This hasn’t been the longest period of silence in the history of It Could Be Worse, but I had a valid excuse this time. While upgrading us to ADSL, Plusnet deleted my blog, photo gallery and database. They restored the sites, but the database was lost. I got most of the anger out of my system using Plusnet’s tech-support facility and discussion forum (a note if anyone from PN is reading: I’m sorry if I came across as a bit of a prat — I was very annoyed). Read more...

A week last Sunday I turned 29 (less than a year to go ‘til the Big Three-Oh! Poop!). My present from my brother, sister-in-law and nephew was an Archos Jukebox Recorder 20, an MP3 player with, in reality, 18.6 GB of hard disk space. Mind you, this is still larger than the hard disks of our two current computers combined, going to prove that the rise of home computers with disk capacities approaching a quarter of a Terabyte has nothing to do with people writing longer Word documents ;) As an aside — has the RIAA(Recording Industry Ass. Read more...

Matthew Somerville is a giant among web geeks: here is someone who, rather than just moan about the woeful accessibility of many corporate web sites, redesigns them. One of the sites he reworked was OdiousOdeon Cinemas, a web site that only works if you use — you guessed it — Internet Explorer on Windows. Odeon originally gave their blessing to the alternative version of the site but, citing “increasing complaints from users”, Odeon’s Marketing Director, Luke Vetere, sent a cease and desist e-mail to Matthew. Read more...

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. Read more...

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. Read more...

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… Read more...

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. Read more...

Keith told me to: Go into your blog’s archives. Find your 23rd post (or closest to). Find the fifth sentence (or closest to). Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions. Posted on August 18, 2000: If ever there was a talent wasted by (apparent) lack of motivation…

Drew told me to: Grab the nearest book. Open the book to page 23. Find the fifth sentence. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions. Because the information in the cell is a sort of heading for the entire sidebar, it makes some sense to convert the tdto a th. — Eric Meyer On CSS [ISBN 073571245X]. Page 23, sentence 5. Read more...

We’re having a little problem with the blog. It can be summarised thus: PlusNet, in their infinite wisdom, installed a new CGI web server. To be fair to them, the upgrade was much needed. But lo! Why did they have to change platforms (Linux to FreeBSD)? In the process, different versions of Perl, DB_File.pm and the associated system shared object were installed. So, whatever I did, I couldn’t do db_upgrade or db_dump/db_load! Read more...