Last night I bumped into someone I was at college with on Borough High Street. I knew his first name straight away, but it took me twelve hours to remember his last name. And then five minutes to find him on facebook...

The online, social, networked, web 2.0 world hasn't completely eliminated the need for human memory

Day 19. Coming out a bit multi-coloured, brown, blond and some black. Too much blond really so it doesn't show up all that well. But give some money anyway!

FAIL

I spent Friday evening and all day Saturday being ill and unlike certain bloggers (I'm sure we all know at least one) I wasn't going to inflict the details on you. So the goal of posting every day in November has taken a hit even quicker than it did last year. I'll still try to make "30 posts in 30 days" though.

This blog was down for a few hours this evening. I could have spent the time composing a post and having it ready to cut and paste in here now that everything is working again. I could have done that.

Oh well. Tomorrow is another day (spent at an users' day for the CMS we use at work, held in a building that is one minute's walk away from the office) and the it's the weekend.

Just a quick one to point out that when you build a Christmas web site in October, sometimes things go a little strange...

November has arrived accompanied by wind and rain and cold (and indeed a cold). How to spend the month?

Well mostly Lettice and I will be spending it buying a house. Or trying to. The other day we took a tame civil engineer to have a look round the place we're hoping to buy (in a sort of "look for the massive faults before paying a surveyor" kind of way) and he could only see one potential problem. Fingers crossed that it isn't.

Like last year, I'll be taking part in NaBloPoMo as a form of half-hearted solidarity with the people who are attempting NoNoWriMo.



And I'll be growing a moustache. Some banter in the office on Friday has somehow led to me agreeing at the last minute to take part in Movember. Now, despite having a silly name and being an Australian import, this is a very good cause so please make a donation. I promise to only post very occasional photos of the mo's progress.

Finally I'll be hiding from the bad weather and watching telly, not least Doctor Who which is back for a special on the 15th.

Last night I had a dream in which someone had hacked our servers and replaced all the images with, correct pixel sizes and file names, "glamour" photos. Which was a rather odd thing for a hacker to do. We were debating whether to shut the site down whilst we fixed it, or leave it up and try to repair things on the fly. Could we restore the images directories from a backup or could we make the CMS republish everything?

Rather relieved to get into work to find everything working as normal; on the servers. All the desktops had been upgraded to MS Office 2007...

I think I've found the root cause of why some date pickers are behaving oddly.

<c:if test="${criteria.startDate eq date and criteria.startDate eq null}">

criteria.startDate is a date object, however date is a calendar object representing the current date and should never be null. Hence, it's impossible for the above test to return true.

The code is total garbage and I wrote it. :-( I wish I had an excuse - I was still learning JSP, we were in a rush, it didn't crash anything, but frankly I should have spotted the dumbness of it before now. Oh well, on with the fixing.

Five years ago today I made the first post on this blog. 828 posts later here we are.

The posting rate has varied enormously but averages one post every 2.2 days. It was highest when I was self employed and working from home and lowest after Facebook and Twitter started to eat up some of the shorter, quicker posts I could have made.

Around 700 of those posts have also appeared on the LiveJournal version of the blog (which generates more comments than the main version, 882 vs 392), and around 250 have appeared as notes in Facebook.

I've moved host once, upgraded WordPress countless times, but kept more or less the same look and feel.

I've learnt how to code with XSLT, JSP and jQuery. I've also moved house, changed job, been to Venice, Amsterdam, Vancouver and Dublin, bought a lot of dinosaurs and gotten married.

Wales have won the Grand Slam, twice. Doctor Who and Star Trek have both returned triumphantly. Tony Blair and George Bush have left the building.

It's been a busy five years, and that's a very true thing.

I spent this afternoon giving TanitaTikaram.net, one of my oldest websites, a makeover from this to this.

I decided to use WordPress and to lightly modify an existing theme rather than create my own. I still have a lot of content to migrate but so far the results are looking good. What do you think?

Today was the 10th anniversary of my first date with Lettice. Back in 1999 we went to see The Matrix in Streatham. Today we had an adventure to celebrate.

First up was the Robot Zoo at the Horniman Museum. Did you know that it took three people to drive a chameleon?

Then we did a bit of shopping. Lettice bought beads and I bought Doctor Who books.(About Time 3 2nd edition is 500 pages long and has an end note about the Chuckle Brothers, how can you not want it?)

If you missed James May's plasticine garden at Chelsea you can now see it at the Royal Festival Hall.

Then we went on the London Eye. Yes, we live in London. Yes, we work in London tourism. Yes, it's been open for nine years. No, we hadn't been on it before.

Then there was yarn shopping. Followed by Yo! Sushi (between you and me, the County Hall branch is always nice and quiet in the evenings and only a short walk from the heaving, 45 minute wait to be seated, restaurants along the Southbank).

Anyway, I'll do a proper image post either tomorrow or on Monday, in the meantime there are pictures on Flickr.

I wonder if the staff in my local library think I have trashy tastes as all I ever take out is comics and tv/film tie-ins. Of course I do have some trashy tastes but I'm also a snob 'cos I buy the good quality books but borrow the trash for free.

At work, we've been doing Desert Island Discs and this week is my turn. I'll be buggered if I'm writing all this lot up and not turning it into a blog post.

I win. No seriously, I win this game because I have had a theme tune written for me. Well, technically it was written for my blog, oh okay, it was inspired by the name of my blog. What? This isn't a contest and I can't win? Oh. Sorry.

According to my mother my first musical experience was dancing (or being danced, as I was baby at the time) round the room to T Rex. Was I too young to be influenced by this? Or did it somehow generate an interest in dinosaurs rather than glam rock? Lucky escape.

Adam and the Ants - Stand and Deliver

I was torn between a classic Ants track or something from his later albums. In the end memories of Saturday morning's spent watching this video on Multi-Coloured Swap Shop won the day (but if you've only heard his old material check out the 1995 album "Wonderful").
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPgHbt0ODr4

Drill Queen - Born Depressed

Justin is an information architect with whom I worked on several projects; he also played guitar for Drill Queen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRrq6zp2_M8

Traveling Wilburys - Tweeter and the Monkey Man

Just about the only bits of vinyl from my dad's music collection that I copied to tape, and one of the few bands that Lettice and I both love. It looks like the record label have been at YouTube so we're lucky to find this animation:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2cb4t_tweeter-and-the-monkey-man_creation

Moxy Früvous - My Baby Loves a Bunch of Authors

Moxy Früvous were a cool, funny, somewhat cheesey Canadian band who I was introduced to via two friends at university. If you saw the groaning bookshelves in our flat you'd know why this song always makes me smile.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9F_XHb81N0

Cerys Matthews - Oxygen

I can't sing. I really can't sing. Neither can my brother, though as churchgoer he makes up with gusto for what he lacks in aptitude. Clearly we got our singing genes from the English or Swedish parts of our family not the Welsh.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPqaPHTlhdg

Pulp - Mis-shapes

The end of the summer of 1995. On the news it's Blur vs Oasis. But, before Blair, there was a much better third way.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7rxAeF1wmQ

Aziza Mustafa Zadeh - Ay Dilber
Stiff Little Fingers - Tin Soldiers

Hands up who wanted (or even expected) to hear some Azerbaijani Jazz today? Well, you're out of luck as I can't find it anywhere on the web. So have some classic punk instead.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pl5V26oXHUI

Tanita Tikaram - And I Think Of You

The reason I'm here. Sort of. I created my first home page in 1995 (personal home pages, remember them? Like Facebook profiles but you had to do all the work yourself) and wanted to do a bit more. So looking around the nascent web for the various artists I liked I spotted that Tanita didn't have any fan pages dedicated to her. The resulting site helped to get me my first job at a web design agency.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9bphQpCLNA

Book

Assuming I'm going to be here for a while then I want something fairly long. An old favourite or something I've never gotten around to? I think I'll go for the latter and take Peter Ackroyd's London: The Biography to remind myself of home.

Luxury Item

A brewing kit. Let's see which of the fruit on the island makes the best booze.

So I found this file, last modified 10 June 1997, on a set of back ups and it's a pub quiz that I ran in Balliol bar. In fact considering the date I suspect that this is the night that pink_weasel first clapped eyes on me and thought "nice guy, shame about the jumper".

People on facebook and twitter said that they wanted to see the quiz, so here goes.
( Onwards to the quiz )

I don't normally do the celeb spotting thing, but I'll just point out that today I passed Vic Reeves in Forbidden Planet. And it was only two or three years ago that I sat next to him in Yo! Sushi at Victoria.

Two people who live in London cross paths twice in busy public places. Shock.

1999: Iceland, Kwik Save, Co-Op, [pub], [Woolworths]

2009: Iceland, Somerfield, [pound store], Tesco, Sainsbury's

Today pink_weasel and I rushed home from work because (a) it was the start of the long weekend and (b) we could shop in West Norwood Sainsbury's on its opening day.