# Wrote this Thursday afternoon on my PalmV, while out and about to see a man about a job.

Cardiff Central - enter through a tunnel with steps to the platforms. Like Birmingham New Street or Amsterdam Centraal, except is Cardiff is older and the steps lead up.

Approaching Bristol Parkway, your eyeline is at the roofline. Ridges into the distance, only broken by the occasional runaway Leylandii. Strong and sudden realisation that where I live is not-like-this. A businessman, bald and silversuited, sits down diagonally opposite. Soon he gets up and strides to the toilet, then back past me to get a sandwich. He eats, I read, we ignore each other. As he tidies his rubbish, he knocks an empty cup onto my bag then to the floor. He apologises, backheeling it under his seat.

He leaves and is replaced by a beautifully brown-eyed woman. Put off by the bald's debris, she sits directly opposite, ignoring conventional train ettiquette. The conductor passes. Any tickets from Swindon? Rummaging, she finds it but he's already gone. We exchange a conspiratorial smile, her face lighting. I glance at the floor, see her pointed black boots. Thinking of Rosa Krebb's knife blades, feel suddenly vulnerable.

She puts on makeup at Reading, shaping her lips with brief accurate strokes. Crossing her legs, grazing my shin, she projects a sharp toe into the gangway. Suddenly she relents and slides into the window seat.

The vacant place is taken by a sad kohl-rimmed girl. Tight headscarf, hoop earrings. Smells of day old chips and week old sweat. Strapping on a walkman, she stares resolutely though the window, lips pursed. Outside it's raining. Looking again, the sky is blue with perfect winter cloud.

We empty in silence, strolling and hurrying through Paddington's vast and vaulted engine shed.

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# My clients are all leery, needy, hostile, angry, creepy and ultimately dysfunctional, says the stripper - It's clear that a lot of the guys who come to strip bars are here to get their revenge on women. I can usually spot them. It's an expression of distaste they wear permanently - whether it's a handsome young blade, a suited business man or, like last night's guy, a bloated, sagging, professional onanist, whose sallow pallor, slack features and faint fishy reek indicate a bitter life misspent. Sometimes I panic that all men are serious women-haters, but then I catch myself, think about my men friends - my funny, clever, warm, intelligent friends - and remind myself that the men I meet aren't necessarily a healthy cross-section of male society.
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# The festive season is almost upon us, and so it's time for Spearmint Rhino to plaster the buses with its oh-so-hilarious XXXMas in Lap-Land advert. Spearmint Rhino advertises constantly in Birmingham. I sit having my breakfast and the buses go past exhorting me to eXXXperience Europe's largest gentlemen's club at Spearmint Rhino Xtreme.

Gentlemen's club? Yeah.

I just don't understand how charging a big entrance fee, insisting that customers wear a tie and putting lobster on the menu makes Spearmint Rhino fundamentally any different from the Exposure, which promises "Full Strip for £5", or from JDs bar up the road and its topless waitresses on a Thursday. You're still paying someone to take their clothes off, you're just paying more for it. Doesn't make it any more respectable you know what vicar, I had a bloody marvellous time out at Spearmint Rhino last night. In fact surely the opposite must be true. Going to a strip joint is, I assume, about getting a funny feeling in the trousers. Spearmint Rhino seems to pride itself on having the "best" girls, thus guaranteeing, I guess, a good big stiffy for your money.

Have you also noticed that Spearmint Rhino never use blondes on their adverts, only brunettes and redheads? I think this is more of their it's-ok-we're-not-really-a-strip-joint-we're-an-exclusive-club bollocks. Blondes may have mroe fun and gentlemen may prefer them, but blondes are dim, cheap and trashy too. Brunettes are classy and redheads are firey - much more the image they want to project. [added 27th Nov 2002]

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# When I wrote my first webpage, sometime back in about 1993, I never dreamed I'd one day be buying a 1400 page HTML reference book.
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# What's all this about?
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# As I left the house this morning, my way was barred by five sheep, all busily engaged in eating the ivy on the gate post. I said Good Morning, and they all filed off and disappeared off up the road.

Fantastic.
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# The Coffee Grounds Canadian Correspondant writes:

Nowhere more than here in Ottawa, the nation's capital, are the language police more active. This devoted group outraged francos and well meaning anglos scour every instance of the printed word to ensure that nowhere is english given more prevalance than french. From roadsigns to the ingredients on a tin of baked beans atleast as much french as english must be written. Sometimes there is just no french translation for the english word so, rather to fall foul of the "roast beef" and "weekend" failures of past generations, they make things up.

Example, the good people of CocaCola are having a Harry Potter promotion. If you put a 2 litre bottle of pop in the fridge then it will magically tell you which quiditch team you are playing for. It does not matter that these words are not real, they must be translated into french for the other side of the bottle and so the venerable house of Hufflepuff becomes Puff Souffle.
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# It used to be very popular in many software organizations to measure programmer productivity in LOCs - lines of code written. Sounds reasonable - after all, if your programmers are working away and the code base is getting bigger and bigger, then something good must be happening. You do still sometimes see companies bragging about how many kLOCs their latest product is.

Over the last two days, I'm on a net LOCs written of -2000. Over the last 3 weeks I've discarded around 500k of source code, which is god knows how many. It does lots more stuff and it's got less bugs. Less code is, in almost every case, more.
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# There is a right and a wrong way to do Sunday mornings

This time last week I was enjoying yet another cup of coffee with AndyB, JD and Anton. We all met at university, but hadn't seen each other since. I'd kept in touch with Andy, on and off, and he'd been in contact with JD, on and off. When Anton emailed via love-it-or-loathe-it-you-can't-ignore-it FriendReunited, all the bits dropped into place, and Andy (I think) suggested we get together. That was back in August, and last weekend was the first date we could all do.

They all arrived here on Saturday afternoon, and we spent the afternoon and evening talking nonsense, drinking beer, playing pool for old times sake and eating curry. John described it as an evening with familiar strangers, which seemed a very good way of putting it. I enjoyed myself very much, and everyone esle seemed to as well. On Sunday, we all sat around drinking coffee and complaining we just couldn't do it like we used to. Then Nat made us all have showers, because we smelled.

Today, I unblocked the toilet, England have collapsed to humilating defeat in the Ashes test, and we're looking after a friend's dog which has horrendous wind.

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#[linkfarm] When good interfaces go crufty
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# Woke up. Turned on TMS. Australia are 327-1. Desperately want to go back to bed again.

planetcutie said Simon Jones - the future of English fast bowling? Yes, because we'll only probably see him play again in the distant future. But this is what happens when you select a squad of players who break bones, muscles and ligaments if you just look at them in a funny way. [added 7th Nov 2002]

AngryJohn [e] said Ha I'll bet this morning there was an extra spring in your step Mr Pessimist. [added 8th Nov 2002]

I retuned my radio (well my audio stream) to FM so as to avoid further bad news this morning. What a fule I was. [added 8th Nov 2002]

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# As part of his uniform, M&S have issued Ali with a clip-on tie. Bang goes their reputation for quality.

smellygit said I had a cup of tea at a Birmingham police station when I was a student. A policeman there explained they had clip on ties so that if someone grabbed it they couldn't be strangled.

So maybe M&S worry their staff might be grabbed by some Middle Englander enraged by too much Christmas shopping, desperate to find the M&S christmas underwear section? [added 7th Nov 2002]

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# A major part of the past weekend's excitement was running off three copies of Nat's thesis. It's being bound now, and she's planning to drive it over to Cambridge and hand in on Friday.

morag spratt [e] [w] said how long has this taken to write and will anybody read it? [added 5th Nov 2002]

It's taken a while - it's about 6 years elapsed time, but Nat's had significant stretches out. Renovating the house took a while, and the whole being pregnant and then raising the Bean kept her away from it for a while.

Will anyone read it? Hope so - it's called Expectation and Reality of Marriage, 1930-1960. There's a lot of social commentary in the papers, on TV and elsewhere, in politics too, which is predicated on "when our parents got married they did it for life". People posit a golden age when everyone lived in married bliss, children played in the streets and nobody locked their doors. Nat's thesis is one of the few bits of work which actually looks why people got married, and what happened to them when they did. [added 6th Nov 2002]

morag spratt said Sounds interesting, but reading it would probably depress me..for reasons too numerous to mention Well done Nat!

The biggest problem with finishing a project of this magnitude is fnding something to replace it! - so maybe this

is why you are moving house eh! : )) [added 7th Nov 2002]

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# Ali started his stretch at Marks and Spencer today. He's there for eight weeks, the first week of which is training. I know IT professionals with 10 years experience who've had less training than that.
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