marramgrass

“It would be incredibly disappointing if we had to sue them.” ‘Them’ being the Red Cross.

The last resort of the bored blogger: some phrases typed into search engines that have turned up this site since the summer:

• “pain in the backside”
• “david blaine tattoo”
• “squid wrong address long time”
• “what-is stereotypically british”
• “arsehole depp” (This one may be my favourite.)
• “ock theologian” (Actually, maybe this one. The mind boggles.)
• “dress sense” (I’m flattered.)
• “operation mobilisation mafia”
• “blow up warthogs” (I really hope it’s a Halo thing. Really.)
• “wachowski contact details” (You know, I’ll need to check with them. They don’t like me giving it out to just anyone.)
• “bouncycastle timestamp cms” (Uh-huh.)

There were actually a bunch more that made me laugh, but since we’re a family website I can’t really say what they were.

Of course, you are free to stick any of the above phrases into Google, but please be aware that I can take no responsibility for what you find there. I think we’ve demonstrated that on the InterWeb you never where your search terms might take you!

(And if you’ve hit this post by searching on any of those strange phrases, sorry for dragging you away from the real long-missing squid.)

More and more often, now, if you hand over some plastic in a shop (here in the UK, at least) you’ll be handed a keypad rather than a pen. Whether or not this is actually more secure than signing a slip of paper, it’s certainly a lot faster and more convenient.

In some shops you don’t even hand over your card: instead, you stick it into a slot on the top of the keypad. I can see the benefits of not letting go of your card, at least from a reassuring-the-suspicious-customer point of view, but I have found myself completing transactions without ever making eye-contact with the cashier. As they finish ringing up the total, I stick my card in the reader, and then I stand staring at the little green screen as I wait for it to ask for the number. That done, as the cashier finishes the transaction, I’m grabbing up my card and putting it back in my wallet, and as I’m handed the receipt I’m busy gathering up whatever it is that I’ve bought.

Now, passing through the checkout is hardly a mainstay of social interaction, but I find myself slightly saddened that even if we choose real-world bricks and mortar over yet another faceless online purchase, we can still get away without acknowledging another human being with a word, smile, or even a look.

Maybe it’s a depressing comment on the way our world works, or maybe it’s just a thing. But I know that if it was me standing behind the counter, or sitting at the till, I probably couldn’t handle an entire day of people who looked at that little LCD rather than looking at me.

Convenience and ’security’ will probably win out everywhere. I was in a supermarket a while back that had a row of unmanned tills where you scanned your own shopping and then stuck your card in the machine to be charged. My wife wouldn’t let me try out the new gadget, but now I’m thinking that I’m glad. It’s not worth it.

It would appear that the Guardian is working hard to completely take over my RSS aggregator. They’ve been flagging up in their feed for a while that the current one would be phased out and replaced by a broad selection of others.

By the time I’ve picked out the ones I want, the single Guardian feed on my screen has become nine!

By the way, if you haven’t tried out news feeds yet, go and download the trial version of FeedDemon (sorry, Windoze only), or hit Google for a free one, subscribe to some of the feeds from the blogs on the sidebar over there or the Guardian page linked above, and try it out. The easiest, most efficient way to keep track of a list of sites that you read.

I’d almost go to France just to see this one.

How far can you get?

Just because, I’ve added a tweaked version of the old, darker, design as an option on the sidebar there (if you’re on the front page, that is).

For this to work it needs your browser to have cookies enabled. That’s the only thing this site cookies for, so don’t worry.

Some of these tweaks may have messed up the design of some old interior links, but I hope not. Let me know if you encounter any freakish difficulty.

It’s a little bit brighter, and the layout is all valid XHTML and CSS - just the posts aren’t :-/

Plus, having ditched the layout tables, it’s much much lighter. One or two tweaks still to be made, but all round an improvement (I think).

Since I’m in the process of bit of a design-tweak to the site, things may intermittently look very weird as I try things out and change my mind and track down bugs and the like.

Please don’t worry, and please try to keep sarcy comments to a minimum.

It shouldn’t take too long. Honest.

It seems that 2004 has been the year of weddings. Seriously, I’ve lost count how many we’ve been invited to, and we even managed to go to most of them.

The last one of the year (unless I’ve forgotten something/one) was on Thursday as my cousin took the plunge. Congrats to them both.

I enjoy weddings, but too many at once and they kind of lose the novelty a little - here’s to a quieter ‘05!