Went to bed early last night, slept over 12 hours. Woke up without any feverishness, which is a definite improvement on the last 2 days, although this sinus headache can go away now thankyou.

Posted: March 28th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
Comments: none

AT&T decides to relocate it’s callcentres back in the USA instead of India - and cannot find 5000 Americans of enough skill to fill the vacancies.

Posted: March 27th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 1

So I thought I’d got over this tonsilitis thing; my throat was feeling okay yesterday, good enough that I went to the folk club after work and found my singing voice to be in fine fettle.  Today though, at work I started feeling really feverish and shaky, and after 3 hours it was plain that I wouldn’t last the shift, so I packed up and came home. And I feel terrible. Really terrible. So I might just call it quits and go to bed.

Also I’m seriously reconsidering whether to stay in Warcraft at all. I’ve not logged on in over a month, not missed it at all. The new long-awaited 2.4 patch came out today and I just can’t get enthused about it at all. None of the new content will ever apply to me cos I really can’t see me EVER hitting level 60 never mind level 70.  I’m half inclined to resurrect Guld Wars again, if I can retrieve my username & password that hasn’t been used in 3 years… if my account still even exists any more.  I wish there was a decent MMO out there that didn’t zone American and European players on seperate servers. I’d love to find a game that I could play with my US friends as well. In any case, my Warcraft paid time runs out in September, and I don’t think I’ll be renewing it.

Maybe I’ll just stick with Second Life. At least that’s free.

Posted: March 26th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 1

Well, Les has tonsilitis/strep throat, and last night I felt that horrible feeling in my own throat so I know its coming. Ugh. This morning we took a trip to Morrissons and bought everything we need to make a good chicken soup.

I’ve always been sceptical about chicken soup. Questions that come to mind are, why chicken and not other things? Why soup, and not the same ingredients on your plate with gravy, or a salad, and potatoes? What about a vegetarian option? But I’ve done a little reading up and apparently it’s true. The onions and garlic contain natural pennicillins, this I already knew, but the chicken itself, apparently there’s some enzyme that comes out of the bones when you make the stock. The enzyme isn’t there if you don’t use the bones.

And soup rather than dinner, because everyone knows that you gotta keep your fluid intake high when you’re sick.

So this chicken soup recipe was sort of made-up on the fly, but here it is. It’s a proper wholesome English-style soup.

1 or 2 roast chickens
2.5 litres water (about 5 pints)
250g chopped carrots
250g chopped onions
250g chopped swede
3 cloves garlic (but you know, I think maybe I ought to have used double that)
250g packet of “soup mix” (a mixture of dried lentils, split peas and pearl barley)
Fresh herbs, salt and pepper to season.
A massive saucepan or stockpot that holds a minimum of 8 pints/4 litres.

We bought two pre-roasted chickens (because we were expecting Kat and her boyfriend to be around for lunch, but they weren’t), reserved all the breast meat and the good part of the leg meat for other meals and put that aside. If you’re only using 1 chicken you’ll want to use this meat in the soup too.

The remainder of the carcasses were stripped into two piles: (1) the mostly-nice meat which will be chopped and later added back into the soup. (2) the scratty bits of meat and gristle and all the bones. All the skin was discarded - it makes the soup too greasy for my taste, and anyway, Xena was looking at me with those big brown “feed-me” eyes.

The bones and scratty bits were put in the stockpot with about 2.5 litres of water and a generous pinch of rock salt. Simmered for 45 minutes then strained. All the bones were discarded. The meat… again with the big brown feed-me eyes. The reserved stock was returned to the stockpot.

In another pan or wok, fry off the onions, garlic and vegetables in a little olive oil. When softened, add it all to the stock along with all the other ingredients. For herbs we used thyme today, mainly because I think thyme goes best with chicken. I would have used sage as well, if there’d been any fresh in the store. Add salt and freshly-ground black pepper to taste.

Put the lid on the pot, bring to the boil then turn the heat as low as it’ll go and just leave it to simmer for about an hour.

Spend the next ten minutes trying to scrub the garlic and onion smell off my hands.

I’m also foregoing coffee today in favour of green tea with lemon, ginger and honey. I had a cup of that last night and felt it working almost right away. With any luck I’ll be able to fight off this thing without resorting to pharmaceuticals.

Posted: March 22nd, 2008 under cooking, health.
Comments: 2

When SUP took over Livejournal, and there were rumours flying around about SUP being connected with the KGB, I was worried, in a sort of conspiracy-theory-paranoid sort of way. The sort where you don’t actually quite believe it could possibly be true, but you daren’t not believe it just in case.

News broke this week about a Russian blogger, 21-year-old Savva Terentyev, who was arrested for “hate speech” and was this week officially charged, a “crime” for which he may face a fine equivalent to half a year’s annual wage for the annual Russian worker, or 2 years in jail with hard labour.

His “crime” was to make a comment (not a post, just a comment) on the Livejournal of another blogger, Boris Suranov, in which he was critical about local police. When Terentyev was arrested in August 2007 his comment was forcibly deleted (by livejournal.ru management, presumably) but a screenshot of it has been preserved here. Not that I expect any of my friendslist read Russian, but, you know.

The website Pajamas Media reports the following response from our favourite Mr Nossik, whose position is unclear but he seems to have been at the time a very big fish in LJ.ru:

“The ignorance of local judges often plays a role in the outcome of cases connected to the internet. I hope that with many journalists present, the judge will look at the essence of the case and not simply hand down a guilty verdict.” Nosik later said: “The people who launched the criminal case are trying in this way to portray police-turned-crooks as a social group that enjoys protection from Russian legislation. It seems to me that it ought be us who are protected by the law, not crooks.”

And less than 4 months after this arrest, Livejournal.com was bought out by SUP, with Nossik as a major player somewhere in the decision-making (even though nobody can tell exactly where, right now, because “blogging evangelist” isn’t much of a job description really).

It occurred to me right at the start that SUP’s interest in Livejournal isn’t advertising at all, it’s nothing to do with business. It’s purely a way to control Livejournal itself, which is by far the most popular website of any kind in Russia. Livejournal is bigger than Myspace, bigger than Facebook. Livejournal in Russia is very, very serious stuff. Now, seeing the timing of the takeover next to the timing of this very high profile case, makes me absolutely convinced of that.

Around the time of the SUP takeover, Mark Kraft, a previous employee of LJ admitted that there was code in place within Livejournal which could track when a LJ user logged on and off and which IP address they were currently connected to.

“Here’s a secret that few people have talked about within LiveJournal. Code was put into the site back when I was working for it that allowed administrators to track a user’s IP address and notify administrators when they’re online. It was added for the best of reasons because of a very serious criminal investigation in the US, but it could be misused by request of the Russian government if that authority and those privileges are unmonitored and that power is put into the wrong hands.”

Which means that LJ/SUP staff can tell not only when you are online but also where you are geographically (more or less). And therefore know where to send the KGB sweep to pick up the next poor Russian blogger guilty of exercising a basic human right for free speech.

And you know, anyone who says to me “Well I’m just so-n-so living in random-western-country, they aren’t going to bother about me,” I have just one thing to say. No they’re not going to bother about YOU but are you really so selfish that you do not care about the rights of others? Livejournal under SUP scares the crap out of me, not because I fear they might do something to me, but because of the many Russian-speaking bloggers who may find themselves in danger simply by posting their thoughts on LJ. It’s them I fear for.

We welcome our new Russian Overlords.

Posted: March 21st, 2008 under blogging, rant.
Comments: 1

There was apparently one photo of me at the awards dinner on Saturday, taken by the professional photographer. It’s quite a nice picture, aside from the watermark, but I’m not sure it’s worth paying £8 for the non-watermarked copy. Anyway at least you can see what my dress and hair looked like. (The lady on the left is Christine, a former TM of mine, and the guy was a magician, doing the pre-dinner entertainments).

Further pics are available at freezeframeevents, click “gallery” then “AA Awards 2008″

Posted: March 20th, 2008 under work.
Comments: none

Wow. OMG Just wow. I am utterly speechless. Now everything SUP has done wrong with LJ becomes perfectly clear.

Here is a news interview from the head of SUP, and there is a translation of it in full into English here.

To summarise: “We don’t give a shit what you think and if you are not fully in support you are to be considered an enemy of LJ. We don’t want enemies here.”

This, ladies and gentlemen, is Russian model business. If you don’t like it, don’t eat it. Just don’t expect anything to improve because it won’t.

Posted: March 19th, 2008 under blogging, rant.
Comments: none

I’ve just spent the best part of whole bloody day trying to configure my email client to work with different email addresses (aol, yahoo and gmail). This is something tht’s not worked properly in nearly a year. At first, nothing worked. After tearing my hair out for several hours I gave up and contacted aol support. All they did was repeat the FAQ at me and tell me that there was nothing else they could do. I specifically asked them if ports 587 (aol) and 465 (gmail) were blocked. They said no.

Miraculously, and without me changing anything at all, the aol and gmail ones suddenly started working again within 5 minutes, making me think that the ports WERE blocked, and they just unblocked them.

Yahoo was still not working though. I ended up contacting Yahoo live help (because I’ve got a paid-for yahoo email account) and it took an hour to get to the bottom of it, but it does now all work. All I had to do was change the mail servers from yahoo.co.uk to yahoo.com, something to do with AOL giving me a US-based IP address instead of a British one (if I visit an IP checker it always tells me I’m in the USA - have had results ranging from Philadelphia to Atlanta, but always US). Nothing but praise from me for the staff at Yahoo.

Posted: March 17th, 2008 under random.
Comments: none

Following all the recent wank about the Jane Eyre plagiarism case (I finally learned how to spell plagiarism correctly), I was passed this Serenity/Firefly fic rec featuring - you guessed it - Jayne Eyre. This, ladies and gentlemen, is how an homage of a classic work should be written.

Jayne Eyre by Meltha

Have boxes of tissues to hand, its a weepy (tears of laughter).

Posted: March 17th, 2008 under fanfic, writing.
Comments: none

I just have to share this. It apparently appeard on the Ellen show, and basically is about two guys who raised a lion cub called Christian, but when the cub got too big they had to release him back to the wild (presumably they live in a country where there are wild lions). Christian adapted well to life with a pride of wild lions. Then a year later the two men came back to visit, and this is the amazing reunion that took place.

Link in case the embedded video doesn’t work:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xr1pWzoLvT8

Posted: March 16th, 2008 under random.
Comments: 1