You know the Larson cartoon with the two astronomers next to a telescope? They see a brick wall through it, and one says to the other “Well, that’s it. We found the edge of the Universe. Let’s go home” or something like that. Well, unbelievably, I just did the same, sort of:

For any geek who’s interested in the structure of a web page they’re looking at, try Aardvark. (You are using Firefox, aren’t you?). It rocks. Once turned on, you can roll the pointer over an element to see the bounding box, the type and the CSS class and/or id, if any. Also you can see the source, muck about with widths, turn off elements and so on. Very nifty - well worth a look.

As you may know, they have a tradition of putting a different animal on the cover of each of their geektastic books. Are they having a laugh, then, that their MacOS X Panther in a Nutshell book has a bloody Alsatian on the front?

Just took the server down for a while to try and fix the cooling problems it’s had. I’d bought some braided sleeving to try and bundle some cables together to improve the air flow. I’m so rubbish with the fat hands and the dodgy eyesight that one hour later, I’ve done precisely two of the power supply cables. Count ‘em - two. Both of those were a durned struggle too. Still I got the new fan in there. It’s just a case of stuffing all the connectors back in and hoping for the best. Science!

Updating my profile on StumbleUpon lead to this personality test. What the hey. It wasn’t conclusive on the first 3 of the 4 type pairs, and it’s all a load of old pony, but anyway:

Well, I am an engineer of sorts, and I got the same result doing the test twice (actually more definite the second time), so maybe there is something in it.

I tell you what, though, the copy-and-paste HTML they supply is bloody awful. It’s not even a table for position - it’s a table with one row and one column! Bunch of arse. I tell you what, their code is not written by an ISTP Engineer…

Eh? Surely not. A computer technology company with excellent tech support? That would be Linksys. I managed to bugger up my WRT54G router by a failed firmware upgrade and they couldn’t have been more helpful. Two calls walking me through the first and second Vulcan nerve-pinch resets and I was back on my merry way. The phones were answered instantly, and both operators knew what they were talking about and pitched their advice at exactly the right level: they could tell this wasn’t just an “is it plugged in” kind of support call. Having been on hold with other companies before this really was a refreshing change. I don’t even know what their hold music is - I never heard it. Your mileage may vary, of course; maybe I called at their slackest time. Whatever. I’m happy. I’m happy. And I’ll punch the man that says I’m not.

I have none. Lots to do, no time to do it. Joining Audioscrobbler has prompted me to tag my mp3 files properly using MusicBrainz - not easy when they top 60gb! I’ve left it running while I came to work - so far it’s about a tenth of the way through. It might also make me finally weed out some stuff that’s frankly terrible and I’ll never listen to.

I still have to sort out the web site for our holiday in Banff: stitching the panoramas is a bit of a cow. Too many things moving in the foreground and a numpty photographer who forgot about parallax - although allowing for parallax when you’re balanced on a plank with helmet and goggles on, 2000m up a very cold mountain isn’t exactly top of the list of priorities.

Plus, of course, there’s always more work to do on the site itself. Since it seems I’m actually keeping this blog thing going, I’m going to need to move it to its permanent home soon, complete with slicing and dicing based on date, category etc. And then there’s the long-awaited music section, RSS feeds and so on. Not to mention the tweaks that the footy blokes keep asking for.

I might even find some time to do real things, you know, in meatspace. Ha!

I haven’t directly recommended a site since I started writing this blog, I don’t think, but this one deserves it because to my mind it’s a jolly good idea, well-executed (barring the capacity problems they’re having just at the moment) and useful. I always like to discover new music, and this seems a good way to do it.

Audioscrobbler is basically a database of what mp3 tracks its users have listened to, and how often. It’s much like the stats iTunes keeps, but with key differences: it has plugins to transmit the data to the server for all the popular mp3 players (and several unpopular ones too :->) and because it’s centrally based, it can track the listening habits of people who listen to music on many different machines, like me. The sky’s the limit on what groovy things can be done with the data, but the core coolness is that I can click on a song or an artist, see who else listens to them a lot, and in turn see what those users like. Maybe I’ll find something new that I wouldn’t have discovered otherwise. It’s better than Amazon’s “people who bought this also bought” logic because that doesn’t take account of why someone would have bought something. I still get recommendations based on the fact that I bought a Tracy Chevalier book or two, despite the fact that they were gifts for my girlfriend. I even bought an Eric Clapton CD for her Dad, but I sure as eggs don’t want any of his stuff myself.

So here’s what I’ve been listening to so far. By the way, I love the way they hijack well-known advertising slogans and shoe-horn their name in there: there’s a different one each time you load their pages. My favourite one so far is “Help - I’ve fallen, and I can’t reach my Audioscrobbler!”.