Monthly Archives: June 2004

Urs Meier Stole My Sanity

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Urs Meier: not my favourite person.


Last night, England were denied victory in the quarter-finals of Euro 2004 by a dodgy Swiss referee with a ridiculous blond goatee and highlights. In case you missed it (where were you? Timbuktoo?) England led in the 3rd minute, Portugal were all over England like a rash, they equalised in the 83rd minute, before Sol Campbell’s 89th minute winner was disallowed for an apparent foul on the goalkeeper by John Terry. Portugal took the lead in extra-time, then England equalised five minutes later.


Then we lost on penalties.


Again.


Don’t blame Darius Vassell. Anyone could have had their penalty saved. Blame Urs Meier: the new bogey-ref of international football, taking the place held previously by Kim Milton Neilson after he sent off David Beckham in France ‘98. Can we have Pierluigi Collina next time, please?


I shall finish with a quote from Bill Bailey:

bq(Bill Bailey).
I’m English, and as such I crave disappointment.

MT 3

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I’ve just upgraded to Movable Type 3.0 Developers’ Edition. The upgrade went without a hitch. Now to see if I can convert from Berkeley DB to MySQL…

UPDATE

I had previously run the mt-db2sql.cgi script, and got an error to do with ‘use of uninitialized variable in numeric comparison’, and ‘comment_blog_id cannot be null’ (a MySQL constraint). I hacked the script, using Data::Dumper to see just what the heck was going on, and discovered that I had an orphaned comment without a blog_id or an entry id. Aha! Berkeley DB, in its file-based, constraint-less way, didn’t care. MySQL, though, did. I added two quick lines to set a value for blog_id and entry_id if they were false, and – Bam! – away we went.

After the débacle of the server upgrade, it’s a relief to have the blog data stored in a more robust format.

Bill Bailey – live at the Colston Hall, Bristol

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I went with Kathy and nine other friends to see Bill Bailey at the Colston Hall in Bristol last night. Apart from hearing a number of jokes from the previous tour (audio of which I obtained here) told ever-so-slightly differently, the night was fantastic. Bill introduced a new feature: the "Scale of Shame", featuring Evil Despots From History, like:

  • Idi Amin
  • Adolf Hitler
  • Robert Mugabe
  • Linda Barker, and…
  • Chris de Burgh


As to the question of "Where’s Osama", Bill morphed his face into that of CdB – nice move…


On a completely unrelated note, as a cat owner/lover etc. I thought I would point you in the direction of The Infinite Cat Project.

Why do I do this?

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I haven’t posted to this blog for over a month. I’m not really sure why, to be honest. It’s not as if I made a conscious decision not to blog; I just couldn’t be bothered.


I do have a bit of history for dropping things as soon as they become popular. I value my perceived individualism, so as soon as I think that something that marked me out as, if not unique, then at least unusual becomes popular, I tend to run a mile.


Anyway – there’s enough navel-gazing about blogging in the world of blogging, so I think I’ll stop there.


I feel like redesigning again, though.