DerrenWilson.net

If only I knew how to make such a button reality… I could name my price, couldn’t I?

Apart from Word, I might also make it available for Microsoft® Excel, Access, Adobe® Photoshop®, Illustrator® and InDesign®, Macromedia Dreamweaver, Flash…

Wahey, the word count thing I was going on about earlier now works. You can now navigate through the archive of this site by date, (unreliable) category, or length of entry. And that’s got to be good.

The code hasn’t changed very much from the original version – I just added another array to get the date to show in the title tag of the archive hyperlinks. I still need to improve the word count-ing code, probably with some sort of regular expression to remove html before the words are counted. From a quick check, counting by hand and leaving big fingerprints on my monitor, it’s reasonably accurate.

So what was the big problem before? A complicated permissions issue, that was only sorted out when… er… I realised I was using the wrong username in my connection string. Ahem.

In my half-hearted way, a long time ago I thought about the idea of having some sort of list of bloggers blogging outside their home countries.

And, through the usual web serendipity, I’ve found someone who’s got such a list. Excellent. Excuse me while I go get myself added…

PS: For those of us who don’t know Latin, the quote by the Roman author Horace translates as ‘They change the sky, not their soul, who run across the sea’. I’m still not sure if that’s true or not.

I’d have liked to have been a fly on the wall during the meeting that gave the go-ahead to the Breville Laughter Lines.

The what?

A kettle, a vertical toaster and a sandwich toaster that – hold on to your seat – play rubbish impersonations of comedy voices when the product has done whatever it’s supposed to. That’s right, set your kettle correctly, and you could be made aware it’s boiled by the sound of someone pretending to be Del-Boy from Only fools and horses! (and how it deserves that exclamation mark).

Other voices include Tony Blair, Ozzy Osbourne and Ricky Tomlinson (I think). I wonder, if the product is a (pfft) success, if there’ll be a more interesting selection on the next set of products. How about a Withnail impression (of Withnail and I fame) saying ‘We want the finest tea know to humanity, we want it here, and we want it now!’? Monty Python? David Brent from the Office?

It does say, in small text on the ad I ripped out of the Radio Times, that there is an on-off switch ‘if the laughing gets too much’, which is a mercy, I suppose. At least I know what I’ll be getting for Christmas this year.

When I’m old and grey, I’ll still be playing 16 Lovers Lane by the Go-Betweens (As long as the retirement home has something that knows how to play MP3s or CDs). Released in 1988, there’s the odd dated sound on the record, but the songs are classics, every single one of them.

And here they are, reduced to a few guitar chords (it took me 15 years to figure them all out):

1. Love goes on!
2. Quiet Heart
3. Love is a sign
4. You can’t say no forever (is coming)
5. The devil’s eye
6. Streets of your town
7. Clouds
8. Was there anything I could do?
9. I’m allright
10. Dive for your memory (is coming)

They aren’t perfect, but no matter how far you’ve come, you’ve always got further to go…

Ahh, University Libraries. When they aren’t making you fill in forms and not letting you borrow because you have a 5p fine, they’re hiding forgotten gems like Alphabet 1964 – International Annual of Letterforms in the stacks.

Here’s some scans of a few ads in the back:

A lovely ad for Monotype Univers in the style of Emil Ruder.

Fantastic Nebiolo ad. Two colours, includes Egizio, Eurostile, Augustea, and other Novarese faces (no Recta, though)

And if you don’t like type for its own sake:

This is a shot of Piccadilly Circus ca.1964. The colour’s got that bright metallic quality that you only get from old printing processes. Mine’s a SKOL (the light, dry lager)…

Literally, fool the eye, which is what this guy does, well and truly, on the pavements of the world.

While we’re on the classical-in-art, I’m overjoyed to see that Matthew Collings is back on the telly, bringing his idiosyncratic presenting style (‘This is Titian to the max’ is one quote I remember from the Radio Times) to the work of Titian, Rubens, Velasquez and Hogarth. Wow.

It’s been six years now, but there’s still a few holes in my treasured Australian CD collection, so I’ve been thinking about a 12-track CD’s worth (but in no particular order) of songs-originating-from-Australia that I miss:

1. The Welcome Mat – Gram
   It’s about Gram Parsons, innit? It rocks.
2. Melanie Oxley & Chris Abrahams – Benchtop
   Truly, Melanie Oxley’s voice is the aural equivalent of honey on slightly burnt toast. And Chris Abrahams has the deftest of touches on the piano.
3. The Falling Joys – Make it soon
   It seemed every Falling Joys song had at least one naff line in the lyric. But they were still rather good.
4. Stephen Cummings – Where are you going?
   Lovely acoustic stuff. Liked writing songs about girls called Jane. Donna Mensforth’s favourite.
5. The Church – Reptile
   Those electric guitar bends in the intro.
6. Magic Dirt – Ice
   It rocks².
7. Smudge – Mike Love not War
   How dare they release their best song after I left the country?
8. Tex, Don & Charlie – Sittin’ in a bar
   ’cos there’s a cold, grey Saturday, comin’ in under the door…
9. The Clouds – See you’re leaving
   Big drum sound.
10. The Triffids – Wide Open Road
    Big bass sound. The lyrics to this song, about the tyranny of distance, are unmistakeably Australian.
11. Weddings, Parties, Anything – Father’s Day
    Just pipped Away away.
12. You Am I – Hi-Fi Way
    Yeah, so it’s a whole album. I miss it. And please throw in a copy of Ignorance and Vodka as well.

Then there’d have to be a CD of all those songs that you should really hate but remember fondly for some reason or other. Step forward Boom Crash Opera, The Angels, Cold Chisel, Mondo Rock, The Divinyls, Mental as Anything…

Insomnia is severely punished in our village, as each quarter hour throughout the day and night is marked by a bangin’ choon from the church clock, positioned about 100 metres from my ear. is it wrong to be ungrateful when you’re just on the edge of sleep and the bells ring for 1:45am?

Anyway, I noticed something odd this weekend. I think one of the bells is missing. Not having perfect pitch, I couldn’t say which bell it is for sure, but on striking the quarter hour, instead of

Bing bong bing bong (pause) bing bong bing bong.

You hear

Bing bong bing       (pause) bing bong bing      .

so it must be the one that goes, er, bong.

Has one of the bellringers (they practice for ages every Tuesday) broken it? Has it been hired out as a massive punch bowl? Has the machine got sick of playing the same tune and gone all modern classical on us?

It’s never dull living in Hayfield.

As is the way of all computing, you manage to do something and it uncovers another area where your knowledge is sorely lacking.

I wanted to write a little php script that would count the words in my blog for me (I’ve done this before, but it wasn’t as clever, as I had to cut and paste into Word).

It works on my local setup, but as soon as I put in the details for the iliveonyourvisits webspace, I get MySQL errors. It seems that the script isn’t allowed to talk to the MT database. Is that right? Is the MT database off limits for any non-MT scripts?

Anyway, at least I can exclusively reveal I’m up to 62,000 words (or thereabouts), but you’ll have to come over and look at the results on my computer to verify it for yourselves…