An inspiring story for the holiday season

I had a dream last night. Much like Martin Luther King, it involved some pretty fanciful things. So I thought I would share the details with you to see if it makes any sense to you.

It began in some sort of fairy tale land. I went past the candy cottage of hansel and grettel, and humpty dumpty falling off a wall, and ended up at a house with a low door. Stooping to enter, I recognised that it was the home of the seven dwarves from Snow White. In the corner sat Doc, who for some reason was not pleased to see me.

"What do you want here?" he shouted. I explained that I was just visiting for a while, and that I wouldn't stay long. He grudgingly accepted this, and I sat down in a chair that was too small for me. Then the other dwarves began to come in. Although they looked familiar, there was something amiss with them that I couldn't quite place. So I asked Doc what was going on.

First, there was a dwarf who seemed really pleased to be there. He came up and said hi to me, and bounced around and told jokes -- but the whole time there was a scowl on his face, like he was really upset about something. Who's that? I asked Doc -- Is he one of the seven dwarves? "You dweeb!" shouted Doc, "That's the Happy that never smiles!"

Then there came a dwarf who kept inhaling, and going a--a--a--a... aaahh. His face was read, and he kept leaning back with a hankerchief, ready to blow... but nothing came. Once again, I asked Doc what was going on, what was wrong with that one? "You berk!" he cried, "That's the Sneezy that never sneezes!".

Finally, in lurched another dwarf, who looked absolutely exhausted. I expected him to drop any moment, but instead he kept walking round and round the room, slowly taking step after step and never coming to a halt. But he kept yawning and sighing, as if he had been awake for days. Once more I turned to Doc. "What's up with his? Why doesn't he go to bed, or at least sit down for a bit?". Doc turned to me with a look of complete disgust at my stupidity. "You nork! It's the Sleepy that never sits!".

Evening all.

I'm writing this from in bed. (oops, almost typed "from in bex". that would have been misconstruable). I'm able to do this because I have got my wireless setup up and running. Thrilling, I know. Anyway, it would be really great, except that my laptop is still a bit old and knackered, so I still have to prop the thing up against a wall to stop the lid from falling over, but apart from that, it's pretty good.

Anyway, it's almost the end of the year. More importantly, I'm soon to head off back to the UK, and hence I won't be able to connect to this website to post updates (since it is based in the US). So expect long periods of silence. No one has yet come up with a good suggestion for how I should spend my new year, so I will do my best to make my own entertainment.

More search queries coming here looking for milkshake. I hope you are satisfied with the explanation that you find here. Ah. This reminds me of a little game that I like to play called,

Get your .dics out

Regular readers will know that I am very fond of what might be called "found" art. Although, that's probably the wrong phrase. What I mean is, text that is formed by some random process that forms interesting patterns. Such as the text that people use in search queries to get here. Or the passwords generated by AOL in their incessant mailings. (their recent adverts, while mildly amusing, makes no sense whatsoever).

Anyway, Get your .dics out is a game that anyone can play, if you regularly use a computer with microsoft products on it, and you are so anally retentive that you cannot stand to see those little wavy red lines under every word that you type. All you have to do is search your computer for a file called "CUSTOM.DIC", and then post it for the world to see. Here's mine:


Aah
Ah
Arsenio
Astra
abuzz
acned
aftershave
alka
amortized
arse
Bunnymen
beefeater
blu
bonce
budgetmeister
Che
Che's
Ché
Croft
clerihew
Davro
Doyle
datagrams
defloration
dodgy
Eh
Emma's
Entertainments
Er
Erm
eh
ents
er
extraordinaire
Frosties
faffing
freshers
Gwillym
gatecrash
git
goth
goths
Hamiltonian
Hmm
Huffman
Hustings
helpline
heterological
hipper
hm
homological
housemates
hust
hustings
I'd've
i
imbalanced
internet
jerry
Lancashire
Lara
Lunn
lesbigay
lesbo
Mandela's
Manson
Markovian
Matt's
Montford
minuting
munchkins
mundanity
Nich
nerdy
noticeboards
novelisation
Oi
Ooo
Ow
ooo
ou
Pookie
Presidente
paperclip
paperclips
percolations
pickiness
pics
polos
postgrad
pts
Quoracy
Rom-Com
rebalancing
rebranded
recurse
Sabb
Ssh
Stott
sabbs
satisfiable
sci-fi
shithole
slanging
snogging
spliffs
subtree
subtrees
Thompson's
takings
televisual
trannie
uh
uni
unmistakeably
unsatisfiable
unsatisfyingly
Vince
volte
Wha
Why'd'ja
Willesden
wankers
whiteboard
whodunnit
wlog
worryingly
yer
zeroth


It's up to you to work out how this file comes about, but just appreciate this list for its entertaining juxtapositions of the obsessions in my life: the "Willesdan wankers whiteboard whodunnit", for example. The exceptionally onomatapoeic, "Oi Ooo Ow ooo ou Pookie Presidente". Who are "Matt's Montford minuting munchkins"? What are Emma's Entertainments and how do they relate to the faffing freshers?

Fans of my oeuvre might like to see how many of my different works they can spot implicitly from the different bits of vocab in there.

Once again, Starship Troopers seems strangely prescient:

178EXT PLANET P - A COMPANY BASE CAMP - JOHNNY

and the others enter A Company's perimeter. No one notices their arrival

because everyone's gathered in a big circle watching the Brain Bug.

CARMEN Look... they got it.

Several of its delicate legs were apparently broken during the capture.

Carl approaches it without fear, puts his hand on the thing.

GENERAL What's it thinking, Colonel ?

Carl smiles in a cruel way.

CARL It's afraid.

Cheers and shouts from the crowd.

A terrible thing has happened: I look at my logs, and I see that more people are coming here by ill-advised search queries than on purpose. Which is awful, since no one is supposed to be coming here at all. But anyway, the fact remains that search queries are outpacing "real" traffic by a factor of two to one. And a really quite stupid fraction of these are coming in based on the query "Kelis Milkshake (Radio Mix) lyrics" through Yahoo, which suggests that someone (probably yahoo themself) has hard-coded this search onto a web-page somewhere. I'm also getting a large number of queries of the form "kelis milkshake lyrics explanation" or "meaning of milkshake by kelis". So, in the interests of actually making sure that web searches do find the information that they are looking for, here is an explanation of the lyrics of Milkshake by Kelis. We'll do this line-by-line

my milkshake brings all the boys to the yard

Kelis here is making use of a technique known as metaphor. This is a device where what someone says is not literally what they mean, but meant to conjure up images and ideas associated with what is meant. Here, she is not literally making milkshake. Instead, "milkshake" is a metaphor for her sexual attractiveness, and "boys to the yard" means that many men approach her with the intention of trying to copulate with here.

and their like it's better then yours

Kelis is claiming that the men who wish to copulate with her find her more attractive than other women in general (it seems likely that although addressed in the second person, there is not a specific individual being addressed).

damn right it's better than your

Kelis is also of the opinion that she is fertile example of the female form, and highly worthy of the males' attempts to copulate with her.

i could teach you but i'd have to charge

Again, these lyrics are not to be taken literally: Kelis is not offering to give a short course in effective copulation and attraction. Instead, she is implying that anyone wishing to attain the same degree of attraction and desirability will have to make significant changes to their persona. "have to charge" is a way of saying, effectively, that although she could offer tips and pointers, she won't.

I know you want it, the thing that makes me, what the guys go crazy for.

Here, the metaphor is dropped and the direct meaning is made clear: other females are envious of her ability to make males want to copulate with her. And Kelis is well aware of the effect that this has on the males and on the females.

They lose their minds, the way i wind, i think its time

Note that this is wind, as in to dance provocatively, rather than wind in the sense of flatulence. That would not be attractive and would not make the males want to copulate with her. Instead, her dance moves are a form of mating ritual which whips up the males into a state of sexual frenzy.

i can see youre on it, you want me to teach the techniques that freaks these boys,
it can't be bought, just know, thieves get caught, watch if your smart,

Here, Kelis iterates that her attraction to males is innate, feral even. There is no way for those who lack these features to attain them through money, and attempts to imitate her mating dance will also fail.

Once you get involved, everyone will look this way-so,

In this verse, Kelis mellows somewhat towards her implicit interlocutor, and tries to give some explanation for how to to ensure that all the males want to copulate with her. She points out that she becomes the centre of attention.

you must maintain your charm, same time maintain your halo,
just get the perfect blend, plus what you have within,

Here, Kelis espouses a policy of embracing the Virgin-Whore dichotomy so renowned in twentieth century sexuality psychology, and inhabiting both roles: being sexually attractive (the "charm") whilst appearing virgo intacta ("maintain your halo"). She must maintain a balance between provocation and innocence. But, again, it comes back to innate qualities, that, if not posessed, cannot be simulated...

then next his eyes are squint, then he's picked up your scent,

... and in this case, those qualities seem to be a musk secreted by the female which indicates to the males that the female is on heat, fertile, and ready to be copulated with.

My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard,
and they're like, its better than yours,
damn right its better than yours,
i can teach you, but i have to charge

So there we have it: Kelis' "milkshake", which brings all the boys to the yard, is a metaphor for her sexual pheromones, which she apparently secretes at a much greater intensity than is usual. And this is something that simply cannot be learned, or bought.

Now it's your turn. What do you think the lyrics of Candy by Kelis might mean? Use your imagination, and write on both sides of the paper.

(If you are not satisfied with this explanation, which I just made up because I was bored and for fuxake, if you can't figure out your own interpretation of lyrics without a search engine, then what's wrong with you, then why not try looking up Milkshake in the gloriously unexpurgated urbandictionary.com.)

I can't help noticing (and I really mean that, I simply cannot help it) that there appears to be a mistake in the lyrics of "Thriller". Here's the Vincent Price "rap" section that comes at the end:

Darkness falls across the land
The midnight hour is close at hand
Creatures crawl in search of blood
To terrorize y'awl's [sic. sic, sic, sic, sic, sic] neighborhood
And whosoever shall be found
Without the soul for getting down
Must stand and face the hounds of hell
And rot inside a corpse's shell
The foulest stench is in the air
The funk of forty thousand years
And grizzly ghouls from every tomb
Are closing in to seal your doom
And though you fight to stay alive
Your body starts to shiver
For no mere mortal can resist
The evil of the thriller

Look at the rhythm: dum de dum de dum de DUM, de dum de dum de dum de DUM
Now look at the last few lines. The rhyme scheme is all off: instead of couplets, it's just all over the place. But it looks like it's supposed to be ABAB. You can just about see that "shiver" could rhyme with "thriller" if you weren't paying attention, but what's with all this "alive / resist"? That just doesn't work. Now try the following:

And though you fight to stay alive
Your body starts to shiver
For no mere mortal can survive
The evil of the thriller

Doesn't that seem much better? And, although it changes the meaning of the ending, it still makes about as much sense, more or less, as the original. So what went wrong?

According to the enviable people at News Scan, "Mersenne primes are an especially rare breed that take the form of 2-to-the-power-of-P, where P is also a prime number".

Well, I suppose that's partly correct: primes of the form 2-to-the-power-of-P are somewhat rare. They aren't all that hard to find, though. See the whole article here.

I shouldn't complain too much. The normally reliable folks at Mathworld (sponsored by New Kind of Scientist, Stephen Wolfram Andhart), persist in claiming in their article on Prime Numbers, that "no efficient algorithms are known for factoring arbitrary primes". As it happens, I know a great algorithm for factoring arbitrary primes, which works about as fast as it is possible to work.

That had better be all for now.

Look, I'm not saying that Google's rankings are a bit dodgy, but there's got to be something a bit askew if this blog is the #4 hit on google for "thin pillows".

And it's very worrying that more people are searching for "milkshake" (25 queries) than for sex (1), nude (2) or even diggerworld (5).

More analysis of weblogs for weblogs later. Or perhaps never.

Now that I've finally got around to posting something new, I just wish I could remember what it was that I was going to witter on about. OK, I'll go to my current obsession.

I'm well know for my obsession with bubblegum pop teenage female double pop acts. I don't know what it is, but for some reason a lot of my favourite music is made by cheap disposable female duos: Shampoo, Daphne and Celeste, taTu, Britney Spears... the list goes on. Well, I now have a new name to add to this roster: Halcali!

Yes, Halcali: a pair of teenage japanese girl rappers who wear boiler suits, just like the Beastie Boys, so they must be real rappers. You can click around here and find some excellent clips (30 seconds or so) from their first album, Bacon (Japanese-style random picking of English words for added coolness!).

Highlights including Guri Guri Surfer Girl (track 3). Listen to the clip of Track 4 to hear the crazy background sample ("this is a recording"). Hear echoes of several classic rap tracks including "Hey you! The Rocksteady Crew" and something else (The Message? Rappers delight? Something by Len? Cross-reference also to the "Shoyu Weenie" episode of Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law if anyone else can pick up on these references) in Candy Hearts (track 6). Wonder if the whole operation is secretly under the control of the mysterious Svengali DJ Fumiya who seems to have credits on every track. Then hear the glory of Electric Sensei (track 11), and realise that you just don't care. To get some sense of what they are singing about, then check out the translation and transcription of the current single, Guri Guri Surfrider :

It's new style How High?
koukiatsu nante chiisai
senkou faiya- maru de daiya
moeagaru sama- su-pa-saiya
sokosoko ha-do ni norikonasu ha-tobi-to
mazu ippo ri-do ABC to the Z moshi mo
norikoeru kamo ne sama-taimu

How high indeed? The album is great, so rush out and buy a copy. If you can find anywhere that sells it, that is, because I can't.

I should give mad props, or at least slightly loopy supports to Adam and Joe, whose BBC3 endeavour Adam and Joe Go Tokyo put me onto this band. Thanks guys! I wonder what's on next?



Oh, Programme Name, my favourite!

Feel free to send the above in to NTK and claim it as your own, but please don't direct people to the copy on triv: it only has 128kbps upload, and a flash crowd would probably destroy it forever (or at least get me kicked off). Cheers. Coming soon: readers letters and all new crazy search terms. Or not. Probably not.

Concepts for which we need a word: the shaking, wiggling, banging set of motions that you use when your ball-based mouse is sticking, and so motions in space are not translating to the desired motion on the screen. With luck, this term will become obsolete as soon as we (which is to say I) get optical mice. Unless they have a whole new and innovative way in which to go wrong.

I think it's fair to say that only a computer scientist would write a 'makefile' in order to invoke latex to produce all their application letters for the jobs that they are applying to. I think it's also fair to say that there's no obvious reason why I have done this, since it probably doesn't save any time overall, and if anything complicates the process and makes it slower. But, you know, anything to avoid actually doing some work or having to think about something.

I noticed today that Frosties aren't called Frosties here, they are called "Frosted Flakes". I've been eating them for the past year, and I only just noticed that. What other vital facts have I been ignoring?

Evening all.

I should point out that after the exertions of yesterday, in which I not only went to Philadelphia and back in the falling snow, but also took a quick stop off in Princeton in sub-zero temperatures. I therefore think that I am quite justified in not having left the house today. Well, there is four inches of snow blocking my egress. So, I am quite happy to stay in and slump in front of SNL.

Anyway, in response to the recent posting by angel, whose new site design makes her look like a goth, and also makes me feel sad that I fall below the line: classified as a blogger that she doesn't know; not a member of the exclusive group of bloggers that she does know. Well, OK, so technically I am a fictional character who exists only to expound the half-arsed imaginings of a semi-anonymous author who refuses to admit that this is a blog, but my point remains... increasingly obscure.

Sorry, I appear to have left a sentence in mid-lurch. Where was I? Oh yes, the fragrant Angel muttered something about having Jehovah's Witnesses (I recommend pouring boiling water over them). What I found interesting was that the Witness began the conversation with the question "Do you think people concentrate too much on material things, especially at this time of year?" That's interesting, because it reminds me of the kind of thing that telemarketers usually say when they call me up in the morning and wake me up when I am quite reasonably sleeping in because I'm lazy. They often start with something that I call, for want of something more concise, "A question to which most reasonable people would be obliged to answer yes". I remember being woken by someone representing Mothers Against Drunk Driving (I'm still looking for a group that represents the interests of drunk drivers, who I have found seem to have no one looking out for them), who called up to ask me if I thought that it was increasinagly important to think of other people, "in these difficult times". My preference in these situations is to call them on this: when someone asks a question like this, just give them the answer that they weren't expecting. Hence: Q: Do you think people concentrate too much on material things, especially at this time of year? A: No.

The other option that I have heard advocated in these situations is to convert instantly, since they also aren't expecting that. When they ask if you have welcomed Jesus into your life respond that you hadn't before, but now that they mention it, yes, super, I believe! Anyway, this is someone else's idea, and quite likely someone whose blog I read, so I will let you fill in the remainder of the details yourself.

Meanwhile: in the interestes of being too lazy to send email to people, I'll just blog this instead. I will be flying to Engerland a couple of days before Christ's 2004th, and will remain there until Uncle Sam sees fit to renew my J-1, which is always a bit of a gamble. So I'm looking for things to do to celebrate the fact that I will be dating cheques wrongly for the subsequent few months. Usually my new year's eve celebrations go pretty badly. Last years celebreation at Chez Triv was a pleasant exception to this rule. (For those not familar with triv.org.uk, think of a slightly less sinister greenend but without the universally popular SSH client). So, I thought I would offer a never to be repeated deal: I can grace your UK-based New Year's Eve party.

Here's what I bring to the table: I will bring myself and my charming alter-egos to the venue of your soiree; I will also bring some quantity of alcohol and my own sleeping arrangements. Now, I know that I will be ingreat demand, so if you want my attendance, then please fill in and return this simple questionairre:

1. Where is the location of your party?
a) In London's fashionable England
b) In the people's republic of Cambridge
c) In Coventrycestershire

2. Which adjective best describes your intended party?
a) Tame
b) Tepid
c) Lukewarm
d) Insipid

3. How is your party most likely to finish?
a) At five past midnight, with everyone sighing "Oh, *finally*"
b) Gently petering out at 2am
c) As the sun rises, the party gently dies
d) The party will never end.

...anyway, more of this later, it's time for Weekend Update.

Mmm, Tina Fey. And she is. Fey, that is. Goodnight.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: applying for jobs is very boring and time consuming. Especially considering that I haven't actually applied for any yet. I'm still working on getting everything that I need ready so that I can do it all in one blast. More or less. So far I've got my CV and supporting materials in reasonable shape, and picked out the places that I'll be applying to. But I still need to notify my referees which places to send letters of (dis)recommendation to, and write a bunch of virtually identical cover letters but make subtle differences (like the name of the place I'm applying to) to each. So some more work to do yet.

So, in the meantime, here is my discovery of the week. Stop words are the words that are thrown out by search engines as being too frequent to be meaningful: words like "the", "and", "is" and so on. So that means that the longest phrase in the works of Shakespeare [allegedly, but plausibly] is "To be or not to be, that is the". Which means that searching for these words in most search engines fail to get anything very useful. Although, searching for anything in search engines these days usually fails to get anything useful. Oh well.

While I'm on the subject, a quick google search reveals surprisingly few hits for the phrase "The Ring of the Fellowship". So, anyone who needs a title for their blue movie set in a Cambridge college need look no further. (Actually, does anyone feel like attempting to start a rumour that such a film is being made? I can't be bothered myself).

Some quick "why not try"s while I'm in the mood:

Why not try... raising the stakes?
...lowering the bar?
...bowling for Columbine?
...exceeding expectations?
...freeing the Birmingham Six?
...having a coincidental meeting?
...foiling a dastardly plot?
...extracting more energy from a system than you put in?
...staying in bed?
...being wantonly obscure?
...being wilfully obscure?
...being Jude the obscure?
...recording a new answering machine message?
...censoring yourself?
...censoring someone else?
...listening to pop?
...splitting up?
...taking the piss?
...taking the pills?
...not trying?
...keeping a web-based diary of things that happen in your life and making it publically available so that the world can read about it?
...juggling too many balls?
...mixing your metaphors?
...thinking up new insults about Jamie Oliver?
...memorising train timetables?
...getting yourself up, dusting yourself up, and starting all over again?
...writing a chapter of a book on a topic that you know a lot about?
...stopping doing that?
...applying for a job?
...pausing for thought?
...pausing for breath?
...pausing to go to the toilet?
...getting married?
...having a nice cup of tea and a sit down?

Sorry, once I get started it's hard to stop. So I'll stop.

Let me tell you something: applying for jobs is incredibly tedious. You spend the whole day messing around with your CV, covering letters, stupid requirements from different employers, and at the end of the day (literally, I'm tired now) you're no further along thn when you started. And you have nothing of interest of meaning to blog about.

So thank goodness for crap lolly stick jokes: they give us something to grimace about. Although, this one is rather familar.

Q: What can of dog can jump higher than a house can?

(OK, the original set up wasn't quite like this, but I needed to correct the grammatical errors).

Ah, that's enough for today. I'm on Internet Explorer so let's see if it manages to screw this post up.

I recently watched the Avid Merrion video for "Proper Chrimbo" which, I had been assured by that arbiter of humour, Chris Moyles, was absolutely hilarious.

I don't get it. More to the point, I don't recognise most of the celebrities in the video, let alone the impressions of them by Merrion. Does this make me incredibly out of touch, or, in some bizarre sense, does it make me cool to be above this level of cheap regional celebrity?

(If you said, "Who's Avid Merrion?", then award yourself five points and a slap on the back).

Still, it seems that the alternative for the christmas number one is a cynical cover version of "Love is All Around", which is a plot point in a film written by the guy whose earilier film first propelled the last cover version of Love is All Around to the top of the charts. Is it me, or is that just stupidly self-referential?

Can I do the joke about how this Hugh Grant thing is wearing a bit thin? You know, about how it was believable that he would marry Andie McDowell, and then dump her for Julia Roberts, but that giving her up for Martine McCutcheon is stretching it a bit? Well, let's take it as read.

Lolly stick joke: What kind of horse never wins a race?
Answer on stick: A sawhorse.
I believe that a sawhorse is some kind of construction upon which you saw pieces of wood. The concept exists in the UK as a Black and Decker Workmate, so the joke doesn't work there:

What kind of horse never wins a race?
A Black and Decker Workmate.

See what I mean? Anyway, I suppose a translation of the joke into English would render the punchline as something like:
A Clothes Horse.

Which communicates the appropriate level of crap-punness required, I think. I think it wouldn't work in America, since they don't have clothes horses in the states -- after they have worn their clothes, they just throw them away and buy new ones. More lolly stick frolics to come.

To recover my lost work from last week, I think it went something like this:


Is there a word for deciding not to email someone, but to post the message that you would have sent in a blog because you know tha thy happen to read that blog? Anyway, that's what I'm about to do, for the benefit of one of my Ivy League Professor Readers.

If you like Zero 7, then you might also like... Royksopp, whose hit Eple you should have heard either in the background music of every single Television programme shown in 2002, or else in the Soulwax megamix 2ManyDJs just after Destiny's Child has been mixed seamlessly into Dolly Parton. You should also enjoy Lemon Jelly.

Zero 7 are also of interest for their patronage of the emerging art of machinima on the video for "In the Waiting Line". Put briefly, Machinima is animation done using the graphics engines of popular video games such as Quake or Unreal to render the thing. Although, it can't be all that hip given that Wired magazine did an article on it last year, and we all know what trailers of the scarifying edge that they are.



Anyway, that's the crux of what I had to say last week, although I preferred it the way I said it originally. Damn you, Internet Explorer! Damn you to Hull!

(thought: when faced with the smug little error box that pops up in Windows 98 when something crashes advising you that "if this behaviour persists, please contact the manufacturer", how many people have actually contacted Microsoft to complain? I tried complaining to Microsoft once about an entirely different issue, and it never did me any good).

Apparently the currently Westlife song is a beatles cover (near the end).

Well, you know, Beatles, Barry Manilow -- they all sound the same to me.

Some people just have too much time on their hands.

OK, let's try this again with a host that's a little bit more understanding. At the risk of not having read the site's acceptable use policy, here goes attempt 2.

Seems like GeoCities does not like people linking to pictures... stingy gits.
Try this:

The Times [NewsCorp]
The Mirror
The Sun [NewsCorp]

Something new: pictures!

these are the newspapers featured in this week's simpsons I was going on about:

I had a very nice update written on Monday, shortly after the SIGMOD deadline, letting you know everything that's been going on - and, through a combination of Blogger's frankly vile code for IE and IE itself, the update got swallowed, and no amount of frantic hitting of the back button could restore. Anyway, I'm now safely back in the realms of Opera, which tends to be less, er, crap (can anyone seriously use Internet Explorer for anything but the most casual of searching attempts? I suppose that with the google toolbar installed it does become just about bearable, but still...)

At some point I shall try to recover the things I was wittering on about, but in the meantime, I have switched in a new tracker at the bottom of the page, since Servustats went offline, then came back apparently having been taken over by someone else and no longer doing anything useful for free. I'm trying out a new one which claims to give me search results so I can see what crazy search terms people use to get here. Sadly, the old ones seem to be lost forever, although the last time I checked, my biggest search results seemed to be coming from various permutations of "Sex bloggs" (should get some more hits from the illiterate one-handed surfers for that), and from "barbara bush nude". It's a sick world out there, best to stay inside.

Now, let's see if this works -- although this time I'll keep a copy on the clipboard unless something screws up.

Nothing much to say except the song that goes through my head every time Save My Life by Pink is played is of course Mongoloid by Devo. I know, I know, you'll all be kicking yourself too for not realising it earlier.
Many thanks to the Impact-font loving proprieter of feelgood:abd for pointing this out to me.

I should point out for anyone concerned that the two songs sound nothing alike to anyone else. It's mostly in the lyrical similarity and the pacing more than anything else. The relevant sections to compare and contrast are:

Pink:
so she... she disappeared
and she... she wasn't clear
and she... she didn't say were she was going

Devo:
and he... wore a hat
and he... had a job
and he... brought home the bacon so that no one knew

Separated at birth.

Also, that Tony Blair has been in the news a lot today. First, he shows up in the Simpsons, playing himself and generally cosying up to Murdoch [*] (it was very well done: I saw it this evening and thought it was a professional impersonator till I found out it was the real thing). Then he demonstrates a charming lack of competency by emailing a hairdresser a copy of his party conference speech.

What I find particularly cute about this whole story (and I use the word cute in its second or third meaning) is the (claimed) initial email reply of the hairdresser: "Thanks Tony, I've had a quick look and it seems fine. Go ahead".

[*] Conspiracy theorists might like to review their downloaded DivXs of the show: there are a few scenes featuring British newspapers. Simpsons being a Fox production after all, albeit a renegade one, they focus on the Times [NewsCorp], the Sun [NewsCorp] and, er, the Mirror [definitely not NewsCorp unless I missed something important]. The attention to detail is nice, tyopgraphy fans -- they even have the more recent black masthead design on the Mirror done right.

Oh, and lastly before I forget, a quick edition of "What we think in our heads vs. what we actually say".

Scene: supermarket checkout queue. Lady in front, eyeing my two frozen pizzas: "Well, we'll all be having pizza at your place tonight!".

In my head, I reply: "No, that would be weird, because I have no idea who you are."
Out loud, I reply: "Ha, yes, um..."

That is all, you may go now.

General congratulations in the direction of RaW - who, according to their website, are the best student radio station in the world, ever! Or at least, some bloke from Radio 1 says so, so it must be true.

Actually, I'm inclined to agree -- I listened to a lot of RaW last year over the interwire. In fact, you should check out the clips on trixie karinski's site: the worrying thing is I remember hearing almost all of the clips featured when they went out live! As I have been heard to mention before, Chris Carter is the future of radio broadcasting (although he will need to change his name if he ever wants to avoid all those X-Files references on the web). He deserves the "best presenter" award solely on the basis of his interview with Tim Westwood from last years awards ceremony.

What's most exciting is that they will get a chance to go live on Radio 1 for winning best station. Normally, Radio 1 is rather embarassed about the winners of the best student radio award, and does its best to lose the winning show in its schedules (the last time RaW won best station, their show went out live to the nation -- at 4am on a Tuesday morning). But this time, apparently they will get a slot on Radio 1 on Christmas Day at midnight, which is pretty decent.

For some reason, the only time that Radio 1 is ever worth listening to is over Christmas when their regular presenters are off on holiday, and there is a chance for some vaguely innovative or at least different programming. The best mix set in the world even, the awesome Soulwax 'Hang the DJ' set was broadcast at 8pm on Christmas Day in 2001, only a few weeks after the legendary Mr. Psyche set on the John Peel show. Plus of course there's the festive fifty, and even the chart of the year (when they remember to put one in the schedules -- I think they forgot last year) makes for interesting listening to hear just how undiscerning the singles buying public is.

Talking of Music, I still haven't worked out what the song Save My Life by Pink reminds me of, so please help out if you can. I got the idea that it was some punk song, so I spent a day listening to every punk song that I own, but it wasn't any of them. It could be something that I heard on the radio, which would make this harder (I can listen to every piece of music I own electronically in about a week solid listening if I am serious about it.

I also heard a song that I liked on the radio, which I successfully identified as Milkshake by Kelis (hook lyrics: "My Milkshake brings all the boys to the yard, And they're like "It's better than yours" Damn right, It's better than yours, I can teach you, but I have to charge"). Problem is, I didn't like the single mix so much, so now I have to figure out what the random radio mix I heard was, assuming even that it's commercially available. It's a hard life living in the modern world.

Anyway, I should probably actually work on my SIGMOD submissions. (current status: one I think I'm done with my part of; one has been abandoned/postponed to VLDB, and the other needs a severe amount of working doing to it asap).

Can spam deprave and corrupt you? I was just browsing the latest offerings on suprnova.org, and my eyes caught "Britney Spears - Half Naked".

In fact, what was actually written was "Britney Spears (Live and More)" on one line, and "Half Baked" on the next line. Oh well.

Thanks Brent! But really, who in Britain says "block" when they mean street?

I've been listening to the new Pink album, available from an illegal download near you now, but I'm really annoyed by one thing in particular: what is the song that "Save My Life" sounds like? You can listen to a 30 second clip here, assuming you can get real player to work. The bit that sounds particularly familiar is the chorus, which begins approximately 26 seconds into the 30 second clip, but if you have any ideas.

The album also features a nice duet with Peaches. Peaches isn't exactly on top form at the moment, but I did quite like the half-hearted ambiguity of "we are all Pink inside". Talking of peaches, a few months ago I accidentally picked up a pre-release version of the second album. I was in the ever rewarding Princeton Record Exchange, when I picked up a copy of Fatherfucker without any inlay or cover for $4 in the cheap section. I assumed that it had been out for a while, and it wasn't for a few weeks that I noticed that it still hadn't been officially released. It must have been a reviewer copy or something.

Anyway, it's a pretty good record, better than most of the reviews would have you believe. I still haven't got around to getting a proper version of The Teaches of Peaches, so I can't really compare it to the first album. But it's got some shout along tracks. I quite like several of the tracks -- Shake Your Dix has a mindless inanity of the call and response genre; I Don't Give A is a loud and shouty bastardisation of Joan Jett; and I U She is very reminiscent of the first album. Anyway, give it a try and if you don't like it, listen to the Teaches of Peaches instead.

I notice that the repellant Section 28 has finally been repealed. Excellent -- but why did no one tell me that this was happening?

Things that annoy me but not enough for me to do anything about them:

1. Conferences that state a date for giving notice of acceptance or rejection and then completely fail to adhere to it, and don't even put up an announcement on the conference web page.

2. Supermarkets which have only one "Next Customer please" marker. You need at least two for this system to be at all usable. If you only have one, then you might just as well not have any at all. I almost lost a bottle of ketchup to this today, despite the fact that there was a clear visual demarcation between my goods and the previous customer's.

Things that you hear other people say as you walk past them that really make you want to eavesdrop further and find out what the heck they are talking about only they are going in the opposite direction, so you can't exactly turn around and follow after them to hear the rest of the story, explained thanks to someone who picked up on the reference, #1

Yes, something of a novelty here. My Ivy League Professor correspondent writes to point out that what I overheard was actually a line of dialogue from The Big Lebowski, that is "She's not my special lady friend, man. I'm just helping her conceive." Which, I suppose, is a somewhat less exicting explanation than any of the others that I had in mind.

Why not start your own Ivy League? Collect different pieces of Ivy and play them off against each other. The winner wins some holly!

Unrelated to any of the above, I keep seeing Amy Sedaris. Well, not even that. I keep finding out that things that I have seen have starred Amy Sedaris. She was in an episode of Monk, playing Sharona's sister. She was in 'Strangers With Candy', a Comedy Central show that I never paid much attention to, as the main character. And she's in this new Will Ferrel movie, Elf, from which title you can pretty much induce the entire concept. The thing is, I still don't really know what she looks like so I would know if I saw her again. In Strangers with Candy, she's under so much makeup that you wouldn't really be able to tell. Still, anyway, watch out for her. As my ad hoc postdoc Cambridge points out, she often features in her brother David's writings, and usually seems more interesting than him. I must get around to buying her co-authored book, Wigfield [Not to be confused with Whigfield. Of course. Or posisbly the other way around].

Meanwhile, to something which is connected only if you live in my head, I was watching an old episode of Press Gang (well, there's no other kind. This was from the final series 5, which is not quite so weak as I remembered it -- perhaps it was series 4 that I was thinking of as being somewhat lame), and I spotted Geoff McGivern in a supporting role. What I didn't realize till the credits rolled was that his wife was being played by Jo Unwin. [Relevant connections: GMcG was, amongst many other roles, the original Ford Prefect in HHGTG; Unwin is probably best know for being married to Chris Morris].

It's not interesting, but it's true.

Things that you hear other people say as you walk past them that really make you want to eavesdrop further and find out what the heck they are talking about only they are going in the opposite direction, so you can't exactly turn around and follow after them to hear the rest of the story, #3

"She's not my ladyfriend - I'm just helping her to conceive"

[This one heard in a pizza place in Greenwich Village, so it's not inconceivable, if you'll pardon the non-pun, that it was said in total genuineness - I mean genuity - um - for real. Unfortunately I didn't catch the rest of the conversation].

Oh, and since everyone seems to be going on about this at the moment (and since I somehow managed to foreshadow it in one of my posts at the weekend, Paris Hilton -- the pictures that you won't see anywhere else! Warning: not safe for work. Not even if you are self-employed.

pillow talk

I'm having trouble with my pillows. At some point, my pillows were just the right depth, but lately they seem too thin for me. Normally, I like a really thin pillow, hence I went to some effort to get pillows that were quite thin. But now one is too thin for me, and when I pile two on top of each other, that just feels stupidly tall, like my neck is at some silly angle. My current solution is to prop one up at an angle of about 75 degrees to the horizontal, against the wall, and then lay a second so that it hits the first about 1/3 of the way up, thus being slightly elevated but not all that much. It still feels wrong. Perhaps it's all psycho somatic anyway.

I should probably have linked to feelgood:abd before. Well, it's not too late -- although it does rather look like the author has abandoned it already. Wonder what that suggests about the thesis?

I missed the third episode of Tru Calling tonight -- I figured that I'll watch it tomorrow if I wake up and the day repeats (I do hope not -- I don't really want to have to do all that C programming over again from scratch). The second episode was quite bad, pretty much a complete re-run of the first: Tru still seems surprised and stupefied when she wakes up to find she is living the previous day over again. Really, she should be getting used to it by now. Then, without giving too much away, she does exactly the same thing as she did in the first episode: completely get the wrong idea about what caused the death she is trying to prevent not once but twice. And this time it is so blatantly flagged who the real arsonist is, you do really want to go up and shout at her.

I'm actually warming to Jake 2.0 a lot more, which shouldn't be too surprising, given its pedigree (a production of David Greenwalt, a Buffy/Angel stalwart) and its concept (nerdy guy suddenly gains super powers through deus ex machina -- except this time, the machines are inside the protagonist, since his power comes from "nanobots", a reasonably convenient McGuffin). Oh, and the subplot is also familiar to Buffy fans: Jake, the geeky yet charming guy is so caught up with his crush on blonde female lead that he doesn't notice that the brunette science geek with glasses (who scrubs up well when necessary) is deeply jonesing for him [compare / contrast to S1 Buffy/Xander/Willow].

I was looking through the TV listings this evening, and misread a title as "Crime Scene Makeover". Which is maybe not such as bad an idea as it sounds. Talking of misreadings, I know that I've been spending too much time in front of the computer when I misread "Xmas" as "X-Emacs". Can't remember the context though.

You may be wonderin' why I'm going on about TV and such. Well, it's been blowing a gale outside today, and I don't feel like going out. The following arrived in the mail yesterday: Undergrads [Which, incidentally, also has the old two-sided unrequited love triangle going on, in the form of Jesse/Nitz/Kimmy - is this a complete cliche or what?], and Yes Prime Minister -- still not available in Region two, and as for any speculation about Bernard/Hacker/Appleby, let's snip that in the bud right there. The world really does not need any "Yes Minister" Slash fiction. (one hit on google and counting).

Talking of google, last night I was chatting to my source on the West Coast who joined recently, although I didn't get any info on how they were doing with their bits. Mostly, I was just scoping out the place for job prospects. I'll probably do the same tomorrow when I hang out in some google haunts in NY to see if they have anything going in their East Coast Branch. Perhaps I can be the one to fix google. I wouldn't hold your breath.

Anyway, chances are I'll be spending a large chunk of the next two weeks in front of my computer screen, as I desperately try to juggle a couple of submissions to SIGMOD. Damn those databse people, I should be finessing my CV and preparing to make a deluge of job applications. Oh well, that's what Thanksgiving is for, I suppose. Pedants might notice that the SIGMOD guidelines specifically instruct authors not to reveal their identies in their submissions, and also to avoid giving it away, by posting copies of their submissions on web pages and so on. Well, note that this non-blog is anonymous, with the exception that most people reading it know who I am, so technically I think I can get away with it.

That reminds me, servustats seems to have died completely and been domain napped by some dodgy set of redirecters. Don't click on the link, kids, and I'll see what I can do about finding a new search query catcher that won't crap out more than 50% of the time.

My million dollar idea - feel free to try it yourself. The idea is that you can make money by selling white earphones. You see, the only people who have white earphones at the moment are iPod owners. You see them all over the place [well, OK, you see them all over the place if you travel a lot in the New York subway], and they all look so smug with their little white earphones, the white wire disappearing discreetly into their pocket. Everyone thinks they are so cool. Well, if you sold white earphones, for about 10 of your local currency units at a time, then lots of people could pretend that they are cool iPod owners. It's probably really cheap to make these earphones, so you could make loads of money. Cool, huh?

You find some weird things if you spend too much time hanging around the US patent office -- like this one [if that doesn't work, then go to USPTO.gov and search for published application number 20030084594 ].

"She's a poet -- and she's unaware of the fact".

Easy crossword clue for the day.
Blair's story: destitute in the Hilton with jack... (4,3,3,2,5,3,6)

Dear Varsity, tell me, what is your opinion? Oh, I see -- you don't have one.

Someone recently asked me to suggest a good date movie. I suggested this. They were not all that impressed.

Asked if he collected any of the pictures in the press of him depicted as a vampire, Mr Howard joked: "Well, not yet." .

All together now: this must be some new definition of the word joke of which I was previously not aware.

Headline spotted in the local campus newspaper: "Election results will determing ruling party". No horsecrap, Holmes!

Mall stores are getting ever more specific: at the weekend I saw one catering for people who keep baby eagles -- it's called "Victoria's Egret".

Theatre group accused of bad taste for "It's Raining Men" sketch. Very bad taste indeed -- they're using the Geri Haliwell version.

Crossword clue, needs some work (mostly because the definition is wrong):

Polish religious figure should not be crossed (7)

More things that make this look too much like a real blog.

Land of the brave, home of the free. The country where it is fine to own guns, but writing fiction is a criminal offense.

I'm reminded of the story (told by James, I think), of the town where a gang of kids started squirting another gang with water pistols. The other gang took against this, so they came back with guns and started shooting the first group. In a considered response to this, the local authorities decided that the solution to the problem was to ban water pistols.

[Put like this, it sounds rather too much like a "hmm, it makes you think" style thought for the day, but I suppose if I had added that the town was in America, then it would have all made sense].

When [TV] Worlds collide.

Having Quentin Tarantino was cool, this seems a bit bizarre.

Wrong information is being given out on the internet:
google search for "search engine with no advertisements"

Sorry for the gap. Stuff to deal with.

anyway, bootlegging is dead. long live bootlegs!.

To the tune of "Oh no, not quail again", please add "Oh no, not a conference in Hong Kong again". But that's next year.

Regular readers will know that I believe that google is the answer to everything. Except that, recently, the question has been "Which high profile search engine that is shortly to have its IPO has been giving much lower quality answers lately?". There are very many clever but arbitrary theories out there as to why those page rankers have had so many rankings off lately (now try getting Jonathan Woss to say that...), but the most appealing (and the least likely) is given by arch hypocrites google watch. [Question: is it ironic that I had to use google to find their web page?].

The theory they have is roughly like this: google has run out of bits. They've been using 32 bits to represent unique page identifiers, and as they proudly announce on their front page, "billions and billions of burgers served". Sorry, I mean "3.4 billion pages indexed". When you add this to 500 million reserved identifiers (presumably actuall 2^29, which is... google calculator? 536 870 912, thank you. Anyway, this all adds up to something dangerously close the magic 4 billion limit of a 32bit identifier (the same reason you can't stuff more than 4Gb of memory in your 386DX, since you were wondering).

So, I have decided to start an appeal to help those poor googlers out. Send google your spare bits! Do you have any spare bits? Perhaps you are using some integers that are always positive, so you don't need a sign bit? Or maybe you are sending email in 7bit ASCII, so 1 bit in every byte is being wasted. Maybe you are running a 2 bit search engine that didn't anticipate how bit the internet would grow in the next five years? If so, you can help. Send your spare bits to bitappeal@google.com. Remember, every bit helps!

[My name is Andrew Orlowski, you've been a wonderful audience, thank you and good night!]

Crap lolly stick joke:
Q: When is a theatre clumsy?
A: When the curtain falls.

Write your own commentary, I can't be bothered.

Am I the only person to think that "Carnival of Love" by Texas sounds a lot like "Caravan of Love" by the Housemartins? Or is it just me? I'm listening to "Satellite of Love" by Lou Reed at the moment, which probably isn't helping.

Perhaps the word I'm thinking of is "scripopple", but that doesn't seem to be a word either. Oh well.

Evening all. I've recently been fiddling around with my computer setup. I'm typing this on my laptop that I have brought back from the dead with a replacement power supply. Fans of my ill-fated laptop will recall that the springs don't work, hence why I am crouched on the edge of the sofa while the laptop is propped up on a chair in front of me, with wires trailing from all directions. This is progress, since it allows me to watch repeats of the Late Show while I type this. Those campaign jokes about the california recall election just keep getting funnier and funnier.

Anyway, what else is up? I feel a little disconcerted, since I did a quick google search for "scribobble", to see how people defined the word, and I discover that there are no hits for it on google, nor even any on Teoma. How can this be? If scribobble isn't a word, then what word am I thinking of? And what does scribobble mean?

I mean, obviously, a scribobble is a doodle which has consists of loops in a circular pattern, much like a manual version of a spirograph pattern (spirograph: 31,500 hits on google; doodle: 1.5million), but that's only one meaning. I'm now deeply confused about who has stolen the other meanings of scribobble (not to be confused with scrobble: 185 hits on google, most of them to do with the scrobbler plug in for winamp).

Hey, Teoma now have a google-style toolbar searchy thing plug in. And you can also get one from altavista (yes, they are stil going). Which leads to the following challenge: how many search engine toolbars can you collect, and install on your computer? Can you install so many search engine toolbars that there is no more space left in your browser to read webpages? Just an idea.

Oh yes, I know: new lolly stick joke. But I'll keep you waiting for a little while longer.

Things you don't really expect to see: An ambulance driving down the road at high speed -- while "Song 2" by blur is playing loudly on the stereo.

You know, I didn't even imagine that ambulances had stereos, but I suppose there's no reason why they shouldn't have them, so quiet periods.

A few short things before I forget them.

1. An entry below appears twice. Not my fault. Can't be bothered to delete the duplicate.

2. The Angel in question is the Angel from DC. I'd link to her blog, but I... don't seem to be about to do so.

3. Boston is in Lincolnshire, not Lancashire. But I still like the coinage "Yankashire".

4. The correct answer was (a).

Now, some more user interactivity. How come I can get to sleep easily when it is raining outside and there is the sound of the rain falling, but not so easily when there is music playing but all I can hear is the drumbeat. Both are at the same volume, so why is the regular noise much more difficult to ignore than the random one? Answers on the back of an email to the regular address. To ensure prompt attention, please send your answers at 2am on Sunday morning EST (7am UK time), since this is the time when I receive least email and hence it is most likely to garner (jennifer) a response. cheers.

Lost in translation

It's taken me a while, but I'm gradually working out a correspondence between british snack foods and america. Contrary to some of the comments posted at snackspot, I do find the variety of snacks available here pretty disappointing. Mostly it's in the crisps department: the basic options here are Lays and Doritos. Doritos should be familiar to UK readers, and Lays seem to be the equivalent of Walker's crisps -- except that the flavours seem to be mostly mild variations on plain (ready salted), rather than any of the exotic Worcester Sauce, Ketchup or Prawn Cocktail variations. Things have improved moderately thanks to the introduction of Pringles. Another part of the problem is that they seem to have great difficulty understanding the notion of a serving of crisps. As everyone knows, crisps should come in units of 28g, and preferably in multi-pack bags of 6 or 12 for about a quid. Here, you pay four dollars and get about a kilo of Dorito-derivative tortilla-style "chips". The problem with this is that if you are not a complete glutton, then you can't get through very much of this before the whole thing has gone off, and you have to throw the remainder away.

Again, there are a few glimmers of hope, in the form of multibags of Doritos (although the bags seem just that little bit too small), and Pringles, which are resealable and so seem to keep for much longer. But this is missing the point. Where are the frazzles? The Monster munch? Nik Naks? Those salt and vinegar spirals that it's almost impossible to find anymore>?

It's almost enough to make me want to use one of those online food ordering things where you end up paying about a pound a packet just for privelege of some decent snacks. I'm telling you, the minute they make Mountain Dew available in the UK with the full caffeine blast, I'm going back to the homeland.

Anyway, I almost forgot why I started this, which is to complain how inferior the US version of the UK versions are. This mostly applies to chocolate. I pretty quickly picked up that 3 Musketeers is about the same as a UK Milky Way, while a US Milky Way is what we would call a mars bar. Apparently, there is also a mars bar around here somewhere, but I've never seen one. These are OK, but they again fall down on the whole size and price issue. In the UK, you can get a 4 or 5 back of decent size mars bars for around a quid (when they are on offer). Here, you pay a few dollars for 10 'fun size' mars bar equivalents, which you need to eat two at a time to feel remotely satisfied, and even then you feel cheated.

Mounds are like little bounties, but aren't as good. Twix also come in stupidly small sizes, and one finger at a time, which is missing the point. They have Kit-kats here as well, but I haven't eaten any, since I am still Boycotting Nestle Products. I did once try a Nestle Crunch here, which is a chocolate / rice crispie style product, kind of like a lion bar, only flat. That would have been OK, but I won't eat them either now. But the thing that really made my blood boil was "Whoppers". I bought a pack of these yesterday. They are "malted milk ball", covered in chocolate. Aha! I thought to myself -- these must be maltesers! So I bought a pack (nice packaging -- they are in what's basically a tetrapak which opens really easily because it does't have to be waterproof) expecting some melt in the mouth excitement. Well, was a I disappointed. They are almost the same thing, but they don't melt at in the same way -- you end up sucking them too hard and hurt your mouth. The honeycomb like structure is replaced by a much crunchier (almost like a Crunchy) interior, and then after most of it has gone you are left with a nasty gritty taste that sticks to your teeth. Nice one, Hershey foods -- you have taken a product of wonder and delight, and tainted it for ever. Thanks.

Now, continuing on from below, who is sending me all this email? Well, I decided to look at just the last log file that I took, which covers roughly the first 9 months of this year. This contained 7093 messages. After filtering out spam based on ignoring low frequency addresses, I was left with 4146 messages. 1779 of these came from mailing lists, most notably from the trivmiscers (you know who you are) who accounted for 988 in the period I was monitoring.

So, to break those figures down, they give a daily average of: 25.3 messages, of which 10.5 are spam. 3.5 are from trivmisc, which, after taking out other lists, leaves 8.4 real messages to deal with.

61% of mail addressed to me (removing spam and lists) is to do with my work. This is potentially depressing. More so may be that 20% of my mail comes from my boss, 13% from industrial researchers that I'm working with, 9% from students in a class, leaving roughly 16% from other sources. (that should add up to about 53%, but there is some rounding).

29% of my mail is personal, which is less than I might have imagined. 9% of my personal mail is from the loosely defined RDP conglomerate, for which I am greatly thankful. Another 20% comes from other assorted friends. That leaves the 10% of my mail which is to do with administrative matters. Which isn't so bad, I suppose.

Lastly, I'm sure you're all asking, on what days do I receive most mail? Well, it breaks down as follows. In total I recorded 33732 email messages. These were received as follows:
Mondays - 16%
Tuedays - 16%
Wednesdays - 18%
Thursdays - 21%
Fridays - 17%
Saturdays - 5%
Sundays - 5%
So, people send slightly more email on thursdays (or they spam more, I didn't bother with that breakdown). And there really is a slackening off at the weekend, perhaps the spammers take the weekend off. No real difference between saturdays and sundays.

Lastly, and I'm sure you're dying to know this, the time distribution of received emails.

  %

10.0                              ##              

9.75                              ##              

9.50                              ##              

9.25                              ##              

9.00                              ##              

8.75                              ##              

8.50                              ##              

8.25                              ##              

8.00                              ##              

7.75                              ##              

7.50                              ##              

7.25                            ####              

7.00                            ####              

6.75                            ####              

6.50                        ##  ######            

6.25                        ############          

6.00                      ##############          

5.75                      ################        

5.50                    ##################        

5.25                    ##################        

5.00                  ####################        

4.75                  ######################      

4.50                  ######################      

4.25                  ######################      

4.00                  ######################      

3.75                  ########################    

3.50                  ########################    

3.25                ##############################

3.00                ##############################

2.75                ##############################

2.50                ##############################

2.25##              ##############################

2.00##              ##############################

1.75##              ##############################

1.50####    ####  ################################

1.25##############################################

1.00##############################################

0.75##############################################

0.50##############################################

0.25##############################################

0.00##############################################

    0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2

    1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 2 3

Well, there you have it. Most email arrives between 3 and 4 in the afternoon. Makes you think, eh?

(Errors due to differences in local time, differing timezones, and such like, carefully and deliberately ignored).

OK, that's quite enough data mining for now.

OK, here is a refinement of the previous figure. It shows "real mail" as #s, and "spam" as *s. Clearly, I need a definition of spam for this to work. As a rough approximation, I'm counting any message for which I received only one message from that address as spam. Clearly that will include some non-spam, but it will also miss some spam where the spammer sends from the same address multiple times. A quick scan of which addresses this hits shows that it is pretty good, suggesting that whitelisting might be the way ahead.

1300                                                       

1250                                        *              

1200                                        *              

1150                                        *              

1100                          *             #             *

1050                          *             #             *

1000                          *             #             *

 950                          *           * #             *

 900                          *           **#             *

 850                          #           **#*            *

 800                          #           **#*        *   *

 750                          #           #*##       **  **

 700                          #           ####     **** ***

 650                          #           ####     **** ***

 600                       *  #*          ####*   ***** ***

 550                       *  #*   *      ####*   ***** **#

 500                   **  ** #*   *      #####*  *#**#***#

 450                  *#* *#* #** *#     *#####** *##*#*###

 400                  *## *#* ##***#   ***######***####*###

 350                  ###*###*##***#* ****######**#####*###

 300                  ###*###*##**##* *#**######**#########

 250                  ##########*#### ##*########*#########

 200* ##              ############### #####################

 150####**           *############### #####################

 100######           ################ #####################

  50######           ################ #####################

   0######           ################ #####################

    MAMJJASONDJFMAMJJASONDJFMAMJJASONDJFMAMJJASONDJFMAMJJAS

    1999      2000        2001        2002       2003

Now, this shows that I get a pretty good amount of real mail to spam, by this measure. The diagram is a little misleading, because of the rounding, but it's not too bad. Except that, for the last couple of months, the spam rate has been creeping towards 50%, having jumped to 550 spam messages in september, from an average of about 100 in last year. Of course, most of these seem to be coming from one of my accounts that is being forwarded and filtered into a folder, so maybe I should just switch this off.

Next up, an analysis of who is sending me real mail. I bet you can't wait.

Right, before you get on anything resembling a lofty equine, let me point out that this blog is for my benefit. Therefore, if I choose to use it as a convenient piece of scrap paper upon which to doodle, then I shall do.

I have spent the past twenty minutes playing around with Unix commands to analyse my procmail logs. The goals are roughly as follow -- to see how much email I get, who I get it from, and how much of it is spam.

If I could be bothered, then I would do all sorts of graphs. But I won't. Oh, OK then. This is a graph of how much email I received every month, since March 1999. Note certain gaps, for August 99 - July 2000, while my email was being delivered to another system, and another around December 2001, for no good reason I can think of.

1300                                                       

1250                                        #              

1200                                        #              

1150                                        #              

1100                          #             #             #

1050                          #             #             #

1000                          #             #             #

 950                          #           # #             #

 900                          #           ###             #

 850                          #           ####            #

 800                          #           ####        #   #

 750                          #           ####       ##  ##

 700                          #           ####     #### ###

 650                          #           ####     #### ###

 600                       #  ##          #####   ##### ###

 550                       #  ##   #      #####   ##### ###

 500                   ##  ## ##   #      ######  #########

 450                  ### ### ### ##     ######## #########

 400                  ### ### ######   ####################

 350                  ############### #####################

 300                  ############### #####################

 250                  ############### #####################

 200# ##              ############### #####################

 150######           ################ #####################

 100######           ################ #####################

  50######           ################ #####################

   0######           ################ #####################

    MAMJJASONDJFMAMJJASONDJFMAMJJASONDJFMAMJJASONDJFMAMJJAS

    1999      2000        2001        2002        2003

Some quick analysis: the data from 1999 is interesting because it shows how much my email has increased in the intervening years. In theory, the activity from 1999 should be relatively high, since I was quite bored at the time, and tended to email people a lot more than I do now. However, these charts are of incoming mail (can't be bothered to analyze outgoing, since it automatically gets sorted into folders, and I don't want to go digging around), and I think what this is mainly showing is how much spam I get. I will do some more poking around to figure out how much of this is spam. Almost certainly, more of this will follow...

Oh, how easily are they fooled:
Google search for laptopzforless

Oh, how easily are they fooled:
Google search for laptopzforless

Many happy returns

It's a year since I landed this side of the atlantic, and decided to make a small corner of suburban New Jersey my home. In that year, I have made many observations, collected many insights into life, culture, politics, religion, and the whole experience of living. And it is right that I should share these with you. But I won't. Because I can't be arsed.

Bah humbug to the lot of you.

Ah yes, I've remembered what it was that was so vitally important to mention, but I didn't. It came to me as I was clearing up the mess from the spilt wine. I want to make this clear, by the way, I sometimes have a little glass of wine in the evening. I'm not an alcoholic, just a small glass, it's supposed to be good for you. Anyway, I accidentally knocked the glass over -- a little clumsy, but not really my fault, it was probably just the effects of the bottle of whisky I downed to whet my palate -- but anyway. It's amazing what it takes to get me to finally clear up all the mass of papers on my desk, and in this case it was 100ml of cheap merlot threatening to take down the DSL modem if I didn't do something about it. Forunately, it turned out that the big stack of paperwork was mostly old drafts of stuff that I had been working on, so nothing important was lost. All this has absolutely nothing to do with this link, which is to a cartoon called The Ambiguously Gay Duo. I think it was pretty well known in the US, but I'd never heard of it before, so I thought you might appreciate it. It's kind of crass and monotonous, but that's how I like my humour. Find the movies on your favourite p2p network if the links on the page aren't working.

Right, I'm off to Boston for a few days. That's not Boston in Lancashire, but Boston in Yankashire. Hey, I should get my own county, I could call it Anchorshire. Or Hughfolk. Or something like that.

Anyway, thanks for everyone who wrote in with the correct answer to the lolly stick joke (it was (a), by the way). You win... the knowledge that you had nothing better to do with your time than to write in and tell me something that I already knew. Cheers.

I'm sure that there was something vitally important that I was going to write here, but I can't remember what it was. Such is life. It's been nearly a year since I crossed the ocean to Yankashire, so expect some stats on this later. And a challenge for any programmers out there: like some kind of anal-retentive freak, I keep all my email, and also all my procmail logs. I would like to bore everyone who reads this by doing some analysis of these logs, but I can't find anything that will analyze procmail logs. I guess what I want is something like those web analyzers, that tells you stuff like how many hits I got per day, who sent me the most messages, who sent the largest messages, that kind of stuff. Probably a whizz to do in Perl, and perhaps someone has already done it, but these days I'm getting too lazy to google, it's quicker to type queries in natural language on this thing and let someone else go out and look for the answers for you...

Talking of logs, I am well aware that the servustats site, which is doing my hit counting and search term scraping goes up and down like, as the phrase has it, a whore's yo-yo. Still, I prefer things that way, since it means that when my hit count seems pathetically low, I can just blame it on servustats being down. I probably miss the odd hilarious google search term that brought people here, but so what?

Also, since I'm too lazy to email people anymore, is the "Angel" who posted in the comments on the webpage about the Soup Dalek linked to in this week's NTK the Angel who knows Bex through DC? Because if so, then... actually, I can't think of any consequences if this is the case.

OK, in the absence of any real email stats, some made up stats.

This week I have:

• Won a total of $95million in 12 lotteries that I didn't enter (although I'm not supposed to tell anyone about it yet, since there are few technical issues to work out first)
  
• Been offered to help various relations of 23 deposed, murdered or naturally expired people shift a grand total of $135million dollars.
  
• Been told about about 7 boys whose parents found $10,000 dollars in their closet
  
• Been offered a variety of products, natural, unnatural and pump-based, which could enhance my manhood by a grand total of 4 foot 6.
  
• Had 3 secret admirers reveal their lust for me, if only I go to some dodgy website, enter my email address and download a dodgy .exe file which will try to get my modem to call a number in Ljubljana.
  

I think that covers everything. Ah yes, as jbs once said (but he doesn't have a weblog, so I can pinch his lines with near impunity), "Somewhere out there, there's some bloke with $25 million dollars sitting in a bank account that he can't shift, and he can't work out why".

And lastly, something I've been meaning to link to for an incredibly long time but never remembered to. From dave, who brought you "Lord of the Rings: an allegory of the PhD?", comes A New Kind of Scientist. It's number two on google for this phrase, but I don't know if that means anything.

Some people seem to enjoy the challenge involved in using products for a purpose that they were expressly not designed for. For example, people who use a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Or people who use nutcrackers to knock down a wall. Or people who use a top of the range high power personal computer as a pocket calculator.

Anyway, I know how they feel because today I have been using Microsoft Excel (Excel! Hah!) as something to produce graphs with. Which leads you to all kinds of questions, like who on earth is responsible for choosing the default colour scheme that the graphs come in when you make them? On what computer system, or printer, or anything, do those colours look anything like a sensible and reasonable choice? They look like some child has been let loose with crayons to make the graph. Worse, they look like a CGA palette, or something. Yeah, I'm sure that it's been fixed to be something less awful in Excel Fireball 2005 or whatever, but I'm stuck with Excel '95 as the only quasi-legal version that I have available to me, and it means that for every graph I make I have to spend about five minutes clicking on semi-visible icons in order to make it look like anything that I could seriously use.

Yeuch. I should just give up and figure out how to use gnuplot or something.

Businesses are great. I have a subscription to a magazine, which is almost done now. But, since they want to get as much money out of m as possible, unless I do something about it they will automatically renew the subscription and charge it to my credit card -- a trick in common with CD buying clubs and pornographic websites, I'm told. One thing that makes me more than usually suspicious is that on the renewal notice (at least there is a notice), there is no mention of how much the renewal will cost. So I call up the customer service people, and they don't know either. They ask me if I want to renew anyway, and I point out that I would rather like to know how much it costs before I choose what to do. I think I will cancel my subscription if they are unable to tell me how much renewing a subscription costs.

It's late, I'm tired, and I've been running experiments all evening, hence I've had the word "recall" drilled into me from all directions. The recall is the number of items correctly retrieved divided by the total number of items that could have been retrieved, by the way, and nothing to do with California. Although I'm still confused that the main democratic candidate appeared to be called Booze Cruiser Monty.

Anyway, some important news: a new lolly stick joke.

Q: Where should you put your TV?

Which rather seems to assume (or begs the question) that you have a TV. Well, fortunately, I do, and it's in the living room, so no real difficulty there. Except of course that this is a crap lolly stick joke, and so nothing is as simple as it could be. So, TV, what are the obvious weak pun opportunties there? Screen, picture, show, channel, remote control, volume, colour, contrast... nothing especially good. I tell you what, in the interest of producing some fake excitement, why don't you pick which of the following crap answers you think is the punchline to this joke, and then wait until I remember to tell you the answer, and then see if you were right. (If you are a big fan of website polls, then you can treat this as a poll. Go around and ask everyone else on the internet what they think, and then use that to make a percentage for each answer).

a) In a remote area
b) Behind a screen door
c) At the bottom of a channel
d) On the island of Jersey with a revolver and a fake bullet
e) In the library, with the lead piping
f) In the middle of a baseball field, because that's where people expect to see the picture.

That is all, you may go now.

Things that you hear other people say as you walk past them that really make you want to eavesdrop further and find out what the heck they are talking about only they are going in the opposite direction, so you can't exactly turn around and follow after them to hear the rest of the story, #2

"...got to get me some bitches..."

(contributed by our mildly synaesthetic Leicester correspondant)

Crossword clue of the day:

Carol King? (9)

I had a dream last night that I was in Central Park, and one of those horse-drawn carriages went past when the horse fell down on the road, and stopped moving.

Ah, but I shouldn't go on about it, I'm just blogging a dead horse.

Things that you hear other people say as you walk past them that really make you want to eavesdrop further and find out what the heck they are talking about only they are going in the opposite direction, so you can't exactly turn around and follow after them to hear the rest of the story, #1

"...forcing me to take cocaine..."

The first* rule of Google Adsense is: You don't talk about Google Adsense.

* Actually, looks like it's the 17th rule.

Cehck tihs out.

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht witnirg lkie tihs mkaes you seem to be an itilleatre cetrin who is too dman lzay to tkae the tmie and erofft to tpye crroeltcy.

Very tedious indeed. Still, on the bright side, there are now websites which automatically convert your carefully written and correctly spelt text into meaningless gibberish.

To me, this is all rather like saying "My error correcting code can detect and correct a large number of errors, so let's insert lots of spurious errors just to show off how good it is." Anyone who tries to use this observation as an excuse for their careless approach to grammar and spelling will receive no understanding from me.

There are just too many things wrong with this story and the way it has been reported for me to even begin...

Extremely tedious observations.

I've been listening to some mp3s (all taken from recordings that I own, before RIAA tries to sue me and my grandmother). I have approximately 400 of them, all in a big directory, and for variety, I use the "randomize order" function in Winamp to create an arbitrary permutation. It seemed like one song was going on for a long time, so I looked up to see what was going on. It turns out that the random ordering had put "The Saga Begins" by Weird Al next to "American Pie" by DonMcLean. What are the chances of that, then?

Well, about 1 in 200. And the probability of something like that happening are considerably lower, seeing as I also have:

a) A couple of rips of singles which have two or three remixes of the same song
b) A couple of duplicates due to differing naming conventions
c) About ten different versions of Hit Me Baby, One More Time

So there's bound to be a few coincidences along the way (or, with high probability...)

Putting all your music on a couple of DVD+Rs, though, that's really cool. Which reminds me...

Punchlines to jokes

Some punchlines to jokes involving animals. Supply your own feeds...

...but a talking frog -- that's really cool!

Here's that sick squid I owe you

Oh no, not quail again.

I'm a prawn again, Christian!

More fantastic science facts from those zany folks at the New Yorker:

"The letters 'H', 'L', 'I', and 'C' were sequentially projected in white against a black background in groups of ten. He scanned each group and was asked to identify the letters in order. The likelihood that he could do this by guessing was one in forty. Nine out of ten time, he scanned the sequence correctly."

Look, it's an easy mistake to make... 4 to the 10, 4 times 10... that's almost the same, isn't it?

I'm about to have a bath with Shaquille O'Neal and Kobe Bryant! This thanks to my local mall, which was having a sale of celebriducks of basketball players - these set me back all of 62c each in some bizarre multiple discounting event. Which just goes to verify my contention that there is a price for most things such that if they are below that price, I will buy them, even if I don't really need them [although in this case, I didn't have any rubber ducks before now]. You may try to express the previous sentence in First Order Predicate Logic if you so desire (FOPL, pronounced 'fopple'). Incidentally, Kobe squeaks if you squeeze his stomach, a fact that may be of use to the prosecution team, I don't know.

On the bus, I came up with some crap paypal jokes.

Q: Why do Paypal never make any mistakes?
A: Because of Paypal Infallibility

Q: What do you call a load of rubbish written about Paypal?
A: Paypal Bull.

and so on. You can go on for ages like this.

It's exactly eight years since I first went to University, which makes me feel very old and very nostalgic at the same time.

Good news everyone. AOL Time Warner Brothers (now simply known as "Oops") have obligigly provided me with a new free CD offering a million hours free on their network. This provides the opportunity to laugh at the surreal imagery conjured up by the passwords they list:

PING-SWAN: Which is a cruel trick to play if you ask me. Reminds me of The Story of Ping actually, which is famous for the reviews it has got on Amazon.

Actually, it also has the unintentionally hilarious review: "To avoid a little spank on the back...Ping...gets in what could be serious trouble. This is NOT a book about capital punishment: The spank is NOT a punishment; it's a reminder to Ping that you need to pay attention to what's going on around you and to try as hard as you can to do your best..." Remind me not to allow this reviewer to administer discipline to any children that I might be in posession of in the future.

Secondly, JADE-EXAM. Which is either a careful examination of a precious stone, or something that the Big Brother gynaecologist hoped that he would never have to do.

Words of the day:

pottery: small and mostly inconsequential acts, such as picking stuff up and moving it, or arranging files on a computer, which give the person doing them a small amount of satisfaction. Derived from "pottering about"

bibliotheism: belief system in which believers are convinces that they are characters in a novel. Consequently, they believe that many outside events are the works of an all-powerful and inscrutable author. They are wont to speculate on the exact genre of the novel they are in (comic, dramatic, romantic or satiric). Certain bibliotheists go further to speculate on the existence of critics who may analyze the plotting and characterization of the Author, probably negatively.

Also, people who eat meat for breakfast are weird. I know that it's surely far more natural to have meat than pieces of puffed cereals fashioned into the vague shape of cartoon characters, but I just think that these freaks who pile on great lumps of ham and sausage meat for breakfast are crazy. Is that so wrong?

My recent confusion about the meaning of the term "shorty" is not just mine, it would seem (thanks to Nick for this link). The term seems to have been in vogue for the last few years, but has only recently bubbled up into the sphere of popular culture that I monitor assiduously. Helpfully, its meanings seem to include separately: (i) Woman (ii) Man (iii) Child, which seems to have everything covered. With some websearching, the main meanings are (in decreasing order of popularity) Girlfriend; attractive woman; any woman; boyfriend; young child; short person; anyone at all. Well, at least it's all people (like Soylent Green).

Through all this confusion, there is of course but one definitive source, and that is of course Jonathan's TEEN LINGO dictionary (I think it came up on NTK or the reg a while ago, by the way), which has all the words the kids are using down the local clubs (youth clubs, that is). If, like me, you are a pastor with responsibility for keeping up with the younger elements, then this guide is absolutely invaluable for translating their slang ridden vocab into more understandable language. Finally cleared up the meaning of "hood rat" from 'I Wish' by Skee-lo for me after all these years, which was a blessing (hey, Skee-lo, if you do get the hood rats, well, that's better than nothing, surely?). Not to be confused with rugrats, of course.

Discovered in the course of researching this article - a new version of googlefight: NTK fight!
Klingon vs Jedi (the nerdy sci-fi references seem to be appropriate for NTK, y'see).

There was a tedious hidden camera show on the flight back yesterday, called "Just for Laughs -- the Gags" [this was the original canadian version, not the equally make UK remake, fact fans]. I was spared having to listen to it since I was sitting in a seat where the headset thingy was working (this presumably is what you get for trying to get the cheapest seat -- I'd say that airplane audio systems I've encountered have a failure rate of approximation 30% based on the flights I've taken). This didn't stop me seeing the really quite dull 'gags' and unfortunately I did have to listen to some cretin a few rows forward finding the whole thing hilarious.

In some ways I'd actually quite like to be the victim of one of these pranks, since then I could take great delight in getting angry with the unimaginative toads who put these things together, refuse to give my permission for the thing to be shown, and maybe even threaten legal action. There were quite a few set-ups in the show that I saw that seemed distinctly dodgy (a taxi with a back seat which threw the passengers around the cab? I would be wanting recompense for the danger that would put me in).

That gave me an idea for a sketch which, since I'm not currently engaged in scripting comedy sketch shows, you are welcome to use for yourself. Some particulalrly lame gag is played on a member of the public. Then the presenter walks on, and points out the hidden camera. The victim flies into a rage, screaming and shouting "how dare you do this to me?" and so on, for a couple of minutes. Then a second presenter walks on, explains to the victim that it was just a set up, and that the hidden camera show was just a fake, and then points out the second hidden camera. The member of the public pauses, then falls about laughing about he had been taken in and thought that it really was a hidden camera show playing a trick on him.

I find this hilarious, but in the same way that a large fraction of the dim-witted populace seems to find humour in hidden camera shows, I suspect that an equally large fraction would find the above unamusing. Perhaps it is. I refer the interested reader to the relevant sketch from "Not the Nine O'Clock News" parodying Game for a Laugh.