I was definitely pre-hangover when I made my previous post. I am now post-hangover. I don't want to tell you what went on in between, but suffice to say I just wasted one of my precious days of annual leave on something that could have been soooo easily avoided. And I *still* have washing up to do. Just one glass of Pimms won't hurt....

Lots of celebratory back-slapping around at the minute. Oh, and very restrained of you to avoid MC over exam time...

well, it was waste loads of time on MC and fail my second year, or work and... hopefully not fail my second year. I've booked flights and everything now, so I'd better pass...

pen] sorry not to repond to your text the other `day (at least i dont think i did) my last few days have been a litle weird and i have now finished work and none the wiser about what to do next. I am glad it sounds like you had a nice time. bob..x

[st d] no worries... I'll catch up with you soon. What's the email address now?

[pen] Have finished motor sport project [at last!] but feel a tad guilty - I've been thinking about you a lot but don't seem to have got round to pressing any buttons or keys which would have let you know this. I now have a natural break until the next job - email on its way ..

[st dogstar] you're bound to feel rather adrift - even after 5 years of freelancing I still experience those feelings on a regular basis but have learned to go with the flow. Mind you, like Mr Micawber, I always believe that something will turn up.

[Chalks] Don't feel guilty - I seem to have lurched through this summer so far, I can't remember ever being so busy. Of the past two months, I have spent precisely two weekends at home, one of which was the birthday, so not exactly the 'laying-on-the-settee-watching-old-movies' time, but instead 240-mile-round-trips-on-Friday-night to collect parents when the trains weren't working and mad midnight dashes to the 24-hour supermarket to buy party provisions because that's the only time I had. Tonight I am driving another 240 miles from London-ish to North Yorkshire for another race meeting. Last night we, as a company, organised the third of four Mountain Bike race events. If anyone is interested in coming to the next one at Wycombe Summit (the woods alongside the dry ski-slope)in High Wycombe on the evening of Thursday, 28th July, then shout out! We have a small field, but it's increasing. And I only went because I thought I might see some handsome men getting changed in the car park... some hope. By the time I got home, my poor tomatoes were wilting! *blithers on in similar abstract vein for another five minutes*

same as before but with a "d" instead of a "." in my name, and @gmail.com instead of @legal....:o) any confusion try st_dogmael@hotmail but i dont use it much

Relating to the discussion a ways up there ^ from a while ago. Arts and Letters Daily just featured an article reviewing a new book that suggests we are all born with perfect pitch.

I've got it and always have had. Great Western engines whistle A flat (above the treble stave). My brother hasn't got it. He can play the piano and read and sing a choral score, so he, too is quite musical. We both had exposure to music, and a piano, from birth. From that, a reasonable deduction would be that I was born with it and he wasn't. The reviewer rightly says that perfect pitch (I prefer Absolute Pitch) is of no use except as a rather flashy talent (though I've never pulled a bird with it) but spoils his argument by saying it actually inhibits the understanding of language. I don't see this, and have never thought of speech as having a pitch, more of a continuous modulation from which much can be deduced. Absolute Pitch is only a form of memory and to be perfectly honest I don't quite understand why anyone who plays an instrument hasn't got it.

Er, why don't you understand, given that you've deduced it's something that some people have from birth?

BTW, I haven't read the book, but I wonder if part of the argument that it inhibits language acquisition is to do with the subtleties of intonation - where the pitch is contextual rather than absolute. To interpret the same intonation in different people, you'd need to slide up and down the scale depending on who was talking. Which is interesting to consider when you link it with the fact that a common feature of autism (strongly associated with a weakness in interpreting the emotional states of other people) is a monotonous voice with very little subtlety of intonation. I'd better go read the book now, hadn't I?

I would have thought that most people have a good sense of frequencies - in that they can tell if a singer or musician is 'off'. The ability to recognise a note and give that note its correct nomenclature is a learned skill and therefore should not be part of a discussion about hearing. I wouldn't know a B flat from an A sharp, by name, unless the difference was demonstrated to me. If a musician (particularly those who play stringed instruments) cannot 'tune' their much beloved device then why (and how) are they playing?
[Rosie] On reviewing my post I think I sort of agree with you.
[Projoy] I'm not sure. Some oriental languages seem to rely on intonation changes for the meaning of various words and phrases - though English does the same to some extent - but I suspect that your comment regarding a 'sliding' scale must be true and would certainly not rely on perfect/absolute pitch, just the variation in such.

[Duj] Pianists can't always tune their instrument, and they seem to get on OK. :)

(Projoy) What I can't understand is why everybody hasn't got it from birth. As I said, it's only a form of memory, like remembering colours. (Dujon) Most people can tell if someone is out of tune, but only relative to some other pitch which is assumed correct. Most people who play a guitar can tune it so that the instrument as a whole is in tune. I have a friend who plays a few tunes (only at home), and plays rather well, and his guitar is in tune with itself but at least three semitones flat. He has a good sense of tuning but none whatever of absolute pitch. I tuned it up for him but he said the strings were far too tight so back down it went.

[Rosie] OK. Why can't you understand that? (PS. I hate to point it out for a third time, but we've already discussed twice why it isn't like remembering colors! Perhaps you remain unpersuaded?)

[Rosie] Perhaps I can help. I have played guitar and sung in very amateur choirs. so I'm not totally lacking in the ability to hear pitch. But I hear lots of other things at the same time. For example, when tuning a guitar I'm often not sure if two strings are at the same pitch because of the different texture of the sound caused by the make-up and length of the string.
The same applies with other occasions. If a man and a woman are singing a duet I could tell you if there was a discord (to my ears), but would struggle to say if they were singing the same note (either an octave apart or exactly) because I cannot separate the pitch of a sound easily from the rest of its character.
Also I find it easy to sing a tune (relative pitch), but have no idea whether I'm singing the same notes as on a previous occasion. It seems to me that the ability to keep or hear a tune in your head does not imply that you remember the actual sound (which would imply that perfect pitch should be possible), but rather that you remember a pattern, which you can then apply to the sound when you remember or sing it.

[INJ] Perfectly described. It is the same for me, except that I'm usually better at the octave thing. At a weekly music school, I always impressed the teacher by being extremely quick at identifying intervals, and thus have a good memory for melody in the way you describe. I now find I have to make more cognitive effort to recognise intervals, but then I have learned a lot more about the subtleties of language intonation since then (through drama but also through acquiring more social skills). Which is interesting.

To me, anyway.

(INJ) Remembering a whole tune would seem to be much more complex than remembering the pitch of a note yet we seems to do it rather well, just as we remember faces rather than any specific physical feature of them. But to me pitch of a tune is an integral part of it and if I hum a tune to myself in the wrong key (because it's easier, say) I still have to assign a key to it.

...is lobbing an accordion into a skip without touching the sides.

On a more serious note, I've had perfect pitch since I could ever remember, both in the absolute sense and the relative sense. So I have very little trouble transposing at sight, as well as playing at sight, or keeping in tune when singing a song in different keys. I've never known how I do it - I also have a pretty fast learning memory for music too. But, oddly enough, I'm lousy at matching names to faces.

(JLE) Yeah, but you're a f****** genius. Would you lob a soprano sax in the skip while you're about it, just for me? Then the five tons of rubble just to make sure.

[JLE] Hi - I'm Kathy. I was the other [apart from pen] female person at Rugby Pilg in May. I thought your piano playing was particularly fine.

I don't have [or have never tested the possibility of having] perfect pitch. I do, however, have an unerring sense of direction, and can point to North however many times I've been spun round. Is this normal?

[Chalky] Wow. I, for one, have never heard of that. Out of curiosity, how accurately can you do this (exactly north, or just approximately?), and how rigorously has it been tested (not quite sure what the most rigorous test I can imagine would be -- maybe someone moving you while you were sleeping into a dark room where you have never been before?)? And can you point to any direction just as easily, or, if asked to point southwest, would you still start from north and work from there?

And do you have to be here to do it?

[Chalky] Can I carry you round with me next time I go orienteering?
I have a pretty good sense of direction and I hang around with a lot of very good navigators, but that's a first for me. I think we need a scan for an overdeveloped pineal gland.

I can always tell where I am and where North is -- I carry a street map and a compass whenever I travel.

[CdM] Just approximate north - nothing too exact! The other directions I would work out in a more conscious way.

[Dan] Interesting. Makes me wonder how bewildering I would find being placed on the north pole with nowhere to point.

[INJ] I don't think you'd want to be burdened with the load :-)

I'm quite good at finding my way home, no matter what city or how drunk I am. can I claim that as a skill?

[nights] That seems to be a skill that humans have evolved as a species. This is evidence - I am sure - that beer has been around at least as long as humans have.

[nights] Were you born with it?

(nights, rab) There must be serious limits to the ability or we wouldn't have "Show me the way to home".

I'm almost tone deaf, can't remember names, and have to calculate north by looking at the sun and trying to remember what time of day it is. Should I get a new brain? Incidentally, there are languages that accent with pitch rather than stress (such as Japanese and Attic Greek). I wonder what it is like to have perfect pitch and speak those.

[Chalky] How do you go in the Southern Hemisphere, in a place you haven't seen a map of?

I have an excellent sense of direction and hardly ever get lost, but I think that's got more to do with observation of my surroundings and the use of maps, mental and otherwise. I feel slightly unnerved without a map, if I am going to spend a while in a place. I carry a compass sometimes. The problem is that, since I obviously use the sun's position for orientation, this sense is most finely tuned on the southern hemisphere environment, so my location of north flips 180degrees when in the northern hemisphere. This is a *most* unnerving experience. I was convinced that London was t' other way 'round, and had to work very hard to swap to the "correct" directions.

[Flerdle] I can relate to that. I find the same problem when I go South of the equator and the sun goes the wrong way.

(Breadmaster) It doesn't make any difference, having perfect pitch. It's the change of pitch that is important. The pitch of speech varies so rapidly, even during one syllable, that it is impossible to assign a pitch to it, other than high or low, say. BTW your method of finding north is quite normal and one I use myself, if that's any comfort.

[flerdle] I wouldn't know - having never ventured into that territory.

[INJ] It does, it does!! And the moon's upside down.

I don't think I consciously look for or use the sun's position or movement, it just adds to a general sense of where's where.

[Chalky] You might be in for a surprise then :-)

there must be limits, but so far I haven't found one. I even, in my fairly drunken state, remembered the Russian for 'do you mind if I use your toilet', while nipping into a bar in St Petersburg on my merry way back to Ligovskii Prospekt. I may have been born with it, but I don't think I was ever drunk as a child.

*goes to work*

[flerdle] It would be interesting for sure. I've been fairly close to the equator but never below it [see? I still see north as 'up' and south as 'down'] Can relate to everything you said earlier about observation, map usage, etc. Even as a child I had a compulsion to know where I was placed and was first to a floor plan, street plan or map - it made my day when faced with one of those pictorial street guide display thingies with a big fat arrow saying YOU ARE HERE!

(Chalky) North is still at the top even in the Southern Hemisphere. Weather charts are a bit difficult to get the hang of because everything goes round backwards but North is still at the top. Everything would still go round backwards even if North were at the bottom. It's fundamental. I'm with you on maps. My father had millions of OS Maps, some dating from the 1930's. I've got them all now and a whole load more. I've made a contour map, six feet by two, of the North Downs from Farnham to the Medway. Wonderful what you can do with tracing paper and a scanner and printer. Needless to say, Maison Rosie (TQ 3516 5955) is bang in the middle.

[flerdle] Maybe that's why you think the moon is white? :-)

[Néa] *thwap*

[Chalky & Rosie] Sign me up to the Cartographile Club !! I love 'em - old ones, new ones, from maps of countries, oceans, volcanic distribution etc. down to the most detailed O.S. map - I can pore over them for ages. I trust you've discover www.old-maps.co.uk which is a superb resource for late C19 O.S. maps of Britain.

Sorry, forgot the http ... that should be www.old-maps.co.uk

(Blob) Tried that. Excellent. Thanks.

Hello. Sorry about the downtime. Looks like an upstream provider is having problems.

Now a bunch of semitrained chimpanzees are jumping up and down on the routing tables. Connectivity is coming and going and the routes are changing even as we speak. Whee.

I hope you're filming that!

(Dan) Only properly trained chimpanzees should be employed. Otherwise you might as well use IT consultants.

Should be sorted now.

chimps running about aimlessly running servers, routers and whatnot? users with more knowledge than the IT staff? sounds like a job for Bath University Computer Services!

[nights] judging by that lack of response, your marketing for BU CS didn't go down too well ;o)

[projoy] oooh, don't. I'm staying late at work to make inroads into a pile of work neglected by a colleague and to show him up as a workshy fop. And I'm STARVING.

[Blob] Thanks :-)

Has MCIOS gone down again? Anyone able to access it?

I expect the monkeys are on the case again.

Oh, I know this sounds like the beginning of a limerick, but I hate it when subordinates sulk. What can be more pathetic than a man who can't accept the fact that his manager is a woman who has vastly more experience than himself? I'm not pointing out improvements he could make for FUN... I'm f*cking helping him... sheesh. *withers and dissolves into a cup of Earl Grey 'Management' Tea*

The sulk has come to a head. He's cross with me for proofreading his work and adding rather a lot of pink pen to it. And he still has a problem with women managers. :-/

[pennylope] a pink pen? Now that's just adding insult to injury :-)
Talking of work - my current project requires that I'm in't office from 4 - 8 pm for 3 weeks supervising a small team of temps who are carrying out a telephone survey. They are all students, immensely grateful for the work and their sheer enthusiasm has transformed a very mundane task, for me anyway, into enormous fun.

[Chalks] Pink rather than red - now that's just too teacherish, although after thinking about it this evening, I might start doing it in pencil. And lucky you for having a nice bunch to work with. I bet they're having fun working with you too. :o)

[Chalky] see, this is just the sort of job I WANTED. I like being on the phone. but I don't get it, do I? I get forced back into catering, a sector I gratefully left two years ago promising never to work in again. grumble grumble grumble, sorry. on the other, more important hand, I need the cash, as I leave for canada in 29 days.

[penelope] BUCS are evil, pure evil. they're arrogant, poorly organised and unreliable. the campus network went out on a sunday, in the couple of weeks running up to most people's coursework deadlines. it took them FOUR HOURS to even get to the sodding campus. naturally, this deep sense of satisfaction was expressed in the annual user survey (encouraged quite a lot by me), so the feedback of the users of the computing services of the university of bath will be, uh, buried in someone's drawer and forgotten about. never mind, at least I have my health, and my own computer.

[nights] Must be frustrating... but it wasn't ever anything I used to deal with. When I graduated (1987) everything - coursework, laboratory practicals with graphs and diagrams and EVERYTHING was hand-written and hand-drawn. My final year project had to be typed - my mum did it for me. There was a computing course as an element, but I never went to any of the tutorials.

[pen] see, I know that writing my essays longhand would be time consuming and thoroughly annoying when I wanted to insert a quote I'd found at the last minute - but I think I'd focus on it more. this has been the case when doing translations into russian (which I can't be bothered to type out because it takes ages) and scored better. so this is something to think about.

BUCS are still evil though. although they were thrilled when I dragged my old iMac down there to see why it wasn't working with the network. I actually rather miss that one.

It looks like I've now been victim to twatspam, of the 5000-links-to-a-website-in-a-post variety. As it happens I'm currently tweaking the back end of this website, so I'll be making it difficult to post more than a couple of links per move I'm afraid.

well I think we can all appreciate it. and it gives us the opportunity to use the construction "a link not totally unlike..." which is always a positive thing.

And it's happened again. These people are complete arseholes. More anon.

Right I've disallowed <a> links for the moment. This is only a temporary solution until I come up with something more sophisticated.

[Rab] Writing you offline.

Actually I'll just say it here, since the bumfuques who do this stuff don't read anyway. What I've been thinking of doing is treating any post with an A tag as bad HTML unless it contains a special attribute. For those following this at home, an attribute is like href="url". We could form them in the same way except require an additional or substitute attribute. For example, instead of href we could require the surname of the nice lady who writes letters to Humph. Another thing that occurs to me is to replace the A entirely, with some other nonstandard tag which will get converted to A on output. Thoughts?

On reviewing my own code, and thinking about it from a user-friendliness standpoint, I'm inclined to go for the latter. It's trivial to implement and easy to explain in the error message, in such a way that users will get it and passing spammers will not.

[Dan] Agreed! Would be nice to still be able to post links with a special tag. [rab] Can you get round your a link prohibition in the same way as at Dunx' place?

I have plans which hopefully should impact genuine Crescenters minimally. My banning of A tags for now is purely a short-term inconvenience.

(sorry if that sounds a little curt - Dan's solution will probably be the workaround that will be offered if the server thinks you're being overly naughty)

On the topic of campus computer people: I have wasted an entire morning trying to get my laptop configured so it can use the university network and internet provider. The goons at the Computer Centre took about an hour and a half trying to do it before declaring that they didn't have the right driver for my make of computer. Assimilating, dubiously, the revelation that this varies according to make rather than OS, I then had to go to the other end of the campus (requiring not one but two bus trips) where, surreally, there is what seems to be a support place for Toshiba. Why this isn't next to the Computer Centre, God only knows. They didn't know what to do, because a look on the Toshiba website revealed that there are lots of possible drivers to download and I hadn't been told what kind to look for. So I had to go all the way back to the Computer Centre (through a monsoon), where a new set of goons had replaced the original ones, but were no more competent. They couldn't find the relevant part of the website and in any case were now talking darkly of the need to open up the laptop and fiddle about with its innards. They wrote down what they needed and told me to take that back to the Toshiba people. Of course, they are all closed now and I have to wait until Monday. All this just to log onto the wretched network! Oh, and the whole thing was conducted in Singlish, which is basically incomprehensible at the best of times but far worse when it's people going on about drivers and networks and suchlike. Really, this place is appallingly disorganised. Thank God I can use the university's own computers for internet purposes or I'd really be in trouble.

As I did on Dunx's page, you can always use Javascript in a tag to get around a restriction on A tags. For example: I'm a link to Orange MC without any A tags. (This works on Firefox at least.)

...and IE, as I just checked.

For those who are curious and don't want to View Source, here's how I did it:-

<u><font color=blue onClick="self.location='http://www.dunx.org/cgi-bin/orange-mc'">I'm a link to Orange MC without any A tags</font></u>

I have plans which hopefully should impact genuine Crescenters minimally. My banning of A tags for now is purely a short-term inconvenience.

Not to be picky, but shouldn't one be able to click on a link? It may just be AOL being incompetent but I can't click on Darren's one above. However, as this topic of conversation goes way over my head (I can just about cope with bold tags), I should probably just let you IT types get on with it.

It works for me on Firefox. For Knobbly's info., in my case the cursor does not change (i.e. there is no indication that the text is a link) but is 'clickable'.

I like Dan's simple work-round. The problem with Darren's (otherwise excellent) solution is there are some of us who operate in Firefox with javascript disabled. I have found this is a very effective tool in combatting trojans et al and am loath to change. Just my opinion, obviously.

I have plans which hopefully should impact genuine Crescenters minimally. My banning of A tags for now is purely a short-term inconvenience.

Well, I was all set to say something about the use of impact as a verb, but apparently it, like Wagner's music, is not as bad as it sounds:
http://www.bartleby.com/64/C003/0165.html

rab's statements on the A tag issue are starting to sound a little... disturbing.

Sorry - that's what happens when I visit the site when drunk. I really hope to have this sorted out properly sooner rather than later. More anon.

They actually reminded me of government statements. As they pointed out on Yes Prime Minister, you should just keep making the same statement over and over again, no matter what people ask you.

Paxman: Are you happy for users of the site to find ways around your ban on A tags?
Prime Minister: I have plans which hopefully should impact genuine Crescenters minimally. My banning of A tags for now is purely a short-term inconvenience.
Paxman: But in the meantime, you accept there are workarounds?
Prime Minister: I have plans which hopefully should impact genuine Crescenters minimally. My banning of A tags for now is purely a short-term inconvenience.
Paxman: Prime Minister, are there or are there not loopholes in the ban on A tags?
Prime Minister: I have plans which hopefully should impact genuine Crescenters minimally. My banning of A tags for now is purely a short-term inconvenience.
Paxman: Look, yes or no. Do you accept there are loopholes?
Prime Minister: I have plans which hopefully should impact genuine Crescenters minimally. My banning of A tags for now is purely a short-term inconvenience.
Paxman: So you say, but what Crescenters are asking is, do you realise there are ways around the ban?
Prime Minister: With respect Jeremy, that's not the real question. I assure all genuine Crescenters that I have plans which hopefully should impact genuine Crescenters minimally. My banning of A tags for now is purely a short-term inconvenience.
Paxman: But Prime Minister...
Prime Minister: I have plans which hopefully should impact genuine Crescenters minimally. My banning of A tags for now is purely a short-term inconvenience.

etc. etc. etc.

(no offence meant to rab)

Good lord, you're right. I should have tried to click on it despite it not looking like I could.

[K] Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Although I recommend not clicking on the '1,000's of free smileys' pop-up.

has the INTaRWeB always been so full of crap, or has it got steadily worse since I got online in the summer of 1997?

[nights] Like everything, it's been mostly full of crap since it started, but it's only been in the last few years that the crap has expressed a desire to leap down everyone's throat.

The big cautionary tale of the net is Usenet, which although some people manage to keep active newsgroups going (using I don't know what antispam measures), is now almost entirely spam. I've been working recently on a little predator/prey population interactives, and I wonder if the cycles of spam-genuine content follow a similar statistical pattern. i.e. the population of predators increases, diminishing the population of prey, which in turn leads to extinction for the predators...

[Projoy] I think part of the problem with Usenet is that most people aren't even aware it exists any more, and those who are aware of it, by and large, consider it too full of spam to be useful. For this reason, I don't think you'd find a cyclical pattern, but rather a gradual tail-off with time.

[Projoy] I see almost no spam at all on Usenet. I read mainly rec.arts.sf.* and a few others. Where do you get the idea that it's mostly spam? (Er, I probably won't see a reply to this for a couple of weeks -- off to Glasgow at the crack of dawn tomorrow.)

[Raak] Well, as you won't see this I can make any claim I like. :) I don't know, but I assume the admin of some newsgroups have anti-spam measures in place, or there are anti-spam measures at the ISP news server level. No idea, really. I also have frequented a rec.arts newsgroup or two (and I believe the drwho one still goes on strong). I used to read a group or two on the alt. hierarchy, but would not attempt it now. They were swamped in spam years ago.

all the usenet groups I ever use (a few music ones and tomb raider, all under alt.) are filled with crap. I looked in on the MC one this morning and that was full of rubbish. a shame really. I'll try other groups though.

I regularly look at, and contribute to uk.sci.weather. There are rather a lot of gadget nerds and people of the spotty-herbert tendency who seem to use weather as an excuse for computer exercises but there are also professional meteorologists who contribute, necessarily under a pseudonym. There is very little outright junk.

The only one I ever contributed to with any intensity was rec.puzzles.crosswords, in which I even created a long-running competition which still runs.

so, who's going on holiday?

Not I. I wish to remain here and enjoy the delightful British Summer in all its scorching glory.

[nights] Holiday? I seem to remember those. Many years ago . . . .

welcome back Tuj! have a nice time?

Yep, 2 weeks in and around Boston with my family, pretty good and apparently the weather kicked 7 bells out of the weather back in Britain, so that's OK. I still say their money smells funny though.

[Tuj] I'd forgotten about that. Mm. Dollars.

I wonder if canadian ones also smell. I've heard you can pop the middle of a $2 coin out.

Yes, but I've heard that about the £2 coin too and never managed it...

Great night on tv last night and all 3 hours of it on Channel 4 starting at eight. A combination of Big Brother (Craig evicted ......yes!!!! result) and two opening episdodes of new drama Lost. An ensemble cast is allowing multi storylines and twists it is gripping already with unanswered questions, polar bear? 16 year old mesage still being transmitted? how is the labrador unscathed?

[Inks] Glad you mentioned Big Brother. I wonder how many people in the UK Morniverse have seen some or even all of it? I think it's been very watchable this year for two reasons: Big Brother himself has been amusing, unpredictable, capricious and in charge; there has been considerable action, some of it admittedly grotesque, during the 'live' streaming.
As for Lost - unless they repeat the episodes at weird times [which is usually when I watch TV], I doubt if I'll get the opportunity to see it.

As a militant anti-Big Brother person, I think the current series has been one of the best so far because it has been low key enough to not manage to puncture my consciousness. I couldn't name a single contestant, so I'm happy.

I think last year was better from that point of view. Can't remember anything about that. This year I recall seeing some press stories about Derek Laud, so it managed to sneak its way into my consciousness.

I watched it until I came home from university, and all of a sudden don't have time for it. never mind.

and I'm stuck with dialup at the moment as our broadband is up the chute again. so I won't be around very much at all, no.

[Big Brother] I'm with Tuj on that one, I'm afraid. The less I know, the better!

I've probably watched an hour all told. What stupid irritating people they are! I've no need to be militantly anti, no-one I know ever having watched any of it, so they claim.

Someone, talk to me! Please............. *sniff* Actually, I'm not despondently lonely, just bored and I have a cold. ;o)

(pen) Hello, pen, I bet your cold isn't as bad as mine! Head feels like lead, i.e. heavy, deformable and the product of radioactive decay.

I like maps
Maps are great
Scratch my knees with a dinner plate.

[Darren] your javascript works fine in Safari on a Mac... and lovely satire :) [rab] MCiOS is also having a mild spate of spammers. (If two can be called a spate, but it's a sign of the special nature of the Morningverse that just two such spams seems a flood!)
I like the custom tag idea best as outlined by Dan - newcomers will get it wrong once and the error message can put them right, or if we want more security we can always refer to some obliquely crescentish word such as Mrs T's surname and anyone who still doesn't get it just has to ask! Any spammer getting around that clearly has such fine products for sale I for one will be proud to read about them on a website in Russian full of ladies with their nightwear on...

[Pen] Hola!

Ah yes, I must get back to finishing mc5-and-a-half. That work thing has rather annoyingly got in the way.

[pen] hope you're feeling better.

hello pen, I fixed my ADSL by going to the local exchange and poking it, just for you. here's a mildly offensive rhyme:
Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
I'm schizophrenic
And so am I.

Thnaks, thanks all for the good wishes and the rhymes, some of which were more amusing than others, hehehehe. I took the day off yesterday (I take very few days off sick - I think that one is my second this year) to try and get rid of this lurgy, but felt so guilty about it that I spent almost the entire day hoovering and cleaning, washing and ironing. I'm the first one to say that guilt isn't a useful thing to have, but also one of the biggest feelers-of-guilt. *cringe* Any advice?

There only appear to be three of us these days. Where'd'they go?

[Pen] What you need is lots of people blaming you for things. You'll get so indignant about it that you'll stop feeling guilty even when you should. So to help in the process I should like to say that I blame you for all the evils of the modern world, in particular having to go back to work after a holiday.

(ImNotJohn)The precipitation (needed for electrification) would be in the cloud and below it but evaporating into the dry air before reaching the ground. These precipitation trails are called virga. This effect is always present in showery or thundery weather even if the stuff reaches the ground. The evaporation absorbs latent heat and cools the air, making it denser and causing a downdraught which appears as a fierce gust of random direction at the surface. It also explains why "April showers" can turn to snow if heavy enough even if the temperature beforehand is as high as 8°C. All this stuff needs rather dry air below the cloud; not too dry, of course or there wouldn't be any cloud in the first place.