I am both bored at work, and bored of that “nice adjectives to go with you name” thing.

A	Antipyretic
L	Loricate
A	Apodictic
S	Saponaceous
D	Dentigerous
A	Ambisinister
I	Inquorate
R	Remontant

[Update notice Black Ink has new content.]

A good weekend, although I’m in some pain now. Ran the first installment of the game, and I think it went well. Shunted some material out of it, which is probably just as well – I knew I wanted a long session for the first one, but it would have been of murderous length if I’d kept it all in. There’s time for strange machines and peculiar symbolism later on. Out of curiosty, do any of the roleplayers on my friends list have any means they use to estimate the length of time that a given amount of material will run?

And then, clubbing, for which I am paying today. Ow. Still a little confused as to why my wrists ache worse than my shoulders, but there we go…

In other news, I’m in Edinburgh for the bank holiday weekend, and will be available for, y’know, social engagements. I’m busy Monday night, and I’m not likely to be free til late on Friday or Saturday, as I’ve got family wedding type things to do, but if people are likely to be out late (11pm+ at a guess) then I’m happy to join the fun at that point, and I’ve all day Sunday, and Monday daytime free if anyone would care to clog my hours up…

So, burge came up with this last night:

Let’s call it the “Little things in life” meme.

List five little things which make you happy/satisfied/give you pleasure. Don’t go for the obvious ones like second-hand bookshops, warm baths, icecream, wanking, seeing a band live or whatever. Odd little things, which give you a little frisson and make things better, even if just for a moment.

And I think it’s ace. And that you should all do it. So get on with it.

My list:

1) The tube map.
2) Walking by the Thames.
3) The random shuffle function on my iPod.
4) Blue LEDs.
5) Music with a fiddle in it.

[Update notice: Black Ink has new content]

I have been aware for some time now that there are a distubring number of people in the world who look like me – my friends keep telling me about spotting them. I’m not sure what we all did in past lives to wind up with this affliction, but the fact remains, there are a good number of us. One of my friends suffers from the terrible affliction of running into me on his holidays – it’s happened to him a couple of times, including one occaision where he went on holiday to Norway, and found me running the hotel he was staying in. And this version didn’t just look like me – he spoken English with my accent, and apparently had similar mannerisms and demeanour.

The poor sod was almost put off his Akavit, but reported that a few glasses soon cured the shock he was feeling, so that was all right. I’m still slightly worried about it, but he enjoyed his holiday.

However, what I had not realised until this morning is that not only are there people who look like me out there, but that there is at least one man out there with exactly the same name as me. This is a little troubling, as it turns out that there’s been a mix-up at some point, and that for most of my working life, I have been paying my National Insurance contributions into his account. I think it’s all more or less sorted now (although I need to call the national insurance people in October to confirm a few things) but still, how hard can identity theft be, if this sort of thing happens by accident? It’s taken them six bloody years to notice that while I’ve been employed and paying tax, I haven’t been paying national insurance, for Christ’s sake!

Actually it’s very sad given that this is what I do for my living, but I’ve spent the last few days writing a couple of class files, that, all told, come to most of 1000 lines of code. Not wildly unusual. But today I’ve started plugging them in to the pages that’re going to need them, fully expecting to spend an annoying hour or two fixing typos, chasing missing brackets, and inserting semi-colons, as one does when one writes a lot of code without testing it as one goes along.

Not a single parse error in the lot of it. Of course, I have no idea if it’ll all do what it’s supposed to yet, but at least there aren’t any typos in it.

I told you it was sad.

Going to bed.

Who’s going to B Movie on Friday, then?

So I’m playing around with Launchcast, Yahoo’s customisable streaming radio service, and I have to say, I’m bloody impressed. A couple of hours of fine tuning and teaching it what I like (chiefly by rating songs, and then skipping to the next track, so it may take longer if you actually listen to all the early tunes it throws at you), and it’s doing pretty well at getting my music taste nailed – certainly better than any of the other “customisable” stations that I’ve tried, which all balked at the fact that I quite like five track lump that goes George Carlin -> Rancid -> Bjork -> Aphex Twin -> Tom Waits. It’s doing equally well at throwing me stuff I’ve not heard, but that it thinks I’d like.

Yahoo seems to have cracked it. So all I’ve got to do now is get one of those apps that MP3’s whatever’s coming out of your computer’s audio, and I’m going to be back to taping songs off the radio.

Plus ca change, eh?

[Update Notice: Black Ink has new content.]

And, because I’m bored I’m going to do that weird meme/music thing I’ve seen other people doing. Under the cut are my favourite lines/couple of lines from the first 20 songs on a random playlist shuffle (or at least, from the first 20 that have lyrics) . Can you name that tune?

Sing along at home…

Like everyone else, I’ve just been to see Van Helsing.

I loved it. It was the stupidest movie I’ve seen in ages. The script honked, the direction was uninspired, the CGI was laughable. There are plot holes large enough to drive a coach and a team of six horses through. Actually, I’m not sure it has a plot, so much as a selection of holes. And even the bits that might, charitably, not be plot holes, are just bloody stupid.

But I got to watch the Wolfman fighting Dracula. And I got to watch Hugh Jackman fight with everything. And Kate Beckinsale looked pretty. I got exactly what I was expecting out of this film, which was entertainment on a LXG level. Perhaps even better. The plot was made up of holes that justified the next fight scene and that’s it, and that’s what I wanted. And I got to watch the Wolfman smack the shit out of Dracula. I’m not sure how anyone could expect more, having seen the trailer, and knowing it was by the guy that made The Mummy, which is a shit film that seems to have fooled people into thinking it’s in some way good.

In other news, I saw another film today, and if The Saddest Music In The World is playing near you, you shoudl go and see it. It tries to be a little too clever in places, but nonetheless, it’s a interesting examination of the ways nations and families express grief and compete for symapthy, set in Winnipeg in the great depresssion. And Isabellia Rosellini plays a woman with no legs whose prosthetic replacments are filled with beer.

Can anyone out there tell me what “viaje” and “la mesilla” mean? I’m just curious, as I got Jason‘s latest album last night, and it’s a sort of mirror of his first album. Where the first began with “Prelude” and ended with “August Closing His Mouth After A Long Summer’s Yawn”, this begins with “February Relaxing Her Fingers After A Brief Winter’s Grip” and ends with “Coda”, and the tracks along the way mirror each other as well – “Without”/”With”, “Halloween”/”May Day” and so on, but I have no idea what if anything “Viaje” and “La Mesilla” mean, and I’m curious…