Has anyone else just had a twilight zone moment and thought they saw an episode of QI where Alan Davies not only got positive points but actually won?

And I’ve only had two pints. Very odd.

Chris O’Dowd (Roy from The IT Crowd), just as scruffy looking in real life and Marc Wotton (Shirley Ghostman), just as creepy looking in real life, in role playing game shop Orcs Nest. Geeks, just like the rest of us.

Torchwood rocks.

More in a day or two.

But for now I just have to say: Gwen, you run like a girl…

So Jack’s asked me what I think of version seven of the “that damned browser” (aka the “browser-like operating system component”). Well, I’ve been using the betas for quite a while and really I don’t really see a lot to get very excited about.

The interface is strange, with all the useful stiff tucked away on the bottom right hand side of the toolbars (and I understand that the next release of Office will have a similar layout) and several obscure buttons way down there on the status bar.

Tabbed browsing. Great if you’re wedded to IE, but last year’s news (well year before last, or was it the year before that?) for everyone else. Thumbnail view of tabs is nice but not as nice as Opera’s tooltip thumbnails.

RSS reader is nice. Much better than Firefox’s dire live bookmarks feature and nicer to look at than Opera’s reader.

Security features. Obviously needed, not my area of expertise, nothing much to say.

CSS improvements? Yep, at last we have max-width support and so on. But really just playing catch up with the competition. Not seen anything in the way of new bugs or incompatabilities that’s going to cause problems for my sites but time will tell.

Page zoom. Copied from Opera and not quite as well done. Very good to see both page and text zoom available. Shame that text zoom is still as crippled as it was in IE 6. And no minimum font size setting - probably the single best invention since the back button, a very simple setting that solves so many problems.

Search settings, nice, better than IE 6, not as good as Opera.

Which, just about sums it up. A huge improvement on IE 6 but not as good as Opera or even Firefox.

You all know which one.

At work until nine o’clock this evening. Doing something the hard way because the easy way would utilise a semi-transparent PNG and for various reasons the usual hacks to get them to (sort of) work in IE couldn’t be made to work. Gah.

So came home, ate fish and chips and watched the first two episodes of The Hand of Fear. Feeling a little better now. Shame that it’s now a bit late to start drinking beer.

As we’re all blogging for history, here’s a bit about my day.

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Alarm went off at 7:00. Lettice got up. I didn’t. Whoops. Staggered out of bed at 8:00 and between checking e-mail, showering, eating breakfast and faffing about managed to get into work around about 9:45. No meetings this morning so not a problem. Check work e-mail and calendar and tell the project manager that I love her because she’s worked out that in our incredibly tight schedule for the site (www.visitlondon.com) redesign I actually have no tasks allocated to me between the end of November and the sometim in February so I can take some holiday after all. But then I groan as I realise that Friday is booked up with meetings from 10-12 and then 12:30-16:00. Ouch.

Spent most of the day working on a project for our kids’ site (www.kidslovelondon.com). Nothing terribly exciting - a bit of CSS, bit of XSLT, bit of JavaScript (enforcing my own recently written coding standards to avoid document.write and use appendChild() etc.). Minor panic regarding the half term edition of the kids’ newsletter but it got sent out on time and everyone seems very happy with the new style.

Went to lunch with Lettice - she’s working at VL for a few weeks. And after that it was time for today’s round of meetings about the redesign project. Time and money versus ambition. Same as every project I’ve ever worked on. We actually have a very good team (and soon to be a much bigger team, an ad will be appear in this week’s New Media Age for six positions within the web team at VL) and doing most of the work in house will cut down on some of the headaches.

Ended up working until 18:30 which makes up for the late start, though a fair chunk of the last hour was spent playing Bang! Howdy (www.banghowdy.com) whilst waiting for other people to go through the designs of the Christmas pages with me. We need to have some pages up very soon in order to cover the switching on of the Christmas Lights.

London Bridge was busy and I just missed the 18:39. I bought this week’s New Scientist (suckered in by the ‘what would happen to Earth if humans vanished cover story) and this month’s .net (a couple of articles that I can quote mine for a brainstorm in one of Friday’s endless meetings). Ran into Séverine and we caught the 18:51 to Tulse Hill and then walked up to West Norwood together.

Home, sausages for dinner, then watched CSI: Miami with Lettice before sitting down to write this.

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So there you are, not my usual sort of post and probably not of any great historical interest.

For everyone who works for a living, via Gungnir on TMP:

Recently, a large corporation hired several cannibals to increase their diversity, “You are all part of our team now,” said the Human Resources rep during the welcoming briefing. “You get all the usual benefits and you can go to the cafeteria for something to eat, but please don’t eat any employees.”

The cannibals promised they would not.

Four weeks later their boss remarked, “You’re all working very hard and I’m satisfied with your work. We have noticed a marked increase in the whole company’s performance. However, one of our secretaries has disappeared. Do any of you know what happened to her?”

The cannibals all shook their heads, “No.”

After the boss had left, the leader of the cannibals said to the others, “Which one of you idiots ate the secretary?”

A hand rose hesitantly. “You fool!” the leader continued.

“For four weeks we’ve been eating managers and no one noticed anything. But NOOOooo, you had to go and eat someone who actually does something.”

Just logged onto Amazon to be presented with this:

That’s what I get for following links from pink_weasel’s blog.

… in lovely West Norwood. The new assistant in Woolies needed a bit of help in getting the right DVD off the shelf - useful hint for everyone: if you’re looking for a ‘D’ and it isn’t at the end of the top shelf, the start of the second shelf is a good place to check.

The gaggle of young women in the doorway of the hairdressers prompted the following exchange:
pink_weasel: “Is there anything more frightening that teenage girls giggling?”
Me: “When they stop giggling.”
PW: [laughs] “Yes. This is about that time you didn’t pick up that My Little Pony from the gutter?”

Bought an old computer game for £1.50 in the charity shop, the manual had a post-it note stuck to one of the pages.

There’s a post on radw saying that John Levene (Sergeant Benton) has died. However, as it’s been posted by a known troll and spells his surname wrong I’m somewhat doubtful. I can’t see any confirmation on the BBC or elsewhere. Has anyone heard this from a reliable source?