On a totally different note, I was looking at the Prime Minister’s E-Petitions website the other day and having a laugh at some of those which totally failed to get any support whatsoever. I decided that some of these were too good - in the sense of being so bad that they’re good - to let them just get buried in the depths of the official site, so I’ve created A Minority of One as a place to display them and allow people to comment on them. Unlike RailwayStations.Info, this was just thrown together in an afternoon using Wordpress as a CMS - the only custom code is a short script to add new petitions to the site. My favourite so far, in terms of demonstrating no clue at all, is a petition to ban peer to peer technology.

Railway Stations
A Minority of One

To begin with, now that I no longer have any need for a website advertising freelance work, I’ve redesigned www.good-stuff.co.uk to be more of a personal site of various things that I want to experiment with. The latest addition is a sunrise/sunset calendar that will tell you what time the sun rises and sets at any location defined either by a UK postcode, a UK placename or by clicking on an interactive map of the world.

Also, having finally got round to getting the x.tc domain working again (it has fallen into disrepair after all those of us who originally used it had left PSINet and most of the DNS got deleted), I’ve also retrieved a lot of stuff from archive.org and reinstated the pointless waffle at mark.x.tc.

So, farewell to all my fans (well, both of you). I hope you’ve enjoyed the sites I’ve managed to come up with over the years. You can keep on pestering Mike for something to replace my contribution - it’s not going to be easy :-)

So. Farewell then
Netscape
Browser extraordinaire

Once you were the
Dog’s bollocks

But now

Just a load
Of bollocks

So. At last the beast fell
And the unbelievers
Had seen it coming
All along.

(apologies to EJ Thribb)

I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher - not lower - than -8 but I’m not having it.

The full story is at ‘Cool Cash’ card confusion.

I wonder if they were as useless for all of their clients as they were for this one.

They now seem to have found a new home, on the bookshelf! Typically, they’re either fast asleep or haring around the room at severe risk of getting trodden on.

More photos here.

Continuing an irregular blog theme, when I got out of bed this morning I found cats in the following places:

Cat 2 (Sproingy) was asleep on the windowsill in the bedroom, looking rather cramped alongside Emma’s hair-straightening thingy.

Cat3 (Scampy) and her kittens were in their box in the spare room.

Cat 1 (Slinky) was on the office chair in my study.

The cat has gone, by the way, so that’s no longer a motivation for giving.

Instead, I’ve just customised the G2 theme to be essentially the same as the blog theme, and fiddled around with the Apache config to handle the URL rewrites rather than using .htaccess files. This has the advantage of being more flexible, but the disadvantage is that I’ll need to change both sections if/when I ever update the blog theme. Also, Wordpress doesn’t seem to have an option for not using .htaccess - if I delete it, it tries to put it back, with disastrous results. So I have to have a dummy .htaccess in there that looks as though it’s doing something but isn’t. I suspect that things may break if I ever change anything on the G2 config as well, but that’s another issue.

In case anyone isn’t aware of the significance of these numbers and letters, this is the infamous AACS key which sparked a huge storm at Digg.

Cat 3 was outside when I left the house, and jumped up onto the garden table in the hope of getting a fuss before I got into the car. I took a photo of that one as well.

All this seems like another way of ripping off fashion victims - the type of people who will pay over the odds just for the right name on the label. So I’ve created a t-shirt design for anyone who feels that they want to proclaim the fact that a designer bag isn’t what turns them on. You can buy a copy through my Spreadshirt shop.

While this is obviously just my cynical attempt to cash in on the latest craze, it would be rather fun to see these out on the streets.