Month: July 2006

See, there I was, just innocently trying to pay off my credit card, when I entered a bizarre world of circular logic:

So I try to email them to let them know that there may be a teeny weeny bug in the error-checking logic here. The web form that they give you for typing messages to them is about 1 inch square, but I write a detailed summary of the problem anyway, knowing this will more than likely be read by an idiot somewhere who won’t actually understand me (and/or care). I click send. Gah! For some ridiculous reason they are limiting the number of characters your are allowed to type in the message to 255. (Why? How can you say anything in 255 characters?) At this point I have already written 4 times as much as this, and consequently end up spending the next 10 minutes editing this down into increasingly incomprehensible txt spk. I click send again and despair. I’m still waiting for them to respond with a form response addressing some entirely different issue. I dunno why I bother.

Just a quick one (again): so I’m reading Metro on the train this morning (yeah, I know) and there’s an article in there about some power cuts in the West End yesterday: after I’d finished cringing about their use of the words “Dunkirk Spirit”, I was intrigued to read about the chefs at Aldo Zilli’s restaurant, who apparently had to walk out after “temperatures in the kitchen reached 150 degrees C”. Er, surely shome mistake, Metro? Maybe the temperatures in the ovens had reached 150C, but in the whole kitchen? Really? 50 degrees above the boiling point of water? Perhaps they meant Fahrenheit…

Elsewhere, Amazon have emailed me with some helpful recommendations:

“As you’ve bought similar books from us in the past, you might be interested in one of these great titles–available with fantastic discounts for one week only:
Marley and Me
Billie Piper: A Biography

Wayne Rooney: My Story So Far”

Er, what? Sorry? What books could I possibly have bought that led your computer to believe that I might be interested in this tosh? I mean, honestly…

Elsewhere, I see that TV Hypnotist Paul McKenna has won his libel case. Now, I’m slightly confused by this, but if I understand correctly, the crux of the case was that the Daily Mirror’s Victor Lewis-Smith had insinuated on a number of occasions that McKenna, like “Dr” Gillian McKeith before him, had bought a fake degree off the Internet. McKenna sued for libel claiming that he had been the victim of a con. So presumably he thought that he was buying a genuine degree off the Internet, then?

Just a quickie, but hey, isn’t gambling great! On Wednesday I joined several of my colleagues on a work social trip to the evening races at Kempton Park.

It was all rather good fun, although the tiny grandstand and all-weather course (the going, apparently was “standard”; you don’t say…) couldn’t quite match up to my previous trip to the races (to Flemington, back in November). By the time the penultimate race came round, my betting activities weren’t exactly looking too great–one of the other chaps from work was about £60 up by this point, but I had only lost money. Nevertheless, as promised, I phoned Sal back in London and read out the names of the horses so that I could place a bet for her. She picked Dancing Guest, purely on the basis of its name. I plumped for Best Guess, which seemed a rather appropriate reflection of my choices up to that point. Sure enough, Sal’s horse came home in first place, giving her a whopping £8 profit even though she hadn’t set foot on the course, and leaving me with even greater losses than before.

So, with the last race approaching it was all to play for. Someone in our group mentioned this horse called Finsbury, and it seemed rather appropriate. You know, because it’s a bit like Finsbury Park. Not that I’ve even been there or anything, except to change trains on my way to Enfield all those years ago when I worked up there, but you know…

Throwing caution to the wind, I recklessly backed this 14-1 shot at £5 each way, and wandered down to join the rest of the group on the grass by the finish line. As the horses came round the final bend, the announcer’s commentary was drowned out by the shouts of the people around me. Unable to hear the name of the leader, I tried to pick it out from the pack, but couldn’t see Finsbury anywhere. As they all crossed the line I scanned through the numbers on the trailing horses, just to see where mine had finished, but still couldn’t see it anywhere.

Ah well, another £10 down the drain then.

Then someone in our group said that Finsbury had won, and I initially assumed that they were merely joking, as most of us seemed to have had some money riding on this particular horse.

But no, hang on! There it was on the TV screen, with a caption reading “Winner: 7. Finsbury”

Fantastic. I danced all the way back to the bookie and collected my £97.50 winnings, grinning like an idiot. When you convert it, that actually beats the AU$200 I won for my part in that trifecta syndicate back in November. It also in one fell swoop wiped out my earlier loss and left me £82 up on the night, which to my immense satisfaction was better than everyone else from work.

Now, surely this, and our upcoming trip to Vegas in September, can be nothing more than the start of my slippery descent into addiction. Ah well, you heard it here first…

Who’s that Walking Past?
On the street outside our house?
Hey! Cheeky Cheeky!

Ah, so now my life is complete: I have finally seen The Cheeky Girls wandering the streets near our house. Sal had seen them several times before, of course–always together, always heading past our place towards St John’s Wood–but last night I finally got my chance, as we rounded off a highly pleasant weekend at Mumtaz, our surprisingly quiet local curry house.

“Look! There they are!” said Sal, pointing out of the window. “It’s the Cheeky Girls”

And sure enough there they were, walking down the street together in their identical outfits. Out in the street, some of the post-cricket crowd driving past, who had clearly just had a very similar conversation, honked their horn, causing one of the cheeky girls to turn round and wave at them.

“What are they doing with themselves these days?” I wondered aloud to Sal. “What does an ex cheeky do for work once the record deal has gone? It’s not like you can go and work in McDonald’s, is it?”

I opted not to run after them and ask. Instead, we just finished our curry and left.

It had been a lovely weekend. Earlier, we’d risen hungover early in the morning and inadvertently ended up watching Michael Palin travel the pacific rim in a ten year old travel series that UK History, in its infinite wisdom, had chosen to show continuously for the whole day, with Palin doomed to repeat himself until 1AM, each time just failing to reach his destination and complete his full circle (although bizarrely they were only showing the second half of the series, as if perhaps they’d only been able to rent the second disc in the box set; perhaps next week they’ll show the first half). By the time he’d reached the end of his journey, and was about to begin it again from the half way point, I managed to drag myself away and into the park, where I sought refuge from the tourists by heading for the secret garden, where I sat in the shade and finished off Douglas Coupland’s deeply disappointing jPod while listening to the sound of Paul Kelly wafting over from the Toast Australia festival on the other side of the trees.

A while back, I mentioned that I’d started uploading all my old photos onto Flickr. Now, I really like some things about Flickr, like the fact that the storage space is effectively unlimited, but I’ve never been entirely happy with some other aspects of the site.

For example, I really don’t like the way everything is ordered by the date it was uploaded (which means absolutely nothing to me) and not the date when it was taken (and in the recent redesign, one of my favourite navigational tools, the calendar, was hidden away behind several layers of menu item). I’ve also never been keen on the fact that, despite storing several different sizes of each shot, the only practical way they allow you to browse your photos is with the default, tiny sized ones (which is fine if you have a rubbish dial-up connection, but in the age of broadband, I’d be much happier if they at least gave you the option of easily looking through the pictures at a larger size).

Luckily, none of that actually matters, because one of the best things about Flickr is that they provide this cracking API that exposes just about every bit of information about your photos that you could need.

And that means, that I can do this: www.mattarmstrong.co.uk/photos

All the photo files are the very same ones that are hosted on Flickr, but the navigation is much more aligned with the way I’d like to show our photos off to the world.

– The photos in the photostream are in the order they were taken.
– The calendar is nice and easy to get to.
– When you look at the individual photos, it’s the “large” size (and there’s a handy “Download Original” button at the bottom if you want to save a copy of the full size version).
– You can navigate through through the images by clicking on the left or right side of a photo.

I still have a few more things to add, but it’s mostly there. So it’s up to you. Stick with the Flickr version, or look at my version. Whatever you prefer, I guess…