Eat your greens!

I just tried to renew my passport online. I received this error message after filling out my name, which contains an apostrophe — ‘Only use A-Z, a-z, commas, hyphens & spaces. See More Help for guidance’

Am I supposed to change my name to ODonnell because some idiot can’t write software capable of dealing with Irish surnames?

I used to be eligible for an Irish passport. It’s tempting to look into that in more detail.

Once, back in 1993 or thereabouts, young master gribley came into my office. “Wotcha!”, said I, or something to that effect. Time has blurred my precise memory of the conversation. “Yo La Tengo are playing. We should go and see them”, he said.

“Who are they?”
“A quiet little acoustic, folky band”
“OK”, I said, after mulling it over a little.

Later, we were ensconced in the Club de Wash (now, sadly, burned to the ground). Yo La Tengo came on stage carrying electric guitars, emitting a wailing feedback noise that would have put My Bloody Valentine to shame. They then played 30 minutes or so of electric, feedbank-drenched rock.

Since then I’ve been to see them at every chance I’ve had, including a fine open-air gig with Calexico at Somerset House a couple of years ago.

I noticed that the film Junebug is showing at Greenwich Picturehouse. The description of the film ends, ‘Bolstering its impeccable credentials is a score from Yo La Tengo.’ I may have to go and see it.

This American bloke has never seen a Dalek before. However, he says he will watch any TV programme which the wise (and beautiful) people of the internet ask him to watch by voting on his website. So vote for him to watch Dr. Who (8pm on Fridays).

On the subject of Daleks – I watched Face again last week. A decent gangster film, but not as good as I remembered it being the first time I saw it. That said, it does have Ray Winstone, Robert Carlyle and Phil Davis all playing villains and Ray Winstone gets to be Very Hard Indeed, running up and down a street in Haringey, shooting at coppers, all the while wearing a t-shirt bearing a big picture of a Dalek and the slogan ‘Exterminate!’ Nice one.

Sad news from the Wonder Stuff list http://furtive-mts.com/martin.php.

…but this is reality so give us some room.”

Switching from dialup to broadband meant losing access to Usenet, via news.demon.co.uk. Which means no late night lyrics posting sprees on alt.punk.

They were pointless, childish and pretty stupid. I kind of miss them. Google groups just ain’t the same, somehow. Anyone know a good NNTP server?

Only discovered this recently - last.fm user profiles include a page that lists your favourite albums by showing the covers. I like this. I like it a lot. Records are about the cover art as much as the music. Ask me if I’ve got a certain album by mentioning the name and I’ll have to think about it. Show me the cover and I’ll know instantly, yes or no, because I’ll more likely remember what they look like than what they’re called.

Anyway, by mysterious digital interweb magic, here are pictures of a large chunk of my album collection. The only disappointing thing about the internet is how small the pictures are. No wonderful 12-inch LP sleeves.

Stuff that’s proved handy/fun/vaguely interesting recently.

Bubblr

Add speech bubbles to photos from flickr. Tell little stories, then save them and e-mail them to friends.

Carson workshops podcast

MP3s of the talks from the Future of Web Apps thing. I’m particularly interested in Tom Coates’ and Cal Henderson’s talks, since I’m working on a large-ish image archive at the moment. All the talks are worth listening to. Why no MP3 from the Adobe/Macromedia guy?

The more-or-less complete Boiled in Lead

Gypsy violins. Electric guitars. Long hair. Tattoos. How can you go wrong with that combination? I was going through a box of old CDs that I haven’t listened to for years. I found four discs by Boiled in Lead – mementos of my time living in the Midwest. The early stuff is mostly English folk and Irish reels. Later stuff brings in Eastern European, Turkish and African tunes – even a venture into Thai music. The sort of band that could say “we found a kaen in a shop, so we sat down and recorded something with it”. Good stuff.

More trees and hierarchies in SQL

One of those articles I keep going back to, so I thought it worth mentioning. Plus it’s something to read if you find yourself stuck with insomnia in the middle of the night. Current project involves pictures classified with keywords along the lines of “crime: piracy” or “water transport: sailing vessel: pirate ship” so I’m parsing the text and using the adjacency table model to store it in a relational database.

Decommissioned FA2 Sea Harrier

We have a new toy at work. I wish we could let people sit in the cockpit and pretend to fly it. It would be like those little rides you find outside supermarkets. But larger. And with air-to-air missiles.

Royal Observatory circa. 2002

My first ever venture into CSS layouts. Since merged into the table-based Maritime Museum site but preserved by the magic of the Wayback Machine. It brings a nostalgic tear to my eye. I wish I’d pushed harder on sticking with tableless layouts too. Oh well, c’est la vie.

From the Associated Press, via Boing Boing – Yahoo! Hong Kong provided evidence which was used against Shi Tao. Interesting, since Yahoo’s defence of their actions had been that they were complying with mainland Chinese laws, which don’t apply in Hong Kong. Their letter to Amnesty International (173K PDF) explicitly states that Yahoo! Hong Kong was not involved in the release of information to the Chinese goverment.

Shi Tao was jailed in April 2005, for ten years, after sending an e-mail from his Yahoo account regarding the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Amnesty International considers Shi Tao a prisoner of conscience. If you would like to take action in support of Shi Tao, Amnesty has further details on their website.

If you’re local, and interested in corporate human rights, we will be having a workshop about the Business and Human Rights campaign at the next meeting of Blackheath & Greenwich Amnesty - 11th April, 8pm, at St Margaret’s Church in Lee Terrace.