Tangential Ramblings

Not sure why, but the strapline for the '80s TV advert for Weetabix has entered my head recently and not found its way out. I'm quite enjoying it.

If you know what's good for you, you do, OK! Weetabix!

My daughter rarely sees the dishwasher being loaded, as most of this activity is conducted after she's fast asleep. So she only ever sees it being emptied, something I often do with her 'help' at 6.30am while her breakfast is warming. Given that she only ever sees clean dishes being taken out of the machine and loaded into the relevant cupboards, maybe she thinks it's a kitchenware delivery machine, new crockery and cutlery being delivered to the house every morning. How cool would that be?

When I comb my daughter's hair after her morning bath, I can't help thinking that the comb-across makes her look a little like Adolf Hitler. (She's not got a moustache, I hasten to add.) I hope that the hairstyle was not the cause of Hitler's genocide tendencies and general nastiness. If it was, then perhaps we've created a monster.

I read yesterday of Caroline Spelman's defence of employing her nanny to perform secretarial duties. The BBC article details a reference she makes to her home becoming her office when she became an MP in 1997, following the "untimely death" of her predecessor.

Her predecessor was Iain Mills, who died aged 56. At what age, or in what situation, does a death become timely? And are deaths ever "a long time coming"?

There are a few issues with our date system. First of all, everything's based around a specific religious belief, BC representing time before the birth of Jesus, and AD representing time thereafter. (The fact that the exact year of his birth is in question adds to this issue.)

And why is time before his birth described in English (a language that wasn't in existence at the time), while the subsequent years are described in Latin—Before Christ versus Anno Domini. Would BC and AC not make more sense, or would that create confusion for electricians? It also seems a little unfair now to refer to a chunk in time as the length of time before a future event, as it would have been difficult for people at the time to hazard a guess as to what year it was.

Maybe all time should be described as ABB, After Big Bang, although a team of physicists has recently discovered that there may indeed have been a BBB period. Or maybe the BB should represent Big Brother, and all time should be referenced as before or after the arrival of Big Brother, when the terrible danger of the human gene pool was exposed.

Whenever I’m the first to use the photocopier of a morning, I’m always unsure whether to believe the status messages it provides me in advance of being ready to do the job at hand. Yesterday morning, I patiently waited for while the print quality was being automatically adjusted, for my benefit I can only hope. I’m glad it was automatic, as I wouldn’t have known where to start if it had asked me to adjust the print quality. Usually however, the machine’s busy calibrating, something I wish it could do on its own time.

I noticed recently that there is no official pedestrian access to Parliament Square; none of the traffic lights have pedestrian crossings taking you to the island. Maybe Brian Haw doesn’t actually want to be there, but alighted a European coach there in 2001 and has been stranded ever since. Luckily he had some tents with him at the time; and some anti-war placards.

One of the biggest problems with risks and issues is the fact that they appear in a dry, uninviting list view, little differentiation between one and the next, the only semi-useful point of reference being an item’s position in a list. Oh yes, I remember, the one at the bottom of page two about environments. It would be great if there was a bubble view of the world, each risk or issue appearing as a bubble. (I’m thinking hovering bubbles that move slightly with time to indicate their dynamic nature.)

Bubbles could be coloured based on their severity (or maybe size indicates severity), risks appearing slightly differently than issues (maybe a slightly different shaped bubble). And the more granular details of an item could be revealed on hover or click, the standard view merely giving the key information. Two items could be associated with one another by dragging between them, and the system would deal with the positioning to make the resulting connectors as unobtrusive and sensible as possible.

I’m thinking something like the Pandora interface (if I remember it correctly), but with risks and issues instead of musical artists. Different views would allow you to display based on age, track, only display the high-severity items etc.

The whole thing would be driven by a structured database (or even a spreadsheet, heaven forbid), but this new view would bring a project to life.

Thoughts?

Seeing Justin Webb on tonight's BBC news reporting on the ongoing Obama/Clinton saga, I could have sworn it was Giles Brandreth.

Among others, I have two identical shirts. One has a slightly dodgy button on the left sleeve, you know, that button that closes the gap between the cuff and the mid-forearm.

The other morning, I stood at my wardrobe having decided to go with the pale-blue, double-cuffed shirt. I selected one of the two on offer, but then chose the other one, deciding that the day's events were sufficiently important to warrant an unblemished cuff-button.

That evening, while running for an 87 bus having popped to Robert Dyas after work, the shirt caught on a shard of metal on a lamppost on Whitehall, tearing the sleeve to the point that the shirt now resides in the bin. Half an hour beforehand, I'd paused outside work wondering whether or not to go back in for the raincoat, deciding against it given the balminess of the evening.

My question is this: if I'd selected the dodgy-buttoned shirt twelve hours earlier, or if I'd popped back in for the raincoat, would the shirt now be in the bin? Or would I still be the owner of a twin set of shirts? To what extent do tiny decisions in life affect things downstream?

On a much grander scale, if I'd not managed to achieve the B-B-E A-level grades that Newcastle-upon-Tyne, my university of choice, was demanding of me, I would have instead gone to Swansea University, would not have been able to choose a rather niche third-year module that Newcastle had to offer, would not have gone on to study for a Masters in that very subject at Warwick, would not have joined the first company I worked for (for they specifically targeted the Warwick course), and I would never have met my wife who worked for that very company.

For the record, I no longer own any identical shirts.

My running times are always based on the London-time analogue clock in our living room. (To its left is an identical clock running five hours behind to remind us of New York. That said, we bought it (in New York) long before moving to New York, a sign that we wanted to move there. On leaving the house for a run, I check the time (including seconds) and do the same on my return. There is a very small chance that during the intervening time, my wife plays wih my mind by advancing/turning back the clocks. We'll see Monday whether I'm actually a sub-30 runner, or whether I'm an hour plus.

Not sure of the political correctness of this post. Let's give it a go and see how things turn out.

I must have watched over a hundred documentaries about the War, Nazism, Hitler etc. And something I've often thought, but only today shared, is that Hitler was quite lazy. Whenever he gave the Hitler salute (Hitlergruß in German; I wonder whether he called it that), it always seems as if he really couldn't be bothered, his arm lazily rising up to around head height, by no means straight nor indeed authoritative, a far cry from the right arms of the people he was greeting, held loftily and firmly straight above their heads.

I guess he got bored of it all. After all, his greetees only had to do it whenever they met him. He had to do it whenever he greeted anyone.

I wonder whether there are any tennis courts in central Newcastle.

Not sure why, but I get an unhealthy level of pleasure from slowly scraping the side of a previously-dipped teaspoon (steel or otherwise) across the lip of a mug (china or otherwise), allowing the interruption of the surface tension surrounding the droplet of tea to let the tea back into the mug. That is all.

I just turned on BBC1 to a programme entitled Casualty 1907. I wonder whether Charlie was in it back then.

Article surfaced on the BBC website:

Naomi bailed after row on plane
Supermodel Naomi Campbell is bailed on suspicion of assaulting a police office at Heathrow Airport's Terminal 5.

Is it *$$? If not, it should be.

Their t-shirts should read "Drug dealer". For that's what they are, at the end of the day.

Let's assume you have some analogue clocks, all of which are set at a random time. Assuming they're all wrong by the minimum amount (i.e. if the clock is set at eleven o'clock and the actual time is 4am, it's five hours slow rather than being seven hours fast), the average of all the clocks' times will tend to the correct time as the number of clocks tends to infinity.

Nice.

Throughout a project, the PMO should record the project's beard quotient, calculated as the total number of unshaven faces divided by the number of males on the project. Actually, to avoid any possible mis-interpretation, the total number of male unshaven faces divided by the number of males on the project. (This qualifier saves the possibility of a quotient over 100%.)

I'm not sure what the quotient means yet, but I'm convinced it is correlated to the RAG (red/amber/gren) status (it may even be a predictor of future RAG). Any suggestions?

What a ridiculous turn of phrase (no pun intended), that of rotating tyres. I understand the principle, but given that rotating is what tyres are best at (with the possible exception of supporting children as swings in playgrounds in their post-driving afterlife), surely they could have thought of something less open to confusion.

I read an article this morning about a new type of clock rivalling the world's most accurate clocks. But when clocks become more accurate than their predecessors, how can you measure their accuracy? Surely, the fact that you can measure that the new clock is more accurate than the old clock means that you had a mechanism for calculating the inaccuracy of the old clock beforehand, which surely means you had a mechanism, physical or otherwise, for providing a more refined time.

At the time of writing, my clock's saying 07:41:57 GMT. Make that 58, 59...

Wouldn't it be nice if menus were put together in the form of Venn diagrams?

In a Thai restaurant, there would be a few sets of circles, one for each of the main ingredients. The chicken circle would be surrounded by circles for noodles, rice, soup etc. Inside the intersection of circles would be written entries for each of the meals therein, Chilli Chicken Ramen appearing in the chicken/soup intersect, for example.

There would be a similar Venn diagram for vegetables a little further down, with the colour-coordinated noodles, rice and soup circles hovering around it. And so on.

I could then easily choose what I was after (chicken noodles, for example) and find the relevant dishes all nestled within the appropriate intersection.

What a lovely idea.

If two guys share a single pair of earphones (one ear each), does it automatically mean that they're gay, in additon to being ignorant of the importance of stereo? I'm not sure, but would like your views. For the record, I'm pretty sure the same is not true for women, lesbianism that it, not stereo-heathenry.

I challenge you to sing the lead and nothing else while listening to the Mamas and the Papas' California Dreaming. To all knowledge, it's impossible without singing the refrain each time. I believe at the time of recording, the two parts of the song had to be recorded separately because of the lead singer's unstoppable urge to join in.

I've never really thought about this until recently, but evolution stops at procreation, I believe. So the only developments that my daughter might inherit from my own evolution have already been defined. (There's a joke quite close to the surface there about regression as opposed to evolution, but I'll leave that to the lesser people.)

I thought about this while cutting the skin off a couple of salmon fillets while preparing dinner yesterday evening. I thought how convenient it was that salmon skin is so resistant to my über-sharp knife, allowing me to slice the meat cleanly off the skin in one fell swoop.

Maybe people would be less likely to eat (and therefore kill) salmon if the salmon was less easy to skin. But salmon will never evolve to have more cuttable skin specifically to give chefs a headache, because the culinary experience not only happens after procreation, it happens after death.

And a side question: do events we see other people experience feed into our evolutionary pass-down? Or is it purely based on our own experience? If the latter, then surely humans will evolve at the detriment of people older than procreation age. It's just a thought.

I had an idea today. I thought I'd share.

The idea is a colour-matching camera. It's a small camera with a mini-flash on it all inside a light-proof sleeve. Kind of like a dice roller with a camera lens and flash at the bottom. You'd press the camera against something that you want to match the colour of, and it would take a picture. This picture would then be analysed, giving a set of attributes for the colour of the item photographed.

You could then take the camera and the photo's attributes to a shop, where you would take pictures of other stuff to see whether it was a close match to the item you have sitting at home.

The light-proof sleeve makes sure the readings are unsullied by external light sources, making comparison between two readings appropriate.

You would use it to take the colour of your sofa, walls, furnishings etc., and then comparing these to items in a shop. It may even give a reading on how compatible two or more items would be from a colour perspective.

Thoughts?

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.

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?

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?

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.

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 hate incorrectly formatted space and punctuation in documents, even though it rarely has any bearing whatsoever on the aesthetics of the printed copy.

An italicised word or phrase should not have its surrounding spaces or succeeding punctuation mark italicised, for example. Underlining trailing spaces is common on the web, and drives me nuts.

I also hate redundant space in documents, something that baffles anyone I tell. A couple of trailing spaces after a full-stop, after which a new sentence once started, have no place. Please get rid of them for me.

A couple of days ago, a little isosceles triangle appeared in the status bar at the top of my phone's Windows Mobile interface. It has a point at the top, at which its highly inclined equal sides start, with a shorter, horizontal side finishing the triangle off at the bottom. The icon is shaded the same colour as its sides, so it's solid.

I can only imagine it signifies a Christmas Tree, some form of reminder that Christmas is only 80 days away.

What are French Polishers called in France? And in Poland? I found out recently that the name has no comprehension in the US. Maybe they're Canadian Polishers over there.

Why is coming unstuck considered a bad thing? Becoming stuck in the first place is the bit that annoys me.

Is it wrong to like Asereje (The Ketchup Song) by Las Ketchup? And what other bands are out there named after foodstuffs? The Black Eyed Peas is my starter for ten.

A little over a year ago, Gavin and I came up with the best two man-made substances: Marmite and WD-40. The third such substance is pesto. Traditional green pesto, naturally.

I wonder if anyone, the BBC included, captures on a regular basis the surfacing trends of the BBC News website. Not the content within the articles, but how they are presented to users over time.

It would be interesting to catpure, say every five minutes, the article that was surfaced in each location on each of the main navigation pages (Main, UK, World, Technology, Entertainment, Sport etc.), complete with link title, link summary and the picture of choice.

It wouldn't be difficult either (although obviously it's beyond my limited capabilities), and wouldn't need much disk space. My calculation gives about 150kB including images per captured page. If 20 navigation pages are captured, then that's 3MB every five minutes, 864MB per day, or 315GB per year.

And it would provide a great insight into the ever changing priorities of what is perhaps the most authoritative news website out there.

Just a thought.

osirra is Spanish, meaning harmony. It is pronounced uh-SI-ra, pronounciation rules as follows:

• Accent on the middle syllable
• uh as in uh-oh (the uh, not the oh)
• SI as in symbiotic
• ra as in Andorra

[That first sentence is not strictly true but it's a nice thought, and I'll be promoting its introduction into the Spanish dictionary. Please join me in this quest.]

How many times can you use cling film* after internally saying to yourself: "Shit, I'm sure that cling film* is running out. I really should buy more."

I'm figuring 30.

* America: please substitute cling film with Glad Wrap™.

Plain flipchart pad
Bloc papier pour chavalet de conference
Flipchart-block
Bloco de papel para cavalete de conferencias
Bloc de reuniones
Flipoverblok

Not sure of the language, but I love the last one. Also, bloco de reuniones suggests dreams beyond those of a humble flipchart.

My good friend Elise is in Hammerfest, Norway at the moment visiting a friend, as advised in her IM status: Hammerfest! I know that she's in Norway, but I prefer to think of her being at an MC Hammer convention, with hordes of Hammer enthusiasts roaming around '80s souvenir stalls dressed in baggy, bright pants, reminiscing about their leg-splaying days.

Emails from men that sign off with a single initial. Effeminate?

d

Does the flat earth society believe in planal warming? I wonder.

So Google Maps has introduced a cool new Streetview feature, enabling you to see images of the sides of each street as you glide around the map.

I noticed that London is not covered by this feature. So I plan on taking a slightly extended lunch tomorrow to map London. I figure an hour and a half should cover it, equipped with my 1.3 mega pixel camera. I'll do the major bus routes (taking photos from both sides) and then email the photos off to Google for them to incorporate. The 8, 26, 55, 87, 452, 137 should get me 95% coverage, I would have thought..

Which is better? Granary or white?

Very short, and oh so very annoying.

(Apparently, she's 4'10". I can't find the S.I. unit of annoyingness.)

Update: here's some conclusive proof on the former.

Update 2: I've updated her Wikipedia page accordingly.

Rod Baber is in the final preparation stages for an attempt at the summit of Everest, in a bid to make the highest ever mobile phone call. Exactly who he's going to call, I'm not sure. For his sake, I hope it's not Virgin Media, as he's likely to get severe frostbite waiting for a worthwhile response. For what it's worth, Lloyds TSB's waiting times have gone up immeasurably of late too.

Anyway, in describing his team's chances of reaching the summit, he indicates that their chances are very good. "But, it's when Everest lets you climb it, not the other way round", he adds. I think I know what he's getting at, but I'm intrigued as to how the other way round reads. When you let Everest climb you?

I've been involved in some legal document reviews of late. It always amuses me the fastidious approach that lawyers employ when it comes to capitalisation. If a word takes a capital first letter, then it needs to have a formal definition. Or rather, any word requiring a formal definition needs a capital first letter.

But what if the word appears at the beginning of a sentence? Obviously, but in that case doesn't, but when a more contextual word adorns the space after the full-stop, then its need for a definition comes into question. The word London appeared mid-sentence today, and I was eager to define it.

so, i propose that all lawyers always employ lowercase type, with the exception of words needing a definition. any proper nouns, like london, should be lowercased, as should acronyms (e.g. the bbc) and at the beginning of sentences.

I have too many friends called Rob. As such, Rob will henceforth be referred to as Carluccio. If you know Rob, please use this new monicker in all communications with him.

We caught the number 360 bus today, westbound from the Albert Embankment. Apparently it goes from Elephant & Castle to Kensington Queen's Gate. I'd much prefer it if it simply did a loop like this one.

Big Ben chimes 156 times a day, a useful fact I calculated yesterday while listening to six glorious such chimes.

Here is a headline from this morning's Metro: Britain "not ready for bird flu".

It's not like joining the euro, you know. We can't join when we're ready.

I find long periods of time quite difficult to visualise. Anything more than about six weeks, and it becomes "a long time", but without a comparator, it's difficult to give it a frame of reference.

I'm looking forward to a big event due in about 75 days' time. A little under eleven weeks. In order to picture this, I work back from today by the same amount of time and imagine a relatively memorable event that took place that many days ago. 67 days ago today, I took a trip to Newcastle on business. I can vividly remember that event, and it doesn't seem that long ago at all, and that's roughly how long I have to wait until the big event.

It would be good if I had a little app. that plucked the nearest such event from my Google Calendar to give me a comparator for any given date I'm eagerly awaiting.

This is the offering on the menu of Bodean's, "London's Original Barbecue Smoke House" in Clapham. I've ordered chips and coleslaw with the ribs, but I'm currently sat anticipating a couple of anecdotes from the barman while waiting for the food.

I found this out today. His name came up in conversation, but I've forgotten in what context.

Anyway, I was surprised to hear that Ken Dodd is indeed still alive. Well, apparently he is. Not sure why, but I'd assumed he was dead. I particularly enjoyed this excerpt from his Wikipedia entry.

Kenneth Arthur Dodd OBE (born 8 November 1927, in Knotty Ash, Liverpool) is a veteran English comedian and singer, famous for selling over 100 million records, his buck teeth, frizzy hair, feather duster (or "tickling stick"), and his catchphrases, often playing on the 'tickled' motif, e.g. "How tickled I am!".

I just received my New Music Tuesday email from iTunes, at 11.39am GMT today (Wednesday). So Wednesday is the new Tuesday, which I assume means that Tuesday is the new Monday.

In light of this, Christmas has been moved to Tuesday 26 December, and New Year's Day will be celebrated on Tuesday 2 January, 2007. Please update your diaries accordingly.

Most people know this. Latitude is a measure of how far north or south you are from the equator. And longitude is a measure of how far east or west you are from the Greenwich Meridian.

Sounds simple, doesn't it. In reality, it's a bit more complex.

I've always been slightly bothered that the lines of latitude are completely different in nature to those of longitude. Latitude lines are all different lengths (actually, there are pairs of each length, one in each hemisphere: the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, for example), while all lines of longitude are the same length as one another.

No two lines of latitude go through the same point as one another, while every line of longitude goes through the two poles.

Basically, the longitude lines cut the globe just as your chocolate orange will come apart this Christmas; the lines of latitude are more comparable to the way you'd slice a hunk of mozzarella. (At least they are like the way I slice mozzarella.)

Yet if you switched the methodologies around, it wouldn't work, because the earth spins on its polar axis. Each 15° wedge of longitude makes a nice one hour segment throughout the latitudes, and in a purist's world, everyone on a single line of longitude should have their watches set at precisely the same time. While everyone on a given line of latitude will experience the same passage of the sun through the sky on a given day.

This division of the world makes beautiful sense, but it's more complicated than you'd first have thought. There may be more on this topic later. But for now, I thought I'd throw my curiosity out there.

I like my archives module over to the right. Not sure how useful it is, but it's become a testament to the longevity of the blog. We're now in month 30, this being the 720th post in 889 days.

Long may it grow.

Whenever I test a new site that needs a keyword, my keyword of choice is chicken. Recently, Francis has pointed me to Tagbulb (which didn't seem to work, btw) and Alan to Flowser. On both, my first foray involved finding stuff related to chicken.

Not sure why I chose chicken, but it's handy to have a keyword in your back pocket for this sort of thing. Saves having to think of one on the spot.

I'm not expecting anyone to buy any of this stuff for me. But I thought I'd share my Christmas list to date, mainly as a reflection on my character.

• The Tosagata Hocho 6" Santoku Hocho kitchen knife
• A Your Retarded t-shirt
• A relatively cheap, small, zoomy, high-res., digital camera. Not sure what model; advice needed
• Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner
• Lily Allen's Alright, Still
• The Guardian Stylebook

I've always thought that seasons deserve capitalisation, yet you're unlikely to find a style guide that concurs. The Guardian's opts for lc. I vaguely remember discussing this very subject with Steve a few years back, and him agreeing.

The days of the week and the months of the year are all classed as proper nours, being awarded the honour of a capital letter at the beginning—the grammatical equivalent of being knighted, I expect.

Yet spring, summer, autumn and winter are left behind, blending unnoticed with the words around them, and it seems unlikely that they'll be granted a meeting with the Queen (who herself has been grammatically knighted).

Isn't it about time we honoured their work?

It's satsuma season!

Whenever I peel either a satsuma or a potato, I am compelled to attempt to remove the entire peel in a single piece. With satsumas (satsumae?), it's relatively easy. With potatoes, it's more of a challenge. Here's how it's done.

You start on one of the flatter sides of what is usually an approximation of an ellipsoid. Go in a straight line for a very short length, and then flip 180° around on yourself (to the left, let's say). Continue following the edge of the peeled section, turning in an anti-clockwise direction. Eventually, your peeling direction will straighten up, as you near the longest circumference of the fruit/veg., until it naturally flips to turning clockwise. Keep following the edge of the peelee (you, btw, are the peeler, as is the knife), until you've reached the end.

Any other method, and you risk leaving a marooned section that the peeler can't get to.

That is all.

Is it me, or is age turning Jerry Seinfeld into John Travolta?

Here's his recent appearance on The Daily Show.

Steve questioned how an ellipsis was displayed in braille. Apparently, it's three apostrophes. In six-dot braille, the bottom-left dot is raised for an apostrophe, and you repeat this three times for an ellipsis. So in effect, it looks very similar to the ellipsis in written English.

As an aside, the full stop in braille is made up of three dots, middle-left, middle-right and bottom-right. Seems inefficient, but I may be wrong.

As a further aside, the fact that braille symbols are made up of six binary entities means that there are only 64 combinations to play with. This limit is extended by the use of prefixes to signify that a capital (bottom-right) or number (bottom-left, top-right, middle-right, bottom-right) follows.

Please don't lengthen the a of latte. Ever. It's Italian for milk, and should be pronounced as such, even if you're a tw*t from Fulham.

Thank you.

Grapes and raisins are up there with the best of the fruit. They didn't make the top five, but they'd certainly be in the top ten. But here's my question: why are raisins so much cheaper than grapes?

Ocado has 500g of raisins (made from Californian seedless grapes) available for £0.75. 500g of green, seedless grapes (a juicy and flavoursome grape) cost £1.99.

The bag of raisins will contain way more raisins than the bunch of grapes will grapes—I'd suggest that five times as many would be a conservative estimate. That would make the relative cost of a raisin 7.5% of that of your grape, and it has to go through a longer lifecycle before arriving in your kitchen.

The only two explanations I can think of for the price differential are:

• The time criticality of the grape's sale
• The grape's increased storage requirements.

Both of these suggest that the premium is for the circumstances surrounding their transport, rather than the product itself.

All food in the UK comes with a best before date, which I believe is defined by the manufacturer.

First of all, this date should be defined by an independent body. This would save the likes of Jif Lemon would likely be given a longer shelf-life than the ten months which they currently get (a cunning pancake day-related marketing ploy).

In addition to the best before date, food should be given two additional dates:

• A still OK before date; and
• A rank after date

The superlative nature of the phrase best before suggests that the quality of the product is still above par after that date.

Depending on the day of opening, milk is generally good for a full day, possibly two, after the best before date. While dried and tinned goods don't have a genuine expiry date, as far as I can tell.

There are two ways. One is to have them act in the same way as a button would, the link being fed through what could be described as the 'outside' of both pieces of the cuff. Alternatively, it could be fed through from the outside of the first part of the cuff, and from the inside of the second part. The former forms a neater cuff, which slides under the jacket much more readily; I believe the latter to be correct from an etiquette standpoint.

Whenever I break a drinking glass, I always look at it for a few moments, I suppose in the hope that either the crack will mend itself, or I will suddenly figure out a way of mending it myself. Only after a few moments' thought will I banish it to the garbage.

Not sure if this is human nature or just me.

If the UK's population density was the same as that of Greater London, it would have a population of 1.17bn. If its density was the same as that of Scotland, it would have a population of 15.83m.

If the US's population density was the same as that of New York City, it would have a population of 64.27bn. If its density was the same as that of Alaska, it would have a population of 3.51m.

At work, just next to the men's toilets, there's a door carrying the following signage:

Plant Room
No Unauthorised Access

I really want to take a peek. I imagine it's a doorway to something akin to the Garden of Eden, but I'm probably wrong.

I bought a coffee from Pret a Manger yesterday. The girl turned around to make it, revealing the following slogan across the back of her T-shirt:

Freshly roasted

Not sure if they've fully thought that one through...

If you are referring to a spreadsheet that was produced in MS Excel, please call it a spreadsheet; not an Excel spreadsheet. Likewise, please never refer to Word documents; documents will suffice.

If you refer to a spreadsheet or a document, I along with much of the rest of the world, will assume Microsoft. Only if this assumption is invalid should you qualify the noun. Thanks.

It seems we need some new SI units. Today I heard of one IT solution being five times more complex than another. I also heard of something having 'tons' of potential. And advertising is quoting a 70% increase in hair's radiance. The committee that decides upon SI units needs to act fast to get all three of these baselined and suitable units identified.

It would be nice if there was a set of numbers or characters that had no inferred ordinality. Generally, the series we use to describe objects all have an order. Obviously, the numbers themselves are ordered (1, 2, 3), but so are the letters we use (a, b, c; x, y, z). Even the Greek characters are ordered: α, β, γ, δ etc.

I'd like there to be a set of, say, half a dozen symbols that we could use that don't have any relative priority. Kind of like paper, scissors and stone. Different people would use them in different orders giving them all equal significance.

A quick brainstorm with Gavin over breakfast in Telford yesterday resulted in the following two substances being nominated the best ever created by man: Marmite and WD-40. Any advance?

I've never understood why the snooze button on most alarm clocks delays the alarm for nine minutes. Why not ten? Here's the explanation. Apparently it's for simplicity's sake. Nine minutes means it only needs to check the last digit of the time, saving on circuitry. As an aside, this year marks the 50th birthday of the first snooze alarm clock.

A few tips.

Store canned beans upside down in the cupbaord. When you open them (now generally via a ringpull on the top), the beans will slide straight out.

Next, some tips on remembering things. Bi-weekly meetings happen every two weeks, not every half-week, because a bicycle has two wheels, not half a wheel. I always used to get that confused before thinking about it in those terms.

Finally, don't bother with Spring forward, Fall back to remember clock changes. The opposite phrases to me seem just as logical, so it never made sense to me anyway. Simply remember that (a) you only see reference to GMT+1, never to GMT-1 and (b) the S in BST refers to summer. These two facts quickly feed the following conclusion: summer = GMT+1.

I assume that this was one of the drivers behind Clive Sinclair in his use of keywords at the touch of a key. Alas it seems I was wrong in my prediction, although it has helped spawn a whole testing and bug-fixing industry.

Without doing any promotion, roll up 10,000 notes of varying sized (from £5 to £50) and insert them down the middle of random packs of Polos. Total campaign cost would be around £100,000, and word of mouth would increase sales of the mints over a long period.

Some formatting issues that need to be addressed. First of all, I received an email today in which the telephone number that appeared as part of the signature was formatted as follows: (0207 XX)X YYYY. This is without doubt the most bizarre grouping I've seen for a London number, with an artistic combination of spaces and parentheses.

Secondly, I have an irrational mistrust of people whose email signature is in a font other than that in the body of the email. The more script-like the font, the greater my sense of unease. Please try to stop using the standard suite of fonts offered by Windows to replicate your offline signature. Thank you kindly.

My wife's first big crush was allegedly on Virgil Tracy. According to his profile, Virgil "possesses a demeanour and maturity well beyond his years", and is an accomplished graduate of the Denver School of Advanced Technology. He never places technology above human needs, and is a fearless, complex young man with iron resolve.

I'd like to think that I share some of his characteristics. For a start, I support the Denver Broncos.

I myself have little time for Virgil, as the vehicle that he piloted, Thunderbird 2, was dreadfully designed, and I was always surprised by its ability to become airborne. I believe its toy equivalent was made out of lead, or at least a lead composite, meaning that it could do some serious damage to furniture and other objects that chose to get in its way.

Even though it does exactly what it says on the tin, August Bank Holiday Monday is pretty weak. The naming of our holidays isn't particularly inspired, what, with May Day and May Bank Holiday Monday (also known as Spring Bank, which I assume is short for Spring Bank Holiday Monday) alongside it.

Must try harder.

Over the past two years, one month and one week, I've made 560 posts, attracting 568 non-spam comments. (This is post 561 if you're keeping count. The fact that it has ID number 620 in the URL is due to futzing around with test posts, mistakenly hitting the refresh button resulting in the same drivel being posted twice, etc.)

It's quite comforting that the latter number is higher than the former, even though it's a close-run thing, the comment/post ratio currently running at 1.016. It's comforting even when you get what can only be described as death threats from the likes of Mario.

I read a few other people's blogs, and hate it when I encounter something that I've decided to call comment wanking. This is when commenters have nothing to add to the discussion, but so rate the author and so want to be associated with his/her work that they decide to comment nonetheless. Matt Cutts' recent post about product hierarchies has thus far attracted 53 comments, including wanking from Josh, Matt Whelan, theGypsy, Dave (Original) - many times over - the list goes on.

Probably not vegetarian, right? Today's the first time I've mentally dissected the term and just realised how horrible it is. Previously, it was a term with no meaning apart from "good for joints". Now, it's oil drawn from the liver of a cod. Lovely.

Surely it should be 'til death us does part, rather than 'til death us do part. The thing doing the parting (death) is singular. You could read the sentence: Until death does part us.

Thoughts?

I've always found it difficult to picture spaces when quoted as square footage or square metrage. I saw a vacant shop this morning boasting 1,800 sq. ft. of space. I'm not sure whether that's a lot or not.

The first thing I do when I have to picture such a space is to picture a suitable layout. So, if the shop was 25 feet wide, then it would be 72 feet deep. Ah, now I get it.

It would be much more useful if the measure quoted was the length of the side of the space if the space was a perfect square. So in the above example, it would be quoted as 42.4 feet. So if the property was square, it would be 42.4 feet by 42.4 feet. (Better still, 12.93 metres.)

It's much easier to picture a space 42 feet square than one totalling 1,800 square feet. As an aside, I often picture 42 feet as seven people (all taller than myself) lying end-to-end. So now, I have a picture of seven people lying down one side of a shop and seven people down the adjacent side. Much easier to get my head around.

Some random thoughts and observations for you.

First of all, the dot that sits proudly at the top of a lowercase 'i' is called a tittle. I find it quite nice that there's a tittle in the word tittle.

Secondly, the only street in the UK on which you drive on the right-hand side is Savoy Court, a private road coming off the Strand that leads up to the front of the Savoy Hotel. I've known that for a long time, but only now do I pass it on a daily basis, on the way to work.

And finally, I was thinking how much more useful pint glasses would be if they had a square corner. They'd be taller, and would have the shape of a quarter-circle when viewed from above. Two hands could then easily carry two, three or four pints, and the square corner might provide a pleasing contour for the hand.

Lastly, construction of the Eiffel Tower was completed in 1889. Not particularly interesting, but secretly amusing to me.

That's all for now.

There's always that dichotomy as to whether to stand up on the Tube when someone that might be pregnant boards. The days of standing up for women in general seem to be over.

A lady boarded my carriage of the northbound Victoria line train at Vauxhall the other day. Including this lady, there were three people standing in the carriage (all women) and all seats were taken; and I would have put the chances of this particular lady being pregnant at 70%, perhaps 75%.

Above 50%, so I felt obliged to relinquish my seat; not nearly close enough to 100% for me to proffer it to her. So I took the only option I felt viable: I stood up without offering it to anyone in particular. Unfortunately, the seat remained unclaimed by any of the three women, and I stood for the remaining three stops to Green Park.

www.catsthatlooklikehitler.com

Caption to a photo of Paris and Nicky Hilton in yesterday's Evening Standard:

Paris Hilton with dog and sister Nicky.

Harsh?

Google Sitemaps tells me that my site comes top on a google.com search for chimpancy. And it's true. Awesome!

Below are some other highlights:

• 4th: my own name (I make it third)
• 4th: martin's having a wank in the cupboard
• 5th: dan dan the mattess man
• 6th: karl pilkington diary
• 8th: evacipate
• 9th: jimmie krankie
• 54th: alan shearer singing
• 57th: rosanna scotto picture

I have an unusually high penchant for fruit at the moment. It has replaced the New York muffin as breakfast of choice.

Top five fruit, according to my palate:

• Pineapple
• Banana
• Melon (canteloupe, not galia)
• Strawberry
• Pear

Not sure if it's exactly in order, but the top three are safe.

As an aside, most irritating moment in sport: Michael Schumacher conducting the crowd to the Italian national anthem after winning a Grand Prix. See today's London copy of Metro for an irritating still. Come on Fernando!

I just called John Lewis. After being put on hold, an automated voice said "Thank you for choosing to hold for an assistant".

I wasn't aware I'd chosen to do so.

There's a notice up in the corridor at work:

Summer 2006
Playscheme
For Children of Staff
Aged 5-12 Years

The staff or the children?

The human body often astounds me. I recently slipped while helping someone put a sofa-bed in his van (see post below), creating a nasty wound on my inner elbow. It's around four inches by 1.5 inches, in that awkward place that makes it difficult to heal due to the flexing skin.

Anyway, healing it is doing. It's fascinating to see the scab that formed within 24 hours of the accident reduce in size, as the surrounding skin regenerates around it. It's now down to around 2" by 1", and I still feel the blood pumping harder to that area, feeding it back to full fitness. If someone could keep still for long enough, it would be fascinating to see time-lapse photography showing how a wound heals over time.

A message came over the tannoy this morning at work saying the following:

Good morning ladies and gentleman. If you are having any difficulty hearing this message, please call on XXX.

A beautiful piece of irony, especially given that there was no more to the message.

Thames Water has been criticised for quite some time now because an estimated one litre in three does not get to our homes due to leakages in its infrastructure. This is often cited as a counter-argument to the imposition of hosepipe bans and the like.

But where does all the leaking water go? Surely it goes back into the system. While there's an argument for inefficiency in there (the water needs to be re-treated, cleaned etc., thus adding expense to Thames Water and therefore the end user), I'm thinking that fixing the issue would not necessarily help on the water-shortage front.

Many will be aware of my fastidious nature when it comes to phone numbers, but I've never shared with a wider audience. Maybe this doesn't provide a forum for a wider audience: be that as it may.

The 020 London prefix is now six years old, having been introduced on 22 April 2000. It superseded the 0171 and 0181 introduced in 1995, which in turn replaced 071 and 081 (1990), before which, it was simply 01. (I'll always remember Going Live being 01 811 8055.) BT's extensive publicity surrounding the 2000 change concentrated heavily on the 7 (inner London) and 8 (outer London) that succeeded the 020 prefix, which means that to this day, the vast majority of people believe there to be two London prefixes: 0207 and 0208. (My brother has recently been given a three, instead of the usual 7 and 8, but that's another aside.)

As you can imagine, this frustrates the hell out of me. People quote their number as 0207 XXX YYYY. The correct grouping is 020 7XXX YYYY. When I used to contact our local curry house in Clapham, I used to have to give my phone number. Here's the associated conversation (always with the same chap) that happened for every single order, verbatim:

Order taker: your phone number?
Me: 020
Order taker: 0207
Me: 7XXX
Order taker: XXX
Me: YYYY
Order taker: YYYY
Order taker: Your order please?

The behaviour has more recently sprung up in mobile phone numbers. It seems that the first five digits are too long to string together (even though they always start with 07), so people split it after three, or sometimes four. It seems somewhat random, more guided by the presence of double-digits as opposed to following a pre-defined breakdown.

So, please from now on could you quote your London numbers as 020, XXXX, YYYY. And your mobiles should be as follows: 07XXX, YYYYYY.

Many thanks.

There is a splodge of concrete on the pavement on the north-east junction of Hannington Road and The Chase in Clapham. It bears a remarkable resemblance to the