Grrrr So it turns out that, as well as being fundamentally incompetent idiots, our estate agents/landlords aren’t really very bothered about having any rent off us after all. That’s what I gather from the fact that I’ve spent the day trying to set up the standing order mandate they were supposed to be sorting out a month ago, that wasn’t paid yesterday. In spite of their indifference to the whole thing, I was actually quite…

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Shameless link-whoring Regular readers may wish to skip today’s post, as it’s little more than a shameless commerical plug: I’ve been helping out some friends of mine, Sam and Tina, who run a wedding video filming business, Satin Weddings. I’ve been trying to optimise their (very pink) website so that it gets a bit higher up Google’s search results. I’m just linking to it here so that the feisty little Googlebot, a regular visitor round…

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Glasto-tastic

Set yer alarm clocks, kids: Tickets for this year’s Glastonbury festival go onsale at 8pm on Thursday 1st April (although it might be worth checking nearer the time if last year is anything to go by–when they quietly changed the date to the day before, had around 3 people answering the phone line and ran www.aloud.com on a ZX Spectrum). I notice that the NME report on this story (here) says that “tickets go on…

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Angel and Jon came over to visit us last night, and they accompanied Sally and I on our second trip to the world of randomness that is the Hemingford Arms (don’t forget to close that window now!) This time we sat in a different corner of the pub, further away from the comedy vaulting mannequin, but in a suitable spot to inspect the dangling accordions, assorted stuffed animals and classical statues with anachronistic headgear. As…

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More linkage

– Play penguin baseball (hitting them lower down so they bounce and skid along the ground seems to be the best strategy). My best score so far is 302.2. [UPDATE: Actually I prefer this version, which appears to be much easier. I can get 536 on this one]. – The Onion: Yee-Haw! My Vote Cancels Out Y’all’s! – The Shorter State of the Union

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Linkage

– The list of 10 Mistakes Writers don’t see is very good. I’m probably guilty of most of these on this blog at the very least. – I won’t be publishing my pitifully low score on this quiz, but it’s worth doing anyway. – Finally, the design/content mixer is very good. Except I tried to mix www.pastemagazine.org/rob.php with www.pastemagazine.org/matt.php and it made my head explode.

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It’s not what you say… This article in today’s Independent made me smile. According to (Tory chairman) Liam “Dr” Fox–presumably having a break from judging Pop Idol (I know)–the Conservatives won’t be bothering with any of that liberal positive discrimination nonsense: “[he insisted] his party would select candidates on merit alone and not because of their colour or sex.” Dr Fox said: “For a meritocratic party to be effective it must be minority-blind. For us…

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Hounslow Plane crash? I’m intrigued by a sudden spike in traffic to the site from people Google-ing for hounslow plane crash, and air crash hounslow. Has somebody dropped a 747 onto the Treaty centre since I’ve been away, because I’m sure I would have heard about that, or is it just because the BBC recently repeated their shabby disaster documentary The Day Britain Stopped? (something I wrote about here)

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Five Angels for the Millennium We went to the Tate on Saturday to see two excellent installations. The ongoing Weather project, as I’m sure you know, is that huge sun in the turbine hall. There’s something utterly wonderful and childish about lying on the floor of the hall looking up at the mirrored ceiling reflecting yourself and everyone else back at you. We spent a diverting half hour or so watching other people messing about…

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