I just saw that I can get a refurb 17″ Powerbook with 1 gig RAM for the same price as a new 15″ Powerbook with 512 meg. Hmm. It only has 64 meg video card RAM rather than 128 though.

I have to decide whether to get this soon, or it’ll be snapped up.

Is 17″ too big? I could always use it as a surfboard. Ultimate portability’s not all that important since I’ll have the 12″ G3 iBook as well.

N.B. This morning, on the train, I sat down next to one person with an iPod. Across the aisle was another person with an iPod. I didn’t look specifically but I bumped into at least one other person with an iPod while disembarking. Tomorrow, I will do an iPod count, but the thing is officially Not Special Any More. It’s now just A Very Good Gadget.

Edit: I bought it. And an expensive bag made from ballistic nylon, with twenty pockets.

I’ve been a bit of an argumentative bastard all evening, but I’m quite glad I stepped out of the internet fight I’ve most recently been involved in, because I’ve just found out that a bottle of washing-up liquid in a plastic bag has leaked all over my duvet (and one pillow). Through the bag. What the fuck? The thing is basically ruined now, isn’t it? I also have nothing to sleep under tonight.

Given the complete pointlessness of the day before this incident I’m really not looking at life as a happy shower of sherbert and kittens. It’s half past two in the morning and I’m still awake, for a start, which should not be happening because some cunts will wake me up in four hours’ time moving bins around and I won’t be able to get back to sleep after that. Mostly, all I did today was sit in my apartment and drink, though I’ve not been what you would call “drunk” – more in a state that enabled me to watch the Hogan’s Heroes marathon without killing myself. Network TV requires alcohol and/or brain damage.

…oh, screw it. I could go on like this for ages but who cares? Who wants to read that? Basically

1. if this is what I can expect for the rest of my conscious existence then fuck it, I’m finding a different life right now
2. I hate everything, including you, but not, clearly, including penguins

I think I might blow up my apartment and start fights with Brad Pitt. Only thing is, there’s no gas in the place. Electric cooker. Bugger.

Chuck Palahniuk

“In my novel Choke, there’s a waiter who ruins the food of any customers who jerk him around,” he says, suddenly enthusiastic again. “He pees in the soup – that kind of thing. Last year, I was staying in [a very posh hotel here in London that we won't name for libel reasons] and, after a book event, one of the waiters said to me, ‘Yes, that’s totally true.’ So I asked him what the worst thing he had ever done was. He said, ‘No, no, I can’t tell you about that,’ but I insisted and, very quietly, he said, ‘Margaret Thatcher has eaten my sperm.’ I was just astonished, but he added, ‘At least five times.’” I would be prepared to bet that not even the late Denis Thatcher could make that claim.

rambling audio post (494K MP3)

Geek notes: I’ve been experimenting with lame and encoding at variable bitrates so this one doesn’t sound like shit.

“Help! Help! My computer’s doing weird things! You work with computers, right? Have I broken the internet?”

1. “Have you tried this, this and this? What exactly happens when you do this? This is what this error message means, so it’s trying to do this. Hmm… I can come round and take a look if you want.”
2. “Run AdAware, Spybot S&D, start using a firewall, stop using IE. Here are some URLs for those.”
3. “Just reinstall Windows.”
4. ~growls into pint~ “Fuck off and buy a Mac.”

It’s probably the first evening in a month where it is nicer outside than inside. Inside, my air conditioning is being particularly hamfisted – either I’m shivering or sweating. It smells of stale tobacco. Outside, the temperature is warm enough that you can wear a T-shirt but cool enough that you could walk forever. It’s the sort of night that you could imagine sleeping outside on, curling up by the riverbank. It smells of a dozen different restaurants at a time.

I’d put some washing on and had decided to go for a walk. I took a bag with me containing a book and a notepad (paper) in case I felt like having a quiet drink somewhere. That wasn’t going to be possible; it’s Wednesday, and things are just starting to wake up around now. Without English licencing laws to encourage you to hit the pub after work and drink continuously until 11pm, if you fancy a drink there’s no particular pressure. If you want to get drunk the option is always there to stay later, so you can take it as it comes, with the result that people don’t seem to get nearly as drunk and raucous and violent as I’m used to. This area is probably the equivalent of Hampstead or Clapham – you may sneer now – but even in those places I’m used to having a slightly higher alert level when passing a pub near chucking-out time. The presence of the odd police car, probably looking for traffic violations, may help this. Or maybe people are just nicer, or happier, or otherwise less in need of alcoholic oblivion.

This is not an area that you go to drown sorrows aggressively, which might explain why I’ve never felt entirely comfortable in any of the pubs here. It’s not that I like pubs full of red-nosed men downing whiskey and muttering, or beshirted wankers drinking Stella, trying to impress birds and each other and forget that tomorrow their job will be just as stupid, but if I’m going to be sitting in a pub on my own I like a little quiet and a little appreciation that I might not be there as part of the happy shiny people brigade. A place does not qualify as a “local” based purely on its closeness. This is a vastly complex piece of sociology and very hard to analyse from the inside, so I’m not expecting to be able to explain precisely what I mean here, but hopefully any UK readers will have a vague idea what I’m talking about.

I didn’t sit down anywhere and read my book, in the end. I would have liked to but nowhere I saw seemed right. I’ve just received a letter setting out all of the conditions for my leaving this apartment, and walking along and seeing furniture shops and nice, stylish places through random windows was like someone constantly whispering this isn’t your place, you’re not part of this, don’t try to get involved. It’s a flawed attitude, I know. Permanence should not affect whether you feel part of a place at all, you’re never permanently anywhere anyway, particularly in my situation, and you’re just preventing yourself from feeling comfortable.

I can’t help it, though. I’ve never been the most randomly outgoing person and I know that I’m leaving in a couple of months, so I feel like I’ll just be wasting my time getting involved in anything.

I have a feeling that this won’t be the last time I think this.

Why is it that people who are, in theory, “professional programmers” don’t seem to care about specifications at all, and assume that there’s no need to have the product bear any resemblance to the specs, comments, description, whatever you have?

Are they stupid? Have they never sworn at an ill-defined requirements document which doesn’t actually tell them what they have to do, and the author’s on holiday until after the deadline? Have they never had a client come back at the end of the project and say “oh no, it’s not supposed to be like that, do it all again”? Do they enjoy doing the same thing over and over again? Or do they think that what they do has no connection to this?

Listen. If you have written a program that does X, and give me a document that says it does Y, where X != Y, one of those is wrong. Code is not its own documentation, you irritating cock. Particularly when I don’t even have the original program, just the output. I don’t care whether you think it’s irrelevant, fix it or I’m not signing off on this, because some poor bastard is going to have to deal with your output data in the future and is going to waste time working out what the hell is going on. That poor bastard is, admittedly, not going to be me (I hope) but it will be some poor bastard in the same position as I am now, and I have more loyalty to them than to you.

God, programmers are such wankers.

Abortion is basically terrorism, you know.

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Alan Keyes said Monday that women who choose to undergo abortions and the physicians who perform the procedure are essentially terrorists because “the evil is the same.”

No, really, he said that, it’s not a distortion by the liberal media, and he said it as a clarification to something that he originally said in May.

“What distinguishes the terrorist from the ordinary warrior, is that the terrorist will consciously target innocent human life. What is done in the course of an abortion? . . . Someone consciously targets innocent human life.

“As I often point out to folks, the evil is the same. And that means, quite frankly, in fighting the war against terror, as I have often put it to audiences, the evil that we fight is but the shadow of the evil that we do.

It’s not so much that I’m surprised that someone would say these things. I’m not even really that surprised that the political climate in this country accepts them as reasonable things to say. I’m just disgusted, that’s all. Again.

Of course, Keyes is really being sort of rational, given his irrational premises that is. In fact, he’s not going far enough. If you believe that foetuses are directly ethically equivalent to human beings, and that abortion doctors are cackling and rubbing their hands at the thought of killing innocent babies (which many people seem to believe, or at least many stupid and/or delusional people) then abortion doctors are as bad as terrorists. If I believed that I wouldn’t be standing around waving foetus pictures outside clinics – hell, I’d be blowing them up. It would be like having the Final Solution going on right under your nose.

(I don’t believe that however and as far as I’m concerned there is no possible justification for believing such nonsense, apart from a stubborn refusal to engage the brain.)

If Keyes really believed that he wouldn’t be in the government, he’d be refusing to even countenance being part of a state that sanctioned mass murder. But I doubt that he does believe it, expecting more that he’s trying the Holier-Than-Thy-Political-Opponent position to garner the Dumb Christian vote, as well as making the usual Everything I Hate Is Terrorism statements. It’s terribly reassuring to be able to tie together all the things you dislike and simplify the world even more than the idiotic “terrorism” concept already does.

Oh, this is an interesting thing to say, too:

Keyes argues that women who claim they have rights over the fetuses in their bodies are akin to plantation owners claiming control over slaves because they are “property.”

Hmm. So if the government claims it has rights over the bodies of women, that’s not treating them as property at all?

It’s redundant to talk about this stuff, I know, but I felt the need to vent. I’ve had a hard day.

I rule the “penguins” category on Flickr.

Flickr is actually getting rather addictive.

It seems to be “Fridge Animal Weekend” at the moment, because I spent some time this afternoon following a fish. I know very little about fish but this one looked like some sort of carp – it was big, too, almost two feet long I’d say. It swam slowly along the canal, just below the surface with its back occasionally poking into the air, its mouth open. I walked along the canalside watching it as dogs and cyclists passed me by. I also saw several turtles but they seemed rather scared of me. Perhaps word has got round the turtle community that there’s some strange guy going around stealing souls. Or perhaps they were visiting their mistresses and didn’t want to be filmed. Turtles are terrible cheaters. Kick him to the bank, girlfriend!

However, I got no pictures as I had no camera with me. Well, that’s not entirely true. As usual, I had two cameras, but neither of them were high-res enough to steal a turtle’s soul.

Anyway, when you think about it, that fish was… no. It wasn’t a metaphor. It was a fish.

P.S. My remote, is.