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So how did you celebrate the New Year? We decided not to venture out into the cold and wet (Oxford is also curiously dead at New Year), and instead planned an evening in. We got a great Chinese take-away from The Oriental Condor (not Asian-Andean fusion food, as you might conclude from the name). We had a bottle of red and a bottle of sparkling wine, and watched “The Big Lebowski” for the nth time. I swear that that film gets funnier every time I see it. The dialogue alone would make it a classic, but the music and set pieces are just superb. The Busby Berkeley/Wagner dream sequence always makes me gasp for air because I laugh too much. The Dude is truly a hero for our times - The Dude abides, man, The Dude abides.

It’s happened at last - I’ve finally got round to getting my gallery fixed up. It doesn’t have a lot of pictures in it yet, but that will gradually change over the next few weeks. Take a look here, or follow the link in the new navigation bar above (so much newness!). I’ve also added a handy little widget in the sidebar so that you can see a thumbnail of the latest picture here, courtesy of the wonderful MTOtherBlog plugin, developed by David Raynes.

Enjoy, and let me know what you think.

I’ve been doing a bit of housekeeping on this site today. I’ve added a few links to the Browsing section in the sidebar to update it with some weblogs I’ve started reading recently. I’ve also fixed the “More..” link in the About box so that it actually goes to the about page as promised. Sorry about that - the link broke when I moved hosts, and I’ve only just noticed.

I’ve also been doing some more work on my long-promised photoblog/gallery. It’s still not done (I’m being a bit of a perfectionist with it), but it should be coming soon. I’m hoping that when I finish work for Christmas I’ll get a bit more time to sort it out. Watch this space…

I’ve just spent half an hour tinkering with my XML summaries, thinking that I’d broken something when I moved hosts. I’d got round to testing it with NetNewsWire, but found that I got an error when I tried to subscribe. Minor panic ensued. I couldn’t find anything wrong with the file, and after tearing my hair out in a techno-rage, I finally decided to try quitting and re-starting NetNewsWire. My XML file now loaded beautifully. Why, in the name of the God of Geeks, why?

I’ve set everything up at my new host, Blogomania, so all it needs is for the DNS changes to propagate through the system. If you can see this post, it means it’s already happened! Everything went incredibly smoothly really. The folks at Blogomania and on the support forums were really helpful, and after a few minor hitches due to my own stupidity, all was well.

I’m moving hosts at the moment, so there may be a bit of downtime over the next 24-48 hours. Do check back again later, I’ll unpack the kettle from the packing cases and brew a pot of tea.

If you love (or hate) Marmite, you might be interested in this load of waffle on the subject. Mr. Butshesagirl was very amused as he is a Class A Marmite addict. He even took took a jar when we went to Florida earlier this year, and got rather agitated when he thought he might have to give it up at customs. As it was, they did let us in the country with it, and he made it his mission to convert a significant proportion of the American populace to the joys of the sticky brown stuff. When we left, we donated the jar to the motel restaurant where it probably resides to this very day - a solace to homesick Brits. When we travel, we like to abide by the old adage, “Leave nothing behind but your Marmite”.

I want to go to bed, but I think I’ve finally got full comment functionality back, and I’ve restored the previous comments. I had to add them manually myself, so I’m afraid that the posting dates are all wrong. Anyway, at least your words of wisdom are preserved…

There are two morals of this story:

1) BACK THE FRELLING THING UP, YOU IDIOT! 2) Maybe think about switching hosts. I think part of this problem might be host-related, and anyway, I’ll be running out of space before too long.

My Moveabletype database got seriously frelled somehow. I’ve managed to trash the old entries and reimport them, but now the entry ID’s are all wrong. Sigh. Anyway, this post is partly for me to check if comments now work.

Something has gone a bit pear-shaped with the comments. The comment count has updated correctly, but the comments themselves don’t appear on the page. I’ve posted a question on the Moveabletype support forum, and hopefully some kind soul will help me fix it. If all else fails, I’ll reconstruct the comments from the notification emails I received for them.

Normal service will hopefully be resumed in the near future.

For the first time ever, I took a look at the “Your Store” tab on Amazon. Here are Amazon’s picks for me.

• Dreamweaver MX Magic by Al Sparber, Gerry Jackson
• Dreamweaver MX: PHP Web Development (Tools of the Trade) by Bruno Mairlot, et al
• Python Essential Reference (Essential Reference) by David Beazley
• Python Standard Library by Frederik Lundh
• The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring [Extended Version] - Four Disc Set [2001]
• DVD Gosford Park [2001] ~ Robert Altman (Director), et al
• DVD Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones [2002]
• DVD 24 [2001]

The first four are fairly obvious as I’d ordered other books from them on Dreamweaver MX and Python. But the others are just plain spooky. I’d already asked my brother for the LOTR box set for Christmas, I watched Gosford Park and was glued to 24 when it was on TV. Even the Star Wars is something I would like if it wasn’t so crap. But as far as I remember, I haven’t ordered anything related to these, or even looked at them on the site.

Deeply worrying. There seem to be two possible explanations: either I’m so predictable that my likes and dislikes can be summed up by a simple algorithm (or one word - dork), or they’ve been peeking through my curtains and following me to the cinema. Spooky. Still, being told what I like is so much less bother than having to form my own opinions.

A thought struck me yesterday about the similarities between Apple and Victorian engineers. Unlikely, you might be thinking, but bear with me. The Business Design Centre used to be an agricultural hall - basically, a glorified barn for markets and shows, and was built in the 19th Century. But if you look at the roof from the inside, you can see that the engineers thought that there was nothing incongruous about a practical, functional building with humble origins also being beautiful. As you can see from the photo, the structural steel roof beams are studded with iron flowers, and some of the supporting brackets are very ornate.

It seems to me that Apple does something similar. Its products are very functional, and designed with ease-of-use in mind, but they realised with the original iMac that functional things can also be beautiful, and even have personality. I’ve always loved the attention to detail, like the coloured apple symbol on the back of the keyboard. You hardly ever see it, but the back of the keyboard is as pretty as the front - that’s a very Victorian sensibility.

There seem to be some teething problems with comments. You may encounter a “500 Internal Server Error” if you click a comments link. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Who knows why. If you try again later, it will probably work. It’s a very general error (basically it means that something went wrong when a perl script was run), and is thus rather tricky to pin down.

A few days ago, I stepped on a wood staple in my Nike Air trainers. The inevitable happened, and my air reservoir got a puncture. I was a bit sceptical that the air thingy did anything at all, but now that I’m listing to starboard with a deflation induced limp, I can appreciate that they did actually have some purpose.

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I think I must be transparent to infra-red. The lights in the toilets at work are triggered by an infra-red sensor. At least, that’s supposed to happen: when I walk in, the lights stay sullenly off. I have to go back and wave frantically at the sensor to persuade it to turn on. I don’t know about you, but I often anthropomorphize technology, particularly when it’s misbehaving (oops, there I go again…). I ask the computer why it’s playing up, encourage my car while it’s struggling up a hill (“c’mon, Molly, you can do it”), and generally curse at the products of Mr. B Gates. In my mind, the sensor has taken on a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation ‘Genuine People Personality’ - most likely the bossy schoolmarm that Eddie the computer reverted to when Arthur, Zaphod, Ford and Trillian got heartily sick of his incessant chirpyness.

“What do you mean by just barging in here, without so much as an excuse me? Now, I’m not turning the light on until you apologise properly. What’s the magic word? Speak up, girl!”

Or perhaps I’m just too flippin’ short to trip the sensor.