So winter is finally here, as my good friend and collaborator Patrick Wray would say “Mother nature’s icy claw” has begun it’s chilling embrace. I know I’m walking straight into a cultural stereotype by talking about the weather, but like all good Englishmen I find it almost endlessly fascinating. Is it just me or do there seem to be too many leaves still on the trees? I’m not complaining, it just strikes me as a little odd. I always seem to be surprised by the onset of winter, and I have a disease that I just can’t seem to shake off. It’s nothing biological, more a behavioural malady. Whenever it begins to get cold all the clothes I buy are only suitable for the summer. Then when the temperature starts to rise again I begin to fetishize coats and scarves. I can’t tell if I’m just very slow to react, or incredibly well prepared, like those people who buy all their Christmas presents in the January sales. Either way, I’m cold.

I finally feel settled in my not-so-new home, in fact I really like Brixton. It’s a real pleasure to walk through the market and move between the walls of sound emanating from the different stalls. It’s taken a while, but I’m a bit of a homebody you see. If I was of a more mystical persuasion I’d ascribe this tendency to my star-sign being Cancer. We Cancarians are supposed to be stay-in types, and also have a tendency to horde. It’s funny the things we believe, especially when like me you don’t subscribe to any religion. I often find myself inventing little superstitions of my own, while simultaneously flouting the rules of more established ones. One such ‘rule’ is my belief that if I say out-loud “I haven’t been ill for a while”, I will become ill within the week. Do you think it counts if I write it down? Hope not. Anyway here’s an image to prove how happy our little family is in our new home, look at those smiles! By the way, I’m the one in the v-neck whose head looks far too big for his body.

I’m beginning to look forward to Christmas at last. If I’m honest I’d been kinda dreading it. I like the festive season, but I usually make the trip home to see my family for the day itself, and although it’s lovely to spend time with them, it can be a bit boring. I come from a very small village in Oxfordshire you see, and as I don’t drive it makes getting about a bit tricky. All of my friends who will likely be in the area live in other villages or towns nearby, and of course no buses run on Christmas Day, even Christmas Eve and Boxing Day are difficult. So I end up being rather stuck and just eating too much. This mild depression was lifted however when I saw some Christmas lights through the window of a flat near where I live. They were cheap and tacky, but they reminded me how great Christmas can be, and I imagined all the fun that family will have. I hope they have kids in that flat, and I hope it snows for them.

A note on the development of this site. I’m at last getting around to adding content to all those pretty menu options on the left. Currently I’m working on filling in the portfolio section, and the gallery is working ok on non-msie browsers. I’m quite pleased with the gallery actually. It’s totally over-the-top, and a massive waste of bandwidth, but it’s fun. There’s still a fair bit to do, but I’m getting there!

Well I should sign off, it’s quite late and I should be in bed. I’ve been waiting for the trailer for “Brokeback Mountain” to download but it aint happening. Oh well, I’ll have to be content with the promo images for now.

I’ve been following the story recently of the shooting of two female police officers in Bradford. Sadly one of the officers who was shot, Pc Sharon Beshenivsky, died in the incident. Of course this is horrific, Pc Beshenivsky was a mother of five and one cannot help but dwell on the fact that five children will now grow up without their mother. However, as disturbing as the incident itself is the reaction by the police force and the media. Let me explain…

The coverage of the shooting has been massive. On one hand this is a good thing, gun crime is still a shocking incident in the UK despite its increase in recent years and the interest in this story bears witness to that, on the flipside though, why does this murder deserve so much more coverage than the murder of a civilian? The reactions it has elicited from the police is quite extraordinary. Former Met Police chief Lord Stevens has gone as far as to call for the death penalty for people who murder police officers. We in the UK do not have the death penalty for any crime, correctly in my opinion, but if we were to ‘bring back hanging’ why would we introduce it to punish the murderers of police officers and not the murderers of civilians? I deplore the statement of Lord Stevens and believe it is the height of irresponsibility.

What I also find very cynical is how certain opportunistic groups inside and outside of the police force are using this tragedy in an attempt to advance their own case for the routine arming of our police. This must not be allowed to happen. It would be a betrayal of hundreds of years of tradition, and of some of our most dearly held beliefs about the nature of our nation. I believe we are living in an era of terrifying reactionism. This incident when placed alongside the ‘anti-terror’ legislation and ID card bill starts to paint a picture of a government, and a public, whose decision making process is based increasingly on the politics of fear and anger.

I just wanted to share with my (three?) readers a fabulous musical recommendation courtesy of my good friend and house-mate Peter Baker. Peter has a very wide and varied musical taste, as well as being a musician/singer/songwriter himself, check out his track on the Bjork covers album ‘Army Of Me’.

The recommendation of which I write is ‘The Milk-Eyed Mender’ by Joanna Newsom. It’s an absolutely beautiful collection of songs that are hard to describe. For me it’s something like a mix of Kristen Hersh, Isobel Campbell and, well I don’t know what really. All I know is that it makes me feel happy and sad at the same time, an uplifting melancholy that I’m a real sucker for.

Well it’s the Conservative Party (known here in the UK as Tories) Conference this week and all the prospective candidates for the leadership contest are plumping themselves up and showing off their feathers. Today was the turn of Satan David Davis and Dr Liam Fox (Dr. Fox? Seriously?). They’re both of the right-wing persuasion even for tories. Mr Davis is a big supporter of bringing back the death penalty (because it works so well in the US), of reversing the equalisation of the age of consent for gay people, and eating babies. Dr Fox is a big Europe-basher and would like nothing more than to pull the UK out of the EU, Dr Fox would also introduce compulsory organ donation to further his evil experiments into human-dog hybrids.

To learn more use the handy evil-o-meter I’ve made for you, or alternatively see what auntie beeb has to say about it all.

BBC Contender Round-Up

Just an ever so quick post this morning to say two things. Firstly I haven’t posted in an age, what a slacker! That’s because I’ve moved to old London town and have been a bit busy. Over the next few days I hope get my act together and start posting like a MUD player on speed, rather than the chess player on ketamine that I’ve been recently.

The second reason I’m posting is to implore my mac using friends to download Camino from the Mozilla Foundation. Camino is a Mozilla based web browser just like the now well known Firefox. However anyone whose used Firefox on Mac OS X will know that it’s not quite mac-like, it feels a bit clunky and slow. Camino however is made specifically for Mac and it’s a fantastic, powerful, and elegant web browser. If you’re on a Mac check it out, if you’re not, drool.

Camino - Mozilla power, Mac style.

mmmmm… men’s chocolate!

These arrived via my kind friend George who returned from Sydney via Tokyo recently.

I’m not quite sure what qualifies them to be named “men’s chocolate”, but they are quite nice. My flatmate Peter is telling me that google say’s that these man chocs come in other flavours too, including giant.

Someone send me some!

Well I recieved my first letter ever fro m The House of Commons yesterday. It was from my local MP Don Foster, who I’d written to about the latest insane proposal from the government for ID cards. It was very nice, and fro mwhat he’d written he had obviously read my letter so that me smile. I LOVE the headed paper and envelope, they have that yellow parchment colouring, very swish.

On a diferent note a big thanks go to my good friend George who turned me on to this Nouvelle Vague album called, Nouvelle Vague. It’s been popping up everywhere on TV ads, shows, and recently Glastonbury. So if you’ve not yet heard them, check it out, it’s the sound of the summer.

So Jaron has moved quickly (considering), and he’s blocked my IP, or he’s having problems with the site I’m not sure which and don’t have the time today to look into it.

Here is the hilarious and absurd message I get….

“Your IP address has been blocked — FOR A REASON!

I regret to inform you that for one reason or another, you violated my terms and conditions for accessing my site and therefore your IP address has been blocked. Blocked IPs can be reset automatically (after 30 days) or manually by me. The latter option rarely ever happens, so you might want to sit pretty for a little while more.

Also, please note: E-mailing will not help your cause, and for every 10 times you visit this site while blocked, the counter will reset back to 30 days. Of course, that’s me just being nice. For every 20 or more times you visit, your IP netblock owner will be determined and a complaint e-mail automatically despatched to the abuse e-mail contact on file.

NB: Don’t piss me off. Trust me.

Thanks for visiting, though, and I hope your access is restored soon.“

Now I’m no psychology graduate, but there’s some worrying clues about Jaron’s mental state in that text I think. Trust me.

The one, the only, Jaron Brass is back on the web. Of course this alone wouldn’t really be news, if it weren’t for his being up to the same old tricks.

Jase Wells has once again fallen victim to the old Brass, read about it at his blog.

For anyone who is unaware of the history feel freee to read up. Starting with the naive suspicions moving on to a full blown community investigation via the comments, and a bizarre ‘arrest’? (With Video!)

Identity, Why Do I care?

The Brass Report

So Tell Me This Mr Brass…

Where There’s Muck There’s Brass

Just a quick post today, I’m working on a few things at the moment so I’m quite busy, but not so busy that I didn’t get time to make this picture of Pier 39 (the one with the sea lions) in San Francisco. I’m using it for my desktop picture, why don’t you?

Download 1024×768

Download 1600×1200

Well I just got back from San Francisco yesterday. I planned to post to my blog everyday I was there, but unfortunately (or fortunately) I just had too much to do, and was enjoying myself far too much. I took far too few photographs, read not half of what I took with me, and didn’t shoot any video despite taking my video camera. Now I know this sounds bad, but I had lots of things to go to at WWDC in the day, and far too much to see of S.F. at night.

As luck would have it, the weekend before the conference was Pride 2004. It finished on the Sunday evening with 13 stages of entertainment. I had a really good time, and I think I must have walked 10 miles worth over the Sunday. I met some nice people, almost everyone seems friendly in San Francisco.

I’m sure I’ll post more about the trip, but for now I’ll just say that as nice as it is to be home, it was very nice to be in San Francisco too.

I just read an interesting article on the new browser war which contains a chilling prediction: “Make no mistake: Microsoft really hates the web… One of the purposes of Longhorn is to destroy the web as we know it”.

There’s a lot of talk around the web at the moment prompted by the news that Microsoft will no longer produce updates to their ubiquitous Internet Explorer (IE) web browser. At face value one could be forgiven for thinking that this is good news for the web and for anyone interested in seeing standards compliant browsers gain market share, there is however a more sinister story to be told. Microsoft’s decision to wait until the release of Longhorn (the next version of the Windows operating system) before updating IE could in fact be a terrible blow to the cause and to the freedom of the web.

If you don’t already know what’s so bad about IE, read on…

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