DerrenWilson.net

• Don’t panic. Even though you are in the middle of nowhere (well, on the A515 heading towards Buxton) the gritters have been out to stop the road turning into an ice rink.
• Drive according to the road conditions. This is no time to be practising your Finnish rally driving, as tempting as it might seem. Opposite lock? Not tonight, I’m missing my rollcage.
• Don’t open the sunroof. Wait until you get home before you start messing about in the snow.
• Avoid going under rail bridges while trains are crossing them. Look at the pretty icicles hanging 80 feet above you – they’d have to be pretty lucky to hit you if they fell off – wouldn’t they?
• Don’t think about your blog when you’re trying to drive. Ew! You just missed that lorry…

After I had ten pretty disgusting sandwiches submitted to the Sandwich Project on Thursday, I didn’t have enough time to delete them from the database, so the SP’s been closed until this morning.

Thanks to two simple SQL statements and one more if in the php, you will no longer be subjected to this kind of thing. I hope.

I’ve also changed the top bit to help you find what to put between two pieces of bread this Christmas.

I’ve wittered on about a site I’ve done at work before, but now I feel confident enough about it not falling over to talk about it in English.

For the last few days I’ve been wearing off the letters on my keyboard for RealFrench.net, the first of several planned language teaching sites. Just this minute, an hour before I leave work for Christmas, a new French Vocabulary section went live. It’s all javascript at the moment, but we are beginning to think about possibly working on another solution, eventually.

There’s also some French Grammar notes and a set of links, along with my beloved Univers (it is French, after all) wherever possible.

Please feel free to leave comments about things you like, dislike or stuff that stopped working on you.

Every December I like to buy the end of year NME – I did prefer the Melody Maker, when it was still alive – to catch up on 12 months of earth shattering indie-rock news.

I also allow myself a warm inner glow if I’ve got any of the albums on the NME’s best of the year list. And this year, double glow, as no less than the record of the year was the White Stripes’ Elephant, which I can’t say is played every night in our house, but it’s there in the CD rack under the stairs.

Reading the NME on the train, it seemed these modern music magazines are a bit lightweight compared to your mid-nineties Melody Maker, when you needed a copy of the Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought next to you as you read the record reviews. These days, it seems 750 words is the maximum article length and no layout is complete without at least three clashing gradients.

Am I showing my age yet?

Anyway, I thought there might be room for a few more end of year music awards:

Best DVD you’ll never see award goes to The Cream and the Crock: A history of You Am I that my sister sent me from Australia. Not the greatest videos ever filmed (except for Jaimme’s got a girl) but worth it for the band’s droll commentary on their own videos. Honorable mention: Wilco’s I am trying to break your heart which doesn’t seem to be available in the UK.

Big dumb grins from big dumb songs award has to go to The Darkness, Men what do R.O.C.K. ‘My heart’s in overdrive and you’re behind the steering wheel…’. Classic rock.

Comeback of the year for Evan Dando, who released a pretty good new record, told everyone he had stopped taking drugs and then went to Australia for a series of apparently shambolic shows. Must have been the jet lag.

Best Smiths impersonation for Ryan Adams’s ‘Does anyone want to take me home?’. It’s all there – the lyrics about ‘twilight years’ and a pretty good stab at Mr Marr’s guitar sound.

Best sunny American record goes to The Thrills, even though the lead singer looks really uncomfortable leaning over onto the microphone like that and wears a very odd chunky watch. These things are important, you know.

Ever gone into a shop with the premonition that the transaction you are about to negotiate is going to end badly?

30th October – I burst into the Max Speilmann photographic shop near Manchester Piccadilly train station. They are about to close, but take the slides I’ve chosen in for enlargements.

(I should have given up when they said they could only do 10×7 prints. Also, because I don’t know Manchester very well, I didn’t realise that there’s at least two other shops a gentle stroll away – in the other direction – that probably would have provided a more generous selection of options.)

Anyway, as I leave the shop, I’m not sure why, but I think to myself that I’ll be very lucky to see the finished prints, and there’s no way they’ll be back in the two weeks promised.

And the sixth sense is right. First visit, nothing. Come back in a few days. Second visit, three weeks after putting the slides in, nothing, and the ’customer service’ phone number. I ring the customer service number; they think the slides reached their slide processing location but have been returned to the wrong store. I describe the slides, a bit of Palladio, some opus sectile, a Venice canal (I’m paraphrasing). I get the feeling, from the lack of empathy and the rote-ness of what customer service say, that this is a common occurrence.

Nothing happens. No-one in the Max Speilmann empire notices a packet of out of place slides and prints in their shop. I call customer service again and they admit that the slides are l.o.s.t. Last Friday, after six weeks of waiting for the enlargements that will probably now never arrive, I get a letter offering a free slide film and processing.

I suppose legally that’s all I’m entitled to, but it still feels very hollow. How are we going to get back to Venice to take these slides again? What am I going to get my sister for her birthday now? How can a large company be so slapdash?

And I suppose that’s where it would end. Before the advent of this blogging/google thing…

Max Spielmann are incompetent and make mistakes

Do not trust your photographs with Max Spielmann

I had a problem getting slides enlarged using Max Spielmann

That’s much better.

extract($_POST);

$filename = "/home/iliveonyourv/public_html/poll.txt";
$fl=fopen($filename,'r');

//$name = fgets($fl, 4096);
$options[0] = fgets($fl, 5);

$temp = $options[0];
while ($temp) {
$theoptions[$temp] = fgets($fl, 4096);
$temp = $temp - 1;
}

$temp = $options[0];
while ($temp) {
$thevalues[$temp] = fgets($fl, 4096);
$temp = $temp - 1;
}
fclose($fl);

if ($results) {

echo "

Current Voting:

“;
$temp = $options[0]; $temp=$temp-1;
while ($temp) {
if ($thevalues[$temp] == 0) {
$percent = 0;
} else {

$tempnum = $options[0];
$total = 0;
while ($tempnum) {
$total += Trim($thevalues[$tempnum]);
$tempnum = $tempnum – 1;
}

$percent = 100 * Trim($thevalues[$temp]) / $total;
if (strlen($percent) > 4) {
$percent = substr($percent, 0, 4);
}
}

echo “

$theoptions[$temp]: $percent% ($thevalues[$temp] votes)

“;
$temp = $temp – 1;
}

} elseif ($vote) {

echo “

You voted for $theoptions[$optradio]

“;

unlink($filename);
$fl = fopen($filename, ‘w’);
fputs($fl, “$name”);
fputs($fl, “$options[0]“);

$temp = $options[0];
while ($temp) {
fputs($fl, “$theoptions[$temp]“);
$temp = $temp – 1;
}

$temp = $options[0];
while ($temp) {
if ($temp == $optradio) {
fputs($fl, “$thevalues[$temp]” + 1);
fputs($fl, “\n”);
$temp = $temp – 1;
} else {
fputs($fl, “$thevalues[$temp]“);
$temp = $temp – 1;
}
}
fclose($fl);
echo “

“;
} else {
$temp = $options[0]; $temp=$temp-1;
echo “

I think it must be about ten years since my first retail Christmas. And it’s only with the passing of time that the mental anguish of those days has disappeared.

Of course I didn’t have a sensible retail job at Christmas. As a nascent classical scholar I had no practical skills whatsoever (and was in no danger of ever getting any). With the help of someone-I-used-to-know, I got a job in a big department store, in today’s retail jargon, offering ambient experiential Christmas solutions.

You what? This is where it gets a bit complicated. The store, John Martins – long since sold off – had a very famous Christmas pageant, which had been winding its way through Adelaide’s streets every November, usually in the rain, since the Great Depression. Part of the procession was a float sporting two Christmas horses (which are where, exactly, in the Christmas iconography?), Nipper and Nimble. Every year, as part of the Christmas grotto at the chain’s store in Elizabeth, a satellite town of transplanted English people 40 kilometres from the city centre, a life size fibreglass replica of Nimble was placed, ready to be part of the kiddies’ Father Christmas Experience. Guess who had been given the job of lifting waiting children onto the beast’s saddle, rocking the horse for a hundred seconds or so, and helping the child off?

Yes, that was my job. For three sweltering Australian Christmases. It wasn’t all horse rocking though – thank you God I never lost a kiddy over the side, though there were a couple of weak bladder incidents – there were helium balloons to be inflated and sold (at inflated prices), photos with Santa to pimp (two photos were $12, three $14. Are you sure you wouldn’t like three photos, Madam? It’s only another two dollars…) and lucky dips to sell. At the end of every day the cash register would be full of sticky dollar coins.

We were an odd bunch in the ghetto. There was Lynn, the talented art school photographer who now had to spend the day picking a moment just before the child erupted into red-faced screeching to take the placid picture with Santa the parents wanted. There were the Santas, who worked every day from mid November to December 24th. One worked at night as a singer as well, until the fateful night when his throat, dry from talking to kids all day, gave out. He gave up the Santa-ing after that.

And me? I talked to the kids, on the horse, about all sorts of things. Except for the backache, it wasn’t really proper work. At the end of it all there was always a tidy sum of money left over to waste before uni started again. After three years, for my last Christmas in Australia before coming to the UK, I transferred to the main store in the city centre and sold Men’s casual clothing instead of Christmas.

On the corner of Princess and Charles Street, hung on the side of a railway arch, is this poster:

I wouldn’t gloat – anyone who’s done print design always feels a little sick in the stomach when the boxes full of thousands of copies of your work come back from the printer… it’s not (always) such an expensive mistake on the web.

As a service/taunt to all those who live outside Airstrip One, but are addicted to The Office: the two, final final Christmas specials will be transmitted on BBC1 at 10:15pm, Boxing Day, and 9:50pm, Saturday, December 27th, so set your high-powered satellite receivers.

According to the write-up in the Radio Times, ‘…we are promised that everything will be wrapped up’ – for a couple of years at least…

Still on the TV tip – want to prove you have a strong stomach? Eat your tea during How Clean is your House? – extra points if you keep going while they’re showing close-ups of the wriggly bugs that live in putrid kitchens.