Let’s bear in mind (1) that I was quite nervous (2) that I didn’t really get a chance to get into my stride and that (3) I think it’s quite embarrassing. Are you bearing that in mind? Ok. Then if you’re ready, here’s that 5live Blogging piece as an MP3 (7 Mb). Featured contestants include James VoxPolitics, Alastair S. Duck and yours truly…
The English talk about nothing but the weather. We do this to avoid talking about ritual goat sodomy, which would otherwise be the first thing on our minds, I think. This is my honest belief. It would decimate my world-view if it was demonstrated to be untrue. At the moment there’s more weather to talk about than normal. A couple of days ago we got within a degree (centigrade) of the hottest temperature ever recorded in the UK. It is – bluntly – stinkingly uncomfortably depressingly miserably oppressively hot.
Now – before you even start – everyone who lives in places that actually get much hotter than this (say in Africa example or – maybe – on the Sun) is bound to find the whole idea of it being really hot in the UK kind of funny. “Ha ha,” they’re almost certainly thinking as they pump out another two or three pints of blood-heavy sweat, “These English people will complain about even the smallest of heat-waves. Once when I was strapped in an oven in the Sahara for ten weeks with cayenne pepper inserted into my rectum, I complained less than this weakling English pigdog.”
Well screw you buster! First things first – compare and contrast the BBC’s current European weather map with the one for North America. We’re stomping all over your weather. I think London’s currently beaten only by Texas and certain particularly gay areas around Miami. Next – bear in mind that English homes are – at best – designed to keep the rain off and the heat in. They are not designed to be cool and refreshing idylls amid the melting pavements. No – British homes are apparently designed for a country with a climate so temperate that any weather that strays from a ten degree range between ‘moist and chilly’ and ‘moist and fresh’ is considered almost insanely avante garde. Thirdly, as a people – we’re just not bloody used to it!
I can feel this post just kind of petering out as I run out of body salts (should I lick my own arm, would that help?) and my brain shuts down forever. No doubt I’ll return for another stab at completing it in one of my many many nightly trips back to the computer that I take when I get bored of lying in my own sweat. Writhing in discomfort isn’t as fun as it sounds. My only other option would be to cave my own head in with a spade in a vain attempt to get some crapping sleep already…
First thing I have to say is that Identifont is an extremely cool and really useful font-finding utility. The next thing to say is that despite the fact it’s extremely cool, it didn’t help me find the two fonts that I’ve been scrabbling around to find for the last week. So this is where you guys come in. I figure maybe you can help me (since my life-long love, Mr. Internet, has completely let me down).
So here we have the first font as it decorates the front cover of the July issue of The Face. Now the weird thing with this font is that I have spent weeks fiddling around with a logo with the word ‘dirty’ in it. Literally weeks. After about twenty passes over the logo, desperately trying to get it looking roughly accurate, I suddenly stumble upon this issue of The Face. Sitting there in my sitting room. The two ‘dirty’s look identical. I’m the most derivative designer alive. Nonetheless, now I want to find the damn font. It’s all through the issue.. Can you help?
Now the other font I’m looking for is – coincidentally – also in the same issue of The Face, although it’s not where I saw it originally. It’s a highly stylised psuedo-cursive that looks a bit like Neon. The best place to see it is on page 153 in the ‘tracks’ section. It’s the font that they use for the name of the reviewer at the end of each review. I’ve seen it all over the place recently, but I can’t seem to find out much about it online. Please help!
Right. So here’s a dumb question about password length. There are a great many sites where you have to register to use the service. Most of these sites require you to provide a user-name and a unique password. In order for your account to be secure, it’s in your interest to have a password that’s hard to guess. So the first thing that most sites suggest is that your password should be a certain number of characters long. The reason for this is that people will try to use passwords that are as simple as possible to remember and short-passwords are going to be easier to remember than long ones. So if you were doing a brute-force attack trying every combination of letters and people (on average) were using more passwords that were four characters long than seven or eight characters long, then you’d be able to break some passwords pretty quickly just by starting with the smallest words. So people stick on a minimum length of passwords. Which is interesting. So my first question here is: if you set a minimum password length of (say) six characters, how many people use exactly six, seven or eight character passwords? Doesn’t that make it easier for people to state ‘a large number of passwords will be of this length, so let’s target our efforts there’? Even if the maths involved is much nastier? I bet – for example – that loads of people have passwords that are combinations of two three or four letter words… What’s the maths like around this stuff?
So after the FiveLive thing, I went for a bit of a wander around TVC to meet with a friend who works on CelebDAQ. Off the record, on the QT, and very hush-hush… Anyway, while exploring the Design Building, I stumbled upon an abandoned TARDIS and decided to have a bit of an explore. Except every thirty seconds someone walked by and I had to look really innocent and totally, “I’m not taking lots of pictures inside your Police Box”. It’s hard to look innocent next to a TARDIS.
Anyway, after a while I got a chance to dig around inside, and I have to say that it’s not really very Homes & Gardens. It’s much smaller and less time-travelly than I expected and (although I looked everywhere) I couldn’t find that nice white room with the round things on the wall and the pulsing console in the middle. The glass in one of the windows was cracked, however. And I did find some kind of articulated insect on the floor though which I determined could possibly have been aa Cybernaut. My conclusion? Cyberman attack.
Caring little, I decided to pose…
Hmm. That was a bit of a disappointment. I mean all things considered, that could only be described as a little bit of a disappointment. Basically, FiveLive‘s morning show was over-running and the weblog feature was stuck right at the end – leaving it to bear the full brunt of the sharpened knife of editorial pressure. So in the end, all we managed was an introductory chunk, a couple of lines from James Crabtree, a line from me and a short conversation with Alastair from Scary Duck. Apparently they also trailed a chatroom that didn’t actually work, which is a bit of a shame because it basically means that those of you who did have questions or comments or thoughts realyl didn’t have any opportunity to present them to the world…
So here’s what we’re going to do – if you have come to this site as a result of that chunk on the radio or if you have any questions or comments abotu weblogs and/or weblogging of any kind (or even if you just want to know what it’s like in the studio at FiveLive – then click on the link below and post your thoughts. Maybe that’s the best way to demonstrate one of the ways ni which weblogs can be valuable in having ongoing discussions – one of the things that makes it most different from simple broadcast media. And in the process maybe we can help some new people try out weblogging for the first time…
I’m nervous about mentioning it just in case I stink up the show but – just in case you’re interested – I’m going to be on John Pienaar’s morning show on FiveLive this morning between eleven-thirty and midday (UK-time), talking about (what else)… weblogs. The other guests in the same slot include James Crabtree of the Work Foundation and Madeleine Morris. And on the rest of the show is Formula One Champion Sir Jackie Stewart and a debate on “Has Feminism Failed?”. The station is broadcast live online via the BBC radio-player (there’s a link on the page above), and I think there’s some kind of parallel web-chat using arcane BBC machinery (which would be a good place for all of webloggia to go and correct me when I say something dumb). If that’s not enough for you, I think you can e-mail in your insults to morning [at] bbc.co.uk and if you’re a real glutton for punishment I think there’s also a webcam in the studio so you can bitch about my hair and watch me sweat in abject terror under the almighty unwavering stare of the BBC. Gulp…
A few shop-soiled weblog-related links, since I’m in the mood:
This week I’ve done a little tiny amount of work for the very smallest of sites. Ickle.org has been running for quite some time now (although it’s a luridcrously small amount in geological time). It celebrates the teensiest of eensy weeny things. I’ve taken on the whole week – three entries on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. And the theme? Tiny tiny superheroes! First up… Shrinking Violet:
” Shrinking Violet joined the Legion of Super-Heroes in 2962 at the same time as Sun Boy, Bouncing Boy and Brainiac 5! She comes from the super-tiny planet Imsk and can make herself super-tiny as well. Which is just as well or she’d squish all her friends …”
Compare and contrast: Long-Suffering Boy…