There are just no two ways about it: Swearing is great.

It's particularly great when seen in the pages of a pseudo-serious magazine. In this case, this monument to the creativity of the human mind comes from the letters page in this week's TimeOut guide.

Please pay particular attention to the use of compound swearwords. These are the best kind of swearwords.

I also applaud his use of 'impotent'.

I don't think I'm being excessively naive in suggesting that this letter should be made an A-level set text.

I don't think I'm being excessively naive in suggesting that this letter should be made an A-level set text.

60 second blog

As I got off the bus last night, a random hobo was drifting around shouting "Go to school! Don't be nobody's footstool!" I wonder if he knows the evangelist who hangs around Oxford Circus with his cries of "Do you want to be a sinner, or do you want to be a winner?" (and the less catchy "You can shop till you drop, but when you drop you're going straight to hell") Together they could create some real literary magic. The world needs their poetry.

Let's get the techy links out of the way – Jenny only clicks on, like, 40% of the links I post anyway, kinda on principle. This one-handed keyboard looks utterly insane; I find it very hard to believe that any amount of experience or dogged determination would render it usable.

There's a story on TheFeature about a club in Barcelona offering to implant RFID tags in its VIP clients. These tags allow these club bunnies easy entrance into VIP areas of the club, but more interestingly can also act as credit cards which can be debited by the barmen. Is chip and pin now looking a little dated to anyone else?

Just in case this meticulously-documented story of a man's experience with penis enlargement pills doesn't excite you, perhaps you should think of moving to Denmark, where LL Media in Nordjylland has provided free porn for its emplyees.

This is a rather amusing story; the cleaning instructions for Tom Bihn bags have their text in both English and French. Both are identical, save for the last lines of the French, which reads "We are sorry that our President is an idiot. We didn't vote for him." According to Tom Bihn themselves, the line is intended to poke fun at the founder and president of the American company, Tom Bihn, but I prefer to believe it's a dig at Dubya.

Those of a delicate position should avoid Mr Tourette, while anyone who doesn't consider themselves a geek or design junky should also avoid this stunning Halflife 2 casemod.

Let's end this little bundle of joy with The Infinite Cat Project. Thank you and goodnight.

This. Actually. Flies.

Click on the picture to see more, and to watch videos of this scale B52 in action. Crazy, just crazy.

Webcams are more than a little on my mind at the moment, and I thought I'd share with you a little known fact about some of the webcams I've come across. Unless they're fixed- or auto-focus, you can adjust the manual focus ring to make them into quite passable extreme macro devices.

The amount of detail they can capture is limited really only by how far you can unscrew the lens, and provided you can get enough light in there, you can actually do some pretty funky stuff. The first pic – apologies if it makes you squirm; I could have done pore-level stuff to really upset you – is a closeup of the end of my sideburn; you can actually see where the hairs have been cut. The second is of the tips of a closed set of tweeezers. I thank you.

Just having a lil' break from the Sysiphusian task which is digitally signed and encrypted mail in Mac OS X 10.3, and thought I should offer a word of apology for the ever-changing design of this site. Admittedly I don't know enough about HTML to do much except change the banner and a few colours, but I realise that it must be a little bewildering.

The truth is, I'm just too much of a design magpie to stick with one design when it becomes a little tarnished. As soon as I see a new design concept glittering away in a pretty fashion, I swoop, and, well, you can see the consequences all around you.

Hypertext links are, by default, blue. Visited links, by default, are purple.

I'm assuming this has become true simply because A Browser (Netscape, I think) popularised the notion to the extent that it has become one of those unquestioning things like red signifying 'stop' or designers defaulting to using serif typefaces for body copy.

But my question is this: why was blue and purple chosen in the first place?

I may have to get this tattooed on my forehead:

There Are Not Enough Hours In The Day

More blogging to be done once work writing out of the way.

Saw Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind today; utterly superb. Go see it while it's still in the cinemas. Amazingly well crafted film, and the acting is staggeringly good. Honest.

In other news, Jenny is being a ministering angel despite getting understandably edgy about her course. Made me my tea tonight in true Fifties housewife style, though the meal itself (bruschetta) was more Naughties than Fifties.

In other other news ("The other other white meat" – Fat Bastard), I think I fancy one of these contraptions. I figure that getting a real bicycle (in a last-ditch attempt to get fitter) is far too energetic, but this device has a battery which can scoot you along when your legs get tired*. Click on the image for more details, and to view the other models the reseller stocks.

Is this idea as crazy as I fear it is? It's all the rage on the contient, you know...

* Nothing can stop your arse from hurting though.

There are only 10 kinds of people in the world: Those who understand binary and those who don't.

Photos from last night's shindig can be found by clicking on the awards logo. Another airing for the old kilt.

Ah Darius! Obviously a real Scot as well as a golden-voiced bag of well-intentioned grease. PICTURE FROM THE APPARENTLY VERY EXCELLENT SMACKED FACE, POINTED OUT BY THE EQUALLY EXCELLENT ED CALLAGHAN.

This will probably only amuse Jenny, but hey, that's enough for me. The grinning gentleman on the right is Big J (Julian Torreggiani) from my work, and for those who somehow managed to survive the 70s/80s divide without hearing of these people, the woman/school child is one half of The Krankies. Fandabidozi!

Thanks to Aston for the pic which brought so much joy into my life.

60 second blog*

I'd like to be a matter of public record that not only did I first spot the mouse, but I actually crawled under the table, with reckless disregard for personal safety, to look for the blighter.

This is cool.

This is even cooler, but does really require broadband.

Is this tragic/fascinating/hilarious/awe-insipring/bloggable/all of the above?

Think we could combine this with this? (Actually, I have yet to read that last one through properly; it actually looks like an interesting piece of research.)

Laugh? Cry? Marvel? What is the correct reaction to Coca Cola's latest marketing ploy?


* That is, sixty seconds to read; have you any idea how long it takes to write the HTML for this shit?

Turns out that, complicated though I thought the process was of setting up digital certificates to sign your emails, the reality was much worse.

It really is a bastard of a process, with the result that what had started out as a four-step tutorial grew to an eight and then a twelve step, as I realised that we just couldn't fit all the detail needed into smaller tutorials.

However, once it's all working (and I'll post a link to the workshop once it's online in a few week's time) it really is pretty cool. Messages which have been tampered with in between being sent and being received display a warning that the message could not be verified (left), and if you're sending to someone who also has a digital signature set up, you also have to option to encrypt as well as digitally sign your email (right) adding a further layer of security.



Even better, because the S/MIME system used is pretty generic, Windows users can understand the signatures too. Outlook also recognises that messages are secured, though since with less sophisticated applications and webmail options all that happens is that your public key gets displayed as an attachment, there are concerns that people you're sending email to might think they're being infected with a virus. Some education needed, methinks.

It's not a foolproof system (many thanks to The 'Fold for the useful links to this useful article) but should help provide an extra level of security.

Last night was... interesting.

I got a very kind invitation from a guy in my work to join him and his friends for a grand gala showing of the new Tori Amos DVD, Welcome to Sunny Florida.

I'm not a huge fan, but thought it might be fun. Which it was. In a way.

Her vocals really are stunning, and her abilities on the piano are nothing short of mesmeric. However, it didn't start until 8:40 (they opened the doors ten minutes late), and the video itself seemed to start rather abruptly. Turns out they had skipped a chapter in the DVD and needed to 'rewind' it to the beginning – adding another 15 minutes to the extravaganza.

When I finally stumbled, numb-arsed, out of the cinema at around 11:20 – pause for a moment to contemplate that... it meant getting home at half midnight – I had moved from a borderline fan to an actual fan, but even so I think I have had enough Tori to last me for a couple of months.

It did start spectacularly well – the version of Cornflake Girl was frankly stunning, and I loved Concertina – but she did get self-indulgent towards the end, and no amount of thinking how much better she could have played Galadriel could distract me.

(Slightly pretentious monochrome) photos of last night's party can be found here

Quick techy post (Skip this post unless you actually care about this shit)

After an afternoon of tussling with Thawte's website (how folks with a life – ie no technical knowledge – are supposed to do this stuff I have no idea), both my personal and work email addresses have encryption certificates, allowing me to send entirely private emails to people.

In traditional Apple style, the implementation in Mail (the mail client included with Mac OS X) is very slick. All the process does is add a small encryption button to the compose window which you just have to click, and bam! private email.

And perhaps even more sweetly, it tells you which sent mails have been digitally signed with this smart graphic:

Missed The Bwa Bwa again tonight. Arsecakes.

Work may be temporarily scaled back on this blog owing to pressure of real work.

Take tonight for example: it has gone 11, Jenny's is snuggled up warm in our bed, and I'm settling down to an evening of writing. It's won't be an epic, but there's every likelihood I won't see my bed much before The Bwa Bwa*, and that won't even begin to clear my list of jobs to do.

* A standard measurement of time in the Phin/McRobbie household. No matter what precedes it, Radio 4 always ends its day's broadcasting with a few bars of Sailing By at 00:45 (dubbed 'The Bwa Bwa' due to the nature of the melody; listen to it, it makes sense), the shipping forecast (soporific stuff), a wish of good night from whatever poor sod is still in Broadcasting House at that time, and the national anthem. Stirs the blood so it does!

I'm doing some high-level blog hunting, trying to come up with a subject for an op-ed piece, and came across this highly amusing post.

Go on, give into temptation, and click on the link!

BeardWatch™
DAY TWOLorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua.

Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem.

Recognise this? Possibly not, unless you're particularly eagle-eyed. It's from "de Finibus Bonorum et Malorum", written by Cicero in 45 BC, and contains the original instance the immortal line "Lorem ipsum dolor sit et amet". This line was beloved of designers, and used as dummy text on page layouts.

Contrary to popular belief, it's not gibberish, and you can read more about it here, where you can also generate chunks of lorem ipsum for yourself.

Do I still need a mobile?

Of course as a confirmed gadget freak, I can't really be without one, but I communicate so much with IM and and email (particularly since Jenny has caught the IM bug), I am beginning to wonder if I do actually need one.

I suspect it's now more 'want' than 'need', but since I would feel uncomfortable walking around without one (there are personal safety considerations apart from anything else), I think a move to pay as you go is in order.

Soon. I need some GPRS bandwidth still...

So. Iraq. War crimes. Bush/Blair.

Ah, a topical, political post. The only reason I'm wary of posting this stuff is that my youthful idealism seems to be at odds with the more considered, mature views of some of the folks that read this, and I take no pleasure in being laughed at. Nevertheless...

In rereading Bill Bryson's excellent A Short History of Nearly Everything, I was thinking about the way that military innovation trickles down to and drives consumer-level projects, and thinking that this can only be a good thing. If goverments are happy to spend (our) money conducting high-level research which benefits us in medical and other fields, I'm all for it.

Except, oh yes, military research is designed to kill people.

It's actually not. It's designed to defend people. To defend me.

But here's my real point. Defend against what? Against whom?

I'm ashamed to admit the idea's provenance (it came from a Terry Pratchett book), but I tend to think that it doesn't matter what system of government is in power, life on the ground doesn't really change all that much. Little changed for rural Russians after the revolution ousted the last of the Tsars; broadly speaking it's just the chattering classes in the cities who are affected, but because these are the people who write the newspapers and history books, posterity remembers these events as momentous.

"We'd be speaking German today if it wasn't for Churchill." So? Would it matter all that much if you and I were speaking a different language?

Notice the fatal flaw? Gas chambers. Pink triangles. Ethnic cleansing.

I just want to be left alone, but in relative security, and that's a difficult balance to strike.

There's just one further complication: mankind is incredibly adaptable, and that which I find acceptable and comfortable both culturally and politically might seem to be an objective ideal, but is in reality wildly subjective.

Youthful idealism? Derivative drivel? Political gold dust? Comment!

This illuminating post is essential reading for anyone who I inadvertently hurt with my continuing inability to understand why you have to look for the Command key, why you resolutely insist on not using tabbed browsing, why you have to quit every application after you've finished with it (this is Mac OS X, people; it's rock solid), or why you [insert infuriating newbie computing practice here].

My names's Chris, and I have NADD.

BeardWatch™
DAY ONE
I can't for the life of me now remember why, but the (male) members of MacUser have decided to hold a beard-growing competition. Since some are apparently and unaccountably squeamish about having their pictures up on my site, I'll just subject you to close ups of my own facial follicles. The plan is to keep this up for a week, but we may reduce of extend this time period. This photo was taken at the end of day one.
Hold on kids; it's going to be hair-raisin'!

I thought I'd share with you some old British banknotes. They came to me from my granddad, and I think they're spectacularly beautiful. Some of them look almost eastern European in their colours and layout.

I can't show you the detail (for more, see the graphic at the top of this page), and you won't get an idea of how big the notes are either, but I hope you can get an idea of how pretty money can be. If you'd like to see higher-resolution versions, please leave a comment with your email address.

For anyone techie reading this, you might be interested to know that, despite the anti-counterfeiting measures in the latest version of Photoshop (which normally blocks you from scanning banknotes), these old notes scanned in without and problems. Wonder what it is the software's looking for?

Bloody Blogger has bloody redesigned!

This is A Good Thing in general; the new site looks fresh and slick, and new features (such as native comments, the new BlogThis! bookmarklet, and the ability to post via email) are to be welcomed and applauded. The new templates look genuinely spectacular.

So why am I pissed off? Because I had just completed a workshop which featured Blogger, and I not only had to go through setting up and capturing all twelve screengrabs, but substantial chunks of the text had to be rewritten too. This on top of the floods of work piling up (to unashamedly mix metaphors... and split infinitives, why don't I?) was mind-buggeringly inconvenient.Bloody Blogger mumble mumble MindSay mumble grunt...

Oooooooh, my head.

I had been given a rather nice 2000 Margaux by someone through work, and we cracked it open last night since we were both, frankly, in need of a little alcohol.

Will I never learn that I simply cannot drink red wine with impunity? It really was a very good bottle of wine, but so rich and heady was it that I woke up this morning (after only three glasses of the stuff) feeling like my body had been subtly poisoned by an Elizabethan apothecary hell-bent on showcasing the effects of some of his more spectacular concoctions.

It really is a curse; I adore red wine. I'm not claiming I know any more about it than its price, but as my friends will attest – most notably Jenny who has often steered me home from Claire & Jeff's or Celia's, pausing occasionally metaphorically to hold my hair back for me while my body violently rebuked me for having abused it so with so much plonk – I really don't take well to it.

If I drink red wine, my hangover always takes the form of a blinding headache. Like cider, lager brings feelings of slight nausea, but more unpleasantly my body just feels really polluted, an effect exacerbated by the fact that for some reason it's lager more than anything that makes me want to light up. If I drink spirits, I wake the next morning positively brimming with vim and vigour, but where's the fun in that?

In other news, Jenny and I did some online grocery shopping to stock up on heavy or awkward stuff that we otherwise couldn't have carried, with the result that we are now the proud owners of 24 rolls of toilet roll, 12 rolls of kitchen roll, eight two litre bottles of diet coke, and enough rice to feed a family of four for the rest of their natural lives. What an exciting life we do lead!

There is a tiny graphic designer inside me still, shouting things like "Truth to materials! Truth to materials!" in a small, squeaky and for some reason Austrian-accented voice. So when I see gorgeous things like this receipt from our dinner, with the pictograms printed in from a dot-matrix printer, my inner designer makes small grunting noises of pleasure.

Seldom has a Friday night been more anticipated...

After last night's marathon sesh, and a whole week's worth of hard graft at 'User, I'm about ready to drop. I was so dozy coming home on the bus today that I gaily sailed past Tesco without stopping to pick up anything for tea.

However, to make the best of a bad job, Jenny and I have decided to nip out to The Only Restaurant In New Cross™ to get quick snack-ette. Naturally, we'll have to set the video recording so as not to miss any unmissable Stateside comedy.

Since we have both been working like minimum-wage burger-flipping monkeys this week, I think we might take ourselves out to the cinema to see the multi-million mindless blockbusting frippery that is Van Helsing; what better way to take Jenny's mind off Renaissance perspective or free my addled cranium of review writing?

There may even – if Jenny plays her cards right – be half-sized hotdogs, salted chunks of some space-age polystyrene-like substance, torso-sized vats of Batman-style chemicals thinly disguised as fizzy pop, and packets of so-called confectionary bearing more than a passing resemblance to the droppings of a small Peruvian mountain goat.

Joy; my latest eBay purchase arrived today. It's a little keyboard for my Palm, and though it normally costs as much as £90, I got if for £15 all-in on eBay. "Bargain" doesn't even begin to describe it. It folds neatly in half. So cute, and very nice keyboard action too...

As an aside, it took me a while to take this photo, adjust levels and stuff, clean up the background so it's pure white, and scale for posting. I now realise that I could have just got some press shots from the palmOne website.

A little bit of linky goodness today, folks.

We kick off with 300 images from 1800 sites, which is a thoroughly fascinating study of the sort of pixel-perfect page furniture web designers use on their sites. The guy who put it together (who appears to be called Ro London) trawled through "Fortune 1000 company sites, major online retailers, well known blogs, top advertising, publishing, and design agencies, technology and software industy leaders, and the very largest online news publishers" to put together a visual list of pixel art. Essential reading for any design folks.

The second link is to an utterly mesmerising project called Semacode, which is described as a system of URL barcodes. URLs (Uniform Resource Locators, or web addresses) are encoded into a two-dimensional barcode – normal barcodes only have one dimension; horizontal – which can then be read in an innovative way; the semacode shown here is for this site.

As well as a Java Applet on their site which allows you to create your own semacodes from URLs, the company has developed client software which runs on Symbian/Series 60 mobile phones. You snap a semacode with the built-in camera, and the software decodes it, presenting you with the URL, or the option of visiting the website using a third-party web browser.

Why do I care? Um, no practical reason. Technologies like this are being introduced in the Far East – 2D barcodes are printed at the end of newspaper articles prompting readers to follow up stories online – but require specialist hardware. That this project runs on a standard OS like Symbian is to be congratulated. There are other applications, and the potential for advertisers to track ROI is enormous. Besides, it's just cool...

Also of interest is this spectacular 180-degree view from the Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity of the first look inside Endurance Crater, a site which lists all the items which are free after rebate (though it only really works in America, unfortunately), and the best costumes I have ever seen.

In actual fact, I appear to have plumped for option (e); doing my work while watching the film. It's that riveting.

I'm assuming the big set pieces will get my attention.

I had intended to crack on with some work for next week to give me a head-start on the stuff on my to-do list, but having just checked the TV schedules I find that Pearl Harbor is on at 8:30, so I am presented with some simple choices:

a) Watch Pearl Harbor
b) Do work
c) Watch Pearl Harbor and work late into the night
d) None of the above

I suspect I'll plump for (a), and given my knowledge of the events surrounding the bombing, I may away to do a little research on the film's subject before I watch it.

Since everyone else seems to be doing lists on their blogs, I thought I'd join in. But not for me the humorous roll call of lighthearted fripperies. Oh no. I have to educate. Just can't leave it alone, can I? Funny? Nah. Boring? Yes please! Friends? Nah. Social suicide? Yes please! Whatever. Read on. If you feel like it...

TOP 5 FONTS
















SOME HONOURABLE MENTIONS

A VISIT FROM MOP AND POP

My folks came down to London this weekend, and we saw the Old Vic's performance of Hamlet. It was the first time I'd seen it, and I was struck again by the difference between reading Shakespeare and seeing it performed; the language is so alien to me, that when written I find it hard to follow. But there's actually little which is abstruse, and the story rattles along at a fair old pace. Neither fact should surprise me, I guess; the plays were written to be staged, not studied, and their creation was driven more by the desire to entertain then to ennoble.

I remember being struck by this thought when I saw The Marriage of Figaro. I remember wondering if I could possibly enjoy "Opera" (both the quotation marks and capital letter are important there), but in fact I spent much of my time in the auditorium actually laughing out loud and being thoroughly entertained. I find it hard to imagine, but I suspect that when the movies are superseded by the next entertainment innovation, people will think of Star Wars and Gone With The Wind with the same awe.

And though the weather was really quite nasty on Saturday, we took advantage of Sunday's spectacular sunshine to take a boat trip up the Thames to Kew. I managed to get quite embarrassingly sunburned.

While you're enjoying these photos, I'd like you to spare a thought for poor Jenny, who spent all the weekend gathering resources, planning lessons, and producing some quite stunning prints from polystyrene ceiling tiles (who knew?) in preparation for knuckling down for this term's teaching. She didn't go to the theatre either. Suggestions on how I can reward her for such selfless devotion are invited; click on the Comments link.

HARRODS FURNITURE DESPOSITARY; IT'S A WAREHOUSE, PEOPLE

PART OF THE THAMES, RUNNING ALONGSIDE KEW GARDENS

MUM AND DAD IN KEW'S STUNNING PALM HOUSE

LOOKING ALONG ONE WING OF THE PALM HOUSE FROM THE ELEVATED WALKWAY

THIS IS A REAL FLOWER. HONEST.