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I do this when I can, OK? And sometimes I can’t, so there. You’ll get no more promises from me of "regular updates" that seem lead to sudden hospital visits, leaking plumbing, possessed keyboards and who knows what else.

Saturday 9th February

It’s about time I got to this. If I had, as I had planned, begun keeping this weblog on September 9th or 10th, this would have been the very first item on the very first entry. As it was, the first entry was put up on the 12th, and events made the triviality of this somewhat unappealing at the time.

In fact it was this page that prompted me to start the weblog in the first place, rather than going on with emailing friends and acquaintances to say, "Hey! Have you seen this?" I notice since then this page has cropped up on other weblogs and some news sites, so you may have seen it already. C’est la vie.

Anyway, the page.

According to Simon Jansen, In New Zealand there are two things that are the essence of being a ‘good Kiwi bloke’. These are of course playing rugby and having a shed. Not being built for rugby, he’s made damn sure he’s got a shed (or a garage at least). But there is a problem, as he explains:

As has been mentioned many long and productive hours are spent in the shed by kiwi blokes. Many fine inventions such as the hydraulic sheep potter and the double headed golf club have been produced as the result of much blood, sweat and beers. And herein lies the dilemma.

Beer.

A session in the shed is typically an all day affair. Starting very early in the morning and going through until late at night when the light fades to the point that you can’t see and hit your thumb with a hammer a bloke will not leave his shed for anything (Hint: Empty paint cans can be very useful here). All supplies must be taken in at the start of the shed session. And the most essential of these supplies is beer.

But how to keep the beer cold?

A serious problem, you’ll admit. One which Jansen solved in the most logical way. No, not ice — that isn’t very effective. Refrigator? He scorns your puny Earth logic. No, he simply applied the laws of physics … and built a jet engine to keep the beer cool. And as he says, a cold beer is just what you need when you’re standing in shed with a jet engine running in the middle of it.

I switch on the television this morning to set the VCR to tape something tonight and the first words I hear are: "…is dead." I can tell straight away from those two words and the intonation that someone in the royal family is dead, and I groan — if it’s the Queen or (more likely) the Queen Mother then we are going to be deluged with saccharine, maudlin, lachrymose royalist shite for weeks. It’s not that bad: Princess Margaret has died (actually, given her awful health of late it’s no surprise).

Now, if I were in any position to communicate with HM the Q I’d say that I was very sorry for her loss, because the loss of a sibling is a severe one, and for this to happen at what is already a poignant time — just days after the 50th anniversary of the Queen’s accession (if you can’t see why that is not a completely joyous occasion for HM the Q, you need to remember that her becoming Queen meant that her father had just died — according to Private Eye recently, at least one member of the Government has had some difficulty grasping this) — can only make the loss more wounding.

Having said that, her death is really of no interest to anyone else. If the Queen died, well, one might say that the hereditary principle was no way to select a head of state at the end of the 20th Century let alone at the start of the 21st, but the fact that she is the head of state means that a degree of public mourning would be wholly appropriate. Princess Margaret, though, was not the head of state. In fact, she was pretty much — though you’ll look in vain for much mention of this over the next few weeks — a parasite, having a pretty good life at the taxpayer’s expense.

Much is made (and has been over the years) of her misfortune in love. Well, plenty of people are unlucky in love (some even are never lucky enough to find it at all) — but most don’t have the option of sodding off to the Caribbean to drown their sorrows. It also has to be remembered that she chose not to marry the man she loved because that would have entailed losing her privileges as a princess.

But, as I said, you won’t get many pointing this out now. Instead brace yourselves for soft-focus, soft-headed hagiography from the likes of Fawning Lord St. John.

Looking across the pond, I can’t help thinking that there has to be something wrong with a country where members of a family like the Bushes can get themselves elected to any sort of public office.

Chris Patten. Not exactly from my locale, politics-wise. Yet he has the irritating and occasionally disturbing habit of saying things I agree with. He’s now EU external affairs commissioner, and in that capacity has told George Bush he’s a fucking idiot. Well, no, not precisely in those words, but in diplomat-speak:

Mr Patten said President Bush’s characterisation of Iran, Iraq and North Korea as an "axis of evil" was "unhelpful", adding, "I find it hard to believe that’s a thought-through policy".

Patten, of course, is intelligent enough to know it’s not likely that "thought-through" policies will come out of Washington any time before January, 2005.

Mention of Private Eye earlier reminded me of the ever-bizarre Funny Old World column by Victor Lewis-Smith. The three stories culled from the world’s newspapers in the current issue explain why Parsis should either accept some form of cremation, or else start breeding vultures; why the Japanese post office gives preferential treatment to gangsters’ letters; and the defeat of Our Lady of Gloria by Bin Laden’s Terrorist.

The Museum of E-Failure: An intriguing idea, intellectual cousin to the Wayback Machine, Ghost Sites is an attempt to actively preserve the home pages of sites that will probably disappear in the next few months. What you get are screenshots preserving, to a small degree, sites which fail. Of course, quite a lot of the time that screenshot is of a blank page with one line of text saying "site now closed" or "last updated…"

Feeling tired? Mind restless? Chill out with the zen-like simplicity of a page intentionally left blank.

Thursday 7th February

I generally don’t much like Flash. It isn’t the technology per se, it’s the abysmally user-unfriendly sites that get created with it. But it can be put to good use as in this amusing little page.

Sometimes changes in law can have unexpected effects, not to say unintended ones. I’m pretty sure this opening sentence from the Scotsman is absolutely right — which is the first time I can recall saying that about anything the Scotsman has said for years:

Ministers behind the newly published Marriage Scotland Bill probably never gave it a thought, but by allowing registrars to operate al fresco they have cleared the way for pagan weddings in Scotland.

The Register rightly was somewhat scornful when Bill Gates tried to portray himself as a born-again believer in security in software: his memo, which spoke repeatedly of Trustworthy Computing (we know he must be serious if it’s capitalised), he was doing no more than arriving at, as The Register put it, the same page as the rest of us. But get this:

Our products should emphasize security right out of the box, and we must constantly refine and improve that security as threats evolve. A good example of this is the changes we made in Outlook to avoid email borne viruses.

I can’t better the Register’s response to that:

Hello? Earth to Bill — it took years of grinding public humiliation for MS to make a simple modification preventing malicious executables from launching automatically in Outlook. If this is Gates’ idea of a security job well done, then all we have here is another PR smokescreen.

Someone with a really good sense of humour obviously read the memo — check out trustworthycomputing.com [you’ll go to a Google page] and smile…

Picture a man who has written a book. This book, among other things, talks about Enron, Kenneth Lay, and Arthur Andersen; it talks about the times the man who is now President of the United States has been arrested and charged with crimes. The author is well known, he has his own television series, so the book has no problem being published. A first run of 100,000 copies is announced, and 50,000 are actually printed.

Then the publisher breaks some bad news to the author:

I was told that, unless I re-wrote large sections of my book … plus change the title and the cover — and then, after all that, reimburse the publisher of up to $100,000 out of my pocket (!) so this new version could be reprinted — then the powers-that-be might actually destroy the ENTIRE run of 50,000 copies that had already been printed! My book would be sent to the shredder and “pulped.” I would then have to wait for up to a year before I could take it to another publisher.

The book is called Stupid White Men (And Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation!) ; the President is George W. Bush; the author, Michael Moore. And you’re entering the Twilight Zone, where a terrorist attack can be held to absolve the President and his cronies from all scrutiny…

Did you know weblogs have their own awards? You’d probably guess they’d be called Bloggies, wouldn’t you? It is kind of unsettling that the Weblog of the Year 2002 is Wil Wheaton Dot Net. I never did get that T-shirt made with DIE! WESLEY CRUSHER, DIE! DIE! DIE! on it…

On the other hand he was good in Stand By Me, he didn’t write the bleeding scripts, and it’s that bloody hack Roddenberry’s fault the character ever appeared on our screens, so maybe we should give the guy a break. I rather like the fact that he has a link sending anyone who says, You’re lame, Wil Wheaton. I hated Wesley, and I hate you, to losers.org.

What am I saying? Wesley Crusher? Wil Wheaton? Aaaarghraghnonononono…