I've been offline for the last few days, in the interrim having moved to London from Warwick and been furiously engaged in job-hunting. In a stroke of luck that seems too good to be true, I've found my perfect job almost right off the bat: PHP/SQL development, in central London, in an open-plan office with a distinctly casual dress policy, with people I get along with, for an above-average salary (given that I'm a new graduate in a decidedly crappy job market). My new home is Wide Area Communications, and I'm very pleased indeed; they were exactly what I was thinking of when I was thinking of where I wanted to work.

The job doesn't start until August 11th, which poses something of a logistical problem: I should really use the gap time to find a place to live and get sorted that way, but I can't actually afford a place to live at the moment without stretching the overdraft into new territory in a thoroughly dangerous way. So we'll have to see what happens. But in the meantime, I'm back down to only one life-threateningly important problem instead of two.

Ironically, the same day that I got a job writing PHP for a living, a PHP script that I've been using for months randomly broke -- don't ask me; I didn't change anything -- so I couldn't tell you properly. But that's fixed now, and I'm back, baby! It's only been two weeks...

Anyway, so I'm in the middle of flat-hunting at the moment: traipsing around a London that has decided now would be the perfect time to become unbearably hot and muggy as opposed to, say, a week from now, when I would have nothing better to do than sit and quietly bake. No. So I'm turning up at a series of unwelcoming doors to crappy flats full of odd people pouring buckets of sweat. I'm pleased, can't you tell?

Property prices in London are insane at the moment, incidentally, and while this hasn't raised the average flat price much -- nobody could afford it otherwise -- it has made for crappier flats, as more and more people convert their living room/lounge into an extra bedroom to save on rents. Screw that; I want a living room! I also want it to be in Zone 2*, close to a tube station, in a neighbourhood where violent death is not a major feature of the night life. Is that too much to ask for Ł500 monthly? It seems so.

I'll do some random linkage on the next update; some of the better stuff has been posted to Gay Geeks; shame on you for not reading it every day. Oh, all right then:

God gives us the finger

Spiders on hallucinogenic drugs create funky webs, although I think they're using a little bit of artistic licence when they claim that "[s]piders on marijuana made a reasonable stab at spinning webs but appeared to lose concentration about half-way through". I'm looking at you here, Dan. Both Dans in fact.

The RIAA claims that filesharing traffic has dropped 15% as a result of their lawsuits, based rather oddly on data from a single week. Incidentally, that was the same week as the fourth of July. Oh, and one day is 14.2% of a week. But, y'know, draw your own conclusions there.

* For Americans and other clueless people: London's metropolitan transport system is divided into concentric "zones". The closer to the desirable centre you are, the more expensive things get, on a roughly exponential scale.

So, Jewel -- remember her? -- has a new song out, called Intuition (please don't link to that; my bandwidth is inadequate). It's actually not a bad song, upbeat and strident with a totally different, poppy direction for Jewel, who had seemed to have petered out on her last album with increasingly long-winded, increasingly meaningless nouveau-hippy songs. Whereas this one you can dance to. And she does: the new video is good. She's conscious that her new direction is a commercial decision, and that's what the video is about: it alternates between camcorder-like "real" footage, complete with date and time stamps, and the standard music video feel of saturated colours and great lighting. The difference is striking: everybody looks much hotter in "video world". But she wimps out a bit: even in the "real" scenes she quite carefully posed and made up, and the video scenes soon come to dominate, culminating in Jewel gyrating in a wet t-shirt, sprayed (for sexual equality, we assume) by a hot young fireman. It's not innovative or anything, but it's amusing and well-produced and, like I said, the song is catchy. So go download the video now :-)
Update: I've just watched it again and noticed that the scrolling ticker which pops up halfway through the video is actually part of the video itself (the copy I have is a frame capture from TV, so this is not immediately obvious). It reads, in full: '"Jewel's music sounds much better now that she's dancing. I love it! SCRREEEEEAAAAMMMM!" - Suzi, Anchorage, AK'. I'm liking this more every time I see it.

So apparently reading an article criticizing the government is enough to get you investigated by the FBI. Hell, meet handbasket. I'm so glad I don't live in the states...

Meanwhile, in related big-brother news, shredding documents doesn't work anymore: a company now offers a service that scans in all the shreds, and then uses software to reconstruct them. I'm sure Enron has already installed incinerators anyway...

Oh, and as posted to Gay Geeks, A Straight Person's Guide to Gay Etiquette is hilarious. Remember, you heard it here first.

I've just posted a massive backlog of good stuff to Gay Geeks, including a followup to the Tom McLaughlin case. Justice was done! Pity that's the exception rather than the rule these days.

Oooh! Join the contest and you can be in a BmB strip!

Cross-posted to Gay Geeks

I haven't been blogging here much, because I've been concentrating on GayGeeks a bit... this multi-blog life is so difficult! :->

WOW. The ridiculously wealthy are creating a gigantic, palm-shaped island, big enough to be seen from space, to create a garden city for the ultra-wealthy. Has to be seen to be believed.

Cool! Hehehe... play with the kitty! And on a more serious note, Slate has good things to say about Tony Blair. Honestly, Tony is so much more popular in the US, and Clinton is so much more popular here... can we just swap?

MySQL dates are in the form YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS (the time is optional, it will assume midnight on that day). UNIX times are either seconds or milliseconds since midnight on January 1st, 1970.

Millseconds:
Seconds:

TheFunny.Org attempts to be funny, and occasionally succeeds, including this TATU parody.

I'm a lesbian
She's a lesbian
We are lesbians
Kissin' in the rain
Kissin' in the rain

I'm a lesbian
She's a lesbian
We are lesbians
Touch me there again
Touch me there again

The singing is bad, like really, really bad. But it's still pretty funny. And if that doesn't float your boat, you can be simultaneously amused, impressed and nostalgic as you hear the Super Mario 1 theme tune played on a classical piano. Including the underground theme song and the bit where it goes really fast towards the end.

I'm beginning to suspect that my trouble getting a flatshare is related to my trouble getting a boyfriend. In fact, I think they're the same problem. They're both long-term decisions that affect your daily life in a big way. If either goes wrong, they can make your life really miserable, through no fault of your own. You often have to make decisions within a few minutes of meeting them about whether you want to persue them or just let them go.

Also, my problems with both are the same: after looking for a while and not finding any I like, I decide I'm being too picky, so I lower my standards a bit. Then I see loads of places, and find one I like, but decide that if I can find one this good, I probably should be able to find one that's better. I put good ones on hold, while checking out new ones, and then when I come back I find the good ones have been taken by other people. I'm afraid that long-term, what I'm looking for may not actually exist in my price-range. The good ones never even come on the market; as soon as they're available, they're snapped up by friends-of-friends of the current occupant. The nicest-looking ones are often unfurnished/boring. The similarities are endless and, indeed, scary. It makes me think I shouldn't settle for a small room, in case it turns out to be a metaphor.

This is definitely a major problem. My only consolation will be that if I find a flat anytime soon, a boyfriend should follow pretty quickly.

I signed up to Friendster today. If you know me, and would like to find out what e-mail address I used to link profiles, get in touch.

Oh, and today I discovered where to find flat shares in London at long last; MoveFlat.Com has apparently been stealing all of Loot's business, which is why pickings in Loot are so poor these days. Why didn't anyone tell me, you bastards? I'm not sure what effect this has on my flatshare == boyfriend theory; is there an island of cute single gay men somewhere that I haven't heard about?

Good god, did that take long and involve unnecessary stress. The new flat is in Tooting Bec, a huge ground-floor room facing the street. The street is a cul-de-sac, so very quiet -- coincidentally, at the end of the street is St. George's psychiatric hospital, which is where I worked as a temp in Easter of 2001.

The house is five bedrooms and two bathrooms on 3 storeys, with a big kitchen and a nice-sized lounge both of which open on to a patio, with a small garden below. My new flatmates are very friendly types, all guys around my age, which is pretty much what I was looking for. I move in this weekend, hopefully.

So! That essential business concluded, I can spend the next two weeks visiting people. Edinburgh will be next week, I reckon -- anybody fancy putting me up for 3 days?

Ooh, they're here! Transport for London has finally got its act together and introduced smartcards on all its trains and buses to replace the old system of thousands of (environmentally-unfriendly, fragile) cardboard tickets with magnetic strips. The somewhat oddly-named new Oyster cards are re-usable, and you don't have to take them out of your wallet for them to work -- just pass them over the reader, and you're through -- which should hopefully speed the progress of people through the gates. Better still, if you lose your card, you haven't lost your ticket -- you just report it missing, that card is cancelled, and they send you a new card with your ticket loaded onto it instead.

Currently they're only available in monthly and annual versions, but as the price drops they will become available for weekly and daily tickets too. Conveniently, they come just when I'm about to buy my first monthly travelcard for my new job, so I can be a cool trendsetter with my nifty remotely-read smartcard, which will almost certainly fail to work in a humourous fashion the first time I use it.

Forgive me for being geeky here; I don't really know why I find these so cool. I've just been waiting to see these cards introduced for a long time -- the little yellow readers started appearing on tube gates more than a year ago. And I really do hate the horribly low-tech paper tickets, they're such a pain.

Random links that have interested me enough to bookmark recently:

AwesomeGamerz is a mildly funny but extremely twisted new webcomic, worth a look.

AlienDice unabashedly rips concepts out of Pokémon, but somehow manages to work in a sexy blue hero. And we already know how I feel about sexy blue men (via the excellent Nightcrawler Zone)

The Egomaniac has landed

I re-tested myself and discovered I have risen one place on the camp scale to be...

LEVEL 7 -- VERY FEMININE
It's kinda assumed 'Oh, yeah he's gay'. Your consistent behavior leads anyone you come in contact with to think that you're more than likely a fun loving Homo boy. You're the life of the party and your hands are moving and talking as much as your mouth. Your clothes are so perfect that sometimes they look fake.

Everyone knows Piltdown man was a fake, but did you know the hoax was probably perpetrated by Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes stories?

The All American Rejects, recommended by eDan, are quite cute and their songs are quite catchy despite having the most foppishly poetic lyrics I've heard in mainstream music in a long time.

It turns out we killed even more whales than we thought. Like, 10 times as many. This seems to lend weight to the theory that we have already fished 90% of all the fish in the ocean. Let's all go back to eating cows! No shortage of them!

A font that changes depending on the weather? I'm not really sure what use this is, but hey, good going there.

Be eco-friendly and stylish with a bamboo bicycle. Also quite cheap, apparently.

Who designs the really big, important websites in the world? The Wheel do. I want to work for these people someday; maybe I'll stick with my current job for the moment though, at least until it actually starts :-)

The Notorious A-List lists celebrities and all known lies about them, e.g.:

Bloom, Orlando
A yummy monkey, indeed. ("Dirty flirt.") "Kinda immature, a bit of a brat but still nice." Linked with Kate Bosworth and Susanna Eng and, I'm told, a German actor; I've gotten a lot of e-mail that Bloom is mostly bisexual, if not gay, and that his "affairs" with Bosworth and Eng are just PR.

These are the things I like to hear.

Enjoy some hard-core irony by procrastinating by reading Slashdot's tips on how to be more productive. Some good advice in there though. "Blog less", for instance.

The wireless beer glass that signals the waiter automatically when you need a refill is a good example of technology filling an urgent need

Virtual humans are becoming more realistic, mainly by adding lots of imperfections. Funny how we won't accept things as real unless they're flawed; the Wachowski brothers were probably right about the Perfect Matrix

Not only is mind-control via television apparently possible, there's a patent on it, surprisingly enough not held by Jeff Bezos.

Roger's Trinidad and Tobago web page has come a long way since I first visited it in 1996, although his web design skills have not significantly improved, it must be said.

My favourite IDE, Eclipse, now (finally) has a plugin to support PHP. Yay!

Oh, and because he keeps asking, I shall mention technoboy in this blog. So there!

Phew! That turned into a bit of a megablog; enjoy!

Matt has updated his website, because he lost control of the old address. It's new and it's fab! Go visit, folks.

Aaron Swartz, self-important boy-genius that he is, does occasionally have clever things to say. Today he's talking about compulsory licensing as a way of legalizing free music downloads: the idea is that everybody pays a tax on DVD burners etc., and in return they can download what they like for free. As Aaron's analysis points out, this doesn't actually work properly. So why am I mentioning it? Because people are actually considering this as a possibility, so it's good for people to know why it's a bad idea.

Of course, the solution to ending the piracy of music online is to make it easier to buy songs than to steal them. Currently, if I want to buy music I have to either own a Mac or find myself forced to use Microsoft products that don't let me burn that music onto CD and have a number of other onerous restrictions. If I want to steal the music, however, I'm usually three clicks away, although the quality is variable and obscure and/or very new stuff is hard to find. I would gladly pay a small sum per song to have the quality and availability guaranteed, but that sum is a lot smaller than what the RIAA would like me to pay, because the RIAA is a useless middleman organization that is ripping off the consumer. But more on that another time.