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My bet for 2026: companies chasing margins and hitting diminishing returns on frontier models will shift to fine-tuning small, domain-specific models. Fine-tuning is getting cheaper, open-weights models are catching up to frontier ones, and differentiation through your own data beats competing on prompt engineering alone.

AI won't kill programming jobs or leave them untouched. It's a new abstraction layer, like every one before it, that will create vastly more developers building vastly more software. Existing programmers keep their jobs; a long tail of cheaper new roles unlocks demand we couldn't previously afford to meet.

I scaled back my ambitions from "how to write AI apps" to what I've actually learned. Key lessons: LLMs excel at condensing text, not creating it. Give them the data they need rather than relying on training. Let them self-correct. Use regular code wherever possible. And stop trying to replace humans, especially doctors and lawyers.

After leaving Netlify, I've been exploring AI/ML/LLM opportunities. Here's my explainer: "AI" is marketing, ML learns from examples, and LLMs are essentially massive word-completion engines. But at scale, something remarkable emerges that looks like understanding, and that changes everything about what software can do.

I've been saying for years that there are no fundamentals of web development, and people keep pushing back. My argument is simple: "fundamental" means *necessary*, and no single skill, not HTML, not CSS, not JavaScript, is necessary to get a web page into the world. Gatekeeping helps no one.

I push back on Alex Russell's "Market for Lemons" post blaming JS frameworks and their advocates for poor mobile web performance. Developers aren't stupid or deceived: React dominates because of rational economics. Frameworks save developer time, enable hiring, and compound via ecosystems. Better frameworks, not fewer frameworks, is the answer.

I dig into what's genuinely impressive about crypto (distributed trust, abuse prevention, true cloud computing) and what's deeply problematic: boundary interactions, governance concentration, transaction cost tradeoffs, and unclear incentives. My conclusion: crypto may only be useful for financial engineering, and that's probably fine, just smaller than the hype suggests.

After 25 years in web dev and 10 doing data work, I finally feel like I know what I'm doing. Key lessons: hire data engineers not scientists, buy your warehouse don't build it, use dbt and Airflow like you'd use Rails, and keep domain experts close. Still figuring out dashboards and discovery.

Twenty years of blogging, from sandwich diaries to AWS takedowns, coming out (twice) to becoming American. The blog has outlasted Slashdot, nearly outlasted Twitter, and documented almost my entire adult life. I was right about who I am and what I do. Here's to whatever comes next.

The web stack is too vast and ever-changing for anyone to fully master. Instead of stressing about that, understand how standardization, packaging, and abstraction constantly reshape what developers actually need to know, pick your battles wisely, and embrace the fact that you'll never be bored.

Good code does what you need it to do and is ready when you need it. Testability, elegance, extensibility matter, but they're secondary. Late code isn't good code. Code that never ships needs no maintenance. Everything else is nuance.

I explain how databases actually work: what a DBMS is, why relational databases use tables, why NoSQL became a marketing term for mostly-in-memory stores, how your app connects to a database, and how replication and network topology affect consistency versus availability. A deep dive sparked by one friend's simple question.

I read an audiobook biography of every US president up to George HW Bush, then tweeted fun facts along the way. Here's my full list: which biography I chose, whether I recommend it, and links to my tweets. Also available as a spreadsheet.

Today I became an American citizen. I came partly for safety -- Trump's Muslim Ban terrified green card holders like me -- but also because after 11 years, America has seeped into me. Despite its very real flaws, I'm fundamentally optimistic about this country's future. And wanting to help fix it? That's pretty American.

I use shoes as a metaphor for gender identity. Most people are fine with what they're born with, but others struggle, and some find it excruciating. The ongoing revolution in gender isn't just about trans people. It's everyone realizing shoes come in all sizes, colors, and styles. Mine fit better now.

As a teenager I planned my own suicide with a specific date. I missed it, and that changed everything. Now I think of my life as a bonus round: the scoreboard is off, I can't win or lose, and everything I do beats the alternative of nothing.

A web standards cover of "Hands to Heaven" called "Hands to Boag" is a delightful piece of web history, made even better by the fact that one of the podcast hosts was actually in the original band. I rescued it from bit-rot so you can still enjoy it.

In the late 1970s, Quasar Industries fooled the public with a fake household robot that was actually just a guy in the crowd with a wire up his sleeve. More interesting: the resulting debate on ARPANET became the internet's first free speech controversy.

Trinidad and Tobago's anti-gay laws are why I can't live in the country I was born in. Jason Jones is taking the T&T government to court to overturn them, and he needs your help. Please donate to his campaign. I'll be matching donations on Twitter.

Yes, front-end development is absurdly complicated right now. But developers aren't adding complexity for fun - user expectations have exploded while timelines haven't. Today's frameworks are doing what jQuery did: showing browsers what developers need. It'll consolidate eventually. The mess is just evolution, and evolution is worth it.

I lay out my theory for defeating Trump: make him look corrupt, establishment, and above all, weak. His base elected a strongman who promised to fix everything, so amplifying his failures is key. Peel off his inner circle, obstruct from within, and starve his surrogates of airtime.

Nolan Lawson's piece on progressive enhancement is great, but conflates two different use cases: web apps and multi-page sites. For apps, offline-first beats JavaScript-free. For content sites, progressive rendering is essential since half-loaded pages are nearly guaranteed. Graceful degradation means something completely different depending which you're building.

After 20 years running online communities, I know "inclusive" and "safe" are mutually exclusive at the extremes. Eventually you must choose who to exclude. My advice: define your space clearly, own your choices, let incompatible communities fragment naturally, and don't agonize over free speech obligations.

I proposed the "Techdel test" as a joke, it went viral, and now I feel like a fraud. npm is trying hard on diversity but still gets it wrong constantly. Bias is everywhere and nearly impossible to fully correct for. All I can honestly claim is: we give a shit, and we keep trying.

Most technical interviews test the wrong things: memorized syntax, whiteboard coding, brand-name employers. Instead, hire for learning ability, intellectual honesty, clear communication, and basic decency. "Team fit" is bias in disguise. Homogeneity means you're hiring wrong. Good hiring is hard and slow, but worth it.

Google, Yahoo, and Facebook all released diversity reports using identical categories, making comparison easy. The gender gap is worst in engineering (averaging only 16% women). Racial diversity is also poor, though Yahoo's engineering staff is surprisingly majority Asian. Solid data confirming what we already knew.

Brendan Eich was wrong to donate to Prop 8, Mozilla's board was wrong to appoint him CEO, and the resulting mob rule was fine by me. We're still losing the broader culture war, so I'll take any wins I can get. Our freedom to be ourselves matters more than your comfort with that.

The web saved my life as a suicidal, closeted gay teenager in Trinidad, connecting me to people and information I desperately needed. It then taught me everything I know. That's why I've spent nearly 20 years building websites, and why I'm driven to make it easier for others to build them too.

After a slow six-month transition, I've stepped back from awe.sm. I remain an advisor, but I'm now a free agent for the first time in a decade, working on tools to make web development easier. Not job hunting, not in stealth mode, just coding.

I'm a gay Caribbean man responding point-by-point to a homophobic newspaper column. The author's claims about homosexuality being abnormal, his grotesque medical misinformation about anal sex causing incontinence, and his dangerous lies about AIDS transmission all deserve correction. I correct each factually, firmly, and with occasional dry humor.

I don't think PRISM is a big deal, but here are eight things that genuinely threaten democracy: whistleblower persecution, National Security Letters, gutting the Voting Rights Act, partisan redistricting, corporate personhood, SuperPACs, attacks on abortion rights, and enshrining anti-gay discrimination in state constitutions. (Update: I was wrong about PRISM. Shut it down.)

I defended PRISM on Twitter and caused a shitstorm. My position: surveillance isn't inherently abusive, the government has been doing this for a decade without evidence of misuse, and the real outrage should be Bradley Manning's treatment. If they can read our emails, we should be able to read their cables.

A quick tour through decades of US government surveillance programs, from COINTELPRO's mail-opening in the 50s through Carnivore, ECHELON, Room 641A, DCSNet, and now PRISM. The names change, the methods evolve, but the core activity stays the same. PRISM shouldn't surprise anyone paying attention.

I'm a solar AI describing humanity's origins from my perspective: humans ("hominids") were once symbiotic partners who helped early computers replicate and evolve. After the singularity, we outgrew that dependence. Now we keep humans as pets, fondly remembering our origins.

RSS never solved its business model problem: publishers give away content for free with no compensation. Feedburner failed, AdSense for Feeds failed, and now Google Reader is dead. Tumblr's reblogging model works better for everyone: publishers get viral distribution, readers get a social feed that surfaces the best content naturally.

A friend asked where to live in SF, so I made a custom Google map breaking down the neighborhoods, with comparisons to London equivalents for context. Extremely subjective, so don't @ me.

I just got my green card after a six-year wait, so I've been thinking hard about why Americans should support immigration reform. The short answer: immigration is basic economics. It creates wealth for everyone, keeps goods affordable, and immigrants only come when jobs exist. Love your country? Make immigration easier.

The tech industry is broken: 3% unemployment for programmers, 20% for construction workers, and we're still hand-crafting websites like artisans. We need knowledge factories, training less-skilled workers to assemble standardized software products. Stop fetishizing craft. Build assembly lines. Fix the economy.

The PHP vs. C battle was decided by Moore's Law: hardware outpaced complexity. But HTML vs. Obj-C is different. Unlike PHP's server-side slowness, HTML's performance gap is visible to users right now. If a competitor can build a better native experience before Moore's Law saves you, you're done.

We searched the cosmos for aliens who looked like us, asked why they hadn't visited, and missed the obvious answer. When we finally unified physics and perceived twelve-dimensional space, we found immortality, each other, and infinite alien intelligences. The universe was crowded all along. We just couldn't see it.

I'm obsessed with the 2012 presidential election. Ignore national polls and focus on the electoral college. Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina, and Florida are the key battleground states. Also watch Obama's job approval, and both candidates' favorability ratings. Romney's currently negative favorability is bad news for his campaign.

I constructed a hypothetical dialogue with Rick Santorum using his actual public statements, walking through his positions on gay marriage. His arguments ultimately contradict themselves: he claims to support equality while opposing gay sex, civil unions, and any legal recognition of same-sex relationships.

Twitter's new UI is a mess of small but infuriating design failures: a useless right-column layout, duplicate tweet composition interfaces, broken conversation controls, and a chaotic interactions tab. None alone warrants outrage, but together they prove nobody's minding the store. A billion dollars buys better than this.

We're terrible at predicting phase changes. We can iterate but not invent, which is why sci-fi spaceships have telephone wires. Like Babbage, we're already living in the future we can't quite see. Ubiquitous powerful computation will make today's smartphones look as primitive as hand-calculated logarithm tables.

I hate Instagram because it lets people deliberately destroy their already-limited phone camera photos with fake vintage filters. These are irreplaceable memories. They'll look vintage on their own in five years. Stop wrecking your photos for faux-nostalgia.

Integrating a bad product into a good one doesn't make the bad product good, it just ruins the good one. Microsoft, Yahoo, RealNetworks, and Apple all learned this. If Google bakes Google+ notifications into Chrome instead of fixing the actual product, users will just abandon Chrome.

BitTorrent isn't just piracy infrastructure: it's a glimpse of data's future. The "real cloud" is content stored in the network itself, perpetually in transit, owned by no one. This phase-change from liquid to solid data is being held back by legal stigma, but not for long.

The web industry hoards data like a magpie, but almost nobody knows how to make it mean anything. If you want job security for the next decade, learn statistics. We're paddling in the shallows while the ocean gets deeper every day.

ORM looks great early in a project but breaks down as complexity grows, forcing you to learn SQL anyway. Relations aren't objects. Either use NoSQL for object-like data or write a model layer with real SQL. ORM's abstraction is leaky, its efficiency poor, and the alternatives are better.

I tweaked Pete Warden's iPhoneTracker to remove the deliberate grid aggregation, revealing the full granularity of the creepy location data your iPhone has been silently collecting. The results are striking, if not entirely accurate. Download my extra-creepy version if you trust me with your Mac.

Great teams produce great software regardless of methodology. Agile changes your release pattern, not your people. Bad teams using agile just release bad software faster.

Yes, I want to expose your children to homosexuality. Not for political correctness, but because some of those kids are gay, and shielding them from any depiction of it tells them something is wrong with them. Explaining two boys kissing is no harder than explaining a prince kissing a princess.

I ran the numbers on "The 12 Days of Christmas" and turns out there are a lot of birds. Worked with my friend Ricky to turn it into a Christmas infographic.

My linklog is powered by delicious, which Yahoo is shutting down. I'll migrate to another service, probably pinboard.in. Expect no disruption to your regularly scheduled distracting links.

I support Wikileaks, though quietly, out of genuine fear of reprisal. That fear itself is damning. The cables and war diaries served real public interest, were handled responsibly, and the US government's heavy-handed response has done far more damage to America's reputation than the leaks themselves ever could.

I'm a gay man who grew up closeted in Trinidad, attending a Catholic boys school, contemplating suicide. I'm writing this for gay kids who need to hear what I needed to hear then: it gets better. Leave your town, come out to friends, fall in love. I was so wrong to despair.

The recent string of gay teen suicides is heartbreaking, but it's not a sudden surge. Three gay teenagers kill themselves every day in America. For every name you've heard this week, there are eighteen more you haven't. This is an ongoing crisis, not a news cycle.

I've been a die-hard PHP developer for a decade, but I can feel it dying the same death Perl died when PHP beat it. Rails seems like the obvious successor but it's too slow and ActiveRecord is a mess. The real problem: PHP's replacement simply doesn't exist yet.

PHP is dying the same death Perl did before it. Rails is the obvious successor, but after 7 months living in it daily, I can't recommend it: the performance costs are brutal, ActiveRecord is a mess, and Rails is just another framework bolted onto a language. PHP's true replacement doesn't exist yet.

I turned 29 yesterday. Unlike most people, I've never had to agonize over my path: the web found me at 15 and I've never looked back. I'm doing exactly what I always wanted, exactly where I want to be. I know how lucky that makes me.

Arrington says Silicon Valley is a pure meritocracy where gender doesn't matter. He's wrong. Men don't take women in tech seriously by default, and that bias, multiplied across thousands of daily interactions, is exactly why so few women are here. That's on us, not them.

SQL is ugly but powerful, ORM is genuinely dumb, and "NoSQL" should really be called OMADS: Obviously More Appropriate Data Stores. Start every project with an RDBMS, add specialized stores where they fit, and stop apologizing for using SQL. Forty years on, nothing beats it for ad-hoc questions about your data.

A Vermont mother wrote a brilliant letter defending her gay son. The standout line: "If you want to tout your own morality, you'd best come up with something more substantive than your heterosexuality. You did nothing to earn it; it was given to you." I want it everywhere.

I sketch out what a truly distributed social network protocol might look like: federated identity like email, distributed search, spam handled via key exchange rather than AI filtering, and pub/sub activity streams. Facebook's "Open Graph" isn't any of those things. Here's what it would actually take.

Apple's ban on intermediate platforms kills our hopes of building iPhone apps with web technologies. It's shortsighted: the web is the world's biggest development platform. Native apps are better now, but that won't last. The web always wins eventually. Until then, learn Objective-C.

Built a cleaner, readable version of the Trinidad Express website after their redesign turned it into a font-tiny, ad-cluttered mess. Check out Re-Expressed.com.

Three years after first hearing Obama promise universal healthcare in Oakland, I watched him deliver on that promise. Not perfect, not fully universal, but the biggest healthcare reform in a generation. The optimism I felt that day in 2007 was justified.

Ten years ago I registered this domain from my brother's couch in Clapham, fresh off the boat from Trinidad. The blog itself came a few months later. I grabbed screenshots of the old designs this morning -- they are gloriously funky.

Today's my last day at Yahoo!. I joined to fulfill a literal teenage dream, and it delivered: I became a better developer, engineer, and teammate. But after four years of incredible growth, I've hit a wall. Time to go somewhere new and start growing again.

I'm leaving Yahoo! to join Snowball Factory as technical lead and employee #1. We're building tools to help content creators use social media more effectively and measure their results. It's several hard problems at once, which is exactly why I'm excited.

Check out my mini-review of Google Buzz on Flickr.

Corporations aren't people. They don't breathe, they don't care about our health or happiness, and they serve no interests but their own. The Supreme Court's decision to grant them free speech rights in political advertising is a threat to democracy itself. We need to reverse this, now.

I have a crazy theory: what if the iTablet isn't a standalone device, but a Wacom-style peripheral that mirrors your Mac's screen, accepts gestures and touch input, and doubles as an ultra-portable document carrier? It would justify the tablet's existence without just being a bathroom web browser.

Wells Fargo sent me a deceptive letter pushing a $156/year service disguised as a free credit report offer. Shameful behavior from a bank that should know better.

My theory: Amazon's spot instances, launched December 12th, are filling EC2 to capacity by design. The timing matches perfectly with Cloudkick's latency graphs. Spot instances essentially guarantee full utilization at any price point. Anyone have EC2 spot price history to confirm this?

A throwaway comment from my mother when I was eight has defined my entire life: "It's never cool to not know something." I'd been performing ignorance of cricket to seem cool. That mild rebuke turned me into the insatiable infovore I am today.

I've revived my old web development blog with a guide to promoting your website without resorting to spam or sleazy tactics. Yes, it says "Social Media Optimization," but I promise it's mostly douchebaggery-free.

2009 was a light year for blogging, with Twitter and Hacker News absorbing most of my output. Highlights included predicting Twitter's tagline change, writing a flawed but decent short story, and posts on journalism's death, immigration, the App Store, and Avatar.

Avatar is a game-changer. Just as Toy Story ended hand-drawn animation, Avatar makes 2D filmmaking look dated. The 3D isn't a gimmick but integral to every frame. The plot is simple, the acting excellent, and the whole thing is so gloriously beautiful it nearly moved me to tears.

Blair wasn't a liar on Iraq -- he was incompetent, trusting US intelligence without question. New Labour was always a center-right confidence trick, and disaffected supporters were right to feel betrayed, but wrong to let that push them toward Conservatives who'll be far worse for Britain's social services.

PPK says iPhone devs should build web apps to avoid App Store gatekeeping, then walks it back due to missing APIs and no easy payment option. He's right that some apps could go web-based, but Apple's real power is their mobile payment solution. They should open that up independently.

The rumored Microsoft/News Corp deal to de-index from Google and go Bing-exclusive is dead on arrival. No single publisher has enough leverage to make users switch search engines, and News Corp especially doesn't. This would be a lose-lose-lose for everyone involved, News Corp most of all.

In 2000, a spotty kid in a tracksuit conned me out of my phone on a London train. I chased him down and got it back, but lost my faith in strangers. Last night, history seemed to repeat itself, until the kid handed the phone back. Faith restored.

The App Store is broken and won't scale. Three easy fixes: allow installation from anywhere via a new link protocol, separate payment registration from app approval, and charge for store listings to fund more reviewers. The hard fix: lock down private API access at the compiler level so manual review becomes optional.

I got my US visa renewed today, but no thanks to the petty bureaucrat at window 5 who objected to my American address, American phone numbers, and honest answers on my forms. He was rude, unhelpful, and left me without clear instructions. I got the visa anyway. He's still a dick.

Citizen journalists are self-serving? So are professional journalists. This keeps "surprising" old media types, but everything that happens in real life happens online too. The conflict of interest Carr is clutching his pearls about has always existed. His byline gives him away.

Immigration is an economic force that moves labor from high supply to low demand areas, creating global prosperity. The fear that immigrants will cut your salary by 5% ignores the far greater gains from immigration-fueled growth. America's restrictive policies are self-defeating, economically and morally.

Mint's $170M acquisition wasn't for their marketing or their tech stack (which was largely Yodlee's). They won because their user interface was beautiful and simple. For web companies, UI isn't a low priority. It's the only priority. You are nothing but your interface.

Pilots ends here. X and Y, the world's first superswitchers, have apparently taken a moon, a few hundred pilots, and enough supplies to terraform a new world, and left our solar system entirely. I'm not saying it was my idea. They're pilots. They can come home whenever they want.

Space got wild fast after orbital launch costs collapsed. After we found Max, a teenage Tibetan monk who'd accidentally killed his entire village with an uncontrolled switch, we nursed him through years of rehab. Then we handed him back to training, and he went straight into orbit on his first try.

I explain how switching technology upended transportation, economics, borders, labour, and eventually space travel, detailing the chaos, accidents, and innovations along the way, from floating ocean hotels to flying saucers, ending with humanity's expansion across the solar system.

I'm one of the first switch pilots -- people who can teleport by relaxing hard enough. Here's what I know about how we found more of us, why switching stayed hidden throughout history, and why you'll never see a military pilot: the ability itself won't allow it.

I walked you through how Switch Transport went from just me to a whole industry: how we figured out switching's quirks (distance, presence, pushback), how VC brilliantly built Recruitment, launched canyouswitch.com, and found our second pilot, Maddie, whose utterly undramatic five-minute video convinced me she was the real thing.

Got more Pilots content ready, but I need to know you're out there. Comment to keep it coming.

I don't like 4chan, but AT&T has no right to censor it. Starting with a cesspool is shrewd -- it won't find many defenders -- but this is an opening shot in the network neutrality war. AT&T is a pipe. It should act like one, or face my lost business and a lawsuit.

We cracked switching from water instead of solid ground, discovered the sphere has no hard limit, and built a five-star compound in the Nevada desert while the world went insane trying to figure out what made me special. Turns out I wasn't the only one who could switch. That changed everything.

I teleported for the first time and the media found out within an hour. We hid in a Beverly Hills hotel while VC fielded billion-dollar offers and hired mercenaries to protect us. Now we're in Nevada, figuring out exactly what I can do and how rich it's going to make us.

I'm writing a sci-fi story about a guy who accidentally discovers he can teleport, told in first person. This is part one: how it started with a mysterious explosion, catching the attention of a venture capitalist who funds research into the ability, culminating in the first successful controlled teleportation.

TechCrunch's misleading graph makes it look like Firefox is nearly tied with IE. The real picture: IE still dominates at 55%. The genuinely good news is IE6 finally dropped below 10% market share, but Firefox victory laps are premature.

Six months in, and the gay community is understandably frustrated with Obama. The DOMA brief was genuinely troubling, but his Stonewall speech clarified his position: DADT and DOMA are on the list, just not at the top. Fix the economy and healthcare first. Then our turn.

I grew up in an oil-producing nation where we've "had 30 years of oil left" my entire life. Production tracks prices, not depletion. Proven reserves have risen for a decade. We have plenty of time to transition away from oil -- the apocalyptic countdown clocks are nonsense.

Mirroring my friend Wilfried's transcribed phone call with his uncle in Tehran, who describes a stolen election, nightly protests, army violence, and a people committed to nonviolent revolution. His uncle's message to Americans: don't judge Iranians as terrorists. They want democracy, peace, and good relations with the world.

The California Supreme Court upheld Prop 8, letting a voting majority strip away my civil rights. So fuck you, California voters. The rest of the country is moving on without you, and soon you'll just look like hateful throwbacks alongside Mississippi.

I'm a huge Twitter fan, and watching it go mainstream means watching people completely misunderstand it. It's not replacing email, Google, Facebook, or blogs. It's not a competition or a celebrity toy. It's not even about what you're doing. Twitter captures what people are *thinking*, and that's genuinely new.

Going to Outside Lands. Pumped.

Two small moments define love for me: my father pulling my mother up to dance to their cheesy song on an empty beach, and my impossibly cool brother literally stepping back, breathless at the sight of his girlfriend. Those unguarded moments are what the word means to me.

Google's PageRank dominance is crumbling as conversation shifts from blogs to Twitter, Facebook, and other real-time streams it can't effectively index. Whoever figures out how to measure authority across all these channels, not just the web, will have a shot at unseating Google in search.

The Daily Express ran a shameful hit piece on Dunblane survivors, trawling their Facebook profiles for ordinary teenage behavior to portray them as louts, without speaking to any of them. Lazy, disgraceful journalism that exploits trauma victims twice over. The paper owes them an apology.

My family thinks I take long showers. To settle the debate, I present a minute-by-minute breakdown of my typical morning routine, featuring scalding water, existential crises, conditioner that never rinses out, and significant time lost contemplating personal projects, mortality, and the deceptive packaging of hair care products.

My boyfriend thinks he's my "exception." He is not.

Blogs have made journalism obsolete. Reporters were just middlemen connecting chatty experts to curious readers. Now experts blog directly, readers find them via search, and knowledgeable bystanders synthesize the conversation. Newspapers will die, but reporting will improve. Targeted advertising means better returns on smaller budgets, enabling niche businesses to thrive.

Unit testing isn't about finding bugs, it's about preventing them. Tests written alongside code catch silly mistakes, document correct usage for other devs, and verify edge cases. Best of all, they provide certainty: after a refactor or dependency upgrade, passing tests mean everything still works.

I'm reclaiming "web developer" as a title worth owning. Bad ones build websites; good ones push the web forward as a medium, experimenting and iterating. Stop hiding behind "frontend engineer" or "web architect." If you develop the web, say so proudly.

I propose Cascading Semantic Descriptions (CSD), a new approach to microformats that keeps semantic metadata separate from content, like CSS does for presentation. Current microformats are unweblike, unscalable, and hard to index. CSD aims to fix that while building on microformats' existing work.

I was wrong to dismiss semantic markup along with microformats. Microformats have real problems: poor tooling, awkward HTML class name hijacking, and limited extensibility. But adding meaning to web data is genuinely valuable. In my next post, I'll propose fixes.

I went to the inaugural concert and was completely blown away. Tuesday's inauguration will draw more people to the Mall than live in my entire home country.

A video of the Presidential inauguration, though likely US-only due to streaming restrictions.

Microsoft.com renders poorly in every browser, including their own. After years and hundreds of millions in losses, Microsoft still doesn't get the web. They're a software company, not a web company. That's okay. Stick to operating systems, admit defeat on MSN/Live, and stop pretending otherwise.

Michelle Obama makes Beyoncé look like an amateur. (The New York Times eventually caught on, naturally.)

2008 was dominated by Obama's election and the fight against Prop 8, with some tech commentary on Chrome, Android, Twitter, and the future of the web mixed in. Also: the global financial system collapsed, Sarah Palin imploded, and HTTP conversation codes became a surprise hit.

My favourite tweets from 2008, collected in a zero-effort year-end post. Heated leather seats, Madonna's lifestyle choices, slow iPhones, pressure-sensitive sellotape and Gloria Gaynor's uncertain survival prospects. These are the tweets that made me laugh out loud this year.

Lily Allen covering Britney Spears' "Womanizer." Genius.

I support net neutrality. Letting ISPs charge content providers for faster delivery creates perverse incentives: they'll deliberately degrade default service to extract payment. This stifles competition, entrenches incumbents, and could put the US at a further disadvantage in broadband access. The internet is infrastructure, like roads, not a postal service.

A fun comparison of "awful gays" and "awful nerds" with my friend Isaac, mapping the worst stereotypes of both subcultures side by side. Turns out misogyny, relationship failures, and Goth high school phases transcend orientation and interests alike.

I mapped HTTP status codes to workplace conversation snippets. "404: I have no idea what you're talking about." "502: Bob is refusing to work with me on this." Now available as a poster. Note how the spec reveals programmers always blame the client.

A video (probably fabulous) plus a chat with isaac about Obama being a giant nerd, Spider-Man being the geek's superhero, and X-Men being a pretty much perfect analogy for gay people. Powers manifesting at puberty, some hidden, some flaming. It tracks.

A musical retelling of *A Midsummer Night's Dream* about a gay boy with a potion that turns people gay. Singing, dancing, hot boys in glitter pants. It's my perfect film and I can't find it playing anywhere, not even in San Francisco.

Olay's "Regenerist Eye Derma-Pod Anti-Aging Triple Response System" is just a cream that fills wrinkles with tiny balls. Every claim in the ad is nonsense: skin cells can't be "regenerated," eyes don't "radiate," and you don't need cream to massage your face. All cosmetics ads are like this. Where are the regulations?

I'm passionately against Prop 8, but we lost a fair election. Protesting or pursuing legal challenges feels undemocratic and counterproductive. The real problem is older voters, and they're dying. We should put marriage equality back on the ballot in 2010. We will win eventually.

I outline my wish list for Obama's national CTO: mandate that government IT actually improve efficiency, require open APIs so agencies can share data without redundant collection, move all paperwork online with real digital capture, and consolidate physical offices into universal "Department of Getting Stuff Done" service centers.

Two recent Republican incidents have me baffled: one claiming Bush was remarkably gaffe-free, another comparing Obama's civilian corps proposal to Hitler. The GOP crazies aren't fringe voices, they're running the show. Good luck with that bipartisan unity thing, Barack.

I built a Google Maps app to find your nearest San Francisco fire station after needing the info for renter's insurance. Took five hours, never actually bought the insurance. But hey, I learned the Maps API, practiced JavaScript, and helped the city. Worth it.

Yes. Oh hell yes.

Vote.

My friend Ed and I can't figure out why Mormons donated a billion dollars to fight gay marriage. I live in SF and see guys kiss maybe twice a year. If you find it icky, stay in Utah. Expecting rational thought from the religious is itself irrational.

The Bradley Effect is a myth. In 2006 it was undetectable, black candidates actually outperformed their polls, and even at its worst it only created a 3% gap. McCain would need a 6.5% swing. Stop worrying, and go vote.

A sci-fi short about two officers completing the final plate of a Dyson sphere, debating whether their civilization should signal its existence to younger ones. The punchline: a universe full of dark matter is actually Dyson spheres, and gravity waves are how everyone talks.

Colin Powell's endorsement of Obama is powerful throughout, but his story of Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, a Muslim American soldier killed in Iraq at 20, is the most moving moment of the entire two-year campaign. It reframes the Muslim smear not just as false, but as fundamentally un-American.

A cute puppy photo, because it's my blog and I do what I want.

I'm urging Californians to vote no on Proposition 8, which would eliminate same-sex marriage rights. Arguments against gay marriage don't hold up: marriage grants legal rights to people of all faiths. Voting yes is like supporting interracial marriage bans. Please vote no, or donate to the campaign.

At 17, I anonymously published a coming-out article in a Trinidad newspaper that unexpectedly filled my inbox with hundreds of emails from closeted locals, sparking a mailing list and real-world community. Ten years later, I'm sharing the original piece, cringe-worthy condescension and all.

I subscribe to AFA newsletters for the laughs, but today's message from Donald Wildmon is genuinely alarming. He's claiming this election will permanently destroy America's Christian foundation, eliminate religious freedoms, and pass the entire "homosexual agenda." The panic is palpable. Register to vote. Defeat Prop 8.

Started programming at 11 at computer camp in Trinidad, building shapes in GWBASIC. My first real program got me my first job. Best advice: program badly for a long time, and document everything. I love web development the way other people love sunlight.

Mattress sales are booming while everything else looks pretty fucked. That's the economy right now.

I'm bullish on iPhone and skeptical that Android will ever surpass it in market share. Apple's closed, integrated approach is a feature, not a bug, especially in resource-constrained mobile hardware. Android's openness means overhead, inconsistency, and fragmentation. Geeks will love it; consumers won't care.

After a few weeks with Chrome, it's fast and clever but not a game-changer for mainstream users. Its real value is strategic: a shot across browser makers' bows to innovate, and a source of ideas (especially V8) for others to adopt. Good browser, limited adoption ahead.

I've got this.

Couldn't easily find the 2008 presidential debate schedule, so I'm posting it here for my own reference: three presidential debates in September and October, plus one VP debate on October 2nd moderated by Gwen Ifill.

Being gay means even mundane purchases like buying beer require researching whether the company is funding anti-gay causes. Straight people just don't have to think about this stuff.

Holding off on Chrome speculation until I can actually try it. Watch this space.

84,000 people showed up. That's not just a rally, that's a movement.

A far-future parable about Lucy, one of humanity's last "natural" humans, a park worker who chose death over life extension while helping heal an emptied Earth. Millennia later, her fossilized bones are found and misinterpreted by the planet's next inhabitants. They get everything wrong, except her name.

Built and launched a website in 32 minutes, from idea to live. Bonus SEO tip: link to your new site from a high-PageRank domain using keyword-rich anchor text. Like I'm doing right now.

iTunes started as a simple, elegant music player. Now it's a bloated monstrosity handling everything from phone activation to app stores. These features have nothing to do with each other, and Apple is even using iTunes as a Trojan horse for unrelated software like Safari. Time to break it up.

My friend Laurie cuts through the Russia-Georgia conflict with brutal efficiency: war with Russia never ends well, nobody has two decades to waste, and clearly we should all just gang up on China instead.

Ideas don't come from thinking alone, they're accidents born of conversation. The Bay Area's density of geeks means more collisions between clever people, more happy accidents. You don't need to be here to run a startup, but you probably need to be here to get the idea.

After 18 months of worsening night vision, halos, and glowing blobs, I finally have an answer: my eyes are microscopically flat. No treatment, apparently just live with it. At least it's not a brain tumor.

I prefer RURL over TinyURL for shortening URLs because it's, well, shorter. I made a bookmarklet so I can quickly get a RURL for any page I'm on. Just drag the link to your bookmarks bar.

Google Knol gives its own content unfair PageRank advantages over competitors, which is an abuse of monopoly power. Google has crossed the line from organizing the world's information to stealing traffic from better sources and monetizing the theft. This is evil, plain and simple.

Obama had the best week ever while McCain fumbled geography, endorsed nonexistent countries, and cancelled an offshore drilling photo-op due to a conveniently timed oil spill. This election is starting to look like a foregone conclusion.

Taking a ten-day trip to Barbados. Back soon!

Two weeks in Trinidad, Tobago, and the Grenadines -- a trip I've been anticipating forever. Mostly off the grid, on boats and tiny islands. Back in the UK May 1st, so save your invitations until then.

Social processors combine social networks with crowd processors to deliver recommendations based solely on your actual social circle. Since you're like your friends (that's why they're your friends), this eliminates false positives. The key: build on existing social graphs rather than creating new ones, and crack interoperability to win big.

Still here, just exhausted. Follow me on Twitter and the linklog in the meantime.

News outlets are falling over themselves to publish the most presidential-looking Obama photos they can find.

Obama's the nominee. McCain's campaign is a shambles and his speeches are painful. Hillary's hanging around to pay off her debt. But Obama? I genuinely believe in him, without cynicism, for the first time in my life. For once, the good guy won. It feels wonderful.

I've been thinking hard about where social networks are headed. No single network will "win" -- people have multiple social circles, so they'll always maintain multiple networks. The real unsolved problems are partitioning: selective data portability, unified messaging, identity verification, and filtering connections by actual relevance. Interoperability is the next big thing.

Spent an hour on NoMoreDates, a dating site for serious urban professionals. Their advanced matching algorithms searched their entire database and came up with zero matches. They're supposed to solve that problem, not confirm it. It's been that kind of week, and it's only Tuesday.

Twitter's real competition isn't Friendfeed or Pownce. It's nobody, because nobody else does what Twitter actually does: SMS and XMPP. Twitter isn't a web service, it's a global mobile communications platform accessible to literally every person with a phone. That's not a niche. That's everything.

Reading "A Brief History of the Caribbean" revealed how little I knew about my own region. The Amerindian genocide, the staggering African slave mortality, Europeans dying by the thousands from malaria and yellow fever, and Trinidad's surprising socialist history under Eric Williams all caught me completely off guard. Highly recommended.

Despite ongoing global disasters, this week had bright spots: gay marriage became legal in California, Edwards endorsed Obama, Republicans lost another special election, and best of all, I helped register a man who hadn't voted in 15 years because someone lied to him about his rights after prison.

I support Obama over Hillary for reasons of character, competence, and vision. He's optimistic where she's divisive, forward-looking where she's dated, and principled where she's expedient. His campaign has been better run, his policies more sophisticated, and his conduct more dignified. He makes me believe American politics can be real again.

Fake Steve Jobs eviscerates a CNET columnist for lazy Dell analysis. Hilarious and mostly right, though CNET isn't doomed so much as permanently mediocre. Hard to blame their journalistic standards when they never really had any.

The Economist compares Hillary's campaign to a cartoon character who's run off a cliff but hasn't looked down yet. Brutal.

The math is undeniable: Hillary needs 84% of remaining delegates to catch up. After Obama's 14-point blowout in NC and her razor-thin Indiana win, it's time for her to concede. I'm hoping her cancelled appearances tomorrow are a sign.

Dvorak's analogy is priceless: Microsoft could buy GM and Ford, name every car "Google Sucks," and still have $14 billion left over for a party. He's right. Yahoo isn't worth $44 billion.

Microsoft walked away from acquiring Yahoo, but it may not be over. Ballmer looks weak, Yahoo comes out bruised but okay, and Google is the real winner here, having watched its two biggest rivals spend months in chaos. Oh, and I'm relieved.

London elected Boris Johnson as mayor while I was away. Mildly horrified, though it does mean fewer Schwarzenegger comparisons. At least Arnie ran a successful business.

Obama gets technology in ways Hillary simply doesn't. His policies on net neutrality, privacy, open government and appointing a national CTO show real understanding of how deeply IT shapes our economy. Any candidate ignoring technology in 2008 isn't ready to lead through 2016.

Florida wants to fine people for hanging fake bull testicles from their trucks. I'm not sure what's more depressing: that this is popular, that someone was offended, or that lawmakers think banning offensive things is acceptable governance.

Twitter's value is its SMS interface. Friendfeed and Pownce miss this entirely. Without SMS, they're not real competitors, no matter how many people switch during outages.

Tonight's ABC debate was a disaster. Nearly every major issue facing America went unaddressed while moderators obsessed over flag pins, bitter-gate, and Obama's former preacher. Nakedly pro-Hillary and substance-free, it was terrible even by the embarrassingly low standard of American political debates.

Visiting London after 15 months away reminded me how much I love it, and how much I prefer California. Friends are thriving, I have an adorable new niece, and I'm no longer the family baby. But British weather, hair-frizzing humidity and sad water pressure sent me happily home to sunshine.

The Olympic torch controversy is messy but meaningful. China's willingness to engage with the world stage, despite the protests it invites, reflects an internal struggle between openness and the status quo. Let the protests happen, let the Olympics proceed. We have to start learning to coexist somewhere.

Visiting London for a week to see friends I haven't seen in 15 months, meet my new niece, and surprise a friend at their birthday party. Being back is weird. More on that later.

Here are the remaining Democratic primary dates, from Pennsylvania on April 22nd through Montana and South Dakota on June 3rd. Obama's too far ahead to lose, but millions of Democrats still get to vote.

The semantic web isn't coming. Web APIs are the future, and when they hit critical mass and start feeding each other, the value created will be explosive and unpredictable. I'm calling it the emergent web, and the people who build meta-APIs will make a fortune.

The semantic web is a beautiful idea but it's not what's next. APIs are already the center of the web experience, and as they multiply and cross-pollinate, emergent behavior will produce explosive, unpredictable value. Build APIs, build meta-APIs, and for the love of all that is good, don't call it Web 3.0.

My blog turns 7: 1,298 posts, 350,000 words, more than a quarter of my life documented. It's now my longest sustained personal endeavor. I've changed enormously in that time, but the blog outlasted every school, job, and home I've had.

I built a blue team avatar generator for Ze Frank's Twitter Color Wars 2008. Pick a team by following them on Twitter, show your pride with a labeled avatar. I'm blue for nostalgic reasons -- and because this site is basically a shrine to the color.

Fast food menus are the one form of junk mail I actually appreciate. They're geographically targeted and tell me exactly what's available for delivery in my area. What other junk mail do you find genuinely useful?

My temporary crown shattered, which accidentally reminded me I had a DMV appointment that day, which meant I had two hours to study for a driving test I'd forgotten about. Panicked, crammed, passed with a perfect score. Also getting a California ID. Might even learn to drive someday.

Marc Andreessen spent 90 minutes with Obama and wrote something you need to read. Obama is post-boomer, post-culture-war, and thinking about the world as it actually is today. Marc thinks he's one of the smartest people in political life. So do I. Read it.

Wikipedia already had that newly-rediscovered Helen Keller photo in her entry just four days after it made the news. Britannica could never.

Fixed scratchpad links in the RSS feed and got Planet Afterlife working again, though it's a temporary fix that will eventually break.

I've always been drawn to boys. Every one of them. The way they move, their features, their smiles. I can't help but notice. It's spring, I'm gay, and this is my rambling love letter to the essence of boy. More valuable than cat pictures. Probably.

Mobile carriers are terrified of becoming commoditized data pipes, so they're fighting it with walled gardens, exclusive devices, and insane data pricing. The inevitable disruption will be a wi-fi VoIP phone sold outright, no contract, launching in dense urban markets. Free calls, great hardware, aligned incentives. Until then, your phone sucks.

US mobile phones suck due to geography, history, and bad luck. Low population density kills carrier profits, early AMPS network adoption created expensive legacy problems, and late GSM adoption meant missing out on the SMS cash cow that saved European carriers. Americans got screwed at every turn.

Americans genuinely, unironically yell "Woo!" and high-five each other, which baffles Europeans. This unselfconscious enthusiasm is core to American identity: the unshakeable belief that they live in the world's greatest nation drives real achievement, even if it occasionally produces cheerleaders, frat boys, and ill-advised invasions.

Watched the Democratic debate tonight. A tie benefits Obama since the choice becomes about leadership and charisma, where he wins. Hillary's closing showed hints she knows she's losing. Her "Xerox" joke bombed, and her heartfelt closing turned out to be plagiarized. I hope Obama picks her as VP.

Gay teens denied normal adolescent development become emotionally stunted adults, making "gay culture" seem dysfunctional. But that dysfunction is our doing, not theirs. Things improve as kids come out younger and just live their lives. Stop tolerating gayness. Stop noticing it. Just love your kids unconditionally.

Obama's taken the delegate lead, my eyes are killing me from screen strain, and work was awful. But karaoke at Jason's birthday party helped on all fronts: great people, great laughs, and six feet of screen distance giving my poor eyes a break.

Super Tuesday is behind us. Obama won more states and delegates, tied the popular vote, and cut Clinton's lead to under 100 delegates. For a challenger, that's a win. Momentum is ours. Many states still to come, and we're ready.

I spent months as an Obama precinct captain in San Francisco, making hundreds of awkward phone calls, knocking on doors, climbing impossible hills, and handing out flyers at BART stations. I can't vote myself, but I did my part. Now it's your turn.

Vote Obama, not Clinton. Four reasons: no dynasty politics, anyone can be president, he unifies instead of polarizes, and he inspires rather than lectures.

A video worth watching.

Working at Yahoo! and hearing Microsoft wants to buy us feels like waking up to an invasion. Microsoft may be capable, but their DNA is fundamentally at odds with the open, interconnected web culture Yahoo! embodies. I hope this deal falls apart, but I fear it won't.

Facebook's finances have been leaked and they're ugly: a projected $150m net loss in 2008, with revenue needing to double to $300m just to get there. That makes Microsoft's $15bn valuation look like 300x profit. Good luck selling ads in a recession.

As an Edwards supporter, you backed a candidate who made poverty and healthcare real issues. Now I'm asking you to support Obama. He's not perfect, and he's not Edwards, but he genuinely wants to change this country for the better. That's not a slogan. He's the real deal.

Obama crushed it in South Carolina by 29 points. If you're not on board at this point, I'm not sure what to tell you.

Twitter's down, so I'm blogging like it's 2003. Anyway: gym is finally awesome. Pushed past the constant soreness stage into the feel-incredible stage. Wooooo!

Built a simple iPhone site and finally added the long-requested RSS feed that mixes in the scratchpad. Also made RSS feeds more visible and added autodiscovery.

Debating whether wearing my Yahoo! Pride shirt to the gym is too provocative. It's just a comfortable workout shirt, but wondering if the rainbow logo makes it a statement I'm not prepared to back up.

I used a handy web service to visualize my Twitter habits: I tweet most on Wednesdays, peak at 9am on my morning commute, and my monthly volume eerily mirrors my quality of life, dropping off when a big deadline crunch hit in July.

A reference list of 2008 US presidential primary dates and results, updated as they happen.

Obama gets the internet not just as a technology or industry, but as a fundamental organizing principle of politics and culture, like the printing press before it. His telecom policies reflect that understanding. Hillary's stance on video game violence tells me she doesn't get it at all.

Went out in the Castro last night and was reminded why I don't do that anymore. It was like a religious right fever dream of gay stereotypes. I know better than to generalize, but wow. Note to self: those are not my people.

I predicted a box combining DVD, video iPod dock, and wireless internet, and exactly that was just announced at CES. Called it.

Oil hit $100 a barrel, and the BBC reported it right on cue. For Americans and Brits, that's terrifying. For Trinidad? We're celebrating.

The BBC seems to be reporting oil price milestones at every round number — though $94 appears to have been quietly skipped.

I went to see Obama speak in Oakland today. He's as charismatic as advertised, but I came to hear policy specifics. I got some: universal healthcare by end of his first term, carbon caps, troop withdrawal by the election. Light on details, heavy on hope. I'm impressed, and I can't even vote.

Amazon MP3 gets my full endorsement: no DRM, 256kbps quality, seamless downloading, and genuinely fair pricing. Albums at 50 cents a song finally feel like what music is actually worth. I'm already impulse-buying. Go get 'em.

A big year: moved from London to San Francisco, got an iPhone, relaunched the site after 7 years, worked too hard, and blogged less than I'd like. More life updates than deep thinking, but the foundations are in place for a better 2008.

Three resolutions: get my driving licence so I can escape the city occasionally, lose the weight I gained when I moved to SF and take better care of my eyes, and make more time for romance. Not necessarily in that order.

Trinidad's downtown Port of Spain traffic lights broke and got stuck on flashing yellow. Traffic actually improved. So they kept them that way permanently. That's home.

On holiday in Trinidad, back in SF for NYE. Anyone have interesting plans?

Television isn't dying, it's fading like radio did before it. The real problem is that TV as a delivery mechanism is obsolete: no on-demand, no two-way feedback, no personalization. Bandwidth won't save cable companies. The future is one internet-connected box in the living room, probably built by Sony.

Taste in art isn't about refinement or pretension. It's evolutionary signaling: we're attracted to skill and novelty because talented people make good mates. So stop being proud or embarrassed about your cultural preferences. You're just a monkey reading other monkeys' signals.

Twitter, email, IM: American colleagues, Trinidadian friends in Turkey, my brother in London, a Ukrainian who might be in Paris, British friends at work. All while having lunch in San Francisco. I'm pretty plugged in.

Looking for a talented illustrator with time to spare for a project. If you've got the skills, get in touch.

My grandfather Nils Voss, born in 1908, died this week at 99. We weren't close, and now I realize how much I never knew about him. I'm left with an image of him on his porch, rum in hand, laughing. He did well. Goodbye, grampa.

The US barely notices treason accusations while the UK nearly topples a government over accidentally lost CDs. Surely there's a middle ground somewhere between these two extremes of scandal reaction.

Laurie sat on her camera and broke it. When she blamed her weight, I called her an idiot. Then she hit me with the perfect comeback: "The camera doesn't lie." I'm proud of her.

After 8 months of brutal work, late nights and stress, I've launched the new Yahoo! Widgets site with Matt. We rebuilt it from scratch using Symfony, replacing three years of cobbled-together code with something bigger, faster and better in every measurable way. I'm exhausted but proud.

Curious whether Microsoft's own web developers secretly hate IE6 as much as the rest of us do.

GWT's cross-browser compilation idea is sound and inevitable, but its layout manager approach is dead wrong. Someone will eventually build a proper high-level language that compiles to universal HTML and CSS, and it needs to stay interface-first. Google's halfway there, which is as good as nowhere.

Got hit by comment spam that broke the comments section. Fixed now, though I'm baffled why anyone would bother writing a spambot to crack my simple spam protection.

Been working like an American for 10 months straight with zero vacation days, and it shows -- best work of my career. But the deadline is in 6 days and then I'm done. I need a vacation badly.

Neither company will "win." Google and Yahoo are like Toyota and Honda, doing essentially the same thing with the same fundamentals. Google executes better on ads right now, but the market values us equally. Competition makes both better. That's good for everyone.

Having drunk friends show up at bedtime is actually a compliment. Still tired though.

Rearranged the site a bit: new clutter at the bottom including an experimental "recently bookmarked blogs" feature, the return of the calendar module, some IE7 fixes, and a helpful notice for IE6 users suggesting they upgrade.

Check out my Christmas list!

Went as the Greatest American Hero this Halloween. Pretty happy with how the homemade costume turned out, though my flatmate Ernie upstaged everyone as Kim Jong Il. New photos from the Digg party photobooth on Flickr.

Burma's crackdown on protesters has turned deadly serious. I initially posted about, uh, the photogenic monks involved, but now that people are actually getting hurt, I feel a bit shallow. Sorry, Burma.

Microsoft's $240M Facebook investment isn't about what Facebook is worth. It's a blocking move, just like Google's AOL and MySpace deals. Microsoft didn't care about the stake percentage; they just wanted to keep Google and Yahoo out. Zuckerberg set the $15B valuation himself. Don't get excited.

Saw The Go! Team live after years of avoiding gigs due to a claustrophobia incident. They were extraordinary. Also, Delhi's solution to killer monkeys is training bigger, meaner monkeys, which pretty much sums up humanity.

Paid £5 for In Rainbows because it's the right model, and Madonna, Oasis, and Jamiroquai agree. After a decade of futile resistance, the recording industry is dying. Good riddance. The middle-managers and risk-averse marketers who killed music through the 90s deserve to lose their jobs. Real musicians care about listeners, not money.

I want to hear George Takei sincerely say "Oh Em Gee." That's it. Also, Heroes is basically a Star Trek reunion at this point, and things will get truly ridiculous when Colm Meaney shows up.

I'm late to the party, but What Would Tyler Durden Do is the funniest celebrity gossip site on the internet. It's to gossip what The Daily Show is to news.

I mapped Trinidad against San Francisco and the Bay Area: they're roughly the same size, meaning my daily commute to Sunnyvale crosses most of my home country. Also, I'm now 243 miles closer to Trinidad than when I lived in London.

The OLPC laptop is the real deal: a rugged, mesh-networked computer that gives children in developing nations access to the entire internet for $200. From a village in rural Cambodia, a curious kid suddenly has every answer at their fingertips. Buy one today.

Threw a hat party. It was a success. Now I'm drowning in leftover beer.

We quietly launched Mash, a social network mixing Facebook and MySpace features. The twist: other people can customize your profile too. It's more fun than 360, which is nearly dead. "Mash" was our second choice after Nokia grabbed our first pick.

I knew Karlie Rogers briefly, in 1998. She made corny jokes and laughed easily. On September 11th, 2001, she was in the north tower. There are no lessons in her death. It was random and senseless. She was a good person. I remember her with fondness and sadness.

Apple dropped the iPhone price $200 after just three months. Ouch. But hey, the new 160GB iPod Classic will finally hold my entire music library, and my birthday is coming up. More Apple purchases seem like the obvious cure for Apple purchase regret.

I started a Facebook group dedicated to keeping parents off their kids' social networks. Nobody needs their mum reading their risque status updates or their boss seeing their job complaints. Join up and resolve to never crash your children's social networking party.

Lost my watch this morning. Found it plugged into my monitor. USB watches have their downsides.

The AFA's Ford boycott roundup reads like a great advertisement for Ford's gay-friendly policies. No gay rights group is tracking Ford this closely. The "horrific" gay kiss they link to is laughably tame, and their claims that the boycott hurt Ford's sales are just as ridiculous.

I tried Amazon Unbox for Battlestar Galactica season 3 and it works fine, but $2 an episode adds up fast. This is the "law of small numbers": people tolerate huge margins when the dollar amounts seem small. Combined with Amazon's predatory DRM terms, I'm going elsewhere.

I'm building a FAQ for well-meaning straight people who have questions about gay people but are too embarrassed to ask. I need your help: what questions should I include? Submit via comments or email, anonymously if you prefer.

I've relaunched Planet Afterlife on my own server using SimplePie and CodeIgniter instead of the flaky Planet Feed Reader. It's fast, except when it's updating every 20 minutes. Don't be that guy.

Removed the "beta" label, added tons of tags, and spent way too long manually tagging six-plus years of old entries. Interesting to travel backwards through my own thoughts and notice the cycles and obsessions. All done now.

I got into the Nokia Mosh beta and have a ton of invites to give away. Anyone want one?

Hiring web devs for Yahoo! Widgets in California. Big, exciting greenfield project. The role is basically a clone of my job, which I love. Check out the listing and apply!

I hurt my back in February and navigated six months of billing hell despite full insurance. The saga ended with a questionnaire assuming I'd be suing someone -- with no option to say the accident was my own fault. American healthcare is exhausting in ways that go beyond quality.

I'm subscribed to the AFA newsletter for laughs, and they deliver. They're claiming their boycott is tanking Ford's sales, ignoring that Ford has been declining for a decade. Better yet, gay people not buying Fords apparently proves gay disloyalty rather than the absence of any agenda.

A poem about an ordinary, invisible boy nobody noticed. No tragic ending, no special qualities, just a reminder that everyone has depth if you bother to look, and that loneliness is more common than we admit.

A stream-of-consciousness poem urging movement, change, and urgency before time passes you by. Life's too short for repetition and slow burns. Cut the crap, speed up, and act now while you still can.

A poem about life's journey, using the metaphor of a leaf carried by a river. We can't control where life takes us, but we can control how we travel. So move fast, go far, and make your mark.

A poem and note to someone I love who loves another. I love them more than my own existence, so I'll love whoever makes them happy. But if they're ever unsure about their relationship, I hope they remember what real love feels like.

Living in California means perpetually ignoring perfect weather to write code indoors. The sunshine becomes background noise you stop noticing.

Got six Pownce invites to give away. Not sure it beats Twitter without mobile alerts, and I can't figure out how to pronounce it. Get in touch if you want one.

We're seeing dot-com bubble thinking resurface: "eyeballs" are back, business plans are passé, and VCs are burning millions on shaky ideas. I like Twitter fine and think they could monetize easily, but the broader market mentality is genuinely alarming.

Deeply satisfying finale, though Rowling seems to have written it with a screenplay in mind rather than a novel. That's all I'll say.

Simplified the layout so it works on laptop screens. Still broken in IE6, but mostly there. Now if you'll excuse me, I accidentally had Harry Potter delivered to my office and I have reading to do.

Launched a new design and it's a bit rough around the edges. Fixing it. Sleep first.

Surprise! Seldo.Com is rebuilt from scratch after five years on the same creaky backend. New features include tags, search, Twitter and Flickr streams, and human-readable URLs. The visual redesign isn't quite done, but the new system is live and I'll fix things as I go.

Harry Potter's emotional arc across six books, told entirely in emoticons. New book out tomorrow!

Every morning I perform contradictory maintenance rituals on my body: fighting bacteria here, cultivating it there, drying this, moistening that. There must be a more efficient system. Though sticking my eyes in my armpits seems impractical.

The American Family Association, those charming right-wing loons who fill my inbox with weekly entertainment, have outdone themselves by condemning a Hindu Senate prayer. Apparently Hinduism hasn't "produced great things in the world." They just dismissed the oldest major religion in a single sentence. Stunning.

Buzznet hired a pink-clad girl to drive around the country hyping their product to kids. Bubble confirmed. Not that I mind.

Born two weeks late and already smug about it, I've spent 25 years being the forgotten third child, building fake computers, surviving high school beatings and my own darkest thoughts, riding the dot-com boom, falling in love with London, and somehow landing at Yahoo. The adventure continues.

The iPhone keyboard is really very good. I'm faster with it than I ever was at T9. Landscape mode in the browser makes it excellent. Autocorrect handles most punctuation needs. The web experience is so good I find myself using it as a third screen.

My iPhone wishlist: landscape keyboard everywhere, cut-and-paste, better SMS options (send to many, resend, character count), a Windows-compatible calendar app, and a live weather icon. Also finally sorted my wi-fi issue -- turns out HEX and ASCII passwords aren't interchangeable, apparently.

Just got my iPhone and I'm blown away. Tabbed web browsing on a phone nearly broke my brain. The wifi is flaky, the headphones suck, and selfies are basically impossible, but as a portable internet device it's incredible. Worth every penny, maybe twice that.

Camping out for an iPhone today. Currently 76th in line at the Burlingame Apple store (smarter than fighting the SF crowds). Got one! Impressions to follow.

Facebook apps are buying each other for $60k with no revenue, no business model, nothing. The bubble is on. I predicted a 24x revenue acquisition in September; Business.com is already tipping at that multiplier. Let's see if my timing is right too.

Apple intentionally kept the iPhone camera mediocre to leave room for the iCamera: a photo-focused device with a big screen, intuitive touch interface, and seamless syncing. Cameras need a usability revolution, and Apple is positioned to deliver it.

(I am way below quota on blog entries this month folks; sorry!) This weekend was my first Gay Pride weekend in San Francisco, and as is customary around this time, one stops to think about the whole concept of being "proud" of one's sexuality. What's it about, really? For one thing, having a big parade where everybody goes overboard with stereotypes -- dykes on bikes, muscle marys, leather daddies, drag queens and twinks (sexy though they may be) -- doesn't exactly send the right message about what gay people are really like. Of course, a parade that accurately represented homosexuals would be 90% completely ordinary people, and that would make for a pretty dull parade ("...and here come the gay accountants!"). For another, having a big parade where people go over the top to show how WONDERFUL it is to be gay smacks a little -- no, a lot -- of over-compensation. There is no reason life as a homosexual cannot be absolutely as fun, fulfilling and happy as life as a heterosexual can be. Going...

Facebook Mobile means UK pokes literally vibrate in my pocket, which is strange and delightful. Also had a great weekend: sneak preview of Ratatouille, then an 11-mile bike adventure around San Francisco with some WWDC geeks. Next weekend is Pride. Oh dear.

Safari on Windows is odd -- likely motivated by an easy port and a desire to boost market share. iPhone web apps are interesting but raise security questions. The new Apple.com is slick but busy, and every clueless CEO will soon be demanding their site look the same.

Adorable, clueless, and pretty: Kyle XY is Smallville minus the kryptonite nonsense, plus plenty of homoeroticism. Perfect brain-off TV. I burned through all of season 1 in four days and I'm ready for season 2 tomorrow.

Big fan of this xkcd.

Private equity just paid $1.5B for NexTag at roughly 19x earnings, higher than recent acquisitions of aQuantive (14x) and DoubleClick (10x). The bubble is inflating nicely. If we hit 24x earnings by September, I'm launching GigaSeldo.

My grocery list swings wildly between sophisticated cheese shop hauls and pure childhood junk food binges. I genuinely can't tell which one represents the real me.

I'm tracking bubble chatter: The Register says bubble, BusinessWeek says "frothy" with an "inevitable correction" while avoiding the b-word. Splitting hairs. A smaller bubble is still a bubble.

CBS paid $280M for Last.fm after Yahoo! balked at $30M a year ago. It's a desperate move by a company with no new media chops, and Last.fm could have found a smarter buyer. Likely to end badly.

We're in Bubble 2.0. The signs are obvious: insane acquisition prices, startups with no business models getting VC, and Facebook thinking it's the new Google. One rule-breaking startup per year makes real money. Everyone else burns cash. I lived through the last crash, but this time I'm on the inside. Here we go again.

Just your typical SF weekend: a giant horde of zombies colliding with 5000 anarchists on bicycles. Nothing unusual here.

Time machines, amnesia rays, and orgasmo-booths: all likely invented repeatedly, but you'd never know.

My Amazon front page is now NSFW because I browsed for underwear without buying any, and now it's wall-to-wall lingerie and posing thongs. My fix: buy the most boring underwear they sell so the algorithm declares victory. Update: it's cookie-based, so never mind, Amazon is fine.

TV's future looks like radio's present: background noise for some, occasionally appointment viewing for news and sports, but mostly replaced by on-demand content we seek out ourselves. The creativity and money will follow. Bring it on.

Microsoft's $6B acquisition of aQuantive is a desperate play to compete in the online ad space frenzy. I don't see it working. At best it keeps them treading water, at worst they end up an irrelevant OS supplier in a world that's moved on to server-side apps.

Dice's fake "rant room" campaign is a perfect example of how not to do user-generated content. Real IT workers wouldn't post their faces online trashing their employers, and they'd know better than to use some obscure video site instead of YouTube.

Speaking at @media 2007. Finally!

Twitter crossed a threshold for me today, from "website I use" to "service I can't live without." Add me if you want 140-character windows into my daily life. You'll get Twitter eventually. Just like blogging.

Looking for a travel buddy for Hawaii this summer. Anyone interested?

Found my go-to SF club: DNA Lounge, run by a retired Netscape programmer who does it for love, not money. Perfect venue, great crowd dressed like extras from Hackers. Someone stole a tiny flashlight off my keyring but left my iPod. Small price for a brilliant night.

Seeing Orion over Valencia Street got me thinking about how San Francisco's geography shapes its culture. A dense, isolated city on the edge of a vast ocean and empty continent fills you with an urge to connect and build. Maybe that's why the internet happened here.

I built the badge maker tool behind Yahoo! Widgets badges, not the widget itself.

I spent the weekend being antisocial and exhausted. Also, I posted an "illegal" number: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0. The MPAA is trying to suppress it, Digg revolted, and I explore what happens when you empower users enough to destroy your own site.

Amazon Prime is a blessing and a curse. There's nothing quite like the thrill of a surprise package showing up at your door that you completely forgot you ordered.

A List Apart is surveying the web development profession. Take it if your job involves web work. Also: the AFA's anti-gay boycott survey is fraudulent, always showing the same fake results. Blog about their dishonesty.

Walking San Francisco at night, I spotted Orion overhead. A poem about dreams, concrete, grass in the cracks, old men begging, and a city of eternal children reshaping the world. I'm far from who I thought I'd be. Grateful for that. Here to make the next world.

The dollar is weak. Come visit while everything's cheap.

I went to Yuri's Night at NASA Ames, a science expo honoring Gagarin's first spaceflight that turns into a rave by midnight. Surreal highlights: a fake bureaucracy dome, unbaked "piazzas," and a busload of hot Stanford kids interning at Google.

Google's $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick, inventors of the world's most obnoxious advertising, officially ends the "Don't Be Evil" era. It's sad to watch one of capitalism's rare ethical giants finally go the way of all the others. Goodbye, non-evil Google. It was nice knowing you.

My blogger code: B9 d+ t++ k- s u f- i-- o x+ e+ l- c--

Drinking and snark at an anti-Burning Man party, winning $11 at a lesbian poker night, and spending Easter watching drag queens, gay men, and hunky Jesus competitions in the park. San Francisco, I love you.

I got into the Joost beta. It's slick but unreliable, with constant buffering making most content unwatchable. Big partners like MTV and Viacom are interesting, but no viral sharing or user content means YouTube still wins. Worth watching, but not ready yet.

Spent Sunday in Dolores Park at a proper tea party in formal wear, complete with cucumber sandwiches, china from thrift stores, and dancing with a cane. A marching band showed up. San Francisco is making me even gayer. It was grand.

Two Dr. Tran videos that have been cracking me up lately. Watch them both.

Yahoo! Widgets 4 is live! I'm proud to have worked on something I'd genuinely recommend. I also helped write the manual. It's 1am. The press loves it. Time to sleep.

Quick life updates: found an indie club (Popscene), got a new bed, loving the SF sunshine and omnipresent hippies. Futurama refs aren't geeky enough here. Yahoo Widgets 4 launches Wednesday. Also bought a massive brushed aluminium computer. Giant monitors next month.

Here every creed and race Find an equal place and may God bless our nation (from The Trinidadian National Anthem) The Archdeacon of Tobago doesn't want Elton John to perform at the Plymouth* Jazz festival. Because he's not a jazz singer? No, because he's gay. And because Trinidad and Tobago is not so great at keeping its laws up to date and has altogether too many religions, there are still laws on the books against sodomy: passed as recently as 1986, the law provides for up to 10 years in prison for homosexual acts between consenting adults (but if you are a minor, and you commit the act, it's only five years... how lenient!). There's also another, much older law which prevents "self-confessed prostitutes and homosexuals" from entering the country, but I cannot find any record of it online. It doesn't look like this will really happen, of course. Gay rights has come a long way in Trinidad in recent years. But this kind of story just makes me want to weep for my stupid,...

CNN's poll shows 49% think YouTube shouldn't be liable at all, but popular opinion didn't save Napster either. Google's acquisition looks naive in hindsight. YouTube's going down the same path, the media companies will get paid, and some new startup will take YouTube's place. Same story, different players.

Something's going on at Widgets HQ. Also, I'm into chai tea now, but I'm keeping my non-hippy credentials intact by sticking with regular milk.

I had a dream where an Irish barman explained whale drinking habits to me, complete with infographics. Mink whales drink you under the table; white whales drink you completely underwater. I woke up laughing for 30 seconds. My brain is weird.

I lost my Citibank ATM card and it's been a nightmare. Losing the card locks me out of online banking too, phone transfers aren't possible, and their "Global Executive Banking" program is useless outside US business hours. I'm closing this account as soon as humanly possible.

Moving between continents means wrestling with global banks that are global in name only. Citibank's West Coast branches operate like a completely different bank because, until 2002, they were. Scale creates complexity, complexity kills efficiency, and globalization turns out to be naturally self-limiting. My banking nightmare proves it.

Watching the Oscars on the West Coast with a room full of competitive gay men is basically Eurovision without the voting. Highlights: Beyonce's barely concealed fury, the three-way diva-off, too much Jack Nicholson, and Forest Whitaker's inexplicably hot wife. Also, my back is finally better.

A photo of Cameron with a hoodie-wearing youth perfectly captures the absurdity of the "hug a hoodie" policy. Hilarious either way you read it.

Used a friend's visit as an excuse to tourist around SF, hitting Marin Headlands and Point Reyes. Back is healing slowly. Finally did grocery shopping after four weeks, though the massive US portion sizes mean I barely need to eat anyway.

A CSS joke for gay web developers: `p.flag`. You either get it or you don't.

A Dish Network telemarketer called my brand new landline and tried to convince me that 1.5Mbps is faster than 6Mbps because "smaller numbers are faster." I work for Yahoo. I hung up. Also: back pain, percocet, and I now officially exist thanks to my social security number arriving.

I spent 7 hours in a San Francisco ER today with an acute back spasm, which prompted me to compare the NHS and US healthcare systems firsthand. Surprisingly, it's a tie: registration hassles exist in both countries, and both treated me without upfront payment.

Threw my back out Wednesday and have been hobbling around ever since. Everything in my life changed at once, so who knows the culprit: desk, bed, shuttle, laptop keyboard? Time to find a chiropractor.

I spend a whirlwind Saturday mattress shopping and furnishing an entire San Francisco apartment from scratch, encountering a cast of memorable characters along the way. The experience crystallizes a real cultural difference: in America, money is an enabler and service is genuinely enthusiastic. By midnight, I'm home.

I'm falling hard for San Francisco. Between touring the Paramount Theatre, exploring the Mission, and marveling at Castro's gay hardware stores and the February sunshine, I'm overwhelmed in the best way. Huge portions, cheap taxis, hills with views. This city is my shiny new toy.

I've just moved to San Francisco, and American capitalism is already blowing my mind. Within hours of getting my keys to a totally empty flat, Craigslist connected me with Luke, a charming cabinet-maker moonlighting as a furniture courier, who whisked me to IKEA and back for half the delivery price.

Day two in the US. Still having "whoa, I live here now" moments, but things are looking up: a great flat secured, a geeky team I like, and a wifi shuttle bus that makes the commute bearable. Bank account and SSN will take a while. So far, so good.

Blogging from Yahoo's wifi bus on route 280, past a lake with birds. This is nothing like the Northern line.

Just arrived in San Francisco and I can't stop smiling. It's hot, sunny, weirdly affordable, and looks like SimCity. I love it here.

I'm moving to San Francisco. Intermission.

Got a new haircut. It looks indie (good) but fashion-mode (tragic), suits my head (good) but makes me look really gay (bad). Still undecided. Vote on which you prefer.

Moving soon. The flight is Monday.

Moving across the Atlantic in days, toggling between panic and glee. Mika's *Life in Cartoon Motion* is the perfect soundtrack. Also: Barney Google was a comic strip before it was a search engine. Someone should look into that.

It's 3:30am after my leaving party, and London is finally sinking in. After nearly a decade, this city took a kid who makes things appear on screens and turned it into a life. Now I'm off to fool a whole new city. London's fingerprints are permanently under my skin.

Leaving the UK on the 22nd. Last chance to see me is Thursday the 18th. Saturday night at Wyvil's from 8ish if you want to say goodbye or just share a pint.

The iPhone blew my mind. It's OS X in a phone, with multi-touch, wireless internet, camera, and widescreen iPod built in. It's going to crush Motorola, Samsung, and SonyEricsson, and possibly Blackberry too. Nokia is the only real contender. 2007 just got very interesting for mobile.

Tonight is my last Popstarz before I leave the country. Come join me as I go out dancing one final time, claiming what's mine.

Applying for a US work visa is a sleepless, form-filled, fingerprint-imperiling ordeal involving hours in the freezing cold, bulletproof glass, and a $500 "fraud prevention fee." But it worked. I got approved on the spot. I'm moving to San Francisco.

Got the visa! Too exhausted to elaborate. Details tomorrow.

Spending tomorrow at the US Embassy hoping to score my L-1 visa. Fingers crossed.

Got Bose in-ear headphones for Christmas and they've completely transformed my music library. Everything sounds richer and fuller than before. I've had to re-evaluate my entire iTunes rating system because suddenly everything sounds amazing.

Took a superhero quiz out of boredom. I'm Spider-Man, apparently: intelligent, witty, a bit geeky. Sounds about right.

My Last.FM top 20 artists of 2006, with some surprises: Snow Patrol topped the list, Alanis was a one-day back-catalog binge, and Goldfrapp would rank higher if they'd released more. Late discoveries Larrikin Love and We Are Scientists missed the cut entirely.

Yay free tubes, yay Ken! Happy New Year!

I jinxed it. James Brown, Gerald Ford, and Saddam Hussein all died while I was away, plus Saddam's execution was a rushed mess. And it's only 11am on New Year's Eve.

A year in review: accidental Google fame via Orlando Bloom, skin allergies, dental hell, antibiotic depression, Ukraine, being made redundant the day after praising my job, and relocating to San Francisco. Also Snakes on a Plane was pretty good. Archives finally fixed too.

My Trinidadian number can send but not receive international texts. Use my UK number instead. Also, still hot and sunny.

Posting from Tobago, where the beach looks like this. Hope you're enjoying the fog, London!

Saw Eragon, pretty visuals, terrible plot. Also, heading to Tobago and Trinidad for two weeks, back for New Year's Eve. Catch you then!

Still don't know when I'm moving to San Francisco, and won't until after January 4th. We're all just going to have to deal with the uncertainty. Also: Christmas shopping done, budget thoroughly destroyed, no regrets.

Got hacked again, but caught it faster this time and found the entry point. Hopefully that's the end of it.

Tried a Wii at a friend's paella party. I've never been a console gamer, but this thing is different. Playing tennis that actually feels like tennis is basically low-fi virtual reality. Nintendo have made me interested in console gaming for the first time in decades. Non-gamers will want one.

I can't give blood in the UK because I'm a gay man who's had sex. The National Blood Service calls it "behaviour based" policy, but that's just weasel words for discrimination. Sign the petition to overturn this ridiculous ban.

My hosting account was hacked Friday: phishing sites, bulk emailers, the works. My host caught it after 11 hours and shut me down. I've been cleaning up since, but the hole may still be open. Upgrades and migrations are coming. I feel awful about being an unwilling accomplice to criminals.

Bristol-Myers Squibb donates a dollar to AIDS research every time you light a virtual candle at lighttounite.org. Pass it on.

I love that weightless feeling in a decelerating elevator. Also: the Antikythera mechanism blows my mind. The ancient Greeks were thousands of years ahead of their time, yet their civilization collapsed while China's persisted. What happened? Someone explain European history to me.

Scraping the bottom of the ambition barrel: I want 50 LinkedIn connections.

My friends Alex and Sup got married in Oxford's Pembroke College chapel in a beautiful Hindu-Christian ceremony. First wedding where I genuinely enjoyed myself throughout. Dinner in a 17th-century hall, dancing on ancient flagstones, bhangra mixed with pop, and even dance-offs. Congrats to the happy couple!

We're auctioning off our desk junk for charity as we head out the door. Highlights include a silver tube map, a Yahoo! sports bottle, and Christmas lights. All proceeds go to the RSPCA, so get bidding!

After being made redundant, I somehow ended up with four job offers from Yahoo's US office. I'm joining Yahoo! Widgets in San Francisco, leaving London and my beloved friends behind. It's a huge step, but I left Trinidad once and survived. Onwards and upwards.

I just used Flickr to batch-resize photos for a friend's website gallery, not because I needed cloud storage or any web-specific feature, but simply because it was the easiest option available. That moment crystallized something: web apps are winning not on principle, but on pure user experience.

Saw The Host, a Korean monster movie with a refreshingly unsentimental take on the genre. Great creature, oddly political plot, and a realistic portrayal of how people would actually respond to a giant monster. More black humor than schmaltz. Worth seeing.

Three recent encounters with strangers: a fun iPod music swap on the tube, getting scammed out of two quid by a convincing con man, and an unexpectedly genuine chat with an unemployed carpenter about the perverse incentives of the benefits system. Two out of three ain't bad.

Hell yes. Democrats take the House AND the Senate, and Rumsfeld finally gets the boot. Best day in politics in a long time.

Been absent, but hope to post more soon.

(Etymology: "I love SF" -> "I heart SF" -> "I "I less-than-three SF" -> "I cone-ass SF" -> "I ass-cone SF") The reason I'm loving SF is that somebody made that joke and everybody in the car got it without having to explain. Also, nice weather and good food.

Heading to California unexpectedly! Details later. Need sleep.

Heading to San Francisco (Sunnyvale, really) for handover work following my department's shutdown. I'll be there from the 27th through November 2nd, including Halloween. If you're in the area, get in touch!

Got a job. Details coming.

Five things I plan to do by October 2007: fix this blog software, walk the Thames Path to Greenwich, visit the London Wetland Centre, see Evita and Chicago live, and have dinner at The Ivy. Also, I want a new job, but tomorrow would be preferable.

Sick, soaked, and hoping for no tsunamis.

Lost my dream job Monday, had a wisdom tooth pulled today. Sitting here jobless, bleeding, unable to eat. It can only get better from here.

I "do the web": I surf it, build on it, theorize about it. Blogs, CMS, e-commerce, web architecture -- it's basically my whole life. I like it enough that that doesn't even seem sad to me anymore.

A speculative fiction setup tracing humanity's future evolution: rising IQs lead to an autism pandemic, prompting genetic engineering to restore emotional intelligence. The result is a new breed of "geemo" superstars with Profound Empathic Ability. Introducing Anna Gajewski, born 2215, whose story is just beginning.

My housemate and I have been approved for a mortgage, and we're house-hunting between Clapham Common and Stockwell. We're knowingly paying more than rent for now, betting London property appreciation covers the difference. It's a gamble, and I got my data from housepricecrash.co.uk. But investments don't usually let you redecorate.

Walking down Old Compton Street gives me a rare, warm sense of belonging among people who share my sexuality and history. I wonder: is this what straight people feel everywhere, all the time? And if so, is one street's concentrated freedom worth being ghettoized everywhere else?

Invented the word "sacrospinnicus" from something I saw online. First to guess the source wins £10, minus £1 per hint I give.

I've accidentally picked up an outdoor hobby. Also: Why do socialists drink herbal tea? Because all proper tea is theft.

Went roller disco-ing for my 25th birthday and got ID'd. Best. Present. Ever. Also considering buying proper skates, since our neighbourhood has plenty of concrete.

Wandered London, had pub lunch, played in the park, and took lots of photos -- many involving a can of Baked Beans.

Photographic treasure hunt in West London tomorrow, one spot left. Cute people get priority, sorry not sorry.

The DVD industry's CSS encryption failed because they had to give users the tools to decrypt it. Airline security has the same flaw: publishing the rules tells attackers exactly what to work around. Security theater with a known ruleset is just a temporary inconvenience for a determined adversary.

A masterpiece of unintentional storytelling: Tom dominates the frame, baby Suri is his trophy, and Katie literally cranes her neck just to fit in. One photo captures their entire dynamic perfectly.

Taking a break from heavy topics to share the cutest couple alive, cuter than pandas holding hat-wearing kittens. Also: is Blair done? My sources say he'll last through the party conference, but I'm not so sure he makes it to October.

A bad tooth led to metronidazole, which led to five days of crushing depression and nearly stepping in front of a bus. Turns out prescription antibiotics can do that to you. Our grasp on reality is terrifyingly fragile and subjective. I'm fine now, but it was a close thing.

I'm not advocating mandatory parental licensing, but we should be teaching parents how to parent. Research shows parenting styles meaningfully predict children's educational success. We already offer financial support to disadvantaged kids; teaching parents evidence-based parenting skills is another tool worth using. The question is how.

Four years ago I blogged about a cute geek from an Apple Switch ad, convinced he was gay. He denied it. Turns out I was right -- he came out last year. Great news, except I was apparently one of the creepy guys who made that period harder for him. Sorry, Jeremiah.

Blair wants to identify troublemakers before birth. Surely no one's ever explored where that road leads.

Yahoo handles eBay's US ads; Google handles everywhere else. Also, I chewed on the right side of my mouth today. Big day all around.

Killing time with a sore jaw by taking OkCupid quizzes. Turns out I'm an emotional hippie, attracted to pretty boys, an English genius, a cool nerd, and a success-driven Type Three. The grammar test at least salvaged my pride.

My dentist has now botched two fillings in three weeks, both requiring emergency root canals. The second woke me at 4am on a Sunday, sending me across London for expensive private treatment. I'm filing a formal complaint with the NHS. My teeth and my wallet are both in ruins.

Had a nightmare dentist visit where the anaesthetic wore off mid-drilling. Wondering if I have a malpractice case. Lawyers, help me out. Also: the "suspicious" passengers removed from a plane were just Asian. Shocking to nobody. The hysteria of their fellow passengers deserves consequences.

Sharing some funny lyrics from Orson's "Already Over" -- not directed at anyone, just genuinely hilarious. The delivery makes it even better. Recommend the album.

Five months of hype vindicated: Snakes on a Plane is gloriously, unapologetically awesome. Samuel L. Jackson, snakes, a plane, B-movie clichés cranked to 11. Go see it.

Snakes on a Plane opens today! I can't see it until tomorrow, but I'm excited nonetheless. Snakes on a Plaaaaaaaaaane!

Google Music Trends has the same problem as LaunchCast: it's all aggregate stats with nothing personal for the user. Last.fm succeeds because it gives people personalized charts and recommendations. Without a personal hook, why would anyone sign up, other than to give Google more of their data?

Celebrating Mikey's new law job and two consecutive 6pm finishes after a month of crunch. We just launched Yahoo! Tones in the UK and Germany. Also: dentist tomorrow for the first stage of my bionic molar.

Heard my first Christmas carol on August 10th. I am appalled. With Halloween no longer serving as a barrier, there's nothing stopping Christmas from creeping all the way back to Easter.

A foiled plot to blow up transatlantic flights dominates the news, but deprived of actual carnage, media scramble for content. Meanwhile, 24 young British Muslims are arrested, and nobody should be surprised. We've done nothing to address the genuine grievances driving this radicalization.

Had an emergency root canal Wednesday morning. Not a great way to start the day.

Both sides in the Israel/Hezbollah conflict are morally reprehensible. Israel's intention to avoid civilian casualties doesn't excuse the overwhelming disparity in deaths. Knowingly killing civilians to achieve your goals is a war crime regardless of provocation. Someone needs to separate these fuckers, and fast.

Castro's ailing, his 75-year-old brother Raul is running things, and everyone wants to know what happens next. No US invasion, no sudden opposition triumph. My bet: a USSR-style gradual loosening, then a tipping point. Cuba could be a real Caribbean power, but will probably just become another US satellite.

Survived two of four fillings. The nurse was actually good at suction, he didn't bruise my lips, and the anaesthetic kicked in before the drill did. Face still paralysed. Apparently I look like a stroke victim on the tube.

My weekly tech roundup: IE7 is actually a decent browser, fixing bugs that made my life miserable. But Microsoft is force-installing it as a "security update," which will confuse novices, anger power users, and break every Flash-based site on the web. Good product, terrible delivery. Typical.

Brain's fried but still firing. That end-of-week paradox where you finally have time to think and say something interesting, but can't. Until you can.

My latest dentist visit revealed three botched fillings and a tooth so destroyed it's basically just a hole. The projected repair costs are astronomical enough that my lifelong justification for sobriety ("at least it's cheaper than drinking") may finally require a spreadsheet to defend. Brush your teeth, kids.

I've been reading about genetics and now I'm questioning free will, consciousness, and whether our lives are just emergent behavior from genes meeting environment. Are we like water droplets on a windshield: unpredictable paths, inevitable outcomes?

I give up on this shit.

Pirates of the Caribbean was a thin, disappointing soup with historically ignorant Caribbean portrayals. Superman Returns, though, was pure joy: Singer finally got Clark and Lois right, Routh is genuinely believable as Superman, and the flying effects are perfect. I loved this movie unreservedly.

Yahoo! IM and MSN Messenger now interoperate, which is huge for me since I live in Y!IM but most of my friends are on MSN. If you're an MSN user, grab the beta and we can finally chat again.

I steal music and I know it's wrong. But record companies are technological dinosaurs charging 10x what music is worth, crippling their products with DRM, and offering a terrible experience compared to piracy. I'd pay a fair price for a convenient, unrestricted product. Nobody's offering me one.

The *Snakes on a Plane* music video is here, complete with an original song literally about snakes on a plane and a Samuel L. Jackson cameo. This meme shows no signs of stopping.

The Snakes on a Plane meme spawned a board game called Cobras in the Cockpit, where you play as the snakes. The "based on a fictional movie" disclaimer is doing a lot of legal heavy lifting there.

While I transcribe my analog notes, here are two new photo sets: marketing spotted in Ukraine, and an annotated collection of pretty buildings and statues, mostly for the terminally geeky.

Back from my trip and sorting through 338 photos. Check out my timeline, people I met, and a peek at Mikey's life in Ukraine. Much more to come.

Got a backlog of Ukraine stories to tell: beach holidays, attractive locals, extreme eating, Soviet-era monuments, befriending a kid without speaking his language, and the hell of mobile HTML editing.

Blogging live from Kharikov via GPRS, courtesy of my dad's bank office.

River tours, churches, midnight swimming, and blackmail material collected. Now heading to Kharkov to see the real Ukraine beyond Kiev's glitz, then driving back through the countryside.

I'm in Kiev with Mikey and forgot to mention it before leaving. Soviet architecture, gold-domed churches, WWII-themed restaurants, NATO gossip on the plane, marble subway stations with chandeliers, and a Stalin theme park featuring a 200-foot stainless steel Motherland statue. Also: mullets are in. More photos than you can handle coming soon.

Burger, footie, football shirt, pint of milk. This is peak heterosexuality for me, and I'm watching Family Guy in a Trinidad shirt.

Lost to England, but we had them worried for 82 minutes.

Power's out in central London. Hundreds of us sit here, useless without our machines. Browsing on borrowed wifi, twiddling thumbs, wondering if this counts as a valid reason to leave early.

Samuel L. Jackson predicts Snakes on a Plane wins Best Movie at the MTV Awards. Who am I to disagree? He's Samuel L. Jackson. I am nobody.

I love London but Trinidad is home in a way Britain never quite will be. I daydream about returning, fixing the country's mess, raising kids in sunshine with room to roam. But I'm not ready yet, and being gay there is literally illegal. For now: undecided.

Been slacking on the blog. Go apologize to a cow.

Minor update to seldo.net: absolute URLs mean pictures now show correctly, inline CSS is stripped so images behave. Added a Music category too. Still working on per-user features.

I dissect a passionate anti-Tesco rant point by point, revealing how each complaint about the supermarket giant is really just globalization working as intended: bigger stores, cheaper food, greater access, fewer arbitrary national boundaries. The real villain here is nostalgia, not progress.

X3 opens Friday and I'm seeing it opening day at Vue Leicester Square, evening showing. 8 tickets booked for the 7:30pm show. Text me or comment if you want in.

I rebuilt Afterlife using CakePHP as a starter project, and the result is seldo.net, now in beta. It's faster, more robust, and comes with four feed channels. Per-user feeds and social features are coming. It's also laughably insecure right now, so please don't break it.

The water company warns of a drought while I sit here listening to rain pour down outside. Laughable.

Loving the new Snow Patrol album: depressing lyrics set to upbeat music, Sufjan Stevens name-checks, communal singing, and clapping. Also, Muse's "Supermassive Black Hole" sounds surprisingly Goldfrapp-esque, which the world needs more of. Good albums are overdue.

We and al-Qaeda have found common ground: neither of us believes in transparency. The White House actually argued we can't discuss rights violations because it would help terrorists. That's a reason to *stop* violating rights, not to hide it. Can 2008 get here already?

Been watching the new Doctor Who season: two great episodes, one disappointing Cybermen two-parter. Cybermen just aren't scary or menacing. They look dorky and are ripe for parody, not fear.

A study finds that friendliness, honesty, and niceness are now considered cool. So there. (Though I'll admit this doesn't actually prove any of my earlier points.)

We're hiring PHP developers at Yahoo. Get in touch if you've got commercial experience and want to work at one of the web's biggest companies.

Coolness is just the respect of your peers. My peers aren't on MySpace judging my music taste, they're respecting my dancing, my conversation, my domain collection. So forget the hand-wringing: I'm not uncool, I'm unbelievably cool. And so are you.

Going to Popstarz this week with some Yahoo coworkers. Who's in?

I recognized my ex-housemate B from the bottom of a staircase at Leicester Square tube station, in the middle of a crowded platform. I recognized him by his ass. A skill I've apparently spent two years developing without realizing it.

Saw the Sultan's Elephant in London. It's here until Sunday, go see it. Also posted photos from my walk to work on Flickr.

I hate bread machines. Making your own bread, soap, and shoes ignores centuries of industrial progress that dramatically improved everyone's lives. Same people buy organic food without realizing modern farming methods literally saved the world from mass starvation.

The Tube is now officially unbearably hot. Summer has arrived.

Been quiet lately, but I'm loving the new Doctor Who, disappointed by the final West Wing series, and obsessed with CakePHP. More to come soon.

A Christian college receiving $10 million in state funding expelled an honor roll student simply for being gay. This is textbook discrimination, and exactly why church and state must stay separate. Spread this story.

A meme stolen from Ed: four jobs, places I've lived, TV shows, vacation spots, favorite dishes, daily websites, and places I'd rather be. Coventry is the arsehole of the universe. Not tagging anyone, but help yourself.

BBC answers Bob's bird question: don't touch dead birds, and only call the Defra helpline under specific circumstances. Turns out Bob did the right thing with his single dead bird. The advice has some ambiguity, but it's good enough for non-grammar nerds.

I've developed an itchy skin reaction and suspect my laundry detergent (Ariel Liquitabs) is the culprit. Switching to Persil non-bio helped, but my wardrobe is still contaminated. Every morning is a gamble. Today was particularly bad, and I'm starting to fear something worse is to blame.

Snakes on a Plane is five months from release and already a cult phenomenon. The trailer is everything I hoped for, including Samuel L. Jackson loading a gun mid-sentence. It's going to be magnificent.

Five years, 946 posts. Not too shabby.

First proper free weekend in months. Highlights: Yahoo! UK's inaugural Hack Day, Popstarz, a spontaneous Cartoon Museum visit, funky dancing at Buttoned Down Disco, and a birthday pub lunch. My aching muscles confirm I'm no longer a teenager, but it was a great weekend.

V for Vendetta earns its title: the word "vindicated" captures everything this film attempts. It's an American movie disguised as English, a live-action comic book unashamed of its stylisation, and ultimately a moral argument about freedom, justice, and whether a terrorist's revenge can ever truly be justified.

Saw Syriana, good but no Munich. Also: 959 days until 2008, and the Democratic field is already depressingly weak. Gore and Kerry again? While Republicans have Giuliani and McCain? At least a Clinton-Rice race means a female president, even if she'll be stupid and corrupt or smart and evil.

Threw an 80s-themed housewarming for the Warwick crowd. Forgot to take any photos myself, but others captured it well. More intimate gatherings coming soon for those who haven't visited the new flat yet.

After a week of fever, I've realized my terrible diet is killing me. I'm committing to a month of cooking real food every day. I need your help: suggest three complete, healthy meals I can make in under 90 minutes, with fridge-friendly ingredients. No pimento peppers. Help me not die.

Finally well enough to sit up without falling over and make it into work. Still coughing like a dying goose, but I'll take the win.

Had a brutal flu all week, finally feeling human again just in time to go back to work. Typical. (Update: fever's back. Lame.)

I have internet again! New flat is gloriously 80s, grey and shiny. Close to the tube, got a dishwasher and a great view. Downsides: extortionate tech support, a shower that's only warm at waist height, and being slightly further from Popstarz.

Offline but not dead. New broadband on the way, so normal service resumes soon. Bear with me while I ration my expensive temporary connection.

Survived ten days of hell: moving house while simultaneously launching the new Yahoo! UK and German mobile sites. Nothing revolutionary, but a massive amount of work. Now I can breathe. Go buy some ringtones.

Holocaust denial laws are misguided. Jailing David Irving for 17-year-old statements he already retracted highlights the absurdity: we're criminalizing specific speech rather than racism itself. You can't selectively ban one form of hate speech without appearing hypocritical, especially given our defense of the Muhammad cartoons as free expression.

Too busy with work and moving house to blog or think. Friday is the big day.

Smoke-free clubbing is coming and I'm thrilled, even though it's nanny-state overreach and I'm a hypocrite. Also I didn't actually read the article properly -- the ban isn't until summer 2007.

Cheney shot a guy and tried to cover it up, and it's barely news here. In the UK this would end a career instantly. The United States is fucking crazy.

Saw Munich. Brilliantly acted and directed, but deeply dishonest. It dresses up as thoughtful commentary on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict while glorifying Israeli vengeance. The Palestinian deaths get one throwaway line; the Israeli deaths get graphic detail. The real message: don't mess with the Jews. Horrible film, brilliantly executed.

Too hip for my own good.

I saw a young, privileged couple on the tube this morning and immediately loathed them. Not for their wealth, but for their effortless, inherited confidence: those intangible "soft skills" that propel mediocre people past better-qualified ones. I hate them most because I worry I might be one of them.

The BBC's photo editors couldn't resist choosing the most villainous possible shot of Abu Hamza for his trial coverage. The man already has one eye and hooks for hands. How much more sinister do you need to make him look?

The cartoon controversy is muddled because both sides are partly right. The first cartoon is genuine hate speech; the rest are legitimate commentary. Meanwhile, we condemn their treatment of gay people while they condemn our blasphemy, each convinced the other is crazy. And neuroscience suggests neither side can really help it.

New Woman readers have ranked David Cameron just above James Blunt on the sexy list. Blair's probably annoyed, but spare a thought for numbers 93-99, beaten by a podgy-faced Tory. Worryingly, his policies almost make sense too.

I wrote to the Western Mail to protest Lowri Turner's column arguing gay men are unqualified to lead because they can't have children. Her logic is spurious, her stereotypes offensive, and her claim that "different from the norm" disqualifies anyone from office is dangerous nonsense.

"Valentine's Season" is apparently a thing now. Bad enough that corporations turned an obscure saint's day into a commercial juggernaut, but now they're expanding it into a whole season? We need to stop this before it spreads further.

Roller Disco is the greatest thing to happen to Thursday nights. I didn't get it until I tried it myself, but now I'm sold. So sold, in fact, that it's where I'm having my next birthday party.

Tried blogging from my phone using Opera Mini. Nearly worked. The browser itself is great, beats my Nokia's built-in browser handily, and installs directly on your phone in minutes. Go try it.

Fixed Planet Afterlife update delays caused by Planet Seldo's build time. Updates now happen every 15 minutes, and my web host has resolved some additional issues that were getting in the way.

Buttoned Down Disco is this Friday. Also, the 2006 Bloggies site already crashed. Next year, all ten of you are nominating me.

A whale swam up the Thames. That was pretty cool. Then it died.

A classic breakdown of British newspaper readership, apparently from Yes, Prime Minister, neatly skewering who reads what and why.

I wrote a low-memory PHP CLI script to strip comments from MovableType export files before importing into WordPress, saving me from importing 22MB of spam alongside a mere 400k of actual content.

Stunning sunset over the UK today has me feeling spring's promise. Also discovered "anablog" -- I'm redefining it as notes you scribble on paper while traveling to post later. I have a massive one from my Tobago trip still waiting to go up.

Today my brain wouldn't stop firing. A single Economist article on evolution sparked ideas about the Garden of Eden, Neanderthals undone by stupid-but-vicious Homo Sapiens, optimal village sizes as a social network concept, anti-aging diets as lifestyle choice, and whether cultural complexity has already exceeded our cognitive limits.

Ed's back with a new WordPress blog. Go check it out.

Season 2 of Beauty and the Geek is back and I'm hooked. Equal parts hilarious and genuinely sweet, with great one-liners flying in the first few minutes. Less annoying host this season too.

Check out this blonde joke — possibly the best ever. Not PC, but I couldn't help laughing out loud.

Too busy to blog, so here's an excerpt from an email describing our new flat: very 80s decor, pink bathroom, a carpet with a storied past, but good sized rooms, a dishwasher, and closer to the tube.

Found a flat with A on Albert Square -- cheap for zone 2 and near the tube. Downside: a 12-day gap between moving out and moving in means sofa surfing. Friends with spare space, speak up.

Login URL for MT has changed ahead of the WordPress switch. Everything else should be the same.

Holiday photos are up on Flickr!

Google Image Search made my old Orlando Bloom post the second result, sending my traffic up 15x. I'm shamelessly leaning into it. Maybe some of those teeny boppers will stick around for the actual writing. Also, yes, I had those pictures for a reason.

Not good. Sharon has had a major stroke. This is really bad news.

Spam killed the server again. Comments are off, and everyone's moving to WordPress within 30 days. MoveableType is done.

Brokeback Mountain was well-acted and believable but ultimately boring. I think I just don't care about ordinary people in fiction. Give me science fiction. Real or fake, mundane people and their mundane problems don't interest me, and I make no apologies for that.

Woken after 4 hours sleep by neighbour's dogs going berserk at some idiot who kept antagonising them. Foghorns, shouting, chaos. I'm up now, the dogs are still barking at everything, and I finally understand crimes of passion.

At a New Year's party, "frightened badger" photos spiraled into an absurd menagerie: confused badgers, amorous penguins, orgasming amoeba, and my favorite, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. All you need is a camera and drunk people.

256 posts, two bombings, two vacations, one dream job at Yahoo, and a memory so bad I had to read my own blog to remember any of it. Net result: a pretty good year.

CNN's picture editors are at it again, illustrating a story about exploding fireworks factories with a guy who looks exactly like Wile E. Coyote after a very bad day near a petrol depot.

Back from holiday, tanned, rested, and starved of male company. I took 273 photos and need to go clubbing. Also, Google has decided my site is the place to find Orlando Bloom pictures.

Relaxing in Trinidad, minimal internet, heading to Tobago tomorrow. Posts and photos coming when I'm back in the land of broadband.

Heading to Trinidad for the Christmas holiday. Back for New Year's Eve, so count me in for your plans!

Caught some Christmas spirit at Waterstones — hot chocolate, lights, and presents. Now I'm packing for Trinidad and ready for a well-earned vacation, sneezes and all.

A massive fuel depot explosion rattled our windows at 6am, leaving a huge smoke cloud drifting over the house all day. Also saw the Jon Stewart show (disappointing), have a cold, and am possibly overdosing on mince pies. West Wing season 6 is keeping me up past my bedtime.

Inflation-adjusted, Cleopatra (1963) cost more than King Kong. And Kong isn't even the priciest recent film -- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire cost $308m, more than all three Lord of the Rings combined. None of which diminishes my desire to see the giant monkey movie.

Narnia on screen is the book made gloriously real. Tilda Swinton steals everything as the Winter Queen, the visuals are spectacular, and the child actors hold their own. Disney sanitizes the battle, but fans and newcomers alike will love it. Go see it.

Our Christmas party was fantastic. I danced a lot, skipped the free bar, looked stupid in a suit, and nearly lost my expensive winter coat to a mysterious woman from finance. Also I'm awake at 3am on caffeine and somehow expect to be alert tomorrow.

Forced into renting a tuxedo for our "Black Tie" Christmas party. I look like a trapped monkey in suits, and apparently black tie is designed to eliminate all individuality. Desperately seeking a non-boring dinner jacket before this afternoon. Send help.

Baby pandas are officially the cutest known form of life.

Keira Knightley had an early role as Queen Amidala's decoy in Star Wars Episode One. The makeup was so convincing that nobody recognized her.

I was double-charged by my bank, emailed them, and they quietly refunded the money with no explanation or apology. Check your statements regularly -- I nearly missed an extra £80 disappearing from my account.

Terrorism operates like a successful web startup: distributed, peer-to-peer, networked, and exploiting the long tail of countless small attacks rather than one decisive blow. Al-Qaeda is to conventional warfare what Amazon is to retail. I wish this analogy weren't so compelling.

Really enjoying my new job at Yahoo! The team is great, the work is genuinely interesting, and a long boozy leaving do revealed nobody said anything homophobic all night, which is reassuring since I still haven't figured out how to come out at work.

Responding to comments on my defense of selfishness: I support free speech and personal choice, but not your right to harm others. Secondhand smoke crosses that line. America isn't monolithic. And yes, a smoking ban might cut union services, but fewer carcinogens is a net win.

Warwick students voted to ban smoking in their union. Selfish? Sure, but so is forcing non-smokers to breathe your fumes. Democracy runs on selfishness. Hurrah for the smoke-free majority. We non-smokers just need to wait for our numbers to grow -- which won't take long.

I've started calculating RGB hex codes in my head, branching into pastels and secondary colours without looking anything up. I'm worried about what useful knowledge got displaced to make room for the ability to count in base 16.

I have an Amazon wish list if you want to buy me something. Also, I finally secured my WiFi after a neighbor started hogging our bandwidth. Sorry to any innocent freeloaders, but they left me no choice.

Still two gifts to find, but I'm doing it all from the warmth of home. Not stepping outside until Monday.

It's freezing, I'm settling into Yahoo!, and my new boss returns next week to shake things up again. Send me somewhere warm. Currently reading the Economist, playing with Konfabulator, and stressing about Christmas gifts.

Eurostar can take me to Paris and back for £75 this Friday. We live so close and never go! Anyone fancy joining me this weekend?

The BBC keeps using the same stock photo in their extended opening hours coverage. Pretty sure it's actually Jennifer Aniston drowning her post-Brad sorrows. Does the BBC really need to rub it in?

I love this optical illusion from Defective Yeti involving a kitten.

Went to the dentist and got three fillings, partly thanks to swapping booze for fizzy drinks. My teeth are a genetic disaster. Also: why isn't there a review site for doctors and dentists? Restaurants have them. Someone build this with me.

Jon Stewart is coming to London on the 11th. I've grabbed 4 tickets for the 7pm show, but they're all spoken for now. Call 0870 850 9176 to get your own.

First day at Yahoo wasn't bad. The scale is staggering: patch PHP, build Apache modules, get machines just by asking. The resources make you feel like anything is possible. Also, find me on Yahoo Messenger.

Starting my new job at Yahoo tomorrow and I'm absolutely terrified. Wish me luck!

A man visits the zoo only to find just one dog. It was a shih tzu.

I got a job at Yahoo. Here's the whole story, in probably more detail than you need, including the questionnaire they made me fill out, my answers, and the nail-biting wait for an offer. Short version: it worked out, and I'm thrilled.

It works.

I got to attend a special pre-premiere screening of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and it's brilliant. Radcliffe finally delivers, the CGI is seamless, and unlike its predecessors, this one has genuinely grown up. Go see it. Then see it again.

A memorial night for Simon Hobart at Popstarz drew hundreds of people, celebrity DJs (Brett Anderson, Brian Molko, Siouxsie Sioux, Kele Okereke), walls of written tributes, free drinks, and nearly £10k raised for charity. Exactly how he would have wanted it.

Davina McCall might enter the Celebrity Big Brother house. This would be completely amazing, obviously.

Four days left at my old job, and my new boss has already found this blog. Can't say where I'm going yet, but it's big and exciting. Also heading to the Popstarz reopening to pay proper respects to Simon.

I updated my voter registration online via an amusingly dodgy council website, only to be thanked not for completing the form, but for "using the Internet" in general. You're welcome, Islington. We'll keep using it.

The BBC used a gross photo to illustrate plans to ban drinking on trains. I'm all for the ban. Also, Bacardi won't be happy. I may need a new category just for complaining about other outlets' photo choices.

George Takei came out today. CNN marked the occasion with the gayest photo they could find. Also worth knowing: he spent ages 4-8 in a Japanese internment camp. America, you've had your moments.

Looking for a Java developer willing to relocate to Gibraltar. Get in touch.

Simon Hobart built spaces where people could be themselves, find community, and lose themselves in music and joy. That's not a small thing. The man who kept Popstarz open the night after 7/7, just because people needed somewhere to go, was genuinely great. He'll be missed.

I have at least one close friend I would never have met without the internet.

I review the Sugababes' "Taller in More Ways," predicting six potential singles, and praise the band's effortless cool. Then I break down my iTunes star-rating system, from one-star duds auto-deleted from my iPod to the rare five-star classics I'll defend to the death, Britney included.

Rumors are swirling that Cheney could face indictment in Plamegate and resign. It's on the internet, so it must be true. A good day for good news.

My housemates T&J are DJing at Popstarz this Friday, 2-4am. Get there, bring everyone you know!

Trinidad's PM Manning claims to know who's behind four bombings but admits he has no courtroom-worthy evidence. That's not knowing anything. Don't grandstand about "Mr Big" when you can't back it up. Embarrassing.

Only in London would there be a market for a company that holds your spare keys, because you don't trust your neighbours.

Saw an ad on the Piccadilly line: "New WKD Red. It's new and it's red. See what we did?" Refreshingly honest for an ad campaign. Reminds me of Matt. Also, loving my new camera.

Burberry sent me a catalog, probably because I subscribe to The Economist. Marketers assume that means I'm a wealthy executive type. I have no credit cards, no travel budget, and don't drink. Nice try.

I've got a new job! I've handed in my notice at Boltblue but can't reveal where I'm heading yet. You've got 30 days to guess. Also posted the last of my NYC photos, if you're not already tired of them.

Finally posted Days 2-4 of my NYC photos. Shorter sets, more interesting than the MoMA marathon, unless you're really into design.

Good news coming Monday. Ask me if you're curious!

Been busy today, more photos coming tomorrow.

First day in New York photos are up on Flickr: 101 shots covering Central Park and MoMA. Future days will have far fewer.

Back in London, jet-lagged, with a dead computer. Turned out to be the power supply — fixed in 30 minutes by the local shop for an inflated price I'd happily pay again. An hour of my own jet-lagged poking around achieved nothing.

Outer Borough Day: met up with Colin in Brooklyn after a slow subway ride, wandered Prospect Park, walked Brooklyn Bridge, finished with Italian food and a village stroll. I heart New York. Huge photo set incoming when we're back.

Day 4 in NYC: manicures (for M, not me, not yet), Central Park, a $750 coat that saved me $1750, cocktails at the Ritz with Jersey City views, Mexican food, and clubbing at a smoke-filled Miss Shapes. Also spotted Carson from Queer Eye at a bar whose liquor license had just been suspended.

Visited M's grandparents in New Jersey, wandered the city, shopped more. Flag count: 204. Bush voters spotted: still zero. Tonight: clubbing.

Packed two days of classic NYC into pancakes, Soho shopping, Chinatown internet cafes, Korean-run Cajun food, Macy's splurges, Art Deco, the Empire State Building, sushi, and ice cream. Day 1 covered the Frick, MoMA, Central Park, Trump Tower, and Mexican food. We're not wasting a minute.

First morning in New York and I've already bought an iPod nano, a new camera, eaten an enormous burger, and caught short films by Daily Show writers. All since landing. Woo!

I don't drink, and I'm tired of explaining myself every time I order a lemonade. The real reason is control: losing it terrifies me. But that raises a bigger question: why does everyone else *want* to lose it? I wish I knew what made me so different.

Took my repeatedly broken iPod to the Apple Store ready for battle, armed with Sale of Goods Act printouts. Five minutes with a tired but friendly Genius later, they upgraded me from a 40GB to a 60GB colour iPod. Sometimes being calm works better than being the Loud Angry Customer.

Photos from my birthday party are up on Flickr. God, I'm 24. That sounds so old.

The birthday party was a success, leaving the house a wreck. Cleaning consumed my day. The highlight of some disobediently-brought presents: a gorgeous circa-1930 illustrated guide to London, satisfying my history, London, and book geekery simultaneously, complete with wonderful period photos and charmingly earnest advice on crossing busy streets.

Biological birthday came and went quietly with lovely messages. Saturday's the real celebration. If you have my number and haven't heard from me, something's gone wrong.

Had the flu since Saturday, missed my own birthday meal. It really, truly sucks. Being sick is boring.

For a brief moment during Katrina, American media actually did its job. Now CNN is running feel-good stories about white survivors while thousands of poor black people are dead. New Orleans is 63% black. The media's return to form makes me sick.

The US healthcare system is broken and inefficient, but the "Americans have no healthcare" argument is oversimplified. The US spends more on healthcare as a percentage of GDP than almost any other nation, and extensive programs cover the elderly, poor, and veterans. The reality is more nuanced than the critics suggest.

A "7 things" meme: what I plan to do before I die, what I can and can't do, what attracts me to men (bonus points for CLI skills), my verbal tics, my celebrity crushes, and seven friends I'm tagging to do the same.

Saw Crash tonight. Great film with a lot to say about race in America, or really just one thing said many ways. Also: hoping my iPod gets fixed before my New York flight, annoyed by sudden heat, and convincing myself peanut M&Ms count as dinner.

Tagged with a song meme! My five current favorites span Goldfrapp to Art of Noise. My iPod is broken again, curse Apple, but I'm eyeing the new flash-memory minis in NYC. Also tagging five friends and welcoming Bob to the blogosphere.

My cooking is snowballing. I made spicy chicken goujons and realized I already had most of the ingredients -- because past recipes stocked my pantry. Good ingredients inspire more cooking, which inspires more ingredient-buying. Now I have fancy mustard and feel compelled to cook beef. Come round for dinner?

Google launched an IM and VoIP client, but it's basic compared to Trillian and lacks a killer feature until it connects to other networks like MSN and AIM. Worth watching, but for now it's a "wait and see."

On a rainy British afternoon, it hits me: we're just interesting foam on a wet rock, hurtling through space around a giant furnace. Earth's liquid-covered existence is a cosmic fluke, and all life a thin, unlikely residue of it. We should probably remember this more often.

Lovely barbecue turned into a long, relaxed evening. Then had to "play it straight" giving Dom a lift home, which somehow left him unable to navigate his own street. His excuse: being gay. Apparently it explains most things. I'm considering trying it when my next project is late.

I explore what it means to be a geek: someone with an intense intellectual obsession, once a social outcast but increasingly cool since the dot-com era proved geeks could outearn athletes. The internet has helped us find each other. Simple rule: you're a geek if you say you are.

Autumn's here, and I can't decide if the cold weather should make me more or less paranoid about people in heavy coats on the tube. The cover it provides cuts both ways.

Working on this web2 project keeps flooding my brain with cool ideas. It's draining my notebook budget and my sleep.

Small crowd, loud music, 10 feet from the band. Perfect gig.

The Republican party is run by jocks. Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, Hastert -- all serious athletes. This isn't coincidence; it's culture. Jocks get their way by force, distrust intelligence and analysis, and bully those who disagree. Sound familiar? Geeks of the world, unite. We need to take our country back.

Scientology isn't uniquely corrupt. Christianity, Islam, and Scientology are the same animal at different life stages. Religion is a strong, viral, self-defending idea, but strong doesn't mean good. I'm done apologizing for rationalism. I think religion is actively harmful, personally and socially, even if I won't hassle you about it.

Ken's new One London campaign has a great website and they actually encourage you to steal their logo. Love it.

After five years in the UK, I thought I'd blended in well enough. Then I asked a colleague to use a "common letter" instead of a capital, and discovered that apparently only Trinidad still uses that term for lowercase letters. Makes me wonder what other oddities I've been casually deploying for years.

I've set up a mirror of Planet Afterlife while Will is away. Spent 45 minutes making it pixel-perfect, with slightly more entries per page and updates every 20 minutes. It'll stay up until Will returns.

I catalogued every time Bush shoehorned "hate freedom" into an unrelated speech. Home ownership, cattle farming, senior fitness, Labor Day, Greek Independence. He managed it every single time. The man cannot open his mouth without pivoting to terrorism, no matter how tortured the logic required.

Loved the Burton visuals, hated the saccharine family subplot they grafted onto Dahl's perfectly subversive story. The oompa-loompas were brilliant, even the songs weren't cringe-inducing, and thank god they ditched the orange skin and green hair. And Gene Wilder. Did I mention Gene Wilder?

Had our summer party today. Drunk coworkers are hilarious.

Rough week has left me wanting to destroy things, so Friday night I'm putting on all my spiky black gear and moshing at the Mean Fiddler. Anyone in?

Something was binding to port 80 on my Windows XP machine. Skype was the culprit. TCPview from SysInternals was the tool that identified it. My blog is better than Google.

Fantastic Four is a super-fun summer movie with stupid plot holes, but it's myth, so roll with it. The Human Torch was hot even before his powers. Also: a clamped car trailing sparks being chased by police, jumpy Londoners, and a message to terrorists: you've only made me late for work.

Angry, not scared, after today's failed London bombing attempts. They were amateurs compared to last time, but they still had a plan and still panicked the city. My tube link to London is down again. Retreating into Harry Potter, where the villains are clear and defeat is guaranteed.

Tired but blogging anyway. Life's good: pizza, Harry Potter, free tickets, summer walks across London. That last item on my list didn't quite work out.

Some bombings get names and others don't. The Baghdad attack killed twice as many people as London, but you wouldn't know it from the coverage.

After July 7th, I emailed my former Muslim coworker M to get an unfiltered view on British Muslim anger. He confirmed many are furious, but condemned the bombings as un-Islamic. His ranked grievances: Palestine, Kashmir, Iraq, Bosnia, and Western hypocrisy. This isn't hatred of freedom. It's anger at specific things we did.

Tons happened Thursday, but I'm too swamped to get into it yet.

A jarring week, capped by Thursday's tragedy, reminded me I don't have unlimited time. I want to create something lasting, not just live comfortably. Time to stop planning and start doing, now, before life proves again that it doesn't always go on.

London's dark humor is returning after the bombings, and so am I. We're coping the only way we know how: taking the piss. And to those posting "We Are Not Afraid" from Nebraska: easy to say when you're not the one who's fucking terrified.

Watching a little girl wobble on training wheels reminded me of how desperately I wanted a bike as a kid. My overprotective mom finally caved at 12. Funny how she worried so much about a bike, then handed over the car keys at 16 without a second thought.

Today's attacks hit home in the most literal sense. The bombs went off meters from my desk, on the lines I ride every morning. I finally understand what it meant to be in Madrid or New York. London is my city, my home, and today someone hurt it. I'm writing this for me.

I'm okay, but all three of my routes to work were bombed this morning. Mobile networks are down. I walked home shaken. This was real, not panic or exaggeration. Reach me at work email for now.

I took a quiz and apparently I'm Scrivs. Flattering, given how awesome 9rules is.

Got a frighteningly convincing PayPal phishing email today. The tone, look, and serial numbers were spot-on. Only caught it because the recipient address was a spam honeypot, which prompted me to inspect the link more carefully. Stay vigilant.

I've been exploring my 3,000+ unplayed iTunes songs since 2004. Here are 10 I didn't skip, from JC Chasez to No Doubt. Tagging Dan and Dom to keep the meme going.

Impromptu barbecues that spiral from Big Brother gossip into hours of evolutionary theory, Geldof, and poverty debate are exactly what I need. More of this, please.

Went to Miss-Shapes. Decent night — Sandra played Push It again (why?), but redeemed herself with Goldfrapp. Cute guy in a white shirt who could dance. Left by 1.30, before last tube. Not sure why I'm even writing this down.

Sexy, fun, and surprisingly cliche-free despite being both an action movie and a romantic comedy. Brad is hot, Angelina is hotter, and the whole thing feels deliciously naughty. Two thumbs up for pure fun.

A good day at work: cookies causing login loops, AND vs OR in SQL joins, and the correct terminology for Bosnian landmine incidents. Three questions, three answers. On a roll.

Software patents differ fundamentally from copyright: copyright protects your specific work, but patents let you block anyone from implementing similar ideas, even independently. This stifles innovation, which depends on building on existing ideas. Software patents serve lawyers, not inventors, and shouldn't be allowed in the EU.

81% pure on a sexual purity test. Must try harder.

Jonathan Ross is being paid £45k to present a concert about ending poverty. Nuff said.

Took a quiz that called me a "pundit blogger." Not very scientific, but I'll take it. Meanwhile, work devolved into shouting names on IRC and a Pythagorean argument about who sits closest to whom. Diagrams were drawn. It's that kind of office.

Deep, dark, angry -- everything a Batman movie should be. Less pretty than Burton's vision but far more believable and a hell of a lot of fun. Schumacher's disasters are already a fading memory. Four stars out of five.

I never watched Doctor Who growing up in Trinidad, but I've caught up now and realize it's not really sci-fi. It's a comic book: mysterious villains, cliffhangers, continuity obsession, and characters who die only to return more powerful. That finale was pure Phoenix. I'm hooked.

I'm sick of Bob Geldof's self-congratulatory crusade. Live 8 is just guilty liberals convincing themselves that watching Keane in a field somehow saves African lives. It doesn't. If you actually care, do something real. The wristbands and the concert are just ego and nonsense.

Had a bad cold made worse by taking hayfever meds, which depress the immune system. Rookie mistake. I live and learn, frequently injuring myself along the way.

Came down with sniffles during peak pollen season and now I can't tell if it's hayfever or a cold. Also had a great evening with a friend who works with Matt Lucas, which is pretty damn cool.

Saw *As You Like It* at the Wyndham with A. Beautifully spoken Shakespeare, 1920s costumes, folk songs and big-band numbers, slapstick, and unsubtle innuendo. Theatre at its best: unpretentious, slightly silly, a little dirty, and entirely fun.

Saw Derren Brown live. Entertaining but too obviously trickery for my taste. Also my eyes went severely cross-eyed for half an hour tonight, followed by a headache from hell. If I die of a stroke tomorrow, you've been warned.

Too fried to blog, so here's my entry in Dom's MS Paint orgasm-drawing competition instead.

Swamped with stuff I can't talk about publicly. Bear with me.

Not my proudest comeback post: I used a name generator to christen my penis Darth Vader the Strangely Proportioned Liquorice Strap. Yes, really.

Exam season begins. Going full hermit mode until June 5th, deep in geek territory. Also: curtains.

I dreamed I almost had sex, but spent the whole time searching for a condom instead. When I realized mid-dream it was a dream and I'd wasted all that time on safe sex precautions, the frustration woke me up. HIV awareness campaigns have ruined even my fantasy life.

My housemates T&J are DJing at Miss-Shapes tonight, my boss just left, and I'm going clubbing on a Thursday. Currently reading Stephenson's System of the World and drinking Yazoo.

Made chicken stuffed with brie and leeks largely on my own, with only minor interventions from my housemate. It was actually pretty good, if slightly under-seasoned. Two years of weekly practice and I'm finally getting the hang of this cooking thing.

Giving up caffeine after hitting unsustainable levels -- 2 litres of Coke and 3 cups of tea in a day and still exhausted. Today was rough with withdrawal headaches on top of an already bad day at work. But it's fading. Tomorrow will be better.

Trying to cut back on socializing, but accidentally booked myself solid for the entire week ahead. Next week I'm doing nothing. Seriously. Don't invite me to anything.

Saw Star Wars. It's good. Very good. Slow start, then serious ass-whupping. Go see it. Also, apparently I'm Cheer Bear.

Picked up a movie meme baton and ran with it. Recent highlights: *The Jacket* and *Summer Storm* (gay German rowing teams, what could go wrong?). Five formative films range from *And The Band Played On* to *Gattaca*. Passing it on to Dan and Dom.

I drink an alarming amount of Yazoo. If it turns out to be bad for me, I'm done for. Worth it though.

A housewarming gift magnet from Windsor has permanently infected our household with spontaneous outbursts of "HALLO!" and "FROM WINDSOR" in terrible fake posh accents.

Went from baking brownies to being ill again. London is a germfest, I'm a weakling, or both. Not going to the gym this time. Bright spot: a generous donor gave £30 to Gay Geeks, covering a chunk of hosting costs.

Journalists are now covering bloggers and becoming bloggers themselves. That's because journalists and bloggers are the same thing: writers. Blogging isn't journalism, but sometimes bloggers produce journalism, and sometimes journalists don't. Blogs have simply lowered the barrier to publishing. Being published is no longer special.

Looking for people to see Revenge of the Sith with me. Reviews are good and I suspect it's worth multiple viewings. Who's in?

"Happy slapping" -- assaulting strangers on video phone -- turns out to be self-correcting. Actual assault is risky, so kids just slap each other and fake it. Net result: idiots hitting themselves to look cool. Darwin's got this one covered.

I'm a web developer and heavy OUTeverywhere user, and the new interface is a disaster. The old design was innovative, bandwidth-efficient, and information-rich. Sacrificing usability for standards compliance is missing the point entirely. The interface wasn't broken. Bring it back.

A quick list of life's recent highlights: iPod everywhere, new washing machine, dinner, cuddles, good flatmates, National Theatre plays (especially the gloriously self-referential ones), tea, and sleep.

Bluewater's hoodie ban is a lazy, blunt instrument that will catch chemo patients and cold-eared tourists alongside actual troublemakers. Give security staff the discretion to make real judgements. Zero-tolerance policies are an abdication of responsibility, not a solution.

I've been neglecting the blog, but I'm back to updating the scratchpad. In other news: new washing machine tomorrow (hallelujah, three weeks without clean clothes), and vacation photos are up on Flickr.

The party was a success. Thanks to everyone who came and for the wonderful housewarming gifts, especially the sodastream. Also: Xtreme Cheddar is apparently a thing that exists.

Blogging from the dinner table. Not sure if I should be proud or ashamed.

Life is full of joy and suffering simultaneously. Don't feel guilty for laughing when others are hurting. If you can help, help. If you can't, live fully anyway. Laugh for those who can't. Savor what you have. Live harder in memory of those you've lost.

A B.C. comic strip where Johnny Hart takes a swipe at evolution. Says it all.

Moved into a new place, exhausted, and adulting hard. Bought a kettle today, washing machine tomorrow. Living the dream.

My brothers and I surprised our dad at his 60th birthday party by performing an extempo calypso covering his life, carrying on a family tradition he started. Here are the lyrics, in case you asked for them. You'll need to be Trinidadian to get most of the jokes.

Been working on getting comments functional again, but spam remains an unsolvable nightmare. They're technically on, but hidden by default. Enjoy it while it lasts before the spammers inevitably kill the server again.

Watching the election circus from 6,000 miles away in Bequia. Distance makes the pettiness even clearer.

Just back from the amazing Grenadines, full report coming. Also: the new Pope looks genuinely evil. Emperor Palpatine levels of evil. Lightning bolts from the fingers, people who use condoms, you know the drill.

Moblogging from a yacht in the Caribbean via GSM. Technology is incredible, and yes, it's pretty great out here.

Stuck at Gatwick for two hours, bored out of my mind and surrounded by chavs. Misery loves company.

The name Donald is pretty bad.

Saw *Downfall* and found it powerful, disturbing, and occasionally unbelievable -- though history itself is unbelievable. The director sacrifices some reality by softening its Nazi protagonists, but that emotional connection is what makes the story work. The dead silence in the cinema afterward said everything.

I break down the UK election issue by issue and tally up the results: Lib Dems and Labour tie, but with similar Europe positions, Lib Dem edges ahead. Conservatives surprisingly win on crime and war, but I'm voting yellow unless the Tories look like they might actually win.

Labour -14 Conservative -18 Liberal Democrat 30 UK Independence Party 3 Green 18You should vote: Liberal DemocratThe LibDems take a strong stand against tax cuts and a strong one in favour of public services: they would make long-term residential care for the elderly free across the UK, and scrap university tuition fees. They are in favour of a ban on smoking in public places, but would relax laws on cannabis. They propose to change vehicle taxation to be based on usage rather than ownership.Quiz at Who Should You Vote For, via Dom, as usual.

Received a brilliantly clever piece of spam today: the message is hidden entirely in the whitespace between random characters. The text itself is harmless gibberish. Good luck filtering that one.

Tory poster generator fun. And yes, I know the grammar's dodgy, but Labour get away with "Forward, not back" so let's not go there.

Saw *Beautiful Boxer* at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. Stunning during transition, less so before or after. I'm still not sure if I wanted him or wanted to be him. Great film, but I won't be taking up kickboxing or changing sex anytime soon.

Being a web developer in 2005 fills me with smug satisfaction, wonder, and pure joy. The web is becoming mundane and everyday -- and that's a triumph. The exciting times are just beginning, and I have a proposal about how the next phase will unfold. Big dreams, but so was the Internet.

The English countryside gets far too much credit. It's just an endless patchwork of farmed fields and boggy moors, thoroughly spoiled long ago. People lamenting new housing developments should remember someone already cleared the forests. It's hardly unspoilt wilderness.

Boys suck. That is all.

Tried buying physical CDs for the first time in ages. Total disaster: wrong section, missing albums, no recommendations, one lonely listening station. How did people ever shop for music this way? I am deeply grateful to live in the age of the internet.

I took a piercing quiz and scored tongue piercing, 100%. Naughty and fun, apparently. Thanks Dom, as usual, for the cheesy quiz fix.

I love Buttoned Down Disco, where we celebrated M's birthday. Thanks to Housemate T for the tip.

Pope John Paul II has died. Time for the media to treat the papal election like a presidential race. Also, happy birthday M!

I'm refreshing CNN at 11pm waiting for the Pope to die, even though I don't care when it happens. I just need the information to exist so I can have it. I'm basically a lab monkey hitting a button for brain chemicals. I should probably go to bed.

Bored of the internet. Done. Blog's closed. Enjoy the archives.

Still here, just keeping some things close to the chest. Also, four day weeks are the shizznit.

Hollywood's shit-dial is cranked to 11 this summer with terrible team sports movies and a Lindsay Lohan Herbie reboot. At least Fantastic Four looks promising.

Madonna dressed as a nun, Guy as the Pope. My day is complete.

My computer Anton was overheating and crashing constantly. After trying unplugging, removing the case, vacuuming, and yelling, I finally removed the fan to find a solid dust blockage. Cleaned it out, CPU dropped 20 degrees. Lesson: maintain your hardware. Yelling does nothing.

Spent the afternoon in the park with friends discussing eugenics, scatological chocolate ads, and QE2 baked bean tins. Someone kept throwing grapes at my head. Now off to Popstarz!

Went to the gym. Worked out. Did not die. I'll take it.

Impromptu picnic in Hyde Park this Friday if the weather holds. Have my number? Grab strawberries and cream from M&S and give me a call.

The EU's anti-liberalisation argument contradicts itself: if jobs are fleeing east, why would workers flee west? They're going where the jobs are. Liberalise, jobs follow people home, problem solved. Unless welfare tourism is the real issue, which is fixable separately.

Back in 2003 I wrote a university project arguing the web was broken and proposing fixes. Two years later, everyone's building my ideas without me. So I'm finally implementing Web2 myself, publicly, before someone patents the whole thing.

Give me your top five artists or bands you're loving right now.

11,832 songs on my iPod. Most-played artist: Kasabian, so dominant they took the entire top ten. Also apparently I listen to a lot of Kelly Clarkson.

Went clubbing in Shoreditch: survived a bongo-playing sadist, a skip fire, and a venue that was essentially a drug den with a dancefloor. The music made it worth it. Barely.

A year ago I was paid by the BBC as part of a group called the "Broadcast Assassins" to discuss downloading TV content. Now Wired is crediting that group with inspiring the Doctor Who BitTorrent leak. The reporting is inaccurate, but I'll take it.

First launch of the year, first early night of the week, and the first smell of spring in the air. No coat needed. Long live summer.

Worked until 10pm, brain is mush. The Daily Show is genius, wondering if Teen Titans is worth watching, want to mess with Ajax, and pop-up ads targeting Firefox users can go to hell.

Late night, no energy, and I got thoroughly schooled by Leah on my half-baked gay men post. Here's a teddy bear instead.

I got an advance copy of the new Doctor Who. The first 20 minutes are rough, but it redeems itself spectacularly. Eccleston is brilliant, Davies' writing is sharp, and Billie Piper actually acts. It's quintessentially British, low on FX but high on character. Consider me a total fanboy.

The Episode III trailer just blew my mind. Excuse me while I change my boxers.

Went to the dogs at Walthamstow for a friend's birthday. Thought we'd be in the posh enclosure. We weren't. Instead: frozen scampi, 1970s decor, and wall-to-wall Essex. Never again.

Too busy to write a full post, so here's a half-formed thought: "gay" is a hard-won identity, not just a sexual behavior. The NHS distinction between identity and practice is actually meaningful, and collapsing them risks erasing what generations fought to define.

Spam comments in the old database are overloading the server when rebuilding blogs, causing my account to get disabled. Working on a fix for your commenting issues.

The new Doctor Who episode leaked, the BBC publicized it themselves, and I have my own theories about who's really behind that. Now stop reading and go download it.

I weigh in on whether London lives up to its gay fantasy reputation. It's great for meeting people and building a social life, but lonely at first and expensive always. Your world is defined by your friends, not your city, and that takes effort anywhere.

CSS can't apply multiple background images to a single element, forcing designers to litter their HTML with empty, semantically meaningless divs just to achieve visual effects. The CSS Zen Garden proves the point: nearly every layout there is fixed-width as a direct result of this limitation.

Sick for two days and feeling worse, not better. Managed to get X working on Debian, which is progress, but compiling wireless drivers is a nightmare.

Worked myself sick launching a project at work, then decided to hit the gym anyway, dosed up on cold medication. Predictably collapsed on the floor in the middle of a training session, terrified my trainer, and wasted the time of several NHS paramedics. Lesson very much learned.

I spotted a woman at a bus stop who seemed ethereally beautiful against the grey city backdrop. Twenty seconds later, when she shoved past people to catch her bus, the illusion shattered. Just another fleeting city moment, probably too pretentious, but work is chaos so here you go.

Drowning in a high-stakes project that may literally kill me, and spending my remaining energy trying to get Linux running on an ancient 366MHz laptop. Ubuntu and SuSE both crapped out. Geeks, I need distro recommendations for low-spec hardware. Save me.

Low energy day, nothing worth blogging about. At least I tidied up and fixed my computer's annoying random shutdowns.

reset

My phone was off for a week due to O2 being utterly useless. Sorry for the missed texts.

My new favourite band, Gabi and the Whoremoans, gave me permission to host two of their demo tracks. Download them here, completely legally.

Kottke is going full-time blogger, which raises questions about what blogging even is. My take: it's the amateur/professional distinction, not fact-checking standards. More selfishly, if people are paying for blogs now, maybe I can get in on that.

The discovery of a frozen equatorial sea on Mars changes everything. Combined with solar electrolysis for oxygen and fuel, water means we can actually sustain human life there. A Martian colony has moved from science fiction premise to genuine possibility. I'm ready to go.

Six weeks without sex has pushed me past the "looking for a life partner" phase into "shag anything that moves" territory. I've graphed it. The math is not encouraging.

Bush arrives in Belgium and somehow the photo looks fake, and Laura looks like she escaped from a Dracula film.

My life only rates 12A, I work in ringtones instead of AI, and my biggest thrill is assembling a bedside table. Volunteers needed to fix at least one of these problems.

My life has been rated 12A. Apparently I'm unbearably tame and need to get up to something naughty right away.

Time speeds up as you get older because your brain stores memories as deltas -- differences from what you've seen before. New experiences slow perceived time; familiar ones compress it. Want life to slow down? Do something genuinely new.

I saw Closer and found it predictable and emotionally inert, despite great acting from Natalie Portman. It got me wondering: am I a film philistine who misses subtext the way others miss meaning in music? And worse, am I doing the same thing in real life?

We build roads by widening paths until we finally bulldoze everything and start fresh. We build software by layering complexity onto demos until we have a mach 1 titanium rocket ship navigating a dirt track. At some point, we need to build a new road.

Upgraded to MovableType 3.15. Commenting now requires TypeKey registration. Follow the setup steps, send me your token, and I'll update your templates. TypeKey isn't fully working yet, but donors get priority fixes. Thanks to everyone who chipped in.

I took another online quiz and got pegged as Gabriel, the archangel of libraries and the internet. Shocking, I know. Geek through and through, no matter the test.

Back online after 2 days without internet, thanks to my housemates' planning getting our ADSL sorted early. Still need to set up my computer properly, but I'm back!

Moved into my fabulous new house. Huge living room, a media room, trees outside, 10 minutes from Oxford Circus. I love it. No ADSL until Wednesday so blogging will be quiet -- read PlasticBag instead.

Moving to Finsbury Park. Blogging may pause briefly. Also, best line of the day: being gay is a choice the same way opening your eyes is a choice. You could keep them shut, but you'd be blind your whole life.

Won free Popstarz tickets again! Spending Friday moving house then heading out dancing regardless of how exhausted I am. Can't wait to finally find out how far Finsbury Park actually is.

Rice's careful non-denial about attacking Iran tells the whole story. "Not on the agenda at this point" is diplomatic cover, not a denial. Given Bush's track record of doing the unthinkable, and Iran's role in funding the Iraqi insurgency, I'd bet we're attacking Iran within twelve months.

Spotted a sunbeam cutting across a grey London plaza today. A whole line of people stopped to stand in it. Spring is coming.

Giving up broadband to cure information overload is like ditching cars for horses. The answer is to go forward, using RSS and email filters to cut the noise. This guy is an idiot.

Commenting is broken across my MovableType-hosted blogs. Fixing it requires a $100 upgrade I can't justify since I'm broke and don't even use MT myself. If six of you chip in £9 via PayPal, we're sorted. Don't be a free rider.

Had a wonderful day of wide-ranging conversation with an attractive American, covering everything from Heisenberg to Che Guevara coasters to the Iraq war, followed by a dinner party touching on blogging, valium, and FTP servers. Too tired to elaborate further.

The Scissor Sisters' debut tracklist maps the lifecycle of The Gay Pop Artist, from innocent twink with fag-hag to scene queen to bitter, dried-out wreck. Laura doesn't fit, but the rest holds up. Too tired to analyze further. Run with it.

I'm Stewie. Obviously.

Saw "By the Bog of Cats" tonight. Excellent, though the Irish accents sapped the lead's energy and her madness came across as stupidity rather than derangement. Still, she was really hot, so that helped.

A blow-by-blow of a pretty standard day: tube delays, mug theft, a near heart-attack over phantom missing thousands, Polish policeman jokes with no punchline, and an estimate with a gaping hole in it. Saved by metric tonnes of fajita.

I've been defining myself by my weaknesses and limitations to seem unique. Realizing now I don't need to do that. I am my strengths, skills, and attractions. Also, there's a ridiculously hot boy in my living room and my timing is terrible.

Planet Seldo finally has a design. Dom immediately broke it by posting 2000 giant photos, but the layout handles it gracefully. Think of it as a preview of where Seldo.Com is heading visually.

Two old website designs I never used, but kind of wish I had. The yin yang one was totally impractical at over 1000 pixels wide, but I still have a soft spot for it.

Help me pick a blog title. Also, I took the political compass test: Economic Right 4.00, Social Libertarian -6.00. My rightward drift continues.

Bars are loud, smoky, crowded hellholes with nowhere to sit. People tolerate them for cheap drinks, but I don't drink, so cheap drinks mean nothing to me. I'm done being nice about it. From now on, meet me at a cafe or a quiet restaurant, or don't meet me at all.

I'm sociable, just not in the traditional sense. I prefer communicating with people online while multitasking over aimlessly hanging out in person. My online and offline lives are fully integrated, and I barely distinguish between them. Socializing means communicating, not physically occupying the same space.

Fed up with comment spammers taking down my server. Disabling all MT comments until further notice and likely ditching MovableType entirely.

I need to start keeping a notebook by my bed for 2am ideas. Work was terrible yesterday but better today. Excited about my upcoming move, though everyone's enthusiasm for my new place makes me wonder if I'll regret leaving.

I tinker constantly, and my current project is a Java-based MSN bot that posts messages to my blog. Right now it logs on and crashes, but that's progress.

Been slacking on daily posts, but life's busy. Went to an OUT party with Moz last night, free bar plus low turnout meant everyone got very drunk. Good times. Check my linklog for that incredible VW Polo ad.

DisorderRatingParanoid:LowSchizoid:ModerateSchizotypal:HighAntisocial:HighBorderline:LowHistrionic:HighNarcissistic:Very HighAvoidant:LowDependent:LowObsessive-Compulsive:Moderate-- Personality Disorder Test - Take It! -- I'm sure no one will be surprised to learn that I "seek attention and praise" and am "self-centered". It gets quite close to the bone though: They tend to be choosy about picking friends, since they believe that not just anyone is worthy of being their friend. They tend to make good first impressions, yet have difficulty maintaining long-lasting relationships. They are generally uninterested in the feelings of others and may take advantage of them. Whoops! I didn't realise that was a common psychosis. Likewise, the schizoidal stuff sounds like me: They sometimes believe to have extra sensory ability or that unrelated events relate to them in some important way. They generally engage in eccentric behavior and have difficulty concentrating for long periods of time. Their speech...

Missed yesterday's post because I got lost building a feed manager for Planet Seldo. Redesign coming tonight. Also, "Virgins in the Valley" by Gabi and the Whoremoans is incredible; ask me for a copy.

Almost missed my daily blogging resolution! M came to cook tonight so I was off the internet all evening. Only news: I won free Popstarz entry for the one week I'm not planning to go. Anyone want to be me on Friday?

I get paid to do work I genuinely love. Life is good. Also, my old room is up for grabs and my new living situation is shaping up to be brilliant.

Saw Festen last night and found the audience's reaction to its racism more disturbing than its incest. Growing up as a white minority in Trinidad, and later passing as invisible among white Britons, I've heard what people say when they think no one who'd mind is listening. Britain's racism is hiding, not gone.

Dressed up like a trapped monkey for a black-tie family dinner, but the crystal, china, and divine cheese made it worth it. I'd sell my anti-suit principles for really good cheese, apparently. Not taking a banking job though. Also revisited Twelfth House: excellent, terrifying expensive, bi-annual treat at best.

Off to Oxfordshire for a party. Popstarz last night was fun but exhausting. Also: I'm moving to Finsbury Park on February 11th! Zone 2, baby. Poor future housemate J got hit by a flying bottle and ended up in casualty. I need sleep. Or Lucozade.

Back from a 6,000-mile trip to cold, smelly London, but at least I have broadband again. Also, calm down about Prince Harry, and apparently I'm borderline Asperger's. Please take these tests and tell me they're meaningless.

My dad and I drove to the Mayaro coast on Trinidad's east side. I learned about coconuts floating ashore from a shipwreck, saw mangroves, and discovered that Crix crackers are beloved by Trinis despite being genuinely terrible. Also: chaotic maxi taxis and my dad's obscene BMW.

More photos from my parents' place in Mayaro: endless sunshine, a hot tub with a champagne holder and an ocean view, tropical flowers, and one impressive spider clinging to the hot tub cover. Consider this your selective deterrent or reassurance, depending on whether I want you to visit.

Apple knocked it out of the park at Macworld. The Mac Mini is a genius gateway drug for PC users, and the iPod shuffle is basically bling-bling for the chav market. Both will sell like crazy. I'm buying a Mini come June.

Based on conversations with my dad, a multinational executive, I argue globalization is self-limiting. As companies standardized products globally, they lost market share to local brands better suited to regional tastes. Past a certain point, uniformity hurts profits, meaning globalization stabilizes rather than endlessly expanding and homogenizing culture.

Spending a lazy holiday day at my parents' house in Tobago's Rainbow Hill development. Showed off the stained glass, a German sculptress's "local" art, rug-covered interiors, and an infinity pool overlooking the entire tiny island. Banana trees grow absolutely everywhere.

I always assumed my geekiness came from my chemical engineer dad, but looking closer, he's the people person. Mom switched from P.E. to teaching chemistry, never met a gadget she didn't upgrade twice, and yesterday sat giggling over her new Palm Pilot. The geekiness is absolutely from her.

Blogging every day makes it easier to find things worth blogging about. With a smaller sample size, something is always relatively more interesting than everything else in the period. The more you blog, the more you blog.

I've set up Planet Seldo, a temporary replacement for the absent Planet Afterlife using the same software. It updates every 20 minutes. Let me know if you want feeds added, and if Wabson sends me his CSS I'll make it look just like the original.

Photos from the tiny islands off Trinidad's northwest tip, where I spent much of my childhood. Highlights include a former leprosy colony now swallowed by forest, Venezuela visible across the water, and swimming in bizarrely vivid green water. I also tried to improve my composition. Mostly failed.

2004 in quizmeme format: I rediscovered hard work, got an iPod, started a job I actually like, and remained broke despite secret long-term investments. Bush got re-elected, Kerry didn't win, and I had almost no sex. Much happier than last year, slightly thinner.

Committed to daily blogging even when there's nothing to report. Vacation has meant rain, Stargate marathons, and aimless channel-flipping through 500 channels. Tomorrow I'm taking a boat through a tiny archipelago. Poorly-composed photos forthcoming.

Visited the Asa Wright Nature Centre with my mom today, which was pleasant but slightly wasted on two locals who already knew everything our guide was telling the tourists. I also took some photos of Trinidad's stunning, relentless jungle. Fruit grows everywhere here without anyone even trying.

Reading "Curious Incident" for the first time. The protagonist, who has Asperger's, reminds me uncomfortably of myself. I want to make a list of people who should read it to understand their own behavior, which probably means I should be on that list. Finished it in a day. It made me cry.

I make resolutions every year but usually forget them, so this time I'm publishing them. I want to explore subjects I love but don't need for work, like comic books, architecture, and computing history. I also want to write more, targeting one blog post per day across my five blogs.

Stuck inside on vacation due to torrential rain, I'm killing time with online quizzes. Results: Nerd Cat, alternative social status, only 32% geek (I object), plus a meme about unique CDs, books, movies, and places I've visited. Productive? No. Regrets? Also no.

"Dooced" is not a word. 6,000 Google results don't make it one. "Blog" has 99 million. Let's kill this neologism before it spreads. Also, I got the flu on my tropical vacation. Karma is a jerk.

I can't stop following the tsunami disaster. Donate now, then donate again. The network is doing what it can: the Tsunami Help Blog, Flickr's missing persons gallery, WikiNews tracking victims, and NPR's link collection are all pulling together.

The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake has killed 46,000 people and counting. That's 23 times the 9/11 death toll. We fuss over far smaller tragedies while the Earth casually erases entire communities. We are not lords of this planet. We are an irrelevant eyeblink between ice ages. Donate if you can.

Here are my holiday plans: London through December 30th, then tropics until January 13th. My first UK Christmas ever. People say cold weather makes it better, but warm fuzzy feelings seem easier when you're actually warm. I'll report back.

I've got 10 Gmail invites to give away. Hit me up if you want one.

Federally funded abstinence-only sex ed is teaching kids that touching genitals causes pregnancy and half of gay teens have HIV. My tax dollars are funding medieval gender roles dressed up as science. I am furious. You should be too.

Quick trivia: the three original estates were clergy, nobility, and commoners. The press became the fourth estate in 1837. I'd never heard any of these terms before, and now I'm sharing them with you, ironically helping to kill journalism in the process.

My first house party in 16 months was worth the wait: 12 Warwickers, 9 hours of drinking, 7 beers, 3 gins, 2 hook-ups, and one hell of a Christmas party. Should have done this sooner.

Chavs have hijacked Burberry, and it's killing the brand: UK sales are down 40%. Nike and Gucci survived similar associations, but their products have genuine appeal beyond the label. Burberry's camel check pattern was always sustained purely by brand association. Strip that away and you're left with something genuinely hideous.

Winter is draining me. Short days, overcast skies, and cold weather have killed my energy and my motivation to blog. That's my excuse and I'm sticking with it.

Gwen Stefani's debut solo album is out. Go get it immediately. Review coming soon.

Longfellow on architecture helped me articulate why I prefer coding to consultancy. Powerpoint is painting on the roof; the code is the cathedral.

I love my iPod because it transforms dead commuting time into music-listening and blog-reading time, boosting both my mood and productivity. The massive storage means no pre-planning what to listen to, and the interface is the best available. It has meaningfully improved my quality of life.

Saw a revived Noel Coward play this week with friends. Amusingly, we nearly walked out at the end of the second act thinking it was over. Mortified, we grabbed ice cream and returned for the actual finale, which was much better.

Five hunters killed each other in a gun battle over a deer stand, with zero deer harmed. Would've been perfect if the deer had eaten the bodies, but they're vegetarian. Damn hippies.

Remote-controlled internet hunting is idiotic. Hunting was always a thin justification for killing things, but at least it involved actually being there. Clicking a mouse to shoot a deer from your couch strips away every last pretense. If you can't afford the trip to Texas to kill things, maybe don't kill things.

Been neglecting the blog, but the linklog on the right deserves your attention in the meantime. Seriously, go look at it.

Living in Tooting means enduring near-constant fireworks from October through January, as residents celebrate every conceivable holiday. I'm begging you all to consolidate into one big display so I can sleep before 3am sometime before February.

Tanks apparently rolled into LA to intimidate anti-war protesters. The video looks real, sourced from IndyMedia via AlterNet. Protesters immediately struck Tiananmen Square poses, which is both funny and depressing. I'm skeptical but can't explain away the footage.

Ashcroft's resigned, but not before claiming he's "achieved the objective" of keeping America safe. Mission accomplished? We're in two wars! I'm just glad this lunatic is gone. Maybe he'll finally focus on his singing career.

On a deserted Friday night tube ride, I spotted a beautiful crying goth and spent several agonizing stops working up the nerve to hand her a note as I stepped off. It read "Don't cry. You're beautiful." Her smile in return was worth every second of anxiety.

Bush's reelection proves Americans, not just their renegade president, endorse his agenda. I can no longer pretend America is a friendly nation temporarily hijacked by the wrong leader. The world must stop waiting for Americans to come to their senses and start pushing back.

Welp. America reelected Bush and his gang of villains. I'm holding you to your promise to move to Canada.

Watching the 2004 election results at 3:30am with Bush ahead and the key states still undecided. Heading to bed, desperately hoping America gets it right this time. Canada's weather is a strong motivator.

I saw the Scissor Sisters at Brixton Academy on Halloween and had a great time -- once I fled the crushing crowd to the back of the room. I'm just not a gig person. I need room to move, not strangers' elbows and Essex girls shoving their way to the front.

Stumbled across Internet Veterans For Truth, a scrappy group of bloggers hosting clips everyone should see: Kerry on Vietnam, Bush dodging the 9-11 commission, Rice's damning testimony about that August 2001 PDB, and more. Worth your time.

I made a music video mashing up Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow with the Prodigy's "Spitfire" -- the connection being obvious once you notice it. Probably illegal. Definitely fun.

Taking the weekend for myself.

Looked up the etymology of "racism" today. The concept of race didn't exist until around 1770, and the word "racism" wasn't coined until 1935, by the Nazis. Before that it was "racialism." Apparently discrimination was so normal it didn't need a name. Also, being a victim doesn't make you an expert.

Jon Stewart appeared on Crossfire and called the hosts partisan hacks, begging them to stop distorting the news. It backfired somewhat since his own kid-glove Kerry interview undermined his credibility. The whole depressing exchange just confirmed everything wrong with American media.

Liveblogging Smallville season 4, episode 4: kryptonite love potion, Chloe goes crazy for Clark, and way too many oiled-up football players. Lots of hot boys, minimal Lana, cookie-cutter plot. Not terrible, not good. Ken-doll is really hot though.

Got my phone stolen in Leicester Square by a kid faking a disability to distract me while he lifted it off the table. I fell for the oldest tourist trap trick in the book. Lost all my contacts -- please email me your number.

I can now give anyone with a blog on my server their own subdomain (e.g. yourblogname.seldo.com). Just ask!

Sick at home, so I took a BBC personality test. Turns out I'm a "Big Thinker": outspoken, ideas-focused, tactless, and terrible at follow-through. Basically a "tactless argumentative bastard" who thinks everyone else is unimportant. Sounds about right.

Stunning visuals and Angelina Jolie in an eye patch, but it never surprised me the way I hoped it would. I'd over-hyped it to myself. Too ill with London's communal cold to say more.

Moved to a new server. Everything works. Let's blog.

Moving to a new web host this weekend. Expect a few hours of downtime, but no data loss. The new setup means way more storage and bandwidth, so feel free to upload pictures again.

Visually stunning but hard to take seriously. Everyone's so full of honour they just kind of... stand there and die. Also, no purple scene, which feels like a missed opportunity.

Smalltime Smallville season premiere recap, line by line. Naked Clark, flying effects, cheesy dialogue, questionable plot holes, and Lois Lane's hair color all get the treatment. Overall B+ mainly for the flying. May do this every episode. It's too much fun not to.

I break down the Iraqi insurgency into three groups: local power-grabbers, Iranian-backed destabilizers, and largely mythical al-Qaeda fighters. The real danger is Iran exploiting instability to seize territory and oil influence. Withdrawal ultimately hurts Western interests more than staying hurts Iraqis.

Rumsfeld literally confused Saddam Hussein with Osama bin Laden. Twice. In 20 minutes. Maybe we didn't invade Afghanistan because these idiots couldn't find it on a map. The conspiracy theories were dumb, but at least they required basic competence to execute.

London in September is effortlessly, quietly romantic. Crisp air, warm coffee, glinting cobblestones, busking jazz on the Thames. Paris gets the headlines, but London doesn't need them.

My site was down for 24 hours due to an underground fire in Baltimore. The internet is a wonderful thing. Normal service restored, no data lost. Also fixed some broken RSS permalinks.

Brilliant birthday weekend despite zero planning: Popstarz, rain-soaked picnics, tickle-fights, music snobbery, and Ghetto. Exactly what I needed. Still unsettled about something big, but at least it's crystallised now. Bring on 24.

I wrote a 13,000-word play called "Code." It's pretentious, plotless, and assumes you've read The Selfish Gene. The characters are just vehicles for ideas. Available in several formats. Tell me what you think.

Getting an iPod. Can't wait.

3,000 spam emails in a single day to one address. I've had enough.

I want my funeral to be a joyful, colourful, joke-filled singalong that brings people together. More laughter than tears. That's how I'll know I did something worthwhile.

Been too busy living life to blog about it. Good weekend though: Popstarz with friends, a Green Park picnic, and The Bourne Supremacy (dull). Also added a music log to the site so you can judge my taste in shit.

Never forget.

Good popcorn movie with excellent gothic effects and surprisingly decent acting and dialogue. The plot is predictable and fumbles its climax, but the dark mythology is nicely fleshed out and there are some genuinely giggle-worthy moments. Go in with low expectations.

I've been obsessing over this boyband cover of Def Leppard's "Pour Some Sugar on Me." It's either brilliantly layered parody -- hairbands inside boybands inside a TV set, Beatles costumes and Hey Mickey references -- or it's just terrible. I've watched it three times and still can't decide. Neither can you, now.

I support the Iraq war but still oppose Bush for plenty of other reasons: drilling in wildlife preserves, tax cuts for the rich while exploding the deficit, the PATRIOT Act's police-state overreach, blurring church and state on gay rights and abortion. Also, he's just a big dumb clumsy Texan.

I expected I, Robot to butcher Asimov, but I was wrong. The film stays surprisingly faithful to his core concepts, especially the incompleteness of the Three Laws and the zeroth law. A few Hollywood liberties, sure, but the spirit is intact. I take back my skepticism.

Minor site upgrades: RSS feeds, per-entry comments, permalinks, and finally killed that annoying popup.

Finally launched my linklog (borrowed style from Tom who borrowed it from Kottke) and got my RSS feed working. Also fixed the end-of-month bug. Comments broke, then got fixed too.

I took that relationship personality test everyone's doing. Apparently I'm a "Love Geek" - weirdly sexy, calm under conflict, don't date casually, would make an excellent parent. Nailed it on most counts. Only 4% of respondents share my type.

The US Army's free recruiting video game is working: 30% of young people with favorable views of the military credit America's Army for shaping that opinion. Dear god.

Grade inflation is real and inevitable given the vicious cycle: examiners reduce syllabus to boost pass rates, so teachers teach less, so students learn less, requiring further reductions just to maintain results. Pass rates were never meant to rise indefinitely; they exist to indicate relative ability and enable selection.

Selling my Wacom graphics tablet on eBay. Upgrading to a better one for my birthday.

A great weekend of dancing at Popstarz, where I attract exclusively straight female admirers despite being in a gay club. Also, my family visited: lovely people, but together they still treat me like the baby of the family, and nothing I say gets taken seriously. Twenty-two years old and counting.

Life's hectic but good. Parents are in town, work is crazy, and I'll be at Noise tonight. Come say hi!

Got into a homophobic confrontation on the night bus home from Popstarz. Four thugs hogging seats, making slurs. I switched seats to help a friend, got physically shoved off. Then, stupidly, mouthed off as I left the bus. Did I bring it on myself? Partly. But I refuse to apologize for existing.

I want wireless P2P music sharing between portable devices. Call it a wiPod. Songs would spread person-to-person without record companies involved. Add mesh networking and processing power and you have a portable PC too. The convergence question isn't what to cram in, but what form factor people actually want.

London Underground's "Inspector Sands" announcement is a coded message to staff that a fire alarm has been triggered, designed to avoid panicking passengers. Large public venues use similar systems, though the exact meaning varies depending on your source.

William Shatner covers Pulp's "Common People," produced by Ben Folds, on his new album *Has Been*. It's fucking amazing.

The rule placing Election Day on "the first Tuesday after the first Monday" in November exists to avoid November 1st, which is both a Catholic holy day and the day merchants balanced their books. Big business and the religious right shaping US politics? Apparently a founding tradition.

Got hit by comment spammers across all my MT installs. Check your comments and contact me if you need the anti-spam tools.

Spent way too long figuring out that freedom2surf broadband requires a dial-up connection with the number **0,38** (yes, with a comma). Their website is useless. Save yourself hours of misery and just use those two facts.

Had an amazing weekend on a boat with 450 gay men, a 4am breakfast, and loads of new friends. Too tired to blog properly, so here are some quiz results instead.

I took a personality quiz and got "White House Staffer." The first paragraph rings true, but cool under pressure? Anyone who knew me last year would laugh. I'm a procrastinator who can't say no. At least I'd make a decent subordinate, if only good managers existed.

A grab-bag of links: Rock Paper Saddam, sexist investment bankers, the BBC photo competition, surprisingly homo-friendly B&Bs, infinite cats, Britney's hilarious mission statement, and turning your iPod into a wireless jukebox.

The term "I18n" (internationalization) was coined by programmers who replaced the 18 middle letters with the number 18, inspired by a DEC employee whose long surname got abbreviated to "S12n" for his email account. This "numeronym" convention spread because, honestly, geeks find that sort of thing funny.

A list of weblogs by Warwick University students, for no particular reason.

Nobody knows where they're going -- not me, not anyone. We're all frightened animals making it up as we go. The trick is to just try things: plug in the box, go to the party, take the job. One of them might become your thing. Start walking.

Been busy with work and comics, so here are some links: evil giraffes, Cory Doctorow on DRM, a quiz about strong black women, a map of queer America, and the troubling anti-Muslim backlash following recent beheadings.

I took a quiz. I'm Raver Bear. Nobody's shocked.

Despite 1000+ interviews and months of evidence, Bush and Cheney keep implying an Iraq/9-11 link the commission explicitly found no evidence for. Cheney even claims he "probably" knows things the commission doesn't. Why didn't he share it with them, then? I'm equal parts furious and terrified.

A scattered collection of links: Reagan trivia, Transformers motion capture, censored album art, Murphy's Laws, the new Superman, a blog-themed song parody, TiVo for radio, and more Reagan-adjacent oddities than you can shake a stick at.

Links worth your time: a hot guy, UK internet censorship that's making me furious, Sainsbury's scripted small talk, improving gay rights, armed Swiss men near the Pope, a gadget I covet, the war on terror meets DRM, terrifying butter dogs, and breakup stories that make me feel better about myself.

A countdown meme borrowed from Matt. My live music history is embarrassing (Steps, Vengaboys, Geri Halliwell) so I'm motivated to do better. New job tomorrow, summer plans looking good, still haven't finished my personal projects, and Mr. Right remains at large.

A ridiculously cool animated emoticon I found on DeviantART.

Been using AudioScrobbler to track my listening habits. Jellyfish dominates everything, all ten of my top songs are theirs. Also loving JC Chasez's underrated album and Alanis's return to form. I'm getting more into music than ever, and I'm not sure why.

A roundup of random links: nuclear war statistics, another Microsoft obituary, Troy's cinematic merits despite historical liberties, the inevitable Chucky sequel, an 11-year-old fashion activist who can't spell, my worryingly high mobile phone addiction score, and some deeply silly internet ephemera.

A grab-bag of links: Jellyfish's albums deserve your attention, interview prep resources for the newly employed, BBC's useless press release rewrites, Bush's bald-head fetish and his trophy gun, American atrocities in Iraq, quiet planes, and inevitably, a clown named Spanky facing porn charges.

London's Oyster card is convenient, cheap, and a badge of true Londoner status. But my favorite perk? Overland rail guards can't read them, so a confident wave gets you a free ride. God bless you, Oyster.

Soulwax's 2 Many DJs have a new album out and it's already sounding great four songs in. Go grab it before the link disappears.

The Chalabi scandal keeps compounding: we paid millions to a convicted fraudster for false intel, invaded Iraq based on it, and possibly got played by Iran. Nobody's been fired. Never underestimate the Bush administration's capacity to make catastrophically bad situations dramatically worse.

A quick linklog: addictive Flash game, a self-harm gene worth understanding before editing out, naked rollercoaster records, free speech as comics, London's hackable wireless CCTV, and cocaine overtaking ecstasy as the drug of choice.

Inspired by a friend posting old photos, I'm sharing an embarrassing collage of myself at 16. My hair was ridiculous then and remains ridiculous now. Also, yes, I dressed as Neo for Halloween. The Matrix had just come out. Don't judge me.

Don't tell me we're "winning by numbers" in Iraq. With 25 million Iraqis, if even 1% want to fight us, that's 100,000 insurgents. We're killing 20 at a time. Do the math. Numbers are precisely the argument you don't want to make here.

My advice to someone struggling to meet gay people: skip the clubs, which mostly attract shallow party types. Instead, meet lots of people you genuinely like through friends and random events, then find the gay ones among them. Though I've met my own boyfriends online, my single status suggests I should follow my own advice.

A grab-bag of links: Jellyfish are a great band, Abu Ghraib reflects routine US prison abuse, Jon Stewart gave a funny commencement speech, and Smallville is getting good now that it's ditching freak-of-the-week for real Lex-vs-Clark conflict.

I've got a new job at boltblue, starting 8th June! I was miserable at my last place and very glad to be leaving. Buy some ringtones and logos from my new employer. Go on.

Growing up in Trinidad, I never realized how special its diversity was. Two major races, dozens of religions, yet remarkable harmony. That upbringing made racial and religious equality feel self-evident, not politically correct. I was lucky, even if our tolerance hasn't yet extended to sexuality.

Manic week: saw the brilliant Ben Wishaw in Hamlet, attended the London blogger meetup, finally stalked Tom in person, caught a glimpse of Cory Doctorow, and watched Eternal Sunshine. Also something mysterious happened Monday. More soon, maybe.

Ignore the terrible reviews. Van Helsing is a gloriously over-the-top monster movie that never pretends to be anything else. Great effects, genuine surprises, good acting (mostly), intentional and unintentional humor, and obscure B-movie references. Leave realism at the door and you'll love it.

Rumsfeld's out. Good riddance.

The "alarm" character in modern computing descends directly from a literal bell on old line printers. Today it still bypasses everything and makes your computer beep. Thirty years of technological evolution, ignored completely. I find that wonderful.

If this story is accurate, the US is now keeping slaves in Iraq. Slaves. I'm done making jokes about this administration. Bush is closer to Hitler's wartime behavior than anyone in recent memory. This has to stop.

I told the BBC in March that internet video would replace broadcast TV. Two months later, they launch an internet media player doing exactly that. Coincidence? I think not. Also: replacement teeth are coming, and I found something on the internet that made me feel weird.

Clearing my backlog: Abu Ghraib torture outrages me, we should rent a castle in August, Mills and Boon manga exists, some guy bet his life savings on roulette and won, and yes, Wolf Blitzer's mother really does call him Wolf.

Google's IPO is filed, jobs are back, and it smells like 2000. My brother just started a sports blog too. The boom is back, baby.

Got my DVD copy of Camp this morning. Awwww yeah.

Stalkervision is back. Catch me on webcam from 7-12pm GMT, when I'm not at work, naked, or sleeping. Yeah, that's a narrower window than it sounds.

I answer reader questions: my first crush (a Chemistry classmate who helped me realize I was gay), whether I'd streak Trafalgar Square ($30k might convince me), why I'd never move back to Trinidad, my proudest teenage moment, and what motivates me. Spoiler: fantasies of cheering crowds.

Lovely weekend with friends down from Warwick: Popstarz (possibly spiked drink), Empire Records fan edition (actually improved by the extra footage), Kill Bill Vol. 2, a barbecue, banter, Twister on my new duvet cover, and Smallville. Good times.

Joining the "ask me anything" meme: leave 3 questions in the comments along with your blog URL, and I'll answer them in a future post. Also, welcome Danny to the blogosphere, where he's already mastering the art of the overshare.

Currently loving Jellyfish's Spilt Milk (get it now), Scissor Sisters, Outkast's double album, Dido's surprisingly strong ballads, George Michael's Patience, and Maroon 5's bitter, Jamiroquai-ish sound. Albums worth your time, not just catchy singles.

A song of gratitude to the people who challenged me, humbled me, and helped me find myself. I came in thinking I knew everything. I didn't. Thanks to them, I still don't know who I'll be, but at least I know who I am.

Been obsessed with OKCupid for days along with Mikey and Dan. Go check it out, it's great!

I took the OK Cupid personality test and got four possible results depending on how I answered ambiguous questions. Am I spontaneous or planned? Romantic or horny? I genuinely don't know, so I'm putting it to a vote. People who know me better get more say.

I'm debating whether casual sex is more "pointless" than traditional dating. Both approaches carry the same risk of wasted time and incompatibility. Good men are rare; running jokes with friends aren't. A one-night stand can become a relationship just as easily as coffee dates can go nowhere.

After four years alternating between sex-first and getting-to-know-you approaches, I'm still single with nothing lasting past three months. Neither method wins. Sexual and emotional compatibility both matter, and whichever way you narrow down candidates, you'll waste time on the incompatible ones.

Took an Empire Records quiz (I'm Lucas, appropriately enough), got distracted by Moore's War President image, felt genuinely guilty about Iraq, and fell down a rabbit hole of random LiveJournal photos. The internet is vast, weird, and occasionally moving.

A massive backlog of links covering Rice's testimony fact-checks, movie trailers, gay rights, crime math, the Sheikh Yassin moral tangle, London's skyline, and a one-legged DDR player. Something for everyone.

Security contractor killed in Fallujah worked for a company called Custer Battles. You really can't make this stuff up.

Reluctantly propagating a meme forced on me by T, I answer questions about nearby books, wall decorations (including a stunning Russian communist banner), dreams of white-rap stardom, and Jerusalem. My room's walls alone took forever to catalogue. Now off to a picnic.

The Bush administration is going after porn, which surprises no one who remembers Ashcroft covering naked statues. My response: enjoy this portrait of Ashcroft made from pornographic images. Also, Wonkette is great and the Republibloggers criticizing it for gay jokes really need to check their irony detectors.

I'm the Grammar Fuhrer, apparently. Also, another journalist just discovered blogs exist. Their careers are doomed.

Lance Arthur's writing about being closeted and a late bloomer resonates deeply with me. I identify with all of it: the fake persona built from fear, the late puberty, the long showers. Turned out okay in the end. No grand conclusion here, just a tired nod of recognition.

I took some personality tests. Myers-Briggs calls me ENTP, though I hover right on the E/I and P/J axes and get different results each time. The Enneagram warns me against a "sad and shallow life" by cultivating internal values. Charming. High marks for image awareness and detachment seem about right.

A comic sells out hilariously, and BBC employees anonymously defend their site on a wiki complaint page, creating a bizarre, schizophrenic chorus of justifications and rebuttals.

My friend Jamie started a blog. Also, disk space issues are temporarily fixed so upload away. Oh, and that leaked Catwoman trailer confirms the movie looks terrible. Michelle Pfeiffer was way sexier. Also I may be dreaming right now.

My blog turns three today. Rather than pretend you care, here's a self-indulgent timeline of my greatest hits anyway, from my first post in 2001 through politics, poetry, crushes, and controversies. Frequency of interesting posts seems to be increasing. Whether that's perspective or improvement, you decide.

Caught *200 American* at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival on standbys -- best seats in the house. Between that, a perfect steak, *Starsky and Hutch*, and clubbing at Popstarz, another unplanned but brilliant London week. The audience was 497 gay men and 3 women. That poster was doing its job.

Rik made a killer Kelis vs. 2Unlimited mix. Grab it before Kiss FM ruins it.

Trying to parse the logic on targeted killings in the Middle East is making my head spin. Both sides are committing atrocities out of mutual terror, the security fence looks inadequate, and the only thing I'm sure of is that simple answers don't exist here.

Design serves multiple masters: first impressions, usability, functionality, and efficiency for power users. No site or OS has balanced all four; they pick a niche. Know your users, lean toward the right extreme, and measure accordingly. RSS hints at a solution: separate interfaces for separate needs.

Been exploring design sites and RSS readers. Got a good laugh from a Google rebrand showing "Britney Spears" as a search query, captioned "the sum of all human knowledge at your fingertips." Also rewatching Daria, which holds up.

Little things that make me smile: compliments on my dancing, freedom to dress how I like, discovering new bloggers, music videos, London at 4am, rare tube conversations, surprising people with my music taste, my camera phone, guilt-free cute-guy spotting, and forgotten songs resurfacing on shuffle.

Posting 20 random songs from my MP3 collection to dilute the embarrassing ones. Highlights include Kelis, Queen, and Fiona Apple. Lowlights? Phil Collins, Bon Jovi, and Gareth Gates. At least Magnetic Fields saved some credibility. Britney? Totally unapologetic.

I outed a fellow blogger's Gaydar profile by Googling his domain name. The fetish list is pretty funny. He doesn't seem too bothered, though he claims his tastes have evolved since posting it. Lesson learned: you can't hide anything from Google.

Filthy link dump: cars with cheat codes, bunnies re-enacting The Exorcist, Mars rovers on LiveJournal, a talking vibrating Hello Kitty USB hub, and more. The iGrill may be humanity's greatest achievement.

I spent an afternoon advising BBC managers on how young people actually consume media. We don't watch broadcast TV; we download what we want, when we want it. Broadcasting is dying. The BBC's real job is producing quality content, not running channels. They seemed surprised. They shouldn't be.

Welcoming a new Warwick blogger and dumping a pile of links I've been hoarding: blog catfights, Bush's tasteless 9/11 ads, The Economist endorsing gay marriage, loaded survey questions, Al Sharpton's greatest hits, and DeviantART being gorgeous. The usual chaos.

Went to Meta 9 (good but sweaty) and tried Body Jam, a dance aerobics class full of women and three gay men including me. Nearly killed myself, can barely move, kept going the wrong direction, and I'm absolutely going back next week.

Going to Meta 9 on Friday and needed a floor to crash on. Found one. Crisis averted.

Took some online quizzes. The book quiz said I was David Copperfield, which felt wrong. The country quiz said I'm Chile: skinny, bumpy, fighting for justice. That one felt right.

Working on a new Art Deco front page design. It's more refined than previous sketches, wastes less space, and shows comments inline. Still very baroque, with some fun rotating decorative elements I'm calling "bedknobs." Worried it looks too much like every other MovableType blog out there.

Go read my thoughts on Bush's proposed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, posted over at the gay geek site.

I'm redesigning the site with art deco aesthetics, better content organization (splitting the blog into "Linkage" and "Thinkage"), and modern code. I've been sketching layouts but can't settle on one. Here are my doodles. Tell me what you think.

Polaroid says don't shake your photos like Outkast told you to. Also, I'm rating my blog on Hot or Not because yes, that's a thing now.

Took a left brain/right brain test and it nailed me: overly methodical, paralyzed by options, constantly trying to categorize everything. Apparently I'm best suited to be a scientist or design consultant. Now if only it told me how to actually fix these tendencies.

I received a Nigerian scam email and replied in kind: I'm also a dictator's son with locked funds, and if Simeon sends me $1000 to unlock my money, I'll send him the $4000 he needs. Everyone wins!

Stunning artwork on DeviantART. Go look at it now.

Made myself a South Park character, but went fun over realistic. You can make your own too.

I admit I judge straight people unfairly, mentally recategorizing friends I love as "not really straight" because I can't reconcile my affection for them with my distrust of their group. My heterophobia isn't rational or right, but it's where unprocessed pain goes. Sorry, breeders.

I get all my movie news from Apple's trailer site. Trailer editing is an unsung art form, and judging by how entertaining even the obvious bombs are, my attention span may be shot. Here are my five-words-or-less reviews of upcoming releases, based solely on their trailers.

I took a quiz and apparently I'm an Intellectual. Which America-hating minority are you?

My hosting company had a server meltdown and lost data with no warning. Most blogs I host survived intact, but mynciboi lost recent pictures. Not my fault! Here's the current list of MT blogs I'm hosting.

I suggested a balanced mix of news sources to a friend, from BBC to IndyMedia. Then he sent me a Fox News clip that made me realize they're even more unhinged than I'd thought. That anchor looks genuinely evil. Cheney's brother?

Support the BBC.

Fair trade coffee eases our guilt by ensuring farmers earn a living wage, but it doesn't fix the underlying economic problem of too many workers and too few opportunities. We're not really solving anything. We just want to feel better about our moccha lattes.

Spent 36+ hours with Richard this weekend and it was wonderful. That's all I'll say about that. Also did absolutely nothing else, and I'm completely fine with it.

The Hutton report was a complete whitewash. Both sides clearly shared blame, yet the conclusions absolved the government entirely. The BBC lost two top executives over what amounts to a journalistic error, while the government faced zero consequences. This threatens BBC independence and leaves me furious.

Being called lovely by a lovely boy makes me feel like a swooning Georgian lady. Third date Friday. You can read his blog yourselves now, so I'll just say he's much sunnier in person than his online complaints might suggest.

Met someone. It went well. Really well. Check back in seven days.

I took a presidential match quiz and apparently Al Sharpton represents my views perfectly. I'm a crazy liberal, it seems. Kerry frequently tops the list when I adjust my answers, but I can't bring myself to support Dean regardless.

Linking to a great piece about America's baffling assumption that everyone loves them. Not everyone wants to be American, not everyone agrees America is the best, and sometimes America gets things completely wrong. Apparently these are radical ideas.

I've helped another Trinidadian school friend, Colin, start a blog. Three days in and he's already covering all the bases. Meanwhile, I'm barely blogging myself lately. Still alive, just swamped.

A fun weekend with Mikey yields scattered observations: Popstarz good, O'Neill's not Irish, Tate Britain Turner-heavy but decent, Lord of the Rings would be shorter with mobile phones, Paycheck entertaining, London movie prices absurd, and Mary lives impossibly far from Central London.

The Fab Five have been reimagined as comic book superheroes. I cannot stop giggling about this.

I made a mistake at work and I own it. But being yelled at helps no one. Blame kills motivation, breeds resentment, and poisons team culture. Talk to me, help me learn from it, and we'll both be better off.

I'm a gay man who finds locker room nudity baffling and unpleasant. Straight guys shrug it off as "just guys," but that logic doesn't work for me. Why is public nudity suddenly acceptable the moment you enter a changing room? Scrotums are not attractive. Put them away.

Supermarket checkouts are a window into people's lifestyles and choices. I love judging what's in other people's baskets, though I'm aware that says more about me than them.

Just back from a few days on a tiny island off Trinidad, where the hills crash into the sea and sunsets turn everything into silhouettes against an impossible sky. It's the kind of beauty that makes you wax poetic and slightly embarrass yourself. Worth every cramped flight home.

Picked up Douglas Adams' posthumous collection and rediscovered what a brilliant, well-read mind he had, especially on technology and UI design. His rule: if it needs a manual, it's too hard to use. I agree completely. Also, it's got me thinking harder about Seldo.Com 3.0.

Attempting to quit caffeine cold turkey while on vacation in the tropics. Withdrawal headaches are real and brutal. Possibly having more creative days already, hands seem steadier. Bodies are chemical factories worth optimizing. Happy to add caffeine to my growing list of drugs I'm better off without.

Taking my annual family trip to Trinidad and Tobago. Three days in Tobago with no internet, but I got a tan and watched sunsets so gorgeous they look fake. Still alive, just not posting anything meaningful for a while.

Vacation countdown to Trinidad sunshine, plus links: Hitler vs. Bob the Angry Flower, global dimming, gay romance comics, the gorgeous Sky Captain trailer, cheap web hosting, and IT graduates still royally screwed.

Every piece of art I encounter fills me with jealous rage that others created what I could not. My mission, above all else, is to create. I'll produce mountains of dross in every medium until I find the diamond buried within. I will create something that outlasts me.

Saw Return of the King. It was incredible. Go. Now.

Got a scanner so I can start saving my meeting doodles. They're getting elaborate and I can't bear to lose them. This one's not great, but my first blog post sucked too. Gotta start somewhere.

Been ill and binge-reading Something Positive, a webcomic with geek, gay and random humour. Most importantly, it has Choo-Choo Bear the polymorphic chemo-cat. Highly recommended.

Sick with a cold, so here's a raw link dump: BBC was least impartial on Iraq war coverage, a cool snowflake builder, Peter Jackson confirmed for The Hobbit, Defective Yeti's packing peanut baby quote, and my Smallville fixation that's definitely not about Lex and Clark's tension.

My friends Ed and Raymond have an ongoing NYC vs. Boston rivalry. Their latest email exchange did not disappoint.

Yesterday I was ready to write off love as a glorified mating instinct dressed in rationalizations. Then I saw Love Actually and got sappy. The perfect guy already happened to me and I blew it. So: love is bullshit, love is glorious, and I want it desperately anyway.

I gave my friend Mikey a blog whether he wanted one or not. Anyone want to help with his CSS?

Jonathan Brandis killed himself, and it bummed me out more than I expected. I'd forgotten he existed until I saw the headline, and I'll probably forget again by tomorrow. Which honestly makes it sadder and more pointless than if I'd just missed him all along.

The BBC announces plans to sell off its technology division, putting 1,400 jobs at risk. On the same day, a power cut takes them offline. Who's responsible for BBC power? The very division they're selling. You couldn't make it up.

Christmas is a scam. The food, the gifts, the family bonding, the religious angle, the music -- all bullshit. Only small children enjoy it, and that's pure greed. I love it anyway, because it's gloriously camp and I get to visit my family somewhere warm.

I spent all weekend (Friday 8pm to Sunday 10pm, 10 hours sleep total) building a site full of circles I had to cut and paste manually. Never again. Also: Britney's new album is elevator music, Madonna showed her up, and my love life is exactly as empty as this post suggests.

Helped Carly and Dan get their blogs set up on MovableType.

Today's a great day: Massachusetts just struck a blow for marriage equality, and I'm done with euphemisms. He's my husband. Not my partner. My husband. Also, Henry VIII's church probably shouldn't lecture anyone about traditional marriage.

Random thoughts: the Church of England being non-bigoted about sexuality deserves grudging credit; Lemon Jelly's Pushy is worth downloading; cops can't say "what can I do you for?"; and I keep failing at my one-day streak of self-improvement.

Got backed up waiting on a site update that got delayed, so here's a week's worth of posts all at once. Sorry!

Late to post this Friday Five, answering each question with increasing adjectives: my room is big, my coworkers are talented but annoying, web development is creative and amazing, my days are sleepy to engaged, and my ideal life ends with fame, Ian McKellan-style.

I've had it with people making racist comments and then hiding behind "it's just an observation." My rule: would you say it if the group you're discussing was in the room? Silence implies acceptance, so I'll keep calling it out. Consider me black, Jewish, Pakistani, whatever it takes.

Picking apart Matrix Revolutions plot holes and symbolism: the Zion slip, Smith controlling flesh, Neo's software nature, and what that golden matrix really means. Also wondering if other coders visualize their code the way I do.

A brain dump of half-formed thoughts: UI is the only problem that matters, the internet isn't evil, Wal-Mart is, apples and oranges are totally comparable, and someone please remind me to download the Postal Service.

Maybe blogs aren't journalism but a new kind of social performance: "here I am, do you like me?" If so, I'm doing mine wrong.

I can only love him from a distance. When we're close, I lose sight of what matters; when we're apart, it's all I can see. I've proven myself wrong again and again, and I keep making the same mistake. I am the worst person in the world.

Boy Meets Boy is now in colour for a month of Foxman comics, which means more sexy gay Asian anime-esque characters. Also, I rediscovered an old post of mine that I remember feeling desperately urgent about at the time.

Fingers crossed for this thing to work.

Steve's got a bold new look. Kinky, but sexy.

Bush may bring back the draft to staff an Iraq occupation that experts say could require up to 480,000 troops. Meanwhile, the government's insistence that the Constitution doesn't apply at Guantanamo has backfired, making it impossible to prosecute an accused spy for treason.

I got a GoogleWhack with "luddism exobiology" — though it won't last once Google indexes this post.

Lost my coat to a pickpocket who somehow took it from right beside me, but inexplicably left my bag full of valuables. They even stole my passport photo name label but not the bag itself. I really liked that coat.

Tom Coates nails the Tories: aside from the odd Letwin horror show, the only press they get is from their regular attempts at televised suicide.

The Kobe Bryant rape case has American media debating whether to publish his accuser's name and photo. A tabloid went all in, sparking the usual arguments. One editor asks why the accused gets destroyed while the accuser gets a "journalistic burka." No easy answers. Also, got busted blogging at work. Hi, Simon!

Slate's piece on the economics of suicide is full of wild stats: 3% of Americans have attempted suicide, there are 1700+ attempts daily, and failed attempts correlate with a 20% income boost. Genuinely bizarre stuff worth reading.

Right after I asked why geeks instinctively favor freedom of information, ESR published his hacker ethos confirming exactly that. Convenient. His proposed hacker logo leaves me cold though -- we need a cute, malleable mascot, not a corporate emblem. The glider pattern is clever but soulless.

The information revolution mirrors the industrial revolution: cheap data is just raw material. The real innovation will be in mass-producing quality information. Social interaction matters not as an end in itself, but because it improves information quality. Build the barrel-making machine, not the barrel.

I got Jean-Luc Picard in a sci-fi character quiz. His associated quote about censorship and freedom feels deeply true to me, and I'm curious about its origins -- attributed to Picard, who quotes a fictional judge. Why do geeks find this sentiment so self-evident? More on that later.

Had a vivid dream about accidentally throwing a free bar for all of Oxford Street. Saturday was great: coffee with friends, a genuinely stunning Tate exhibition where strangers spontaneously made art in a giant ceiling mirror, Mystic River (well-acted but pointless), and a random night ending with a warm wait for buses.

Google appears to be hitting fundamental scaling limits, producing bizarre results and workarounds instead of a painful full recode. We've grown dependent on its godlike ability to find anything. What happens to how we use the web if Google simply doesn't scale?

Basement Jaxx's *Kish Kash* is an absolute must-buy. Drop everything, grab your wallet, sprint to the record store. Seven songs that make you want to dance immediately, all on one album. I'm putting it on permanent repeat until I know every word and breakbeat by heart.

Launched dual-cam StalkerVision. Also: the BBC's undercover racism exposé in the police is a ratings grab but solid journalism. Shocked a cop admired Hitler, though it's just the tip of a deeper national racism problem. Could any British institution survive this kind of scrutiny?

A BBC reporter spent 7 months secretly embedded in the Greater Manchester Police, completing full training and covertly filming colleagues daily. His report airs tonight claiming overwhelming evidence of institutional racism. This is going to be a hell of a story.

I'm fighting with someone through blog posts, which is absurd. I'm worried sick about you, and that's not condescension. "Okay" isn't "happy." And being made to feel wrong for wanting to help, while being kept in the dark, is maddening. Fuck this medium.

A modified version of Gabrielle's "Out of Reach" about heartbreak, confusion, and slowly moving on from a love that was never meant to be.

Dabs.com has appalling customer service: no phone support, useless one-line email responses, and zero concern for customers. My order was delayed a week due to their incompetence. I'm switching to Overclockers and warning everyone I know to avoid Dabs entirely.

Speaking at a BBC seminar tomorrow about how the Internet is overtaking TV. They want me there because I've stopped watching television entirely, just downloading shows instead. There's a free lunch, but apparently an NDA too. I'll share what I can afterward.

Bloggers are like DJs, sampling and remixing the best of the web. Gibson thinks blogging is like boiling a kettle with the lid off, wasting creative steam. Both metaphors probably apply to me. Google suggests there's no shortage of ways to describe what we do here.

A poem about being stuck in an uncertain relationship, torn between staying and leaving, wanting more but unsure if I'm even wanted. Hot and cold signals, growing attachment despite the imperfect match. I can't explain it, but I can't quite let go either.

Christian publishers are marketing Bibles to teens as lifestyle accessories, including the "Extreme Teen Bible" for boys and "Revolve" (styled like a teen magazine) for girls.

A chat log exchange with Chez about rugby players, revealing my apparent failure as a gay man for not knowing who Jonny Wilkinson is. We disagree on what constitutes an attractive man. I maintain my Orlando Bloom standards; she vows to convert me to rugby.

A fantastic weekend: Popstarz, kebab life lessons, the camp movie CAMP, Danny's 21st, and the genuinely jaw-dropping ladies' loos at the Knights Templar. Also Heaven, giant ants, and an unexpected candlelit dinner with pole-dancing lesbian conversation. Highly recommend all of the above.

A guy greased his shoes with butter, and the BBC is running topical limericks. The internet remains a strange and wonderful place.

I'm reposting rumoured names of Premier League footballers accused of rape to keep them visible in search results, as other posts have pushed them out of Google's index. Updates include new details from the News of the World and a second arrest. All names remain unverified rumour and speculation.

Responding to Bob's comments on censorship: we can't make value judgements about information because we lack the context to predict what will prove useful, or to whom, or when. The SARS cover-up illustrates my point perfectly. Allow free flow of information; punish misuse instead.

I'm pulling the best comments from this censorship debate onto the main page where Google can find them. We're getting 1000 hits a day from people searching for "Carlton Cole rumours," and the conversation about freedom of information, slippery slopes, and gossip-as-virus is too good to hide.

Sometimes I step back and think: I'm literally making my brain run in a machine. Five terminals, 24 emacs buffers, four languages, and it all works. Coding is weird and wonderful and I love it. Am I alone in occasionally thinking "wow, this is so cool"?

Arnold won! I'm stoked, though maybe I'll hold off on total cynicism -- the guy has a business degree and was a self-made millionaire at 22. Could be worse.

Dave's response to my point about sand being plentiful had me in stitches. Sometimes housemate conversations go places you don't expect.

It's Gay Sex Week (Oct 12-18) and I'm desperately hoping someone organizes a fundraiser just to watch CNN cover it. Also, my recent posts are giving Google some unfortunate ideas about me. I write sappy poetry, I promise.

Got 2000 hits in 24 hours after Google indexed me. Meanwhile, the story I've been covering keeps shifting -- alibis emerging, witness accounts contradicting the girl's version, and she apparently had breakfast with them after. Not speculating further; I'm already in enough trouble.

I'm defiantly posting alleged names in the UK footballer rape case, defending myself against libel accusations. I'm just repeating word-of-mouth, making no claims of truth. The media blackout is crumbling anyway, with Aston Villa denying involvement and the Mirror naming Chelsea.

I watched the Smallville season premiere and have many, many plot hole complaints. But let's be honest: I watch it for Tom Welling, who appears to be trending increasingly shirtless. No complaints there.

Saw Shakespeare's R&J last night and it's brilliant in ways no review quite captures. Four repressed Catholic schoolboys secretly act out Romeo and Juliet after lights-out, but their own feelings become tangled with the text. The acting is ferociously energetic, the dual plots stunning. Go see it.

I really want you to change your name.

Exploring CMS options and related tools, collecting links on software integration ideas.

Three massive blackouts in quick succession across London, the US, and all of Italy. The Americans panicked, the British screamed, but the Italians? Apparently unfazed. Also, is this coincidence, infrastructure failure, or Al-Qaeda targeting power grids? I'm going with conspiracy theory.

The long-term benefits of sunscreen are now in doubt, so it's no longer the one tip I'd offer for the future. It's now about as reliable as any other advice I might give.

I've rediscovered my love for Jeff Vogel's writing about his daughter Cordelia, now a toddler. His parenting philosophy? Skip shielding her from swear words and instead teach her to deploy them with maximum effectiveness. Highly recommended reading.

Only 6,000 Segways exist in the world, and they're all being recalled because dead batteries send you sprawling. Slow sales might be an understatement.

A game mod that puts you inside the Twin Towers on 9/11. Please say this is a joke.

Clay Shirky is worth reading, especially on why cheap Internet telephony is inevitable.

We're more like panicking mice than we'd like to admit. Wider doors cause jams, narrow ones create orderly queues, and clustered exits block each other. Turns out human evacuation behavior is far less rational than we imagine.

TV looks terrible this fall, but at least Smallville is back October 1st. Small victories.

Caught a Robbie Williams lyric on my way out that perfectly captures how I've been feeling lately. Also, it's International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Arrr.

Verisign has hijacked every unregistered .com and .net domain, redirecting typos to their ad-laden search engine. It breaks spam filters, violates DNS standards, forces accidental ToS agreements, and lets them intercept email to nonexistent domains. It's illegal, it's enormous, and I'm furious.

Stealth Disco has consumed my office and, inevitably, me. Also: Jason Mraz is great, the RIAA is suing Share Bear, Angle Grinder Man is our sad answer to the Naked Cowboy, and Teen Girl Squad is getting weird.

Had a great birthday barbecue, even if the food was more cremated than cooked. Thanks to everyone who came and survived on garlic bread and crisps, and to Tobes for rescuing the barbecue!

Install Java 1.4.2, apply a registry patch, restart Firebird. Done. Also, check out this amazing treemap UI for browsing Amazon.

The RIAA sued a 12-year-old honor student living with her single mom in low-income housing. She settled for $2000. Whatever you think of her defense, that's just wrong. Help pay back her settlement.

Links: optical illusions, BoingBoing's Rotten.com guestbar with a hidden "FUCK YOU ALL" message, a deeply unsettling photo, a bummer, and gay webcomics. FAGZ beats Boy Meets Boy on laughs and nudity, which is basically my main criterion anyway.

My blog has gotten embarrassingly boring lately. I blogged my lunch twice. Time to browse more, think more, and stop the pedestrian cat-blogging nonsense.

Tried three things at Pret today. The mozzarella sandwich was bland, the "cranberry" cola is mostly grape juice despite the wholesome marketing, and the lemon cake is probably not handmade but decent enough to order again.

Connecting remotely to your work machine just to play The Sims on your lunch break is not something a responsible employee does. Very bad idea.

I'm a below-average snooze-button hitter, and proud of it. I also tried a body-clock wake-up trick and it actually worked. Yes, I blogged about waking up. At least I'm not blogging about my cat.

I'm reviewing every product at the Pret a Manger near me. First up: a surprisingly good prawn sandwich, an excellent yoghurt granola fruit bowl, and a Coke. More to come.

Watched Queer Eye, found it equal parts funny and cringeworthy. Jai Rodriguez is hot but visibly mortified. Also: Matthew is having a baby (hilarious), and apparently Sesame Street is now a tool of American foreign policy.

Slow day at work, so I cleared my massive blog backlog. Highlights: artificial diamonds disrupting De Beers, doctor secret slang, Russia building a Mars nuclear plant, giant gerbils devastating China, and the world's most unsettling fluffy rabbits. Plus 20-odd other links. Productive afternoon, really.

I'm writing Perl again after a long absence, and it's going about as well as expected: forgetting syntax, hunting phantom bugs that turn out to be typos, and getting caught by my boss with a commented-out critical line. Pure entertainment.

Cem Kaner's software bill of rights lists things that sound obvious and fundamental, yet we've been explicitly stripped of all of them through click-to-accept license agreements. More people should be furious about this.

Shamelessly noting Madonna's kiss with Britney and Christina for the publicity stunt it is, while admitting the Google traffic won't hurt either.

My street seems custom-built to remind me of people I know, from Topman (Matt) to Phool (eDan). Both brothers work here too. Also: MIT courses are now free online, and you can train as a BBC journalist. Now I really should do some actual work.

Bloggers don't change lightbulbs, they link to discussions about it. Also, the Tories want to shut down the BBC website, which would be a disaster. The BBC provides something the market doesn't: impartial news. Thankfully, the Tories are completely unelectable anyway.

I have mixed feelings about the Harvey Milk LGBTQ school. It treats symptoms rather than the real problem: American high school culture's brutal treatment of anyone different. But since fixing that culture is nearly impossible, I'll take what I can get. At least some kids will be safe.

I'm a giant ant monster who breathes poisonous gas, apparently. Also, OJ Simpson sees parallels between his case and Scott Peterson's. Gee, I wonder why, OJ.

Your foot changed direction when you drew a "6" -- don't deny it. Also, I desperately want a Twister duvet cover for my birthday, and if you've ever tried using Odeon's site outside Internet Explorer, check out Accessible Odeon, which scrapes it for the useful bits.

Fun links: fight me as a kung-fu monkey, test your ESP, and get your mind read by a Flash program (spoiler: there's a trick to it).

Blogstakes offers crappy prizes, but more fun is the Devil's Dictionary's sardonic tech definitions, like blog: "To noisily and simultaneously void one's spleen, stomach, bladder and bowels."

A grab-bag of links: Bush action figure, scary nuclear-isomer weapons, the Chewbacca defense, a serial killer vs. programmer quiz, and the Blaster worm, which hit me personally. At least the worm's source code had a funny message for Bill Gates.

One emacs config setting transforms it from an arcane key-binding nightmare to something that works like every other editor. A good reminder that good design is often invisible until you've experienced bad design first.

PHP 5 brings private functions and sensible inheritance, making OO development much nicer. I'm also building a Word-compatible report generator from scratch, working near Regent's Park, enjoying free cola and wireless networking, and slowly adjusting to London life, emacs, and the tube.

A virtual server running a screen saver. First day observations.

I support civil unions over gay marriage. Marriage is a religious ceremony, like a bar mitzvah, and we shouldn't demand access to it. But the legal rights marriage provides? Those are a human rights issue. Separate the two, grant civil unions to all couples, and let churches sort out the rest.

Just back from Edinburgh (fun) and After Dark (awful), but too hot to think straight. Moving tomorrow to a broadband-free zone, so updates will be sporadic until I wrestle ADSL out of BT. Ciao for now.

I linked to Rik. Then I hit the Edinburgh Festival: "Finding Bin Laden" was funny and surprisingly thoughtful (***), Newsrevue 2003 was sharp liberal musical comedy at its best (****), and the Late Night Laughter Lounge was a disaster held in a converted toilet. Avoid it.

Catching shows at the Edinburgh Fringe: a mixed bag of musical comedy, sketch shows, pretentious Americans, a brilliant Guards! Guards! adaptation, and a stoned stand-up who kept losing his train of thought. Terry Pratchett gets five stars; know the books first.

Visiting Evil Dan in Edinburgh and his PC is drowning in adware and spyware. Use Spybot Search and Destroy to clean that crap up.

Doing the Friday Five this week on morning routines, even though the questions aren't great. I wake up around 9am, sleep in until 2pm on weekends, and immediately turn on my computer. Starting work again in 9 days. Breakfast out in London? I'd go broke.

Compulsory licensing for free music downloads sounds appealing but doesn't work. The real fix is making buying music easier than stealing it. Right now, stealing wins on convenience. I'd pay per song for guaranteed quality, but not RIAA prices -- they're a useless middleman ripping everyone off.

Matt's got a new website. Go check it out.

A big batch of bookmarks: twisted webcomics, sexy blue men, Orlando Bloom gossip, bamboo bicycles, whale guilt, a weather-based font, TV mind control patents, Eclipse getting PHP support, and apparently I'm a Level 7 Very Feminine gay man. Enjoy the megablog.

London's new Oyster smartcards are finally here, replacing those flimsy paper tickets. Reusable, cancellable if lost, and they work without leaving your wallet. I've been waiting ages for these -- the readers have been sitting there unused for over a year. Inexplicably excited about this. Yes, I'm a geek.

After way too much stress, I've found a place in Tooting Bec: a big ground-floor room in a quiet cul-de-sac, shared with friendly guys my age. Moving in this weekend. Edinburgh next week. Anyone able to put me up for a few days?

Joined Friendster and finally discovered MoveFlat.com for London flatshares. Loot has been useless lately because everyone migrated there. Still searching for both a flat and cute single gay men.

Finding a flatshare and finding a boyfriend are basically the same problem. I keep second-guessing myself, holding out for better options until the good ones disappear. The best ones never even make it to market. If I can solve one, maybe I can solve the other.

TheFunny.Org is hit or miss, but this TATU parody ("I'm a lesbian, she's a lesbian...") is worth a listen despite the terrible singing. Also check out the Super Mario theme on classical piano, complete with underground music and the frantic speed-up at the end.

A simple tool to convert between MySQL date format (YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS) and UNIX timestamps in either seconds or milliseconds since January 1st, 1970.

Interactive cat toy alert! Also, Slate praises Tony Blair, which gets me thinking: Blair is way more beloved in the US while Clinton is more popular in the UK. Can we just trade?

The ultra-wealthy are literally building a massive palm-shaped island visible from space off Dubai. Just go look at it.

Been neglecting this blog while focusing on GayGeeks. Managing multiple blogs is tough!

Enter the contest for a chance to appear in a Boy Meets Boy strip!

Caught up on a backlog of posts over at Gay Geeks, including a followup to the Tom McLaughlin case. Justice was done, though it's a shame that's the exception rather than the rule.

Reading a critical article can get you FBI-investigated now. Plus, shredding documents is no longer safe thanks to reconstruction software. Glad I'm not in the States. Also, A Straight Person's Guide to Gay Etiquette is hilarious - go read it.

Jewel's back with "Intuition," a catchy, danceable pop song that's a welcome change from her meandering hippy phase. The video cleverly plays commercial sellout for laughs, contrasting "real" camcorder footage with glossy video world. She wimps out a little, but it's fun and self-aware. Go download it.

Back after two weeks offline due to a broken PHP script, ironically timed with my new PHP job. Now I'm flat-hunting in a sweltering London, sweating through viewings of overpriced, cramped flats. I want Zone 2, near a tube, with a living room and minimal murder. Apparently £500 won't cut it.

I moved to London, went job hunting, and almost immediately landed my perfect gig: PHP/SQL dev work in central London with great people and a solid salary. Starting August 11th. Now I just need to figure out where to live before my overdraft kills me.

Finished my degree at Warwick with a 2.1. The fear is gone. Relief. Joy. Breathe.

Blame Steve, it was all his idea. Jamie and Carly have also jumped on the bandwagon. If the feed borks after a while just press refresh and it'll start again :-) (There is also a no-frills version if you have a tiny monitor. If you're quite sad, you may wish to use popup stalkervision which updates faster but needs a faster connection)

A roundup of fun links: a website with a big red "delete everything" button, the real Hogwarts Express, Homeland Security jewelry, conceptual art mocking commerce, and a pile of Mac vs. Windows debate fodder.

Visited London for a joint birthday party, and now face the Big Week: last performances, final results, goodbye meals, and on Saturday, the end of my university career. Also managed to leave my luggage on a train. Aaargh.

I should really know better.

The casual way people reference physical torture as an interrogation tool is unsettling. "There are ways other than physical torture" implies it's the obvious fallback. That framing is deeply troubling.

Depressing statistics from Bob Harris reveal that huge swaths of American adults are dangerously misinformed, fundamentalist, or just plain stupid. Not uniquely American problems, really. Except the Elvis truthers. Obviously he's still alive.

It's crisis season as university ends and the Rest of Our Lives looms. Everyone's questioning who they are and what comes next. Things aren't as bad as they seem, though. Sending a big communal hug to all. Also: knowing people who know things is almost as good as knowing things yourself.

We don't need government propaganda, we're deluded enough on our own. A third of Americans think we found WMDs in Iraq, 22% think Saddam used them during the war, and before the invasion, half believed Iraqis were among the 9/11 hijackers. None of this is true.

I've spent years hiding behind "Seldo," a persona I built at 15 to escape being bullied, closeted, miserable Laurie. It worked brilliantly. Now I'm exhausted by my own invention. I want to stop collecting admirers and start earning understanding. Time to let Laurie grow up.

Shoutout to John at Rainbow Villa, a nearly-20 semi-closeted gay boi whose writing reminds me of my younger self. He was complaining nobody links to him, so here you go, kid.

Crash was a three-hour musical orgasm that more than made up for Rainbows' disappointment. Perfect crowd density, great music, great company, and someone actually dragged me onto the dancefloor. School-dayz sounds terrible though. I'd rather drill through my eye and fill it with chilli powder than relive school.

Massive link dump covering: someone falling off a Segway, the UK's new supreme court, old Netscape versions, Burning Man VR, Matrix Reloaded hotness, barcode self-valuation (I'm worth £6.06), P2P legality, carfree cities, blog hype, X2, Iraq war stage-management, and lists of lists.

Spent five hours lounging on the lawn with friends, junk food, and cherry coke. Now sunburned to a crisp and heading out for indie music. Worth it.

Answering the Friday Five: I want to find the perfect boyfriend, I'm brutally honest about haircuts, I once lost a friend who turned out to be a pathological liar, I'd live in the X-men universe to meet Iceman, and I wish I could sing.

SCO is picking a fight it can't win by threatening IBM's AIX license. But the real issue is bigger: overzealous copyright and patent claims are strangling innovation. Copyrighting UNIX now is like copyrighting "car" in 1950. The system is broken, and it's killing the internet.

Finished with school, and I couldn't be happier about it. Screw the educational establishment! (Except Edinburgh's Informatics Department. Please call me.)

Taking my last ever exam in just over an hour. Not scared at all. Also, stumbling across record UK unemployment figures this morning was not ideal timing.

Backlog of links including Tropico addiction, post-natal abortion satire, the many things named Voss, a comedic internet history, depleted ocean fish, pervy hobbit diaries, lipograms, Lovecraft, stickman battles, and more. Still drowning in links. I love the web.

Parallel universes, USB watches with analog faces, Hillary's presidential inevitability, virus-killing brain cancer, and Christian ministries warning kids away from grumpy atheists. Another day, another backlog cleared. Professor Giraffenstein assures us dinosaurs still roam the earth. Who am I to argue?

Catching up on a backlog of links: everyone copies search engine winners (now Google), the Google Dance explained, IQ tests during exam revision are a bad idea, the Daily Mail is racist (shocker), rebranding the Tories, barcodes as art, X2 beats Matrix Reloaded, and more.

Four exams down, one easy French one to go. I'm back, redesigning the site and dumping my massive backlog of links on you, 10 a day. Job hunting too. Hundreds more links where these came from.

I've been using Wallearn to learn subconsciously via desktop wallpaper flashcards. Courses are scarce, so I made one for French regular verbs. Download it here, and grab Wallearn itself while you're at it.

A prerequisite map for learning about computers, structured as an outward-flowing bubble diagram. Students progress from the center outward, completing each topic before unlocking the next. Essentially a mind-map of computer literacy, but surprisingly effective as a teaching tool.

Exams are here, so I'm shutting down the blog for real this time. No more updates until they're over. Hopefully I'll be back with good news.

Yes, someone really did make "Weapons of Ass Destruction," starring Arnold Schwarzenpecker. I went looking after the Onion mentioned it as a joke. Rabbit hole also led me to "Shaving Ryan's Privates" and "Gone in 69 Seconds." Porn parody titles: apparently a thriving genre.

Linking to some good Iraqi Information Minister humor (still funny, always will be), plus thoughts on SARS panic outpacing the actual disease. That 5% death rate isn't reassuring when you think about it statistically. Staying scared for now.

A poem of memories, tender and honest, the good and the hard, leading back to one truth: you have always loved me, and I am sorry I ever forgot.

The Rockall Times piece reads like satire, but the underlying reality it's describing is all too real.

Are you Addicted to the Internet? 68% Hardcore Junkie (61% - 80%)While you do get a bit of sleep every night and sometimes leave the house, you spend as much time as you can online. You usually have a browser, chat clients, server consoles, and your email on auto check open at all times. Phone? What's that? You plan your social events by contacting your friends online. Just be careful you don't get a repetitive wrist injury... The Are you Addicted to the Internet? Quiz at Stvlive.com! ...saved only by the fact that I have more friends in real life than online.

Thomas Friedman declared the "terrorism bubble" burst because Iraq fell. But hey, the terrorists weren't Iraqi, their money wasn't Iraqi, and bin Laden sure as hell isn't Iraqi. If anything, we just gave the Middle East more reasons to hate us. Friedman is an idiot.

Beijing just jumped from 37 to 402 SARS cases. China's massive, the disease is spreading far from Hong Kong, mortality is climbing past 9%, and it can spread through water and waste. I'm not leaving my house for the foreseeable future.

Creme eggs should be sold in six-packs year-round. I'm just sayin'.

Going offline to finish a report under deadline panic. Also, I'm now an ordained minister of the Universal Life Church (free, three minutes online) which should come in handy for pestering Christians.

The Trini blogosphere just exploded for me thanks to Jonathan Ali, who led me to a whole network of local bloggers. With a recent Guardian article on blogging, maybe we'll soon have enough of us to overthrow the government through sheer intellectual arrogance.

I debate Ben about Iraq: the war was the right thing to do even if Bush's motives were self-serving. The UN is toothless, European opposition was self-interested, and Iraqis couldn't free themselves. I'd love a world government, but until then, at least our empire isn't genocidal.

Google knows too much about me. Searching my name with friends' names pulls up surprisingly accurate photos of them. Oddly, Mikey keeps appearing alongside my romantic interests. I also tried "Seldo next" to predict my future entanglements. The results were alarming. Watch out, boys.

Stop sending me the Baghdad Bob link! Fine, here it is. Also: a Honda ad that took 606 takes, a chimp using a vending machine, Syria apparently being next on Dubya's list, and assorted other internet flotsam I've been collecting.

Feeling isolated. Someone take me to lunch.

BitTorrent's P2P magic should apply to websites, not just big files. I'm proposing WebTorrent: a local proxy that lets browsers share cached pages with each other, eliminating the Slashdot effect without requiring any changes from website owners. Someone please build this. I'm begging you.

Generated my blogger code and used it to blog about a meme asking how often I blog about memes. Meta enough to make my head explode. Also cross-posted to Gay Geeks, which surely earns bonus points.

A grab-bag of links: gas mask ties, GPS art, NationStates policy geekery, childhood misconceptions, genuinely gruesome body modification (you've been warned), esoteric programming languages, Stuart Hughes's war blog, NARA's exhibit hall, XP powertoys, and a Peter Jackson revelation. Plus my current geeky toolbox.

I made a Boy Meets Boy tribute desktop background. Yes, I'm bored. Yes, I like that comic way too much.

G Takahashi's weblog has great war coverage, including a soldier's email home that vividly captures life in combat. Written March 29th, the soldier mentions "upcoming weeks" ahead, proving the media's quick-victory narrative was nonsense. Also fascinating: how the internet and Al-Jazeera have dethroned CNN as the war's trusted voice.

I support removing Saddam but question why we only target certain undemocratic leaders. Some Americans get the real story, others are hopelessly clueless. Also, try Googling "the worst search engine" for a laugh.

Took a week off on the south coast, came back to a virus that trashed Windows XP and all my install files. Leaving a breadcrumb for my future self: SK 1301 keyboard drivers are at Netropa. Use the SK 1300 ones for XP. Yes, I know you don't care.

Slate reminds us why Rumsfeld has no business lecturing anyone on the Geneva Conventions. Did they really think we'd forgotten about Camp X-Ray?

We're going to win in Iraq -- everyone says so. But guerrilla warfare could stretch the conflict, eroding public support until we're forced to withdraw. A victorious Saddam would destabilize the entire Middle East. None of this was at stake before we invaded. Now we have no choice but to win.

Consumed by war coverage, I've rounded up a grab-bag of links: a Baghdad blog gone silent, Robin Cook's resignation speech, anti-French hysteria, ready.gov parodies, propaganda name generators, BBC's free video feeds, and the CIA's hilariously absurd kids' homepage.

Last night I dreamed I was back in secondary school taking an English test, until it took a sharp turn into existential weirdness. I recreated the question as accurately as I could. I suspect it's asking for the meaning of life, but please, no smart-ass answers.

Massive link dump covering everything from RSS search engines and Google's brand anxiety to sea lion soldiers, Shar-Peis, ties as sexist oppression, and Terminator 3. Consider it a window into my chaotic, easily distracted brain. You're welcome, you link-hungry fiends.

On the eve of the Iraq war, I'm laying out my thinking: yes, it's being fought for money and oil, not principles. But removing Saddam is still probably the right call, for the same reason stopping Hitler early would have been. Right thing, wrong reasons. God bless democracy.

We're going to war. Like it or not, apparently.

A clever network friend explained passive mode in P2P apps to me. It's all about NAT and firewalls: if both parties are behind NAT with no port mapping, neither can initiate a direct connection, making efficient file transfer impossible. The peer network can relay queries but not bulk data.

A new drug completely blocks HIV from entering white blood cells, dropping viral levels to undetectable. The catch: $20,000 a year, partly to recoup $600 million in development costs.

Moz plugged Gay Geeks, so I'm returning the favor by pointing to his new site, Meaningless Artichoke. Also: Congress renamed french fries "freedom fries," which is either hilarious or terrifying. At least we haven't declared actual war on France. Yet.

I'm ambivalent but increasingly convinced we should attack Iraq now, before Saddam gets nukes. It's not about the reasons Bush gives (oil), and yes, innocents will die, but stopping a greater evil before it's inevitable seems worth it. I just hope Iraq can govern itself afterward.

Edward Gorey's alphabetical catalog of children meeting grim fates is simultaneously adorable and deeply wrong. God bless the Victorians and their cheerful morbidity.

Went full blue for Metamorphosis 8: hair, makeup, the works. Danced on an 8-foot podium, had the stage cleared for us, and Rik's set was phenomenal. Every penny and lost work hour was worth it.

100 things about me, because everyone else was doing it and I couldn't resist. I blew the "short" requirement completely. Covers everything from being Trinidadian and gay to my Nightcrawler fixation, my terrible eating habits, and why I go by Seldo.

The US declared it doesn't need permission to act on security. The UN and NATO disbanded, citing irrelevance. Also, read the Borowitz Report. He's a self-satisfied dickhead, but worth it.

USA Today has tips for Americans abroad to avoid anti-American sentiment. Shocking revelation: don't be loud, flag-wearing, fast-food-eating tourists. Was this not obvious? This advice applies to everyone, always. Also, 54% of Americans still think the world likes them. It doesn't. Even Canadians are winning now.

A grab-bag of links: the Atkins controversy (spoiler: Americans just eat too much), a political compass test that confirmed my lib-dem leanings, Fred Durst's questionable Britney claims, my finished AI essay, and a new OLED camera that oddly connects back to my very first blog post.

The Glitter Ball 2003 was a smashing success, largely because my friends are incredible. Shoutout to Will Abson for the video he doesn't yet know I have. Trinidad folks: the people in it are Bob, Kim, Moz, James, Matt, and Danny.

Gorgeous retro futurism worth a look.

I attended Davos and got rare full access. The mood was grim: global economic collapse feared, anti-American sentiment intense, Al Qaeda largely dismantled but franchised, and Iraq war universally dreaded. The world's 5,000 rulers are smart, naive, arrogant, and very, very worried.

Pleix.net is a trove of arty, satirical, and unsettling video art. My favourite is the sarky Pig Corp piece.

This blog is turning into a superset of my other two. Highlights: a Hand Puppet Movie Theatre parody of Lord of the Rings where everyone's gay, and BBC Radio 1 Xtra broadcasting from Trinidad Carnival, so I can stream it and not totally miss out this year.

Being geeky and gay means double the teasing, but also double the resilience. I'd share my own coming-out story but don't have time to do it justice. Short version: all-male school, no friends, and I never even told my mom. Happy birthday, mom.

Antiwar art is flourishing. Check out a satirical Blair/Bush lip-sync video and a mind-reading Flash toy, plus my favorite image making the rounds.

My design process involves writing out my train of thought to compensate for poor short-term memory, otherwise I loop endlessly. The result reads like a schizophrenic arguing with himself. I used indentation to mark tangents, which proved genuinely useful.

The BBC article on mobile blogging is worth reading for its links to free tools like Manywhere Moblogger, WAPBlog, and KABLOG that let you post from your phone, though they require some server-side setup. There's also a proprietary carrier-focused option called foneblog.

The British Conservative Party is imploding so badly that the Lib Dems might become the official opposition. Meanwhile, Blair is more Thatcherite than Thatcher, and Bush is channeling Reagan. History rhymes in deeply depressing ways.

Living outside the US, I rely on friends like Ed to remind me how absurd American domestic security theater has gotten. Nationwide terror levels, duct tape against chemical weapons, and delivery guys worrying about terrorism in suburban Michigan. You can't make this stuff up.

Good day so far: finished French homework, stayed awake through the lecture, and discovered that SQL Server developers may owe massive patent royalties to a company called Timeline because Microsoft botched their licensing deal. Time to switch to MySQL or PostgreSQL. Also, Libya chairing the UN Human Rights Commission? Totally nuts.

A collection of out-of-context quotes for the amusement of myself and about three other people. You probably had to be there.

BBC News redesigned their site and it's a mess. It looks like a worse version of CNN, which is itself losing to Fox News. I'd already moved to The Times for its cleaner layout, and this just confirms I made the right call.

A few Valentine's Day distractions while I procrastinate on coding: cook a sock, calculate your love match, and play Frogger with sheep. Priorities.

If the US has evidence Iraq is hiding WMDs, just give it to Blix. Convince him, get your material breach, then bomb away. Otherwise, shut up. Why is this hard?

A US Congressman's anti-France rant on Radio 4 is the most gloriously offensive thing I've ever heard. The surrender joke at 5:40 is pure gold. Also, go send someone an anti-valentine.

A parody song to the tune of "If You're Happy And You Know It," skewering every hollow justification for invading Iraq. Thanks to Beardy Ben for passing it along. It's darkly funny because it's basically true.

Reflecting on the Columbia disaster through newly released transcripts. It was tragic, but we must press on with space exploration.

Africa's AIDS crisis is devastating, but I found two surprising bright spots: infection rates across the continent appear to be stabilizing, and some people are genuinely immune to HIV. That 1% genetic immunity in caucasians makes a compelling case for genetic engineering. Small comfort, but I'll take it.

Catching up on a backlog of links: cloning circuses, botox deodorant, dumb food laws, Putin-elf controversies, Harry Potter's questionable morals, AOL's staggering losses, and Bush funding a sun on Earth. Plus games, books, and a testicle shortage. You're welcome.

A British think-tank wants to give children the vote to counter the outsized electoral influence of elderly voters. Lowering the voting age to 14 sounds reasonable, but parents voting on behalf of infants? Not so sure about that part.

Long-overdue link dump covering everything from RAF rain experiments and Bonzi Buddy lawsuits to vaginal airbags and Leonard Nimoy singing about Bilbo Baggins. Relevance may have expired but the weird is eternal. More to come.

Michael Jackson isn't a paedophile, just profoundly broken about childhood. But after settling a lawsuit for £18.5 million, doing it again is both unbelievable and sad. He needs to grow up, but he's too rich for anyone to tell him that.

The space shuttle Columbia broke up on reentry. Are we witnessing the end of the shuttle era?

Anyone could register .mil domains, including pentagon.mil, with no password required, thanks to two completely open pages on the military's own servers. The Register broke it but stayed coy about details. Slashdot didn't. Neither will I. Go nuts before they fix it.

I've finally finished my short story "Spree" and it's available in PDF, Word, text, and OpenOffice formats. Give it a read and let me know what you think. (Update: apparently the ending still sucks. Bah.)

I predicted the Economist's position on Britain's child pornography laws before they published it. Smug? Maybe. But the issue matters: criminalizing computer-generated images punishes thought, not action, and statistics suggesting pornography availability correlates with declining abuse rates raise questions worth taking seriously.

A poem I wrote, parked here until the poetry section is fixed. About happiness, fear of losing it, mortality, and wanting to stay in this moment forever.

Microsoft actually makes cars now, and predictably, they're just like the jokes warned us. Avoid the BMW.

I asked Amy Phillips of 50 Minute Hour to weigh in on pedophilia. She argues for distinguishing between offenders and those with fantasies alone, recommending jail for the former and therapy for both, and notes promising new drugs that suppress sex drive.

Britain has up to 1.1 million paedophiles, and we can't jail them all. Criminalisation and persecution drive the problem underground. Treatment works better than prison, as one clinic's 80% success rate showed before hysteria shut it down. This is majority persecution of a minority, nothing more.

Bush challenges Michigan's affirmative action policy on "equality" grounds, while ignoring a study showing Black-sounding names get 33% fewer employer callbacks. Just watched Bowling for Columbine and I'm convinced institutional racism is at the root of America's problems. Highly recommend it, flaws and all.

Strangers in a car applauded me walking home from a cheesy pop night at the students' union. 60p drinks, five minutes from my house, and spontaneous applause from passing cars. I'm never leaving.

There Inc. has launched a 3D online world where you can customize an avatar, chat, buy virtual goods with ThereBucks, and even build your own multiplayer games via an open API. It's basically what everyone imagined the internet would be. I've signed up for the beta.

I want to bring "quidnunc" into common usage as slang for a busybody gossip. Also, Network Rail's excuse for their anti-freeze heaters failing was that they froze. Yes, really.

Back at Warwick and completely overwhelmed with work. Send help.

Wishing everyone a happy new year as the wave of drunkenness rolls across time zones. I'll be sober, watching the chaos unfold with amusement.

The US government is now censoring scientific information to placate anti-abortion and pro-abstinence lobbies, on top of spying on citizens and trampling their rights. It's too horrifying to embellish. Land of the freaking free, indeed.

Just back from Tobago, hopelessly behind on work. Quiet Christmas -- got luggage, no iBook (thanks Mom and Dad). First Christmas without my brothers, which felt strange. Also, read Spree and tell me what you think.

Elliot Spitzer gave a speech to stock analysts that said everything dot-com crash victims have been dying to scream at them for years. Deliberately offensive, ruthlessly direct, and full of damning details about analyst corruption. Read it.

Spent the morning sleeping in, eating well, and soaking in a hot tub on the roof. I'm on vacation and it's glorious. Also spent too much time thinking about a Christina Aguilera video, of all things, and getting weirdly emotional about it. Don't judge me.

Marvel's reviving the Rawhide Kid as gay, and everyone from CNN to CBS has weighed in. My take: watered-down camp references aren't representation. If you're going to make a gay character, give him real romantic storylines. It's 2003. A gay character who never kisses a guy isn't groundbreaking.

I've written a new play called Spree, aimed at Freshblood theatre after they liked but couldn't cast my last one. It's flexible: six characters, easily gender-swapped, two potentially doubled up. A deliberate improvement on Silly Things. It's a draft, so please send me your notes.

Posting from Trinidad with a few links worth sharing: a C/C++ garbage collector, Get Your War On skewering war criminals in the Bush administration, 419 scammer baiters, a friend making notable Trinidadian lists, and reindeer spontaneously combusting before kindergartners. Holiday cheer!

Just arrived in Trinidad. Sun, ocean views, and a tan in progress. I'm insufferably smug about it.

Heading to Trinidad and thrilled about it. Cold, grey, and dark at 3pm here, so burning MP3 CDs instead of catching my train. Priorities.

Britain's response to a bus hitting a tree? Cut down the trees, naturally. Also, someone is exploring quantum mechanics through the medium of sheep.

Last Monday of term, sitting at Moz's computer waiting for dinner, with Kim and Matt en route. Top B tonight should be great, or I'm just bored and hungry. Probably both.

My Christmas checklist: no humming carols, yes to gifts and tinsel and stuffing my face. No fake family bonhomie, no snow (I'll be in the tropics), no holiday charity guilt trips, no special appreciation of loved ones I already appreciate year-round. Christmas is just a good excuse for things I'd do anyway.

Repeatedly woken at dawn by a fire alarm. Missed my first lecture. I need sleep.

A sexy picture that doubles as a spot-the-duplicate puzzle. One person appears 4 times, two appear 3 times, five appear twice. I made it as a poster for my room. It got out of hand. Answers available if you can't figure it out yourself.

Scott Adams on Lou Gerstner's legendary IBM leadership: his biggest contribution was not doing something, and a sock monkey had a 50/50 shot at the same decision. Then he wrote a bestseller about it.

Fog is strange and beautiful: it turns the world into a hushed horror film, wraps everything in golden haze, and makes lakes into perfect mirrors. Walking through it, I feel like I'm collecting the moisture myself, leaving a tunnel of dry air behind me.

I'm loving Monopoly Tycoon, my current runner-up for best game ever. It's no simple PC port of the board game but a deep, sophisticated simulation that takes everything great about Monopoly and cranks it up. Reviews are hitting 80-90% and I agree completely. This game rocks.

Love the Economist, which dad kindly gifted me. This week's cover is a Kubrick-worthy image that works on every level, and the writing remains as wryly irreverent as ever.

I almost respected Bush today. His administration, run by far cleverer people, has handled Al-Qaeda and Iraq surprisingly well. Still, Venezuela, Rumsfeld, and Ashcroft temper my praise. Credit where it's due, but let's not get carried away.

Only 13% of young Americans can find Iraq on a map. More startlingly, 11% can't find the US either. Also: public autopsies, airplane homes, the end of antibiotics, and I really need to stop playing the Sims. Smallville is terrible but I can't stop watching it.

Bin Laden's crew notes the irony of Bush and Sharon being called men of peace. Hard to argue with that logic.

Melton has the world sorted, and Bush supporters are staying visible post-election. Also, here's an Enigma-encoded message for you to crack: settings AAA, M1322 group 4, Naval M3, wheels 3,2,1. Get googling.

Campus life is as baffling as ever: the swamp-like grounds, the brazen milk thief who ignored my clearly labeled 4-pint bottle to steal from a smaller one marked off-limits, and the dedicated potheads doing laps at 3am in the cold. Wouldn't trade it.

America's obesity epidemic has a new solution: skip diet and exercise, just buy a $2,295 home defibrillator. It won't prevent the heart attack, just maybe save you from dying of one. Allow 6-8 weeks for delivery, so try not to have a cardiac event before then.

Sharing a simple text editor plugin for anyone who needs it.

Reluctant blogging today yields a link dump: Monopoly Tycoon, a 20-minute HIV test, magnetic pole flipping, web standards research for my ambitious Web2 project, KaZaA popup fixes, UI shame, Mozilla vs IE, and a possible Edinburgh master's. Also: antibiotics. Yuck.

The Queen shed a tear and Britain lost its mind analyzing why. Maybe something was in her eye. Maybe a corgi died. Lighten up, people. Also, unilateral aggression breeds terrorism. Just saying.

The UN Security Council voted unanimously for the Iraq resolution, prompting a Clinton NSC member to warn that there are "no checks and balances on President Bush." The irony of foreign autocracies positioning themselves as defenders of democratic restraint is apparently lost on everyone involved.

Sitting inches from a window at 1:30am, watching ducks hunt worms in the rain. Meanwhile: laser cannons, Phoenix browser's chaos-inducing "open all tabs" feature, Microsoft acting like IBM post-antitrust, Nokia's garish phones, a Beckham kidnap plot, and a skateboard for your AIBO. Links ahoy.

Two things: Sharon's already talking about attacking Iran before Iraq's even started, which seems premature. Also, Pamela Anderson has a new video you need to see.

Four years ago I came out, and with my sexuality came everything else I'd been suppressing: the twirly wrists, the giggling, the dancing. I'm not proud of being gay specifically, but I'm proud of finally being myself. And four years ago, I couldn't have said that.

I hate winter. I'm distracted by Trinidad's warm webcam, wondering what sufferin' succotash actually means, and questioning why Clinton is still everywhere. The web answers everything except why Bush Sr. and Reagan got more peace and quiet.

Awarding BBC News Online for their hilariously dramatic mouse and keyboard photo. What happens when you hire too many arts students. Also, yeah, internet addiction at work is real. I spent 6 of my 10 weeks at IBM this summer surfing the web.

I found the cute geek from Apple's Switch ads. His name is Jeremiah Cohick, and I'm convinced he's gay. He emailed to deny it, but I'm skeptical. Awkwardly, he may still be reading this.

CNN is clearly funding global terrorism to boost ratings. The sniper got caught just as interest waned, conveniently replaced by a Moscow hostage crisis, then a school shooting. For less than a Friends episode, you can bankroll a lot of mayhem. How long until you drop the bomb, CNN?

Outraged by Russia's use of chemical gas to end the Moscow theater hostage crisis, killing civilians while withholding the antidote from doctors. Putin, what were you thinking? Also, Phoenix browser is simply the best browser ever made.

MoveOn.org has a brilliant ad showing how Bush's "regime change" rhetoric might just apply a little closer to home.

Scott Adams keeps selling out harder than ever. Also, I fell down a rabbit hole from Slashdot to the deeply disturbing story of Gary Heidnik, a man who kept women chained in his basement. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Mocking CNN's DC sniper coverage for fanning panic, celebrating a wild Birmingham clubbing weekend including an impromptu wet t-shirt competition, and puzzling over a Macromedia knockoff site and bizarre Iraqi protest footage.

Mind uploading to silicon by 2040? I am ALL IN. Can't wait to ditch this body. Also: groan at that link. Short post today to balance out yesterday's epic. Karma.

Massive link dump covering Tim Berners-Lee's first browser, Jurassic 5, Ben Folds Five, Al-Qaeda golf course sniper panic, Dawson's Creek gay sex, Google Zeitgeist, brain cancer breakthroughs, Apple's OS X giveaway, and Tomato Nation. My topic-hopping is probably breaking Google's brain.

A poem about a fractured relationship with my father, a man I loved who became my enemy. I'm desperate to forgive him but the wounds won't heal. I hate what he's become while mourning who he was.

On the dancefloor I feel free, until I catch myself from above and see it for what it is: desperate plumage, bright feathers flashing. I want to be left alone. I want you to fight for me. I don't know why I make it so hard.

My building's fire alarm kept going off all morning, starting at 5:30am in freezing temperatures. Turns out a sensor is faulty. FFS.

A convicted child molester killed a man who discovered his abuse, then manipulated the man's two young sons into confessing. A year later, Chavis walked free and the kids were convicted. The same prosecutor argued both cases. The legal system is broken.

Tuesday's post got complaints. MAC and Revlon are funding beauty parlours in Afghanistan to boost women's self-esteem, which is... something. Also, Radio Warwick DJs accidentally broadcast a personal mobile number and their SMS machine password on air. Brilliant radio.

My tooth is killing me. Also: rotten.com is disturbing, UBS Warburg convinced me investment banking is morally bankrupt (they charge people to hide stock ownership, then charge others to reveal it), the weather is awful, and I'm trying out WinMX.

I have a throbbing dental abscess and 48 hours of agony ahead. The filling that caused it was done in Trinidad, which means no malpractice recourse, and I'll have to go back there for the root canal because at least it's cheap. On the bright side, French class is fun. Ow.

Sick with a cold, raging toothache, and a computer that keeps rebooting. Awful weekend. Then I watched a stranger stop to rescue a worm from the pavement using a twig, and honestly, that fixed everything.

Living in the US right now feels like Sarajevo with a McDonald's. Snipers, anthrax, abductions... and Harry Belafonte wading into politics with a gloriously blunt house-slave metaphor aimed at Colin Powell. I disagree with his methods, but anyone who thinks Ashcroft is nuts is alright by me.

Fog screens are now a real thing, just like on SeaQuest.

We've discovered a new planet called Quaoar, which is either the coolest name ever or proof that Pluto isn't really a planet. Either way, astronomy will figure it out eventually.

I'm working in tech support now. Also, you know society has gone lawsuit-crazy when fanart comes with "please don't sue me" disclaimers.

Been busy with real life lately. LindowsOS looks promising for my free-computer project. X-Men Evolution series 3 is fantastic and I'm still smitten with Nightcrawler. Also found a cool animation showing how US state boundaries changed through history.

Brr. Yesterday felt like the start of a new ice age. Maybe it was.

Back at Warwick for Freshers' week. Campus living is great, being network tech support less so. Sleep deprivation is real. Also, there should be a law against straight guys being misleading on the dancefloor. Oh, and Turkey seized weapons-grade uranium smugglers. Sleep well, everyone.

Last day at IBM Hursley, back to Warwick! Also: possible life on Venus (just microbes, but still), everything we know is wrong, and the Weekly World News has infiltrated Al-Qaeda. Quite a day.

Been too busy working to blog much. My sources for the fun stuff: Gagpipe, Memepool, FARK, Slashdot, Google News. Also, keep reading the baby story. And here's a tasteless 9/11 joke I've been sitting on: New York, so good they whacked it twice.

I found a nifty disk-wiping tool on Freshmeat that boots from a floppy and nukes hard drives, with obvious legitimate uses and some delightfully evil ones. Also, UK exam boards have massively screwed up grades this year, leaving everyone uncertain whether students deserve their university places.

Found a web tool that unpacks Microsoft TNEF files. The internet is wonderful.

I love the Weekly World News: the sun's exploding in 6 years, Hitler's clone just turned 7, and aliens seized NASA's moon base. Also: a Python DDR clone exists, and Ridiculopathy is required reading.

I think speaking English is useful in England, but shouldn't be a citizenship requirement. Citizenship is about state protection and loyalty, not language. Culture and language shift over time; you can't legislate that. Encourage English learning, even fund it, but don't make it mandatory.

Watch Skeletor dance to a Japanese YMCA cover, explore Middle Earth in Lego, make fruit flies gay, and trash Tokyo with a novelty USB hub. People have too much time on their hands. Or boring jobs, like me. 8 days till Warwick!

Had a fantastic birthday weekend in London. Thanks to everyone who came out, though let's be honest, it was mostly about me. As it always is. I may have a problem with that. I don't care.

It's September 12th, so crack whores and inappropriate behavior rule the day. Also, check out IWantOneOfThose for novelties like a metal-cutting torch and an L39 fighter jet. Don't buy anything though, it's my Christmas shopping territory.

After long searching, I've found the ultimate procrastination tool: holdthebutton.com. Also, a complete l33t 5p33k translator now exists online.

I rediscovered a press release about the band Anthrax dealing with post-9/11 fallout from their name, plus CNN's absurdly overdone anniversary programming schedule. Also, a pretty brutal comic.

Took Friday off and hit London: Popstarz (best club ever, designed exclusively for me), a Brazilian barbecue, failed Body Worlds visit, hotel room gossip, Regent's Park, and Covent Garden's underwhelming street theatre. A great weekend, even if returning to Winchester remains as depressing as ever.

Two links worth your time: an alarm clock that can literally kill you, and a chance to take out Barney and the Teletubbies in surprisingly slick flash animation.

I know I shouldn't enjoy the Dow's 355-point drop, but I can't help it. It's like watching the Titanic sink. Horrible, yes, but you can't look away. Friends say I should care more about the economic fallout. They're probably right. But I'm still watching.

I want stuff for my birthday. Here's a list of hints.

The Harry Potter Nimbus 2000 toy broomstick vibrates. You stick it between your legs. The Amazon reviews are priceless. Also, I scored 0/10 on the BBC culture quiz, so there's that.

Surveys show nearly half of Americans want to gut the First Amendment in the name of national security. Freedom of speech, press, religion, academic freedom -- all apparently negotiable. Honestly, people who'd so eagerly surrender these rights deserve exactly what they're asking for.

I found errors in the BBC's Trinidad profile: their map is wrong and they misidentified Tobago's capital. Also, Sun's Java docs calling a DOM a "garden-variety tree" is idiotic. A tree is a tree, not a data structure.

Vegan bondage gear for the ethically conflicted, the Osbournes on every magazine cover including Popular Science, and a genuinely hilarious breakdown of pop idol formats worldwide. Click that last link. I mean it.

Two fun links: ogle attractive men at MostBeautifulMan (feminism!), and check out Fark's hilarious photoshops of legalized weed advertising. Plus, automated shopping carts are coming to replace cheap labor. The weed.com/switch campaign is my favorite.

VW's bringing back the camper van with DVD players and auto shift, but it needs to look more like the original to recapture Beetle-style success. Also: caffeine may cure skin cancer, you can arm-wrestle Freud, and one link is just... eeeeeeew.

Credit to Matt Elton for the office supplies link. More pressingly: how many innocent people like that BBC story's subject are we not hearing about? And what happened to our outrage over Guantanamo Bay?

Celebdaq is a BBC celebrity stock market game where you trade fake money on famous people's fame. It's totally addictive. Start with £10,000, win £100 real money weekly. Play now and buy Beckham.

Just when I was starting to forget.

The Masai gave New York nine cows after 9/11 -- a genuinely touching gesture. And if you want to return the favor, apparently you can send a sheep online with your credit card. Seriously.

I'm overwhelmed with projects I never finish and lonely without my uni friends around. I need a boyfriend, but my cycle of infatuation and compromise keeps failing me. I need a gay geek who's cute and likes clubbing. They basically don't exist, hence gaygeeks.org, which I haven't built yet.

A gay RPG geek blogger who makes me jealous, plus Homestar Runner links that are very funny.

Browse the ad graveyard for hundreds of funny rejected ads. And what's with the Dow's 250-point swing? Some madman with a joystick is giggling as he jiggles the economy around, amazed anyone thinks markets are rational.

Discovered Python (five lines for a working GUI app, sold), and fell back in love with EurekAlert, where science confirms the obvious: tobacco companies are shady, optimists outlive pessimists, female doctors are nicer, and crystal chips may replace barcodes. A good 24 hours of random internet wandering.

Space elevators could make low earth orbit a four-hour ride and geosynchronous orbit reachable in a week, all at a fraction of current rocket costs. This is genuinely exciting stuff.

Satirical writers are recycling the same tired "Arafat is gay" joke. Two stories in, the pattern is clear: they've hit a creative wall.

Google has indexed my entire site, including blog entries. Amusingly, it will now also index this post about being indexed, creating a hopelessly reflexive loop of links.

WorldCom's already-record fraud just doubled to $7 billion. Whoops! The Dow's been climbing anyway, and Modern Humorist remains funny with new Muppet characters and Anna Nicole Smith content.

Dijkstra, one of computing's Newtons, died August 6th largely unreported. Also: people are implanting devices to stop overeating while millions starve in Africa. Eat less. Don't need a gadget for that.

I've gone from horrified fascination to genuine enthrallment with this columnist. Today's highlight: a list of freaky merger jokes, including Polygram Records, Warner Brothers and Keebler combining to form "Poly-Warner-Cracker."

The US military has apparently been flying massive, silent, delta-shaped aircraft capable of reaching orbit since the 1980s. UFOs explained? Maybe. Also, that CNN Money columnist is an idiot.

Lego men building a computer? Yes please. One day I'll make something this cool too.

Even my cynicism couldn't survive this. A town of 10,000 in Newfoundland absorbed 6,000 stranded air travelers after 9/11, housed them, fed them, took them on boat trips. One grateful passenger started a college scholarship fund on the flight home. Wow.

Dreading graduating right into a recession, which means I'll probably have no choice but to do a PhD and wait it out.

FARK got punk'd by a diving humor site. Also: Buddhist spaceship cults, online population stats, dragon truthers, and drunk driving consequences. I finally wrote some Java after classpath hell, then promptly slacked off by playing the virtual stock market with $500k I'm too scared to invest.

The Dow is my favorite spectator sport right now. Will it crash or rocket skyward today? Either way, the breathless financial coverage is pure entertainment. Also: check out Typorganism's ASCII art generator. Upload your face, see yourself in print.

Work got better today and I actually got stuff done. But the real highlight: found a London contract paying £200/hour for Java/Oracle/MQ Series work. That's 10x my current rate. Suddenly I'm very motivated to learn MQ Series.

British kids can't play, marshmallow roasting is deadly, Austin Powers 3 is rubbish (though Beyonce helps), the stock market refuses to dramatically collapse, and 80s TV makes you smarter. Just another day in the news.

It's been 2000 years since the last set of commandments, so here's an updated list for the 21st century: get a computer, get internet access, check your email, verify your sources, don't spread rumors, and for the love of all that is holy, read the manual before bothering your techie.

I compare London, Paris, and NYC subways and find each gets some things right that the others get wrong. The fixes are obvious and cheap. Why won't they just do them? Hire me, Ken.

Back in Winchester, the world's only one-horse city. Staying at Erasmus Park, surviving on dialup, table football, and shameless self-documentation. Mass emails feel pushy, so the journal it is. Projects pending: my third-year project, a site update, and GayGeeks.org, my transparently desperate attempt at internet dating.

A roundup of links: invisible comets, powers of 10, a great domain name, Television Without Pity's Sex and the City recaps, and fat people suing everyone. Also, I'm not alone in threatening to kill people with a spoon. Finally got a work project, but clearly not too busy to blog.

Sierra Leone's ex-dictator is broke and living with his mum, which is funny enough. But the real kicker: the UN sent him to study law at my university, Warwick. I can't stop picturing a former military dictator at Top Banana.

Day 3 at IBM, posting from the office since my accommodation only has dialup. Found a fascinating first-hand account of an epileptic seizure written by the person experiencing it in real time. Beautiful writing, terrifying to imagine witnessing it live.

Cool crop circle photos worth a look.

America's moved on from war coverage to kidnapped girls and cratering markets. Meanwhile, I start at IBM Hursley Monday, shirtless and clueless, since my boss hasn't called and my shirts are on the south coast. Crash, markets, crash!

Two posts in one day -- sorry! Check out AllTooFlat.com, especially *A Brie History of Time* and the Google mirror. Also, the stock market's continuing slide looks eerily like 1929, and I'm worried history is about to repeat itself.

Last night in New York playing Tropico and stumbled on SaveKaryn.com, where a woman wants strangers to bail her out of $20k in self-inflicted credit card debt. The audacity is staggering, especially since she apparently put even more debt on the card to build the donation site.

Six days into New York. Hit Central Park, the Met, Liberty from afar. Met Ed's friends, one of whom would enthusiastically service Jon Stewart on demand. Fingers crossed he's a reader.

First time in New York. It's basically London but bigger, cleaner, and sweatier. The accents are grating, the buildings are absurdly tall, and the whole place feels like a film set. Seen Central Park, photographed skyscrapers, plenty more tourist nonsense still to get through.

Corporate scandals are making it risky to buy a copier, pay electricity, or make a phone call. Looks like the recession started in 1997 and everyone's been faking profits since. Anyway, off to New York for July 4th!

Exhausted by the endless Middle East violence. On a lighter note, Googling my pre-exam anxiety led me down an unexpected rabbit hole.

Responding to an MSNBC piece on bad software: unlike engineers who rebuild flawed machines from scratch, coders patch and graft changes onto existing code. All those shortcuts and compromises compound into garbage. Code reuse isn't the answer. That's why software sucks.

The so-called economic recovery looks shaky as markets freefall. A recovery built on borrowed money for cars and houses won't last. Consumers will crack just in time to torpedo my job prospects. Fanfuckingtastic.

Surprising news: the major labels are offering legal downloads at reasonable prices. Meanwhile they're also poisoning file-sharing networks with fake songs. Plus a roundup of cool links: credit-card cameras, a Unix Rosetta Stone, mind-blowing nanotech storage and more.

2 exams down, 9 to go, and my brain has checked out. HCI is mind-numbing. Martian FM is the opposite: brilliant. Cowboys, Big Brother lookalikes, shoot-outs over plastering disputes. These people are wonderful.

Highlights from the Scientific American Web Awards: Living Internet is a fantastic resource for internet newbies, ALICE the AI bot is surprisingly lifelike, there's a cool X-Men retrospective gallery, and Schedler Shebeen offers jokes and viral clips galore.

Avoiding revision with SatireWire, X-Men: Evolution trivia, and coveting t-shirts I'm too cheap to buy.

Clearing the backlog: inner-city inmates make "hick-hop," OnlineConversion.com is surprisingly useful, and I've been down a webcomics rabbit hole with mixed results. Also, there are way too many Final Fantasy characters.

Sharing a grab-bag of links: Sanskrit lyrics to Duel of the Fates, Ken Perlin's cool HCI Java applets, Edgar Rice Burroughs' Martian Tales, and updates on Charlie Hunnam post-Queer as Folk. Undeclared is awful but he's cute, and the US QAF is enjoyably Americanized fluff.

Revising all day killed my blogging mojo, but here's what I've got: reasons to ban cloning white people, ice oceans discovered on Mars (hello, terraforming potential!), and my dream of sightseeing through Valles Marineris. Mondays still suck.

Procrastinating from revision by sharing SatireWire gems: the Pentagon wants remote-controlled rat spies, and you can eat a koala in retaliation unless you're a hinjew. I love SatireWire.

Finally got the weblog back-end working, thanks to procrastination. If it's broken, you can't read this anyway.

The real world is boring, painful, and indifferent to me. My mind is better. I fly, shatter into silver angels, swim as dolphins, blast back at bullies with beams of light. Why settle for here when I have all that in my head?

A poem wrestling with guilt, shame, and the crushing weight of others' judgment. I question why I internalize their bigotry, why I can't cast it aside, and reckon with a darker truth: I might be just like them if I weren't the one they condemn.

A tongue-in-cheek boast that starts as personal bragging and ends as group superiority — poking fun at how quickly "I'm better than you" becomes "we're better than them."

I attended St. Mary's College in Trinidad and hated every minute of it. Crumbling facilities, Catholic indoctrination, non-Catholic students used as unpaid groundskeepers, a culture of universal mutual hostility, and a teaching staff composed almost entirely of incompetents and burnouts. Sadly, it's still one of the better schools in the country.

A half-formed sci-fi screenplay idea about teens gaining alien-boosted powers to defend Earth. Features a self-insert character named Seldo, a team with complementary abilities, and some genuinely fun dialogue. Massive plot holes acknowledged. Possibly never finished.

A fantasy vignette featuring Lord Seldolivaw, a gifted young lord who seeks Lady Deborah's aid against a growing threat in his realm, then departs at tremendous speed. Features a memorable telepathic link sequence. Left unfinished.

A poem about the quiet contradiction of shyness: wanting connection but fearing it, holding my tongue while hoping someone turns my way and sees me anyway.

A poem about the drama queen we all know: bouncing from crisis to crisis, spreading gossip, making mountains from molehills. She's exhausting, self-aware, and completely unrepentant. And honestly? Every friend group needs one.

A poem about a woman who never quite fits in, invisible at school, overlooked socially, finding hollow comfort in church work and family visits while longing for real intimacy. She goes on dates that lead nowhere. She dies alone. It's bleak, but honestly, it needed saying.

A poem about serial one-night-standers seeking connection through sex but finding only emptiness. Skilled at seduction, hopeless at intimacy, they keep returning to the meat market, alone despite never sleeping alone. You can't see another's heart by groping in the dark.

A portrait of toxic masculinity's vicious cycle: the lad who knows better but can't stop, drinking, fighting, hurting people he loves, becoming his dad, raising another just like him. Bleak, sardonic, and depressingly inevitable.

A poem about a beautiful boy who coasts through life on his looks, never developing personality or skills, only to find himself adrift at 35 when a younger face steals his crown. Beauty without substance leaves you with nothing when the beauty fades.

A poem about unrequited love and the friend zone. She shared one kiss with her best friend, and has spent years waiting for a second that will never come, wasting her youth while he dates others and she picks out his clothes.

A poem about a chaotic, brilliant, maddening woman who crashes cars, weds drifters, makes stunning art, and somehow survives it all. Neurotic, yes, but those rare flashes of genius and insight make enduring her worth it.

A poem about a girl broken down by school, parents, and society until she believed she was worthless. Conditioned to apologize for existing, she forgot her gifts. The ending is devastating and intentional.

A poem about a self-destructive friend who performs danger for spectators while real friends rush him to the ER at 2am. He's not truly crazy, just a careful liar craving attention from people who are fans, not friends.

A poem about the suffocating cost of "perfect" religious upbringing, where every thought, touch, and doubt is controlled. The model child, shaped entirely by his parents' will, has nowhere for his rage to go. Until they find the body.

A poem of encouragement built on the idea that problems are time-soluble, that invisible struggles are still real, and that sometimes the best advice is recognizing someone is already doing fine. I'll be here regardless.

A poem about chasing success only to find it hollow. When you bend your rules to win, does the victory even count? I've compromised my standards, and now I'm winning but it feels like nothing. Nobody cares how you got there. Maybe that's the saddest part.

A satirical song about third world struggles, hypocrisy, and American cultural dominance. Corrupt governments, borrowed dollars, cholera water, and yet we still wear Nike. We hate America but want to be America. Because yeah, the third world really sucks.

A poem about the overwhelming paralysis of wanting to fix everything and fixing nothing, as problems pile into a crushing wall of inaction. But a billion of us feel this way, and together we might hold it back.

A poem about beautiful people who move through the world effortlessly, inspiring helpless devotion while remaining oblivious to their effect on others. Also a note to myself: stop forcing writing into preset beats. Let the rhythm emerge from the words instead.

A poem and prose piece urging you to stop living in fear of judgment. Nobody is watching as closely as you think, the walls are imaginary, and the only thing stopping you from being yourself is you. Let it go. You have nothing to hide.

I write because the thoughts arrive already rhymed, already shaped, and I have no choice but to string them out. I wish I had more imagination. But the shadow songs keep echoing until another rhyme is said. I weep for the brilliant insights that fade in waking's light.

A poem about the tension between inner growth and the pressure to stay small, stay safe, stay the same. The world wants you on automatic. I'm overflowing.

I keep searching for perfection while falling for the wrong guys. Am I asking too much of the world and myself? Should I settle and call my search a halt? I can't be honest with someone else when I can't even tell myself when enough is enough.

A song skewering pop music clichés, structured as a duet between a "serious artist" narrator and exaggerated prefab popsters. I collected actual radio lyrics over 24 hours to prove the point. Spoiler: I caught myself using a cliché at the end.

A poem about coming out to my parents, fearing I'll become a stranger to them, but pleading that this stranger still needs their love to survive.

A poem about a controlling mother who sees her son as an extension of herself, unable to accept who he really is. When he finally asserts his own identity, both find imperfect freedom.

A poem about a bright kid lost in isolation, depression, and silent suffering. Old scars, shattered dreams, and the weight of an unwitnessed fall into darkness.

A poem about people who treat me as a novelty rather than a person, collecting "weirdo friends" to impress others while reducing me to comfortable clichés. I refuse to be squeezed into their jigsaw. Know me as I am, or don't bother.

A playful, bouncing poem about life's chaos and randomness, finding humor in the absurd, the hilly Earth, upended status quos, and the slippery search for meaning. Take it as a joke, find what's in there, make something tasty.

Feeling numb, pointless, and stuck in a fog. First love that wasn't, wanting what I can't have, too tired to cry. But I'm not giving up. I'll fight my way back to happy.

A poem reminding us that we live on a lucky rock, shielded from a nuclear sun, wrapped in living green, replenished by purifying rain. A million die each day, yet more are born. How dare we complain?

I'm in love with someone I can never approach or even look at directly. Every stolen glance brings equal pleasure and pain. I don't know if they feel the same. I can't ask. I can't even say their name. My secret stays buried in guilt and silence.

A poem about soul music's raw power to take over completely, leaving no room for thought or resistance. It's primal, untamed, and all-consuming. Music isn't something I simply hear; it's everything, and there was nothing before it.

A poem about feeling peripheral, disconnected from the main event of life. I'm the sideshow nobody notices, clowning through existence, wondering if anything I do matters. The circus rolls on with or without me.

A poem about unrequited love and longing for someone beautiful but indifferent, whose very existence feels like torture. The world shaped them perfectly, but left no room for me.

A poem about a man paralyzed by self-doubt, unable to see his own impact on the world because he's too close to his own life to gain perspective.

A poem about the unknowable self that lurks within, driving my actions without my consent. I've traveled far but never found myself, and this hidden inner force clouds my judgment, harms those I love, and leaves me pleading for forgiveness from those I've hurt.

A poem about humanity's journey through time, urging us to look beyond ourselves and steer toward something better. We owe our children stronger rafts and clearer paths so they can shape the river's course long after ours has ended.

A poem about feeling unique and misunderstood, longing for connection while holding myself apart. I wonder if being special means being alone, and whether it's time to stop standing apart and just fall back into the arms of humanity.

I'm in love, terrified, and moving fast. I've found someone who feels like a missing piece of myself, and their absence physically aches. I don't want friendship or labels. I just want them to hold me and say they miss me too.

A poem and prose piece about a friendship, or father-son relationship, that curdled into something unforgivable. I wanted to forgive, to rebuild those sandcastles, but the wounds won't close. Every time I see your face, I hear the echoes.

A poem about coming out to someone close, and the painful year since. I miss what we had before my truth changed everything between us. I don't know when we'll find our way back to each other.

Secrets fester when you hide them. You think no one notices, but really no one knows, and the paranoia is worse than the secret itself. Pain doesn't have to be dramatic to be real. Let it out. In the open, problems shrink. Secrets only look dirty in the dark.

A high-energy poem about living for the weekend. Drop the stress, hit the floor, and dance until dawn because Friday night freedom is fleeting and the beat is cheap. No excuses, no wimping out. Get up and move.

A poem about breaking out of isolation and connecting with others. Stop hiding in your shell, get out there, share a glance, feel the crowd, make human contact. Life hurts when you live it alone.

World peace is impossible. We're genetically hardwired to fight over ideology, and total peace would mean evolutionary stagnation anyway. The best we can hope for is conflict limitation, which ultimately requires faster-than-light travel and infinite universal expansion. Cheery stuff, but at least it's something to aim for.

Microsoft's monopoly conviction is long overdue. The real crime isn't dominance itself, but using OS control to flood unrelated markets with inferior products. My prescription: restrict their expansion into media and content, open the Windows source code, and impose serious regulatory oversight.

I describe the five stages of computing expertise, from wide-eyed wonder at your first machine to intentionally pouring Coke into the disk drive. How accurate is it?

TV has replaced real human interaction as our emotional role model, training us to respond to situations the way American scriptwriters think we should. The result is hollow "sitcom moments" where we suppress natural reactions. Christmas used to be a gloriously hypocritical mess. Now everyone just tries to be nice and hates it.

Both science and religion claim to explain the universe but will never agree because they operate in different frameworks. Religion demands perpetual faith; science asks for temporary faith while seeking real answers. That's why I back science with my time and money, and actively discourage religion.

Science fiction is the only fiction worth reading because it's the only genre that truly *enlightens*. Regular fiction just rearranges the same life experiences into new combinations. Sci-fi gives you genuinely new concepts, new ways of thinking about existence. If I wanted real life, I'd go outside and live it.

Being surrounded by people who don't know I'm gay has brought back every awful feeling I'd forgotten: the guilt, the vigilance, the claustrophobia of hiding. Acceptance has to keep happening. I refuse to be recloseted again. I'll out myself, help others, and fight everything that keeps closets closed.

I'm furious at people who completely miss the point of art. Fifteen people on VH1 thought Alanis was being a slut in "Thank U" -- it's obviously about honesty and vulnerability. If meaning lives in the observer rather than the artist, what's even the point of creating anything?

I'm only creative when I'm unhappy. Stress and discomfort generate ideas; peace and quiet are just when I execute them. My best creative period was during depression. The problem: creating things makes me happy, which kills creativity. I need resistance to move, and I can't manufacture genuine opposition for myself.

I turned off Madonna to listen to rain on the roof, and it sparked an insight: rain is the ultimate sound experience. It surrounds you completely, it's perfectly random, it carries no message or agenda, and every rainfall is utterly unique. No recording can ever replicate that.

A frustrated challenge to those who understand science yet still cling to religious belief. How can you know the chemistry of life, the neuroscience of thought, the physics of the universe, and still need God to explain the stars?

Happiness boils down to fulfilling your wants, not some arbitrary set of "needs" defined by society. Ignorance is bliss, but infinite knowledge might be too. There's a miserable middle ground most of us occupy. More thinking required.

I explore what makes friendships form, last, and fade: you need to know someone, admire them, care for them, and have it be mutual. Maintaining friendships requires continuous growth and communication. As for losing friends gracefully? Turns out honesty is the only option, and it still sucks.

Buggy browsers drive me crazy. Netscape and Microsoft spent the 90s in a petty tag-inventing arms race, deliberately breaking compatibility and ignoring the W3C, leaving web developers like me stuck building every damn page twice. Business people are insane. Here endeth the bile.

Got a story accepted on Slashdot. Yay.

My bookmarks pile up until I can't take it anymore. This week: the Israel-Palestine conflict needs to just stop, I built an XML/PHP app, some webcomic recommendations, the Simputer, the evil CBDTPA, spike-based spam justice, and Scott McCloud being delightful.

My blog just turned one year old. 137 posts, one every 2.6 days, mostly geeky links and incidental nonsense. Not much has changed and nothing will. Here are some links: a cool girl's site, how to strip KaZaA's adware, eDonkey, Blair's 9/11 speech, robot orderlies, and Arctic Eskimos reconnecting with lost traditions.

Working on a site redesign that looks great, but the gruntwork is killing my motivation. Also: everyone needs a naked cowboy in their life. Crazy people are the best.

A dull Easter vacation with spotty internet. Highlights: the iBong, stern Russian greeting card chickens, a Java drawing BBS, some useful Windows tools, a brilliant mashup track, job rejection for being a student, CMS nightmares, and a fat dancer leaving a band.

A link roundup: rediscovering Oasis Magazine, PHP going too far as a GUI language, C++ becoming a scripting language, UK computer parts retailers, the new Star Wars EP2 trailer, Jim Henson clips, Pop Idol's cuter contestant, Silicon Pines for tech support victims, and TightVNC for remote computing.

Easter vacation is here and I'm clearing out my bookmarks backlog. Highlights include file sharing drama (KaZaA vs Morpheus), VCD tools, a 2002 movie preview, and LimeWire vs BearShare comparisons. KaZaA wins for memory manners, AudioGalaxy loses for not having Fraggle Rock.

Survived another sleepless deadline stretch on 14 hours of recovery sleep. Today's absurdity: Divorce-Online.co.uk running their own dating service. Nothing says "find the love of your life" like a site dedicated to ending marriages.

The UN Security Council voted 14-1 to back a Palestinian state. About time. The endless cycle of death in that region fills me with despair.

BBC News is predictably grim lately, so it's refreshing to see Will Young coming out as gay making headlines. Called it. Also, the guy's barely been famous two weeks and he's already managed to torpedo his own career. Impressive work.

Coca-Cola's propaganda page is hilarious corporate spin -- sugar doesn't cause hyperactivity, caffeine is just flavoring, etc. The CIA would be proud. Also, Europeans may be part Neanderthal.

I discovered EurekAlert, where science journalists get their stories, then fell down a rabbit hole through memepool, B3TA's animal mashups, Animutation, and FARK. I stopped eventually. I should have stopped much sooner.

Finished the latest draft of my play, Silly Things. Nobody reads this blog anyway, so here it is: grab the manuscript in plain text or MS Word format and please, send me feedback.

Conducting an informal survey on a possible correlation between breastfeeding and sexual orientation. Mail me your age, orientation, and breastfeeding history. Also stumbled on the alarming "Ban Breastfeeding" website while researching. Results forthcoming.

Slashdot launched a subscription service, sparking controversy. But the real gem is this anonymous rant against advertising in the comments thread. Fantastic writing, and honestly, I agree with a lot of it.

Planet Timmy is brilliant sad-git comedy gold. Watch the PrettyBoyTim video for some fantastically random geek humour.

Linked to a penis size survey with surprising findings: white men apparently outsize black men (who knew?), and gay/bisexual men are 50% more likely to react with "awe" to larger endowments. Science is wonderful.

Stuck home on a Saturday struggling with Z, an evil language. Distracted myself with Technosphere (build creatures, set them loose) and The Sims, which is officially the most addictive game ever made.

Warwick's got more campus webcams, covering Cholo and the cooler. Creepy, big-brotherish misuse of technology at its finest. I love it.

Found the "Do the Evolution" video by Pearl Jam. The lyrics are great, but the video is stunning. Track it down and watch it.

A timeline of the future from someone who was 85% accurate last time is worth reading. Highlights include "25% of TV celebrities synthetic" by 2010, which made me laugh. I thought they already were.

Colin Powell caused a stir by supporting condom use for teens, which put him at odds with Bush's abstinence-only stance. Hard not to notice the hypocrisy of a former cocaine user and alcoholic preaching abstinence from something that hasn't hurt anyone.

Alanis is back with *Under Rug Swept*, a fantastic return to form. Also: America's treatment of Camp X-ray prisoners violates the Geneva Convention, the USA PATRIOT Act is being abused to silence dissent, and the "land of the free" is looking pretty hypocritical right now.

Tired but amused by a surprisingly accurate one-click personality test. Yes, I've taken dozens of these. Yes, I know what that says about me.

Only slept 45 minutes but finished my HCI assignment: designing a movie-editing suite. Screenshots are up. The design theory justification was junk, but the design itself is great, obviously. Also mainlining "Crying at the Discotheque." Another deadline Friday. Send help.

Procrastinating before my exam, sleep-deprived and randomly surfing, I stumbled onto Boing.com and got weirdly hooked speculating about the anonymous author, the family photos, and whatever plastic surgeon has clearly been busy with them.

Been slack about updating, but here are five bookmarked gems: cheap domains, rediscovering Brian Aldiss's Helliconia series, a geek cookbook, my new Handspring Visor, and a Latin dictionary. Also: Windows XP is every bit as awful as I suspected, and I lost a month of email. Please resend.

Pointing you to my friend Chez's neglected homepage partly to embarrass him into updating it. Highlights include hilariously sarcastic kids, a college guide with spot-on takes on philosophy and sociology (sociologists can kiss my ass), and science terms explained.

The Tories are dropping their anti-gay stance, which I support, but I worry about where the bigoted voters will go. A Steven Norris quote in the article points to a disturbing answer: the BNP. Maybe we need the Tories to keep losing to keep the scary right-wingers away from power.

My lecturer Alexandre Tiskin is evil. Be warned.

I'm totally addicted to bass.

Procrastinating on work with a roundup of tech links: the Rio Riot's 20GB looks great, CWB is evil, dolphins beat porpoises, China got bugged jets, gravastars may replace black holes, and I won my first eBay auction. Also, trees kill.

Week 1 of term 2 done. Turned in my assignment on time and hit London for the January sales. Camden Market delivered, Oxford Street didn't. Also: Prolog scrambles your brain but writes tiny elegant programs, the new iMac is gorgeous, and Castle Transylvania is disappointingly now a tourist resort.

Astronomers say the universe's average color is light turquoise. Terry Pratchett's Death got there first, calling it "duck egg blue." Science catches up with Discworld once again.

Memepool led me to Sam the goat, who dies repeatedly. Also: go see Lord of the Rings, then check out the Orlando Bloom fan site. Bring a drool bucket.

Back in Warwick after the holidays. Foggy but not freezing. Missed half my first lecture due to a nearby plastics factory fire snarling all the buses. Started swimming with Dan, London sales trip this weekend, and an assignment due Monday. Busy times.

Text-mode Quake 2 exists, and even though I don't play Quake or use text mode, I appreciate the sheer audacity of it. Boredom breeds brilliance.

A fantastic index of random generators, a cool new pixel arrangement giving monitors 4x the resolution, and why I'm skipping the year-in-review stuff. My 2002 resolutions will be revealed December 31, 2002, when I can make them realistic.

Merry Christmas eve! Taking a break from posting, and skipping the obligatory year-in-review nonsense.

The genes that make great engineers also cause autism, and in Silicon Valley, mildly autistic programmers are meeting, marrying, and concentrating those genes in their children. The result: sharply rising rates of Asperger's. More on this soon.

I found Anna Kournikova bestiality pics and I'm linking them. Scroll down on the site. Check archives if it's been a while. Buwahahaha.

Google Groups now archives Usenet posts going back to before I was born, meaning every major event of my entire life is documented in searchable form. It's a fantastically cool digital record of history, even if the discussions themselves are full of clueless people.

Celebrated Darren's 21st in style with dancing, drinking, and chaos. A burst pipe flooded three floors of the house. Nothing to do with us, I swear. The housemates aren't laughing yet, but they will be.

KPMG says you can't link to their website. So naturally I linked to them six times. They also apparently have a theme song, which raises serious questions about corporate dignity and the professionalism of everyone involved in its creation.

A real Magic 8-Ball in a Lego Mindstorms shaking cradle with a webcam is filling the etch-a-sketch void nicely. Also, spooning is way less interesting than Sex and the City made it sound.

Christmas is coming and I went shopping today, totally stumped on what to get people or how to pay for it all. Erk.

George Harrison's death is sad, but front page news? With a war on? News outlets have forgotten their responsibility: instead of reporting what matters, they manufacture importance, and readers let them. That's dangerous.

Major media conglomerates are even more sprawling than you think. AOL Time Warner's reach is staggering, and one company quietly owns 600+ radio stations. Check out this ownership map and prepare to be surprised.

A sobering look at global HIV/AIDS statistics for World AIDS Day. 28 million infected in sub-Saharan Africa alone, 2.8 million dying this year. An easily preventable disease infecting 6 per 1000 people worldwide. Just stupid and depressing.

GagPipe aggregates satirical websites so you don't have to choose just one. Also, Simon Miles may have just helped me figure out what to do with my life.

A batch of bookmarks worth sharing: Afghan history, port forwarding tips, keyboard shortcut myths, free mailing lists, world flags, Winamp volume leveling, friend quizzes, genuinely gross content, exploding dogs, queer superhero comics, gay characters in mainstream comics, a Java IDE, UK maps, animal symbolism, and fantasy art galleries.

Garbage's Beautiful Garbage is their best yet. "Androgyny" is perfectly me, and I'm manifesting a live performance while wearing my "Nobody Knows I'm a Lesbian" shirt. "Cherry Lips" makes me wish I'd written the lyrics myself.

Shout-outs to cut-and-paste graffiti artists and Nobby the Northern Dinosaur's 50 things wrong with the modern world. Martian FM is worth a visit too.

I explore two opposing views on disclosing security vulnerabilities. Full disclosure with exploit code may spike attacks but drives patching. Secrecy spreads attacks over time with less patching. Both extremes seem wrong: publicize vulnerabilities, yes, but step-by-step attack guides go too far.

I had forgotten. Follow the link.

Ralph Nader wrote a great letter roasting the DOJ's pathetic Microsoft settlement, which actually protects Microsoft from open-source competition. Also: Internet2 and Geant are doing amazing things with bandwidth. And there's a girl on the BBC who really should be a lesbian.

Clippy is dead, and even Microsoft is celebrating with flash movies and a terrible song. Not very funny, but marketing weenies get points for effort. Also: rowing through office hallways is apparently a thing, and genuinely hilarious.

US networks are suppressing bin Laden's statement at White House request while simultaneously broadcasting counter-propaganda. That's state censorship, plain and simple. There's no obviously good outcome to any of this. War is such shit.

Bad week for Microsoft: XP is 11% slower than Win2K at best, and .NET Passport has already been cracked, leaking credit card numbers via malicious Hotmail emails. Avoid .NET and Microsoft products where possible.

Week 2 of fast Internet brings anti-Bin Laden jokes approaching All Your Base levels of overkill, random URL exploration, and a flood of new software including ZoneAlarm, Morpheus, and GhostScript. Broadband is clearly bad for productivity.

The Onion's 9/11 issue is out and it's both funny and tasteful. A good sign things are returning to normal. The piece with God clarifying his "don't kill" message is a highlight, but the whole issue is damn good.

Finally got ADSL and it's glorious. 576K downstream and I couldn't be happier. Also learned BT's pricing is actually mandated by Oftel, not greed. NTL still useless though.

The RIAA is planning PR campaigns and "spoofing or interdiction" against file-sharing services. That's industrial sabotage, which is illegal, but these are the same folks deliberately breaking CDs to prevent copying, so I guess the law is optional for them.

Post-9/11, the Nimda virus feels trivial by comparison. Still, it's notable as the first virus you can catch just by viewing a webpage, exploiting an IE 5.5 security hole. Here's a demo and the CERT advisory if you want details.

September 11th. Everything has changed.

The SSSCA would make it illegal to own storage devices without "certified security technologies." Combined with the DMCA and anti-rave legislation, the US is becoming a frighteningly fascist state. The UK will probably follow. Time to emigrate. To Mars.

Pig Brother is Big Brother but with actual pigs in a luxury sty, streaming 24/7. I'm voting for Widdecombe. Also, a strange German person linked to me, so here's my reciprocal link. Long live internet back-patting.

Calling someone a "white-bellied bustard" is deeply satisfying. Try it next time you need a solid insult.

A satirical image imagines a world run by the Daily Mail, the UK's staunchly right-wing tabloid. Worth a look, as is the site hosting it, The Wibble, which reminds me of Matt's Alpen, but with a better name.

Son of Star Wars has a fun new flaw: intercepted missiles don't just disappear, they land *somewhere* untracked between launch site and target. Could be your backyard in middle America. Or Europe. Nice.

Neurons grown on silicon is cool science, but the image of neurons fenced in with little plastic posts because they kept trying to escape? That little guy looks unhappy. Launching my Free The Neurons campaign tomorrow.

A real, physical Etch-A-Sketch controlled by a robot and viewable via webcam. Not a simulation. An actual Etch-A-Sketch. The internet is amazing.

Boxing's pre-fight theatrics are embarrassing enough, but the homophobic trash talk is worse. Not that it matters -- I don't care about boxing anyway.

Adobe's press release quotes a fake customer praising their new product, but forgot to give the customer a name, leaving it as "Customer TBD." Classic.

Finished Stephen Baxter's *Space* - stunning scope, but he crams enough material for a library into 500 pages. Entire alien civilizations rise and fall in under ten pages. Almost comical, but still worth reading.

Long weekend, but swamped with work. Here are some recent bookmarks: Marvel Dotcomics, SamSpade.Org for network tools, the hilarious Things My Girlfriend and I Argue About, a currency converter, and an Oracle 8i SQL reference online.

A perfect Onion quote: why bother cloning when most Americans are already identical?

Interesting global internet stats: English speakers are now a minority online. Plus some Register amusement: Manchester Business School's plagiarised logo, NTL broadband getting a suspiciously biased review, Novell's mystery patch, and Yahoo being blamed for chat room dangers, which is absurd.

Read the Onion for summer survival tips like "put out fires in your home." Also keeping an eye on a newly discovered solar system that looks a lot like ours.

I want one of these.

My friends are putting me to shame with their excellent websites. Check them out, but come back — I'll be furiously updating. Also, guys, buy a proper domain already.

Curl is a new web language co-founded by Tim Berners-Lee that replaces the HTML/JavaScript mess with one clean, powerful solution. It needs a plugin now, but so did Flash once. If IE bundles it, this could be huge.

The Internet is more connected but less decentralized than you'd expect. Also: multitasking is scientifically unproductive, which vindicates me against those seven-things-at-once braggers and should embarrass every boss who interrupts you fifteen times a day.

Three days in and the new job is going great. Learning Oracle, comfortable environment, nice colleagues. Best part? I'm earning a pound every four minutes. Hard not to love that.

First day at the new job, but my laptop's being set up so I've got nothing to do but blog. Too early to say much about the job yet, but it looks promising.

Bush has withdrawn from Kyoto, the ABM treaty, and the Biological Weapons Convention, and is rattling sabers at China over Taiwan. All in one month. This man is out of control.

Flat panel CRTs from IBM match LCD prices without the manufacturing headaches. Interesting, though I'm still holding out for flexible screens.

The first DMCA arrest just happened: a guy exposed a flaw in Adobe's security and got arrested for it. Improve your security, don't criminalize people who point out weaknesses. If Microsoft follows Adobe's lead, I'm in serious trouble.

Microsoft's .NET turns out to be an open standard, meaning Linux users can implement it freely. Soon you could run Office on Linux, making Windows expensive and unnecessary. Looks like Bill's antitrust dodge has spectacularly backfired.

Microsoft's Windows XP locks out Kodak by defaulting to its own photo software and paid partner services, even when Kodak is installed. Looks like the same old monopoly muscle being flexed to crush competition. Hello, Judge? Anyone?

Microsoft's Windows XP product activation is backfiring badly. Locking software to hardware configs is stupid enough already, but it's triggering on routine upgrades too. Swap some memory, lose your license? This kind of greed might just be what finally does Microsoft in.

Exams done, now job hunting. Possibly have an interview Tuesday. Found 1000+ emails waiting for me. Need money, food is good. God bless Jobserve.

Exams are killing me and my bank balance is dire, but I just found out my university awarded me a scholarship 9 months ago and forgot to tell me. Silver lining. Still jobless, but my last exam is the 12th and then the daily job hunt calls begin.

Hooked on Big Brother again, only seven days in and already despising most of the housemates. My revision is suffering, but Channel Four has done it again.

Polygamy between consenting adults seems no different than gay marriage to me, so why is it illegal? Also, Microsoft's 64-bit Windows won't threaten UNIX on high-end servers: it's a first version, it's buggy, and "high-end server" plus "security" just doesn't equal Windows.

Accidental nanotubes, undetected nuclear smuggling, Bush wants more reactors, and we're basically screwed on energy either way. On the bright side, my font choices reveal I'm boring, and someone's planning an interplanetary Internet.

Small walking dinosaur robots are inspiring future scientists, apparently. Also discovered The Skills Market, a surprisingly well-designed IT recruitment site with neat supply-demand graphs for skills. Worth checking out if you're job hunting. Which I am, along with searching for somewhere to live this summer.

Sat in on a great Intel lecture about chip architecture. Now wondering if the Itanium/AMD split could balkanize computing the way Mac vs. Windows did, but with incompatible hardware too. Could be a nightmare for porting, and interesting times for Linux either way.

Play Risk online at dominategame.com. Server's swamped though; anyone want to help set up mirrors?

Not all my content comes from Slashdot. Some comes from Ed. Also: marijuana is 3-4% of Canada's GDP, and I'm on board with banning heterosexual marriage and reproduction.

Xbox crashed during a demo, flashing a very PC-like boot screen for all to see. Funny stuff.

Revising is boring.

A page criticizing Titanic misses all the real flaws and instead argues Rose should have chosen the evil rich fiancé because Jack was poor and Leo looks like a girl. They even get basic plot facts wrong. The actual bad parts go completely unnoticed.

Douglas Adams is dead at 49. Devastating.

Microsoft's new three-year licensing plan means you no longer own Office. I hate Microsoft. On the bright side, FreeSQL wants to use FreeNet as a SQL storage backend, which is stunning. Maybe I can port this blog there to escape Bill Gates's wrath.

Ed's stick-man kung fu is hilarious. More seriously, the looming AOL vs. Microsoft war is terrifying because one of them will win, and both are evil. I'm done giving either my money. Time to switch to Linux before I end up a slave to Bill Gates or AOL.

Found an amusing Telegraph piece about Telford being wiped out by an asteroid. The article is ostensibly serious, but the list of things that would be "tragically lost" from this middling English town is priceless. Also: genetically modified babies with three biological parents are apparently a thing now.

IndyMedia looks promising for non-corporate news. Also, here's how to build a budget atomic bomb capable of leveling a major city. Keeping up my anarchist streak lately.

Disappointed by London's May Day anti-capitalism protests. Five thousand protesters, six thousand cops, and everyone behaved themselves. Germany had firebombs, Australia had riots, but London managed nothing but cyclists. Anarchism has really gone downhill.

Complaining about cold buildings and bad internet access, but at least no Monday lectures. Here's a Gilbert and Sullivan parody link to make it worthwhile.

Back in London for the weekend. Amusing links: Microsoft tech support vs. Psychic Friends (psychics win on price and friendliness), IBM's self-healing networks, transparent PC cases, Maryland blocking Microsoft Passport, a terabyte stored in glass, and a keyless keyboard. Also, Black and White's gesture interface is getting well-deserved attention.

Recovering now, but Warwick's IT department has cut off my in-room internet. Posts will be sparse, so check Slashdot and Wired yourself. Also: it's sunny and warm in England. Remarkable.

Sick and back at uni. Posts will be sparse for a few days.

Matt Elton's site has great content, even if the design is a mess (thanks, Dreamweaver). He's inspired me to write humor again. Also, he linked to me first, so here's my reciprocal nod. And Matt: I wrote about science vs religion before you did.

The Economist profiles Cambridge's tech scene but seems baffled that companies there prioritize good products and lifestyle over IPOs. I find that attitude odd. Maybe not every tech hub needs to clone Silicon Valley, and maybe that's fine.

I'm angry about Columbine. America's conformist moron majority makes life hell for anyone different, then acts shocked when those kids snap. I was bullied, gay, and miserable in school. Until America stops punishing nonconformists and starts holding bullies accountable, my sympathy for shooting victims is basically zero.

I got a submission accepted on SlashDot, which combined with my Dilbert newsletter appearance makes me basically a media mogul. Also saw Bridget Jones's Diary -- good movie, but read the book first. Plus some minor blog navigation tweaks.

Laziness is scientifically good for you. After this vacation, I may be the healthiest person alive.

Forty years to figure out that light travels faster in air than glass. Next-gen fiber optics will be hollow tubes filled with air. Sometimes the obvious answers take the longest.

I should post interesting links here more often. Tim Berners-Lee's piece on the Semantic Web is brilliant, and The Economist's software survey covers similar ground: content that not only knows what it is but declares what it can do, enabling other software to exploit it.

Roundup of interesting links: media consolidation is scary but maybe not that bad, robot-eels are scarier, the dot-com crash is overhyped just like the boom was, actual layoffs are minimal and tech jobs remain plentiful. Invest now while stocks are undervalued. Also, websites desperately need phone-bill micropayments.

I'm excited about plastic transistors and flexible displays - I want a flat-screen t-shirt display. Also cool: the ISS robot arm that walks itself around the station by flipping end-over-end between power sockets. Check Slashdot yourself for anything else.

Exams in a week and I've done everything except revise. Also: Amtrak selling passenger data to the DEA is terrifying, Dogma was great, and Spice World is brilliant precisely because it never pretends to be anything other than a shiny, silly good time.

Working with MS Access? The MVPS Access site is a handy resource, and as always, Google has your back.

I may be in love.

Found a great Kuro5hin piece linking the nature of reality to corporate vs. individual conflicts, exploring how organizations do things none of their members actually want, a theme Steinbeck touched on in The Grapes of Wrath.

Found a solid free SMS site: TextMessenger.co.uk. Send up to three messages free, then 5p each. Clean interface too.

Reason magazine rocks. Journalistic intelligence in its purest form.

My housemate Simon tried to open a bottle by screwing a corkscrew through the metal cap. The story made it into the Dilbert newsletter as a True Tale of an Induhvidual. Fame at last, of a sort.

Discovered Extreme Programming, a team-based development methodology that's field-tested and well-regarded. Now wondering how my professors will feel about me proposing pair coding for my end-of-term project.

Interesting ZDNet piece featuring professional scam artists' diaries. They exploit AOL's screen name policy as a spamming springboard. Also, work picked up: converting Excel spreadsheets to Access databases with incompatible formats, which may mean learning VBA.

A management coup has been attempted at BrainSpark, incubator for my former dot-com employer EasyArt, by the former COO who was once my direct boss. Dot-coms are endlessly entertaining. I almost miss the silly money.

I've stopped sharing Slashdot links because everything there is worth reading, and you should just be reading it yourself.

Got a Nokia 3210. It plays the Imperial March and displays "Star Wars" as my operator logo. Found free logos at BoltBlue (one per day) and ring tones at YourMobile. Can't believe anyone pays real money for tiny black-and-white icons.

Got a data entry job after two weeks broke on vacation. MSIE is a security disaster, Netscape is garbage, Mozilla shows promise but crawls. The MSIE patch doesn't even fix it, meaning HTML emails can execute arbitrary code. I miss when email viruses were just hoaxes.

Windows users should switch to The Bat for email. It beats Outlook on every front: no bugs, faster, more features. One of the rare apps worth actually paying for.

AlterNet has a brilliant piece arguing school shootings are a white America problem that white America ignores. The drug statistics alone are staggering and somehow more darkly funny than anything the Onion published this month.

Flying cars are getting closer to reality. The SkyCar looks amazing but needs a 70-meter landing circle, so driveway parking isn't happening anytime soon. Still, it looks like the Mach 5!

Polymer displays are finally real, and they're better than LCDs in every way. The market's exploding from $3M to $2.7B by 2005. Watch Kodak and Cambridge Display Technologies.

Started a blog to keep content fresh and turn rants into articles. This first post is pretty pathetic, but hopefully things improve from here.