Bit quite here the noo. Any particular reason?

Right, probably safe to come back in, then, and make again my suggestion for a new game that was lost the other day. Is anyone on for a round of Collective Consciousness Hangman, in which one person sets a conventional hangman problem, but only other players are allowed to reveal the letters or add lines to the scaffold.

Other players take guesses in turn as to which letters are in the word. The players who arbitrate over what letters are in the word are not allowed to confer. The shape of the word can only emerge through tacit mutual consent - via, in other words, the collective consciousness. Ask Kevan to explain more about this.

[rab] Nice place you have here. I'm sad I haven't really had time to visit before, but I'm sure I shall be back.

• Spine not a single colour - resolved by choosing the 'dominant' colour.
• Shiny colours/trims - like gold and silver. Basically ignored, unless the entire spine was so made at which point I think I assumed the nearest matt alternative (like yellow for gold, or gray for silver).
• Colours not existing - like brown. See above. Pretend it's dark red.

As for brown not existing - do you mean that just for light or for pigment? Does the Chancellor of the Exchequer also not exist?

[flerdle] I suppose. I still think there is a difference between subtractive colours (ie pigment) and additive colours (ie light) in this regard, though I would also readily concede that brown is almost as much an absence of any other describable colour as black - which is perhaps why you don't see bluish browns, because brown is essentially black with less blue in it.

Consider - when you mix paint to make brown, you start with yellow then add a bit of red and a small amount of blue. Another option is to just mix red and green, but I've also made brown by starting with red and adding black. There has to be some blue in there to take the colour away from being orange, but not enough to make the blue distinct: the blue in brown is like salt in vegetables.

I should perhaps clarify that I am not actually all that attached to the colour brown, and only own one pair of brown shoes.

Interestingly enough, in my first year of uni I was accidently on two electral rolls, as my hall of residence automatically put everyone on. It was a general election so it is illeagal to vote twice (I was lead to believe, i'm not an expert). I phoned up the relevant person at the city council to tell her that I wasn't allowed to vote. Her advice to me was just not to turn up, which i protested about as I didn't want to be part of the apethetic 70% of the population who don't vote. My local council now at home has had the sense to only grant me votes for local elections as you are allowed to vote in two places at once for local matters, but it took them 5 years to realise this.

• By not voting, you are leaving it up to me to choose your government. You might be OK with that, we might have similar views. How about we allow the electors in Burnley to choose your government? Still OK with that?
• You are. like it or not, a member of society. Membership of society comes with a few responsibilities, including contributing to the common good, and participating in governing that society? Don't feel like participating? Fine, give up your vote, stop paying your taxes, but don't expect to be able to use any of the things your taxes pay for. Like water.
• Related to the first point, but: the fewer people who vote, the less representative the government is. Political parties know well that they need only target a few thousand electors in a handful of streets to change the outcome of an election. The rest of us, because so many people 'can't see the point' are a self-selecting sample, something which no research company would accept - you think the make up of the current parliament reflects the political opinion of the whole country? Want to do something about it?
• It does make a difference. Or, it would, if everyone voted. It's ludicrous to complain that 'my vote doesn't count' - in a properly representative vote, every vote 'counts' Think we don't have a properly representative vote? Well, there's one way of going about changing that - you could try voting for it
• (to address rab's point) Local councils have a surprisingly large amount of influence on your daily life - particularly if you're a council tax payer, or you're involved in education. Or like having streetlights. Or have an opinion on enormous building developments in inappropriate places. Or are fond of local amenities, like having your rubbish taken away every week. In fact, the fact that you cannot answer your own questions suggests to me that your local candidates have failed to make the effort to inform you, an increasingly common situation these days. For myself, being recently new to the area, I read all the election addresses (OK, both of them) and made my mind up based on what they promised. National politics and my own political leanings didn't really enter into it - especially since I only had two candidates to choose from
• One final rant. Rather than having a 'Not voting for anyone, you're all bloody useless' option, which is, to be frank, a bit of a cop out, why not get involved? See if you can't actually engage the candidates in some political debate? Perhaps even stand yourself? The only reason that politics is so dull is because we - the people who it is for - allow it to be.

Anyway, hacked again last night. *sigh*. This time it wasn't serious, and didn't affect MC at all. But it's making me wonder if I shouldn't find a host with tighter security.

In related news, I was told that a top that I would usually consider too small for me makes me look slimmer. By that argument, do trousers that are too long for me make me look taller?

That's better.

[MF] Is that a new Boardo variant you're playing there?

Time for dinner - tempted by pizza and DVD, really.

Yours sincerely, The Editor.

That's the way I made some of my AI papers more relevant to me, anyway. At the time it was examples from roleplaying, but the point is the same.

Meanwhile, I think you should be asking Herr Wagner about the whereabouts of the ring.

The secret of well-scansioned verse is this:
To hear each line like music in the ear
And yet to also hear it as 'twere prose.
The metre's like a shoe of certain form:
It yields not to a wrongly shapèd foot
But presses it into its tum-ti-tums.
The foot that fits the metre well, is thus
Enhanced by rhythm's clockwork-like progression.
But if the foot bears no resemblance to
The stressed and unstressed points along the line
Then like to bunioned club it will appear
When forced into a shoe however pretty.
The metre is the bezel, sense the stone
That fitted well together make a jewel
The versifier's craft combining them
Into a whole that's greater than its parts.

[BB⁴] Yes I forgot about the 'editorial slant'. It's worth watching a few of the live bits then the highlight show to find out hgow the editorialising works. The Sunday night show is particularly good for this, as they will always show an edited version of Saturday night's live task. Plus you get the pop-pscychology from Manchester Uni's most famous member of staff (and thus, I s'pose, strictly speaking one of my colleagues) which is C4's risible attempt to make the show 'respectable' rather than just admit it's just pandering to the homo sapiens' instinctive desire to peer over the garden fence (or, in times of yore, drill a hole into the next cave).

Having said that there was a piece on the radio the other day about these shows, and there was a remark which struck me - the reporter suggested that these programmes are social experiments masquerading as mass entertainment, whereas the thing that for me distinguishes British efforts in this arena is that they are exactly the opposite: there is always some affectation of worthiness, such as the Big Brother psychologist.

Of course, later tha same day I heard the chairman of the FCC ask rhetorically (and apparently without irony) if there was any other broadcast system in the world that the listener would choose to replace the US one with.

If they are browser popups, then there is always ad-aware to stop spawning advertising windows and spyware. Simply inhibiting all popups can be inconvenient.

[Bob,gil] I switched off all Java and JavaScript on my browser ages ago and it's never inconvenienced me even slightly.

No, sir. I wouldn't do that, sir.

In the meantime, it all seems a lot speedier than I'd expected, so hurrah. Glad to help, and it saves me writing a server of my own.

[All] You might be touched to learn that the Manchester Evening News is running a special David Beckham Memorial Issue.

I ask because I'm a) drunk, and b) not aware of any glitches. Tell me, I'm your friendly neighbourhood BOFH.

The best thing as far as I'm concerned is that the sysadmin is someone who understands what this space is for. That's priceless. (But for everything else there's MasterCard).

I couldn't help myself, it was Franics my 12 year old son's fault, as I was passing his bedroom he called out "Aunt Petunia's had a howler!", so this evening instead of doing the ironing I've been engrossed in HP and the Order of the Phoenix, page 100 so many suprises I'm gripped already (by a childrens book?).

However - and this may well be an entirely different issue - I am firmly of the belief that a University is not a training camp: if companies want their intake to have specific skills then they should stump up the cash and train them themselves rather than let the burden fall on the taxpayer. Furthermore, a University education should be largely academic: that's rather the point. This, however, has the consequence that it's not suitable for a majority of the populace and, crucially, I feel there is no shame in such institutions being 'elitist' in the sense that they select only people for whom such an education is beneficial. The main problem faced in the UK today though, as far as I can see, is that institutions with a more vocational approach to higher education have been crowbarred into an existing structure designed to do something different, and anything that isn't a 'degree' is considered a second-class qualification. Not easy to see how one can change the general public's attitude to non-degree qualifications. Anyway, that's roughly what I wanted to say though I'm not sure it makes sense.

This seems particularly bizarre, though, when you realise that even having a degree is irrelevant if you have more than about three years of industrial experience. That hasn't stopped hiring decisions made by my boss from being blocked because the higher management felt that the degree was from a school which "wasn't good enough". Ludicrous.