So, on Sunday, I got rather drunk at a rather nice dinner. Photographic evidence available, as ever.

DNS problems. I have absolutely no idea what's going wrong. I've tried to change my DNS record at NSI about four times now. It's all gone rather horribly pants.

Will work on it...

On to Plan B. Which is proving surprisingly easy to implement, seeing as it doesn't even exist yet...

Mental note: acquire spine and ask medic friends to install it. Apparently these things are useful nowadays.

Bloody hell. Angst is as fun as ever, and is approaching from all directions (three at last count, plus one internally). It's all a bit pants, really. I'd cheer myself up by watching a bit of Cold Feet, but that'd just depress me, really.

Anyway. Bed. Things are always much better in the morning.

Go on. Send a cow.

Still playing with askcaz.

Amusing article in yesterday's Guardian by Jeremy Hardy on stem cell research.

Conservative Christian Beliefs about Hell - needed as research for a poster design(?)

Mirror neurons in this week's New Scientist.

I am a ram.

[Via slashdot] DirectTV vs. the Hackers [more] reads like something out of a cyberthriller novel. Cool.

Look. Are you in, or out? And if you're out, when are you back in?

Hmm. I just realised that that sentence could really be taken both ways if you're talking about him.

And that one. Oh, forget it. Innuendo is just far too easy these days.

Still playing with askcaz.

Well, my ASP coding definitely isn't up to much at the moment.

Regardless, I've set up askcaz as a joke advice column with/for a friend on my server.

Feel free to send your own piss-take advice questions!

Via 50 Cups of Coffee comes a finger-on-the pulse interview with today's teenagers: the Washington Post asks kids about Dubya in the Britney Spears Chatroom. I now have two (more) things to worry about:

a) Dubya

b) Teenagers

New photographs in the gallery of the Rag Pembroke Formal Hall (that, cunningly, I wasn't even at).

Went out for a reunion dinner last night with the rag crew, photos are now online.

I still haven't got round the problems with Netscape, so please bear with me. I realise ec isn't even working with NS6 at the moment (which means any Mozilla builds are a dead loss as well). As soon as I've learnt enough to figure out what tags I should/shouldn't be using, I'll give it a shot, but you might have to wait until next weekend.

See Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. It's good.

Prime number band theory
It really is rather elegant and simple: if you want success, you want fame and you're in a band, stick to prime number groupings. There are probably reasons for this, but it's best to run through this as follows:

This is not my theory
I take no credit whatsoever, I am merely reporting: this was wonderfully concocted in the bar by Rich, Max and Chris, all of whom came up with an excellent proof.

It works:

The power of One
Of course one works. It was always going to. You've got your divas, your Badly Drawn Boys and your Robbie Williams, you've got your Billies and (unfortunately), your Phil Collins.

Two's fine as well
The Two Princes. No problem. Classic, great song. Charles and Eddie. Wonderful.

Four is Right Out
Four doesn't work. It was never going to. Eternal used to be four, now they are three, with the sad loss of Louise. See also: Spice Girls - A Case Study.

Five is Alright
Five is alright. No problem. You've got, well, Five, and we solidly maintain that there were five Beatles: George Harrison deserves his place, after all.

Six is a big no-no
You must be kidding.

(and so on)

Any prime number will do
Come on, Live Aid had about nineteen or thirty seven odd members...

The Spice Girls - A Case Study
Well, they started good. Five. Sporty, Posh, Baby, Scary and Ginger. Phenomenal success. Girl Power. Everything was looking good. Then things started to go downhill: Ginger left. Suddenly, they were a four, the classic unstable combination of pop groups. Before they knew it, album sales were plumetting, they were no longer raking in the number ones, and the group has all but disbanded, reverting to the power of One.

So? Believe us. It works. Of course, you're welcome to disprove it, or help refine it.

Do you like it? Tell me if you don't. I'm expecting masses of browser compatibility problems and there's bound to be display issues on Macs. Any problems, please drop me a line and feel free to shout at me, or praise me (if you think it's due). There's quite a bit of hacked javascript and bizarre dhtml-alike div and span stuff going on, so I won't be surprised at all if this fails to display on gargantuan proportions.

updated - I just tried this in Netscape 6 (it was early, and I didn't feel like being demoralised before) and rather predictably, it all falls down. Clearly something to with layers and other crap. Thanks, Microsoft and Netscape. Grr.

Well. Term's started. I'd do some kind of state of the finalist address, but there doesn't really seem to be much point. This is the last term we have before we properly freak out and, as you might expect, things are just a little tense. Those with jobs lined up are wondering if they're right for them, those without are, well, desperate. Or just wandering around with a bemused look on their face.

New photos in the gallery - Daniella's 21st birthday.

More later. Am tired. Rest assured, I'll be back, there's a fair bit of backlog to get through. In the meantime, check out the visiting list.

My excuse is that they were pestering me. It's your turn to make yours now...

that makes a new year, then
... and two years worth of blogging, as well...

New Years in Edinburgh was amazing. Extremely cold, full of snow, and about one hundred thousand people in Princes St. getting it together, oodles of fireworks. As ever, photographs (329 from the trip) coming soon. Assuming, of course, that Chris doesn't freak out when I ask him if he's got space for a 70mb photo gallery on the server I'm sitting on...

one year on
Hmmmm. One of the things people were saying shortly after (and before) the fireworks went off was "So, what's been the best thing? And the worst thing?"

Annoyingly, I had to answer that the worst thing was that there was no best thing. This year has somewhat plodded. I haven't really got anywhere, not at least jobwise. That stuff just hasn't happened at all. This year, though, things should start happening. Now, if we're talking about academic years, I'll come over all smiley on you. It's been great. First term's been triffic, brilliant, all those superlative words spilling out all over the place.

On the other hand, I'm starting to get slightly alarmed by the fact that most of my friends at home are now in nice, stable, rewarding relationships. In fact about eight out of ten are. And I'm one of the left over ones. This is somewhat scary for me, though also strangely liberating as it's been over a year and half since I've last been seriously going out with someone. To tell the truth, it's been far nicer than I thought it would have been. At least, it hasn't been the disaster that I thought it was going to be. I think.

Just one last thing. Years ago, I'd be thinking about the year 2000 and its immediate successor and the only things that really came to mind were "I'll be twenty one" and "I'll be graduating and getting a job" combined with the rather naive, and killer "my life will be sorted out". Add to that "I will be a grown up", and it was a rather frightening situation, and I was happily relieved that it was a long, long time away.

Well, sod that. Time goes on, and it has a funny habit of accelerating the older you get. I'm now twenty one. I know not much more (I think) than I did before. I think the most valuable thing that's been impressed on me is the fact that though adults seemed much wiser when you were younger, they weren't at all. They were just taller. The really frightening prospect is that you get to be as old as you like and you still haven't figured anything out at all. That scares me (and my friends) shitless.

Bleugh. Well. No updates til Sunday, then, because I'll finally have my ethernet connection back (and be able to do something sensible about the email backlog I've acquired)...