Monthly Archive for September, 2005

Breaking News

Published on September 28, 2005 in Music. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Yes there are adverts here (but only on individual post pages). If they turn out to be more irritating than rewarding, I will get rid of them.

And now, some pop lyrics:

We’re just receiving reports of an incident on a farm in Sussex, where a number of people have been arrested in connection with annoying the nation.

It is believed that the owner of the farm, a Mr Hibbert, has been co-operating with police and government officials, in a plot codenamed “Operation Less Pricks”, and kindly granted permission for the use of a 17th century tithe barn as a temporary holding place for those arrested.

Although not confirmed, we are led to understand that those already charged include

  • bus drivers who don’t wait for people to sit down before pulling away from the bus stop
  • taxi drivers who use their horns instead of knocking on the door
  • people who moan at the council about the streets being full of litter – not stopping to think that it is the people who drop litter, not the council
  • a room full of drama teachers listening to Björk
  • grown men with replica shirts worn over their jumpers, who stand up and stretch out their arms when the opposing team fail to hit the target
  • an assortment of scriptwriters, novelists and playwrights who own Agas but don’t know how to use them
  • a musical equipment reviewer responsible for an article entitled “Microphone of the Month”
  • a woman who described herself as a little bit “Bridget”, a little bit “Ally”, a little bit “Sex and the City”, who chose to call her baby boy “Fred” as a childishly rebellious attempt at a clever reaction to those who might have expected her to call him Julian or Rupert. A bit of advice – call him Rupert – it fits. And besides, it’s a good name. Don’t be calling him Fred, or Archie, with all its cheeky but loveable working class scamp connotations – unless you really do have plans for him to spend his life in William Hill’s, waiting for them to weigh in at Newton Abbott
  • also being held is a whole wall full of teenagers spitting needlessly
  • an amateur thug in camouflage trousers, whose Japanese fighting dog had run amok on a Swindon council estate
  • a man from the record company, who said that George Michael continues to challenge social taboos through his music
  • Lisa Riley
  • continuity announcers introducing comedy shows
  • a pub band who get uppity when everyone goes to the bar during a song they’ve written themselves
  • a group of football fans referred to as “Commodores” – as in “Once, Twice, Three Times a Season”, who feed sugar lumps to police horses at cup finals
  • an artist who says his next album will be more “song-based”
  • a man who informs people that he gets up at six o’clock every morning, and seems to want a medal
  • people who say they “speak as they find”, and are somehow proud of it
  • journalists who try to spell an interviewee’s laugh
  • an organisation who declared an awareness week for awareness weeks
  • and a council worker who had dropped litter

We’ll bring you more details, as they emerge.

“Breaking News” –Half Man Half Biscuit

Get the MP3 here (track four under “Peel Session, 3 September 2002″), and buy the new album here.

Donegal

Published on September 28, 2005 in Writing. 9 Comments Tags: , , , .

View from Cleendra

As I mentioned some time ago, I visited Donegal for the first time back in late July.

I knew I would be starting my new job on August 1. So because of the strange way in which the salary system works, it was financially beneficial for me to stay in my old job until July 31, or as close to as possible. I managed to arrange for my resignation to be effective as of Sunday 31st, as opposed to Friday 29th, which ensured that I got paid for the last two days of the month, even though I didn’t work weekends. Crazy.

The other point was that if I’d left on Friday 29th, I wouldn’t have worked seven whole months in 2005, so wouldn’t have accrued as much paid holiday. “Leaving” on Sunday 31st ensured that I had another 1.75 (I think) days to take as paid leave, which allowed me to physically leave on Tuesday 26th, take Wednesday-Friday as paid holiday, then I was off Saturday and Sunday as usual (but still getting paid), and officially left the company at the end of Sunday, in order to start my new job on the Monday morning. Clear? No? Good.

So my final paycheck was going to be as (un)healthy as usual, and all of a sudden I had three days to kill. My mother bought the house in Donegal initially to be used as a holiday home while she still lived in Southport, but after retiring last year she sold the house I grew up in and emigrated to Donegal for a well-earned retirement early this year. And it was about time I visited.

I staggered out of work after lunch on the Tuesday, a couple of pints worse for wear, said a cheery goodbye to my now ex-colleagues, and weaved my way to Luton airport to catch my flight to Belfast.

I was only going to be gone for a few days, so a rucksack would be enough to pack my things. Of course, you’re not allowed to take blades into an aircraft cabin any more, so I couldn’t pack my razor. I briefly considered also taking a large suitcase and placing a single safety razor inside it, but decided against the idea on the basis that the inconvenience of carrying the bloody thing would far outweigh the satisfaction of making my point…

Once through security, I became slowly infuriated by the incessant PA announcements informing me that I was not allowed to smoke anywhere outside the permitted smoking areas. There were no signposts for smoking areas, and I searched the departure lounge high and low in vain. Eventually I located the hidden smoking room behind gate 13 and slowly poisoned myself until my flight was called…

Reflections

One enjoyably brief flight later I touched down at Belfast International Airport just as the sun was setting. My mother met me at the airport and it was time for the long drive to Donegal. The sun was just setting as I arrived, and so as we drove I had all manner of areas of staggering natural beauty pointed out to me with the words “and if you look over there, that would be a terrific view if it wasn’t too dark to see anything”…

We crossed over the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, but aside from the road signs changing colour and the speed limits changing from miles per hour to kilometres per hour, very little else seemed to change. I still saw sectarian graffitti, flags flying from lampposts… The troubles may be in decline in terms of violence, but feelings still run strong.

Arrival at the house was swiftly met by a flurry of attention from Padjo and Chi, the dog and cat I hadn’t seen for the best part of a year.

A slurp of wine, some home-baked bread and butter, and the welcome sleep of a gentleman of leisure (for the next three days, at least).

I awoke in the spare bedroom to find a cow looking at me from the field behind the house. A far cry from suburbia, indeed. No bulls this time though.

Then around to the front for a cup of tea and a cigarette, and the view above – looking out across the moors to the Atlantic. After a hearty breakfast, we walked out with the dog around Maghery, the closest there is to a town in the vicinity. It has a shop. And a pub. What more do you need though, really? We take the dog up to the beach, where I get some great photos of the sky over the sea, and meet a couple of wandering dogs. My mother seems to be the only person in the area who believes in having the dog on a lead – everyone else seems to let their dogs roam free…

Later, we walk up to the famine wall – a superfluous structure built by the starving locals for a pittance of pay from the English invaders during the famine. Stirring stuff.

Ruined church, mountain

Then off to Glenveigh National Park, to take in ruined churches, rolling mountains, lakes and greenery as far as I can see.

A trip to the pub rounds off the day – I settle by the turf fire for a fine pint of Guinness, but then have to wander out into the night to smoke – smoking in pubs has been illegal across Ireland for just over a year…

Up again (eventually) on Thursday, we take another walk with the dog, then a trip into Dungloe, the nearest “proper” town. Everything is priced in Euros, just like in Rome last year. What exactly is wrong with a single European currency? I hate getting ripped of by paying commission every time I buy or sell foreign money…

Some food shopping, a visit to the market, and a general wander around the town, then back to the house for dinner. I take Mum through my Flickr photos, and show her the photoset from my trip to Rome. It took forever on dialup, but it was good to remember that (slightly insane) holiday…

Later we settle down for another great home-cooked meal, and watch an old video of Shallow Grave, which I’d somehow managed never to watch.

Finally Friday comes, and with an early start (okay, 9 o’clock), a swift breakfast, and then it’s already time to go. Quite how the time passed so quickly I have no idea – I did so very little, bar wandering around the beautiful scenery, eating home cooking, and chattering away with my mother. We get on incredibly well now that we live apart, it’s a far cry from the incessant yelling matches of my teens.

It’s been a thoroughly relaxing few days, and in a lot of ways I’m envious of my mother’s lifestyle out here. Early retirement, to the tranquil idyllic setting of rural Ireland, the country of her birth, with her days free to walk the dog to the ocean and back, read any book or watch any film she likes, and gaze out across some staggering natural landscapes at her leisure. Of course, I couldn’t cope for even a few days without broadband or fast food takeaways, let alone live in a new country, leaving all of my friends behind.

Mum, dog, Atlantic

On the drive back to the airport I can take in all of the views I missed in the dark on the way here, and as we laugh listening to Irish talk radio as Belfast draws near, it feels a little like leaving home again… I’ll be back though.

Resolution

Published on September 21, 2005 in Tech. 15 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Binary Bonsai will no longer support 800×600. That’ll be fun when I’m browsing on my cellphone (or any other niche client) then…

I don’t know whether people’s attitudes are broken, or whether maybe the web is broken.

People use a wide variety of resolutions. I don’t personally know anyone using 640×480 or 800×600 on a personal computer, but I know lots of people (including me) who browse at even lower resolutions on mobile devices. Then there’s browser window sizes…

Screen resolution is NOT viewport size. My home and work machines both run at 1280×1024, but my browser windows are generally a little over 800px wide, and as tall as I can make them (to reduce the need for scrolling). I’d guess that makes the window somewhere in the region of 850×990. Subtract the chrome, and that leaves you with a viewable area of maybe 810×970 (I’m guessing, sue me).

99% of sites look acceptable in this setup, and I generally dismiss sites that aren’t readable in this format – unless the content is sufficiently compelling to make it worth my while reorganising my layout, but I’ll still grumble about it.

Yes, I’m a high-end user, and I know most people will run every single application maximised, wasting all that screen space and ensuring they can only see one application at once. Maybe they can only cope with one application at once, I don’t know (my xterms are all 80×24 chars too)…

The K2 theme (the current design of this site) almost fits into an 800×600 viewport – the margins/padding make it a little wider, so whilst the content will be entirely visible in 800×600, you’ll still get the sideways scrollbar cluttering up your browser window, and reducing the visible screensize. In 640×480, you can read the article text, but have to side-scroll to get the sidebar content.

Fluid width was supposed to solve all this, but in my opinion it’s even worse. I seem to recall that something like 60-80 characters per line is the ideal number for readable text, and with a fluid layout you still have to pick the viewport width for which you want your users to be able to easily read your content. A 1000px wide viewport might make for 70 characters per line, giving 800×600 users 60 characters per line and 1280×1024 users 80 characters per line – great. But people using 1600×1200 or wider are going to get 120 characters per line, and are going to struggle to read a thing – if we assume that most users keep their browsers maximised. Widescreen displays are something else again – 2560×1024 isn’t that uncommon, and 160 characters per line is asking a lot of your readers.

So if fixed width is bad, and fluid width is also bad, what are the options?

I’ve chosen fixed-width as the lesser of two evils – it’s readable without side-scrolling on most clients, and the default font size ensures a reasonable line length (although font size on screen differs wildly between OSs).

How about dynamic font sizing? You’d probably have to accompany it with dynamic image sizing for it to work properly, which is another problem altogether – resized bitmaps look awful. Vector images were supposed to solve this, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in the wild.

PDFs already work like this – the entire content shrinks and expands to fit your window size (with overrides available, of course), and it would be interesting to see whether a web that worked in the same way would be more accessible – or maybe less so.

Obviously it doesn’t work like that, although you could probably achieve something close with cunning use of JavaScript. Of course, 10% of clients don’t have JavaScript support activated, so it’s hardly a solution. Still, I think I might knock up a demo over the weekend, just to see whether it’s even possible…

Dumbing Down (again)

Published on September 20, 2005 in Ego and Writing. 4 Comments Tags: , , .

The Guardian reports on dumbing-down in science reporting, and makes some excellent points. On the reasoning behind the practice:

Why? Because papers think you won’t understand the “science bit”, all stories involving science must be dumbed down, leaving pieces without enough content to stimulate the only people who are actually going to read them – that is, the people who know a bit about science. Compare this with the book review section, in any newspaper. The more obscure references to Russian novelists and French philosophers you can bang in, the better writer everyone thinks you are. Nobody dumbs down the finance pages. Imagine the fuss if I tried to stick the word “biophoton” on a science page without explaining what it meant. I can tell you, it would never get past the subs or the section editor. But use it on a complementary medicine page, incorrectly, and it sails through.

But I think it’s all part of a larger point – it’s almost as if intellectualism and knowledgeability have become qualities to be actively avoided, rather than embraced. The broadsheets (including The Guardian, after a fashion) are reinventing themselves as tabloids, television has never been quite as vacuous and insipid as it is today (although thankfully it’s still (apparently) vastly better than most US networks), and even my beloved Radio 4 seems to have lost a little of its edge recently.

When did it become cool to be clueless? And why?

The reunion and the reminiscence

Published on September 18, 2005 in Ego. 0 Comments Tags: , , , .

Martin has very kindly saved me the effort of chronicling the ten-year reunion of the four most interesting, most attractive and all-round best (yes, I am being entirely objective) ex-Birkdale High School students by writing his own account, here.

It would have been laughably easy to leave this entry at that one short paragraph, but I’ve been neglecting this website enough as it is recently, bar a few frustrated ramblings about computer hardware (most of which have been largely resolved, much to my relief).

It’s quite surprising that of the 150-odd boys who were my peers for five years at Birkdale, I’m in contact with so few of them. Even considering that my form only consisted of 30, we were streamed by ability (or rather, perceived ability (and in some cases sheer malevolence)) for most core subjects, so I met most of the intelligentsia of my year frequently enough (and it’s probably impenetrably long run-on sentences like this one that got me a grade C in English Language, in which I was firmly placed into Set Two…).

So out of 150 pupils in my year (and four times that amount in the school’s other years at any given point during my stay), there are only three people I’m even in anything like regular contact with.

Dan and I are still great friends, having lived together for a while in Derby, and even now that we live several rail-networks apart we manage to get together for beers frequently enough (possibly too frequently, given the amount of money I seem to effortlesly haemmorrhage every time we do so).

Martin is a more interesting case – having been close friends at school, we started to lose touch once I dropped out of college, and lost touch even further during the period when he was at University, to the point where I called his parents house out of the blue to catch up, only to be told he was living in New York, and could I call back in three months’ time.

After he graduated, we caught up a few times in Southport, but in October 2001 he emigrated to Thailand, where he’s remained for most of the past four years. Oddly enough, we’re probably closer now that we have been since high school – we talk frequently online, I’ve been out to visit him in Bangkok twice, and I’m about to book my third trip (all being well, Dan will be accompanying me).

The only other ex-Birkdale alumni with whom I have anything like regular contact is Mike. Born in an industrial accident involving a time machine and a thesaurus, Mike has the rare misfortune of having been an impressively eloquent forty year-old lawyer since birth[1] Now a high-powered thrusting solicitor in the City of London, he can at last use words like “cornucopia” and “lavatory” in the pub without being mocked any more than is absolutely necessary.

Mike sailed through sixth-form college whilst I noisily and noticably crashed and burned into the academic (and general) oblivion I was to inhabit for the following few years, and by the time he was graduating from Bristol I had barely made it into regular employment. I’ve managed to make up a surprising amount of ground though for an uneducated geek, and can just about keep pace with him in conversation, on the all-too-rare occasion that we actually manage to meet up. We regularly email, but I’ve seen even less of the man who lives just 50 miles away than the man who resides about 6,000 miles further east.

So whilst it was terrific to catch up (and get roaringly drunk) with the two percent of my year with whom I’ve made the effort to keep in touch, I was left in the days afterwards wondering what happened to the other 146, and how I could so effectively lose touch with 99% of my peer group within such a short space of time – not the ten years that have now passed, but the much shorter amount of time it actually took to do so – I’d hazard a guess at two years…

But with ten years gone (and where did it go?) and only four of us in touch, it doesn’t bode enormously well for the twenty-year reunion, when we’ll all be 36 years old. And I thought my fast-approaching 27th birthday was scary…

Linknotes:

  1. May not actually be true ↩