Very sad to have the news that Chris Lightfoot has died pop up in an RSS feed this morning. Like many others I never met Chris but always enjoyed reading his blog for his analysis and wit.

Dear Lawrence Miles,

I’ve just read your latest blog post and eagerly await your Faction Paradox/Muppets crossover novel.

Very True Mood: contemplative

From Mark Pilgrim’s latest post:

Official Google Blog: From Gmail with <3
no comment, i just like blogging things with angle brackets in the title to watch the chaos in rss readers

Snigger

Very True Mood: mischievous

I upgraded to Word Press 2.1 earlier in the week and it went fairly smoothly.

As is now customary I had to hack a few files because there is still no standard way of making the category and archive counts appear inside the links rather than after them. I also had to comment out a section of the new categories list function as I couldn’t get it to not include the default header to the list in addition to the header I was supplying.

And I’ve just realised that if I comment out the code that inserts a <ul> I should also find and comment out the code that inserts </ul> ‘cos right now all my pages are invalid.

I’ve also hacked the Now Reading plugin to link to LibraryThing rather than an internal library page. It makes more sense to only tag, rate and (sometimes) review books in one place rather than two. If only LT provided a feed based on its date started and date read fields I could probably do away with Now Reading altogether. I also haceked together a link to the book edit page directly from each sidebar entry. I hope you can’t see that. And I’ve just seen that this too is producing invalid XHTML. Sigh.

The Live+Press plugin controls has vanished from the write post page but everything important is still working behind the scenes. I just can’t set my Live Journal userpic, or the mood and music fields, any more. Quick test: is it still parsing lj tags like this one: very_true_thing ?

[Update] - Odd. The Live+Press options are present in the edit page, and whether a post gets cross posted or not seems to depend on whether I save a draft first or not. Curious.

On the bright side, I seem to be unaffacted by the PHP 5 fiasco that hit my host. And I’ve finally got around to enabling friendly permalinks, though I wonder whether http://www.stevepugh.net/VTT/2007/01/13/i-♥-the-taxman/ will work in older browsers.

Very True Mood: curious

Well, a little bit moany, by comparison with some people[1] I’ve really got nothing to complain about, and what I have is largely self inflicted.

There ought to be a law against it.

I’m waiting for a furniture delivery. It’s coming sometime between 7 and 6 today. Getting dressed before 7 on a Saturday? When you have no plans to go further than the local shops[2] today? It’s just not right.

Seeing as I haven’t posted all week…

Happy New Year

I have foolishly gone and made a bunch of resolutions, and told people what they are (so I can’t conveniently forget all about them), so I might as well post them here:

1. Give up alcohol for seven weeks. An odd length of time, but it means I can start drinking again just in time for Lettice’s 30th.
2. Give up soft drinks, sweets and crisps. Yikes! All in one go.
3. If I buy breakfast on the way to work then I must buy a cheap lunch. Kind of vague this one, but I know what I mean.
4. Pay at least £100 into my savings account every month. Standing order now set up to transfer the money the day after I get paid, so I don’t need to do anything else for this one.
5. Limit my wargames/role playing games spending. I did a little experiment a while back and the results were a bit scary. I’m aiming for a lower figure this year - £500 total, so I have a limit of £100 per quarter and an extra floating £100 for magazine subscriptions and similar costs.
6. Get a hair cut at least every two months. Lettice may want me to go for “the full Tom Baker” but there were some very frightening photos of me taken at the Christmas party and I think short is better.

Five days into the year and I haven’t broken any of them. Though the fact that alcohol free lager tastes even more revolting than regular lager and that alcohol free bitter doesn’t seem to exist, may be my undoing.

[1] Lawrence Miles has dumped his diary/blog for November and December online in one big splurge. It’s not easy reading. This guy is one of the most talented writers to ever touch Doctor Who but he’s got some serious issues - I really don’t want to say anything trite like “tortured genius” because that turns a person into a cliché.

[2] More importantly to the Farmer’s Market - West Norwood is moving up in the world!

Quick post before I dash off the work Christmas party.

Today there’s a blogathon marking the tenth anniversary of the death of Carl Sagan.

My parents had the large colourful hadcover of Cosmos and it was one of those books that I was always taking off the shelf and reading, understanding more and more of it as I got older. Probably one of the formative influences that led me to read physics at university. Very simply, he was one of the greatest communicators and popularizer of science that there has ever been.

A charming individual, dklover@hotmail.com, has been posting abusive comments (now deleted) on an old post of mine, accusing me of over reacting when I laid into some idiots who decided to use the word gay as an insult.

His/her latest missive is presented below, as he/she didn’t included any punctuation I’ve had to guess where one sentence ends and the next begins.

you must be the biggest loser on earth not one person has wrote to you for a long time so i thought i should say some thing

A few facts first, since your last comment on 23rd November, six people have posted comments here (some multiple times, hi Jack) and a further three people have commented on the LJ mirror of this blog. As I’ve only posted seven posts in that time that’s fair number of commenters for a modest little personal blog like this.

your last comments were quite rude implying that im gay and bigot

They were meant to be rude. You came to my web site and attacked me, you reap what you sow.

However, I did not imply that you were gay - I suggested that you might have fun in a gay bar, something that lots of straight people do all the time. Also, I did not imply that you were a bigot - I stated it clearly.

well thats a big word for a small minded person like your self you are strait up and down stupid and i dont have to go off at the deep end like your self and try and use words hat you dont even understand good one brainiack

Bigot. Five letters, two syllables, easy to pronounce, quite easy to define. That may be a big word to you - judging by your spelling, punctuation and grammar you have problems with the English language. However, as your IP address resolves to the Netherlands you may well not be a native speaker.

ha ha ha your such a fool i await your reply wich im sure will be inthrouling

Did you mean enthralling? I don’t know about that, but I’m sure this post will raise a smile or two somewhere.

Via snapesbabe, take the first line of the first entry of each month and post it.

• Jan: 365 days ago I made a post about things I was looking forward to in 2005.
• Feb: I haven’t been posting much recently.
• Mar: That’s what’s written on the side of the bottles for the water cooler in the office.
• Apr: Bollocks.
• May: … because anyone who has ever seen my dress sense would know that fashion blogs aren’t something I read much.
• Jun: Got a good one today.
• Jul: So that Genesis Ark, what’s in it?
• Aug: Just started up Opera and look what popped up.
• Sep: First wedding anniversary today!
• Oct: Hmm, there are some PHP warnings on my ‘write post’ page, seems that something is up with the LivePress plugin.
• Nov: My life has been rated: 15.
• Dec: This morning I had a conversation with Lettice about the difference between methodological naturalism and philosophical naturalism.

Very True Mood: chipper

Got a short e-mail today about my StarDate Converter:

Have you considered making the current stardate available via RSS?

Hmm, interesting. First of all I’d have to translate the calculator to PHP or whatever to do the calculations on the server, but after that making the output available via RSS would be easy enough.

But would it be practical: the second decimal place represents a period of little over five minutes, so if someone wanted this to create a stardate ‘clock’ they’d be hitting my server at least that often. Not a disaster on its own but something that would need keeping an eye on if it proved popular.

Maybe I should test it out with the French Revolutionary Calendar first (I really need to convert that to PHP anyway so that the dates on this blog aren’t reliant on JavaScript). Hmmm, let’s see where this leads.

Very True Mood: curious

Comments have been off on new posts for the last week or so. This is a goof on my part and is now fixed.