Work Christmas lunch yesterday, at a place in Castlefield called The Ox. It was tasty, the place was not crowded and the service was good. Also, apple and melon J₂O is too delicious (albeit a bit too sweet) and should be banned.

So. BBC Backstage/GeekUp party on Saturday at the Pitcher and Piano in Deansgate Locks. A great deal of fun. I helped out with BBCish stuff for a few minutes, but I was really there as a guest and had a good time. There were drinks paid for by Cubic Garden (yay!) and food laid on by the Beeb. There was a Wii that a room full of geeks couldn't get working properly (oh how I LOLd) and a Skype/Twitter link-up to London, where the other Backstage bash was happening simultaneously.

We were also invaded by Santas in the form of a fancy dress charity pub crawl.

edit: Pictures here. I don't see any of me, thank dog.

So I hung out with GeekUpprs and had free non-alcohol cocktails (Apple Mint, MMMM) and life was good. I sneaked my GeekUp Secret Santa gift/s in and left them by the food, anticipating that this would get them found quickly. The main gift was a picture of the recipient being mauled by Gemma's polecat, which apparently really happened. I found the details in the GeekUp archives. (I do my research, you see.) I didn't go over and introduce myself, but I saw the picture being passed around to general amusement, along with the little rhyme I wrote for the tag. I had help laminating these beforehand, which was a wise precaution. Plastic-wrapped is good when alcohol and free food are flowing.

Speaking of free food, yes, the diet is on hold and I am back in the grip of Brute Hunger. :-/ Have already bounced back up to 80kg. I must carry on the rest of this week as though I'm still on the sachets/green veg regime, or, knowing too well the raging animal that's under my skin, I'll just balloon. And that would be shit. Very, very shit. Because, to be honest, I like being less fat. I like it a lot.

My Secret Santa also gave me my gift on Saturday night, anonymously delivered in a jiffy bag by one of the employees. It is a Diet Coke bottle top and a roll of Mentos. XD If you don't know what happens when you put Mentos in Diet Coke, YouTube it.

Also, my hair is now short again. A bit shorter than I'd intended, even. That doesn't matter. It'll grow back - all too fast, no doubt.

What else? Finishing off birthday present for father. Almost all other presents are done. It's just the ones coming from overseas that I've still to receive and wrap.

The work email poet-pirate strikes again...

Context needed. Someone in Religion sent around a blank-verse invitation to come pub crawling for his leaving do, mentioning bars called Odder and Long Legs. (Jabez Clegg is another bar along Oxford Road.) I'm still on holiday leave on the date in question, so:

Pub Crawl RSVP

With deep regrets, etcetera,
To turn down such a lyric lure
I find myself away that day
Upon a quest obscure;

For secretary's siren song
Informs me I have leave to burn
And must essay some holiday
Or lose it, in my turn.

So raise a glass for absent Herms
And happy quaffing, one and all:
Be odd, be clegg, be long of leg -
The better pubs to crawl.

(Oh, and I'm well aware the last line can be interpreted in more than one way. "To crawl the better [of the] pubs" or "The better to crawl pubs".)

That takes me to 26 poems, half my target for this year (52). I'm quite happy with that, especially because I've also started digi-painting again in the meantime, which I hadn't expected to do.

I may even bubble up with some more poetry before the year's out, if all my creative juice isn't spent on paintings and writing the Twine Wars opening.

edit: A few people have emailed me back with things like "Brilliant!", "You really are very good at writing poetry. Have you written a lot? Have you published anything? I'm properly impressed…", "I loved your poem back to [colleague] - good work!" and "Bravo!" Fun to get compliments and hopefully give other people a chuckle out of their afternoons. *danceydancey*

edit2: reply from sender:
"Its bad form to send a reply so witty
It make the author of the invite feel rather shitty"
Awwwwww... haha. (Don't worry - he didn't mind really.)

Change of plan: breaking diet today instead of tomorrow—our team Xmas lunch has been moved because we expect to be frantic with work next week.

I rather like being frantic with work. I suspect this is entirely a tribute to my manager, but I never seem to be gien more than I can handle, even on rushed projects like this one will be (down to delays over budget or paperwork elsewhere, AIUI), and I like helping out on different things as needed while we get a site on its feet. I like being called in to troubleshoot. I like being complimented on my canis ex machinae swoops and general quickness and attention to detail. I'm vain. ;)

I like it less when there's confused loyalty, during times when (say) more than one site is fighting for my attention. Although I do find that flattering and privately gloat about it quite a lot.

Anyway, I'm not stopping the diet completely, only moving to one meal a day and two sachets.

I read somewhere that happiness is contagious, so take this! Ker-pow, right in the kisser!

I now fit a 36 waist comfortably. (Even smaller, if I hadn't inherited my figure from my father's side.)

I have a beautifully-wrapped present on the desk next to me, ready to send to the Laaaaahndoners. It contains dark chocolate ginger (grandmother's fave) and something-coated crystallised pineapple from health food shop, plus slices of fruit cakes and some posh crisps from the posh bak'ry along Oxford Road, in a nest of shredded letters and bank statements for protection. Classy.

I'm acing work just now, dropping good ideas left right and centre and generally making pages nicer whenever I touch 'em.

I've made a good start on the thing for dad, found an absolutely perfect public domain photo I can use for reference for the back part, and I still have lots of time, including this weekend, to finish it.

Speaking of this weekend, Backstage/GeekUp party on Saturday. Then Multiplatform team christmas lunch on Monday and Religion team christmas lunch on Tuesday. Also, I might go along to the Drupal UG this Thursday... although I haven't played with my installation at all, not even upgraded to 6.

I've had two responses so far to my offer of free piccies. Sadly both from kitty lovers, but what can you do... ;)

Life is pretty good. And I've just remembered I forgot to take my meds this morning, so it isn't even the chemicals talking.

To fit in with my wolf art of last night, an Egyptian collection is opening at World Museum Liverpool today. It includes this cat mummy.

Cold today, indoors and out (less so indoors now I've complained to the appropriate person and she's apparently fixed the overzealous air con). The Metrolink was buggered earlier today; the machine they use to clear ice off the tracks was broken, according to t'radio.

I haven't been in a very good place mentally since Slen moved out. Things have been tense at best: not an improvement, and I'd say overall worse. Frankly, I've felt bullied on a number of occasions - nothing a normal person would consider omg awful, just being forced into stress situations (eg loud noise) and suppressive atmospheres (eg "shut up or you'll get extra chores"), and generally belittled (eg "oh, complaining again are you").

Perhaps I miss him, too. I won't know that until next time I manage to interpret a hint of emotion in my thoughts. It's a bit awkward being autistic. Rather than one day feeling "man, I miss so-and-so", you have to wonder "do I miss so-and-so?" and wait until you find yourself thinking of them, perhaps try to estimate the ratio of positive and negative thoughts you have towards them, and then work out what that means. (For example, when I miss someone I don't idealise them; I remember irritating things about them and fantasise about telling them exactly what I think of them. I also remember irritating things about people I am glad I don't see any more, and fantasise about telling them exactly what I think of them. You see the problem...)

I hadn't got to see very much of him recently anyway. It's still a bit of new girlfriend syndrome, and she seems every bit as obsessive and disorganised as he is. (She is only relatively young, though.)

Paul's off in Ireland for most of this week, too.

Lost hardly any weight over the last week, which was expected because I've been trying eating green vegetables as well as the sachets and imagine I've put plenty of weight of chlorophyll and water into my formerly empty innards. However, if I don't lose much during this week I'll know something's going wrong. I have to admit that eating until I'm satiated is a relief. I'm eating once a day and as much as I feel like (because, come on, it's cabbage, sprouts, spinach and green beans, could we get any more lapine?). Plus hot food is definitely helpful, because I'm so cold all the time. I wish I could still wander outside barefoot in the snow, but that's evidently the price for losing so much of my body weight over the last couple of years.

I feel like nothing much is moving on other personal fronts. Everything's stalled. Oh, except that I awkwardly 'came out' as neuter-critter on a mailing list. One or two of the people on there met me IRL, so I thought it wise to take the opportunity when the subject (of gender options on forms) came up on-list. As usual, I think I made a pig's ear of it, but am most heartened that nobody much has reacted.

At least writing stuff feels like it's going better. Laffent Ferrl's brother introduced himself to me properly this morning and offered his services as an occasional viewpoint character (i.e. I like him and he'd be fun to follow), and I even remembered what I had been planning to call him. I don't always write this stuff down, because I come up with it at random moments, so I had known his first name at one point and then forgot it.

Laffent is a seven-foot, beautiful, blue, curvy, longbow-wielding, soldierly, proportionately muscular woman. (A very nice specimen of orchood, if you happen to like that sort of thing.) She got the looks and the brains in this family. Her brother's the charmer - and a bit of a redneck, if one can use that word about people whose skin colour is determined by their literal blue blood.

1.5 kilos down this week. Hurry up, man! I wanted to be under 80 by now. (I'm 80.45, so very close really.)

Seriously though, meatcarcase, can't you find more fat to drop? Because let me tell you I don't need an atlas to find several handfuls, if you know what I mean.

Ha. Also, I am going to start eating greens and protein. I'm too desperate for them¹, and if you're careful you can do this and still stay in ketosis (aka mega weight-drop area, aka starvation). So says a friend of the family who has flirted with this diet several times. (I could draw sarcastic conclusions about its long-term efficacy in her case and her resulting qualification to give advice, but she successfully drops weight every time, and that's all I need to do. I don't do the yoyo thing too badly, not judging by holding steady for almost a year in this interval.)

Oh, and I finally have my prescription refilled as of this morning. Luckily my mother and I are on the same dosage of the same med, so there can be intercaninenecine pill-scrounging. The delay, as it turns out, is that they wanted to speak to me before refilling it, so I need to make an appt. Which means getting there and taking time off work, both of which cause me bearable anxiety.

I spent all weekend gaming round at my unbrother's house and I have surprisingly few regrets about that. Although I'm ready to make myself some art and code now. Speaking of Art with a capital A, aka Tet, I think his deadline on the art exchange is today, so I may or may not bother doing the quick sketch I'd planned. He's popular because he admins the server, so lots of ass-kissers will have given him pictures. ;)

More microformats today. I've finished converting a huge "useful contacts" table from bad HTML into better HTML plus lots of span class=vcards. My eyes are now crossing. And I've forgotten what I was actually supposed to be changing about it in the first place. Wahoo!

¹ At least, let's optimistically assume that the sustained intense urge to rip apart people/trees/Quorn roasts and gorge on their insides signifies a craving for protein and roughage. Let's have no more gentle games of rough-and-tumble with the cat only to pause and realise I'm chewing his scruff rather enthusiastically, or anything like th...
...not that I've ever done that, you realise. It was a random example, haha. Erm.
Plus, maybe I can finally stop dreaming about food. The whole "oh noes I broke my diet by accident" stress dream archetype was never cool or original, and it's looking pretttty hackneyed by now.

Today my time has been fought over (not quite literally, because one of the parties is in London; pity, I'd like to have seen it come to blows. Religion vs. Independents Commissioning, ding ding!).

It's an evilly satisfying feeling.

This is all still fallout from going home ill on Friday, which meant I couldn't get all the stuff done for Commissioning that needs to be done. And needs to be done by me.

What's particularly satisfying is that I really am the best person for the job.

Which sounds weird, because I'm officially but a lowly Web Assistant and don't have amazing expertise in any one area, but for this—replacing text, cutting images, a fine eye for proof-reading, italicising titles and linking to mentioned webpages when appropriate, along with improving the general HTML coding and making things cleaner and sharper with low-key CSS messing—I couldn't explain it all to someone else, let alone expect them to remember it, and I'm dashed sure nobody else in this building would bother to do it.

And I'm pretty accursed fast, for all that needed to be done to these pages, to fit it into three days and still make time for a few extended search-replaces to remove out-of-range characters. Honestly, I don't think many others would have been able to do everything I've done to this standard in this time.

It's... weird.

And fortuantely, because my fingers have been flying these three days with barely a break, I have a smart partner in London who's picked up on all the errors I missed.

Our site for The Passion has won an RTS award for Innovation in Multiplatform.

Extreme Pilgrim (one of those series with the crazy CofE vicar going round doing $FAITHist things for the camera) won Best Documentary Series.

At time of writing, their website hasn't updated with the winners. I can't find any mention on the BBC, either, so for now you'll have to take my word for it.

I'm pretty cynical about awards, to be honest, but my teammates are excited. It's quite cute.

Another few tricks with hcards.

These guys' details are freely available on the web, so I hope they'll forgive me for using them as examples.

Example 1

Paul Rodgers, Editor, 6 Music
Phone: (020) 7765 4763
Email: paul.rodgers@bbc.co.uk

When someone's email address contains their organisation's full name, it'd be churlish to refuse the opportunity, and no little thing like lower-case letters is getting in my way.

A couple of points to note in our first example:

• Paul's job title also includes the department he works for (well, controls, actually). That's fab, since it lets us kill two cats with one ballbearing.
• You'll also notice a big org span, which has to encompass his department (organization-unit) and company name (organization-name) and a bunch of other stuff.
  • I'm hoping this is ok semantically. As I understand it, when both unit and name are specified, anything else should be ignored; and indeed, exporting to Notepad through Operator shows that it seems to have been interpreted correctly.

Which creates:

Paul Rodgers, Editor, 6 Music
Phone: (020) 7765 4763
Email: paul.rodgers@BBC.co.uk

Example 2

Second example:

Robert Gallacher, Editor, Planning & Station Sound
Phone: (020) 7765 4373
Email: robert.gallacher@bbc.co.uk

And Robert's department isn't stated here, so we'll just mark it up as a role, which is easier. The org span can now go just around the letters BBC:

Which creates:

Robert Gallacher, Editor, Planning & Station Sound
Phone: (020) 7765 4373
Email: robert.gallacher@BBC.co.uk

Please note the date on this entry. It could well be that these people's details are no longer accurate. View them as examples only.

I'll probably start privlocking these update posts, don't worry. I know diets are terribly boring for those who aren't involved.

But I was either 86.4 or .6 this morning, can't remember now, and thinnnnngs can only get better.

I think the reason I do well with the shakes is that not eating at all is, to put it bluntly, a rock hard thing to do... whereas eating salads is the realm of pansies, girls and metrosexuals, none of which I am, at least full-time.

(Actually I like salad—or salad components eaten separately, depending on the component—but the canteen at work changed hands and the food there is rubbish now.)

Now, fun with anamagrams.

Herm Baskerville:
"Leash Verb Milker"
"A Berserk Hell Vim"
"Barks Eviller Hem".

Herm Diogenes Baskerville:
"Barking Redeems Evil Holes"
"A Berserk Helldog, Semi-Vein"
"Barking Heeds Eviler Moles"
"Love Lies, King H B Redeems. Ar!"
"Hell Rover Debases Mike. Gin!"
"A Helldog Ember Rives Skeins"/"A Helldog Ember: Knives Rise"
"Hell Rover Singed Iambs. Eek!".

My favourite: "Hell Rover Bandies Geekisms".

(Weft suggests "Tutor is Achieve" or "I Teach Vitreous" for Ice. Ice suggests "T' Few" in a Lancashire accent for Weft. Weft suggests "alien stab" for Basaltine. Basaltine suggests "Fake it twisty" for Weft. Weft is now not speaking to Basaltine.)

We have a neat new section called Introduction to Ethics. I hope the title is self-explanatory.

To a layman (i.e. me), at least, it's dead good.

There's also an updated version of the Sunni and Shi'a Muslims (what's the difference?) article.

Sneaking microformats into here. And testing them until they work with Google Maps.

To see and use microformats in Firefox you currently need a suitable extension. If they get wide uptake, though, expect that to change.

(It's such fun updating this old site. Once you get used to the tables and can skim through them blindly, at least.)

An hCard microformat worked example

Firstly, refer to a vcard syntax glossary like this one. There is also a hcard microformat creator, which works best with a little common sense added.

Both of those were less than 100% helpful in marking up some of the addresses I was doing today, though, so here's an example of a fully marked-up company name and address with some tricky bits.

(This address is available freely on the web and was the first example I had to hand, unsurprisingly.)

In this example the address needs to show up as "BBC Media Management Scotland, Zone 1.02, Pacific Quay, Glasgow".

With microformats you can't put information in attributes (so you can't do <span class="org" address="1 Balloon Street">Company</span> or similar). All the text you want to mark up has to be there, displayed on the page.

That's a problem. There is no post code here.

Well, I found an incomplete post code for Pacific Quay, Glasgow on the web. G51—that's enough to help your mapping software out, at least. How to include it without making it visible? I just cheated and told the browser to hide it: <span class="postal-code" style="display:none">G51</span>

Similarly to the post code, the country (Scotland) is not shown separately. This time it's because the page is only aimed at people in Scotland, so it would look patronising and possibly US-centric at worst, merely bloated at best. So much for the site visitors, but mapping sites are almost all American and will assume the country is America unless told differently. Well, I could add another hidden span here, but wait a second. What was that organisation name again? BBC Media Management Scotland. There's a usage of the word that already exists, ready for me to throw my class="country-name" around.

The full organisation name, then. There isn't actually a company called called "BBC Media Management Scotland". "Media Management Scotland" is a subdivision of "BBC". A human reader will grok that, and with microformats we can get the computer to grok it too. <span class="fn org"><span class="organization-name">BBC</span> <span class="organization-unit">Media Management Scotland</span></span>

Or with the extra country-name: <span class="fn org"><span class="organization-name">BBC</span> <span class="organization-unit">Media Management <span class="country-name">Scotland</span></span></span>

And yes, you need to add both fn and org for it to understand that this is the name of an organisation. hcards were set up for people and org really refers to the company at which the named person works.

The address is fairly straightforward except for that "Zone 1.02″. Experimenting with Google Maps, I found that "Zone 1.02, Pacific Quay" turned up no results, even with the country name and partial post code included. "Pacific Quay" on its own does turn up the correct result. I could just not mark up Zone 1.02, leaving Pacific Quay as the full street address. But that's changing reality to please Google or Multimap, which is dumb, and besides would be unhelpful to your readers if they want to export the full address, say to print some labels.

Luckily hcard microformats have a class called extended-address, I discovered after some digging. The examples I found used it for things like room or flat numbers in a building. That'll do. <span class="extended-address">Zone 1.02</span>, <span class="street-address">Pacific Quay</span>

I think that's all the tricky stuff in this example.

Full thing:

<span class="vcard">
  <span class="fn org">
    <span class="organization-name">BBC</span>
    <span class="organization-unit">Media Management Scotland</span>
  </span>,
  <span class="adr">
    <span class="extended-address">Zone 1.02<span>, <span class="street-address">Pacific Quay</span>,
    <span class="locality">Glasgow</span> <span class="postal-code" style="display:none">G51</span>
  </span>
</span>

Naturally, you'd want to remove the whitespace to get it to display inline without unsightly gaps around the commas. And you could replace the outermost span with a div to make it block-level.

Example on the web

That was nice. I've just listened through a Radio 4 documentary about women in the army, which is exactly what I needed to be researching for my own writing, and because it was in a meeting, I get to call it work.

The producer's comments before and afterwards were useful too. Quite a bit to think about.

And it meant I got my face about up on 5th, which is always good. Since we moved down to be with the other geeks (ah, bliss) on the ground floor, we haven't been seen around the Religion department as much. I try to keep my paw in up there, and if that means attending functions and leaving parties at which there is free orange juice (really nice stuff this time... tasted like Tropicana, I think? Quite sweet) then, well, it's no great hardship.

I've been socialising so much at work recently. Going out to the weekly pub lunches with the geeks (I generally just have a drink), the odd meetings with the old department, meeting new people while helping out with the Ents newsletter (so good they've asked me to do it three times, despite the first one being "a one-off, honestly"... I nodded and, quietly clairvoyantly, kept the template files I'd made), training someone (!!) the other day to update a database, upload stuff and use Adobe Acrobat Writer (which I've never even used myself) and active and helpful on the internal mailing lists and Yammer. It's quite surprising. I'm looking askance at my definitely-autistic self. I wouldn't be surprised if my name's becoming known.

(And it is—at least, a lot of people have told me it's cool!)

Oh, and I played with my browser settings. The title bar now reads "Mutt's Weblague > Create New Post — Wordpress - Best-Fox 3.0.3 | All Hail Herms". This is done through the MR Tech Local Install extension; there's also a randomiser that comes up with "Mozilla SlimeParrot" etc.

Another useful link: monitor calibration tool.

Of adults with an ASD only 15 out of every hundred have a full-time paid job –an Aspie with christianity (I don't know her source)

My work is awesome. I'm really happy to have a job.

That was all.

This may be one for Anke: Snowl for Firefox, a messaging thingy.

Did more on the most urgent piece of artwork last night. Today have been wrestling with my PC at work. It was rebuilt overnight and a lot of settings went kablooie after they had to wipe my profile. I hope to have Outlook restored to its tricked-out glory eventually, and luckily—no, consciously and foresightedly!—I had a day-old backup of my Firefox profile.

Even Firefox knows me as Herms. By the way, if you ever need to mess with Firefox profiles in Windows, get the Run dialogue box up (window key + R, or choose Run from start menu if you're a mouser) and type "firefox -P" to get the profile selection screen.

edit: THIS IS COOL! Warioland in-game footage.

Scallies and chavs in oil paint, in the style of Old Masters. Vespers and a few other arty people on my friendslist should enjoy this.

Concilium Plebis

edit: This is for Charlycrash!