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Owen’s blog
Syndicated from Freakcity, this is my other journal; see also <lj user=owenblacker> for my LJ.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaah!
A Toyota Avensis. Sans urine. Ok, so it would appear I forgot to mention it here (having been pissed when I blogged about it), but one of the more curious parts of Saturday evening was that I can remember quite prominently having pissed against a silver Toyota Corolla (or Avensis, perhaps), but none of us could remember why.
Apparently, RobG (Kee) was leaning against it and I told him not to, cos I needed a wee, so he told me to piss on the car, so I did. Crystal. Though I also saw Rob going for a wee, which was rather rude.
Bloody good night, though. I like bellini, it’s official.
Today’s a little dull, but enlivened by the amusement of RobG’s hangover having finally kicked in. And it being payday (so I’ve spent £250,– on Amazon). And having received a box from Figleaves with pretty boys in.
Anyways, should get back to reading about accessibility things.
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Eurgh
My head hurts. RobG’s head hurts. Admcg’s scarf seems to have his stomach lining on it.
Des has gone out to buy lard. Phood sooon 
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Mmmm, vodka!
Oops, I appear to be pissed and stoned again. RobG’s voddie night at Revolution. Very good fun. Lots of lovely voddie — cherry Bakewell being my favorite — and Russ was there too, so we all groped him somewhat.
He’s a BIG boy!
Then off to Match, on Margaret St, W1. Very nice. They do a “Bramble”, which is lots of gin and a little mûr. And bellini. Mmmmmmmmmm.
Now we’re all back at mine, drinking Champagne cocktails, and I’m blogging and flirting with Stuart by MMS. He wanted to see what Des’s knob looked like; the joys of cameraphones 
Anyways. Back to the alcohol…
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Dammit!
But wow, nonetheless! Guess who forgot that the IMDb’s images are cleverer than that.
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Eurgh
Wow! Sleepy, hungry Owen, trying to remember how to get here from the M25.
*interrupted by boyfriend wanting to use PC*
Ok, I’ll try that again. Not quite so sleepy and with a bacon sandwich inside me. And Gayrath has been and gone, taking JenJen with him.
Good evening. Went to Anandamide’s birthday party at Retro. Des came along and brought a couple of friends — Adriano and Jackie, a couple; they’re both really cool and he’s really pretty. The four of us, plus Andrew Anarta, Alex Teleute and JenJen, headed back here, via a friend’s to acquire some comestibles. Listened to the dancey trancey albums I bought the other night, when late-night TV advertising enticed my credit card to help itself to HMV.co.uk
Watched some of The New Statesman whilst JenJen was a love and made everybody breakfast, but wasn’t really in the mood for Alan B’Stard, so popped Daredevil in, which I’m really quite enjoying. And Jennifer Garner looks fucking amazing!
Right, off to do my NO2ID work…
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Does it show I’m catching up on Knowledge Management emails?
How to do title tags accessibly (and, Scott, FreakCity would so not pass on that test )
Good blog post at masl.to/?W1972295A . It’s by the maker of Fangs (possibly one of the coolest things ever: www.standards-schmandards.com/fangs) and explains about separating bits of a title tag. It also mentions the golden rule of title tags (which I am so fed up with having to explain everywhere):
If the title contains the name of the site, the name of the site should be placed at the end of the title. This makes sure that multiple bookmarks from the same site are easy to browse through in the bookmarks folder and listeners to your page get the most important information first.
Anyways. Back to reading…
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Wierd but cool
Interesting link just went round the office. Are you in my Monkeysphere?
*reads further*
And it’s REALLY funny. For some reason, my inner monolog has Lee (EnglishImpatient) reading it to me.
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Sleeeeeeeepy
Not a massively interesting day. I hate it when I’m not in the middle of a large project. Today has mainly been spent reading stuff — useful, work-related stuff (like WCAG 2,0, for example), but hardly scintillating, nonetheless — and dealing with minor issues here and there (like the reluctance of a large client to install the .Net Framework v1,1 on their webserver, despite v1,0 being there already and the alternative being to keep using 3000 lines of flaky-as-hell ASP Classic and a hotfix for the MCMS Postback issue we experienced on Allied Domecq).
That’s quite an interesting one, actually. There’s a bug in hotfix #832348 for Microsoft Content Management Server, which means that some scripts will postback incorrectly. Rather than going to www.site.org/Folder/Template.aspx or to www.site.org/Channel/Posting.htm, it posts back to www.site.org/Channel/Template.aspx — the CMS pseudopath, mirroring the CMS Channel hierarchy, but with the Template ASPX’s filename. The combination doesn’t exist, so it 404s. Thankfully (grâce à Stefan Goßner at Microsoft), we have found out that hotfix #892474 resolves this issue, so we’ve just asked AT&T to test it with a view to rolling it out /stat/.
The odd bit of NO2ID mail over lunch, natch, we now have York City Council affiliated; and Streatham’s CLP voted against ID Cards last night at a meeting that Des Browne backed out of, rather cowardly, at the last minute, so Simon Davies (NO2ID Chair) pulled out too, postponing the tête-à-tête to another time, rather than having a one-sided debate that would weaken the significance of the vote.
Music at work isn’t too bad today, though the studio appears not to like Jay-Z vs Linkin Park very much. The Depeche Mode remix CDs seem to be going down well, though. And someone’s just set Rammstein playing, covering DM’s Stripped , which is rather odd (and very good). The Rush Hour compilations arrived from HMV.co.uk today (no branding on their packaging, très odd); I must learn not to watch adverts (or shop online) when stoned. They look quite good, though.
Anyways, I’m whittering, in a work-avoidance stylee, so I must off to work. Retro later, hopefully with Des there too: not seen him all week! And JenJen in my spare room… 
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The last Anatomy for Beginners was on tonight, too (missed ER during the Core Board meeting). I never realised that bladders contain so little (about 400mL, apparently) or that the uterus was quite so small. And it really does seem that ova just fly through empty space into the fallopian tubes. (I wonder how many ever miss?) And we certainly approved of the penis of the live model. The rest of him was rather pleasant, too.
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And now for bed
NO2ID Core Board meeting went well, though I’m frankly astonished to discover that apparently half the fringe-left (of which I would consider myself proudly a member) seems to think we’re a front for the SWP!
A front for the SWP?! They’ve obviously never read any of my posts to The List back when I was subbed. Or noticed that UKIP are affiliated. And various bits of the Greens. That’s the one thing I really hate about left-wing politics. If we weren’t all quite so bloody People’s Front of Judæa we’d accomplish so much more.
BBC’s Question Time from Croydon was scary. It didn’t help that Trevor Kavanagh was there (I laughed out loud when he claimed that The Sun try not to wax hyperbolic about immigration). The girl in red in the audience was dead right. I’m paraphrasing, but she “didn’t realise she lived around quite so many narrow minded, Daily Mail reading scumbags”. You go girl. And move North Of The River; you know it makes sense
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Oh it so r0x0rs!
This Linkin Park vs Jay-Z MTV Mash-Up thing is great. Numb / Encore is my new favorite track. Expect to see a lot of it on the office’s Audioscrobbler soon. If the “enhanced CD” will let me rip it. And Chester Bennington really is deeply sexy.
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*cra-a-a-ck*
Goodness, osteopathy’s wonderful — who knew? Had some electotherapy to loosen up my lower thoracic upper lumbar back. Then massage, massage, crack, crack, crack. And I feel SO much better for it. Really nice bloke, too, very friendly. Another appointment at 9am, Monday. Working from home is much more difficult when you’re waiting for a client to give you information about a third party and they haven’t yet. Guess I’ll have to go chase again… Picked up a couple of CDs as I went to buy electricity earlier, including the Jay Z Linkin Park collaboration CD+DVD that they’ve been playing lots of on Kerrang! lately. Looks good.
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Goodness, is that the time?
Just Say No. So glad I’m working from home tomorrow and seeing the osteopath. Came home early from Retro, cos I wasn’t really in the mood and was rather tired (despite there being cool people there I’d not seen in ages. And Fruitbat ). Got a nice big hug from Scott, anyways.
Got sidetracked by Anatomy for Beginners again. Très cool, and that live model is SO cute. Today was the GI tract, though they didn’t make him show us his anus, bless ’im.
Then Desperate Housewives on E4+1. That show is utterly fantastic; and it would seem that the psychotic mother is actually really sweet, I’ve really warmed to him. I think NTL should carry HBO. And S4C Digidol, natch. Great adbreak: weird to say, but cool FilmFour ad and an ad for a cool-looking compilation album. And Point Pleasant is on now — Marti Noxon’s new project — it’s looking wonderfully dark. Which reminds me: I must watch those episodes of Carnivàle and Lost that I got. Gonna buy the Carnivàle s1 DVD soon, but I must be good for a while yet.
Chatted briefly with Des, on his new phone. He sounds good, but is missing me (shocker). Gonna have to make sure he’s out on Friday. It’s been too long since I saw him.
Got told off at work earlier for trying to skew Audioscrobbler towards good tracks (Depeche Mode’s /Enjoy the Silence/, remixed by Mike Shinoda). Damn, foiled again!
NO2ID core board tomorrow. Not quite sure what to report, as the database is nearly there, but we can’t get it installed quite yet. On the plus side, though, the Home Secretary’s local council (Norwich City Council; he’s the MP for UEA, my alma mater 
) have passed a deeply cool anti-ID Cards motion. Not only are they affiliating, but they also resolved:
to make it a policy of the council to ensure that national identity cards would not be required to access council services or benefits unless specifically called to do so by Act of Parliament; and
only [to] co-operate with the national identity card scheme where to do otherwise would be unlawful;
So deeply cool. Especially that first one, as the Identity Cards Bill provides only for the introduction of compulsion in council-offered services by statutory instrument, not by enactment.
As well as Norwich, Oxford City Council have passed a very similar motion and, tonight, The Borough’s motion only fell by one vote (I’m a little disappointed in the Lib Dem one-vote majority, but it’s great that it was even close to passing). Local Government turning against the government; wonderful.
Pissed off with the Tories’ attempts to racialise the Elections. Either way it’s bad: if it works, then we’re living in even worse a state than I thought; if it fails (even if their vote is split to UKIP and the BNP), then Labour are still gonna end up with a massive majority.
I still think my favorite result would be a minority Labour government that requires them to sell out to the Lib Dems on PR (and, if I wanna dream, with STV; maybe I should write an STV app as a C# learning exercise). At least then we wouldn’t get any of this shitty bipartisan nonsense, where everything is one-upmanship and manichæan, with no room for reasoned, argued compromise.
The death of the party whipping system would suit me better, in which case the government couldn’t rely on their stupid majority in order to rush through poorly-thought-out legislation. ID cards at the moment; Clarke’s fascist counter-terrorism plans soon. Ok, so they repeal the suspension of habeas corpus after a fashion, but derogating from the ECHR again in order to permit the introduction of house arrest without trial. Sometimes I wonder what the fuck is going on with Anglo-Saxon democracies at the moment. Thank fuck for the Québecois, who must be what’s responsible for making Canada sane, I guess.
Anyways, working from home tomorrow doesn’t mean not wor
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Oh shit.
Scott’s accidentally Jimmed a rather personal mail to The List. Oops.
Very floaty day. Got some more Unilever done; some of the other bits of the project are working well enough for me to be able to check some of my earlier work, so I’ve mostly been making formatting tweaks.
I appear to be becoming less of a nicotine-deficient stressbunny, which is good. Though I got rather pleasantly stoned last night. Bad Owen; no biscuit. But quite a few minieggs.
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Coo, pretty
I’d forgotten how much I quite like Kristian Leontiou (and quite how pretty he is, but that comes across less easily in MP3). But it allows me to segue over to AudioScrobbler (www.audioscrobbler.com) quite easily. Just set it up at work on our jukebox machine, so you can see how awful everyone else’s taste in music is by looking at www.audioscrobbler.com/user/WheelStudio Very cool ickle plugin (for just about every MP3 player known to God).
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Hmm
How does James do it, dammit? Back not hurting too much. Got to work late again (shocker). Helped RobG with more C#-ness, looked at a bug on AD, got confused about some thing we’re doing for where Scott works, where I have to phone someone to clarify part of the original brief. Why can’t I just ask Scott, dammit?
And bitched to Paul Faggot (the other other gay in the office) about James and his disturbing ability to pull Cadinot models without trying.
Must find something to do that looks like work.
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Ouch!
My back hurts. A lot. It started hurting just before I left the office and is agonising when I move in certain directions, but is tolerable if I stand up without twisting round any or when I sit up straight (so this is the best posture I’ve ever had at a keyboard, believe me!). Finally, it has spurred me on to maee an appointment to see the Osteopath near Ilford station on Thursday morning. Hopefully that should help. Work was alternating between dull (data entry for the shiny new site we’re launching for Unilever really soon) and interesting (helping RobG learn some more C# on a learning exercise for our intranet, or possibly website), via different (helping write a press release about the shiny new site we recently launched at www.allieddomecq.com *very proud* ). Not a bad day, all in all. Once I got there. And I got to bounce some more about our fantastic comeback on Saturday (masl.to/?O6DE1205A) whilst chatting to one of the pretty straight boys at work. Trying to be a little more interesting than just whittering about my day, we had quite an interesting email into www.writetothem.com today. Once upon a time, at www.faxyourmp.com, we had a couple of users mail in to mention that their MPs were asking them to confirm their “unsigned message” in writing. Obviously, we thought this was a bit silly. Thankfully, the government is also a bit silly and, in 2000, passed the Electronics Communications Act (some readers might remember us at www.stand.org.uk campaigning to get the nasty bits removed; they ended up in the same year’s Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act). Section 7 of the ECA specified that: In any legal proceedings, an electronic signature incorporated into […] a particular electronic communication […] shall each be admissible in evidence in relation to any question as to the authenticity of the communication[…]. For the purposes of this section an electronic signature is so much of anything in electronic form as is […] logically associated with any electronic communication […]; and purports to be so […] associated for the purpose of being used in establishing the authenticity of the communication[…]. Kinda ok, but there’s not requirement that it be secure I can say that this blog entry is signed by just saying so and saying that the words “Signed by” make it so. So, when MPs were complaining about signatures, we thought we’d take the piss a little. Every message sent through FYMP (and WriteToThem.com) is accompanied by a hash of the user’s email address that is a legitimate digital signature. Oh yes, très secure. Other than that, I chatted with Des a little, emailed with James and left voicemail for Stephen. And watched the fascinating Anatomy for Beginners (masl.to/?U20F2105A) on Channel 4. Ok, that’s far too much writing. Bedtime. After another little smoke, maybe.
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Fucking nicotine inhaler bollocksey
How would Smess know?! I want a cigarette
Does it show that I finished my course of patches last week? I’m thinking of going back to step three for another week’s worth, but wearing each patch for two days, to wean myself off a bit better.
But I really want a cigarette; this wanky inhalator thing just ain’t helping.
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Well, at least it made me smile.
After an All Staff mail went around, reading “Owen running late. Frozen door.”, at least one reply made me smile.
If anyone else has trouble opening a stuck door (which I didn’t, I just couldn’t get the earling thing locked again, but even so), then take a look at the nicely retro animated GIF at gprime.net/images/gifanimation/9.php
It made me smile!
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Fucking bollocks
It was for charity, right? Locks froze, took me 25 minutes to lock the front door. Combine that with feeling like shit, a shite District line and having to wait until 9am before being able to try to find somewhere in Ilford that sells de-icer (Poundsaver, apparently — nowhere seems to sell WD40 these days!) means I’ve only just got into the office.
And I want a cigarette.
And my legs *really* fucking hurt.
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Oh God.
It was for charity, ok? I appear to have taken my clothes off for charity last night. I blame Snoboardr, obviously. But it raised £500,– for Shelter, apparently.
Twas a really good night, anyways. Lots of dancing, particularly with a *very* cute Asian lad called Amit. He needs to come to my Strip Poker Party, I think. And Baz was there, being very pretty, as well. I appear to have been a little bit rude with him at one point. Oops.
And Smess wrote on people lots. He wrote “Hot screw” on my back, with an arrow pointing downwards. I don’t know what he means. Or how he’d know, frankly!
But George IV came back here, along with me, Des, Alan and some bloke Alan escorted to his room rather rapidly. We appear to have drunk even more (in my very homosexual martini glasses). And there appear to have been some other consumables involved. Terribly naughty.
But I really must remember to do my physio every day, if I’m gonna dance like that. I can barely move my legs now.