Miscellaneous Blog

For those of you living in Manchester, there’s a blogmeet, organised (again) by Kate of  The Manchizzle

I’ve sorted things out for our blogmeet. Unfortunately Trof NQ couldn’t give us a dedicated space that would be big enough, but Centro can give us their whole basement area. Centro is on Tib Street towards the northern end heading away from the city centre.

We’ll be meeting there on Tuesday, March 10 from 7-9pm. Just come downstairs. They do very nice beers and drinks as well as coffees and non-alcoholic bevvies. They don’t do food as far as I know, so maybe grab something nearby (Hunters BBQ?) beforehand if you’re coming straight from work. I’ll bring the nametags.

I’ve missed the last couple of blogmeets due to clashes with holidays, gigs or just having the wrong date in my diary.  May see some of you there.

I’ve finally got fed up with the increasing levels of crud on MySpace, and decided to investigate Facebook after being prompted by Scott, along with semi-regular nagging from members the #Freaks crowd who had already abandoned MySpace in favour of it months ago.

Facebook does allow you to search for people before you actually sign up, and I found a whole load of people I know are already members.  Not just the same crowd that I had as friends on MySpace, but loads of past work colleagues, and members of my old gaming group who I’d really lost touch with since moving to Manchester.

So far I’ve got 36 friends in less that 24 hours since signing up, which doesn’t seem like bad going.  And that’s all people I know, either face-to-face or online, not random strangers.

I won’t be deleting my MySpace profile quite yet, but I can’t see myself spending much time on that site except to check band’s sites for song samples and gig dates.

Arriving at work this morning I met a work colleague who’d just stepped off the same train as me. He’d just got a mobile phone call from his boss saying the office was closed because of a fire.

The road outside the station was indeed filled with fire engines, but it turned out that the fire was at the pretentious wine bar next door. Although all the surrounding roads were still closed, including the main A34, the fire brigade allowed us through to our undamaged office. By that time they were damping down the embers, and there was no danger of it spreading to our building. (It’s the building you can see in the background of the photo)

Too early to speculate as to the cause, but the whole upper floor was completely burned out. It’s just four days after the grand opening, and there are mutterings about arson. Which is probably what you’d expect when the owner had recently done jail time for GBH.

Although I’d been in the building a few times under previous management when it was called “Brasingamens”, the refurbished establishment was not the sort of place I’d ever be likely to frequent. It was squarely aimed at the footballer’s wives market, and the only time we’d ever be likely to go there was to laugh at the prices (Eight quid for a glass of wine, so I hear). Perhaps they should rebuild it as a real ale pub with live music every Friday night.

At the moment I have to go all the way to Crewe for that sort of thing.

Update: BBC News is now reporting it as suspected arson. Which is pretty much what we all thought.

I’ve got a rather contentious comment thread on a five-week old post that I need to keep a lid on lest anyone goes thermonuclear on me.  So for the time being I’ve turned on comment moderation across the site, so every comment will have to be approved by me.

One everyone concerned has had the chance to have their say I’ll close that post to further comments, and turn moderation back off.   In the meantime, thank you in advance for your co-operation.

My grandmother, a keen gardener, used to describe slugs as “the Devil’s creatures”, after they’d eaten the seedlings she’d carfully planted yet again.

While I have no interest in gardening whatsoever, I’m beginning to wonder if she had a point. When I returned from holiday, the living room carpet was covered in slimy trails, when the wretched little things had been crawling all round the room in the two weeks I was away.

So I vacuumed the carpet. And the very next morning, there were a fresh set of trails.

There’s is no evidence of poltergeist activity, so I don’t believe it’s ectoplasm…

I’ve followed Carl Cravens over to the dark side, and set up a twitter account – my username is “Kalyr”.  Time will tell if it’s any use – depends how many people I know are on it.

Charlie Stross has been driven to this:

I’m seriously considering pitching a detective novel, about the hunt for a serial killer. The unique selling point will be that as the detective homes in on the killer, he gradually comes to sympathize with him, and ends up questioning whether he should actually collar the murderer … because the victims are all spammers.

As I’ve said before, there’s only one thing to do. Nuke Florida from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure. (Actually, Charlie’s plot summary sounds a little bit like the plot of Iain Banks’ Complicity)

I’m about to upgrade this blog from WordPress 2.1 to 2.3. That should explain any strangeness for the next hour or two…

Update: Seems to have worked so far.  No nasty-looking database errors, and it doesn’t seem to have eaten my theme.

As you’re proably noticed (unless of course you’re reading this via RSS), I’ve tweaked the layout of this blog a bit.  Not a complete new design, more a second attempt at what I was trying to achieve in the first place.  It now actually works properly in Internet Explorer (i.e it looks the same as it does in Firefox)

Let me know if it looks strange in any other browsers.

I’ve reinstated the coloured background rather than white, but I’m not totally sure about that.  What does anyone else think?