Blue magnolia

So, I’ve been neglecting my blog. Badly.

But, I’m back for some shameless self-promotion. I have my very first video on YouTube. It’s a ‘fan video’ (as I understand the youngsters refer to them…) for my favourite tv programme, Supernatural, with music from my favourite singer, Billy Bragg. I’ve never made a video before and probably won’t ever again, but I just couldn’t get the combination of these scenes and this song out of my head. Had to share.

The song is Tank Park Salute, and it’s beautiful song that Billy wrote about the death of his father.

Leaving the copyright issues aside, I quite like Google Book Search.

Yesterday, I found a use for it that other brilliant librarians probably thought of ages ago, but I still feel smug for thinking of it too.

Here’s how it goes: working in a library, it’s not unusual to find pages that have fallen out of books lying around, and often there’s no way to find out which book they came from, except to stick them in a draw somewhere and wait until someone comes along and complains that the book they’re reading is missing a few.

But, now there is a way, isn’t there? Exact phrase search in Google books and bingo!, as they say.

Yes, I felt very smug indeed.

I’ve heard a lot of heated talk recently about which is more intuitive to use, a PC or a Mac. It’s fairly obvious that there are two sides in this argument, and I’m with those who think Macs win on this front, but that’s not what I’m here to argue about. What drives me mad is that the people who think Macs aren’t intuitive are people who think intuitive means working exactly like a PC.

Just because you know how to do something without thinking because you’ve spent you’re whole life using a PC and could navigate Windows in your sleep, it doesn’t mean you’re using your intuition.

The trouble is, learning is such an organic process that most of the time we don’t even know we’re doing it. Since I switched to a Mac two years ago, I have had to learn how to do things that Mac way. The thing is, once I’ve found out how to do something, I always want to shout, ‘Of course! Why didn’t I think of that? That’s so obvious!’ and then curse Windows for brainwashing me.

I’ve never looked back since moving to Macs (hey, that rhymed!) and don’t regret it for a minute. I’ve slowly unlearnt the clumsy PCness, and it’s liberating.

If there’s one thing that makes your heart sink reading applications for a library position, it’s the person who thinks telling you how much they love books will get them the job.

There are slight variations on this faux pas. Sometimes a love of literature is professed, which is just the same but a little pretentious, as well as smacking of ignorance unless you’re a *very* specialised library.

And why don’t people realise that if they tell you how much they like reading that’s exactly what you picture they’ll be doing all day?

Three things that amused me today:

1.  The person walking behind me as I hurried to buy tickets to Hot Fuzz (more about that tomorrow, maybe.  But see it.) who was on her mobile saying very loudly, “You’re such a liar!!!  Nobody serves roast potatoes with casserole!”

2.  The doctored sign on the bus that said, “Please give up this seat for a person in a whee chair.”  Sounds like fun. Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

3.  The thought that I can’t tag my blog posts with politics without adding government too.  That’s one for my fellow technical services librarians…

OK, there’s a fourth.  That over 200 people have signed my petition without me even trying.  I will be trying, but it’s good to know that people will stumble across it anyway.

The world’s been good today.

Wahaayyyy!!!! My petition to the Prime Minister about the BBC’s iMP (previously going by the name of iPlayer - some trademark trouble going on?) service has been approved, which is the most joyous thing that has happened all week.

Short recap: The BBC say that they provide ’services for everyone, free of commercial interests and political bias, yet they plan to launch an on-demand tv service which uses software that will only be available to Windows users.

Sign the petition now.

Curiously, six people have signed it even before I knew it was up there. I can only assume there are people around who just browse the petitions looking for ones they want to sign, which is an interesting pastime. The publicity the e-petitions site gained from the road charging petition fiasco can only be good, and goes to show what these things can do. Over a million people signed that petition (now closed); a thousand will do me.

I’d better start letting people know. Hello? Any mac users out there? Tell all your friends to tell all their friends to tell all their friends…

[Note: you can only sign the petition if you are a British citizen or are resident in the UK, which is a shame]

Apparently carbon offsetting is not all it’s cracked up to be. I’m saddened to hear this, because I care about the environment, but am obviously too much of a hypocrite to give up flying. This may change in the future, in the same way that my hypocritical status as an almost-vegetarian soon evolved into fully fledged no-fish-for-me vegetarian. Although… I still eat dairy products which are inextricably tied into the beef industry and slaughter of cute baby cows. So, still a hypocrite. Better get back to the point.

I thought my money to Climate Care was changing the world. Maybe it’s not neutralising my emissions (did I ever think it did?), but it’s got to be better than jumping on a plane and doing nothing about the guilt that that entails. Of course, not flying at all and still contributing to environmental projects would be better. Way better. But my life is a constant evolution towards being a better person and I haven’t got that far yet.

The government’s plans to bring standards into the offsetting industry has got to be the first step. Let’s make sure there are no cowboys in the business and ensure that people have the right information to be able to compare different schemes before we dismiss them altogether. Far from just ‘planting trees’ Climate Care’s schemes involve projects that actually reduce emissions, e.g. renewable energy projects in third world countries. Companies that take your money and plant a sapling in a field with it may be well intentioned (I’m being generous today), but they are taking advantage of a well formed idea in the popular imagination. Planting trees = good. Who didn’t learn at school that more trees equals less CO2? It’s an easy and oversimplified answer, but let’s not put all carbon offsetting schemes in the same bag.

Although, it is all becoming a bit of a gimmick.

The British Government has a brilliant e-petitions website, where anyone can go along and create a petition addressed to the Prime Minister. I was going to make this a post about having fun looking at the petitions that get rejected (’We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to sing “We’re Going To Hang Out The Washing On The Siegfried Line” through a megaphone while standing in a barrel of custard outside the Houses of Parliament’ is rejected for being ‘outside the remit or powers of the Prime Minister and Government’) but I’ve had a better idea. I’m here to tell you that I’ve submitted a petition regarding the BBC iMP Windows bias affair (see my previous post, Bill’s Broadcasting Corporation), with the following text:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to prevent the BBC from making its iPlayer on-demand television service available to Windows users only, and instruct the corporation to provide its service for other operating systems also.

The BBC plans to launch an on-demand tv service which uses software that will only be available to Windows users. The BBC should not be allowed to show commercial bias in this way, or to exclude certain groups of the population from using its services. The BBC say that they provide ’services for everyone, free of commercial interests and political bias’. Locking the new service’s users into Microsoft Windows whilst ignoring those members of society who use other operating systems should does not fit in with the BBC’s ethos and should not be allowed.

Now, somebody else could probably have put it more eloquently or politicky than me, but I got there first unfortunately. If the petition gets accepted I’ll be back to provide the link, so please check in again for news.

Much as I think it drains my very soul, I do, occassionally, watch tv. Television is sleeping for awake people; it’s what we do when we can’t be bothered to do anything else.

But the way we watch tv is changing. Forget digital tv, forget high definition , the real revolution is happening on the internet. It won’t be long (I’m not just using that as a figure of speech; it really won’t be) before we’re all watching programmes downloaded onto our hard drives while we sleep. This isn’t a long way off - it’s not even any way off. It’s already happening, albeit on a small and timid scale.

But now the BBC have announced a free internet service that will allow people to download many of their programmes onto their pc a week after they air on ‘real’ tv. This is the start of the revolution; this is where it really begins, with a giant broadcaster offering downloads of popular programmes without charge.

Pretty good, you think. How forward thinking and up with the times our national broadcasting organisation is. Then they tell you that you’ll need to download a free piece of proprietry software to watch the downloads, and once downloaded each programme will be available for thirty days. Fair enough, right? A decent compromise, really. Really? Well, it is if you use Windows.

Because only Windows users will be able to use the service. It’s bad enough that commerical organisations drool over the money the masses of pc users will throw at them whilst forgetting the mac minority, but I thought the BBC was better than that.

The BBC say they ‘provide a wide range of distinctive programmes and services for everyone, free of commercial interests and political bias’. I’m pretty sure that gifting microsoft an internet tv monopoly whilst preventing thousands of non Windows users from accessing the new service falls outwith that mission.

Impartiality has always been one of the cornerstones of the BBC’s ethos. I hope they remember that, and soon, because there are too many companies that I’ve lost all respect for, and I still quite like the BBC.

Snow in Christ Church Meadow, Oxford.

I have a few more serious ideas for posts rattling around in my drafts, but I can’t possibly write any of them now because I’m completely giddy with excitement at the prospect of snow.

The Met Office website creaked along all day under the strain before giving up completely, which goes to prove that I’m not the only giddy one… although I may have been a significant contributer to its demise, as well as driving my colleagues mad with my constant updates:

It’s going to snow tomorrow … Did you see it’s going to snow tomorrow? … The BBC says we’re getting six inches of snow … I’ll have to wear my Docs to work in the morning, it’s a health and safety issue … Has it started snowing yet? … It still says it’s going to snow tomorrow … Heavy snow … Look, they’re using the word ‘heavy’ … I’m so excited, it’s going to snow … Real snow … Proper snow, like when we were children … Oh no, I broke the Met Office website!

If you happen to live in a part of the world where winter brings snow every other day, please excuse how dull this post seems to you. I understand that, like most things, snow is only interesting when it’s unusual. I remember meeting two Chinese girls at University who were delirious about the prospect of a tiny flurry because they’d never seen snow before. We’d be dancing in the street at the first sign of rain if it only happened once in a blue moon. Snow is a lot like like rain, only whiter, colder, and so much prettier.

So, my camera’s ready in my coat pocket, my Docs are sitting by the door, and waiting for the snow to start is a bit like waiting for Santa Claus. I know I’m going to fall asleep eventually, and when I wake the magic will have happened.

So, this is my new home.

There were a few reasons that I decided to move over from Blogger to WordPress, but I can’t remember any of them at the moment. I think I just fancied a change, and a pretty new template.

Imagine my horror when, after creating my shiny new WordPress account, I discovered that WordPress’s Blogger import tool only worked with the old Blogger. I might have been less gutted, only I’d only just changed to the new Blogger during the inexplicable frenzy of template updating that ultimately led me over the the other side. Bugger.

But I persevered. I investigated complicated scripts that only computer programmers could possibly understand, and began to get a headache. I was determined though. I wanted a WordPress blog! I decided the only solution was to copy and paste. Every. Single. Post.

And that’s what I did. Title by title, post by post, label by label, date stamp by date stamp. I might have missed out a few boring posts towards the end there, but I did it. It was some feat, I tell you. And possibly the dullest, most tedious four hours I’ve ever spent.

I came here today to talk about the differences between Blogger and WordPress to help guide anyone else making the move. But before I started I noticed some news on my WordPress front page. New Blogger Importer, it says. New Blogger Importer. This truly is Sod’s Law in all its devious glory. But, without further ado, let the comparison begin, because nothing will bring back those painful, lost hours. Read the rest of this entry »

A while ago I reported with much excitement the new friends to be found under my kitchen sink - I got worms. It was with innocent green enthusiasm that I set up my little wormery, fed my composting buddies daily, and fed the ‘worm juice’ to my plants.

I’m sure you can sense the ‘but’ coming.

Sadly, my wormies died. I’m not completely sure what happened - they may have drowned because I didn’t empty liquid often enough. Alas, they just seemed to not be there any more. So my wormery composted what waste it already had slowly without worms for a while, survived a move to a new flat and has sat unattended under the sink for a few months.

Until yesterday. I cleaned it out in the bathroom (the joys of living in a flat), and was pleasantly surprised to find some good quality compost lurking at the bottom. It’s now set up ready and waiting for some new tiger worms to arrive in the post. Yes, in the post.

Is there anything you can’t buy on the internet?

Needless to say this time around the little things will be getting extra loving attention because I don’t want to feel like a failure again. More importantly, I want to report my amazing successes so that I can persuade other people to go out and get worms. Worms are great.

Pan’s Labyrinth was not the film I thought it was going to be. It wasn’t a fantasy-fest of amazing costumes, creepy characters and spooky lighting. It was sometimes those things, but it was so much more as well. It wasn’t another Labyrinth at all.

Ofelia is a young girl with a dead father, a sick mother and a murderous step father. The world she lives in is a constant struggle of misery and fear. So sinister fairies and a pale, hooved faun don’t scare her when they come beckoning - they are portends of another world she longs to escape to.

Unlike Labyrinth, a large proportion of the story takes place in the real world, where the Spanish civil war is barely over and guerillas are hiding in the hills. Only Ofelia knows the secret of what lies in the woods behind the makeshift army base that she is forced to call home. If she can complete the tasks the mysterious faun has given her, she will become a princess, the heir to a hidden kingdom with all the happiness that entails. Or will she?

Pan’s Labyrinth is a magical tale of hope and innocence. While everyone around her is preoccupied with death and violence, Ofelia perseveres for something better. The film is dark, brutal, but ultimately uplifting. A real original.

Where have all my comments gone? This must be my punishment for nelgecting my blog for three months.

I’ve been busy. I can now knit socks and play Ode to joy on classical guitar. Thought the blogging thing was gone for ever. I was wrong. Oooooooo, that was all a bit W.H. Auden.

Wish I could think of a ‘thing’ for this post. But I can’t. Oooooooo, that was all a bit Keith and Orville.

I think I’d better stop now, and come back when I’ve got something sensible to say. Ooooooo, that was all a bit….. No, really. Stop. Talking to myself now. Stop it. Stop. ‘Stop’ spells ‘pots’ backwards. Stop. .

Talk to George. He can be a bit daft, but he’s ok. It’s a bit like talking to a crazy person.

Is he meant to look like Richard O’Brien?

Judging by my last few posts you’d think my name ought to be Greennettle, not Bluenettle, as the environment seems to be my only inspiration at the moment. That’s no bad thing.

But Greennettle looks silly because it has an annoying double n in the middle and it’s plainly dull because nettles really are green. Whoever heard of a blue nettle? Exactly. I’m unique.

Maybe tomorrow I might think of a different theme. Today I’m going to tell you how to feel better about flying (did you know one flight to somewhere not that far away is the equivilant per passenger, pollution wise, of driving a Mini around the world ninety-ish times? I forget the details but it was on the front page of The Independent not that long ago) by “neutralising” your carbon emissions.

Climate Care will calculate your carbon dioxide emissions (not just from flying, but that’s where my guilt lies) and let you buy offsets which will go to fund sustainable energy projects to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by the same amount. There are other companies that offer similar things, but I liked Climate Care the best. You don’t get a fancy paper certificate like some companies offer (nice email tho), but that’s nothing to fret over. And it’s all so simple.

If you don’t know too much about this type of thing and think it’s probably expensive - it’s not (although Climate Care have a minimum purchase of £5). I don’t think it will be long before all airlines are offering offsets as a part of their ticket prices. Although I’m sure they’ll get an “administrative fee” in there as well, as always.

The Librarian in me loves Google’s new image labeler. I don’t care if I’m basically serving as cheap labour for an image labelling project, it’s fun an addictive and this post is going to be short so I can get back to it.

The idea is that you and one other person are shown the same image from the web. You both type in tags (or index terms in librarianspeak) that you think are suitable for the image, and when you have a matching tag, the image changes. This goes on for 90 seconds and you get points for each match. When the time is over, you can see your score, the top scores for the day, and a list of the top all time scorers. Note: you’ll need to sign up for a Google account if you want to appear in the lists as something more interesting than guest.

Sometimes it’s unbelievably frustrating, for a few reasons. The “game” doesn’t know what the image is; that’s the point - a large proportion of the images on the web appear to be really boring groups of people standing around having their photo taken, or worse company logos and the like. My screen is tiny and sometimes I can’t tell what the piccy is actually of. And sometimes you get paired with a complete idiot who doesn’t know what the moon looks like.

But I love it. Unfortunately I’ve spent so long writing this post that I have to go to work now and be a real Librarian. Hmmmph.

No sooner have supermarket giant Tesco announced that all of us loyal and environmentally friendly customers are going to be getting clubcard points for reusing bags (prompting inner cries of We’re not just doing it for the points, we always bring our own bags! from Bluenettle. Besides, what am I going to do with three clubcard points?), arch rivals Sainsbury’s announce they’re going to start using compostable packaging for their fruit and veg instead of plastic. Now, there’s nothing more annoying than finding there’s no loose tomatoes and having to take home a bunch of unecessary packing too, but at least now I can feed the packet to the worms.

Except I hate Sainsbury’s. I’m the exact opposite of a Sainsbury’s Snob. So I dearly hope Tesco will follow suit soon, as they surely will. This could be the new supermarket “war” - not petrol, not baked beans, but being nice to the environment.

The baked beans war was exciting though, wasn’t it? You arrived at the supermarket each week holding your breath to see how cheap the beans were. 1p! 1p for a tin of beans! The best bargain of all time. Some small teenie weenie chain that I completely forget the name of actually started paying their customers 1p to take a tin of beans away. With limitations, of course, which was a shame.

Back to the point, it’s a good state of affairs to be in when people are so concerned about taking care of the world that supermarket chains are using environmentally friendly ideas to woo customers. Or at least to keep the ones they’ve got.

Go and see Little Miss Sunshine. Now.

Never since I heart Huckabees have I felt so happy after seeing a film. Time and money well spent.

Here’s how to go to the cinema if you’re uninitiated in the film-going ways:

Arrive nice and early to buy your tickets, because you don’t want to miss out. While you’re waiting for the film to start, wander around the corner to Borders and sit on the floor in the knitting section. It doesn’t have to be knitting - whatever your current obssession, indulge it. At the alotted time saunter back to the cinema and pay close attention to the trailers, because you never know what’s coming up (currently liking the look of Children of men, Right at your door and The Queen. Enjoy the film. When it’s over, enjoy the sights and smells of a city centre late at night, dodge the crazy people and head for a quiet pub. Order a pint of real ale and discuss the film and anything else you fancy with your companion(s). Buy some chips from the kebab van while you’re waiting for the bus home if you must.

Write a blog post about it when you get in.

A few months ago I wrote a post about my gradual rise from murderous meat eater to hypocritical, fish eating, leather shoe wearing almost-vegetarian.

I am happy to report that since then I have graduated to real vegetarian with non-leather shoes and a couple of pairs of leather shoes that will be biting the dust as soon as they’re old and battered enough that getting rid of them isn’t incredibly environmentally unfriendly-ly wasteful. My cool brown retro Skechers are going to be replaced by this fantastic number from Vegetarian Shoes, who have already happily supplied me with my boring normal works shoes (I also considered buying their wacky clown shoes and wish I had, just to make people go Oooooo) and the best vegetarian walking boots in the world ever.

I also own a pair of vegan Earth Shoes (beware, not all of their range is vegan) that are a bit shiny red for me but I got for an absolute bargain price so I can’t complain. Good for the back apparently, but I’m too embarrassed by the redness to have worn them enough to notice. Also, the fact that the inverted heel is so low means that my trousers drag even more hopelessly along the floor than usual when I wear them. What can I say, I’m short. But I do love them, I love them a lot.

So, shoes. I wrote a post about shoes (which so isn’t what I was planning on writing about today). I have therefore also graduated, in a slightly longer period of time, from football obsessed tomboy to almost-girl, who still likes football quite a lot but has also taken up knitting and sometimes wears a top with flowers on it. Flowers.

So, you recycle your paper, tins and glass, maybe plastic if your local council are so inclined. You give your old clothes to Oxfam, or perhaps you take them to one of those big metal bins that say DO NOT ENTER on the giant flap, and wonder who is was that did. You probably send off your used printer cartridges for recycling, maybe your old mobile phones too (check out Envirophone, who will not only recycle your phone but pay you for the privilege… unless it’s really crap like my old Sony J5, in which case they’ll still take it, but you’ll get nowt. Either way, come to think of it, you’re probably better off selling on ebay, which is a kind of recycling when you think about it). Basically, you’re doing your bit and you feel pretty good about it.

Still, there’s probably one type of waste that you stick in the trash without even thinking about it: food. No matter how much you try not to be wasteful, sometimes your eyes are bigger than your belly and you end up with half a plate full of stir fry/omlette/stale chocolate cake that no one is ever going to eat. And even the best cooks leave behind skins and peelings and horrible hard bits on a daily basis. How can you get rid of this without filling up landfills and incinerators? One word: worms (unless you have a greedy dog. If you do, read on anyway).

I know, I know, you haven’t got room for a wormery, you haven’t got a garden. What if I told you you can keep a wormery indoors? Really, I didn’t know either. Still not sure you’ve got space? Small kitchen? My thoughts exactly, before I did a bit of research and discovered Original Organics’ Junior Wormery. Now I have worms worming away under my kitchen sink!

Here’s how it came together:

1. I surfed the net and bought the wormery online from Original Organics website. Because we were going to be away for a few days after its arrival, I chose to get the worms later by voucher (included in the price), but they’ll send with as well.

2. My boyfriend stayed at home to take delivery, and as promised it arrived the very next day.

3. I sent off the voucher when we were ready and waited for those worms.

4. I was worried the worms wouldn’t fit through our post box, but they just came in a fairly small, ordinary envelope (and a plastic pouch inside that). I wonder if the postman knew what he was carrying???

5. We set up the wormery as per the instructions (everything you need is included), and finally added the worms.

6. Wahey, wormery!

You have to slowly build up the amount of food you add, and after just a few weeks they really start getting through it. The Junior Wormery is only designed to cope with the waste of one person, but it does pretty well with the two of us. The worms are happy with just about anything that used to be alive, although meat is not a great idea, and too much citrus can make for an unhealthy wormery. But it’s not just for food - any organic waste can go in: garden waste, paper etc (how much obviously depends on the size of your wormery - our small one manages the odd kitchen towel, some bonsai clipping and the occasional handful of dead leaves). There’s very little maintanance involved, but you do have to sprinkle a handful of a special lime mix (also included) every few weeks to keep the pH in the right range.

So, what do you get out of it, except knowing you’re wasting less? Well, the best bit for most people is that after about two months you’ll be able to get “worm juice” from the tap. This is very rich fertilizer (and boy does it smell like fertilizer!) that can be diluted and used on your plants. The other thing you get after about eight to twelve months is a bin full of compost. (Do you get all of that from a greedy dog? Maybe in a slightly less useful form…) As we haven’t got a garden I’m not sure what we’ll we’re going to do with the compost yet, but we’ll cross that bridge blah de blah.

I really think a wormery under the sink is a fantastic idea, and I’m only sorry I didn’t know it was possible earlier. I really feel a whole lot greener. One question though: do you think our landlord would class worms as pets?

Want to find out what it’s like to be a Librarian? Visit LibraryThing and catalogue all your books. Copy catalogue that is. Don’t worry, it’s LibrarianSpeak.

Among other cool things you can do with their service if you so desire is create a widget for your blog to show people random books from your collection. I fooled the system to have it show only the one book that I’m reading now, which was very clever of me. I did this by only bothering to add one book to my account. Sneaky.

Tomorrow I get to catalogue things for real, and classify them too. Labels, lots of labels. Tidying. Chocolate biscuits (sorry, that should read no eating in the Library). Talking on the telephone to very odd people. Fixing the computers. Phoning the IT guys to ask them to come and fix the computers properly. Laughing at other people’s cataloguing errors. Finding missing books. Writing reports about missing books. Moving things. Writing incredibly informative leaflets and deciding what colour paper to print them out on. Delegating the photocopying and folding of leaflets to someone else. Organisation, that’s what it’s all about.

The trailers for The wicker man, a new remake of the 1973 British classic, looked promising.

I’ve never seen the original, so I’m completely out of my depth making comparisons, but I think I can say with some confidence that the 1973 version was better than this pile of incoherent codswallop. There are worse films than this remake for sure, but it must be hard to take a reasonable actor like Nicholas Cage, put him in a solid, sinister storyline and come up with a movie as dull and disjointed as this. I think I was meant to be scared, but only the usual horroresque slow, building strings playing in the background in every other scene could put me slightly on edge. Pavlov’s syndrome, maybe?

The obvious question is whether this remake was necessary at all. From what I hear, the original is pretty good - I added it to my LoveFilm list as soon as I got back from the cinema. I suppose that’s a plus point for the new film - it’s at least entertaining enough to show that the basic premises could make for a good story in the right hands. It’s just already been done.

If they wanted to make a glossy colour film, Americanised and all Hollywooded up to whet modern appetites, then my first instinct is to say think of something original. I’m not sure, however, that I can shout that out and mean it, because there are some old films that I think should be made new for a fresh audience (and me) to enjoy. I’d dearly dearly love to see a new version of To kill a mockingbird, great as the original is. Why? Because the film missed so many important things out of the book that I want an even better one that does it justice.

My conclusion must therefore be: remakes are fine if they’re an improvement on the original (and I would generally count an equally good version in colour as an improvement, with all apologies to those who would disagree), but pretty pointless if they’re worse.

The wicker man is very pointless.

I abandoned my blog, and I didn’t think I’d be back. For more than three hundred days, these pages have been alone, silent, and let’s face it, barely visited.

But then today, in a fit of nostalgia/boredom, I visited the lonely pages and read many (ok, all) of those old posts. Like rereading an old diary, I smiled, laughed, and cringed helplessly. Most importantly, I thought (with ten months of hindsight, of course) I’d actually done pretty well at the whole blogging thing, even if I was a bit scatter-brained to actually get a loyal following. You’ve got to have a theme to get on in the blog world, and I just don’t want to bore myself that much. But hey, who cares? I’ll write about anything and everything and hopefully win people over with my witty charm… Maybe not. How about some interesting stories, useful info and a little bit of self indulgent musing? Possibly more of the latter, let’s face it.

So much new is going on these days that I don’t know where to start, so I won’t. Except to mention the fandabidosy Performancing plug-in for Firefox, a sublime blog editor that may well have sealed the deal in my return to blogland.

Watch this space. Future topics may or may not include any of the following: Knitting, growing tomatoes, my shiny new flat, Ireland, vegetarianism, walking, a new job, films, jala neti, poetry, nonsensical ramblings, football (soccer), recycling, composting with worms…

In fact, I’m so excited about that last one that I just have to get in a little teaser: there are worms living under my kitchen sink! Trust me, this is a good thing

I’m not sure what there is to say about Google and their digitisation project, except do they think the rules don’t apply to them? I don’t think I’ve ever seen such blatant disregard for the law.

Whether or not Google intend only to make small portions of the texts available to users, they’re missing the point that the very act of making the unauthorised copy is illegal. Now they seem to think that out of print and out of copyright are the same thing.

Maybe I should start downloading pirated films from the internet. Using Google’s logic I could justify my actions by publishing a small amount of my illegal download on this website and claiming it was all good publicity for the film. I could announce it in press releases and make sure the whole world knew about it, and surely all the film companies would be falling over each other to thank me.

I used to have a great deal of respect for the way Google operated, but now they seem to be just another faceless corporation, bulldozing their way through the law and common decency in pursuit of money.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t equate illegality with immorality, and I don’t think copyright law is perfect, but it’s there and it’s there for a reason. Authors have a right to protect their work from exploitation, and to that end to be able to control who is authorised to make copies of it and for what purpose. Google need to acknowledge that authors have that right, if only because it’s the respectful thing to do.

It’s not about money. As far as I’m concerned, all they have to do is ask. Or is that too much effort?

My new found status as an almost-vegetarian was placed in jeopardy last night, when I may have accidentally consumed a small amount of something that in many ways resembled beef.

Who would have thought that the contents of a pastry slice labelled Spinich and Ricotta would in fact be a brown beefy sludge? It sure wasn’t cheese and there was nothing green about it. Someone at Sainsbury’s having a laugh?

If I didn’t so hate the litigious nature of modern society, I might put something here about suing the supermarket, but I do so I won’t. It reminds me of the time I bought donuts from Tesco, and the custard ones were filled with apple and the apple ones were filled with custard. I didn’t sleep for a week, I can tell you. If you can’t rely on the contents of your donut, what can you trust?

Back to the plot, I have decided to be less of a hypocrite and make the next pair of shoes I buy cow friendly. Vegetarian Shoes seem to be well made, stylish and generally free of dead animals, which is pretty much all I can ask for.

Random Billy Bragg quote (don’t sue me Billy):

I dreamed I saw a tree full of angels, up on Primrose Hill
And I flew with them over the Great Wen till I had seen my fill
Of such poverty and misery sure to tear my soul apart
I’ve got a socialism of the heart

And, goodnight.

I’m trying to cut down on internet use. No more evenings spent aimlessly surfing, no more reading the bbc pages exhaustively without actually gaining in knowledge because after five hours I’m kind of bleary eyed.

Blogging is allowed, because this is productive. I actually have to have my brain in gear to do this, even if it doesn’t seem like it sometimes. Sometimes it’s hard work to get the words down; sometimes the amount of time and effort that goes into writing and rewriting a post seems entirely under represented by the number of words that end up getting published. Sometimes I can spend half an hour staring at a blank screen and then give up. But at least I’m thinking.

Doing nothing makes me tired, and I won’t do it any more.

This evening I read a bit of Nineteen eighty-four, listened to Vin Garbutt and Billy Bragg (I’m loving Billy Bragg at the moment. £7.99 for a double cd? Bargain.), and thought a lot about doing yoga. All of those things require a degree of intellectual effort. I might have felt better if I’d actually done the yoga, but baby steps, baby baby steps.

You know those quizzes, those You know you’re a child of the eighties when… quizzes?

They invariably list a number of popular (children’s) culture icons from the said era, such as My little ponies (#My little pony… skinny and bony…#), He-man and Transformers. If you ever owned these, played with these, or fantasised about playing with these even though your parents were too stingy to actually buy you any, then you surely are a child of the eighties. I had fake Transformers and My little ponies from the charity shop, but I’m not complaining.

And He-man did have the power.

I’ve always known, thanks to these quizzes, that I am a child of the eighties. Well, thanks to the quizzes and the indisputable knowledge that I was born in 1979.

My status as such a privileged child was reinforced finally and indisputably today. There can be no doubt, if there ever was any, that I grew up in the decade of Button moon and Cabbage patch kids.

Today, I correctly identified the song Suddenly wafting through the drafty corridors as being the song that was played at Scott and Charlene’s wedding in 1987. #Suddenly, every part of me…#

If you don’t know who Scott and Charlene are, then you’re clearly not a child of the eighties, or else you live in a part of the world which is culturally barren. What sort of people have never seen that great Australian soap Neighbours? Making tea time interesting for the last twenty years.

If you do hail from such a poor deprived place, then you might be interested to know that tomboy Charlene was played by none other than Kylie Minogue. The show also launched the career of Russell Crowe, although nobody actually remembers him being in it.

Not even me, and I’m a child of the eighties.

There are reasons why two days is not long enough for the weekend, and these are they.

There’s two. The first is that Saturday is next to Friday, and the second is that Sunday is next to Monday. The whole weekend is contaminated by contact with the not-weekend.

Anybody remember Dinosaurs? Not the momma! Ahem. Where was I?

Ah yes, a three day weekend, that would be perfect. All that’s needed is one day in the middle and two days to act as a buffer zone on either side. One pure, pure day of nothing except relaxation and wine.

Now, I’m not necessarily asking for a four day working week here. I’ve no problem with working five days in a row. What I’m suggesting is that we get this extra day off by making the week eight days long, which is surely the perfect solution.

What’s that you’re saying about science and moon cycles and the solar system and stuff? I don’t understand. Or maybe I just can’t hear you.