mememachine.net

Back From France!

Yes, we are back from cheese-eating-surrender-monkey land, and very lovely it was, too. Excellent, inexpensive food and wine; beautiful, peaceful countryside; excellent roads with virtually NO traffic, and so on and so forth. Of course, I imagined that after the much-vaunted SHOCK AND AWE of the genius strategist and moral bastion Rumsfeld that the war would be over, nasty Saddam would be dead, we would have found all the fabled caches of naughty weapons, the Iraqi populace would have fallen on their knees to thank their liberators, Bush and his cabal would be totally vindicated in their brave, moral decision to go it alone despite all those pussy peaceniks and eternal democracy, peace and love would have descended over the whole of the middle east region for now and all eternity, without any innocent civilians being harmed. I guess that was a bit optimistic.

I realise I am probably misguided and thus found it most instructive to read A Warmonger Explains War to a Peacenik. That cleared everything up for me.

Off to France!

We are off to France tomorrow, for a much-needed week-long break, during which time we will walk in the Cevennes, eat lots of good food, read lots of books, and keep an eye out for the famed national mascot, the common cheese-eating surrender monkey. We will also be keeping our fingers crossed…

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arms race?

Now that the war is started, I have BBC News 24 on in the background. I see that Iraqi Scud missiles were shot down by Patriot ‘anti-missile missiles’. I am relieved to know that the Iraqis do not have anti-‘anti-missile-missile’ missiles. That would just be too complicated…

where is raed?

Where is Raed? is a weblog from a young Iraqi in Baghdad. Hang in there, buddy…

lovely little motors

In the spirit of keeping my head down and working and pretending the end of the world isn’t nigh, I’m trying to build a website for a classic car broker friend in two days. Using standards-compliant CSS/XHTML, of course. Could you be a pal and have a look [ home page | car page] and see if (how) it breaks in your browser? Particularly if you are using Windows. I know it goes horribly pear-shaped in Safari. Any comments would be gratefully received.

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It’s War…

…and, incidentally, it is also my birthday, not that that seems particularly important right now. I do hope they manage to assassinate Saddam early on, but that might be wishful thinking. I’m 34, if you were wondering.

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It’s just not Cricket!

The Guardian cricket journalist loses the plot, hilariously. This seems to be what living in London (“one of the worlds’s worst cities”) does to intelligent, sensitive folk…heh.

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zooooom! ha ha ha!

Hey kids, I’m back on the information superhighway, at long last. The nice men from Telewest have just installed our broadband and it works a treat. Now I have to go out and buy a phone…if I can wrench myself away from this blistering 1Mb connection.

honk! honk! Motorvating in Surbiton!

Yesterday I had the great pleasure of going down to Surbiton to meet a very nice man named Jim Craig to see about doing a website for his Classic Car brokerage. Having bought Ashframe.com (coming soon!) and thrashed out what he wanted from the site we felt that it was only reasonable to go for a ride. Or two.

First off we went for a pub lunch in a 1968 drop-head (i.e. convertible) E-type Jaguar, Old English White, a 5-litre V12 engine and NO SILENCER! It was way cool, brain-stunningly loud and we received lots of admiring glances from sultry young fillies. More than just a car, it is a fanny magnet.

After lunch (Cumberland Sausages and mash) Jim had an even bigger treat lined up: we went for a little jaunt in an ultra-rare 1934 (I think) Alvis Speed Twenty! It was way cool, and we received lots of admiring glances from elderly ladies. More than just a car, it is an old dear magnet.

The Alvis is a joy to drive (apparently), particularly if you like challenge. After the byzantinely complex and involved startup procedure, which involves pushing, twisting and sliding various buttons, dials and levers, one must contend with the fact that the accelerator and brake pedals are transposed – not something to forget during and emergency stop. Allied to this is the fact that the Alvis weighs a hair short of two-and-a-half tons and has no power steering. Or wing mirrors.

As Jim pointed out, the car hails from an age when only rich people had cars and was thus essentially pre-traffic, so why would you need to see what is behind you? A vision which seems almost impossible in contemporary London. Anyway, we had a gay old time, pootling over to Sandown Park and back, if one can be said to pootle in a vehicle heavier than a Sherman Tank and longer than a barge. It was great fun, I must say. If you want to buy the Alvis, it is yours for a mere £42,000 (neg.) Contact Jim. The Jag is also for sale…

I also learned that Classic Cars can be gotten for extremely reasonable prices. For example, you should be able to get a VW Karmann Ghia, surely one of the most beautiful cars ever produced, for around £3,000. Which is what we paid for our 1993 VW Golf 1.4. Ho hum. I’m sure they are not reliable and a bugger to get parts for…

And finally, in the grand tradition of pissing around in Photoshop, I decided to make a spoof logo for Jim, which I thought reflected the timeless, understated elegance of the beasts-of-the-road in which he trades. And here it is:

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TV ad induces vomiting shock!

The new – and in my opinion rather splendid – Wrigley’s X-Cite TV advert which features a young man waking up after a night on the tiles with ‘dog-breath’ who proceeds to barf up, convincingly, a rather skanky looking mutt has been forced to move to a late timeslot after a record number of complaints from viewers. Many complained that it scared their children and some even said that the ad had actually made them blow chunks*.

My hat is off to the creative team behind this work of genius, flawless from concept through to execution. Heh.

* In Canada they have chocolate chip cookies which rejoice in the wonderful name “Chunks Ahoy!” I expect if you ate a whole packet this is what you could expect.

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fstr! enter the vortex!

I have recently noticed a rash of TV ads promoting ultra-convenient fast-products. Now, I know this isn’t a new trend, it just seems in danger of reaching ludicrous proportions. First it was microwave bacon, ready in less that a minute! (because normal bacon is sooo time-consuming). Then microsausages - in only sixty seconds! (which reminds me of Homer Simpson’s response upon being shown Moe’s new industrial cooker which can “flash fry a buffalo in forty seconds!” – “Oh, but I want it NOW!”

I believe I saw an ad for superfast hair dye, but I might have dreamed that one. And then last night we were introduced to Speed Murphy’s (a kind of stout, poor cousin to Guinness), obviously trying to garner some trade from all those busy folk who really just haven’t got time to wait around all day for their Guinness. Jaysus!

I suppose that last one makes sense given traditional British drinking culture – the more pints you can squeeze in before closing time, the more impressive it will be when you projectile vomit onto a statue at midnight. I expect some ambitious young graduate at a brewery somewhere is already working on a highly-pressurised can which will shotgun pissy, synthetic, ersatz* ‘lager’ down your throat so fast you won’t even realise that it tastes vile. And you will pay £5 a can for the exquisite novelty of such. If you happen to be a thick-necked halfwit in a designer shirt who frequents JD Wetherspoon’s fine drinking-and-fighting establishments. They (the brewery) could call it Vortex, or Cyclone, and watch the moolah roll in!

Now, this would seem like a satirical flight of fancy if they (Bass, I think…) hadn’t already unleashed that sub-zero crap with the ultrasonically produced ice-crystals (no, really) onto the market. In fact, I expect Vortex or its equivalent already exists…anyone care to confirm?

* It occurs to me that Ersatz would be a rather splendid name for a fake German (or maybe Czech) lager, which, according to ancient tradition would of course be brewed in Slough, shite beer capital of the UK. “Ersatz Pilsner, the echt-lager!”

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the coolest stud at MIT

I’ll let this one speak for itself: “I am the coolest stud at the MIT univeristy” [sic]. An invention which might stop the endemic phone crime muggings in London. Or you could just do what my wife does and stick with your ugly, but unattractive to thieves, Philips Savvy. Man, that is an ugly phone.

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swing a cat

Omigod, this ad [link to 2.3MB .avi file] for Nokia videophones is brilliant. Brilliant, I tell you! Mee-ouch! (pet-lovers: relax, it is faked, apparently).

[via boingboing]

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Moleskine

I just wanted to belatedly join the in-crowd in pledging my undying allegiance to Moleskine, finest of all notebook/journals. And what better to write, draw and doodle in it than my new favourite pen, the very wonderful Staedtler Mars Professional*? Yum. Seems quite a few bloggers are fond of their Moleskines, and I must say I am enjoying trying to get my handwriting back into shape after letting it atrophy dreadfully in the last few years. People used to comment on how nice it was, you know? Sigh…

* the designation ‘Professional’ generally bugs me in a product name, particularly when appended to a toothbrush. How many professional toothbrushers are out there? (Apart from in India, which is a law unto itself.) Dental hygienists don’t actually brush your teeth do they? As far as I recall, they use horrible needly jets of water. Personally, when it comes to toothbrushing, I consider myself a gifted amateur…only one cavity! (This may be due to my general avoidance of dentists, not through fear, you understand, just laziness. Maybe if I went a bit more often I would have fewer dreams about all my teeth falling out†).

† although that dream is apparently more to do with feelings of sexual inadequacy, so I’m told…Freud was full of poo.

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Veet? Veet?? Tweebs!!!

We learned the other day, from the telly, that the depilatory cream Immac is soon to be rebranded as Veet. Veet?? That is lame-o! I have a much better name: Tweebs. Said neologism coined through a cunning conflation of ‘tweeze’ and ‘pubes’. Genius, I’m sure you will agree?

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William Gibson alert!

Just a quick heads-up for fellow geeks to let you know that William ‘WG’ Gibson will be giving a reading of his new, eagerly anticipated novel Pattern Recognition (which is partly set in London, fact fans), at Foyles Bookshop on Thursday 24th April. Details here. I am so there…gotta get my totally skanky copy of Neuromancer signed, after all…I hope I don’t, like, faint, or something. Heh. Only joking, WG. (me and WG, we like that).

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Brand Schmand™

A while ago I was talking to a friend, who will remain nameless, who was, that very night, giving a talk on ‘online branding’ at the ICA. I enquired as to what he knew about online branding, to which he replied, with astonishing candour: ‘Branding Schmanding!’

Which led me inevitably to the notion that BrandSchmand™ is a most excellent naming for a branding agency. Or maybe a t-shirt design company. If anyone would like to form said company with me and make megabucks, do drop me a line, yeah? Or perhaps you would like to design a logo? Or even a way-cool animated logo? Knock yerself out! I will send a book on Corporate Identity to the best submission. No, really.

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three days to go!

Only three more days to wait until I have my very own internet connection again, and a ‘blistering’* 1Mb connection at that, thanks to those nice folks at Telewest and their Blueyonder service. I’ll never have to leave the house again! (Adrienne, if you are reading this, that was a joke. Honestly.) I am hoping – perhaps optimistically –that they will come and install it and I will be back online right away, thanks to OS X’s marvellous autoconfiguration features. Fingers crossed. After five months without my own connection, during which time I have had to scrounge other folks’ bandwidth and frequent cyber-cafes to check my email, it will be a blessed relief. And of course blog updates will resume with some sort of regularity. Lucky you!

If anyone is using Blueyonder and OS X, please let me know how you are getting on.

An aside: I do rather like the Telewest branding, all those concentric blue circles animated quite nicely…

* This Guardian article on broadband uptake in Japan puts things into perspective – over there they are introducing VDSL, which promises speeds of up to 52Mb per second! Which is frankly ridiculous and I want it.

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one of those days…/kids these days…

I thought my day was bad yesterday, but Adrienne managed to trump it. It was just one of those days, you know?

The morning started with two ‘technical support’ phone calls, helping out friends for whom I had installed Jaguar and configured networks, etc. Said configuration is actually easy as pie with Jaguar thanks to the miracles of Rendezvous, which pretty much does it all for you (sometimes I just love Apple). But! We had a bit of bother trying to explain how to do things differently in OS X than OS 9, particularly over the phone, where the slightest ambiguity in description can lead to enormous confusion. I know have deep sympathy for tech support people the world over, particularly after this snippet of conversation with the less technically-adept of the two friends:

friend: ‘we can’t seem to check our email!’

me: ‘which computer are you using? the new iMac or the old one?’

friend: ‘we have tried both’

me: ‘you can only get email on the old one at the moment (we don’t know the password yet), make sure the modem cable is plugged into that one’

friend: ‘which is the modem cable?’

me: ‘it has a squareish plastic end with a little springy clip on it. it should be in the back of the new iMac’

friend: ‘I can’t see it!’

me: ‘It should be plugged into the port with the little icon of a phone next to it’

friend: ‘What is an icon?’

me: ‘!!!’…‘It is a little picture, of a phone handset, with dots coming out of it’

friend: ‘Um…is it the headphones?’

me: …

– several minutes more of immensely frustrating dialog ommitted, you get the picture–

me: ‘look, maybe I should drive up to Cambridge and sort it out for you?’

friend: ‘Yes, that would be helpful. We aren’t really very technical here’

me: ‘…’

Luckily, I managed to get my very good friend Chris, who lives in Cambridge, to go sort it out for me. Bless him. They were apparently very impressed with his technical acumen. They are very nice people, I should point out…

Anyway, immediately after that I had an urgent call from my other friends, who have three macs networked together. They apparently couldn’t import their email into mail in OS X from outlook in OS 9. After spending several minutes trying to sort this out I had to give up. I have since found that this is a common problem. Sometimes I hate Apple. If anyone knows how to do this, I would be eternally grateful.

So, in a state of mild stress I went to my meeting, late. And then I got a parking ticket after said meeting, for being in a space about 10 minutes outside of the allotted timespan. I actually caught the warden in the act:

me: ‘Excuse me, I just went to buy some mushrooms, it’s only a few minutes outside the time limits, can you not let me off, I’m having a bad day?!’

Traffic Warden: ‘Sorry sir, the ticket is already printing, there is nothing I can do.’

Ah yes, of course. Oh well. So I drove home in a massive huff, not helped by the ever-present impatient London driver, who will honk you if you pause for more than a femto-second, for any reason whatsoever. Like, say, waiting for an old lady to totter across the road in front of you. In the logic of the impatient London driver, I should simply run said old lady down, rather than impeding him on his doubtless incredibly important journey to wherever…but I digress.

Got home, thought to myself ‘A nice vigorous run will calm me down’! So I went for a run, and promptly locked myself out of the house. I had to laugh. I went to a friend’s house, but they weren’t in, so I went for a run anyway. By the time I had finished, my friends were in and I was able to phone Adrienne to ask her to come home. I was feeling rather sorry for myself by this stage. Adrienne said she would be at our friend’s house in half an hour…

An hour later, she still hadn’t arrived and I was starting to get worried. She eventually turned up, looking rather shaken, and told me she had just been attacked while cycling home. By a group of nine or ten year old kids! They had shouted rude things at her and thrown a full can of beer at her, which hit her in the head, knocking her off her bike. Luckily she was wearing her helmet and there was no oncoming traffic, otherwise, well, I don’t want to think about the possible consequences. Adrienne being a take-no-shit kind of person confronted them and asked them what the hell they thought they were doing, at which one of them ran up and splashed her with the contents of his beer can. This is nine-year-olds we are talking about. What the hell is going on?

Adrienne said something rather uncomplimentary, but doubtless accurate, about their mothers’ obvious lack of parenting skills, at which they took umbrage and a larger kid who had appeared started to run at her, at which point Adrienne felt it expedient to flee the scene, and is luckily okay and unhurt. All of which puts my day into some kind of perspective, don’t you think?

So, what conclusions can be drawn? Firstly, don’t sweat the small stuff. Secondly, London is apparently populated by feral street kids, psychotically impatient drivers, overzealous traffic wardens, and is arguably a bit of a shitehole, really. Remind me why people live here again?