we had not bought this table now, Mrs RH would have bought lap trays. And that really would have been the end.

This will be old news to some, but Mrs RH has just told me of a little snippet on the Russell Brand show that highlighted the fact that I Want You by Bob Dylan sounds exactly – and, folks, I mean exactly – like it's being sung by C Montgomery Burns. Here's a link to an except of the track on the UK iTunes Store, so you need to have iTunes installed and be in the UK. Otherwise take your pick from the links on Google's page for the album.

Also, should you not have seen the summer's sleeper hit yet, here's your chance:

Soundtrack courtesy of Lee Maddeford.

Ah, the West Country! If it please the court, I humbly submit a few pictures that prove that this is The Nicest Place to Live™:


A G&T in the H&H
(Gin and tonic in the Hare & Hounds); some more photos of the afternoon's sketchin’-readin’-drinkin’ here.


The Westonbirt Arboretum
Less than half an hour's drive from chez Receding Hairline is this huge, idyllic fancy forest (as I like to call it). Trees, shrubs, glades, dappled sunlight, dogs, people walking incredibly slowly, the desire to wear sandals and a hat and walk with a stick; it has everything. Including The Festival of the Tree, where there are lots of Phil Harding types all busily turning wood. Into tat in most cases. The worst thing that can happen to you at an arboretum is that you twist your ankle in a hole and fall down; anyone who meets my wife over the next fortnight must offer sympathy. More pics in the Flickr and .Mac galleries. (Same pics in each; .Mac is a bit prettier, but Flickr does more. All pics are untouched cameraphone snaps.)


Mrs RH doing some craft!
This is a happy accident; I was testing some webcams and happened to snap this. For some odd reason I like the photo even though it makes it look like the crafting is being done on the high seas in a force nine. Includes a guest appearance from my best friend Erik the filing cabinet.

UPDATE Mr Stonebridge tells me that my code was fine; I was just being impatient. If the below works, hurrah; if not, read on.



Bah. I've tried embedding the video here directly, but clearly I'm doing something wrong. Click here to watch Jeff’s Opus hosted on .Mac; it's well worth it.

Oh, and if anybody can tell me why the code below isn't doing what I want it to do – it just shows the blue QuickTime Q, but nothing loads – I'd be most grateful.

<embed src="http://www.recedinghairline.co.uk/othergraphics/Opus.mp4" type="video/quicktime" width="467" height="274" href="http://gallery.mac.com/chrisphin/100077" kioskmode="true">

The wife and I took our wee car to visit Cheddar Gorge today, and since he was going too, we decided to go along for the ride. You can come too! Well, virtually, that is, thanks to the wonder of iLife ’08 web galleries!! Click here to see lots of pictures!!! Well, nineteen, anyway!!!!

Also, I'm mucking about with some video at the moment, and Mrs RH has been filming anything that moves recently with our trusty Canon MD160. The resulting opus has been in preparation – merci bien, iMovie ’08 – for some days now; you'll be invited to the iPremière shortly.

And finally, paying lip service to this blog's title – and in the hope that it nets me some more lucrative receding hairline Google ads – please view the below video which demonstrates the ultimate evolution of the humble comb-over. Only in Japan.

Today is Mr & Mrs Phin's second wedding anniversary. The last twelve months have seen us move to Bath, slow our pace of life down, and buy a car. All good, folks. Next year in Acapulco. Or maybe Bath again. It's very pretty, after all. Such events inflame my dormant Hallmark tendencies, and so I make no apologies for the barely-credible self-consciousness of the picture that accompanies this post.

Just a quick note to say that the address for the RSS feed for this site has changed. The old one will continue to be published, but if you could resubscribe to the new address it will make things a bit easier down the road. Apologies if your RSS reader went a bit nuts with Receding Hairline posts.

Also, this article on the ol’ Amstrad PCW brought back fond memories; my first proper computer was the PcW10 with its 'paper-white' display. I'm a LocoScript boy at heart.

And finally, below is the phenomenal volume of paper and assorted tat – note that the mug and pen are special Induction-branded examples, though you can't see it – from my official Future induction. Note too that the foil-wrapped thing is a lolly, not a condom; they don't encourage that degree of colleague interaction. Future. Is. The. Best. Better. Than. All. The. Rest. *beep*

Mrs Receding Hairline and I are seriously considering buying a car, which has me almost micturating with excitement. At the end of the discussion, during which we'd um'd and ah'd about the pros and cons of spending what is in reality a paltry sum on a second-hand hatchback, we fell to justifying the purchase to ourselves. Finally, I made the point that our wedding had been so cheap (case in point: the bride's dress was bought in Jigsaw for £110) and we'd been such well-behaved little Thatcherites – school, uni, jobs with no gap years or other life-enhancing fripperies – that we were in some way due a bit of middle-class, twenty-something expenditure.

“I mean, how much does yer actual wedding cost these days,” I asked.

“Can be twenty grand,” she replied. “Which is frankly ridiculous. I mean, I know you get a nice day, but how nice can a day be? For twenty grand, I'd want a day of continuous orgasm. And I wouldn't want to get all dressed up and have to be polite and gracious. I'd want to lie in a hotel room, farting and watching films, and being fed rare delicacies. Or actually, have the actors themselves come in and act out scenes from the films.”

Amen, sister.

EDIT She has just opined that she'd like a rooftop jacuzzi for in between the orgasms. But, ever the logical male, I pointed out that with a continuous orgasm, there's be no ‘in between’; if it were a continual orgasm, there would. She just gave me a funny look, suggested instead that the jacuzzi could be to round off the day, and went back to reading her book. Le sigh.

Well, New Cross, we've lived in your filthy yet strangely comforting bosom for just over two years, and we're almost ready to pack up and ship out. You've been fun, frustrating and – it's worth saying again – filthy in almost equal measures. Folks who say you have terrible transport links are just plain old wrong; the 453 goes straight into the heart of the metropolis via Waterloo, the 436 to Paddington via Victoria and the 172 to St Paul's if you feel in need of spiritual nourishment, and the 177 will carry will passengers at annoyingly infrequent intervals to the myriad delights of Grinij should you require top-notch gastropubs. The view from the window of the new flat in Bath isn't as diverting as the one from the lil' flat at 186 New Cross Road, but then again, we do benefit from not living at a fairly major junction of a four-lane A-road, next to a bus depot. Plus, emergency services of every stripe seem to have an irrational fondness for this particular route, and having the ability to pause live TV just to let sirens wail past – or, more often, sit at the lights making noises like amplified queens – is less of a luxury than a necessity for us. Oh well. I imagine that in years to come, we'll tell our children that “your mum and I used to live in London, you know” but the ungrateful little shits (I think it's important to begin developing an appropriate parental attitude as soon as possible) won't have an inkling of the sheer hard work and emotional trauma living in the capital city entails. It has been a phenomenal effort, but while we're undoubtedly making the right move for us right now – we may find ourselves back here in the fullness of time – I am grateful for everything the city and the people we've worked with in it have done for us, and I'm so glad that we had the opportunity to work here when we were young enough to live it properly. Thank you, London. See you around, yeah?

Hands up, those who'd like to be jealous of my new life in Bath. The below is the view from the beer garden of my local pub, the Hare & Hounds. Rather pretty, yes? It was micturating down with rain this morning, but by lunchtime the sun was out, and by this evening one could happily sit sipping a pint of something brown and room temperature.

Ma and pa are down in Bath at the moment, en route to their holiday-of-a-lifetime in South America. It is, of course, very good to see them, and not just because for the fortnight plus that they'll be away, I have the use of their car. Hurrah holidays and hurrah Peugeot. In theory, the world will be able to follow their travels on the simple blog I set up for them, phinsinperu.blogspot.com. Bookmark the site or the feed, why doncha?

As a public service, and because this sort of intelligent contribution to the public debate is what blogging should strive to be, here is a link to Mr Betteridge's superb post entitled Why the BBC will never distribute DRM-free TV programmes. Thoroughly, thoroughly worth the read, and though he is, I believe from his writing, an advocate of liberalising the intellectual property laws, it's not a Doctorow-style rant, and addresses the reality of the system in which the world does business. Cory might well have valuable things to say, but he has never managed to convince me that he's not simply a dangerous alloy of wide-eyed dreamer and stickin'-in-to-the-man zealot.

Little by little, my existence in Bath is becoming a little less Spartan. I now have a can opener, I today bought a bottle opener – for the lovely, lovely bottles of real ale purchased at the weekend, before realising, bottle held forlornly in hand, that I didn't have an opener – and in about a week's time I should have a toastie maker. Yum. This is all just as well as my wife today realised that there is technically a four-day window between the release of the new Harry Potter book and The Big Move, and so it's entirely possible that come the day I expect to have all my stuff here with me, I will instead have nothing except the knowledge that Mrs Receding Hairline knows who dies. (My god, there's a hell of a lot about Harry Potter on Wikipedia...)

Hello Chris,

Please can you call Phil Hadler @ FSC Music on no peeking, folks.

The message I took is 'Rock Frog £89'. He said you would know what that meant.

Thank you
Sam @ Monmouth Street Reception

---

Try saying the last sentence in an ominous voice: “He said you would know what that meant...” Also, I'd like to point out that this entire communication was intended for a colleague of mine, Chris Vinnicombe. I thought not working with Chris Finnamore at Dennis would have put paid to hilarious crossed wires...

Random fact I learned today: the phrase “the man on the Clapham omnibus” has been incorporated in Canadian patent jurisprudence. Canadian, I tell you. Madness.

I went to visit Mrs Receding Hairline last weekend, and it was surprisingly like checking up on an ageing relative. I helped make sure she had clean clothes. I threw out the nice full bowl of mould – never lift a plate without first checking with the woman of the house how long it has been there – and sterilised the crockery in the dishwasher. We took a carload of cardboard to the recycling and a sack of old clothes to the charity bins. And then we went for a run in the country and had fish and chips in a pub near Westerham.

In fairness to the poor dear, life has been almost intolerable recently – worse for her than for me – and just keeping body and soul together is challenge enough. Also, last weekend wasn't all country jaunts and hilarious tales of hyphae, and I damn well need a holiday. That won't happen until after The Move, and that throws up new head-fucks every day. Dear everything: please just all be over.

...but News Knight with Sir Trev, which only started tonight on ITV, had me laughing out loud mostly because it has him saying stuff you usually only hear from Rory Bremner. I think the comedy works largely because we've heard that particular voice read out headlines for thirty years; I've never known a time when he wasn't presenting news, and to hear him doing comedy – albeit a slightly smug, knowing comedy – is funny in itself. Plus it had Clive Anderson and Marcus Brigstocke. Recommended watching, and if you missed the first one, I have it recorded.

And finally [bong] I have to report that this was a very dull weekend during which I couldn't muster up the energy to do much. I'm now getting seriously bored and pissed off at being sans wife. The end of July cannot come quickly enough.

Is there anything nicer than a freshly baked Maris Piper potato, oozing melting Cornish butter, with cracked black pepper and a sprinkling of Anglesey sea salt? Why yes, yes there is. And that something is the self-same baked potato with tuna mayonnaise and spring onions. But I didn't have that tonight. Oh no, it was the unadulterated potato* for me this evening, largely – indeed solely – as the blinding realisation dawned on me as I went to prep the tuna a couple of hours after popping the potatoes into the oven that I don't have a tin opener here in Bath.

* Good name for a band, Mr Cope?

Have spent the last fortnight rebuilding my Mac absolutely from scratch – really not fun – and recreating parts of this site too. Apologies if your RSS feed suddenly got repopulated with lots of stories from this site.

Remember kids: back up. (I had, I should point out, but for various dull reasons restoring wasn't a simple clone-across-and-be-done-with-it thing.)

Also, apologies for the terrible geek joke in this post's title; I never can resist.

I started drafting a post about the new Olympic logo, but found that Coudal got there before me with something far more articulate, less ranty, and more swearword-free. Their post is perfect; the one thing I'd add is my wife's observation that the new logo evokes the graffiti you see everywhere in London, which is quite a nice visual play.

And will everyone please point at least one visually illiterate dolt to the following text from Coudal's eighth point; if we can make just a few people take this on board, mankind may have a chance at being not so pig-headedly stupid:

“When we hear ‘my kid could have done that!’ we think ‘success’. Some of the greatest logos of all time involve two lines (the Christian cross) or three lines and a circle (Mercedes). Your kid could have done that, but she didn't. Nor did she design the graphics standards manual that goes with it. So give it a rest. Or send us her resume.”

Young Mrs Receding Hairline came to visit last weekend, which was very very lovely. It was the first time she'd been to Bath properly – this is, not in the welter of form signing, bank-balance depletion and desk-humphing* that characterised our previous visits – and I think she now feels much more positive about the move.

On the subject of Better Half, I should record for posterity the immeasurable good she has done to the apparent taste of my music library. Yes, Max Raabe is still in there – nothing to do with her, I hasten to add – but it's been very rewarding to have a proper muso for a wife. And I do mean proper muso. As a teenager she was an avid reader of Q and the NME, and, though not quite as fundamentalist as she once was, she still maintains a pretty hard line on novelty records, bubblegum pop and the musical stylings of Phil Colins. But then, that's quite as it should be.

If it weren't for her, though, I'd never have sought out and discovered so much music that I now love. Case in point: The Divine Comedy. (I know they qualify as mainstream by most people's reckoning, but work with me here.) I recently bought Victory for the Comic Muse and it's been on continuous loop on my iPod ever since. You can preview it on iLike or through iTunes, and is one of the most rewarding albums I've bought in ages. I humble direct you to A Lady of a Certain Age, Mother Dear, and, just because it amuses me, Threesome.

* No, not humping. Humphing may be a Scottishism, and just means lifting, though it suggests that the objects being lifted are heavy and unwieldy, and that the process of moving them around is tiresome and unwelcome.

This morning saw my broadband finally activated in Bath and boy does it feel good. For someone like me, going cold turkey on Internet access – or, worse, the methadone of jumping on a neighbour's dodgy open network – is hell on a stick.

Coming up with titles for posts is hard. Take this one, for example; all I wanted was an excuse to post a pretty little pic I took of the afternoon sun hitting a leaf of sage on my new pot 'o herbs, but to title it 'A picture of some sage' is as dull as a dull thing owned by Mr McDull, son of the original John Dull of Dulwich. So instead we have a dreadfull convoluted title that derives from a tenuous connection (sage and onion stuffing) married to a barely-there pun (stuff = things wot might be in the post); I think it comes from working in t'media, where you're contantly having to come up with such dreadful little bon mots in captions and headlines. Apologies, all; here's the damn picture...

I'm sure you must be aware of this already, but just in case this celebration of nasal, oddly-cadenced speech has passed you by, please take note that tomorrow is International Talk Like Bob Dylan Day.

And while we're about it, please don't let September 19 pass you by either.

Even the graffiti in Bath is polite, has a social mandate, and is pretty. Keep an eye on Flickr for more photos of life in Bath.

I think I'm finally getting to grips with the layout of this town, though that might have something to do with recent purchase of a pop-up map of the centre. Above, for example, you see the Pulteney Bridge, that shares the rare distinction with only three other bridges of having shops along both sides. That – it looks like a street, not a bridge, while you're on it – added to the fact that the Avon loops quite severely, was, I think, the root of my disorientation. Or maybe I'm just a bit crap.

It's all a bit odd, really. The shops are shut when I leave work, I feel at risk from scurvy from a lack of fruit and veg, and we moved so little stuff on Saturday that I don't even have any crockery here. It feels almost like I'm living in a very poorly-resourced hotel, and spend my life pretty much either in bed or at my desk:


The work is good, though, and it's exciting to be trying new stuff. Acclimatising to a different publishing house's systems is disconcerting; my colleagues throw around phrases and words without thinking relating the processes governing how the magazine is put together, and it's all very alien. Sometimes it's just a simple translation – 'editing' is 'proofing' here, while 'proofing' is 'signing off' – but Future's much more robust, regimented content management system has its own very specialised lingo and customs that I'm having to learn.

In other news: I know it's wrong, I know it's parochial and patronising, and I know that I too have a strong regional accent, but... when I overheard a chap with a very broad West Country accent on a mobile this afternoon talking about advanced enterprise hardware configuration stuff, I couldn't help but grin to myself. There's just something about hearing 'server' pronounced 'zerver' that gives you a warm glow, particularly when the speaker signs off what is obviously a business call with 'all right, my lovely.'

At the moment, though, I feel very much between two worlds. My keyring holds two sets of keys – London and Bath – and my identity cards bespeak a slightly schizophrenic sense of self. My lady wife is still in London too, so I kind of feel like I live in neither place. That should change over the next few weeks, though, as I find my bearings here and explore the city more. Any recommendations?

Let me know if you want an invite to Joost (what's this?) – I have 999 of them to give away, though the invitation process seems to be b0rked. Works on PC and Mac, but only Intel variants of the latter.

I'm moderately impressed with the experience and the technology behind it, but it's flaky as hell on my MacBook. 0.9.4 just crashes out after a couple of minutes, and the version I have running on my PC fares little better. Ah well, that's why this is a beta programme. Oh, 'programme' geddit? Arf, arf, arf...

Today, I am delighted to say, I am a walking cliché: I am literally wet behind the ears.

(I discovered a small spot there yesterday, and when I reached up to scratch a niggling itch, I noticed a little blood, so I've just given myself a little clean up. With the consequence that I am literally wet behind the ears.)

Yes, this may be a quietly nauseating story, but when was the last time you were a walking cliché? Huh?

I bought the third series of Peep Show the other day to watch in anticipation of series four starting on Channel 4 tomorrow; it's one of the best things to hit British TV screens in the last decade, and we were really looking forward to watching fresh episodes. Its stars, David Mitchell and Robert Webb, also play the characters of Mac and PC in Apple's recent advertising campaigns.

When we fed the DVD to our Mac mini – which acts as our central media server – it spat it back out again, claiming that the anti-piracy features of the disc meant it wouldn't play back. Sure enough, on tiny print on the case, it stated that the disc probably wouldn't play on a PC, Mac or Xbox. Now, I acknowledge that DRM and other systems aren't inherently Bad – usually just clumsily implemented – but the implication that because I'm watching a DVD on a computer I'm a pirate really rankles; it's like having to sit through that bloody 'you wouldn't steal a car' nonsense at the start of many commercial DVDs. It can't be skipped, and just makes me resentful: I've just spent fifteen quid on this disc of plastic and metal – and all the intellectual property it contains, I know – and you're telling me 'piracy is a crime'; it's difficult to escape the innuendo that I'm considering piracy.

As if it wasn't ironic enough that one of Mitchell & Webb's own DVDs will play on neither Mac or PC, the final glorious insult is that it the anti-piracy feature, which prevents me from watching the DVD, doesn't actually prevent anyone from pirating it.

One last, tangentially-related thing: if you pop on over to pcpro.co.uk/links/152podcast, you'll hear me arguing against PC Pro's deputy editor David Fearon's assertion that PCs are better than Macs.

We've been uncharacteristically sociable this week, and have barely spent any time in the flat except to collapse into bed at an ungodly hour and rise at an even more demonic one. A couple of nights ago we went to see Russell Brand and Noel Fielding host an evening of comedy at the Royal Albert Hall. Our seats were in a rather odd position: we were perched in the seats reserved for the choir during an orchestral performance, and had slightly surreal view of the stage and – even more curiously – the audience. It didn't diminish our enjoyment in the least; the only genuinely weird part was that some film clips (including some of The Moon) were shown on a huge screen that we couldn't see, and our only experience of these clips was watching a screen-lit audience oooh-ing and giggling at the action.


There are more such pictures of the Albert Hall here.

Today's release of an update to Mac OS X has made me an irrationally happy man: it includes support for a swathe – a veritable slew, even, dare I say it, a raft — of hitherto unsupported mobile phones. My spiffy K800i is included, so here I am, transferring my 800+ long list of contacts, plus my diary, to my mobile. You have no idea how happy this has made me.


10.4.9 also includes support for USB webcams which is pretty exciting; can't wait to put it through its paces.

Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention, and it is by careful application of this theorem that we arrive at this photograph...

...in which Mrs Receding Hairline has shielded herself from the glare of the early afternoon sun with the application of this handy tshirt-cum-hood in order to check the directions to Atlantis. We've dubbed it iFalcon, as it follows on from her occasional habit of wearing a tshirt on her head during the night to block out the light, something like the little hoods birds of prey wear in falconry.

By 'Atlantis', we don't, I should point out, mean the lost city – the Interweb isn't that good – but rather an arts supplies store in Whitechapel*. Why they didn't call it ARTlantis, I have no idea. Clearly a missed opportunity.

On the way back from buying exciting things like paints and canvases, she was again telling the story of one of her pupils who, at sixteen, had been asked to model by Lucien Freud. She turned it down, and while acknowledging that sixteen might indeed have been a bit young to get yer kecks off in front of an old man, both my wife and I agreed that if at any point an artist of Freud's calibre had ever expressed an interest in painting us, we'd have jumped at the chance, and to hell with the risk of low-grade sexploitation. Imagine being able to look at that picture when you were sitting in a bath chair wearing a muffler – by which I mean 'old' not merely of an eccentric bent.

Mrs R H put it best: "Even if he wanted to paint me with a banana up my ass, I'd be fine with that."

Amen to that, sista.

I haven't, incidentally, neglected the FFC; results are still being collated – you can still vote! – and I'll report back soon.


* The first time I am aware of hearing 'Whitechapel' named was in a song by Edith Piaf, in which she pronounces it something like Wet-chapelle; it always sounded impossibly romantic to me, though I have been disabused of this notion following today's visit.

As you may have heard, the Phin household is currently debating the notion of running a Funny Face competition. Why? Well, the clue is rather in the title; it's funny. I think that's reason enough, but Mrs Receding Hairline is sceptical, and so I present you with the official poll. Amazingly, the voting's currently a perfect 50/50 split – I know, who knew! – so I invite you to vote.

Basically, a FFC (that's 'Funny Face Competition', to you, buster) involves pulling various hi-larious faces, taking photos, and putting them on the web for all to see and possibly vote on. Whaddaya say?


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Glancing at our router last night I noticed that there was traffic on our Internet connection and to/from our NAS drive, and it wasn't caused by either of us. Further poking around in logs showed that some bugger was repeatedly probing the NAS over the FTP port, being denied access every second or two as they presumably cycled through a list of common passwords.

Tracing the IP address of the source of the attack (hey, man, it is an attack; I feel violated...) suggested that the perpetrator was based in Shanghai – apparently rendered 上海 if your browser will show the pictograms properly – hence the tongue in cheek, mock-hysterical title to this post.



I ran a port scan on the perpetrator's computer, and he had a few ports open as well, including FTP, but at this point I decided to take the moral high ground and leave him be. That, added to the fact that I wouldn't have the faintest idea of how to go about exploiting an open TCP port.

Needless to say, a stop has been put to the incoming attack.

There's only one word to sum up this week: smarginfluftisubble.

It was a week of ups and downs, but I'm in an uncharacteristically and inexplicably good mood at the moment. It could have something to do with snagging a Mac from work. It turned up in our labs weeks ago, and as I was tidying up the labs in anticipation of a big group test, I came across it again. Further investigations revealed it was an old machine of IT's, but that they were happy for me to give it a good home.

Now, souped up with a SuperDrive, a stonking 32MB graphics card, and the weirdest RAM configuration you're likely to see when sober (576MB?!), it's sitting under my desk in the office, quietly ripping DVDs. (My laptop gets around 23fps with the encoding settings I use; this ol' 500MHz G4 gets between 1.5 and 2; bless.)

This afternoon was spent on various freelance projects and on making bolognese. For reasons which may become clear as I age, I seem to have decided to make two pans of the stuff, so – and I mean this quite literally – if anybody within practical striking distance wants mincey goodness (I'm looking at you, Darien, and all you crazy cats at Dennis) let me know and I'll pack some up. Note: my bolognese has made grown men weep with its deliciousness.

We've also upped our home broadband – I'm loving Virgin Media's new bundles – to 8Mb with free evening/weekend calls; all for £14.99 a month. Luvverly. This was partly made practical by the fact that we had a visit from a BT engineer to fix our ailing phone line – as fully paid up landline owners now, we've joined the 19th Century's technological revolution. It'll be horseless carriages next.

On Friday Aston, Ruth and I had lunch with young Algernon, and it sure was good to vada his dolly old eek again. I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed the old roué's company – come back to work in London, Albuquerque!

But as always, I'm just done with all the business of getting my life and flat straightened out, and would like another day's weekend to enjoy it; bah.

When I were a lad, growing up in the wilds of the southern Scottish countryside, multi-day power cuts were common, and if we suffered from extreme weather, folks just damn well got on with it. Not so in London. Flurries of snow – like the one that fell last night – frequently bring the city grinding to a halt. "What's this? Snow, you say? Well... What do we do about this devil's dandruff? My wife has a big hairdryer...?"

Bleh. A ten and a half hour flight doesn't sound too bad, but in truth I feel like I have spend my entire life on that damn plane, watching a small flickery screen updating its position on a map with glacial slowness. Add to that that I was up at 4:30 this morning, and that as I write my body's telling me it's approaching midnight, but my clock tells me it's just mid-afternoon. Ah well. I need now to go and pick up my media pass, then I'll do a little wander, take a few pics, eat something then retire to the Marriott's Sky Bar.

Below a quick snap from the plane, somewhere around the Lava Beds National Monument.

Go and amuse yourself with the nicely polished monoface. Seriously, I'll never speak to you again if you don't visit the site this instant and have some fun dammit. What do I pay you for?

So long, 2006, you served us well. Yes, in just a few short hours, the time will come for us to start writing the year wrong, as 2007 girds its loins and prepares to pounce and savage. Cue lots of 'hilarity' when writing the dates on magazine job bags, viz "Did you really proof this page a year ago, Chris? My, aren't we working ahead of schedule..." et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. *Sigh*

What's your big hope for the fresh new year, then? Me, I want to get the work/life balance right, whatever that takes. And that's about more than just doing the appropriate number of hours; it's about clearing space in my mind to deal with the minutia of home life as well as being determined to enjoy the time I spend out of the office to the full. I guess that amounts to A Resolution, but since that all sounds a bit hardcore, let's shy away from that definition.

I suspect that 2007 will, too, be the year that my hairline will leap the last few inches back across my shiny pate, exposing a monk-like 'do that must be kept trimmed as short as possible if I'm not to end up looking like a mad physics professor. It'll be the half moon glasses next, and that's the end, really. I wonder if I should register recededhairline.co.uk too?

Lumme and heavens to Betsy all round, eh? Here's what my better half and I think we'll look like in the autumn of our years:

Note that although I'm squinting comically, my myopia and astigmatism appear to be cured. Maybe by the time we're approaching retirement, medical science will have provided me with brand new eyes with 20/20 vision. Maybe the missus is just wearing glasses to Make A Statement.

Happy Noo Year, chickens!

Otherwise known as 'going home for Christmas', the next fortnight will, I predict, be spent in a welter of free technical support for friends and family. Joy. Many of my tech journalist colleagues have been telling me that when they're prevailed upon to fix computers whenever they visit the Mother Country – or Mother County, as the case may be – they simply tell those involved that they don't know anything about computers, viz "Your PC only connects to the Internet for seven minutes? Wow, that must be annoying." *Silence*. *Turn back to what you were doing*. It takes some cojones (to be pronounced co-jones, like two people from the Jones family working together) to pull off, but it may become necessary.

In other news, we only just got round to putting up a Christmas tree on Friday, He's a pretty, slim thing, though. Witness my wife, stricken with the cold, wrapped up in a voluminous Aran jumper, decorating him.


And here she is again, sitting beside me on the train Oop North. Witness the two laptops sitting in front of us – married people don't talk to each other, dontcherknow; married geeks communicate on ICQ – and marvel at having t'Internet on t'rain. Admittedly it's slower than Connex South Eastern – hey, a gag! – but it's still a great way to while away the long, long train journey...


Merry Midwinter Festival to all, by the way. See you in 2007!

I want to stay at this hotel. (Once it has been built, obviously.) Read more about it here.

A moment, please, for the acting giant, Christopher Atkins. My wife and I have just finished watching The Blue Lagoon (billed as Passionate drama with Brooke Shields and Christopher Atkins as adolescents who must become self-sufficient on a desert island – and deal with their burgeoning sexuality, so we were intrigued), and it introduced us to this most entertaining of actors. He's an exponent of the 'wide waving arms = an accurate facsimile of emotion' school of acting. Here, for example, he's mid-strop, listing all the things that are annoying him about his cousin Emmeline:



A few scenes later, and we see him mocking her pubescent body. All together now: "I've got a luvverly bunch of coconuts, [Da-na-na-ner-na], There they are standing in a row..."



The director is also rather fond of showing the young Atkins and his co-star Brooke Shields in the buff. Like, yer actual buff, not just artfully placed fern fronds and loin cloths. It all seems to be amazingly innocent, and the actors are remarkably mature in their handling of the nudity and sex scenes. In the spirit of keeping this blog family-friendly, the furthest I'll go is this grab, but you get the, er, point.



At only one point does the film get a bit hackneyed, and it's at the point apparently when Emmeline's sexuality awakes. Now, I never passed through puberty as a teenage girl, so perhaps female readers could enlighten me; do highlights on water turn neon blue?