The Lair

In my misspent childhood, I used to read Lucky Luke, the cowboy who could draw faster than his own shadow. In one comic, Lucky Luke and Jolly Jumper (his horse, of course of course) accompany a stagecoach. Unfortunately every single meal served by the stagecoach consists of two things. Bacon and beans. Beans and bacon. Bacon and beans ice cream. Bacon and beans flavoured pancake. The works. Bacon and beans. All day, every day.

Needless to state, that shit gets a bit old. And don’t even talk about the flatulence.

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There is no content here. None. Not that there ever was. I am merely breaking my self imposed silence for a while to note the following.

There was a Top Of The Pops 2 Police special last night. I somewhat shamefacedly admit that I could, in fact, sing along to about 80% of the tracks that were played. The only tracks in the playlist I didn’t know were the early punk era stuff. Ok, people. Sign #125 that drac is old. And we like it that way. My lawn. Geroff it etc.

I was vaguely tempted (when I saw the tickets advertised) to go see them in Manchester or someplace. However their tour is in September, so umm.. no. September is now designated as my month to panic and frantically shovel steaming piles of horseshit disguised as thesis chapters. October? Well, that’s when I stitch on my knee pads and prepare to grovel.

Also, Fool’s Gold and a six part documentary on the Stone Roses. (1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6). I stole the links from Metafilter, although that discussion quickly disintegrated into a my-music-is-better-than-yours pissing contest.

And my recent listening has also included Genesis. Anyone spot a pattern here?

No. I didn’t go this year. I honestly didn’t see the point, since the weather was appalling for the most part. Very cloudy and windy. There was a fair bit of rain too. Instead, I stayed at home and watched out of the window (yes, I live sufficiently close to the airfield to allow this) and occasionally ran out into the garden.

Still, nothing like living vicariously through the Flickred up photos of others so I present –

Paul Nichols. Nice photos of the wingwalkers there.
PhilEAF92 (all photos tagged elvington)

Nothing very fancy – and I didn’t hear very many jets either – so all in all, I don’t think I missed a great deal.

Ah, the seven facts. I’m sure quite a few of the people who read this blog already know a couple of these. I may have even mentioned them before. I’m nothing if not unoriginal.

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I know I don’t blog very often about environmental issues. There are many reasons for this; most of which can be summarized as apathy and a distaste of the more militant tree-hugger tactics. No, I think global warming is (mostly) a man-made catastrophe waiting in the wings, yes – I do recycle and make environmentally conscious choices when I can. Just don’t tell anyone about the multiple flights back home last year, ok? But I don’t kid myself that I’m actually making an appreciable difference or helping stave off melting ice caps. I’m just doing it because it’s the right thing; not because I seriously think that sorting a couple of bottles for recycling will save anyone. Illogical, resigned to my fate and perhaps defeatist? Yeah. All of those.

And my uncharacteristically somber mood is due to a couple of images I saw yesterday.

arctic sea ice concentration in 1979.
arctic sea ice concentration in 2007.

Full archive. The pictures start from somewhere in 1978.

And in related news, Russia is making a play for a large part of the exposed arctic.

Been busy and bored in alternate spurts. I keep my idle hands busy with various amusements. The thesis work itself isn’t that interesting; I’m fast losing the will to live in the face of a wordcount to satisfy. The amusements, on the other hand, are worth documenting.

Everyone should know of Desktop TD by now. It’s addictive like crack, might be one of the few non-annoying uses of Flash on the web that I’ve seen (excluding Youtube, of course) and well, it is personally responsible for a lot of time wasted. A while ago, I was sent an email asking me to reserve my username for The Casual Collective; a new venture by the maker of DesktopTD. The Casual Collective offers (among other things, I’m sure) a chance to play a multiplayer version of DesktopTD. What’s not to like? I registered. A couple of days ago (after I had forgotten all about it), I got an email inviting me to login. Today, I played my first multiplayer DesktopTD.

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YSlow is an extension to Firefox. Actually, that’s not quite right. YSlow is actually an extension to Firebug, an awesome extension which runs on Firefox. Its purpose is to find out why your site is slow. YSlow. Geddit? Geddit? Never mind then.

Despite being just a tiny bit suspicious of cookie-cutter recommendation tools, I gave it a whirl. I like it. YSlow gives a useful overview and is certainly a great introductory tool to profile a site. There are some recommendations made that can be safely ignored; but that takes nothing away from the tool itself. As always though, the application/site developer (ie:, you) should know best about what might work and what won’t. In my personal opinion, rules are ok to break so long as you know why you’re breaking them.

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So, Facebook was down for quite a while yesterday. Since I’m one of the hip and trendy Facebook haters; I actually didn’t notice for a while. I usually interact with Facebook only when I receive notification emails. Headed over to my profile, saw that the app was broken.

Mild consternation. Muttered a few curses. Ran a few tests. Nope. App really was broken. Then started half an hour of investigation while I upgraded to the newest version of the library and futzed around trying to fix it. Predictably, nothing worked. So I just threw my hands up and figured that Facebook was broken. Went back to work. This morning, things are back to normal again. How fortunate that this is a fun application and my employment or emotional well-being doesn’t exactly depend on it.

Remember that rule about checking your own code before blaming the compiler? Well, this was one of the rare occasions where the compiler (or in this case, the Facebook platform) was at fault.

A tad more concerning though, El Reg is reporting that the outage revealed severe privacy flaws. More details. Where are your privacy controls now?