Black Dog Blog

Archive for May, 2007

The Salford move is definitely happening, double dog dare, no returnies.

I have no idea what this'll mean for me. Hopefully lots of other 'new media' people to play with, which will hopefully mean lots more training opportunities. I am starved of geek contact here.

Next soon-to-be-huge thing in the Web 2.0 world, apparently: Google Gears (Yeah, I've only just heard about it.)

More info and podcast interview

(Stuck in my head: Singing Chocobo song.)

edit: I just got blog spam for "anchovy caesar salad dressing" instead of the usual softcore cialis OEMs. This vegetarian, prefers-cooked-veg-to-rabbit-food-thanks-very-much hound had no idea that this is apparently such a lucrative niche market.

Oh, by the way, more words and phrases I'd like banned from media English (qv "called for"):

"very real" (meaningless)
"ordeal" (abused to the point of meaninglessness)
"quite literally" (simply annoys me, and is tautological when interpreted literally)

(Frankly, I'd also add "user-generated content" to the list, but that's merely me being weary and bitter.)

Bobbin' along. In my coat. My leather coat. That my brother had made for me in Turkey. My leather coat that is black, fits me, reaches to my mid-calves (just as I asked – the idea being that it makes me look taller?) and has red, flame-like design around the bottom (which I asked for as a joke!).

Aww yeah.

I've got a few Looks already. Also, have frightened a small child. Maybe it's the hairspray. Hey Mutt, the '90s called; they want their slick-back and ponytail look back. And Neo wants his gormless expression?

(I'd totally be rocking the red mirrored sunglasses too, if I dared.)

Best birthday present ever… yet. \m/ \m/

With everything else that's been going crazy, one thing I have completely neglected is my birthday.

It's cool. I don't mind. I was intending to postpone it until the boy got back from Turkey, anyway.

However, it meant I didn't ask for stuff from people. (Although I have got a slim package that I haven't opened yet.) There are a few things I'm watching on eBay and stuff, that I might buy for myself and let people give me the money for or something like that.

I just haven't felt like thinking about it so much. Apart from that it's my quarter century (which is slightly aaagh), various things going on with family — Slen's holiday in Turkey being the very least of those — meant it wasn't going to be a 'normal' birthday however you looked at it.

I did manage to do one Major Life Thing sort of thing before I turned 25, and I'm quite pleased about that.

Three Hypotheses of Human Interface Design

Interesting stuff, though I don't believe for a pico that this person is the first to think of it. I wonder if that is why I prefer IMs to email. (But probably not. There's another psychological pressure at play in my own personal case.)

I still don't see the point of Twitter! That's a fine example of what seems to me to be something streamlined to the point of inutility. But can I argue with the popularity…?

I'm going to go along to this.

I sense a mini version of this over the weekend. :D

Do conditions in zoos facilitate circumstances in which elephants would kill their young out of stress? Corrected that headline for ya there, newsy-website person.

I admire this woman's actions. Good show.

Yeah, all right, I wouldn't have resisted making that pun either.

Carousel fraud 'out of control'

I don't know if someone will take note of my feedback email and fix this, but this story at present is illustrated with a picture of… a fairground carousel. With no explanation of what carousel fraud is or why it's called that.

(From Wikipedia: The term… "carousel" refers to the way that the fraud in a more complex manner sees VAT and goods passed around companies and jurisdictions, similar to how a carousel travels round.)

And I hope I'm allowed to say so! ;) (As my userinfo page clearly states, my views are not that of my employer.)

(Hahaha, they fixed it.)

Brown pledge to tackle bullies

How? You can't legislate against people being bumholes! (You could remove restrictions that make teachers scared to intervene in physical fights going on right in front of them, but you wouldn't stop the little bastards 'knowing their rights' and taking you to court.)

Dinopaddle! I've wondered about this.

BBC Springwatch: Concrete gardens

Just lose the car! There's no excuse for it if you live and work in London.

Let's spend £££ on sea defences instead of moving somewhere a little more sensible. Well, it's the sea, yaknow, wat khun you do?

A Star Wars virgin gives his thoughts on the film. Fascinating stuff.

(I'm not sure I quite believe he's as naïf of the major plot twists as he claims. With the films' huge presence in pop culture, could anyone be? Heavy, heavy unconscious foreshadowing throughout if he is.)

I must watch these films sometime, though of course I've been spoilered for all the good stuff over the years.

Fascinating story!

We don't want you in our country unless you marry for LUV!

Oh boy. I'm fundamentally and noisily a marriage-secularist; I am very angry when marrieds get special treatment or advantage. I'd rather it didn't exist as a status (ie as something separate from 'just' cohabiting), but at the very least it should be de-toothed.

Given that, I'm entirely in favour of people who decide to marry for financial advantage rather than being "genuinely in love".[*] If we insist on affording special privileges to people who recite a few stupid phrases in front of a registrar, then as many people as possible should be included in this scam. That means house-sharing platonic friends of same or differing sexes as well as non-heterosexuals.

In principle I ought to extend this to poly groupings too.

[*] I've been known to do reasonably daft things for reasons of said emotion (in its #3 meaning: fraternal, sororal or monastic), so I have to be very quiet in mocking it for a while. Because them's the rules.

Give it the old mitochondrial heave.

Man offers museum his own head

Oh, that silly Martian sand.

Arctic explorers hurrah!

My fingers seem the opposite way round every time I look at them. I'd say pretty even.

Nergye requests more mousies.

Woo… twirly.

I would like to call for the words "call for"/"called for" to be banned from journalism. It's a hideous, sloppy phrase. If an official has requested, demanded, set out a fatwa or done any other verbing, I want to know which it is!

Anyone can 'call for' something to happen. I just have, technically publically. If I am reading a news story that claims to be accurate and tells me someone significant has asked for, suggested or ordered something, I want to know what authority the asker has to make the request and how strong the request was. How else can we judge how significant the story is? (I mean, she might be minister of the interior, but in what capacity was she speaking and does she have the clout to make it happen? And, especially, how is she going to follow up? Talk's cheap.)

If, as I suspect, in most cases the answer is "no authority and we think he was just having a whinge", then it should not be included in the news piece. If the entire piece was based on this someone having a whinge outside their jurisdiction/area of expertise, send the writer back to hack school.

I would also like to call for religious officials to stop calling for stupid things in public.

Gyps bengalensis. Complete – and I mean total – chance. (I'd been reading about them not a couple of days ago, hence was able to be reasonably sure it was indeed an Indian species.)

I love having a pattern-finding monkey brain that reads delightful coincidences into everything. The world is great. I'm great. I really need to wash my hair. In addition gibt es sunshine. Waaaarmth.

I'm not dead; I am very busy with something. I WILL be trying to check emails comments etc frequently!

Bishies and action lines IS Shakespeare! It IS!

It IS it IS it IS~

Weird sea stuff. Squee!

They need to bring back the judging panels or some other method that isn't open to misuse quite that blatant.

(Not that I wanted the UK to win – our song was, obviously, naff – but some of the western European countries deserved to place better.)

I watched the tape of the heat with my bandmate earlier the same day, then watched the show live with him and his bro.

Being able to say "She just said 'how are you' and they said 'fine thanks'" was fun. (I kinda wish I didn't have this number-blindness. I can't count backwards from three, apparently, without getting a couple of them the wrong way 'round.)

Not much to say about the entries… I saw a lot of Ruslana-esque adorableness sloshing around, a face type that is seemingly deliberately designed to get round my stoic filters, which was a little disturbing. And Sweden, well, eye candy yay.

Really most of the actual songs fell flat for me. I have secret luv for Denmark's Drama Queen, but because of the aforementioned imbalance it didn't get through the semis. For me, Germany and Iceland should have won or come close. Hungary close on their heels. I was eager to like Finland (naturally) if only her song had been anywhere near catchy. I was frightened of Belarus (but the dancers on the white things were fun). Spain and Greece were surprisingly good and, well, Switzerland, what can you say… except "go away, WOD nerds"?

About the winner? I sort of half-assedly wave a "yay lesbians" flag, but really, it was just so blah!

Terry Wogan (a Radio 2 DJ and the English Eurovision commentator) told an ancedote on the radio about his first arrival in Finland, when someone apparently told him that the way to say "Sorry, I don't speak Finnish" is "minä rakastan sinua". He said it made him popular instead of getting punched, so I am slightly skeptical…

Oh, and finally – JOULUPUKKI WTF?

I so win at writing exciting teaser text. …when it comes to department email newsletters that people may not read, anyway.

("Jack Lewis: anything but ordinary
Clive Staples Lewis changed his name to Jack at three years of age. He converted to Christianity in a motorbike sidecar on the way to Whipsnade Zoo. Listen to exclusive audio and read about C.S. Lewis – the life, the work and the worship.
[here I linked to the page]")

Someone I know in the department is one of those people who go the extra mile – those who won't just write in business speak, but will put a joke or a photo (or even a full-blown poem) into their departmental emails. I admire that. You never know upon whom you'll foist an unexpected grin. Or who'll spot your silly puns.

So hurrah for the cutely dorky office cat-lovers, and let's encourage those who put a bit of enthusiasm into the dull bits of their jobs.

U2 feature in worst lyric top ten

I'm right behind the Des'ree one and U2's "A mole, digging in a hole…", which I always found ridonkulous.

Unholy row at clergy soccer game

Mmmm, rat surprise and walrus terrene. (pun, not typo ;p)

Sparked by discussing this one, I mentioned lutefisk to my colleagues and had to tell one of them what black pudding is (she's Muslim and so has obviously never been near it)… yick.

Pinhole photos, including one from Jyväskylä <3

Buddhist pretties.

Inspired by a silly meme posted by Altivo, I completely remade it. It's still just as silly.

You're meant to spell out your name acrostically like so:
S – You like sweet things
A – You like the natural world
M – You have canine tendencies
and then post the full list under a cut so people can play for themselves.

Read the rest of this entry »

*claps hands over mouth* No no no no…

This is horrible.

It is the fault of the rutting media for not ever giving the Lib Dems serious coverage. For seeing to it that the Tories – the only slightly more moderate wing of the BNP – are seen as the only credible alternative to authoritarian New Labour. Fornicate two-party politics. Fornicate it.

Voting reform. Proportional representation now. Hah. Not while the majority parties are in power.

(BTW, I voted so am entitled to pass comment (and rant at the non-voters and the people who voted wrong).)

More awesomeness.

And more, especially awesome after this clip.

*throws up the ears* Woo. >:)

What rubbish that only empathetic people get embarrassed. Autism out the earholes here and I still beat myself up over humiliating moments from years back.

(Performancing/ScribeFire is excellent except that because it saves the text, I forgot to post this this morning when I wrote it.)

Yes, heelwork to music: that bit you see on Crufts every year when a person comes into the arena with an excited dog and does a little dance with him or her.

I'm a sucker for seeing dogs so obviously enjoying being so silly. In fact you could say I got chills… they're multiplyin'…

Love how Carolyn uses her arm signals. Also, Golden Retrievers are made of 36 carat win. My sisters were Goldies.

And now — fight to the death!!21"!31