Tangential Ramblings

rickroll (v. tr.) [rik-rohl]: to post a link to a video that itself looks appealing, but which actually links to something dull like Rick Astley's hit single Never Gonna Give You Up.

My daughter mastered the art of multi-tasking this morning, combining the activities of having a bath and having a shit.

Not pleasant; but very impressive.

I saw a TV advert this evening for Woolite, a liquid for washing machines that prevents ruination of your clothes in the wash. But wait: it's not your average washing liquid. It's not a detergent; it's a safe-tergent.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it's a safe-tergent. You most definitely heard it here first. What a dreadful strapline; which dreadful copywriter came up with it; and which member of the client organisation accepted it?

Good luck, Karen. Thoughts are with you for today.

Some time ago, I started using GMail as my mail client. The only way I could do this without changing my email address (me@domain.com) was to auto-forward all email to me@domain.com to me.domain@gmail.com. I could then configure GMail to respond from my me@domain.com account, but it did this by putting "From me@domain.com on behalf of me.domain@gmail.com" at the top of each email. Rubbish.

Recently, Google Apps enhanced its functionality to allow you to direct your MX records directly at its servers, and for it to control your domain's email address. So now, me@domain.com can be accessed directly through GMail. And I can even change the GMail logo to my own domain logo. No reference to GMail apart from a google url and a "Powered by Google" footer, accompanied by a diddy logo. Fabulous!

Now I need to figure out how to migrate all my me.domain@gmail.com mail to me@domain.com. It's no mean feat, by all accounts.

I don't think Virginia Hayward will be particularly happy with the typo in her name in Ocado's recent marketing email, nor on their associated product page.

Luxury indeed.

In circumstances where a football team only needs to secure a draw, I've often thought about a scenario in which, immediately after the kick-off, the eleven players rush back to their own goal and arrange themselves on the plane of the goalmouth ready to defend the pounding that the opposing team will administer to them for the next 45 minutes. After a brief respite for oranges and to ice the bruising caused by the ball's (and indeed balls') battering, they'd be back out for 45 further minutes of the same.

I nervously aired this idea in the office the other day, given the impending such fixture that England faces against Croatia tomorrow. It turns out that a colleague had often shared these very thoughts. He probably hasn't analysed it to the extend detailed below.

The goalmouth is 7.32m wide and 2.44m high. There would be seven players lined up on the goal line, each responsible for defending a goal width of 1.05 metres. With 42 inch waists, and assuming they're rotund enough for their depth (fatness) to be equal to their width, then they would be 0.34cm wide, so they'd have to shuffle left and right to defend the ball from going through the gaps in between them. This wouldn't be as difficult as it might sound, as with the ball being 70cm 22cm wide, the defenders (as this is what they would all be deemed) would only have to shuffle 18cm 41cm either way to close the gap sufficiently to prevent the ball from going through.

Ah, I hear you say, why doesn't the opposition score by lifting the ball over the seven defenders' heads? This is where the other four players come in. These four players would lie atop the heads of their seven colleagues, two on the left atop one another and two on the right, again atop one another.

===== =====
| | | | | | |

Like so.

Assuming their seven floor-standing colleagues were 1.85 metres tall (6'1"), then the four airborne players would only need to be 29cm wide, or 36" round to cover the area up to the cross-bar. All of Peter Crouch's height, there would be a 3.3 metre gap between the heads of the left and right airborne players, which would be defended in each of three ways:

• By one of these players being a goalkeeper
• By having an extra tall player in the middle of the seven floorstanders
• By the aforementioned lateral shifting.of the seven floorstanders.

The alternative would be to place the goalkeeper in the middle of the seven, using his height and hands to defend that middle area.

So tomorrow, England will be playing in the 11 formation (as opposed to their regular 4-4-2) to secure the draw they need to qualify for Euro 2008. I'd be surprised if McLaren risked any other strategy.

My bus journey to work affords me the time to catch up on my subscription feeds using Google Reader from my mobile phone. The interface is specially tailored for the mobile screen, and being above ground means that I can download a whole bunch of stuff as I go, and read it along the way.

The first post I happened upon this morning was from Stephen Fry's wonderful blog. It was also the article I was reading when I arrived at work. The last third remained unread.

It was certainly an enjoyable read. But it was incredibly long. 5,611 words in total, spanning eleven pages of the Word document I've just pasted it into, the purpose of this exercise being to count the words. I was quite impressed with the length of my, er, post last night, but its 614 words pale into insignificance when put alongside Fry's interminable rants. (They were primarily rants in this instance; and I use the word interminable to mean seemingly without end, without casting negative judgment on the associated content. I smiled and laughed out loud on numerous occasions, much to the bemusement, and possibly fear, of my fellow passengers.)

So Fry: that I can get through the rest of my subscriptions on the 40 minute journey to work, please try and curb your enthusiasm and keep the posts a little shorter, there's a good chap.

And the rest of you: subscribe to Fry's blog. It's a joy to behold.

Today, Amazon launched their new product: Kindle. And what a bag of bollocks it appears to be.

First, a summary. Kindle is a portable device that allows you to download the text of books and read them on the go. It is capable of storing over 200 books, weighs in at 292 grams—compared to an iPhone's 135 grams—and measures 19cm by 13.5cm, very similar dimensions to your standard paperback fiction book. And it's a mere 1.8cm thick. The cost: $399 (£195 and falling, not that it'll be available in the UK).

So, it's small in size, relatively big in storage, and light. It's not cheap, but not crazily expensive.

Now to its drawbacks.

The first obvious one is that it's about as proprietary as you can get.

• Books are downloaded over a bespoke wireless network—Amazon Whispernet, built on a Spring mobile network. Maybe this is a great idea for Amazon, allowing it to safeguard revenue streams, but it strikes me as a bizarre choice for the user, given the wireless they already no doubt have at home, and the increasingly fast connection that comes with their mobile phone
• Blogs can be read on it, but not via your industry-standard RSS. It uses its own bespoke Kindle file format, so blog owners that their content to be accessible need to do some work to make their content available in that format. WTF?
• And each device comes with its own email address. Fabulous. Just what I need: another email address. Only by sending pdfs and docs to this email address can such documents be accessed on the device.

The screen is not backlit which allows the battery to last for 30 hours; but not having the option for backlighting is a big weakness. Its screen has a good resolution enabling beautiful font display, but don't expect a reaction when you touch it. A touch-screen it ain't, despite this becoming an expectation of portable devices during the three years since Kindle was on the drawing board.

This is primarily a reading device, so why it has a fully-functioning QWERTY keyboard I have no idea. (Further, why the keys are angled to suit the few true touch-typists among us beggars belief.) It would have been much more appealing to save the space (or make the screen bigger), and incorporate a touch-screen keyboard into its, er, touch-screen. And even the keyboard itself is bespoke. Its only symbols seem to be forward slash, @ and the full-stop/period.

And get this: it's black and white. Actually, it's capable of four shades of grey, 15,999,996 fewer colours than the iPhone.

All in all, it's weak. Maybe it's competing in an entirely different market to that in which other portable devices sit—aiming at the book reader rather than the technophile—but nonetheless, these people are likely to be familiar with mobile devices and functionally-rich keyboards. It's the equivalent of Nintento unveiling the Atari 2600 in 2006 instead of the Wii.

Amazon itself admits it's a technology company, not a retailer. It's had a go here, but it's missed the mark by a mile. Maybe I'm also way off the mark with this, but my first impressions are not good. You may have gathered.

(BTW, if you're still reading, the title of this post was inspired by a 1980s TV advert for Kinder Eggs. I know nothing of the advert itself other than the line Kinder; Chocadoobies. I googled chocadoobies to do some research, and am pleased to announce that no reference has yet been made to them, whatever they may be. So here's the first, along with second and third. Does anyone else remember the ad.?)

The BBC has some strict editorial guidelines dictating the length of its article titles and surfaced news headlines. All too often, they results in ambiguity in the headlines' meanings.

Today's article about whether the Chancellor should extend Northern Rock's £24bn credit line (Darling pressured over Rock's fate) prompted thoughts (in my head at least) of Chris Rock's lover being questioned over his recent disappearance.

I've wondered for a little while whether I should introduce a new category to my tangential ramblings (ambiguous headlines, for want of a better title) in which I write the article that I'd imagined reading before reading the BBC's version of events, under the identical title.

Would that appeal? Would it generate mirth? Would it be libellous?

Yesterday's run was marginally better than that two weeks ago. The same 6.32km run was completed in 31m 40s, a little over 1% faster than the previous run, extrapolating to 50m 6s for ten kilometres. It was certainly a chilly run too, although I'm glad I'm not out in it today.

Still a long way to go on the time front. I think I'll build the speed up on the 6.32km route before starting to increase the distance. Eventually, I want to get to a position where I can consistently run 12.5km within the hour.

Last Christmas, I didn't give you my heart, nor did you throw it away on Boxing Day. Instead, I published a list of stuff that I would like for Christmas. Here's an update on progress against each of these.

• The Tosagata Hocho 6" Santoku Hocho kitchen knife: not got, but got a similarly great knife from Ben for Christmas
• A Your Retarded t-shirt: not got, still want
• A relatively cheap, small, zoomy, high-res., digital camera: got the Canon Ixus 70 from my mum for my birthday. Fabulous little number
• Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner: Christmas present from Ben. Great book
• Lily Allen's Alright, Still: not got, although downloaded LDN last week from iTunes. Not sure I still want the album
• The Guardian Stylebook: still not got, still want, but in the meantime have read Strunk and White's The Elements of Style which was a marvellous read.

This year, I'd like the following.

• XKCD college-style unisex t-shirt (small)

More to follow, I'm sure.

Now in most walks of life, sex sells. Or at least creative directors claim it does so that they can incorporate it into their work in the name of art.

But in this instance, I beg to differ. The lady reclining in front of the fires that Robinson Willey has on offer looks positively chilly. She should wrap up, or else get herself a Robinson Willey fire.

All in all, I like Ocado. They're reliable, good quality and everything's very convenient. (My wife does the shopping itself, so I can't comment on the user experience on the web front.)

I do have two gripes however, both to do with substitutes:

1. If you send a substitute for an item because the ordered item is not in stock, tell me how much the ordered item would have cost me as well as the cost of the substitute; and

2. If the substitute item is more expensive than the ordered item, swallow the additional cost. After all, it's your fault, not mine.

The first request is a seemingly trivial invoice display issue. The latter is a point of principle, one which would drive loyalty and bring a feel-good factor to customers suffering at the hands of your stock issues.

If the entire world's population jumped into the ocean at the same time totally submerging themselves, sea level would rise by 0.0014mm, the thickness of a plastic bag. Here's my logic.

The average male weighs 82kg; female 70kg. Assuming a body density the same as water (hence why we float, but only just), that gives us 1g/cm³, or respective body volumes of 0.082 and 0.070 cubic metres.

With 1.01 males per female and a world population of 6.6bn, we have 3,316,417,910 males and 3,283,582,090 females with combined body volumes of 502,686,567 cubic metres. The world's oceans and seas occupy 361 million square kilometres of the world's surface, so evenly applying the volume to that area gives you 0.0014mm.

Jump in on your tod, and the water level will rise by a fifth of the width of an atom's nucleus.

Feel small?

I have a problem understanding trackbacks. As far as I'm aware, they're a way of officially linking to a blog post. But beyond that, I'm neither sure of how they work nor of their use. Please help ill-educated Dan by providing a comprehensive, layman's description.

Google's possibly the most powerful and well-recognised brands of our time. So tell me: what colour is each of the letters? Please use the comment facility for a non-cheaty guess.

I know, but only because I remember the acronym that their colours spell out. (Mnemonic would be a step too far, as it's hardly easily memorable.)

No looking, now.

Shortly after my daughter was born, I made up a little tune that I sang to her. Actually, tune is flattery; ditty would be better. It consists of a mere two bars (or measures, as I just found out they're called in the US), and if sung in D major, would read as follows:

(My lack of perfect pitch means that I don't know whether I'm singing it in D major, and indeed the key probably changes from one rendition to the next.)

For some unknown reason, no matter what's upsetting her, singing this ditty to her over and over again seems to mesmerise her, and her tears always turn to smiles immediately. The more tearful she is, the faster I sing it. And it never fails to work.

Give it a go on your own children, and let me know whether it's my dulcet voice or the tune itself thats working miracles. Or my easily-pleased daughter.

I just bought a nose-cleaner for my daughter. It's basically a plastic suctiony thing, allowing you (me) to suck snot of the poor little mite's nose without getting it in your (my) mouth. (That was last night's method of choice. Classy.)

Its stapline reads as follows:

One of the greatest milestones is when little ones learn to blow their noses, until then Baby nose-cleaner will be an invaluable part of baby care.

Yeah, it's right up there with walking, first day at school and birth itself.

Congratulations little blog of mine. This is your thousandth post. I thought we'd celebrate (or celibrate as Holly Golightly says at the end of the White Stripes' Well It's True That We Love One Another) by combining two of my loves: numbers and words. So here's a potted statistical history of the first 999 posts. (This one's not included because I've not finished it yet.) Here goes!

There have been 999 posts in 1,220 days, attracting a total of 1,301 comments. That's 1.30 comments per post, 0.82 posts per day, 1.07 comments per day.

The 999 posts are made up of 168,016 words, 758,040 characters (excluding spaces), making an average of 168 words per post; 4.51 characters per word. In total, there were 16,299 unique words and numbers, including hyphenated constructs and spelt-out URLs. My most populous word was the, its 10,703 occurrences accounting for 6.37% of the total, followed by to (2.90%), of (2.65%), a (2.56%), and and (1.78%). The most prevalent 123 words accounted for 50% of all words.

There were 625 instances of it's, but only 402 of its, all 1,027 used correctly, I hope. 525 theres, 409 theirs and only 92 they'res. Beer and wine were mentioned seven times each. 58 footballs compared to eleven soccers and 17 baseballs. 167 Yorks (most of them preceded with New, I expect) compared to 151 Londons. And 140 Googles compare to 15 mentions of Yahoo! Four fucks and three wanks.

The most populous non-trivial word was people, with 284 occurrences, followed by great (225), day (217), little (193), good (181) and number (180). Excel, its capitalised and non-capitalised forms combined, warranted 89 mentions. Twelve was graced with 43; Seinfeld with 14.

α, β, γ and δ got a single mention each. The 4,300 occurrences of a were equal first alphabetically, zoomy rounding us off with a single mention. My longest word was plimpplampplettere, the beautiful Dutch word meaning to skim stones. Compartmentalised won the English record together with indistinguishable, both with 17 letters.

During the 105,282,240 seconds between the first and 999th post, I have married my lovely wife, moved country twice and had a beautiful daughter. Roll on another thousand posts.

Thanks to Ben for introducing me to Belle and Sebastian, and to John Peel, whose tribute album contains their track Lazy Line Painter Jane. Fabulous track culminating at 5:25 with a rapturous Hammond crescendo to beat all others, leaving only 22 seconds to bring us all back down to earth. Truly marvellous. Its two playings filled 11m 34s of my journey to work this morning. Apologies if my enjoyment of the track freaked out any of my fellow 87 bus passengers.

In its article about the recent deal between MySpace and Google, the BBC included the following paragraph.

Tens of thousands of developers have now written applications for Facebook, ranging from online Scrabble, to movie reviews and video sharing services.

I'm surprised they didn't mention the application allowing you to throw virtual poo at your friends. I'm still struggling to get into Facebook, and am seriously considering committing Facebook suicide.

I sympathise for the writers that form part of the Writers Guild of America, who are currently striking over how royalties for downloaded content are divided. Their argument: they should get some. I don't know the intricacies of the row, but it strikes me that they should get some, no pun intended.

But maybe this juncture offers a wonderful opportunity for studios. Could they use the opportunity offered by the impending dearth of content to open up the writing of their shows to the general public? Open source sitcoms? Open source dramas?

I think it has mileage. As I understand it, the studios own the rights to the shows, with no obligation to use the incumbent writers. So opening future episodes up to the general public shouldn't cause any legal issues.

And the public can in turn do the filtering of writing efforts, weeding out the chaff digg-style.

So, move aside writers—oh sorry, you aleady have done—and let the general public through. This week's Grey's Anatomy is brought to you by Michala Johnston, from Grandview, Missouri.

I've entered the BUPA London 10,000, a 10km run through the streets of London on 26 May, 2008. Although I'm not training specifically for it just yet, I thought I'd give my trainers an airing yesterday, and undertook the following run.

It was hard. I completed the 6.32km in around 32 minutes. If I'd carried on at the same pace, I would have managed a 51 minute 10km, or else a three hour 34 minute marathon. Neither would have been possible, as my wife and daughter would no doubt testify, both witnesses of my distressing breathing and general fatigue on returning home.

I'm hoping that by the time May comes around, I'm sub-45 for 10km, ideally sub-42. Let's see.

I quite like spaghetti. There are certainly better pasta types out there (rigatoni, farfalle, tagliatelle to name but a few); but spaghetti has its place in the pasta family. (As an aside, feel free to check out my US pasta-buying habits.)

My main annoyance with spaghetti, however, is its length. Both when cooking it and eating it. The diameter of the pan of choice is always less than the length of the spaghetti, so it's always a faff trying to get it all submerged. And while eating, I'm one of those uncouth types who likes a knife for my spaghetti, such is the danger of eating it in its natural, full-length form.

My solution: half-length spaghetti. Easier to cook, easier to eat and safer for your whites. It will be called spaghettini.

Thoughts?

Afterthought: shit. Just found out that the word spaghettini is already taken. It means thin spaghetti which cooks quicker. Need a new brand name.

I was very excited when Google announced Wednesday that Gmail would now support IMAP. Co-incidentally, the announcement came on the same day that I exchanged my defunct MDA Vario I for a whizzy MDA Vario III.

IMAP allows me to send email from my mail client on my phone (Outlook Mobile), for inbound Gmail messages to automatically appear in Outlook, and for the whole thing to be sync-ed. Or it would if it worked. There is a known problem with WM5 and WM6 causing inbound HTML messages to appear blank. If it gets fixed, then the whole experience will be sweet. In the meantime, I know that you've emailed me, but I don't know what you've said. And I'm annoyed.

Apparently, the British army is looking at some form of invisibility technology to hide its tanks on the battlefield.

Somewhat pointless in the example highlighted by the photo, I would've thought.