But I’m pleased with myself, so I’m writing about it. After some effort, I’ve got the ‘Now Playing’ feature back on Black Ink – or rather, replaced it with a ‘Recently Played’ feature. It’s a bit egocentric, thinking that anyone gives a toss what I’ve been listening to, but so’s the whole damn site, and I mostly did it for the technical challenge.

This sounds pretty trivial – after all, there are tools that’ll do it for you if you use WinAmp on the PC, or iTunes on the Mac. But I, of course, am a difficult bastard, and use iTunes on the PC, so instead of being able to get nice little application to do it for me, I’ve had to cobble together a means to take the XML that you can generate with iTunes, parse and sort it, and dump it out. The sorting was the biggest bastard, and still isn’t perfect, as the most recently played is actually at the bottom of the list, but if I want to keep the ‘Recently Played’ function on iTunes useful, and not limited to the last five tracks I’ve played (and I do) I’m going to have to live with it, until I can be arsed to re-write the thing from the ground up.

Which I’d like to, because at the moment, it’s completely custom to the way I want it to display on my site, rather than being generic, but it’ll wait until I have a week or so spare.

Counties I have visited

After a fairly last minute decision, I wound up at B-movie last night, and as per, it was ace, although it means that I am almost certainly not clubbing tonight, unless I drink enough to override my good judgement. Yes, I am a big wuss.

Completely missed spotting winterthing while we were in the club, and so when she wandered past while I was waiting for a night bus, I thought “Nah, couldn’t be”, forgetting, of course, that the world is always smaller than I think. Collapsed into bed and fell asleep watching Spaced at just gone three, which is, I think, the fastest I’ve made it back from Kings Cross…

Leaving for the V-lantines massacre at some point soon, honest. As soon as I feel able to move my neck…

Tried Bison for lunch. Wasn’t really terribly impressed – it was nice, but I prefered the other interesting meats I’ve had at the gastropub, I think. The spinach was the nicest spinach I’ve ever had, faint praise though that is.

In a staggering move, I’ve actually had really good customer service from BT. Our ADSL has been moved to our new provider, and when I phoned BT to confirm that my old account with them had been closed, the man on the other of the line noticed that they’d take a payment for a month’s ADSL yesterday (I knew it’d happen and was OK with it – just an unfortunate coincidence of dates) and he didn’t think this was terrbily fair, given that I’d essentially paid for a month’s BT ADSL, only to use less than 24 hours of it before switching ISP, so it’s going to be refunded to me apparently. Result.

Gosh, my life’s exciting.

Edit: Del, here’s the link to Paul’s review we were talking about last night.

I’ve mislaid my Kodo CDs, which is annoying, because after seeing them on Friday, I really want to listen to them some more. There was a bit more flute/dance Kabuki type-stuff this time out, and I confess, it’s more the drumming that I go for, but still, massively impressive. I see there’s a DVD of this tour coming out later in the year, which will be very cool, because while the drums sound good, it’s the sheer physicality of the performance that’s most impressive – in particular, the second half closer as two mad bastards beat on a taiko drum that’s bigger than they are, using sticks like baseball bats.

Went out round town on Saturday, looking for a new bag. Failed to find one, although I did get a new shirt. The met up with Gordon and fire_sermon for dinner at Garlic and Shots which was a bloody good laugh.

Spent most of yesterday in bed, because I didn’t have anything pressing to do. So I finished Be My Enemy (which, truth be told, I was a little disappointed by, although the bit with the chef made me laugh like a drain, which I suspect means there’s something very, very wrong with me), and watched Plunkett and Macleane, which I’ve always liked a lot more than the film probably deserves, but hadn’t watched in a while. I suspect I’ve mislaid my copy of the soundtrack as well, which is annoying.

So, I’ve joined the Scottish Malt Whisky Society. I’d be planning to wait until my birthday, but since it’ll take three to six weeks for my membership to come through, I figured I’d do it now, and claim the money back off my parents, who have offered to get me the membership for my birthday.

I was out at the society’s tasting rooms with work colleagues last night and very pleasant it was too. Tried (among others) the sweetest whisky I have ever enountered, from Glenrothes distillery. Seriously, the damn thing smelled more like treacle than whisky. Very nice. I’ll have to get a bottle before they sell out.

The rooms themselves are near Farringdon, where I can get a direct train from Tooting BR, which is ace for me. But the reason I’m boring you all rigid with this is that among the things I’m thinking of doing for my birthday is going for dinner either here (the pub beneath the rooms) or here (the separate restaurant that’s part of the pub but has a different (read: posher) menu), and I’m just looking for a show of hands in case anyone’s interested. I can only take a small number of people in, and will undoubtedly be going more than once this year, so I’m really only looking for people willing to do both, on this occaision.

Well, OK, just new. There’s a new Brookmyre book out in a few days, which I’m looking forward to, but more importantly, I’m pleased to discover that not only does Cory Doctrow have a new book out today (OK, yesterday, but I was asleep when it was announced), but that he’s done the same thing as his did with his last one, and made it freely available on-line under the same sort of Creative Commons license that he did his last one. His last one was one of the most interesting and entertaining sci-fi books I read last year, so I’m looking forward to this…

I don’t trust astrology. It seems like a pile of bunk to me. But I do, on the other hand, make periodic use of the tarot, so y’know, it’s not like I’m occupying some kind of atheistic high ground here. But still, it’s in that spirit of skepticism that I have just looked at chineseastrology.com (via arcana_j). I was born under the sign of the Fire Snake, apparently, which means that I am a wise philosopher and basically an all round mystic sage, which I chose to believe is entirely accurate. Of course, it also means that I’m supposed to hugely physically attractive, and have flawless skin, and I’m damn sure my skin’s not flawless.

But the real reason I know all this is crap is that this year, the one that started on January the 22nd, is the year of the Wood Monkey. This is, apparently, the best year I’m going to have in the next decade or so at least. Given that I woke up on January the 22nd feeling largely unable to face the world, this does not fill me with confidence. I mean, it’s entirely possible that I’m going to have a staggering wonderful year, but I was reflecting the other day that I had a brilliant 2003, and all it feels like 2004 has done thus far is piss on me, so y’know, maybe I was just born at the wrong time. Well, I know I was, but sadly, it would make no difference to my Chinese astrological sign if I’d been born at the right time.

But y’know, this isn’t a pity party. (Well, maybe a small one. Shut up.) So, after due consideration, I have decided that while I do not, under any circumstances believe in astrology, I shall, this once, assume that it is true, and astrology had damn well better look grateful about it. But I’ll be watching closely. I’m going to be looking back on 2004 (and early 2005, I guess) hard, and if things don’t rock utterly from end to end, I shall be demanding my money back. I don’t trust fucking monkeys, anyway. I mean, humans are basically just monkeys that decided that we liked plumbing and electricity better than throwing turds around and eating each others’ fleas, and look how we’ve turned out.

So: I have the week of my birthday off (20th-28th of March). It’s not a terribly special birthday, other than that it more or less obliges me to stop thinking of myself as “mid-twenties”, so I have decided that I’m going to do something (or possibly several somethings) interesting and special in that week, because my age isn’t being obligingly exciting. So, kids, I turn to you for suggestions please. As many, and as creative as you can come up with. Don’t worry about cost, time, or any other limiting factor other than, y’know, the laws of physics and basic possibility. I may not do somethings because they’re too expensive or time-consuming, but I don’t want to discount anything at this stage.

Well, I can only assume that someone sat down to write a film saying “I know what we’ll do – we’ll take the way Alasdair wishes the world worked, and we’ll map it onto a life that’s half his childhood fantasies, and half his more outrageously sappy teenage hopes and dreams, and set the whole thing in a slightly brighter version of his internal American South.”

Fucking loved it. I’ll be surprised if I see a more charming film this year, and it’s a strong early contender for my favourite of the year, as well. The world doesn’t quite work like that, but I’ve always loved the idea of a personal mythology, of stories from one’s past that are entertaining in and of themselves – the sort of story you find other people passing on saying “I knew this guy/girl who…” They don’t tend to be tall tales on the scale that’s presented in Big Fish, but still, the film captures that spirit of personal narrative beautifully. I’ll have to seek out the book.

My boss (who is on holiday) woke me up this morning, by sending me a text message complaining that he had rung the office this morning, and no-one had answered the phone. On a Saturday. When I was trying to catch up on the sleep I haven’t been getting. Bastard. I haven’t dignified him with a response.

So, having been woken rather sooner than I would have liked, I lay in bed for a while. Then I took my coat to the cleaners. Or rather, it took me there.

Had the drunken fuckwit from the other night thrown up over my biker-style leather jacket, it would have cost me 25 quid to have it cleaned. Annoying, but ultimately affordable. But no, it was my long coat. And so it’s costing me over seventy quid, (an amount that makes a difference to my plans for the month) to get it cleaned, because it’s a softer leather (and more of it) and has to be sent away to a specialist company. And it’ll be two weeks before I get it back.

A complete and total shitehawk, I say.