Year: 2008

(I’m sure they’ll have fixed it by the time you read this, but still…)

I wouldn’t normally be taking photographs in the gents toilets in a pub, but when I saw this on Saturday afternoon, well, I couldn’t resist.

I don’t know about you, but if there had been a point during the afternoon when I’d “required a no 2”, then there is no way in the world that I would have asked behind the bar so that they could escort me to the ladies…

On Monday I walked home past one of those Evening Standard headline boards that was yelling at me about “Black Monday”, and telling me that fifty odd billion had been wiped off global share prices. This was on a day when the FTSE had closed down about 300 points for the day. Yesterday the FTSE closed up about 200 points, and so far today it has continued to rise, and might even close marginally up on the week.

No doubt the Evening Standard’s crack team of headline writers are already stencilling in “Red Thursday/Friday” on tonight’s board. No?

I can also tell that the markets are having a bad day when I pop over to the BBC News website: if bad stuff is happening, then they move their MarketWatch tickers to the front page. When the markets recover, they quietly shift them back to the business pages…

I’m not for a minute suggesting that the global stock markets aren’t in a bad way (and who knows, maybe when the Americans wake up things will start heading in the other direction again and I’ll look like the fool for writing this) but I do wonder how much effect the relentless barrage of negative media coverage and prophecies of doom have. The fate of the markets being so much about sentiment after all, I do wonder how long it will be before those prophecies start to fulfil themselves…

There’s this pervasive and unpleasant sense of glee at the prospect that a recession might be on the way, which seems odd to me. Sure, all those people losing their jobs and houses certainly makes for a good way of filling your newspaper with juicy stories, but it’s not much good if no one has any money left to buy it, is it?

Much to Sal’s chagrin (she calls me “clicky” if I spend more than 20 minutes hunched over the laptop of an evening), I’ve been doing a bit of work on the site recently.

I’m really doing it for Sal’s benefit, as I’m anticipating a hypothetical period later this year when I might need to update the blog from internet cafes a bit so that people know what I’m up to, and so I’ve been adding some features in anticipation of that (mainly the ability to save half written drafts when I run out of time and/or money), but somehow Sal doesn’t quite see it that way…

Mostly, I’ve been taking the whole thing apart and putting it back together again, a bit like you might with a knackered washing machine. I have almost certainly broken something, or left a vital part on the kitchen floor somewhere, so if you work out what that broken or missing thing is, do let me know…

Much of the underlying code had hardly been touched for the 5 odd years that I’ve been blogging here, so this exercise has generally involved me roundly mocking the me of five years ago for being such an idiot, as I remove 20 odd lines of hack-y code and replace it with the one php function that already existed to accomplish the same thing. I’m sure the same thing will happen again when I look at the code again in a few years time and realise that the me of now was an idiot as well.

Anyway, while I’ve been doing this I’ve been mugging up on security issues like SQL injection and cross site scripting, and I found this cartoon, which made me laugh a bit more than it should have done.

Yeah, I know, I need to get out more…

As usual, I half-heartedly resolved that this year I might do a bit more writing than last, but somehow life sort of got in the way and it hasn’t really worked out so far. To be fair, I did spend the first two weeks of the year suffering with the same cold that everybody else has (although thankfully not the norovirus, yet) but it was still enough to have me confined to bed on my first sick day in four years.

It is going to be a big year, though, with no shortage of stuff to write about, but that probably means that I’ll spend most of it actually doing exciting things and not so much of it writing about them. Ah well, hopefully at the very least I won’t stop taking pointless photographs…

Last night we made a last minute decision to go out and do something, so eschewing the chance to queue up all day to see some band play, Sal and I instead picked up some extremely cheap tickets to see the West End revival of Patrick Marber’s Dealer’s Choice.

I’d thoroughly recommend it, even if you don’t know anything about poker (and we certainly don’t). Great performances all round, although thanks to the wonders of typecasting I’m not sure quite how credible Roger Lloyd Pack can ever be in a serious role. Our cheap tickets also ended up being so close to the front that we were almost on the stage–close enough to smell the coffee and close enough to see that the cards being turned over in the poker games in the second half of the play all matched the ones in the script, which must take some planning (they subtly switch packs for each hand, but still…)