Dutch is beautiful. I can read it without knowing any.

Unintentionally hilarious headline: Marokkanen gooien homo in het water (Moroccans throw gay in the water).

I'm currently watching Fitna, and yes, it's most definitely for work.

I seem to have become addicted to posting 'microfiction' on Twitter. This must be how they get you sucked in. #Brains.

Question: Would you like, dislike or be indifferent to seeing my Twitter updates mirrored on my blog (probably in a single post per day from some tool like LoudTwitter)?

If I found a thing that would only collect and post updates that contained certain user-defined hashtags, I'd use that for sure.

---

I get my two week placement with FM&T soon. Looking forward to it. I think they want to keep me on for longer.

---

Seen a cool video that will interest Altivo and other fur-types.

That's randomly got me looking at paw glove tutorials on YouTube. I'm not a furry or fursuiter and don't have any interest in the whole full-body itchy-plastic-fuzz deal, but I would love a properly awesome pair of paw gloves with proper pads, like so (but Black Dog, or Grey Dog, instead of Red Fox).

I saw some leatherwork gloves that are nice-looking, but far too fetishy and immobile. I'm nervous about my manual dexterity or movement being impaired in any way. (The shoes are awesome, though.)

I suppose fingerless fursuit gloves would be object-defeatist. I do like my fingerless gloves, though. Shame it's too hot at the moment to wear them.

View the original post at Black Dog Blog

Guess I know what I'm doing this weekend after all; I'd forgotten until this morning (yay Outlook reminders!) that I'd agreed to help out with DrupalCampUK.

That also answers any questions I might've had about what to do this evening. That's right: get my V6 on and then see if I can get NodeProfile to do what I need it to... namely provide 'child profiles' for main profiles, call them 'character' and 'author' if you will, effectively allowing the author to post in-character. (You see? Everything I do, I do it for you...)

Am now itching for one of these. And a netbook to use it on. I do rather like being technology-lite, being naturally inclined to hold out until direct neural interfaces are available, but the drawbacks of being disconnected from the mothercloudwebnet in the meantime are starting to outweigh the benefits of not being mugged.

View the original post at Black Dog Blog

We've taken down our Ethics of Same-Sex Marriage section. Yes, I'm afraid it's already gone; I wrote the 410 redirect myself.

It was judged to be not high enough quality to be worth keeping and updating. Shame, but there you go.

BBC News provides coverage of the latest gay marriage news. Other news websites are available.

View the original post at Black Dog Blog

This morning we got a postcard from our former boss, who's just retired. Cool. (He is a ttl leg end. I bet SOP are frantic at losing him.)

118 118 man seen in Marmite

It may not be immediately obvious to everyone, but one family is convinced they can see the mascot of a directory enquiry service on the lid of a jar of Marmite.

Claire Allen, 36, said she was the first to notice the image on the underside of the lid as she was putting the yeast spread on her son's toast.

Her husband Gareth, 37, said he could not believe his eyes when he saw it.

Mr Allen, of Ystrad, Rhondda, said: "The kids are still eating it, but we kept the lid."

He explained: "Claire saw it first and called her dad to come and take a photo of it.

"When I first looked at it I wasn't sure, but when I moved it away from me it started coming out. I thought yeah, she's right - that's the moustache bloke from the adverts.

Mrs Allen told the South Wales Echo: "Straight away Jamie said "that looks like 118″, and my other boys (Robbie, four, and Tomas, 11) even said they could see a face.

"People might think I'm nuts, but I like to think it's 118 118 looking out for us.

"We've had a tough couple of months; my mum's been really ill and it's comforting to think that the jogging man from a commercial directory enquiries company advert is watching over us."

Read the original story here. Doesn't make much more sense than my parody, does it?

So I've been was agonising with colleagues about how this was ever considered to be 'news' within the BBC's remit to inform (no), educate (...no) and entertain (?).

Other text services are available, including AQA, which has sexy goffboi harlots working for it.

And now it's time for....

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Psalm or Marmite advert?

Marmite advertisements use the attention-grabbing tactic of claiming you may hate their product.

But are the following quotations prophecies from the psalms associated with Jesus, or adverts for the goopy black stuff? You decide!!!!

1. "More in number than the hairs of my head are those who hate me without cause"
2. "You either love it or hate it"
3. "All who hate me whisper together against me"

Marmite's next campaign: "For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household. Some of whom will eat peanut butter. Shun them. Shun them."

View the original post at Black Dog Blog

(Old news, actually, but I've only just come across it.)

Condom condom condom condom

At a wedding!

And no, the post tags are not lying. This was made by the WST. Now that's awesome.

View the original post at HellHound.net

Booya, Daily Wail. Pwned.

View the original post at HellHound.net

(My, what a tabloidy-sounding title.

(Firstly, the Outlook-centricness of this post is sadly unavoidable. That's just what they have at my workplace. For Thunderbird and Gmail, where we talk about coloured 'follow up' flags, feel free to substitute tags.)

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James Cridland has collated some useful tips from BBCers on how to deal with email. Worth a read if you're in any busy organisation and get flooded by work (and not-so-work) emails.

Follow-ups since James posted:

JF (person who originally asked for tips):
Thanks very much to all of you. Really helpful thoughts - for what it's worth, my top tips are below. I'd like to collate all these into some tips to share with colleagues - James, hopefully I can use your blog entry as a starting point for this. It will be interesting to see what else you get.

But first, how many people would love to be able to search your mail archive as easily as Gmail, or the internet more generally? It's amazing what I can find in my personal Gmail archive from six or seven years ago at a touch of a button. And it would save SO MUCH TIME at work, as well - say, looking for people who seemed good but weren't available last time I wanted to arrange an interview on a certain topic. Of course the Outlook search takes so long to find something, that I find I rarely bother, and never try using a second keyword when you don't find the item you were seeking first time around.
I've been lobbying various people for a Google Desktop, or Xobni (inbox search software) implementation for ages, but it all falls on deaf ears. Too expensive, too uncollegiate, and so on. But imagine what a treasure trove of useful ideas and information our inbox archives are! I know some people are allowed Google Desktop, restricted not to share outside the BBC, but someone, presumably at [the BBC's contract IT provider], has kiboshed any future users of this. Any ideas? I've even considered a petition...

Anyway, ever since realising a few months ago that I was spending half my life scrolling through my inbox trying to figure out what to do next, and constantly updating several handwritten to-do lists, I've developed a system that seems to work as a dynamic, constantly updated to-do list.

I use the principle of Delete it, Deal with it, or Delegate it. Sadly I don't really have anyone to delegate to, so I have to delete or deal with things. This is really nerdy I know, but every message on its way in that can't be knocked no the head immediately gets a coloured flag:

Red: urgent to do
Blue: less urgent to do
Yellow: something to hold until the issue is dealt with
Green: Generic stuff it's handy to be able to access in a second
Orange: ideas to present at meetings or to others
Purple: ideas to pursue if I ever get any time

The best thing about this is that you can sort by coloured flag, so you can see what needs doing in a second. You can email yourself, instead of keeping to-do lists, and if something becomes urgent, change the colour from blue to red.

You can also, on the flag button when an email is open, tell Outlook to give you a reminder at a certain date and time, so it handles deadlines nicely as well. Given all that, I still never seem to get below 200 items in the inbox, and that's not including all those yellow-flagged items which get stuck in a pending folder to go through whenever I get time.

I know it sounds complicated, but I reckon I manage to get a lot, lot more done that I used to. I don't seem to send many more emails (still around 1500 a month, unbelievably, or one every six minutes...), but this has helped focus my time immensely.

JF in reply to HB:
Sorry, one more thing - does anyone have any tips for part time people dealing with email? A lot of my colleagues are only in the office two or three days a week, so find an absolute barrage of material when they arrive back from a few days away - more than can realistically be dealt with, especially as they may have to be on air or producing a programme within half an hour.

HB in reply to JF:
Part-timers? First off, they should ask to be removed from all the distribution lists they can.

Some intelligent filters can help - for example, delete anything with *junk* or JUNK: in the title and anything marked as Low importance (look for "marked as importance" in Outlook's rule building wizard). Use colour rules too, to colour red anything with High importance or a deadline attached. (As a company we should encourage good email practice on the part of the sender, which would help with the previous two points.)

They should compose an intelligent Out of Office saying "I'm part time. Please re-address anything important to..." My Out of Office gives two different addresses: one in the internal address book for internal people and an external-facing address for others.

AW in reply to HB:
Personally, I want to be on MORE distribution lists. Quite useful sources of information most of the time!

HB in reply to AW:
Agreed - but I work here five days a week (and enjoy the general hum and occasional great idea from [our high-traffic internal mailing list] rather than find it annoying). If I only worked two or three days, I'd be drowning.

JF in reply to HB:
Really useful tips there H. Email etiquette is so important though - it's almost a separate topic. How many times have you sent an email to someone that was then forwarded to a group of 20, which would have been drafted more thoughtfully or slightly differently if the wider audience was the original intention? There's no malice intended I think, it's just one of those habits people have.

DH in reply to JF:
I don't know. Two of the things that make e-mail so powerful are the ease with which you can forward e-mails and the fact that it is so simple to send to multiple people. I can see that etiquette around forwarding needs to cover confidentiality, and possible offence, but if you start making rules about things not being drafted well, in a format that is mostly about speed and convenience, I think you're getting into baby and bathwater scenarios.

Finally, Jason in a comment to James's post adds: "Best tip I've heard is to set a rule to delete anything you're only CCed on. If it's important, then they should have sent it directly to you."

Use that last one if it works for you. Myself, I'm not CCed on things all that often, and when I am it tends to be things that are relevant to me (such as people discussing things they're going to ask me to fix when they decide on them).

View the original post at HellHound.net

We have a nifty new Hindu history section, put up last Friday. It's much better than the old.

It was written for us by a real professor. (And illustrated by me by courtesy of stock.xchng, Wikimedia Commons et al.)

View the original post at HellHound.net

I dreamed we were setting up a new board game, but I was tired and knew I wouldn't be able to take in the rules.

This dream confirms two things:

1. My Tuesday night activities are seeping into my subconscious,
2. I am feeling professionally insecure.

I also recall someone in the dream saying this was a cooperative game (i.e. "players against game", not "players against each other" - e.g. Pandemic), which tantalised me, because I've never played a co-op and would very much like to try one. If only to keep from inadvertently pwning Phil.

Currently reading: Women's Work for Weft. Just finished Elizabeth Bear's Dust, about which I hope to post more in future.

Currently wondering: if it makes sense for a hypothetical humanoid, pre-industrial silk-based economy to make some kind of toy that was a hybrid of spindle and yo-yo.

View the original post at HellHound.net

Um. OK, that was a little odd. I just got the strong urge to buy a mobi phone or other cheap camera so that I could start a Flickr blog of five-word food reviews.

I don't even eat that much bought/packaged food!

Can't even blame the water cooler for this one. (It's only 1.5 arm lengths from me, but I'm known to get crazy ideas during the couple of steps to it, which my brain appears to categorise as "my time" rather than "company time".) This one appeared while I was sitting at my desk eating a Sainsbury low-fat Moroccan butternut squash wrap.

Nice. Right side of spicy.

Can anyone reassure me that it's normal to be mobbed by low-flying ideas at any time of the day or night? (Either that or I'm turning into my mother...) Have you had many doozies while at work/at college/meant to be doing other things? Mine generally tend to be better subconsciously-thought-out than the whole tortilla photoblog thing...

View the original post at HellHound.net

Yes! I want to be a slush reader while I work on one or another of my embryonic novels. :D

(Actually, I like my current job a lot.)

View the original post at HellHound.net

So, on the downside, a total LEGEND is retiring. He's been the kind of overboss of my team since I've worked in Religion, boss of my immediate manager (I think; never been shown an actual map). And he's a great dude, esoteric, brilliant, equally at home converting philosophical texts to plain English and working around SQL Server's inanities. Would come into our office, back when we still worked physically in the Religion department, and ask us random ethical questions from whatever article he was writing. Great dude.

I'll miss him. On the plus side, I got to rifle through the skip(!) of books he's chucking out in preparation for leaving. Adoptees are sitting on my desk by the names of The World of the Polynesians, Dominion, The Art of Deception and On the Art of Writing Copy.

I also have a slim paperback named Geometric Patterns from Churches and Cathedrals, quite rightly wondering why I picked it up. If none of my artsy offliners wants it, I'll offer it to you lot.

Tomorrow there will be goodbye luncheons and drinkypoos and presents and speeches, which'll probably embarrass the poor sod. If I ever stop working here, there'll be very specific instructions...

View the original post at HellHound.net

Nice to be back at work.

Sad, I know! But when I'm off for extended periods I always seem to do nothing but sleep and don't get much creative work done. I need the routine.

View the original post at HellHound.net

Sometimes I think you're actually a 'Help' programme built into all BBC computers.

I mean that in a good way.

– a colleague in London who has never met me

This is not the first time someone has asked if I'm a virtual construct. Seriously. Welcome to my world Mister Anderson.

View the original post at HellHound.net

Make a list of 5 things you can see without getting up:

• Quiver trees (Aloe dichotoma) in Richtersveld National Park, South Africa (this picture), because I finally got bored of the ice floes and turned the calendar page over.
• Bob's Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, You Idiots, printed out and stuck to the divider thingy at the back of my desk.
• Ten unmatched jigsaw pieces that I collected one day by the railway level crossing out of joy that such things would be unexplainedly scattered there.
• A little bright green plastic windmill (like a cocktail toy or party favour), which is a Super Secret Symbol of Freedom. It stands up because I cunningly pushed the the wooden stick through the bottom of an inverted plastic cup and then fixed the bottom with some Blu-Tack. The spirit of Blue Peter permeates this organisation, I tell you.
• An article about an ex-Nasa scientist who does origami, cut out from a newspaper. I have yet to make the origami snail from the directions in there, but I will.

It seems my desk is more personalised than I realised. And more untidy.

How do you style your hair?
"Short back and sides, please". If you mean what do I do with it when I get up in the morning, I brush it. If you mean how do I dry it, I towel what I can and let mother nature do the rest.

What are you wearing now?
A buff-coloured collarless shirt with mud (see below) on the left sleeve. Black slacks and my black ankle boots, a little muddy for unrelated reasons. A black baseball cap with a C and two Bs on it, a solar-charged watch of which I'm rather fond, contact lenses and underwear. A neutral expression.

Who was the last person you said 'I Love You' to?
I don't think I've said that outside childhood.

Do you nap a lot?
Only in meetings. Er. I'm trying to cut back on that.

Who was the last person you hugged?
What constitutes a hug? Held in my arms, whispered endearments to and rubbed heads with? That was this morning. The somewhat violent endearments ("You stink and I'm going to kill you" - these pass for endearments in my case) were followed by "On reflection, this may have been a bad idea". The reason for this was that I'd just realised about the muddy pawprints all up my sleeve. I have to work in this shirt, damn you.

I don't think this qualifies as a hug, but I did get a lot of kisses and (cleaner) paws up my arm from a dog outside the pharmacy on the way to work. I don't know what it was - like a very large Staffie. I want one. Those blunt, flat-topped HEADS and that bad waggy TAIL.

What TV character would you most like to meet in real life?
IMDb lists nine television adaptations of The Hound of the Baskervilles, hey?

Other choices, hmm. Lassie. I'd like to buy Irene Adler a drink. Oh, and meeting either first-season Mohinder Suresh or Hiro Nakamura from Heroes would be likely to be fun. I could quiz Suresh on how he talks so much bollocks about genetics given that he's supposed to be a geneticist, and hear him splutter about it in that rather gorgeous voice of his (which I will steal some day, oh yes). And Nakamura, well, we both like waffles. Oh, I know! A couple of Pratchett novels have been adapted for TV, so: Death. And Gaspode.

What was the last thing you ate today?
Low fat houmous. Shut up.

What was the last text message you received?
No mobile phone, but I did get an AQA texted to my brother for a laugh, just in case Charly got the question. The answer claimed Hazz is the most handsome member of Miniluv and that he makes the ladies go wild, which - no offence to drummers anywhere - I find myself reluctant to believe without photographic evidence.

What websites do you always visit when you go online?
At home, obviously: Profusion, home of fantasy and scifi collaborative writing and roleplay, email (if I don't have Thunderbird open), Gmail (nicer interface than Thunderbird anyway), two LJ friends filters, pholph.com (because it's one of the few comics I read that doesn't have a feed, curse you Tet), usually Neopets, usually check Twine. I almost always use Google for something, too, and often Wikipedia, Darklyrics and reference.com. I have a few news feeds set up in Google Reader, but am never arsed checking them.

What was the last thing you bought?
Just been to Sainsbury to break my fast with carrot batons (they didn't have any mangetout. Pout), low fat houmous and Diet Coke with Citrus Flavour Aspartame. Yes, all right, extremely girly, no need to rub it in.

What are you listening to right now?
Office ambience. Drone of one male voice to my left-left-front, cackling female to my front right, tictac of my keyboard.

What's the last song that got stuck in your head?
Don't Fear the Reaper, Blue Öyster Cult, is playing right now. I don't know why, but it's guaranteed to be a hideous pun. My brain does that all the time. (And if I wasn't filling in this meme backwards as is my habit, it'd be Meat Loaf's Paradise by the Dashboard Light.)

If you could have any superpower, what would it be?
Teke, obviously. It's the granddaddy of all superpowers. For recreational purposes, shapeshifting, and teleporting would be useful too.

What is your favourite weather, and why?
For beauty's sake, light snow that doesn't settle (given that, beauty aside, I still have to walk to and from the station each day). To be out and about in, I'll settle for anything dry with moderate temperature. I love the wind in my face.

If you could play any musical instrument, which one would you play?
Electric bass is most likely. I don't really have a strong urge to play any instrument. Sing, perhaps, if only I had a deep enough voice.

How are you?
How? I just am; I don't have to try or anything! Epic!

What's something you'd like to say to someone right now?
I'd like to burst into a cheesy song from a musical at someone.

Your dream career?
I basically already have it, I think: something I do for money and leave at the office when I go home, ready to do my own thing with the rest of my time.

What's your favourite flavour of ice cream?
A few different Ben & Jerry's kinds - Cookie Dough, occasionally Phish Food (it's a bit rich), Caramel Chew Chew and Cherry Garcia (I think? cherry and dark chocolate bits)... well, I think I've liked all of theirs that I've tried. To avoid sounding like a B&J advert, I also like pistachio ice cream, and mint choc chip, and once had this very nummy melon flavour (yes, ice cream, not sorbet, quite weird). If anyone makes me this, I will immediately make you my wife.

View the original post at HellHound.net

Am coming off the diet after speaking to the GP today. I'm down to 79kg at the moment, which is 10kg better off than I was to begin with - even with a break for Christmas yumyums in the middle. So, nice, and I haven't given up hope of losing more: I plan to continue for a while with lots of green veg and protein as I was while on the sachets anyway.

I stopped because I can't wake up in the mornings, even after 8–9 hours of sleep, and can't stop myself falling asleep in meetings at work. I don't know what it is about meetings; it's not even hot or unventilated rooms. It seems to be when (certain?) voices are talking at length. It's rather embarrassing. Nobody says anything...

Although a couple of the girls at work, during the course of a conversation at someone's leaving drinks, mentioned that they'd noticed I'd been losing "a lot of weight". I guess people do notice, it's just that they don't feel comfortable mentioning it apropos of nothing. I sometimes wonder if I'm excessively forbidding without meaning to be.

I mean, I thought girls usually can't get enough talk about diets. *ducks and runs*

I'm also really weak and very cold. It's heartening that I can manage with one heavy duvet instead of two now, but my fingers and toes still hate me in the cold weather. Figures. It's not as though I've lost any weight from them, they've just always hated me.Yes, foolish human, we have and do. Soon our time will come.

Also talked to the GP about medication and gendaargh. I'm still on the meds because if I stop them I quickly become overwhelmed by such disasters as dropping a fork from the dishwasher or not having any cabbage, let alone going out to places or writing. We talked about trying a larger dose for a month. I really want that feeling back, the one I had during the 'honeymoon' period in the first month or so. I felt so much more like myself, and it was very much a rush of god to the head. (I wonder if that's how people feel on intoxicants... I can't imagine any other reason people'd ingest them.)

View the original post at HellHound.net

This is what happened at my workplace two nights ago. Apart from the game of Werewolf, that is.

These people have been outside for several nights, protesting peacefully, and on Tuesday they suddenly rushed into reception and did what you see here. All reasonably peaceful from what I could make out. Mainly a megaphone and a lot of shouting.

Still. Imagine being the one guy, alone, behind the reception desk at that point. You can see him in the first video. I spoke to him later. There was nothing he could do - too late to lock the doors, and he said the protesters were worked up enough that they'd have pried them apart anyhow. It's apparently not that difficult (thanks, that'll help me sleep better at night). The people in yellow jackets in the videos are the police, who had to be called to control the situation and eventually make the protesters leave.

I have every sympathy with the protesters' viewpoint. I quite liked seeing them outside every day, a sort of reminder that people give a stuff about something other than their credit card bills. But when they invade my place of work and won't go, the turnstiles and waist-high glass security banners I pass through every day start looking awfully flimsy. These protesters were not violent, but imagine if they had been. We have security personnel in the building, of course, but enough? Suffice it to say that I'm nervous now, in a way that bombs on tubes in London didn't manage.

Oh, and for the record, here's my prepared speech for anyone who has a go at me for either my employer's decision not to broadcast the charity appeal for Gaza or our wider coverage of the current violence there:

I imagine, not knowing from personal experience, that the hardest part of journalism must be what you can't report. The BBC has a duty to be impartial and a legal obligation not to say anything it can't prove to be true (you also have the latter). But if you think a building full of journalists doesn't have an extremely good idea what's really happening in Gaza, I think you're probably wrong.

I believe in being prepared. But I hope I won't be in any kind of situation that necessitates using it.

I no longer wear my BBC baseball cap on my journeys home. Just in case.

And I leave by another entrance.

View the original post at HellHound.net

To create a mailto: link to an email address that contains ampersands, like "bob&george@notadomain", escape the ampersand with %26 (mailto: links are URLs, after all) like so:

<a href="mailto:bob%26george@notadomain">bob&amp;george@notadomain</a>

(Problem courtesy of a problem I encountered in work today, answer courtesy of a quick Google.)

View the original post at HellHound.net