It started so innocently. Steve has long-referred to the small orange aiming light on our cameras as the badger-frightening device. So at M's New Year's Eve party, when I started taking lots of photos with the badger-frightener, I told Simon to look like a frightened badger. And then Steve. And then it began to spiral out of control... we got confused badger, terrified badger, angry badgers, trapped badger, amorous penguins, deep-fried badger (twice), smug giraffe, orgasming amoeba, angry chicken, exploding porcupine, amorous ostrich, condescending budgies, suicidal dolphin, and my personal favourite, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil (though most people agreed that he looked almost entirely hydrogenated). I recommend this game to anyone, obviously. All you need is a camera and drunk people.

Great party, and coming home took less than an hour! God bless the 24-hour tube and long live Ken!

A combination of jet-lag and NYE-party-induced biological clock problems, plus a wealth of distractions, meant I didn't get to bed until 3.30am last night. Thus, at 8.15 this morning, there were few things in the world that could have woken me.

It turns out, however, that those few things include two loud and extremely excited dogs yelping and barking, alternately, at full volume, in the neighbour's garden just below my window. For half an hour.

After being woken by this and having it continue for 10 minutes, I finally dragged myself to the window to see what was going on. Turns out, in the garden opposite, there was an old guy in a big coat (for brevity, let's call him "dickhead"). He seemed to be just standing there, but the dogs could see him and it was driving them nuts.

So why didn't dickhead just go back inside? Well, he did, for 10 minutes, and the dogs quietened back down, and I began drifting back off to sleep. But then he decided to make a stand, or something, I don't know, and came back out, because the dogs again resumed their furious barking. He began talking to the dogs, and held his hand out over the garden fence where they were. I don't know what he thought they were doing, but it just drove them into a further frenzy.

At this point, the patience of everyone was wearing thin. This garden is one in a long row of back-to-back gardens between two rows of houses, so there were easily 30 bedroom windows in easy earshot of the barkfest. I was by no means the only person to be considering murder this morning. The first sign came 10 minutes later, when somebody leaned out their window and blasted a full-on foghorn-type siren. In the ensuing 5 seconds of silence from both dogs and dickhead, siren-man screamed "SHAAAAAADAAAAAAAP!" in most aggrieved tones. Dickhead replied with something defiant, apparently, and maintained his position.

Next up a woman from the same side of the row as my window started shouting at him. He seemed to want to defend his actions of waking up dozens of people early in the morning on a public holiday by winding up his neighbour's dogs. Needless to say, his defence was soon crushed.

But the damage is done. I'm awake now. And the dogs are so wound up from the barking and the shouting and the foghorn and such that now, even with dickhead gone, they are still barking at everything. Birds. Planes overhead. Each other.

I am not usually a violent man, but I can say I now at least understand the mindset one might need to be in to murder someone in a crime of passion. Certainly, if I'd had a sniper rifle today, neither dogs nor dickhead would have survived.

Much ado about nothing, frankly. I was distinctly underwhelmed; possibly because it was hyped to be so good. It was believable and moving and well acted and everything, it just wasn't interesting. Nothing of any importance seemed to happen, but took 3 hours to do so.

Update: After some thought, I've narrowed it down to one conclusion: stories about ordinary people bore me. This also explains my lack of interest in fiction (as opposed to science fiction). I am unapologetic about this. Ordinary people are boring, and I'd rather not hear about them, especially if they're fake ordinary people.

MoveableType comments once again killed the server by being spammed into oblivion. Comments on all blogs are disabled indefinitely and you are all switching to WordPress, like it or not, in the next 30 days. That piece of shit has gots ta go.

Aww, shite. Aaargh. This is not good.

Google Image Search has recently indexed an old post of mine as a good source of pictures for Orlando Bloom; strangely, as there was only one. In fact, it's the second result, so although the actual image is hosted on another server entirely, most of the traffic is also coming to me. Depressingly, given all the effort I put into writing, the teeny boppers pouring in for a glimpse of Mr. Bloom have increased traffic to this site initially by a factor of 10, a figure that has now levelled off a bit but is continuing a slow rise, currently in the region of 15,000 visitors a month. That's actually beginning to top the traffic at my long-dominant forum for gay nerds.

But... oh well, any publicity is good publicity right? Give the people what they want!

Getcha Orlando Bloom pictures here!

Orlando bloom, he so sexy!

Yes, I am a bandwidth, attention, traffic and publicity whore. But hopefully a certain percentage of clever people will stick around and read the archives, because I sure as hell haven't posted anything intelligent yet for January.

And I suppose Orlando Bloom is, y'know, passably cute. Or else I wouldn't have had all those pictures lying around.

The public subsets of my holiday photos are now up :-)

Your MT configuration has changed in advance of the switch from MT to WordPress, so you must now login here instead. Nothing else should have changed; please get in touch if it has.

The flat-hunt is over. A and I will be living, hilariously, on Albert Square from the 23rd of February. Of course, since I have to move out of Tollington Park on the 11th of February, that unfortunately means moving all my stuff to a temporary location for 12 days and sleeping on various sofas. For the price -- new flat is very cheap for zone 2, and 4 minutes from the tube -- it was worth it. But friends of mine with empty room space or floor to sleep on from the 11th to the 23rd, please make your voices heard...

Work's been too busy to blog recently. So in the absence of any real content, an extract from an email, describing our new flat...

The building is four floors, one building away from a corner on a short road leading to a grassy thing called Albert Square (which I don't think we have access to). We're on the third floor, up some very 70s open stairs -- a bit spartan but well-maintained and well-lit. As you enter the flat you're facing a sort of reception area flanked by cupboards. To the left are doors to two reasonably sized double-bedrooms, both about the size of my current room. To the right the flat opens out in the kitchen on the right, the living room in front of you and the bathroom to the left. Bathroom is a bit small and was kinda messy when we saw it, but our contract guarantees that the whole flat will be professionally cleaned before we move in. The kitchen is a good size, with oven, gas stove, washing machine and (hurrah!) a dishwasher.

Living room is smaller than my current living room but bigger than my dining room. Ceilings throughout are reasonably high. Decor is very very very 80s -- the bathroom furniture is pink, the dining table (in the living room) is steel and glass, and the chairs are shiny steel tubes with suspended leather seats and backs. The couches are low black things and the carpet -- well, it started off life grey. Its current state is a testament to a long and active life, I think.

In general, at or above the standard of my current flat, but much closer to the tube.

I know they aren't PC and everything, but this is the best blonde joke I've ever seen. I was laughing out loud.

Season 2 has started! Dear Christ, but I love this shit. It's piling up in the first few minutes of the show...

• "I can solve a rubik's cube in 12 seconds"
• "I so know what you're thinking... maybe we have ESPN"
• "My IQ? It's a C... so that, uh, 3.5?"
• "I have several role models... I like Wolverine, because he proves that hairy guys can get chicks"
• "If only we could harness his [brain] power for evil"
• "I'm ready. Bring on the dweebs."

Laughs per minute are equal to awwws per minute. It's both hilarious yet fundamentally sweet.

Less annoying host this season too.

Update: Torrent of the first episode

Ed is back with a brand new blog, the first of the movers to WordPress. Check it out, see if you like.

It's been one of those days when I've had a lot of ideas. Some days I get nothing all day, and some days every single thing I see or read or hear produces a huge firework of new ideas. As an example, I was reading the Economist on the tube home tonight. It was running a survey of evolution, and one of the articles had this quote:

"[Genetic scientists] showed that head lice and body lice diverged 75,000 years ago. Since body lice live in clothing, and most other species of mammal support only one species of louse, the inference is that body lice evolved at the same time as clothes. That is an interesting coincidence, and some think it doubly interesting in that it coincides with the eruption of Toba [a massive volcano that severely disrupted the earth's environment for a number of years]."

This makes me think: so, the world suddenly had a nuclear winter that caused cold (but not fatally cold) temperatures in Africa, where all humans lived at that point, and wrecked crops. I'm not speculating on the preceding; it was mentioned earlier in the article. This would have (a) forced the invention of clothing, because it was cold, and (b) forced a lot of migration. So a lot of humans would have been forced out of this pleasant lush land where there was lots of food, almost a garden paradise, into lots of other places where the going was tougher, by very sudden climate change, almost like an act of God. Being forced out of a garden by God sounds familiar. But the real clincher: before they were forced out of the garden, everybody was naked.

The same article later on produced more. Like this one:

"The brains of modern people are only about 6% larger than those of their immediate African predecessors. Perhaps more surprisingly, they are smaller than those of Neanderthals."

The article had been talking about the two main theories of what happened to the Neanderthals: were they out-competed, or did they interbreed with Homo Sapiens. The consensus is that either way, they clearly weren't as good as Homo Sapiens. But their brains were bigger. So maybe they were smart and peaceful, but they were destroyed by an influx of vicious little Homo Sapiens? The loud and dumb triumphing over the wise Neanderthals, too intelligent to contemplate genocide... it would make a good story, anyway.

Then there was this:

"[T]he size of a primate's brain, adjusted for the size of its body, is directly related to the size of the group it lives in. (Subsequent work has shown same relationship holds true for other social mammals, such as wolves and their kin.) Humans, with the biggest brain/body ratio of all, tend to live in groups of about 150."

The idea of the Ideal Village size is one I've come across before, and it fascinates me. Is there something deep in our psyche that craves social groupings of about 150 people that we don't get in big cities? Could there be some kind of business opportunity in creating a website called The Village, where you formed close-knit villages -- like social networks, but limited in size to exactly 150 people? So if you wanted to invite a new person into the group, you'd have to kick a different person out. Maybe on the basis of how well everyone else in the group knew them, a process that would self-select towards progressively better-connected groups. What would be the advantages of such close-knit groupings online? Networking? Support? Babysitting? Job advice? People to live with? Would physical proximity to people in your Ideal Village be encouraged, or is it irrelevant?

Then I got off the tube and started walking home, and saw this headline:

MIRACLE DIET HALTS AGING

What if a miracle diet really did halt aging? As in: today, right now, we discovered a diet that would halt aging, but only if that diet was all you ever ate. You'd remain perfectly healthy, never get any older, but that's all you could eat -- I dunno, a mixture of olive oil and almonds, or something. Would you occasionally sacrifice a little aging in order to eat a steak? Would you keep eating other stuff until some perfect age, or would you stick at your current age? Or would people start treating aging as more of a personal choice -- people would stick at 18 for a few years, then get bored and move on to 30, then eventually deliberately hit middle age? What if getting older was your fault, and not unavoidable?

Back home, some email, the first part of this blog entry, then some more reading, finishing off this already very inspiring article (if I were this writer, I would have found it monumentally difficult to stay on topic):

"Natural selection causes evolutionary changes that give people the means to exploit their new, more complex circumstances [civilization]. That makes the cultural environment still more complicated. And so on. Dr. Deacon believes this process has driven the capacity for abstract thought that accounts for much of what is referred to as intelligence. He sees it building up gradually in early hominids, and then taking off spectacularly in Homo Sapiens."

So complexity of cultural environment exploded exponentially. We can see that happening. But what will happen? Will it continue to rise, producing this amazingly complex society we can't envisage? Since I can't envisage it, I won't bother trying. But what about the other possibility: will cultural complexity at some point reach a limit, when we can no longer handle the complexity of daily life with our current brain? Some people would claim that's already happened.

Has all of that got you thinking?

I love one of these days.

Spring is coming. It's not in the air, yet. But it's promising to be. Today there was an absolutely spectacular sunset over the UK, which made me happy.

UrbanDictionary's word of the day today was anablog, which I think should be modified to mean the stuff you write down with pen and paper when you're on holiday, so you can blog it properly later. I have a really big anablog I wrote on the plane home from Tobago that I have yet to post.

Warning: Near-fatal geek levels in the post below.

One of the big problems that made me follow Will in abandoning MovableType in favour of WordPress was the constant onslaught of comment spam. The problem with moving, however, is that if I want to keep continuity, I have to import the content of the old blog into the new blog. That's easy enough -- MT very nicely provides export, and WordPress is elegantly set up to import directly from WordPress -- but the problem is that it comes with all the spam. In the case of the now-defunct FreeTrinidad.org, that was 22MB of spam tacked onto the end of a mere 400k of actual content. Now, doubtless there were some real comments in there too, but 99% was spam.

So I wanted to import just the content, not the spam. Unfortunately, there's no nice nice way to do this in either MT or WordPress. So I wrote one, and in case you have this problem yourself, here it is below. Loading a 22MB+ text file into memory and then spitting it back out again tends to cause the average web server to complain, so this solution is deliberately low-memory: it uses an absolute maximum of 30k at a time, usually significantly less, and it spits output directly as it goes.

<?php
/** MoveableType export file comment-stripper
  Instructions:
  This is a PHP CLI script, i.e. you're supposed to run it like so:
     php.exe this_script_name.php mt_export_file.txt
  It will then output everything to the command line -- this lets you 
  see if it's working. A good idea, once it's working, is to instead
  pipe all the output to a file, e.g. mt_no_comments.txt. Like so:
     php.exe this_script_name.php mt_export_file.txt > mt_no_comments.txt
  You can then upload the resulting file into whatever your 
  new blog software is. In our case, WordPress, which handled it perfectly.
*/

// first argument is file, open it
$filename = $_SERVER['argv'][1];
$handle = fopen($filename, "r");

/*
algorithm:
read every line
  if not incomment
    add prevline2 to filtered
  endif
  shift prevline1 to prevline2
  shift current line to prevline1
  store current line
  if currentline is "COMMENT:" then
     set incomment = true
  endif
  if currentline is "TITLE:" then
     set incomment = false
  endif
*/

// initialize vars
$filtered = "";
$prevline2 = "";
$prevline1 = "";
$currentline = "";
$inComment = false;

// don't do anything if the file didn't open
if ($handle)
{
	// cycle through the whole file
	while (!feof($handle))
	{
	   
		if ( ! $inComment )
		{
			$filtered .= $prevline2;
		}

		$prevline2 = $prevline1;
		$prevline1 = $currentline;
		$currentline = fgets($handle, 10000);
		
		if ( strpos($currentline, "COMMENT:" ) !== false )
		{
			$inComment = true;	
			
		} else if ( strpos($currentline, "TITLE:") !== false ) 
		{
			$inComment = false;			
		}
		
		echo $filtered;
		$filtered = "";
		
	}
	fclose($handle);
	
} else {

	echo "Couldn't open $filename !n";
		
}

?> 

Having sorted out this problem also means it will be easier to migrate all the remaining MT blogs (dammit, I keep forgetting there are so many of you...).

Seen on a forum I frequent today:

The Times is read by the people who run the country. The Daily Mirror is read by the people who think they run the country. The Guardian is read by the people who think they ought to run the country. The Morning Star is read by the people who think the country ought to be run by another country. The Independent is read by people who don’t know who runs the country but are sure they’re doing it wrong. The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country. The Financial Times is read by the people who own the country. The Daily Express is read by the people who think the country ought to be run as it used to be run. The Daily Telegraph is read by the people who still think it is their country. And the Sun’s readers don’t care who runs the country providing she has big tits.

Apparently it's a quote from Yes, Prime Minister but it's not clear.

Not much happened. But there was a whale in the Thames. That's pretty cool. I want there to be lots of whales in London.

Update: :-(

This friday. Go on, you know you want to. Details are available if you've never been before.

In other news, the 2006 Bloggies have been announced and their website has promptly collapsed under the load. Hilarious. Next year, you bastards are nominating me, even though there's only ten of you.

Updates to Planet Afterlife were being delayed by the build time for Planet Seldo getting too long. This has now been fixed, and as a bonus, PA will now update every 15 minutes instead of every 20.

Update: There were also some issues with my web host. They have now got their act together, so the updates will actually happen.

The new Opera Mini browser works on my phone. It can render my site pretty well, so this is a test to see if it will also let me blog from my phone. Here goes!

Update: well, it almost worked. It logged in and posted, but failed to submit properly -- probably because my blogging software is poorly designed rather than the browser itself being bad. It posted the text above; I came in on a PC and added the title and the link.

The interface is surprisingly good for a mobile app and beats the crispy-coated ass out of my Nokia 6230i's built-in browser. It works on nearly every phone you can think of, even the crap ones, so go try it out now -- you don't have to fiddle around with PC-to-phone cables to install it; you can just download it from your phone in about 2 minutes.

Folks, I have an announcement to make. There is a new place to go, a new thing to do, on Thursday nights. And that thing is Roller Disco. Housemates T and J did it first several weeks ago, and raved about it, but I did not truly understand until I tried it myself tonight how truly awesome it is.

Totally the venue for my next birthday party. Just so you know.

I just saw an ad exhorting me to do something special "this Valentines Season".

Hold UP. What? A season? When did it become a season? It's bad enough that the card manufacturers have managed to promote an obscure saint's holiday into a gigantic commercial event*, worse that they got away with making it grammatically incorrect (though correctness still holds the lead) but now they've upgraded it from a single day to a season? Shouldn't we be able to have some sort of referendum on whether we feel emotional blackmail by emotionless corporations can be extended to cover a chunk of February in addition to the several months prior to Christmas that they've already been ceded?

So has this dreadful expansion of everyone's most angst-ridden holiday taken off? Sure enough, use of the phrase is spreading (there are more results with the apostrophe than without, thankfully). We need to stamp this out before it gets any further, people. This is worse than when they tried to make dooced a word.

* Valentine's Day is by orders of magnitude the biggest-selling day for mobile content at both my previous and current employers. Apparently, artificial sincerity is most popular when remotely delivered.

Dear Sir -

I would like to make it clear how incensed I am by the contents of Lowri Turner's column of 27th January. It was both shockingly ignorant and incredibly insulting.

Her ridiculous premise is that you are not qualified to run the country unless you have "sat in accident and emergency with a small child", "had to make the decision over whether to give them MMR" or "gone through the schools' appeals process." Shall we list how many of these Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron have been through?

But apart from her spurious conclusion that gay men are unqualified to run the country because they cannot have children, the tone of the article reveals a very worrying mindset. She writes "Their lifestyles are too divorced from the norm. They are not better or worse, but they are different." Apparently, being different is an enormous problem if one is to run the country. So I suppose being of above-average intelligence would be a problem? And above-average wealth would certainly make you different from the norm, but most of our current leaders currently match both of those criteria. What about a leader who was black, or muslim? They certainly have lifestyles "different from the norm", which Ms. Turner seems to define as anything different from her own white, prosperous, child-laden lifestyle. I suppose she thinks all minorities should be barred from public office for their dangerously abnormal lifestyles?

The remainder of the article is just a wash of insulting stereotypes about gay men, from claiming their "biggest headache is whether to have a black sofa or a cream one" to the shockingly ignorant "if they have a child it is a dog." A great many gay and lesbian parents would be very surprised to hear that their children, shown in studies to be equally well-adjusted and healthy as those raised by heterosexual couples, do not in fact exist.

Before launching into this appalling display of homophobia, Ms. Turner, at least aware that her statements are likely to be controversial, prefaces her comments with the claim that "not only are some of my best friends gay, but probably most of them are." I sincerely hope that this is not true. To think that anyone would be so incredibly rude to her best friends, and in such a public forum, is horrifying. I also hope that the gay men and women who do know Ms. Turner give her their honest opinions of this article the next time they see her.

Yours sincerely,
etc.

Other commentary:

• Thingbox is discussing it at length (you'll have to join to read)
• Brett Lock has an excellent rebuttal
• If you too would like to be very angry at the Western Mail, their editorial contact details are available. The relevant bits are:

  Western Mail and Echo Ltd
  Thomson House
  Havelock Street
  Cardiff CF10 1XR
  

  Switchboard: (029) 2022 3333
  Readers' letters: readers@wme.co.uk
  Feedback: walesreaderlink@wme.co.uk