I haven't blogged in ages, or updated my site. In fact, I haven't done a single thing with it since the Yahoo! showdown that saw the most popular section of this website shut down. So to those of you who came for the the Launch scripts: they're gone, sorry. They're no longer available and I'm not giving the source out, I dont have the resurces to take on a big corporation in court.

So I've been wondering what I should do with this blog. People read it, but what's it for? I might say that personal blogs are a way to share your thoughts with others, to participate in online culture, to connect - whatever that means. Isn't it more like putting up a little shrine to yourself? I dunno. Seems kinda egotistical, maybe thats not a bad thing.

I came across an old conversation in an internet archive, me as a young teenager trying to score some ketamine. A naive and stupid thing to do, but hey. Of course I had no idea I wasn't anonymous, even back then I'd taken some basic steps to protect my identity, and I didn't know that internet chats are logged and kept. I got over the experimenting-with-substances phase pretty quickly, and I never did try Vitamin K - also known as cat tranqiliser, 'coz thats what vets use it for - but there it is. Permanent, indelible evidence of yours truly trying to set up an international drug deal. Bugger.

So what about this blog? Anyone who knows me in the real world can probably find it. My employer, family, girls I might want to meet. And future employers? In a world where everything you write is stored forever my opinions on hacking, pornography, politics and any number of shady areas are only a background check away. What happens in 30 years when my nices and nephews can read this? Will I be as embarrassed as I was when I found that old chat transcript?

Ah screw it, I dont have that many secrets anyway. So welcome back to the new strix.org.uk, I think I'm going to up the content, add pictures and cut back on the introspection. Let the bullshit begin...

The empty cardboard box has been added to New York's National Toy Hall of Fame. I think this is excellent, not only is an empty cardboard box (next to lego, and a length of rope) the ultimate toy, its cool to see it up alongside the manufactured marketed things like Barbie Dolls. Something else I like about this collection is that most of these toys work on the imagination, they're not an entertainment system like a TV or GameBoy, they're something you must be creative to use, which can only be good for kids. Much better than doping them up on junk food and sugar and then sitting them in fornt of an XBox IMO. Well, for kids under 11 anyhoo.

National Toy Hall of Fame

via UNEASYsilence

Something that's always bugged me a little are the censorship functions on search engines, those righteous little options with names like 'Family Filter' or 'Safe Search'. Little munchkin hats for search engines to tip at puritans. I dont think it's good to blinker people so that they can maintain a fantasy of living in some 1950s white picket fence world, better to expose people to the real world so they can love life for what it really is.

Anyhoo, so I wrote a script to search both with and without the family filtering, and then return only those results that are 'potentially offensive'. I was amazed. Google's SafeSearch(tm) is one wacky piece of kit. Offensive inappropriate pages it's protecting people from include The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, The UN International Court of Justice and this Wikipedia article about kittens. There were also a few consipracy kook sites about secret government censorship, happy crazy irony there, slightly more profound, the Feminists Against Censorship was taken out of the 'safe' results. Hmmm...

Of course, the script has practical uses as well, it produces near perfect adult searches, uncluttered by irrelvant vanilla stuff. Just the thing when you're googling for... um... treasure. Porntastic!

script here. go play...

The lights went out tonight. 10:30, the whole island blacked out. I put on some shoes and went outside. It was perfect. In that moment, moving silently between the shadows I felt completely centred. I could wish it was the end of civilisation and the lights would never come on. Everything was right. I knew in some primitive way how to act, how to move. Unseen, alert, aware. I also knew how I could have felt, running, leaping between uncertain footholds in the dark, hard ragged breath, tired, bruised muscles. Scratched and dirty. Half starving. Bare feet and hands, propelling myself through the bush. Eyes straining at dark shapes as I run. Somewhere deep inside my mammalian brain, below the noise of my inner voice and the complex, self referential thoughts of ego and identity, is an animal that wants to hunt.

Summer is here! It's wet and rainy and awesome. Surfing, beach parties, topless sunbathing. Of course, none of there things are happening at my house so I'm moving down the camp site until further notice. So call me on my cell phone, not my land line. Bye.

I got BoingBoinged! Sweet! I'm getting exposure and a metric crapload of traffic. So, this is the face I make while professing undying gratitude to Xeni Jardin: 8->

Trackbacks:

http://www.boingboing.net/
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/
http://google.blognewschannel.com/
http://www.limeyinbermuda.com/
http://blog.outer-court.com/
http://pmm.typepad.com/planet_multimedia/
http://in-out.upper.jp/
http://chilidog.blogsome.com/
http://skytg24.blogs.com/

Kick Ass! Thank you all.

Yeah! Whooo! There is this most kickass electrical storm going on outside. It's out in the sea to the southwest, clear, dark night with a big cumulus clouds rolling in towards the island, kicking off sheet lightning up and down the front, disappearing in and out of the thunderheads, lighting them up. It was a perfect moment, standing ot in a field at the top of the cliffs, grass up to my knees whipped up by this warm dry wind the storm was pulling into it, drinking a warm can of Bav NA (a Dutch non-alcoholic beer, I'm about the only person I know who likes it), dark sky overhead, lighthouses behind me and to my left, and these amazing shapes lit up in the clouds. Awesome.

Wa-Hey! Another beautiful Saturday on Alderney. Sunshine and fog, was just out taking photos of trees in the wierd light. And I met a new girl today, always a nice surprise. All the pick-up artists I've studied are adament about the three second rule, that is, if you see an attractive girl, you have a three seconds in which to start your approach, he who hesitates being lost. Altogether I must have taken about 20 to esablish that they weren't day trippers, clear my head and snap into character. She was with an older woman, probably her mom, and they were carrying groceries, enough for a fair long while. I took the tack of 'Hey! Welcome to the Island!', body language, tonality and eye contact were more or less where I wanted them, invited them to a party later on. I doubt they'll show, but that's fine, I'm happy with how my technique and inner game are progressing. I've been working on first impressions for the past fornight or so and it's good to have opportunities to practice, I have met *lots* of tourists this past few weeks.

Guernsey was an eye opener, I went there on Wednesday to get my arm sorted out. I'd barely stepped off the plane and there were are half dozen girls in the the arrivals hall, cute girls, who I'd never seen before, more new faces than I'd met in the past six months. I tried a couple test approaches, mostly on principle and for practice, it didn't go down very well. I hadn't slept and my arm still hurt like crap, so my congruence wasn't there and I wasn't at a good place in my head, still a good experience, noting negtive body langue and watching assumed rapport fail. Valuable lessons. Also good to prove to myself that I can take a few failed approaches and go straight into another unaffected, something I wouldn't have been able to do six months ago.

I took some time out at the hospital to check myself out in the mirror, body language, a couple facial expressions, and they looked fine to me, but they weren't working like they normally do, wich I guess proves that at some unconcious level girls are very astute to false body language, and faking it as much as I was causes some subtle inconsistency that freaks them out. On the way there I met this girl and got about five lines into conversation, but she was just being polite, so I raised the gambit of telling her I was going in for a vasectomy (which should usually be a good hook) and made a couple of jokes about it. Nothing, completely wooden expression. No smile, no giggling, no shift in posture, didn't even move her feet. Which I guess goes to show that you cannot fake that naughty-happy-confident state girls are attacted to. I was back on form by the next afternoon with my arm fixed, lesson learnt.

All considered, it was very liberating to hit on these girls in Guernsey and fail with absolutley no consequence. It was completely win-win, I'd succeed and learn something, or I'd fail and learn something, and never see them again. It was fun. On Alderney everyone knows everything everyone else does, so if I did something stupid and screwed up with an island girl, not only have I burned a bridge, but all the other chicks will know about it, so I can't repeat the experiment, or try anything too often. From the air, Alderney looks tiny small :-)

Hey, welcome to the new server. This website is now powered by Debian Linux. In other news I'd like to say ''OW! SWEET (cat juggling) OLSEN TWINS! DAMMIT, FOR THE LOVE OF BENJI THAT HURTS!'' I got up just now at 3am to do... 3am stuff. Anyways I fell over and put my shoulder out. So now I can't sleep and it's like 5 hours before the quack shop opens and I can get it fixed. Oh well, at least I fixed the music videos. Time for an all-night Futurama marathon methinks.

Looks like the ad remover's broken again. This is about the fourth time in a month, Yahoo must be up to something to keep rearranging their systems like this. The first couple lockdowns shut out my stream ripper :-(, now they've got another new layout for their ASX files. Oh well. For those of you who don't care, here's some pictures of a squirrel on water-skis.

Everyone else: The original ASX were pretty cool, standard mms: streams together with comments that could be used to figure out what the streams were, then they went and replaced them with HTTP streams that have these big long cryptic querystrings, presumably to keep track of users and resources and to tip off the FBI that you're spanking it to JoJo, who's only 15.

In either case the ads were served as separate streams and were easily taken out. Now it looks like they might be combining the ads into the same stream as the content, but I'm not sure yet. I've tried to take the new setup apart a little, but I grow bored with fixing this over and over.

I think the answer may be to quit using their own playlists, which are full of ads and Jennifer Lopez, and make my own playlist generator that feeds off the 'simmilar artists' feature. Be good practice for the new generation of spiders and scrapers I'm designing, the interact an absolute minimum with other sites, for less disruption and a smaller footprint in the logs. But not today. It's a beautiful afternoon and I'm going outside for awhile. Bye.

Whee! I fixed it! My very retro vintage washing machine is now working again, four months after I decided to take it to small pieces, in the name of science (it had exploded in a carpet-soaking puddle of dirty, foamy water). I'm not sure exactly when it was built, I'm pretty sure it predates the transistor and I'm guessing early sixties. Inside it is dirt, clockwork and neatly machined parts. Its cycle is controlled by grooves and lumps in a wheel which hit little levers, opening and closing circuits. This wheel is connected by more clockwork to the main axle of the thing, so timing is measured by revolutions of the drum.

I think it's kinda cool, an artefact of the twentieth century. From before cars and washing machines and toasters became computerised. It has no electronics whatsoever, it's an electrical machine. Yet it's perfectly functional. Works exactly the same now as when people were crapping themselves about the cold war while they did their laundry. Odds are this thing was making it's thumping whirring noises at the same time as Kennedy was having sex with Marylin Monroe. How amazing is that?

I'm happy. I'm feeling glad. I've got sunshine, in a bag even. And a Gorillaz CD. Been working on a credit card processor for an ISP on the mainland, implementing a system called Protx. Fun project, quite a lot of content knowlege to pick up so it's been a learning curve. Complex objects moving in precise patterns. The sort of thing I like to make. As always, a lot going on, white out over the Channel. In local news, the States has introduced poultry lisences (like dog lisences, not sure if you have to have you're chicken's name on the little brass tag or not).

Been quietly practicing mirroring the breathing of customers in the bar as I'm serving them. Part of a rapport technique I'd like to learn. Pretty crap at it so far, getting better. It's easier with smokers and people lighter on their frame. Did you know women get all uncomfortable and awkward if you stare at their navel? They do, no matter how discreet you think you are, they notice. Takes some getting better at. :-)

Making an effort not to get bent out of shape by Valentines Day. Like I need a reminder that today would have been 4 years with my ex. Valentines Day sucks. All shop windows and television specials and commercials of happy sexy people. Valentines Day sucks. I don't feel lonely or inadequate or unloved any other day of the year. Valentines Day sucks. I look around at this bleak vista of grey February days, pale overweight British women. Crude, agressive yobs swearing and shouting on a Monday night, pushing each other, hoping to start a fight. All anger and thoughtlessness, drunk, uncaring, futile and without ambition. Drawn teenage girls pushing prams, girlfriends of the yobs in the pub. This whole picture sucks.

And that's OK. Alderney's a beautiful place, and the people - by and large - are lovely. It's the enchanted isle and where I choose to live. It only sucks today because I'm looking at it through shit colored galsses. And that's OK too. I almost never feel alone, even more seldom does it bother me. It'll soon pass. Still, emotions are important, they let you know when you're out of balance. And today they're telling me I should be investing more of my time, money and effort into personal relationships and to developing interpersonal skills.

I think enthusiasm and success have a lot to do with one another. The island's been a perfect place to get on with persuing my goals for the past six months or so, and I'm happy with my progress in most areas. The goal I need to focus more on as spring comes in is 'Have a varied and satisfying sex life.' Number three on my list for this year :-) So I need to fill the role of 'Princess' in the great romantic comedy that is my life. And, come to think of it, my life could use a little more romance, and comedy.

TODO: Work on my stand-up act.

Alderney does have some hot sexy young women. But... they both work at the Moorings, and I don't think either likes me much. That said, it's easy to see a lack of options in such a small community, there's certainly not enough girls to play any kind of numbers game. Like in London you might be able to go up to 30 girls and ask if they want a quickie and eventually one will say yes. Can't do that here, you ask all three single girls, and then you're out of options. Also, there'll be the same three single girls tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that.

Like Groundhog Day. But to think of that as a shortage is to forget that three single girls is more than anyone needs. One is the exact, perefect number of girls to have a relationship with, and two is the exact, perfect number for sex, so three is a surplus. And they're all dying with eager anticipation for a chance to go out with me. They just don't know it yet. Man, there are some sloooooow-ass learners here.

I'm not planning to land a local girl. I may bring one person into my life, I probably don't want a feudal clan of the island's old families. Shakespeare wrote an excellent cautionary tale about the hassle a girls parents can be, hang me for Romeo. Besides which, local girls come with baggage, every coarse violent loser she's ever dated, all her extended family, everyone she's known her whole life, will be everywhere I go. And endless poo with people's grapevine based opinions. Way too complicated.

Fortunately, only abut half the population are locals, and spring'll bring a fresh herd of waitresses and bar staff to the island for the tourist season, and probably some foreign party girls now and then :-) So I should be preparing, not complaining. I've got into Skype recently (voice chat for you technophobes). Occurs to me this is the perfect tool for practicing girl skills, can call some lonely person up, try different tacks for making first impression, then see how fast and hard I an get her laughing.

Should also read more Kenrick Cleveland, he writes books on sales and persuasion and stuff like that using his own approach to NLP. Be hella useful if this stuff can be made to work, and if I'm skyping there's no risk of wierding any locals out. I must finish reading 'Influence Spinning', it's a pretty mind bending book, with some answers to a very interesting question: How does one go about being an influential person? Awesome.

So... Kenrick. Or I could go watch the crisp eating competition at the pub up the road. To complete it someone has to eat 30 bags of Walkers crisps in one hour. Yeah, that sounds like fun...

Sunday afternoon again. The customers are back to good spirits. Had a loud happy birthday party in the pub last night. Some guy I think works in construction. Spilt Sambuca on one of the tables and set it on fire, sort of rippling blue flame. Usually I'd get pissed and kick people out for setting the furniture on fire. I wasn't in the mood and it didn't seem to be doing any damage to the surface. And I have a fire extinguisher handy if I need.

The thought of turning a fire extinguisher on a crowd of drunken young men set alight with blue flames, hozing them into awkward flailing snowmen in a hissing torrent of white powder appeals to me. Gives me an evil grin of an inner smile. Perhaps I shouldn't tempt fate.

There was some live music at the pub next door last night, some sunshine today, people are in a better mood. I think cigarettes also have something to do with it. People have either quit or gotten over their New Years resolutions. People on nicotine withdrawal resonate bad energy, just humming with it. Little black holes of irritability and internal conflict. Any room with that is an unhappy room, and no ammount of feng shui will fix it. But that's past and the bar's happy again now.

In my (smug) opinion quitting smoking's all about imagination. And hamsters. It's like if you tell someone an idea you have and they don't like it, they got this hamster on a little wheel in their head. If you ask them 'Yo, what's wrong with it?' Their hamster starts running around on it's wheel and *ping* they come up with some valid criticism of your idea, some reason they've come up with because they were asked to.

Simmilarly, if you ask something like, 'How would you fix that?' or 'What else would it be good for then?' Off goes the hamster. *ping* Suddenly you've got a solution to your problem or some other useful bit of thought. You've just gotten free use of their idea hamster.

It's the same with smoking. You decide you want to quit, like suddenly and cold turkey, you have this urge to smke, so you're thinking about it, and your hamster is turning like crazy, becuase you're subconciously asking if you can have a smoke and why not. And the hamster is coming up with these 'reasons' you might be able to have one, and how nice it might be, and you're going to fail because of this.

Being in a bar, around people smoking, with alcohol making your cravings worse and eroding your will, doesn't help. You fail, and then feel bad, and you've spent however long feeling crap and taking it out on everyone around you. Waste of time IMO. I did that several times, failed, felt hopeless and without will.

And then one day I just stopped. I'd been thinking a lot about how much damage I was doing to myself, and probably losing the years I should be kicking back and enjoying my life's work. And it occured to me how bummed my family would be if I died a horrible death of lung cancer. Dwelt on that for awhile. Then the next time I moved to light up I just looked at the thing and decided I didn't want it. My imagination was working for me. So, after five years, that was it. I still have one very occasionally, and I can because I know I don't want one.

So that's what you've got to do, get the hamster on your side, using your emotions in a useful way. If you know you can have a cigarette anytime you like, and you just don't want one, don't feel like it, then it's easy not to. Also, if you do have a cigarette, don't enjoy it much, then you haven't failed at anything, you're just having a smoke like you do every day, and it's no big deal. Also, you start to reinforce your emotional response to smoking, giving it some momentum so you'll feel even less like having one next time.

I should try find more application for this. I bet there's a bunch of stuff this technique would be useful for. Me, I could use more motivation sometimes. And I bet once I've got that I can think of a way to harness other peoples creativity in fun ways. Sounds like something that might have value in the 'people skills' department. hmmmm.... *ping*

Hello World. There is another beautiful night outside, just saw the moon set, went all red as it got to the horizon. Orion was very bight, I'm still not used to how it looks from the northern hemisphere, even after two years this side of the equator. Strange to think the sky is something I see every day and can still do a double take and realise it's wrong. Kinda. Anyway, for all you people who don't go stalking about the middle of nowhere alone in the small hours, I recommend it. It's peaceful, helps me put things in perspective.

Also nice to have some rugged coastline to go walking on in a place that's safe at night. I'm still very happy I came to Alderney, all through summer the locals were warning me I'd change my mind in the winter. It's bull, winter's great. Completely different atmosphere on the island, much more rural. It's cold and it rains. I like it. The strongest winds we've had so far gusted at over 65mph. That's hurricane force. The weather's just not as interesting inland. And I like rain. Water is life.


I'm coming to like the people here better as well. Could just be the end of culture shock or something. I haven't made as much time as I could for people the last few years, time I made more of my social life I think. I have a very social job so I tend to keep my own company when I have free time. I have have many excellent friends off the island, mostly form home and university, I should I should work on some friendships here. I meet plenty of very cool people across the bar, think I might have myself a house warming or something and invite a subset of like minded younger people.

In other news, still very busy, as I like to be. Things are working out and carrying on. Traffic to this here site is picking up, and I'm finally indexed by google. I've been on some of the ther search engines for awhile, now I have a top 3 raking for a couple of my keywords, and top 10 on a few others. Given the the huge complex subject that is page ranking, I'm very happy, it's exceeded my hopes for it. Quick trivia contest: A noddy badge via first class mail to the first three people who identify the keywords for my top 3 result on google. :-) [start with 'stream']

I've got two new projects in the offing, one I'm fairly sure will make a modest ammount of money and one I'm tentatively hoping will make a very small ammount to start with. If it works and breaks even I will be very excited. I've been writing software for the better part of my life now, I think of it as making machines to make things. Systems to take inputs and create something you want, business cards, financial reports, inputs for other software, all sorts. Now I want to make software that can produce money. That is the output I want from the program I'm writing, real dollar transactions, that I can invest or withdraw as cash.

The beauty of what I have in mind is that computers can do things so very quickly. Thay can complete complex tasks with thousands of calculations in a tiny fraction of a second. So if I can come up with something a computer can do that results in money being made, less than a cent on average, even negaitve ammounts some of the time, the process can hopefully be run again and again, very fast, indefinately, which is where the possibility of large sums of money being generated becomes real. Not a daydream or 'one day'. Real, like I've seen done. I know other people have done simmilar things in various areas online, I owe it to myself to do the same, and succeeed.

It's a fairly ambitious project, and I'd hoped to be finished it long before now. When it first started the projct was a lot different in how it would work. It's become apparent a couple times that what I was doing wasn't going to work, or had been done before. Good ideas that failed because of something I didn't figure on to start with. Which is good, the more I fail with my best shot the further along I am on this particular learning curve. And I'm sincerely optimistic for the medium term future. Of course that has been the case many times before, so what?

My goal for the other project is to take me home. I haven't been back to Zimbabwe since... years. So I'm starting an eBay store, I have a source of stuff to sell so the real challenge will be running it efficiently, so it performs with minimal effort. I have about enough money to make the trip I have in mind, but travelling tends to eat all my capital, so I want another source of revenue specifically for that.

Sometimes when I'm working the bar and it's quiet I'll get a guy who wants to tell me his troubles, and these are very practical cautionary tales. Mostly they involve a woman, some children and debt. So many people spend their whole working lives making payments on debt for stuff they can't back out of because of responsibility to other people. They find their whole life worked away. Which is why I want money to invest. If I can have can have money coming to me from investment instead of away from me into a morgtgage or credit cards or whatever my life will be so much richer in other ways. Free, even. I should mention, my parents have been excellent role models in this. Rather rent a caravan than mortgage a house.

So I should save more. And that's my plan for the year. To make an online entity make money. Also to develop my social life and visit home sometime around May. And on that note, I have a lot to do :-)

Yeah Baby! 2005. I am so stoked about it. December was a little grey for me, some shitty stuff happened in December, or at least I thought it was shitty at the time. And I turned 24. Wasn't looking forward to that, didn't feel I've achived all I wanted to by this point in my life. To the way I think, 23 is still like being a teenager, one can be still exploring the world and yourself, carefree and living. Just living, doing stuff and enjoying it, still dreaming about 'adult' life. Life after 23. Career and crushing responsibility and mortgages and all that stuff. Getting a receding hairline. Writing a will. Damn.

So yeah. I was thinking in terms of a lot of negatives about age. And that's pretty dumb, but I was. Thinking about it, most of the people I know on this island who I find cool and interesting and enjoy spending time with - just for the sake of it - are a fair bit older than me. People who are still living and full of energy and keen to try new things. People with stories, because they've tried lots and lots of new things.

I still had a some negative self image things going on, a feeling of loss like I couldn't be a kid anymore. Sounds dumb when I read it written down, still one has got to acknowledge these things to work them out. And I think I've worked out what it is. In my life and the last two years of working bars I have spent time with so many half dead people. Old folks who can bash my ear for an hour while I nod my head and go ''mmm... yes... really....'' They'll be talking about some dog that the owners of the pub, 14 years and three landlords ago, used to have. Or about how they cant get used to new measurements (the currency changed in 1972 - 8 years before I was born - from old pounds to new pounds, some old folks dont like the new ones). Something very unimportant compared to the scale of a human life. People who will not talk positively about anything contemporary, especially if it's in the news. They want to tell you about how things should (ie, used to) be.

And then it happens. They notice I have an accent and then ask where I'm from. And I say 'Harare'. And then tell them it's in Zimbabwe. ''Oh, Rhodesia!'' they say, brightening up. Because I am a Young-Person, and I have A-Lot-To-Learn, and they now want to share their wisdom with me about what a mess 'the blacks' have made in 'Rhodesia' and how wonderful it used to be (under the apartheid of the Smith regime). Because as a young person, with such a lot lot to learn, I obviously know nothing about my own country, to which he's never been. And something I really hate, as an African, is racism. People putting down my african friends and countrymen in my presence is not cool.

I could say something sharp. There's no point, it won't do any good. So I just clench my toes and carry on with the head nodding. There's no reason to assert myself against a person like this, to try and change their view of the world. They're too scared of it. Changeing to them would mean letting go of the past. A person like this is intimidated by the timer on their VCR. That to me is what old means. To not want to change. To fall off the horse and not keep getting back on.

I am very, very afraid of getting old. The thought terrifies me.

And that's where I had it wrong. I'm never going to get old. I won't let myself. Sure, my body will age, time will pass, and that's fine. Because I will never give up wanting to live. I know that with a certainty. I think that people who let themselves be old, never had that desire to start with. They're bitter about life carrying on without them after they gave up on it. Which is why they won't say anything nice about the present, and are enthusiastic about the past, non-commital about the future.

I'm always going to want to change myself. To keep ahead of the times. And I have some great role models to spend time with. I know some excellent senior citizens who are younger than I am. People who will still rush off to Amsterdam to check out an art expo and smoke some weed. And boy do they have excellent stories. And in all the time they've spent, doing all this cool stuff and growing as people, they've learnt a lot about life the universe and everything, and I want to hear about it from them. They're not alone in a bar, talking at some bored foreign guy. They're out, living. And when that takes them to my bar, I want to talk to them.

These people don't say 'If I knew at your age...' or 'Back in my time...'. Because they don't have regrets, they learnt from their mistakes and the crap they were served, gained from it, and kept on living. And they're still doing it now, and the present is still 'their time'. And that's how I want to be :-). It's going to be pretty cool to have all those great memories to look back on, and all the stuff I think about more worked out.

And I can wait. There's going to be a lot I want to do between now and then. And I am really looking forward to it. It's going to be awesome. Starting............ Now. :-)

Force 11 gale windy, strong enough to tip shipping containers over. Wrecked a couple yachts and closed the harbour. The sea's huge, rolling into the island and exploding over the breakwater. Magnificent. I enjoy big weather :-)

And hey! It's xmas. A time of buying stuff and having to listen to that creepy perv Tom Jones sing about how crap the weather is. And doubtless there'll be another crappy xmas movie aimed at 'family' audiences. Probably it will be about St Nick having some dumbass problem and needing the help of some cutesy American kid, or some BS like that. Oh well. You know which xmas movie I'd like them to make so I can watch it? Alien Vs Santa Claus. Rated R18, now that would be cool. How about it Hollywood?

Somewhere the Salvation Army is rallying. I think a key part of army's identity is the music it marches to. It sets up personal and group boundary and security things. It's like drinking songs. An anthropologist writing this would probably have stuff to say about territoriality and tribal bonding rituals and stuff. Every army has a sound: bagpipes to chimurenga songs played on african instruments, it defines them. And I think that singing christmas carols is the reason why the Salvation Army will never take over the world.

So, I guess I'd better go buy some stuff, huh?

Wow its windy! I've just been out in the fields south of my place, it's an amazing night out there. There's a force six gale tearing over the island from the south, skating low clouds in over the bay of Biscay and tearing them to streamers over the curve of the island. You'd think it would be screaming, but it isn't, just very, very windy - loud white noise and the cracking of my clothes. I think that maybe wind needs hollows and shapes in it's way to make eddies and build up resonance to make whistling sounds. The fields and cliffs are pretty smooth with nothing to get in the wind's way, gorse and meadow grass chased into small sharp waves by the gusts.

The moon's almost full tonight, fading in and out as clouds slide under it, the air's hazy. I could just see huge white horses through the haze, but I couldn't get close enough to the edge of the cliff to see them smashing into the island. The current of air coming over the edge of the cliffs was too strong to move against. It was a really amazing experience, the sheer force of the wind and spray in my face and tugging at my clothes, the grandeur of the scene. It's awesome to see things as big as clouds moving so fast and pulled apart over the island. Moonlight was the perfect way to see it.

I was only out in the wind about 20 minutes, it seemed longer. It was only when I got home I noticed my heart was racing. My place is small and warm and well lit, getting back to that after the after the cold, wild night was... anitclimactic. It's very quiet despite the music playing, if that makes sense. Lava lamp blobbing away, half built PC on my workbench. Neat rows of spare parts. A normal, homey scene, somehow out of place.

So I guess I'd better get on with it. The PC's a 500mhz recycled AMD, nothing exciting. It's going to be a data entry terminal. I'm painting the case two shades of a honey color with black highlights. Got primer paint all over my hands. So, getting on with it....

Today I bought myself a super-soaker. A big flourescent orange and purple water gun. Because they're stylish and sexy, and I look like a brute hunk of man walking through town with it. Actually, it's because of a nasty hairy turd that spends the day barking itself retarded outside my front door. I'm very fond of my flat, it's great and I've put a lot of work into fixing it up, I don't want to move. The catch to living here is this shitty idiot animal my elderly landlady dotes over. She actually calles her house the [dog's name] house.

I've tried to explain politely that I work nights and need to sleep at least some of the day, and ask her not to let the thing out the second she gets up and about (5am), but it's hard to explain anything when she's absorbed in cooing at the thing. What makes old people talk to animals anyway? She's otherwise sane and has plenty of friends. The animal is widely hated, several neighbours and aquaintances have offered to help me mete it with an 'accident', but I'm just not arsehole enough to upset the owner. She's like 90 years old.

Anyways, I did some reading on animal psychology online and it turns out that when not caused by painful rectal mites, endless barking is caused by dogs being stressed or bored. In either case, dogs seek attention or resassurance from people, so hollerin' at them is only going to make the problem worse. It's not effective negative reinforcement. Repeated electric shocks and exposing dogs to citronella - a smell dogs don't like - does tend to solve the problem. Not real practical for me though.

A better recommendation was to throw a can of water in the face of a barking dog, like across a fence, or to use a pressure hose. Apparently, it's important to approach the dog calmly and quietly, to simply be around it friendly like - right until it barks for the first time. Then as it does, throw the water in its face, same time as yelling at it. That way the dog comes to know 'Quiet!' means 'shut the hell up' ratherthan 'I'm paying attention to you'.

My hallway's carpeted, so I can't use a bucket of water, hopefully shooting water up the thing's nose will be coersion enough. Oh well. If I had enough time, I'd go sit on the beach and read a book. If I had spare time after that I'd make a violent computer game called 'Poodle Hunter'. As it is I have stuff to do.

I've put the stream ripper on hold for awhile. When I get into crazed-enthusiasm-for-programming mode everything tends to get put on hold, I barely eat or sleep and drag myself to work by force of will, much as I like my job. So after the last week stuff like housework is backing up on me, think I might take today to set it right. I always feel that it's time wasted. I can spend six hours doing a week's ironing and then my afternoon's gone, nothing achieved. All this ironing and tidying is just vanity anyway, clothes are exactly as warm and practical unironed. But I can't go work dishevelled, and I guess I do care if people think I'm a slob, so I iron. I know I shouldn't care and nor should anyone else, but hey.

The island's electricity comes from antique and roaring diesel generators, the waveform of their output has been decribed as 'a row of bloody christmas trees', as opposed to a smooth sine wave. This puts a lot of stress on the cheapo AC to DC power supplies of small consumer electronics (switchmodes like on a PC seem to do OK). These power supplies wear out relatively quickly and then blow their internal fuses like they're supposed to, so that the power unit can be replaced without damaging the rest of the device. Only not everyone knows this so I see a lot of VCRs and Sky boxes at the tip, I have a couple I found there with perfectly good mechanisms and circuitry that just want standardized power units swapped in.

What has this to do with ironing? Well, I don't usually watch TV, I don't keep one in my home because I don't have the time to watch one and because terrestrial stations in the UK are dire. BBC and ITV broadcast the most incredible parade of crap and sports, focused around terrible British soap operas and football matches, in between the same baby product and homeloan commercials day in and day out. Soul sucking stuff. Come 2am, however, the lowest common denominator is asleep and they broadcast some quality programs, documentaries that are actually fresh and interesting and some adult education material, open university, et al. I think the government makes them do this.

In any case I think I might fix a VCR and record some 2-5am broadcasting, then hitch the VCR to my computer with a tuner card - which I also found at the Impot, amazing what people throw away - and see if I can't feed my mind a little while I get on with this ironing lark.

Oh well, best get on with it. And I've downloaded some new Evanescence music videos to watch. And there's an annoying sound biting at my concentration. Time to go water the dog again...

Whoo! Finally got my stream ripper working :-) Downloaded myself a copy of Linkin Park's 'Breaking the Habit' as proof. Excellent music video, gritty CGI anime, compliments the track perfectly. Probably the best music video I've seen this year. One of the things I like best about Japanse animation is the way good anime and mangas have such cool symbolism. This one has lots of gears and spinning circles (continuity?), gasses, pulsing fluids, steam, mists, haze, bubbles (breath/life?).

I'm not an expert on anime or Japanese icon, and this won't be everyone's mug of beans but it's an excellent piece of art in an authentic style. And a very motivational song. Go see it.

Otherwise, its been a good week. The weather's been lovely so I took some time off to go climbing last Tuesday and Wednesday. Alderney's directly in the way of massive tidal movements between the English Channel and the Bay of Biscay, the whole sea's always moving in one direction or the other against the island. This makes for some very powerful currents in the narrow stretch of water between here and France.

So, how the island disposes of it's trash is to incinerate what it can and then push the ash and what's left over a cliff into the rough, racing water of the Swinge. Around the neap tide this water can go way, way down, exposing a rocky wash.

One of my regulars once told me about how his father used to collect old coins and medals from this beach under the impot (municipal facility). So that's what I went to go see. You'd think it would be foul, with all the crap they push off the cliff from the tip, but it isn't. The tide tears away all but heavy pieces of metal and ceramic. It's actually really cool, it's like a pebble beach but with lumps of metal worn smooth by the sea. Brass goes orange, copper goes pink or dark green, aluminium weathers into smooth pieces and steel rusts into dark, pitted forms, sometimes black, sometimes orange with rust. Bits of very stained stainless steel. Drifts of little opaque sanded glass pebbles.

There's supposed to be a band on this wash where the physics of it all are right for small pieces of metal to accumulate, where it's good for coins etc. The water wasn't far enough out when I went there, but I did see some neat things. I'm always astonished at school art classes giving kids fake-o stuff like plastic glitter and white copy paper to be creative with when such beautiful materials are quite literally being bulldozed into the sea. Vivid things, like when pyrex goes irridescent from being battered by rocks. But then I'm a charcoal on brown cardboard sort of guy more than a crayon on white paper sort of guy.

Anyhoo, what I did get down there was a brass boule and a length of thin copper tubing that had been rolled into a tight ball. Both now live in my fruit bowl. The climb down took about an 45 minutes, the cliff's steep but chunky so it's easy climbing. Getting to the face involved a lot of blackberries, just coming into fruit this time of year. The trick to moving through blackberries - without ending up like that creature from Event Horizon - is not to be in a hurry. For safety I would have preferred to have someone climbing with me, but as it was I had to make to with someone at the impot knowing where I was. From the bottom I could see a much easier way up, so getting back only took about fifteen minutes. It's always easier to go up then down.

Other than that, mostly uneventful. Spent three days and nights fairly solidly wrestling with this stream ripper, I can get a little carried away with things like that sometimes. In the end I didn't use RTSP/RTP but went with using MMS framed streams over HTTP, turned out better for what I'm doing. So it's working, but it's not a finished product yet.

There is the most beautiful night outside. I finished work at about 12 and took some food out onto the sea cliffs at the end of my road. You can see for miles from the top of the cliffs. The moon's not quite full but it's bright, and shining through high, wispy clouds. There's a warm breeze blowing in and the sea's flat calm. On my left there's a slight front on the horizon following the French coast, with some low nimbus over Cherbourg, glowing orange on the underneath from the lights of the city. There's rows of orange lights all along the coast, odd little towns and lighthouses. On my right I can see the lights of Jersey. Straight ahead is the Bay of Biscay reflecting the moon. Awesome.

The sky here is one of the best things about Alderney. On England the horizons were close and the sky is small and dirty, the stars faint from light pollution. I missed it. My end of Alderney is a plateau above the sea, the sky is huge, and it's often clean, so the stars are brighter, or if it's a bit dirty it makes for red sunsets.

Otherwise, today's been uneventful. Spent most of it struggling with the an RFC, trying to implement the RTSP (real time streaming protocol) in PHP to make a stream ripper. I've been taking an interest in launch.yahoo.com recently, specifically it's regional versions. I might publish what I've worked out about it so far, and some tools I've made in dissecting it. Will hold doing that while I ponder how much poo that could land me in, if any.

Went to work, pleasant enough. A bunch of mainland girls came in dressed as cowgirls. Took some photos and assured me at length that one of their number didn't have genital warts. Good to know I suppose, maybe that's like the mating call of the Midlands or something. A wedding came in, pub crawling. Happy bunch, no one I knew. Folks here seem to celebrate everything with a pub crawl across St Anne. Finished at a marquee on the Butes.

A pleasant end to an unevetful week. Didn't get as much done as I'd like. Finally got carpets laid in my place. Built a database of proxy servers and some scripts to feed and use it. There's a website on owls (genus strix :-) ) I've used to test it which must be wondering why all those hundreds of Argentinians are visting recently *grin*. I think it's cool how stuff like google text ads translate themselves to other languages when you surf out of foreign servers. So that at least is done. Also finally got round to servicing some monitors, got a pair of 17 inch ones now for my box, lookin' sweet, and I put in another 20GB drive for a project I have in mind.

Got myself a copy of Candice Alley's music video 'Hello'. Been watching it all day. That girl has the most incredibly green eyes. Hello. Also got myself a packet analyser, if I've time tomorrow I'll use it to watch some RTSP transactions. I'm a big boy now, I should be able to work this fiddly thing out. But not tonight. It's 2am and I'm going to bed. Bye.

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