Monthly archive: July 2007

Humorously coarse; risqué. Vulgar; lewd.

Read more about bawdy at Answers.com

So now not only can I squeeze into my skinny jeans again (well, I say skinny, the label says 32W), but I can even go out in public in them (I wore them a couple of weeks ago to a garden party spent inside due to the rain). The trick is not sitting down.

I have therefore decided to clear out my closet and give away anything that does not fit.

This is a bold move for me: many times in the past I got back in shape but kept a set of 34w trousers in case the weight crept back on. This time I will get rid of them, and if I baloon again, well, I'll be big and beautiful in some newly bought threads.

But I'm funny with clothes. They are infused with memories. I often remember what I was wearing on most occasions in the past, probably because I had put some effort into choosing what to put on. Only last week I wished I had kept a t-shirt I used to love, a pale yellow, deep v-neck Fruit-of-the-Loom that I wore all the time… when I was eleven. Yes, I know, I so need to get out there and get meself one of them life things.

So for now the clothes to give away are in an unused drawers unit that is waiting to be Craiglisted itself. Chances are they will crawl their back into the closed on a fat day.

The portable sanctuary in which the Jews carried the Ark of the Covenant through the desert. A case or box on a church altar containing the consecrated host and wine of the Eucharist. A place of worship.

Read more about tabernacle at Answers.com

Email on the go does not necessarily involve a Blackberry, a server that pushes email to you and a costly subscription. You can achieve pretty much the same if you have the following:

• a desktop machine running Outlook
• a mobile phone that syncs with Outlook – any Windows smartphones or pocket PCs will do
• emoze installed on both machines.

The result: your mobile syncs in real time with your desktop machine. Emoze is a free service that pushes automatically your messages to your mobile from your computer, and viceversa. You read messages on the go, reply to them, and you'll find the reply you wrote from your mobile in your Sent Items folder on your desktop.

One month ago emoze released version 1.4, and the experience has improved considerably. Hardly any battery drain, and efficient and lightning fast access to email.

You will of course also need a suitable data tariff that allows you to be connected all the time. I'm on T-Mobile (unlimited data for 7 pounds 50 per month on top of any T-Mobile price plan), and recently Orange launched a similar tariff (around 8 pounds per month, 30MB max, currently not advertised on their website but offered when you sign up or change plan).

Emoze can also synchronise calendar, contacts, tasks and notes – but I personally chose to sync those via USB only when I'm at home. That would be overkill.

Mean-spirited, disagreeable, and contrary in disposition; cantankerous.

Read more about ornery at Answers.com

I watch less and less Big Brother with every passing year, and this being season 8, I practically tuned in on opening night and then just read Grace Dent's TV OD at Radio Times on Mondays and Thursdays.

Grace Dent makes me giggle. I wish I could say that the way she describes what goes on in the house is spot on, but having watched about thirty minutes altogether this year I just have to trust her.

That's how I learnt that Gerry has slept with between two and three thousand people. Crikey. On Monday Grace was wondering:

And what's with the array of medals that Gerry seems to be wearing attached to his little military jacket these days? The Royal Vauxhall Tavern Cross for Valour? Who knows.

And I spluttered the water I'd just swigged across the seats at the woman in front of me in the tube. I apologised, wiped the display on my phone, then thought: is this the same Royal Vauxhall Tavern I know, the one down the road from our flat, our local, where the drag act is un-PC and the men are sweaty and dance with their tops off? The pub where Dr B. and I met over four years ago (while sweating and dancing with our tops off)?

Either Grace Dent has an extensive knowledge of all things gay, or there is another Royal Vauxhall Tavern that is rooted into the public consciousness.

Sometimes you may get a 412 error in WordPress:

Precondition Failed. The precondition on the request for the URL /wp-admin/post.php evaluated to false.

This is more often than not a result of your host running mod_secutiry, an overzealous (yet useful) utility that filters incoming data. Some people found they could not post an entry with the word 'gamble', others with words that are code commands like 'curl' or 'cron', or the words 'delete' and 'from'.

To get around this, add SecFilterEngine off to your .htaccess file, post your entry or page, then remove the snippet, unless you want to keep the security check disabled (not recommended).

Any of several poisonous plants of the genera Conium and Cicuta, such as the poison hemlock. A poison obtained from the poison hemlock.

Read more about hemlock at Answers.com

Don't sneer – not everyone is as web-savvy as you lot.

So yes, these days anyone who's anyone in social media circles is jumping Twitter's ship and moving over to Pownce. It's sort of like Twitter, but with file share (messages, links, files, and events). It's sort of like IM, but you can send files to one person, everyone, or a group of people.

Pownce is currently so hot that even if it's still in private beta, much coveted invitations to join Pownce are being traded on eBay. By the way, I've got six left to give away, and a nice comment here below can earn you one if you are quick. Flattery can get you very far ;-)

Anyway. Back to Twitter (but do read Garoo's review of Pownce if you are interested). Because not everyone is insane enough to waste all day trying out new stuff, and I feel obliged to explain very briefly to the vast majority of people out there what Twitter is and what it is not.

Twitter is a status application. You tell it what you are doing and you have a wide choice of ways to do so:

• typing in a window on Twitter.com, from your computer or mobile phone browser
• by sending a text message to +44 7624 801 423
• by sending an instant message to twitter@twitter.com
• by using a desktop widget for PC or Mac
• from Facebook
• from the address bar in Firefox or Flock

and I'm sure I'm forgetting a few.

People can subscribe to your updates and receive them via text message and/or on their Twitter page and/or IM and or RSS feeds. It's very very easy, idiot-proof I dare say. And that's exactly the beauty of it.

There are several easy ways to display your Twitter updates automatically on your weblog. This is what most of my friends have seen (the now defunct – but you never know, I might put it back – 'Right now I am…'). This, however, is the least useful of Twitter's uses in my opinion.

Twitter is fantastic when you sign up to receive text message update from a close circle of mates. One of them is in town, sends a message to Twitter saying 'Anyone near Soho for a cheeky pint?' and if you are, you reply.

Twitter is very very good when you get a connection with other people, mostly unknown, who touch your life for a fraction of a second from across the continents or round the corner.

Twitter is a bit crap some days when all you get is people bragging about who they've met and where they've eaten and how many iPhones they snatched after queuing for three days. But then again, you can just ignore that or unsubscribe from receiving their updates. That's the beauty of the river of data that flows around us every day: you just pick what you want and trust software to filter out what does not interest you.

Me? Gosh, I don't know. I use Twitter inconstantly (and I'm still a newbie on Pownce) to shout out about something I'm doing that I want to share, no matter who listens.

Worringly, however, more often than not it's just to say I'm eating. At least now with Pownce, I can send photos of my food too.

To take another's possessions or rights gradually or stealthily. To advance beyond proper or former limits.

Read more about encroach at Answers.com

When I 'undesigned' this website, I removed the links to the last five del.icio.us bookmarks from the right-hand side column and started looking for a more elegant and flexible solution than the (otherwise very well working) del.icio.us daily blog posting functionality.

It took me a while, but I finally managed to find, tweak and implement it. Here are a few links and pointers if you want to do the same.

The original script is Yet Another Weekly Delicious (YAWD) on Nozell.com. This link appears to be broken, you need to Google it and get the cached version. By the time you read this, the links on the page that links to it from the author's website might have been fixed.

I changed a few things (mainly wording and presentation), and followed the author's recommendation to password-protect the file (instructions on how to password-protect a web page), because the way this currently works is, you hit a URL and a new entry with the last seven days' worth of bookmarks gets generated.

That's it really. Next step would be to create a cron job that does it automatically, but for the time being I still prefer to maintain some editorial control and have a quick look at the entry (mainly for stray unescaped special characters) before changing its status to 'publish'.

Here are the websites I bookmarked into my del.icio.us account over the past seven days:

• My Mom Hand-Knit An iPhone
  An uber-cool mother's knitting saga, and the tips and details to help other knit-happy folks save 800USD.

• When 'Digital Natives' Go to the Library
  An article explaining why libraries and librarians should evolve and take a page out of gaming in order to better serve today's youth, digital natives who approach knowledge in a novel way.

• 3 Ways to Aggregate Your Identity
  Reviews of ProfileLinker, 8hands and MyLifeBrand (and many others in the comments), sites and services that promise one-stop management of all of your social networking.

• Flip – upside down text
  Type into one box, upside down text that you can copy and paste elsewhere gets generated into another box. No idea how that works.

• Twitterbook: Update Twitter using Facebook Status
  It runs automatically if you can access CHRON on your server. Otherwise, you need to call a URL every time you update your Facebook status.

Characterized by bathos (insincere or grossly sentimental pathos).

Read more about bathetic at Answers.com

British cuisine is quite special. Often, the name of the dish is the recipe itself. Cheese and beans on toast. Scones with clotted cream and strawberry jam.

Ok, I'll grant you these are not the most elaborate of recipes, but that's exactly why I'm so keen on them.

Today (or rather, on Thursday night, one of the rare occasions when Dr B. cooks splendidly for me): bangers and mash with red wine gravy.

Ingredients:

• sausages (our favourites are Tesco Finest Pork & Fresh Bramley Apple Sausages)
• potatoes
• butter, 1 large knob per person
• red wine
• Bisto gravy granules, beef flavour

Preparation:

1. put the sausages under a hot grill, turn from time to time until evenly cooked;
2. boil the potatoes;
3. whisk the potatoes, add the butter, season to taste;
4. make gravy according to instructions on packet, replacing half the water with red wine;
5. serve sausages on potato mash, cover with gravy.

Bangers and mash with red wine gravy, originally uploaded by bitful.

I used to log on to Windows Money every single day (sometimes twice a day) to download transactions from my bank accounts and log all my cash expenses.

Clearly, that was madness. I have kept a log of everything I spend every day ever since I can remember, first on paper notebooks, then on Filofax printed cash flow and credit card inserts, and later graduating to a text file on my computer and moving up the ladder via more and more complex spreadsheets until the orgasmic beauty that is Microsoft Money. Oops, got a bit carried away again. Sorry.

I was saying, perhaps my obsessive habit could be justified in the days of yore, when I had to check in the morning whether that day I could afford to buy food (or, more likely, cigarettes – what the hell was I thinking?). Today I am in a slightly more comfortable place financially and impending omens of bankruptcy can wait until the next Sunday morning.

So I've decided to keep one week's worth of receipts, write down my cash transactions in an note on my mobile phone and only update MS Money at the weekend.

Now this is willpower, originally uploaded by bitful.

It turns out this week I've only used cash twice, to buy coffee and a beer. My credit card, however, is piping hot. Well, at least I have the good habit of paying my credit card bill in full every month.

And now please excuse me, but the sweet siren song that MS Money does when it reconciles transactions is summoning me to give it all my undivided attention.

I've lost it again, haven't I?

One that makes or repairs wooden barrels and tubs.

Read more about cooper at Answers.com

What were you doing on 07/07/07 at 07:07:07?, originally uploaded by bitful.

On 07/07/07 at 07:07:07 I was in the middle of trying to figure out an error thrown by a PHP script, and I paused for a minute to take a screengrab of the computer clock.

I was most definitely not sleeping, unfortunately, as I woke up at 4:55, stayed in bed until 5:40, then gave up and got up.

But for all you sleepyheads, I can assure you that 07/07/07 at 07:07:07 was just another very uneventful second.

It was sort of cool to look at the clock though, waiting for the moment to happen, seeing it pass by, then getting back to normal.

1. Horses can mate with zebras. A zorse is the offspring of a zebra stallion and a horse mare; the rarer reverse pairing is sometimes called a hebra. I am not making this up. A hebra was recently born in Berlin. Wait, no, that's a zorse. Whatever.
2. Britons eat one-third of all the cod consumed in the world.
3. You can insert a line break within a cell in an Excel spreadsheet by hitting Alt-Enter, as return by itself would simply enter the values and move to the cell below. Via a colleague at work.
4. Yak shaving as described in Wikipedia is 'a neologism which describes the act of performing seemingly unrelated and often annoying tasks which stand in the way of an ultimate goal [...] Yaks are large, Asian bovines that have long, thick fur that would presumably be quite a challenge to shear'.
5. Copyleft is the practice of distributing free copies of a work for others to use and modify, as long as the modified versions maintain the same freedoms. The GNU General Public License (GPL), and Creative Commons 'Share-alike' licenses are examples of copyleft.
6. Human-like robots inspire empathy up to a certain point, in which they are made so similar to humans that they freak us out. The phenomenon is called the Uncanny Valley and explains for instance why we accept highly stylised characters like The Simpsons easily, but find those in Final Fantasy for example a bit creepy and 'too human'.
7. Shoes hanging on a Wire is usually a sign that a dealer lives nearby, or that drugs are available for purchase in the vicinity.

A cheap showy trinket. (Also chachka or tsatske).

Read more about tchotchke at Answers.com

My waking-up goodies drawer, originally uploaded by bitful.

I have not had a Saturday morning lie-in since, well, I've never had one, and now that I need one I've prepared a drawer full of goodies to make me stay in bed longer tomorrow morning.

You will notice the obvious absence of electronics. Because if I had my pocket PC phone (with internet, Outlook, games, music, and movies), what's the point? I may as well go next door and turn on the PC.

Wish me luck.

UPDATE (7 July 2007 at 6:23PM): Woke up at 4:55, tried very hard to stay in bed, ate the banana at 5:40 then got up. Slight flaw in the system: no light to read, and cereal bar and raisins wrappers way too noisy for bed partner.

At least I was up to witness 07/07/07 07:07:07.

Over the past few months I have been fascinated by data/stream aggregators and have subscribed to many such services to see what they would do.

Some that I have been enjoying pottering around in are:

• Tumblr
• Profilactic
• SuprGlu
• iStalkr
• Dandelife

(Have you also got the feeling they are running out of good names?)

And here is what my scattered activities across the web look like when they are put together:

• Bitful on Tumblr
• Bitful on Profilactic
• Bitful on SuprGlu
• Bitful on iStalkr
• Bitful on Dandelife

As usual, I have taken my toys apart to look inside, and last night while I was tidying up my hard drive I found an intriguingly named 'stream.php' file. I configured it, added a few images and classes, uploaded it and it automagically merged five streams (bitful, flickr, del.icio.us, twitter and last.fm) into one single bitful data stream, merged chronologically.

We like.

I will have to check it to see how frequently it updates. It's a quick and easy text-based link thing that only shows the last few dozen actions, as it is based on existing feeds and what they chuck out by default. I suppose I could make it dump this data into a database (for archiving) or merge the feeds into one (via Yahoo! Pipes) for others to subscribe to.

The trouble is, I have no idea where I copied the script from, so I cannot credit anyone. Let's just say I did not write it myself, and if you know who did, I am more than happy to give them the due recognition.

If you are interested, my inspiration (and aspiration) is Emily Chang's Data Stream, and my constant source of information for all things lifestreaming-related is Lifestreamblog.com.

A British sailor. An English person. (Short for lime juicer, from the use of lime juice on British warships in order to prevent scurvy).

Read more about limey at Answers.com

I have installed a plugin that displays links to archived similar entries below each post. The past is coming back and biting my behind. Not sure I like it.

For a while now I have been wanting to display some links to similar posts below each entry. I had explored a few possibilities but I wanted something that worked with as little intervention on my part as possible. Ideally, with nothing for me to do at all.

Last night I found the Similar Posts WordPress plugin. I have just unzipped it, uploaded and activated it, then inserted a tag in the core code and, lo and behold, old posts suddenly are there to haunt me.

Unlike other plugins that analyse the post title or its (manually chosen) tags, this one compares the content of the entire body text, stripping out stop works (editable list), and then outputs links to posts with the most matching words. I was a bit sceptical, but I changed my mind when I saw that more often than not it's chillingly accurate.

I started this weblog as a means to keep track of what I was doing for future reference. This plugin is a way to revisit the past. Enjoy it while it lasts because I have a feeling I might want to make the past shut up pretty soon. Not big on the past these days, me.

The desire, practice, or acceptance of having more than one loving, intimate relationship at a time with the full knowledge and consent of everyone involved.

Read more about polyamory at Answers.com

A slanted or oblique surface. Monotonous talk filled with platitudes. The special vocabulary peculiar to the members of an underworld group; argot.

Read more about cant at Answers.com

I've been working in the same team for fifteen months now and I have not told anyone I am gay.

Well, nobody asked – and I love and cherish the UK and the people who inhabit this glorious land because they mostly mind their bloody business, one of the qualities that earn my highest esteem and admiration.

Anyway.

These days of Pride celebrations I have been thinking a lot of old me, rather miserable in a previous life in a country where I thought I had no right to be respected for who I am. Hardly surprising, when you think that that country – Italy – five and a half years after I flicked the finger to it and left it for good, is still light years away from even the faintest, most watered-down concept of a recognised same-sex union. Or, to be entirely fair, of any sort of unmarried union, regardless of sexuality.

And so I thought I owed this to old me. I'd love to be able to go back and let my old self know that everything is going to be alright, that I will be living in a place where laws protect me and public opinion respects me.

But because I can't go back in time, I thought instead I'd ask Dr B. to be my 'plus one' at a work do next week. He said yes. I am thrilled.

I am gearing myself up for a reassuring anticlimax though: I have not told anyone, nobody asked, but I have a feeling everybody knows. As lovely Dr B. just told me, 'Do you expect them to think you are straight? Erm, have you seen yourself in a mirror?'

He might have a point.

1. Fabric softener can make your acne worse because it's oily and you rub towels and bed linen constantly on your skin.
2. A person who is attracted to an overweight sexual partner is called a chubby chaser.
3. Your RSS feed URL shows your Twitter user number. Via Steve Rubel.
4. The theremin was the first musical instrument designed to be played without being touched. It consists of two radio frequency oscillators and two metal antennae. The electric signals from the theremin are amplified and sent to a loudspeaker. Via Boing Boing's link to a theremin cover version of Gnars Barkley's Crazy.
5. Haukur Eiríksson (Icelandic entry at the Eurovision Song Contest 2007) was one-third of ICY (first ever Eurovision Icelandic entry in 1986). Via an email from Nabazhack's author Geir Freysson.
6. The message 'Handler could not be removed' you get when accessing some weblogs seems to have been due to the WordPress Feedlist plugin. You should not get that any longer on Bitful after the stripped down redesign.
7. Shia Islam allows a man and woman to marry for a fixed period of time, ranging from an hour to a century. It can be used as a solution to avoid falling foul of strict Islamic morality laws but is also criticised as a cover for prostitution, and for the tens of thousands of children from temporary marriages whose fathers will not acknowledge them and are therefore considered illegitimate.

To explore natural caves.

Read more about spelunk at Answers.com

Cheap and grumpy, originally uploaded by bitful.

Blimey. A cameraphone photo I snapped at Wong Key last December has been selected for inclusion in the newly released third edition of the Schmap London Guide.

View my photo on the Schmap London Guide

And to think I only took it with my phone to send to a friend to let her know where I was.

My del.icio.us tags are getting a bit out of control, so I tried using Matt Biddulph's stem identifier, but my bookmark thows a 503.

I did a quick search and I could only find The Amazing del.icio.us Stemmer, suitably renamed by the author The Broken del.icio.us Stemmer.

If you have any suggestions, the comment box (or my email inbox) are all yours. Thank you in advance.

And now, back to del.icio.us 'rename' page, which to be honest does the job – one bloody drop-down-selected tag at a time…