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p. I’ve knocked up a rather primitive checkbox type thing so that you can switch the “fancy titles(Some liked it, most didn’t)”:http://www.rousette.org.uk/mt-static/blog/archives/000525.html effect on or off. Check the box on the right to toggle the effect, and then reload the page. The current status is shown beneath the checkbox. The script saves the state you’ve selected in a cookie, so you obviously need to allow cookies to be set for this to work.

p. It’s horribly inelegant at the moment (for one thing, it doesn’t remember the checked state of the checkbox), so I’ll develop something better when I have time.

p. Fruit bowls are strange things. I’m quite a keen fruit consumer, but however much I eat, there always seem to be one or two pieces of fruit which decompose quietly at the bottom of the bowl. Today I discovered an ominous looking kiwi fruit lurking at the bottom, and gingerly picked it up. It squished in a worrying way, and then actually fizzed. It sounded like an alka-seltzer dropped in water—that’s a serious level of fermentation. For a mercifully brief moment, I toyed with the idea of drinking the juice to see if it had produced a decent kiwi hooch. A particularly painful memory of some banana wine I once tasted surfaced just in time, and I threw the fruit in the bin. A luck escape, I think.

p. This is my second or third reading of this book, and I still feel drawn to it, which should tell you something about how extraordinary it is. ‘Pollen’ is a kind of sequel to ‘Vurt’ (his first novel), and it expands on some of the odd things mentioned only briefly in that book. But even if you haven’t read ‘Vurt’ the story stands on its own very well, has an exciting, twisted plot, as well as one of my favourite fictional heroines of all time.

p. Boda (short for Boadicea) is an Xcab driver, who rides around Manchester in her cab called Charrie (short for Chariot). Her hair is shaved off, and she has a map of Manchester tattooed all over her body and scalp. Xcabs form a hive mind, literally forming the map of the city as they travel around. Xcabbers have their memories wiped and their heads shaved when they join, so Boda can remember nothing about her pre-cabian life. At the opening of the book, her lover-to-be, Coyote—a rogue black-cab driver, and half-dog—is killed after picking up a mysterious young girl called Persephone as a fare. Boda sets off to find out who killed him, and in the process has to let go of everything she has known and break free of the Xcab hive.

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p. I used to have [“transparent title tips(Funky tool tips)”:http://www.rousette.org.uk/mt-static/blog/archives/000217.html] on this weblog—a tip I picked up at [“kryogenix.org(The original version, as far as I know)”:http://www.kryogenix.org/code/browser/nicetitle/]. I removed it because it seemed to be causing some odd behaviour on IE6. However, there’s a modified version at “1976design.com”:http://www.1976design.com/blog/archive/2003/11/21/nice-titles/ which doesn’t use a PNG background, and has a few more niceties.

p. I don’t know if this will work any better (comments from IE6 users would be very welcome), but I thought it might be worth a go. This version has rounded corners and transparency to the background if you’re using Mozilla, and an opaque background if you are using any other browser. Unless you are using Safari 1.1; in a moment of inspiration, I realised that I could use the new “element transparency feature(text-align)”:http://www.mediaworkers.de/text-align/opacity.html of Safari 1.1 to make the title background semi-transparent, like so:

p. background-color: rgba(51,51,51,0.8);

p. I’ve tried it in IE5x on the Mac and it doesn’t seem to break anything, so we’ll see how it works out. I’m living on the bleeding edge here, folks, so feel free to shout at me if (when, perhaps) it messes up anything horribly. I’m just in one of those, “ah, give it a go, why not?” kinds of moods, but in case it does all go a little bit “Pete Tong(Definition on h2g2)”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/A649 I’ve only applied the rule to the index page for now. Hover away!

I caught the beginning of Top of the Pops 2 this evening, and heard that they were going to be featuring the brilliant version of the Tears For Fears song Mad World by Gary Jules which closed the equally fantastic film Donnie Darko. So I grimly stuck it out through a pile of 80s trash (‘The Lambada’, anyone?), albeit with a few gems sprinkled in it (Roxy Music), because of course they put Mad World on last.

The song is completely stunning, and the video is pretty special too. I think that it’s a bit of a shame that Tears For Fears didn’t use a similar arrangement in the original version; the lyrics are so stark and beautiful that they deserve to be heard properly, accompanied only by a quiet piano part. Still, it was the 80s and big synths and over-wrought vocals were where it was at.

Gary Jules’ latest album, Trading Snakeoil for Wolftickets sounds like it would be worth a proper listen. It’s another one for the Christmas list, I think.

p. Mr. Bsag was trying to remember the proper term for baby hamsters this evening (I forget why), and—embarrassingly given my profession—I couldn’t remember either. We hit Google for an answer, and in the course of our search, found the World’s Cutest Hamster Picture [“here”:http://www.hamsterific.com/Hamsterpics/FNF/Black-Pearl.jpg]. This little smasher is a Djungarian hamster (Phodopus campbelli, also erroneously known as a Siberian hamster—”Ee’s no rat! Ee’s ‘amstair!”). The males of this species show extremely unusual behaviour for mammals; they [“act as midwives to the females”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/720421.stm], pulling the babies gently out of the birth canal, and cleaning off the placenta to clear their airways.

p. The term is ‘pups’, by the way, just in case you are on tenterhooks. Obvious, really.

p. There’s a rather sad and dusty gap on our computer desk where the old iMac was. As well as the embarrassing [“keyboard problem”:http://www.rousette.org.uk/mt-static/blog/archives/000516.html], we’ve been having some problems with the screen shimmering when the hard drive is being accessed. Luckily, I did actually get an extended warranty with the machine when I bought it, because for once it wasn’t a complete rip-off. As the expiry date was looming, we decided to get it in for repair.

p. I did this with some trepidation, as there’s probably no limit to how inefficient they could be in getting the fixed computer back to us, so we could be without it for months. The silver lining around this particular cloud is that if they can’t fix it (or can’t fix it within 6 weeks) we’re entitled to a new Mac, which would have to be a nice LCD screen iMac as Apple doesn’t make our model any more. I almost feel guilty about salivating over the possibility of a new machine while our trusty old Graphite is away.

p. I was amazed by the number of Police still hanging around on Friday morning. As the coach came past Buckingham Palace, there was a military helicopter flying low over the grounds and a Police officer about every 10m. It was a proper ‘ring of steel’—or rather a ‘ring of fluorescent yellow’ as it was raining and the coppers all had their waterproofs on.

p. I’m no monarchist, but I can imagine the Queen thinking that it was all a lot of fuss over nothing. After all, she lives there all year without the huge Police presence, and still manages not to get herself blown up. She must have rolled her eyes and tried to refrain from saying to Bush, “We stayed here during the Blitz, you know, when doodlebugs were dropping all around. If you can’t deal with a little risk, you’re welcome to turn around and go right home.”

p. I’m of the opinion that security measures tend to invite people to try and break them. People with burglar alarms get burgled because thieves think that they must have something worth stealing. A ‘hard limousine’ is just begging for someone to try firing on it to see just how bullet-proof it is. Judging by the recent fake footman debacle, the Queen is obviously of the same opinion.

p. Islington is an odd place; there are a lot of rather down-at-heel kinds of shops and cafés, and many more very trendy up-market clubs and restaurants. I knew that there was a “Bierodrome”:http://www.belgo-restaurants.com/ somewhere near the MacExpo site, and since I wanted to have an early supper while waiting for the worst of rush hour to clear, I thought that I would go and check it out.

p. I was pleased to see that they had a rather unusual special offer on meals taken between 6 and 7:30pm. You pay a price equal the the time that you order. So, if you place your order at 6:30, you pay £6.30. And you get a half pint of Belgian beer in with the price! Fantastic!

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I’d been looking forward to going to the MacExpo for weeks; piles of great Apple products and hundreds of other Mac-fans—what could be better? My impression was that there weren’t quite as many exhibitors as last year, but there was still a lot to see. Apple was there with the whole range of hardware on display, and was running seminars on the new features in Panther, the G5 and so on. Adobe was there too, showing off their new Creative Suite. There were some very good seminars—particularly the ones run by Adobe on tips and tricks with Photoshop. Of course, this meant that I immediately wanted two things: a copy of Photoshop CS and a new digital camera that will write RAW files. RAW files are the cat’s pyjamas! I wouldn’t have to worry about exposure settings at all then—just shoot in RAW, then fiddle with the sliders until it looked good.

Apple always displays their hardware so well (on uplit perspex benches) that even the eMacs looked good. The new iMacs with the 20” screens were very pretty, and the G5s were superb. The word ‘fast’ isn’t really adequate to describe the G5. Applications open before you even think about what you want to do. So I’ll console myself with the thought that I value my ‘staring into space’ time while waiting for applications to load too much to get a G5. Well, I don’t think I even convinced myself with that…

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p. Yesterday we went to see “Vincent in Brixton”:http://www.dailyinfo.co.uk/reviews/theatre/vib.htm at the [“Oxford Playhouse”:http://www.oxfordplayhouse.co.uk/]. We don’t often go to the theatre (mostly because of the cost), but it’s wonderful when you do get a chance to see something—it’s such a different experience to the cinema.

p. We heard about the play months ago when it was running in London, and were intrigued by the premise. It tells the true story of a very young and naive Vincent van Gogh when he moved to London to work as an art dealer. He lodged with a much older widow called Ursula, her daughter, and painter-and-decorator Sam in a liberal house in Brixton. Vincent gradually relaxes his uptight Dutch ways and settles in to life Brixton, falling in love along the way. We only see the very start of his artistic career, but his emergence is fascinating to see.

p. I think special praise has to go to Clare Higgins, who played Ursula. She was stunningly moving as the widow—suffering from depression, and yet going through a kind of emergence of her own. The play was also unusual for the amount of real cooking which went on. It isn’t often that you get to see a whole Sunday lunch cooked on stage.

p. I’m bunking off work tomorrow to go to the “MacExpo”:http://www.mac-expo.co.uk/ in London. I’ll probably be back late, but I’m hoping to get time for a full report on Saturday. If you’re visiting the Expo and spot a short woman having a Gollum-like argument with herself about the merits and demerits of blowing six months of salary on a [“G5”:http://www.apple.com/powermac/], then do come and say hello. And stop me, please…

p. Continuing on the theme of paranoia, I’ve been paying serious—and very overdue—attention to backing up my MovableType installation and entries[1]. I’ve been really bad at remembering to export and backup the entries, and the thought that I could—at any moment—lose weeks of considered (and ill-considered) entries and comments started to really bother me.

p. I did a search on the MovableType forums for an automated solution, and came upon “this brilliant solution”:http://www.virtualvenus.org/archives/0309/createanexport_blog.php by “girlie”:http://www.thegirliematters.com/ at Virtual Venus. You can read the full story if you follow the link, but it involves setting up a new blog with index files for each blog you want to back up, which writes a text file in the export format. There’s a rebuilding script which you can schedule with cron, and I’ve also set up a cron script running from my own machine to suck the backed-up files off the server and on to my computer using curl—just in case the server bursts into flames, or something. I did say that I was feeling a bit paranoid.

p. Girlie also has a cunning plan “here”:http://www.thegirliematters.com/tips/archives/0309/configurationlistingwithphpand_mysql.php to allow you to view your configuration settings and save them to a file too. Finally, I now have my templates linked to external files (which I’ll also back up), so I should be ready for any self-inflicted disaster.

fn1. It must be the time of year, or something. In times gone by, people would have carefully preserved and stored their food at this time of year for the hard, lean season ahead. Perhaps my urge to back up my computer is a modern echo of this folk memory.

p. I’ve just started footling about with [“CVS”:http://www.cvshome.org/], so I was very interested in “this article”:http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5976 by Joey Hess about storing his whole home directory in CVS. I don’t think that going to those kinds of extremes would help me a great deal—partly because I have to write a lot of documents in binary formats, so I wouldn’t get the benefits of diff and so forth. In fact, I’m a bit hazy on whether CVS can deal with binary format files at all. No doubt someone will enlighten me…

p. Nevertheless, it’s quite inspiring, and I can see that the benefits would be enormous. I’ve often had the experience of binning some document, only to find (amid much grinding of teeth and tearing of hair) that I needed it a few weeks later, and I have a lot of trouble keeping track of all the numerous revisions of co-authored papers. It would be fantastic to be able to see the differences between the current version and the one three revisions back in a clearer and more reliable way than Word allows—not to mention the hideous privacy problems involved with revision tracking in Word. I certainly want to start using CVS consistently with my web sites, so that when I break something disastrously while tinkering (and I do mean ‘when’ rather than ‘if’), I can roll back to the last good version fairly easily. I’ve got to do some serious studying of “this article(CVS Version Control for Web Site Projects)”:http://www.durak.org/cvswebsites/ to work out the best way of doing it.

p. I started to listen to Dead Can Dance a few years ago, and I’ve also followed the solo work of Lisa Gerrard—one half of the band—after Dead Can Dance split up. I’ve been trying to think how to describe their music to you, and I have to say it’s pretty difficult. Their image is goth, but their music encompasses medieval, Middle Eastern, Irish folk, Native American and trance music. The thing that holds this whole melange together—in my opinion—is Lisa Gerrard’s incredible voice. Lisa is the female equivalent of a counter-tenor; her voice is unusually deep, and if you didn’t know what sex she was, “male? female?” would be flicking back and forth across your mind, like an auditory version of that vase-face visual illusion.

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