Thursday, January 31, 2002 :

This is funny, about the stupid things kids used to do a school. The Mary Whitehouse Experience made a comedy series out of material like this.

Wednesday, January 30, 2002 :

Went for an early morning run today along the Thames from Tower Bridge to embankment and back. As I settled into a rhythm, my mind started to wander as it often does on a good run. Because I hadn’t been out early for a while, something about setting off for a run in the dark brought back memories of other early morning runs I have taken since I took up running to keep fit at age 18 or so.

• Running around the streets of Calcutta and Bangalore at dawn to avoid the heat and smog, while on a three month trip around India after university.
  
  
• A six mile circuit through the woods near my parent's house when I was a student, a hundred times, from early morning July wearing just shorts and Tevas to freezing, grey winter in a hat and gloves.
  
  
• Coming down from my bedroom in the hotel to run around the Jardins des Tuileries in sub-zero January darkness before starting my day’s work at the Hotel Ritz in Paris.
  
  
• Later, running along the banks of the Seine from my apartment in Parisian Spring after I had moved out of the hotel itself into my own place.
  
  
• Across London Fields and along the Regents Canal in Dalston, on pitch-dark freezing winter mornings at 6am before work.
  
  
• Running for two hours straight along the seafront from the north of Santa Monica to south of Venice and back at 6am when fighting jet-lag just after arrival in L.A last Summer, then around the bay running on the sand at Laguna later that Summer

These are just the ones that came to mind while jogging along the embankment. Memory can be a cool thing sometimes.

Tuesday, January 29, 2002 :

Doh!

Rats. After all the tinkering with the stylesheets, I just realised that I left the site overnight with no default stylesheet. So if you'd viewed the site before; no problem, the relevant sheet would have been identified from the cookie set on your last visit, but if you hadn’t visited before, you would have got no stylesheet at all. So apologies to my many insomniac / overseas readers. (I’ve now set the new grey look as default).

Can’t—fuggin’—sleep. The start of 2002 seems to have stressed me out to a surprising degree.

Monday, January 28, 2002 :

Cool grey style option

Feelin’ kind of grey lately so added a new stylesheet option to the right navigation bar. (note to self — must get out of this feelin’ grey thing).

Saturday, January 26, 2002 :

Blogger Pro

OK; I just got the Blogger Pro thing — let's have a look how it works…

Thursday, January 24, 2002 :

So because I paid Blogger $12 to take the ads of April's Newness Dance News, which is hosted at blogspot but appears as part of her Newness Dance site, I got 9600 free impressions on the text-ads on the Blogger front-page. So I thought since they were free, and I don't have anything to sell, I'd just run a .foxinternet advert. 9581 impressions delivered so far, 14 clicks. 14 clicks!!

Wednesday, January 23, 2002 :

If a scientist tells you that he has almost perfected his time-travel machine, run for cover. You'll know that mankind is about to be wiped out by a freak meteorite or something once we get to the point when scientists have almost invented a time-travel. Why? 1) People from the future don't keep popping up in time machines all over the place throughout history. 2) Therefore man never discovers the time machine. 3) Therefore mankind must get wiped out before the invention of the time machine.

A nollie is like an ollie but you shift your feet forward and tap the nose down and shift your weight backwards to jump - just like an ollie only the other way round.

Monday, January 21, 2002 :

From the rules for registering a .me.uk name on the nominet website.

7. There shall, without exclusion, be a sufficient demonstration of an abusive registration if the registrant is not a natural person and cannot demonstrate that they registered the domain name with the agreement at the time of a specific natural person, and that the domain name was a reasonably faithful representation of that person's legal name.(my emphasis)

This could be read such that a registration is abusive under this rule if, a) the registrant is not a natural person; AND b) the registrant cannot demonstrate that:

i) they registered the domain name with the agreement at the time of a specific natural person; AND ii) that the domain name was a reasonably faithful representation of that person's legal name

i.e if the registrant IS a natural person, what he/she registers does NOT have to have anything to do with his/her legal name. I wonder whether that is what they meant...?

Went to April's rehearsal for the latest Newness Dance work yesterday, at her request. Should I be concerned that the other members of the company have started calling me Yoko?

Thursday, January 17, 2002 :

I'm always working, slaving every day Gotta get a break from that same old same old

Monday, January 14, 2002 :

Nasty speeding fine. Particularly for a Harley enthusiast - I didn't think those things could speed!

.me.uk domains came out today. Lots of the 'good' ones have been snapped up straight away - like search.me.uk, ask.me.uk, help.me.uk, sue.me.uk. People are obviously still thinking that there is money to be made in domain name speculating. I wonder if they're right? Nominet are charging 50 quid a pop for the first month to discourage this, dropping down month by month to a fiver in July for what's left. When I had a look this morning, I could have had strip.me.uk for a bit of porn domain speculation, but by this afternoon, it'd gone. blog.me.uk and blogger.me.uk were still available as at around 16.00GMT...

Friday, January 11, 2002 :

Heard a good example on the bus today of how the speech of London's youth is changing away from old-style Cockney / estuary English to a Tim Westwood-style dialect influenced by / attempting to ape certain accents of British Asian and Afro-Caribbean origin. White male, about 19, standard hooded top/baseball cap hip-hop type look... mobile phone rings with suitably irritating bespoke ringtone...

Nah, I'm on the bus, man, innit. Yeh, I'll be there in a minute, man, innit. Fuckin' buses innit. A'ii, sweet.

Grammatical query - should one insert a question mark after the word "innit" where it is used as a seemingly inappropriate addition at the end of a sentence that is otherwise a statement rather than a question innit?

A redesigned Newness Dance site is now up - just a minor redesign to incorporate some new front page content about the company's forthcoming work and to tighten up the look a bit. I've had to work with the same old non-validating frames-based code. Really the site needs to be completely readdressed from scratch now, but that's a job for another time, and possibly some other people! I'd be interested if anyone with a mac would tell me whether it looks alright in IE5 for mac (I suppose this is one way of doing your cross platform debug). It does some slightly weird stuff in Netscape 6, but still looks OK and works. The vast majority of the current audience seem to be using IE5.0 in any case.

Thursday, January 10, 2002 :

Sweet [via boingboing].

These are cool - human, handwritten and block stacking clocks [via metafilter].

Saturday, January 05, 2002 :

I am in Ronnie Scott's. Yay! It's excellent.

Friday, January 04, 2002 :

Back at work. Bored already. Feel the need to do something that I can be proud of in 2002. Don't know what that's going to be. Must transcend desire for peer approval while harnessing energy arising when like-minded people come together with enthusiasm and without cynicism. Need like-minded people. Like what, though?

Thursday, January 03, 2002 :

The wisdom of super-models which includes loads of hot pictures of super-models.

Wednesday, January 02, 2002 :

OK; here's the latest - draft three - modified draft two in the light of Phil's comments.

Tuesday, January 01, 2002 :

Happy New Year. I've been away doing the family Christmas thing. I've designed a first draft for a business-card size flyer for April's next work, talk less - toying with two versions at the moment: draft one - draft two.

want more?