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p. Like many women, I have occasional bouts of gloomy dissatisfaction with the shape of my body. Some of this is due to a slight insecurity, and some to utter frustration with the manufacturers of women’s clothing, who seem to think that women are basically cylindrical like men. Mr. Bsag—who is always telling me that proper women are supposed to be my shape—found the perfect poem for me; it’s called [“A Homage to My Hips(The poem is about half way down the page)”:http://www.geocities.com/womenpoets/clifton.html], and is by Lucille Clifton. I can’t imagine a nicer gift—the poem is a wonderful celebration of the body. I found “a page”:http://www.poets.org/poems/poems.cfm?prmID=1459 on which you’re supposed to be able to listen to Lucille reading her poem, but I didn’t have any luck with the RealOne audio file. That’s a shame, as I’d love to hear her reading it.

p. I’m going to copy it out and pin it up beside the mirror to remind myself to be proud of my shape.

p. I don’t—as a general rule—watch or listen to programmes about money or personal finance. I just find it too depressing, and if I’m brutally honest, rather dull. But last night I watched a Money Programme investigation called “Mortgage Madness”, and ended up totally fuming by the end. I haven’t yet descended to the middle class depths of boring the pants off people with in-depth discussion of interest rates and house prices, but it is one of the subjects most likely to send me off on a long rant.

p. You see, the house prices in Oxford have reached ridiculous levels. Prices have risen all over the UK, but many people use Oxford as a convenient commutable suburb of London (rather them than me—you wouldn’t catch me spending 90% of my life on the M40), forcing the prices up even more. If you didn’t buy a house at the depths of the last slump, or you don’t earn 50K a year, you don’t have a hope. Or so I thought.

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p. This is fabulous—Safari 1.1 (included with Panther) “implements (There’s a screenshot here in case you don’t have Safari 1.1)”:http://whatdoiknow.org/ the CSS text-shadow property. When I was learning about CSS, I remember reading about text-shadow and getting quite excited, before I realised that no current browser actually supported it. Judging by the nice examples produced by [“Frank Limbacher(This page won’t make a lot of sense if you don’t already have Safari 1.1)”:http://www.mediaworkers.de/text-align/shadow.html], the results can look pretty stunning.

p. When I get some free time (hah!), I might include some shadowed text as a special treat for Panther users, and wait for the rest of the browsers to catch up.

p. [via Frownland]

My Sunday early evening treat is watching Scrapheap Challenge (and Andromeda, but that’s a guilty pleasure). This week’s challenge was a particular treat—the teams had to build a jet-propelled racer. If you’ve never seen a jet-powered go-cart zooming down a dragster track, then—by crikey—it’s about time you did! The cognitive dissonance involved in seeing something that looks like a shopping trolley making a sound like a 747 on take off nearly killed me.

The element of danger is always an appealing part of Scrapheap Challenge, and the heady combination of tanks of propane and kerosene and spark plugs in close proximity to a rather scantily-protected driver gave quite a frisson of excitement to the proceedings. Not that I want anyone to be hurt, I hasten to add—I just like to see things burst into flames, which one of the vehicles obligingly did on this occasion. Excellent.

I’ve had a couple of days of living with Panther now, and I’m almost totally impressed. My few quibbles so far are to do with Apple not quite going far enough along the line they seem to be pursuing. I still don’t think that I’ve found all the new features and enhancements, but here are the highlights:

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p. My local Apple Centre emailed at the end of the week with an invitation to come to a Panther party on Friday night. They had permission to sell Panther at 8pm—a full 4 (or 5?) hours before it was released in the States. I had previously ordered 3 copies for all our Macs at work, and of course I jumped at the chance to spend the weekend tinkering with it.

p. The Apple Centre here is really tiny. They don’t have a lot of space to keep stock in, so most of their business is ordering in hardware and software, repairs, and a fair bit of Education account business with the University—it’s just a couple of rather small rooms. When I turned up after dark, the place had the feel of a 1930s speakeasy, with a lot of furtive looking geeks hanging around, collars turned up, and then emerging clutching black boxes under their raincoats before they hurried off into the night. “Psst. Wanna buy a pukka operating system?”.

p. It was all great fun. They had some machines set up and running Panther, so the monetary transactions were all carried out to a soundtrack of oohs and ahs, as people discovered Exposé for the first time.

p. It was quite late when I got back so I didn’t install until today. I also wanted to read my iFriend[1] Joe’s new eBook, [“Take Control of Upgrading to Panther”:http://www.tidbits.com/takecontrol/panther/upgrading.html]. If you haven’t upgraded yet, I heartily recommend the book to ensure that you make the right choices while upgrading, and take all the safety precautions you can. It’s $5 well-spent in my opinion.

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p. While watching the Stephen Fry comedy quiz “QI” last night, a rather striking question came up:

p. ”Which has been responsible for the most human deaths—the nuclear bomb, or ducks?”

p. Of course, phrased like that, it was fairly obvious what answer they were looking for, and it was not going to be the obvious one. But I was still rather surprised; ducks, it seems were the primary vectors of the “Spanish ‘flu pandemic”:http://www.ninthday.com/spanish_flu.htm in 1918-1919, which is thought to have killed around 30 million people worldwide.

p. So, the moral of this story is that you should stay away from ducks. If they’re not [“mugging you”:http://www.rousette.org.uk/mt-static/blog/archives/000315.html], they’re giving you ‘flu.

p. Much as I love my computer—and technology in general—it plays havoc with your posture and suppleness. There were huge numbers of beginners in yesterday’s yoga class, all showing the classic slumped and hunched posture of people trapped behind a keyboard all day. Not that I’m any different—for the past few years, I’ve had less and less activity to do at work (my field work used to be fairly active), and I too am gradually stiffening like a gnarled tree. The teacher was obviously aware of our problems, and did a lot of twisting, shoulder-stretching asanas (postures), and even renamed a particularly effective one ‘computer asana’. This seemed to make the whole practice more relevant to modern life, although I like the traditional names like ‘downward dog’, ‘locust’ and ‘tree’.

p. All this work on our stiffest bits certainly made for a noisy class—when we did the twisting postures, the sound of popping, cracking joints was like distant artillery fire. My autumn resolution is to practice some yoga every day, even if only for 10 minutes, before I end up prematurely inflexible.

p. I dealt with my first comment spam with “MT-Blacklist”:http://www.jayallen.org/projects/mt-blacklist/ today! It didn’t get caught by the default filter, but with a quick click on the blacklist link in the notification email, I added the offending URL to the list, and poof—the spam comment was magically removed. No tedious deleting of the comment, adding the IP and waiting for the site to rebuild.

p. If anyone wants to look at the blacklist of the banned URLs and regexes for the URLs, you can find it [“here”:http://www.rousette.org.uk/blacklist.txt].

p. I was extremely nervous about something I had to do at work today. I really don’t want to go into details (apart from anything else, I don’t want to re-live today), but I will say that it involved wearing smart clothes—highly unusual in my universe. This meant that I had to get the bus in to work, and was standing at the stop in the cold, nerves all a-jangle. It wasn’t long before a song started going through my head (I hadn’t put my iPod on yet). I listened with absolute horror, as “Don’t stop me now” by Queen played on with dreadful clarity.

Me: Hey, Brain! “So don’t stop me now don’t stop me /’Cause I’m having a good time/having a good time”… Are you nuts? I am *really* not having a good time at the moment, and frankly, I think that your choice of music is rather insensitive. Brain: I was just trying to pep you up a bit—it’s a cheery song! Me: Well, just stop it. Can’t you play something else? Brain: OK, what about “The Bare Necessities”? Me: NO! No Jungle Book, no eighties rock, OK? Brain: Pfft. You’re no fun.

p. Sometimes I think that the old idea of a “homunculus”:http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/noelle212.html inside your head and making executive decisions for you, makes a lot of intuitive—but absolutely no scientific—sense. If I do have a homunculus, it has appalling taste in music.

p. At the beginning of this month, “I linked”:http://www.rousette.org.uk/mt-static/blog/archives/000451.html to an article probing what [“people have in their Docks”:http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2003/09/30/dock.html]. The comments revealed a plethora of popular applications, but also another user (Nathan Ladd) of one of my new favourite applications: [“Life Balance”:http://www.llamagraphics.com/]. At the time, I was just trying it out, but I’ve since taken the plunge and registered.

p. I first heard about Life Balance via the “Mailsmith”:http://www.barebones.com/products/mailsmith/index.shtml mailing list, and—like a pig after truffles—I had to check it out. On the surface, Life Balance looks like a common or garden to-do list/project manager, and I have other applications for that. “iCal”:http://www.apple.com/ical/ has a very basic implementation of to-do items (recently improved with version 1.5.1), but I have also really enjoyed using “tasks”:http://alexking.org/index.php?content=software/tasks/content.php which is extremely well-produced, and has the advantage of being web-based, so that you can depress yourself with the length of your to-do list wherever you might be. In fact, I still use tasks, but Life Balance has a slightly different focus.

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p. I’ve finally got around to posting some Lomo photos I took in London over the summer on to [“wings open wide”:http://www.rousette.org.uk/mt-static/wingsopenwide/index.html]. It’s quite nice to look at them again now that Autumn is drawing in.

p. It’s certainly not the first time I’ve seen it, but I watched Dogma again recently, and was reminded all over again what a great film it is. As you might imagine, a film by Kevin Smith (with all the attendant swearing and knob jokes involved)—about two outcast angels trying to get back into Heaven via a loop-hole in Catholic dogma—was hugely controversial. Given that it also featured a black 13th apostle (best friend of a black Jesus), a Muse now working in a lapdancing joint, and the great, great (etc.) grandniece of Jesus—oh, and “Alanis Morisette(Requires Flash)”:http://www.alanis.com/main.html as God—the film was at the receiving end of a torrent of condemnation in the Catholic press. This is a great shame, since Kevin Smith is himself a devout Catholic, and even goes to the trouble of having a long disclaimer at the start of the film, explaining his views and the fact that he wasn’t out to offend anyone. Personally, I can’t see how anyone could find it blasphemous—in fact, I think that it rather celebrates Faith (as distinct from Religion). But then I’m not religious, so I’m perhaps not the best person to judge these things. Mr. Bsag on the other hand is a practising Catholic (admittedly a very laid-back and liberal one), and loves this film. He particularly treasures the line, “Leave it to the Catholics to destroy existence”, and actually wants to have a ‘Buddy Christ’ figure[1].

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p. The Guardian had a feature on the “Wildlife Photographer of the Year(Natural History Museum site for the competition)”:http://www.nhm.ac.uk/wildphoto competition, and there are some incredibly stunning photographs. I think that my favourite is the winner in the ‘Animal Behaviour: Birds’ category—a beautifully delicate but dramatic photo of a barn owl from the perspective of a vole taken by Nick Oliver. I know that I’m a bit biased towards birds, but I also love the “portrait of a blue-footed booby”:http://internt.nhm.ac.uk/cgi-bin/wildwin/2003/ad_picnumb.dsml?catdescrip2=ap&posdescrip2=hc&picnumb=ss08 by Werner Bollmann. I’m just speechless at the wonderful composition and the blend of soft browns and the steely blue of the bird’s beak. This is the kind of thing I aspire to—in my dreams.

p. Update: I’ve fixed the link to the blue-footed booby so that it points to the correct page. Sorry about that. p. Update 2: Gah. There’s something weird about the URL, and I can’t get one to point to the correct page. Follow the link above, and the booby is the last thumbnail on the right.

Drawn by the promise of footage of keas¹ in the trailer, I watched a programme about the natural history of the islands around Australia. In the course of describing the arc of islands from the north of Australia to the south-east, they passed over New Caledonia, which perked up my attention while I was waiting for the keas. I always knew that it was a very small island, but it isn’t until you see it on a satellite photo relative to the huge bulk of Australia, and even the smaller swathe of New Zealand, that you realize what a tiny speck of land it is.

They presented New Caledonia as ‘Jurassic Land’, where the lizards are king. This is true in part (though there are hundreds of interesting species from all kinds of taxonomic groups there—except for mammals), but it reminded me of all my lizard encounters during my stay there.

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