Category: Random

So I’m really hungry, so I go to the shop to get some kind of reasonable food and I get a big bottle of coke and some frozen pizza and a packet of cigarettes and some little foamy strawberry sweets and I get home and sit on the sofa and I heat up the oven and eat all the strawberry sweets and drink lots of coke and watch TV and then I get my pizza out and eat about a third of it before I feel full and slightly sick and ill. The point of this story? Nothing you tell people as children sinks in even the slightest little bit.

Mark on stuff: (1) “If fruit tasted so good that they artificially flavored candy like it, why don’t people eat actual ‘green apples’ or ‘watermelons’?” (2) “I partially spent the night outside on a hammock. I say partially because I fell off in my sleep and spent part of the night on my concrete patio. And then another part, from 4:40am onward, I came inside, because the flowers were making popping noises and I wanted to be where it was safe. ” (3) “I’m fascinated by how tic tac toe evolutionized into the game Connect Four.” (4) “I’m flying to Missouri for a bigmac.”

A lot of people recently have been doing work based around entirely CSS-based sites. Some of the latest tricks and tips have been written up over at A List Apart. My question with a lot of this stuff is where it ceases to be useful. Take the design of plasticbag.org for example. I think it makes clear and logical sense visually, but it doesn’t necessarily only have components within it that translate well into structural markup. When you reach the edge of what CSS can do (and retain the point of CSS – to be cross-browser, clear, elegant and more importantly STRUCTURAL) don’t you inevitably end up with tables again? Isn’t that inevitable at the moment? And possibly long-term as well.

So I’m at home watching television and I’m really excited about watching Will and Grace because I’m obsessed that the two main characters can’t really be as dull as they actually appear to be, and I’m consumed with the sense that they might even one day be able to make me laugh. But no. They’re just there. Neither of them are people I’d want to hang out with. Supporting cast is, of course, another matter. But Will and Grace themselves? No.

And it’s the Halloween episode and it’s kind of shit and I start counting how many times I’ve laughed by about half way through the program and it isn’t difficult because it’s ‘1’ time and it remains one time until the end of the episode. Which is depressing. And half way through the damn episode they put an advert for the new Angel boxset on. And I listen and I get all tweaked because it’s out on Monday. Not that I want to buy it you understand, but because the Buffy boxset is also out then and I MUST HAVE IT. Who can I sell, I’m asking myself. Who can I sell to buy that. And then Will and Grace comes on again and rigorously sucks arse for another twenty minutes.

Buffy. Our love is god.

Ralphy old chap, you’re missing the point. It’s not that we make fun of Americans. It’s just that we make fun of each other, and the first thing we noticed about you is that you’re American. Love ya, baby.

Live: At this very moment, Zeldman is playing Photoshop Tennis. Much cooler and more geeky than you can possibly imagine. The game’s only half-way through. Check back tomorrow for the final results.

There’s currently a job going at the BBC and you can apply for it online and I’m completely obsessed with it. I need this job. I crave this job. But because of that, I’ve been putting off applying for it all week. I want my application to be perfect. It has to be great. It’s too intimidating a project. If I don’t get it, I’ll be incredibly depressed. It’s got to be done today otherwise I miss the deadline. I feel ill.

In the spirit of encryption – and to encourage people to start using PGP as standard – you may now send me encrypted e-mails via tom%40plasticbag.org. All you have to do is install PGP and look up my public key on the PGP servers.

I have a long-standing interest in issues of cryptography – particularly as it relates to privacy laws. I’ve become increasingly aware of the presence of surveillance cameras over the last three or four years, and have followed the development of face-recognition software closely. I recently got sent a copy of as a present off my wishlist, and I ploughed through it at a phenomenal rate. While it wasn’t as technically illuminating as either The Code Book or the extraordinary (and must-read) novel Cryptonomicon, it did cover the level of NSA interference in the development of cryptography very well. At the back of my mind, though, I’ve always been convinced that whatever they may say, the NSA must be close to developing either some level of quantum computing or some kind of system for factoring large numbers – both of which would signal the end of much of the security that encryption currently provides. But according to an article at the BBC, this is far from the case. In fact the NSA is asking for more and more money to find some way to fight the rapid spread of strong encryption around the world.

Horror of horrors: I am not nearly as woolly a liberal as I had initially hoped: “More of a damp and flaccid liberal, you’d like the world to be a little better – you just don’t want to have to make the effort yourself. So, you once went on a demo and you watch Children in Need and you voted Labour last time round. But don’t kid yourself – that shrivelled and underused liberal conscience impresses nobody.” [via the Dragonthief]