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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.

Sometimes it’s just nice to potter. Work is, by necessity, so focussed on getting results in the shortest possible time, and the remaining time so packed with other chores that need to be done, that I really appreciate being able to just potter without any pre-determined goal. This morning was a pottering morning. Being a geek, this meant tinkering with a design for a gallery for this site (not quite finished yet), while listening to a great Sunday morning mix of Beck, The Velvet Underground, Jimi Hendrix and Peter Gabriel, and singing along cheerily. The aim was not to finish the gallery (which is just as well, because I didn’t), but just to fiddle about with it, and by messing about find out what and how I wanted it to be.

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Winter is dribbling in. Today is one of those days when Britain exhibits its ability to produce really world class drizzle. By this I mean rain that isn’t sufficiently forceful to be exciting, but just enough to make you thoroughly wet and miserable. Mr. Butshesagirl and I had to go into town this morning, and Cornmarket Street was a sea of umbrellas, grey puddles and grim faces.

While we were in the tiny branch of Sainsbury’s searching vainly for veggie sausages, there was an announcement on the public address system: “We apologise for the delays customers are currently experiencing at the tills”. There was a pause, and for one glorious moment, I thought that she might be about to blame ‘leaves on the line’ for the wait. But no, it turned out to be “a technical fault” - probably the barcode scanner had got bored with going beep (see Eddie Izzard sketch about the short attention span of supermarket barcode scanners).

It has been brought to my attention by a Windows XP user (in my experience, you can’t avoid having at least a few friends who are tasteless enough to use Windows), that my carefully constructed, properly validated site breaks in IE6. Inexplicably, the content of the post squishes its left padding by about 1 pixel for each successive post, so that it ends up with the text to the left of its own left border (the vertical line between the publication date and the text). I have no idea why, or even how, this happens. In Chimera 0.5, IE 5.2 (Mac), Mozilla (Mac) and Opera 5 (Mac) it renders correctly to the pixel, but in IE6 (and probably IE5 Win too), it looks totally pants.

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…is that there are a lot of excellent invented swearwords. So if some frelling tralk has you by the mivonks, you can eloquently express your displeasure at all the dren that’s going on.

OK, I promise to shut up about Farscape for a while.

I’m hopelessly addicted to Farscape (or “FireEscape” as I sometimes dyslexically refer to it). I’ve watched it since the first season, and my addiction gets deeper with each new one. I challenge anyone to show me a more innovative, gripping, dark, kinky, funny and well written TV show.

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Lordy, it was windy today. All the remaining leaves have been shaken from the trees in one go, and odd eddies have swept them into strange, regular piles. Our fence, weakened by the local kids’ obsession with clambering over it, was creaking back and forth alarmingly.

The weird weather put us in the mood for unsettling cinema, we went to see the film “Donnie Darko” at our local independent cinema, The Phoenix. After the, now familiar, readjustment of the projector (The Phoenix has an endearing habit of not lining it up properly - I imagine them in the booth, hastily bunging another phone directory under the stand), we settled down to watch this bizzare film.

And I loved it - it’s funny, disturbing, original and features the world’s most sinister rabbit. I’m not kidding, I’m going to have nightmares about that bunny tonight, you mark my words. It even had excellent music: Joy Division, Echo and the Bunnymen, and a cover version of Mad World by Tears for Fears, which was much better than the original. There’s also a superbly smarmy cameo by Patrick Swayze, of all people. Highly recommended.

I was having a coffee at the little AMT kiosk in town and noticed a sign advertising AMT’s new website. The tagline was (wait for it) “Don’t worry it isn’t boring!”

Wow. The advertising budget for that campaign must have stretched to literally tens of pence. Perhaps they made a leap for the BBEdit “It doesn’t suck” pinnacle of coolness, but instead they crashed into the valley of mediocrity. I’m afraid that I was so stunned by the tagline that the URL didn’t even register, so I can’t provide a link. Oddly, a cursory Google didn’t turn it up either.

They do make a damn fine cup of coffee, though.

I’ve been having a bit of a tinker with the site. I wanted to convert the site valid XHTML, with the page layout handled by CSS. After a lot of effort, I think I’ve done it. It looks more or less the same, but it should be standards compliant and, more importantly easier to maintain. Bear with me if there are a few glitches for a little while.

This is more fun than anyone should be allowed to have on a Thursday night. Rearrange Bush’s speeches into something with more clarificationitude. My theory is that this is an actual White House speech writing tool. Thanks to Boing Boing for the link.

I’ve just updated the XML button using one of the lovely set that Jeremy Hedley has posted. Swish, eh? If some of you are wondering what the heck that little orange button does, just click it (natch) and copy the URL of the resulting page into the “Suscribe” dialog of an RSS newsreader (like the excellent NetNewsWire Lite), and bingo bongo, you have but she’s a girl headlines updated automatically for your surfing pleasure. Go on, you know it makes sense…

So, it looks like the Fire Brigade are almost certain to go on strike in the next few weeks. I can’t say that I’m surprised, or, for that matter, unsympathetic. They get paid pretty poorly for a dangerous and difficult job, and they’ve lost patience. I’d be amazed if they do get a 40% rise, but it pays to aim high, I suppose. House prices being what they are in the South, public sector workers have no hope at all of buying a family home (nor have I, for that matter). I saw one news piece some time ago, where a firefighter was sleeping in his car because his family home was a 300 mile round trip away - an insane situation for anyone, let alone someone with such a critical job.

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An open source PIM is being developed, which seems like a great idea to me. Anything that might offer people some alternative to the Microsoft stranglehold is very welcome. Now that Microsoft has offered to “share” its source code with developers, if that’s really what they are going to do, it might be possible for OpenOffice to improve their compatibility with MS Office documents even further. I’ve haven’t used OpenOffice, but I did use Sun StarOffice on Linux, and my impression was that it worked pretty well on the whole, but replicated the whole “Office Experience” rather too closely. It isn’t only the fact that my valuable data is locked in a proprietary format that worries me (which OpenOffice addresses nicely with its XML file format), but also the bloated, clunky interface. Word X is horribly slow, cumbersome and prone to crashes (which, thanks to MacOS X, only takes Word down, and not the whole shebang). After one such crash, I irretrievably lost all the formatting in a paper I was working on, and vowed to write everything in TextEdit until I’m ready to format and send it. Grrr.

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I had my second fun ride (ie. not to work) on the Kingcycle today. Mr. Butshesagirl and I devised a fun, but not too hilly route, trying to avoid very busy roads. Then we just got out the door with the bikes when the rain started. Why does that always happen?

We doggedly carried on, but decided to truncate the route a bit. I’ve discovered a couple of things about recumbent riding. 1) You can go flippin’ fast on the flat without much energy expenditure. We got onto a bit of flat cycle path, and before I knew it, my speedo was reading 20 mph, and I was going “Wheeeee!”. 2) Hills are tricky. Of course, any human-powered vehicle is only as good as its engine, and mine is a bit knackered. I’ve never liked hills (in the upward direction), and I see no need to start liking them now. My problem at the moment is that very steep hills require me to go into the very bottom gear, and there’s nowhere to go from there but get off. The gears are slightly out too, so the rear mech unexpectedly jumps from 1st to 3rd gear, ruining my nice steady cadence. That’s my story, anyway, and I’m sticking to it. 3) Hill starts in a big gear are nearly impossible.

Still, the whole thing was fun, despite the rain, especially the long, swoopy bends.

Today’s shouted comments, from teenagers crossing the road:

“She rocks! Are you going in for the Olympics? [To which I answered, yes, of course] That’s a BAD bike! [By which they meant good. I think]

This weekend, Oxford Town Hall is packed out with Olympic standard beer bellies, all doing their best to get their way through 120 real ales and 18 ciders and perrys at the Annual Oxford Beer Festival. Mr. Butshesagirl and I went along last night to sample some of the nectar on offer. Well, it’s only polite. We decided to start with cider (I spent my formative years in Bristol, and unlike many of my friends, didn’t develop a learned aversion to cider from over-indulgence) - mixing beer and cider is a bit of a bad idea.

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