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p. After a long and productive life, my phone[1] died today. So I ventured forth to my local electrical shop (hint: rhymes with ‘murrays’) to buy a new one. Anyone who lives in the UK will know what an undertaking this is—especially on a Saturday morning. As we’re a bit strapped for cash at the moment, I was looking for the cheapest cordless DECT phone I could find, that didn’t look as if the buttons would fall off after one call. I eventually tracked one down, but then I had to find someone to actually get a boxed phone out of a locked cupboard somewhere so that I could buy it. This was easier said than done.

p. It’s one of the Laws of the Universe that if you go in not wanting to buy something, you’re hardly in the door before a salesperson jumps out from behind the kettles and asks you if you need any help. If you go in with the intention of buying something, it’s impossible to find someone to help. You think you’ve caught someone’s eye, but then they duck down behind the washing machines. It’s an elaborate game.

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p. As I’m now technically semi-employed after the end of my contract (it’s a long story), I’ve been frantically applying for jobs. This morning, a University which shall remain nameless rejected my application. Just to rub salt into the wound—followed by a nice dash of vinegar—they sent me two identical rejection letters. Thanks a lot! I think I’ve got the message now.

p. I’ve been somewhat plagued by a deluge of spam comments on the site recently, so I was very interested in “this hack(Mentalized)”:http://www.mentalized.net/journal/2003/09/09/movabletypeeasiereditremovalofnewcomments/ to delete a spam comment directly from the email notification. I agree with “Erik(NSLog())”:http://nslog.com/archives/2003/10/09/easycommentdeletion.php though—a direct link to also rebuild the site and add the offending IP to the banned list would be just perfect.

p. Does anyone have any clever strategies for dealing with this kind of thing? I check my email fairly frequently, but I find it irritating to have to immediately wade through several pages of options to get rid of some objectionable comment so that I’m not inadvertently promoting a p0rn site. On the other hand, I really don’t want to turn commenting off, because I think that the comments are the best part of writing my blog. Sure, I get the occasional troll visiting along with the spammers, but the majority of comments are funny, informative, interesting or thought-provoking. Or in exceptional cases, all of the above. All I want is a painless way to get rid of the 2% of abusive comments.

p. Here’s an interesting situation; a shop called [“Bravissimo(Bravissimo web page)”:http://www.bravissimo.com/home.html] is opening up in Oxford, selling lingerie for the larger-busted woman. They recently placed an advert in the appointments pages of the local paper for bra-fitters. Of course they couldn’t specify that it was open to women only, because of equal opportunities legislation, but do you think that they would actually invite any male applicants for interview? Assuming that they would be worried about—how can I phrase it delicately—applicants getting an inappropriate level of satisfaction from the job, then they might also be worried about gay women applying. But you can’t ask people about their sexuality either, so they seem to have a bit of a difficult task.

p. What we have here is a modern legal minefield.

I subscribe to MacUser magazine: a very fine publication for hopeless Mac fanatics everywhere. The last issue came bundled with another magazine called Jack, in a small, paperback sized format. “What’s this?”, I thought. I read the explanatory letter which was included:

Dear subscriber, Along with your regular issue of MacUser, you’ll find a copy of Jack. Why are we sending you a free magazine? Well, we’d really like to know what you think of it. What you like, what you don’t like and what we could do better. As a Mac User subscriber you will have more than an interest in design and creativity, so we would like your opinion on Jack. It has an eye for detail and design that will be refreshing to regular magazine readers, especially as Jack’s designer has just won Magazine Designer of the Year.

OK, so far, I’m interested. I read on:

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Why is it that office buildings are so badly designed for ventilation? My office—in common with many, I’m sure—has been like a sauna for the past few days, with none of the benefits of being able to sit around semi-naked doing nothing. It’s cold in winter, boiling and airless in summer, and even when it’s bright and sunny outside, we need to have the lights on. Quite apart from the discomfort, it seems a terrible waste of resources. Our building is by no means unusual in this; most of the office buildings I’ve been in are stuffy and hot, or stuffy and cold if they have air conditioning.

Surely it doesn’t have to be like this? I know that there are awkward limitations caused by trying to pack a lot of different rooms into a large building, but it must be possible to get a reasonable airflow through the rooms, and not have others which act like giant greenhouses. Our flat is remarkably cool in summer, even on the hottest day, and yet is quite cosy and warm in winter. It’s just a pity that I have to spend so much of my life in the office—especially in the summer.

I’ve had a frustrating weekend. For a couple of weeks my posts have been slightly sparser than usual because I’ve been distracted by trying to set up a new site for Mr. Bsag to sell his paintings from. This was supposed to be a fairly leisurely affair on my part, as there was no great deadline looming. However—as it has a habit of doing—fate intervened, and the other half got an exhibition of his work at a local alternative therapy clinic (which also has gallery space to soothe patients while they wait for their appointments). So now I really want to get the site up and running so that visitors to the exhibition can follow up by visiting the online gallery—and this is the main point—buy lots of paintings so that we can pay our rent next month.

But I’m finding trying to do a full time job in the day and build a fairly complex website from scratch in the evenings and weekends pretty exhausting. I thought that I’d got a nice structural, standards-compliant markup sorted out late last week, but when I checked it in other browsers it broke rather spectacularly. Gah! I had intended to get the bulk of it done this weekend, but I ended feeling so tired and dispirited by the whole thing that I got practically nothing done. I need a break…

p. [26th March 2003]

p. I’ve noticed that in the toilets (or ‘restrooms’ in US English) of most restaurants in the States, there’s a notice by the washbasins informing employees that they MUST wash their hands before they return to work. I find this both annoyingly patronising towards the employees and slightly unnerving for the customers. Starbucks reached a nadir though: their notice was accompanied by instructions for washing hands with no fewer than 6 steps — accompanied by detailed diagrams. To give you a flavour of this document, step 1 was “turn on taps”. Now I don’t know the Starbucks employees personally, but they seemed like pretty intelligent, well turned-out people who needed no advice on basic personal hygiene. They can manage to remember a complicated coffee order and make a low-fat, no-whip mocha-frappuccino, so I think they can handle simple hand-washing without special instructions. I’m sure that they have the notices there because of some State or Federal law, but it’s really treating people like children.

p. “This (studio2f)”:http://www.studio2f.com/stolen/ rather puts my “recent (Elementary my dear Watson)”:http://www.rousette.org.uk/mt-static/blog/archives/000197.html adventures with a bandwidth rustler in the shade. The cheek of the man! At least I don’t have to make my living out of what I post on the web, so net thieves are a personal irritation rather than a drain on my income.

According to this article a third of academics in the UK want to quit. And I thought it was just me… Of course, dissatisfaction is hardly unique to staff in higher education—-who doesn’t want more money and less work? But this survey did confirm my impression that the situation has got markedly worse over the past few years.

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p. Well, I’ve been quite the detective today. I noticed, when having a periodic check of my site statistics, that my biggest referrer (by a long way) was a “Navy Wives bulletin board (Navy Wives - not p0rn despite what it sounds like)”:http://www.navywives.com/cgi-bin/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi - somewhat of a surprise, to say the least. I couldn’t see any obvious links to my site on this page, but after a bit of digging in my recent visitors log, I found out what was happening.

p. Someone signing herself as ‘Susie’ had used one of the images in “wings open wide (Oxford sunset)”:http://www.rousette.org.uk/mt-static/wingsopenwide/archives/000085.html#000085 in her signature on the board. Now, don’t get me wrong — I’m flattered that anyone likes the image enough to bother to use it — but there are two things about this whole business that have really hacked me off. First, all of the works in wings open wide are covered by a “Creative Commons Licence”:http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0 which clearly states that people are welcome to copy, distribute or display the work, but only if they give the original author credit, which Susie certainly didn’t do. Since the Creative Commons Licence is very generous in what it allows a licensee to do, I think it’s downright rude to violate it, not to mention illegal. Second, Susie didn’t even copy the image to a local drive (which is why all the referrals were showing up). So, not only did she use it without attribution, but she’s also stealing my bandwidth.

p. Unfortunately, Susie doesn’t list her email address on the board, nor could I email the administrators of the board without registering on it. So as a temporary measure, I’ve changed the URL of the image — so that her sig will break — and put a message to Susie on wings open wide in the hope that she might visit to find out what’s going on. Grrrr.

I’ve written before about the brain-melting tedium of adverts in the cinema. Now it looks as if the punters are starting to strike back. Film-goers in the States are suing chains of cinemas for damages for advertising a certain start time and then showing three or four minutes of adverts before the film itself. Good for them, I say, though I think that they are getting away lightly with only four minutes – it seems like we have to endure about 15 minutes when we venture to the Odeon cinema in Oxford. At least when you’re watching TV at home, you can always mute the adverts, channel-hop, or go and make a coffee. In the cinema, you’re a captive audience, and you can only roll your eyes and groan as yet another flaming Bacardi advert comes on.

[via BoingBoing]

You know how some women who get beaten-up by their partners claim that they have walked into a door? Well I actually do walk into doors. I managed to clout my arm on the door handle in our living room yesterday morning. It was early, I only had a few neurons firing, and they evidently hadn’t got their act together yet. My brain failed to center my body on the door opening, with the inevitable result of a painful impact between arm and metal door handle.

I’ve been trying to write grant and fellowship applications today — what a pain! Obviously, I’m trying to get money out of these people, so I don’t want them hating me for naming names (though they are all much the same), but the application forms are driving me crazy. To give one example, they ask for aims and objectives — what’s the difference, for crying out loud? Then, to cap it all, they ask you to outline the outcome of the project and publication plans. The outcome. What, am I psychic or something? And if I knew what would happen, there wouldn’t be a lot of point in doing the research in the first place. Of course, I’d like to produce 4 papers a year from the project (all in Science or Nature naturally), but this is the real world, and the Harvard Law of Animal Behaviour applies: “laboratory animals under carefully controlled conditions do as they damn well please”.

Does anyone make an application to write grants for you? GrantWriter v.6, or grntgrb for the command line junkies:

starving_biologist% grntgrb --bigmoney --now

Yes, it’s that time of year again. The time to start collecting that new partwork on Understanding Your PC/Collecting Miniature Teapots/Worming Your Opossum. Who buys these things, and more importantly, why? You can buy a book with identical information in it, and pay about the same, so why wait every week for some pathetic little magazine thing? Do they need that sense of anticipation? Or can they only digest a certain number of words at a time before their brain becomes dangerously overloaded, and might explode? My theory is that the publishers rely on some kind of New Year related enthusiasm to start a hobby. I’m betting that 99.9% of people buy less than three parts and then lose interest in the nuggets of opossum worming wisdom. But there must be a few people who do, in fact, have a complete partwork set. I think they need help.