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 classi