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I spotted this on Facebook a while ago and it made me chuckle, especially if you read it in chronological order.

Dear BBC,

I’ve just watched “The President’s Guide to Science”, part of the Horizon series on BBC 2. It was narrated by Helen McRory who, it seems, is unable to pronounce the word “nuclear” correctly, pronouncing it instead “nucular.” This is unfortunate as the first twenty and last ten minutes of the program were largely about nuclear technologies as weapons and a power source.

Please ensure in future that narrators can actually pronounce all the words in the script correctly before employing them. If they are unable to pronounce a particular word, don’t employ them to narrate a documenatary which features repeated use of that word.

Thanks,

Tony

Some of you, maybe, might have noticed that this site was AWOL for a few days earlier this week. Well, that you’re reading this means that it’s all OK again now. At least, I think it is. If you notice any problems with the site, please let me know.

The site is now hosted in the US of A, so it may not be quite a zippy for those of us in the UK, but needs must. Basically my hosting provider stopped trading. Not without notice, it has to be said, but rather sooner than had been anticipated. This website was just about the last thing left on the old server when it got switched off. The only significant change is that my code repository now has its own subdomain as it’s hosted on a different box from the rest of my website: http://darcs.tonywhitmore.co.uk

I should also take this opportunity to randomly mention Harley Davidson Tours UK and Europe.

I recently posted about winning the first ever reader competition over at the lovely Amy’s lovely blog. I eagerly awaited the arrival my prize, although as a fallible human being, I was less eager to blog about it. That’s not to cast aspersions on the quality of the prize itself, merely to justify the tardiness of this post with excuses about having been busy recently.

I knew exactly what to expect: Nothing I could ever predict. I was sure Amy would manage to find something totally random and yet reflective of her personality. I had been led astray somewhat by Neil, who suggested that I may need batteries, an aerial or an arc-welding kit to make use of the mystery prize. It was with a deal of trepidation that I opened the fairly innocuous package which arrived last week. Here’s what was inside:

A truly unique prize, I’m sure you’ll agree. As Dervla Kerwan might be paid to say, “This is not just an apron. This is a pink polka-dot apron with ‘A Little Bit Different Dot Com’ badge, lovingly wrapped in a luxury gold ribbon, topped by a certificate of congratulations.” The latter is presumably to prove the provenance of the former to any Lovejoy who might make my heirs an offer on such a prestigious item in generations to come. Here’s a closer look at the badge on the pink polka-dot apron:

She has managed to bring a bit of the madness of her life into mine. Thank you Amy, I feel special! If you and Neil come for dinner you’ll even get to see me wear it.

I’ve spent some time this evening looking for a recording of Handel’s “Zadok the Priest” coronation anthem which has been released under a Creative Commons, Public Domain (or similar) licence which would allow me to use it in a derivative and non-commercial manner. I’ve mostly failed at this. (I have found some royalty free recordings but they cost to download and seem to have restrictive small-print attached to them.)

If you can direct me to a legitimate recording under a friendly licence, please help!

Some days, it’s not worth getting out of bed. The day begins, proceeds and ends without any great excitement with nothing special to mark it out from its neighbours. The treadmill (sometimes a literal treadmill) just continues. Not today. Today is marked by a special and probably unique event. I have won the first ever reader competition on Amy’s blog. Quite what I’ve done to offend Amy sufficiently that she should use that particular photo to illustrate the announcement of the winner, I have yet to discern. I will, of course, keep readers updated as to what the mysterious prize is. If anyone is really interested you can read the competition and entries here.

In other news, this blog is now syndicated on Planet Bitfolk, so hello to all the readers now subjected to my posts through that shiny and substantially new conduit.

A couple of weeks ago we went up to London to see Copenhagen, by Michael Frayn. Summed up by my friend Chris as “Physics and Nazis”, this new production is directed by Elly Green. I’ve known Elly (sorry, still Eleanor to me!) since we were born although this is the first time that we’ve met in about ten years. It was great to meet up, although the trains and timings of the performance meant that we didn’t get long to chat about stuff. Hopefully we’ll get another chance again soon.

Anyway, the production was great, with a very effective set and excellent performances. It received five stars in the Time Out review, which is fantastic. It runs until Saturday, so this post is horrendously late and apparently tickets are selling fast for the last few shows.

OK, I’m struggling a bit for a witty and amusing title. A special Noprize to anyone who gets the reference. It’s all just an excuse to say that I finally hit 13 stone this week, which means that I’ve lost 3 stone since this time last year. That’s 42 pounds to our American readers and 19.05 kilograms for our European friends. That’s a stage weight and a half I’m not carrying around with me all the time. I hope that the slow and steady pace at which I’ve been losing weight means it will stay off with a sensible diet and regular exercise. Losing three stone was the original target I set myself this time last year, but I think there’s a bit further to go.

To celebrate, I decided to put on a pair of my suit trousers which I was actually wearing this time last year and see how they fitted.

I’ve had the same mobile phone number since I was 18. I’ve had the same mobile phone for the last six years too – a Samsung A300. This has been a cause of mockery from some people, just because I look after a phone and don’t replace it every 6 months. It was a great phone at the time but the speaker in it is damaged and some of the buttons have stopped working properly now, so I decided to get a new one. After investigating, I chose a Samsung U600.

I ordered the new handset from the Carphone Warehouse, because they seemed to be the only people who had it on my phone tarrif. I gave work’s address for delivery. Everything looked fine in the confirmation e-mail, but in the shipping e-mail the delivery address had changed to home! Why offer an alternative delivery address if you’re going to ignore it?! Oh, and the shipping e-mail was written in bad HTML so that it looked like this:

Fortunately there was a plain text part too. As I suspected, I couldn’t use GPRS or MMS on the new phone with my old SIM in it. I called O2 customer services and spoke to a nice guy called James who said that GPRS and MMS hadn’t been enabled on my number. Although they could probably be enabled on my old SIM he said it was worth moving my number to the new SIM as the old one was probably near the end of its service life and the new SIM would be pre-configured with all the right service numbers. He sounded a bit surprised that I’d not had to be shipped a replacement one in the last six years. He left me some very clear instructions and within three hours my number had been moved to the new SIM. I got a couple of text messages which I allowed to automatically configure the WAP and MMS settings on the new handset. Brilliant stuff!

Now, just have to hope it works in Belgium…

Dear Asics,

1. Do not create your website entirely inside Flash when HTML can provide almost all of the functionality your pages need.
2. Do not require pop-ups to be allowed from your site to let me view it.
3. Do not hide the navigation bar and menus in my browser, preventing me from easily seeing URLs and bookmarking them.
4. Do not use only metric weights in a site designed for the UK. Provide both metric and imperial.
5. When providing a drop-down box for distances, provide units. Are we talking miles or kilometres?
6. Having made people endure this site, do not make one of the two final suggestions “Undefined”.
7. Do not create your website entirely inside Flash so that users have to go through all the questions again instead of hitting the “back” button in a browser.
8. In fact, don’t create your website in Flash at all. Use Open Standards so that anyone can use your site and maybe buy some of your products.

Thanks.