• Permalinking technology exists at the back-end (i.e. one can specify a range of posts to show in the URL) but I need to find some way of generating the appropriate links. This can probably wait until we have a few more posts.
• I may well add a 'search' facility at some point (again, more posts are required before this becomes useful).
• I might add a login feature so that the server can remember things like which games you're playing, award prizes for stunning play and so on. (NB this seems to be controversial, but the point is you won't be obliged to use this feature).
• A side-effect of something I have planned elsewhere on this site would be to have an editable MC reference. Obviously we already have the Encyclopaedia at !York, but I think it would be cool to have an editable, searchable volume here. Ideally one would wish to transfer the Encyclopaedia entries over from !York, but I don't really know what's happening to maintenance of that server.

HTML validator?

• Item 1
• Item B
• item iii

I could add the buttons you suggest. Yessir. Whacking it on "Things to Do" list now...

• Limericks games. Whoever started it (DrQ?) chose "game headings". I can turn these off since I too dislike them. Should I do this?
• See whole game is there, once the game is long enough (look at the top of this page, for example). As I said, I'll add "jump to the bottom" and "reclothe" when I have a few minutes spare.
• Auto name labelling was there originally, but I think it disappeared at some point during an "upgrade". I shall attempt to reinstate it.
• Punchy title. The title was deliberately understated, but I'm willing to hear suggestions.
• Reshading: this was one of my customisation ideas.
• Updatable profiles (and possibly encyclopaedia) are On The List. (But note "I have day job" caveat).
• Caption competition... interesting. Either this could go as a separate type of MC game or maybe a completely different interactive part of my site completely... I shall think about this. Allowing people to upload images makes me feel slightly queasy from a storage point of view, but I could impose a suitable filesize limit I suppose.

• Thanx!
• Goodie.
• Goodie goodie.
• Suggestions above.
• Goodie goodie goodie.
• Goodie goodie goodie goodie goodie gum drops.
• You will need to monitor what is uploaded for content as well as file size. Suggest emailing to you to upload?

[BtD] Can't get to !York, and I'm on an .ac.uk domain so it's either a server problem, or it's bitten the dust (though if the latter, I reckon jim would've told us.

Just thought I'd share the latest bit of highly targetted advertising to land in my mailbox, which will make sense to those of you who've met me:

Be Beautiful - Get everything you need for fabulous curly hair. Treat your hair to Curl Friends and get everything you need to achieve bouncy, super soft curls with incredible definition and flawlessly fine shine. Curl Friends caters to your curls concerns with specially formulated hair cures that work great in any combination without weighing hair down. Need more shine, less frizz, something to fend off the fly always? Curl Friends has got you covered with products designed especially for the particular needs of curly hair.

Divi payout on celebdaq absolutely thousands, time to buy some Jacko and Chris Martin. Ranked 10278 worth £36032 +260.32%.

1. Contemporary music award
2. Female artist of the year
3. Male artist of the year
4. Ensemble/orchestral album of the year
5. Young British classical performer
6. Rover album of the year
7. Biggest selling classical album in the UK
   Critics award
8. Outstanding contribution to music award 2002 - Andrea Bocelli.

Seems to be catching.

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.