My dad went to St Petersburg this week. He dropped in on his way back from the airport (while I was at work) and left a little gift for me.
That’s fantastic, I thought. A doll inside a doll inside a doll… Russia… the most obvious gift. Well, knowing my dad, there must be some sort of witty underlying pattern, which will become apparent when I start opening successive dolls.
A while back I spent an evening clearing out old photos, discarding the duplicates and failures. There’s very little after 2001, because it was soon after then when I switched to digital photography, so everything files itself neatly on an arbitrarily large hard drive.
If I could send a message to the 8-year old me, taking possession of his first camera, I’d probably give him the following suggestions.
1. When you receive your photos back from the developers, take out the ones that are blurred to the point which you can’t tell what they are. Take out the duplicates. You can leave in the ones of people that you secretly don’t actually like, but be aware that in twenty years, they will probably get discarded too.
2. Write some information on the back of each one with a felt-tip pen. Though they are all in their correct envelopes in sequential order on your shelf right now, they won’t always be. Put the date on them. Yes, it’s time-consuming, but it is useful information.
3. Don’t worry about names for now. In twenty years, if you can’t remember their name, then they probably didn’t make that much of an impact on you. However, at that point you SHOULD start adding names, because Alzheimer’s is just around the corner.
There is a certain tragedy to the way that photos are no longer something tangible that you flick through and handle by the edges. Much like music, we’ve learned how to extract the data and shift it between different formats at will. Sure, it’s still the same underlying data, but the romance is lost.
Remember to keep making those backups, guys.
A year ago, I was in a European city with Karen for a few days, and it was dinnertime. We were walking through the streets, peering in windows and inspecting menus to find something that appealed.
Sometimes, this kind of thing just slots into place. Interesting eateries leap out at you, or you are in the company of a friend who has a plan of action, or you have an inexplicable confidence that it’s all going to work out okay.
Sadly, the situation in which we found ourselves did not conform to this specification. We were struggling, desperate, hopeless, forlorn. Neither of us had the gusto to take charge of this operation, and there was a lot of Do you like this one?
and I don’t know, do YOU like this one?
going on. As you are probably aware, this situation should be avoided at all costs.
We inadvertantly meandered into a nice-looking, albeit empty, restaurant. Empty of customers, empty of staff. It was the most promising menu that we’d seen, which seemed like adequate justification at the time.
I put some metal shoe shelves in the garage at the weekend (the Ikea [REDD][], in case you are wondering).
[redd]: http://www.ikea.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?catalogId=10103&storeId=7&langId=-20&productId=16087
For years, I’ve found [rawlplugs][] to be an interesting curiosity. They are undeniably clever, and also notable because they tend to be the lone plastic rangers in a toolbox of metal varmints. When I was a kid, I associated metal with grown-up things and plastic with toys. Clearly, rawlplugs had to be a toy of some sort. So what were toys doing in my dad’s toolbox?
[rawlplugs]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_plug
Anyway, this weekend marks a transition for me: from being someone who looks at rawlplugs, to someone who has actually used a rawlplug for the purpose intended.
The shelves haven’t fallen down yet. This is impressive.
Weblogs are very time-sensitive, as you probably know. They attempt to capture the *here* and the *now* and the *this* and the *that* and the *wow* and the *yeah* and the *groovy* and the ilk.
There are caveats however. Certain time-sensitive data is just not worth reporting on.
Firstly, the “hey, do you like my new design?” post. You just know that this is going to look daft in three years time when someone is browsing through your archive and they come across it. If you really must publish a post like this, at least have the decency to include “before” and “after” screenshots.
A variation on this is the “I’ve added a small rotating badger to my sidebar” post. Rotating badgers are cool, so I’m going to forgive this particular instance, but as a general rule I feel that if you publish a post when you *add* the small rotating badger, then you should then really delete that post once you’ve *removed* the small rotating badger. Or include “before” and “after” screenshots. Whatever.
The second example of time-sensitive data that’s not worth reporting on is:
> I’ve now had 100 comments on this site!
…and…
> I’ve now had 200 comments on this site!
…and…
> I’ve now had 307 comments on this site!
…and all the variations like…
> I’ve just checked, and I’ve now written 10,000 words on this site!
…or…
> I’ve written 38,000 characters on this site, not including whitespace, HTML markup, links to small rotating badgers and punctuation other than exclamation marks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
My **actual point** is that I’ve added a “More from the same category” thing. If you are viewing the [individual entry archive page for this post][], then you should be seeing it at the end of this post ((oh boy, if I delete it and then forget to update this post then I’ll never hear the end of it now.)). It basically digs a random entry out of the archive that is under the same category as the post which you are viewing. I’m quite meticulous ((note my use of the term “quite”: there is still a lot of stuff in “Uncategorised”)) about categorising posts, but generally I don’t make them visible to readers. This changes that.
[individual entry archive page for this post]: http://pete.nu/blog/2006/10/related-post/
Posts can belong to multiple categories, so it’s theoretically possible to browse the entire site just by following the trail that starts below. It only appears at the bottom of individual entry archives – I could put it at the end of each post on the front page ((or search results page, or monthly archive page… you get the jist)), but I’m currently leaning towards keeping the front page free of clutter.
The “More from the same category” thing is in the form of a small WordPress plugin, which I can make available if you so desire.
Now, my minions – feel free to go back in time, and leave daft comments on old posts. Back when it was good.
Twice now I’ve heard the new [Barenaked Ladies][] song on the radio and thought to myself:
[barenaked ladies]: http://www.bnlmusic.com/
*Who’s that? Sounds like Matchbox 20. In fact, that sounds so much like Matchbox 20, that it can’t be anyone other than Matchbox 20. Surely.*
And then Chris Evans or Terry Wogan will say “And that’s the fabulous new song from the Barenaked Ladies, and it’s called [Easy][], and it’s fabulous.”
[easy]: http://www.emusic.com/samples/m3u/album/10939212/0.m3u
Click that link to listen to the song, and tell me that it doesn’t sound exactly like Matchbox 20.
And I’ll ponder on how much the Barenaked Ladies’ new song sounds like Matchbox 20, and how ashamed they should be.
Finally, we have managed to get round to “sorting out” our bedroom in the new house.
The rest of the house has been reasonably simple to furnish, but the master bedroom kept getting bumped back for two reasons.
Firstly, Ikea let me down in a big way. They allowed me to order a mattress, pay for it, and wait for half an hour at the warehouse round the corner before finally deciding that it was out of stock. Subsequently I went home without a mattress. There didn’t seem to be any point in assembling our new Leksvik bedframe until we had a mattress, so the boxes remained in the garage for a while.
> Ikea, you are bastards,
> Spreading agony and crises,
> But I continue to buy your wares,
> ‘Cos I’m a sucker for your prices.
Secondly, my sister’s boyfriend said that he could get us a couple of nice wardrobes for free. We held out for those for a while, but at the weekend we decided that they probably weren’t going to materialise, and so we’ve bought our own.
> You promised us a wardrobe,
> Heck, you promised we’d get two!
> But did they turn up? Did they, boat.
> I’m slightly miffed with you.
And that’s why our bedroom will soon be “sorted out”. Just as soon as I build all the furniture. And then, I’m hoping that everything will tumble into place, as suitcases full of clothes can finally be unpacked and awesomeness is restored.
> At last! The dining table
> Can be used for taking supper.
> Well, it will be, when we buy some chairs.
> Off to Ikea again. Bugger.
*Yes, that’s all original poetry. Aren’t I bloody great?*
Let’s start with a hypothetical person, called George. George is hypothetical. George says “[Waterboarding][] is not torture.”
[waterboarding]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterboarding
George is entitled to his opinion, but he’s wrong.
Let’s create a hypothetical situation for our hypothetical George to be in. Let’s say that George, through some ugly string of coincidences, finds himself captured by some very bad people, *”strapped to a board and tipped back or lowered into a body of water until he believed that drowning was imminent”* ((quote taken from the Wikipedia article linked above. Not that Wikipedia is necessarily the authority on such things, but I don’t think that anyone can argue with that definition.))
When George is eventually released, what do you think that his opinion on waterboarding will be now? Will he still think that it is not torture?
That was a hypothetical question, but feel free to answer it anyway. Comments validate me.
As you are probably aware, Karen and I bought a house a fortnight ago. After about a week, I got bored of having the estate agent’s “Sold” sign stood up in front, so I took it down and laid it flat on the ground (allowing the estate agents to pick it up and take it away when they are in the area).
However, Karen informs me that at some point this morning, the “Sold” sign has been re-erected. Clearly, we need to move it a little further from the front yard so that it won’t be instantly replaced. Here are some thoughts.
1. In the dead of night, take the sign round to the churchyard and stand it up in front of the church. For maximum potential offense, stick it through someone’s grave, preferably a recent one.
2. In the dead of night, situate the sign in front of a nearby school. That will cause some rumours to fly about in the morning, eh?
3. In the dead of night, install the sign next to the railway line. Then, when a train comes past, it will make a fabulous clacking noise like those plastic things that you put in your bike wheel.
4. In the dead of night, scour the town for dog turds. Collect them all up into one large pile that is sufficiently big to support the sign. Place the sign in the pile.
5. In the dead of night, break into the allotments and locate the sign on some random guy’s plot. When he discovers it, he’ll be all, like, “But it wasn’t even on the market!” and “How much money did it sell for? Is that my money, now?”
6. Uhm… in a pub.
7. Throw it in the municipal swimming pool.
8. Balance it atop a telegraph pole.
9. Traffic cone.
10. Paris Hilton.
What the… did the Government quietly reclassify [Kahlua][] as a Class A drug while I wasn’t looking? Nobody seems to be selling Kahlua! I’ve tried various supermarkets, I’ve tried various off-licenses, and none of them sell it. In fact, most of the time when I go into an “offy” and ask for Kahlua, the chap on the other side of the counter shows no signs of even recognising the name!
[kahlua]: http://kahlua.com/
I’m starting to panic. This is all horribly, horribly wrong.