19.53, Mon 10th Apr
Many happy returns for to-day go to 
The Founder.
And many happy returns for to-morrow go to Sarah.
May your days be merry, and your years bring you everything you're hoping for.
daweaver | A collection of ephemera | (people) | (communities)
Pictured | Route map | the snow in the summer or so-so | The journey
1: 24 (Bloomsbury, Camden, Kensal Rise) 3 mins the last bus
How to ... block Livejournal commercials
19.30, Fri 7th Apr
Righty-ho, one point of order, then a message from the Central Office of Information.PO: Would someone - anyone! - with the Navbar on public display please pipe up. I'd like to analyse it, with a view to writing filters to take it out. Ta. EDIT: Mat is thanked.
Pay Attention, Livejournal! The observant people at No LJ Ads have spotted the bribes offered to sell your soul (two pork pies and a strawberry yoghurt), and how much soul the leeches want to steal from the rest of us. The latter list:
* Gender (so set as Unspecified)
* Birthday (so blank it out)
* Country (so take it out, along with postcode, province, city, and time zone. Readers may wish to set misinformation - those of us in the UK may wish to use Ouagadougou for perma-GMT.)
* Interests (This'll be your call.)
You can, of course, put any or all of this information in the "About You" free-text box, where it can't be parsed by automated processes.
Now, the voice of sanity has also found out how the commercials will be served - via an Iframe, which calls content from adserver.bml Readers who haven't done so already may wish to add adserver.bml to their Adblock lists.
Alternatively, there's this little snippet of CSS code that should work for any browser, copied from the comments to one of the above posts:
/* Start copying here - ignore the next line if you want to use the status bar*/
table#lj_controlstrip /* LJ status bar */
div.ad, /* whole ad div */
div.skysraper, /* skyscraper ad */
div.leaderboard, /* leaderboard ad */
div.smrect, /* small rectangle */
div.medrect, /* medium rectangle */
div.banner, /* banner, obviously */
div.5linkunit, /* not sure */
iframe#adframe, /* iframe inside div */
{
display: none !important;
}
/* Copy ends here */
Open up Notepad, copy between the two indicated lines, and paste into the blank file.
IE users, save it somewhere on your computer as ljads.css
Go to Tools - Options - Accessibility
Tick "Format documents using my style sheet"
Click Browse, and point to the ljads.css file you've just saved.
Firefox and Safari users, go to your Chrome directory (you may need to search for a folder called chrome) and save the file as userContent.css
Restart your browser, and you're set.
(If you already have a userContent.css file, append the section to the end.)
Opera users go to Tools - Preferences - Advanced - Content - Style Options
Under My Style Sheet, click choose, and point to the ljads.css file.
Click open. Under Author Mode, tick the following: Page Style sheet, Page fonts and colors, My link styles.
Under User Mode, tick the following: My style sheet, My fonts and colors, My link style.
(I've not got Opera available to test, but these instructions look credible)
All users Other userContent.css CSS files are available, to block more than LJ ads.
Now, these methods will fail if Livejournal makes changes to its styles, but they're infinitely better than nowt. Keep watching...
Mood: 
hopefully helpful
Music: The Burkiss Way to Dynamic Living
18.49, Thu 6th Apr
It is, I suppose, rather inevitable that good wishes are sent to-day to Mr Oi No Mel, resident genius, Eurovision analyst par excellence, and all-round Good Egg.
To mark this event, a short anagram in his honour.
HAPPY BIRTHDYA (5,8)
Livejournal's head found in its pants
18.18, Sat 1st Apr
Those of you who were subscribed to 
thesnowinsummer will want to unsubscribe. In their bungled and incompetent efforts to save the feed, and in spite of my specific request to the contrary, the feed that has been ticking along quietly has been cancelled.
Readers will wish to add tsitsoss_rss to their feed list.
Alternatively, if you prefer an RSS feed-reader that isn't prone to arbitrary delays, or to break for no apparent reason, then you'll want to add http://www.daweaver.free-online.co.uk/r
I would apologise for the inconvenience, but it is not of my making, so it would be dishonest to tender an apology.
21.19, Mon 27th Mar
Not that I'm moaning or anything, but it would be nice if someone were doing something to get The Snow in the Summer or So-So working again.
Anyway, here's what you might have missed because Livejournal can't do the basics properly.
( More... )
Four in a row
19.36, Sun 26th Mar
(This post has been corrected for an error.)
Hullo, fortune-hunters. Mystic Mug here, with the result of the Commonwealth Games Conundrum.
How many gold medals would be won by competitors from the Indian sub-continent? One from Pakistan, one from Sri Lanka, and twenty-two from India. So 24 is your answer. Right?
Wrong. The small print stated that podium results are final, and subsequent disqualifications do not count. Therefore, India wins back the two golds she lost following drugs tests, so 26 is the final score.
This doesn't make any real difference; Mr Mel was the only person to guess in the scoring zone, and he scores 7.0 (rather than 6.7) for his insight. It's enough to lift him into second place, only a point behind Mr Pokery.
Full details, including updates to the other running contests, on the Prediction Page.
Until next month, it's Mug and Out!
Snow in the Summer Catchup
21.05, Thu 23rd Mar
Another few days, another few words.
( Cut for your convenience. )
Music: Christian Burns - Something About You
Song of the Day
18.28, Wed 22nd Mar
(For values of "the day" roughly equal to 27 July 1990)
Back in summer 1990, I had quite some time on my hands. The bonkers education system in England, features terminal exams in May and June at the end of the fifth form, and then doesn't pick up again until the start of September. Eleven weeks with nothing to do.
Well, that's not strictly true; one can always rely on parents to find you something to do. But my abiding memory of that sunny and warm summer is the evenings hanging out with chums, listening to the latest contemporary sounds. A Man Called Adam, the Little Angels, Moby, Dan Reed Network, Power of Dreams, World of Twist, and so many others that have just melded into a continuous soundtrack of wonderful.
One of the records that we heard a lot, and then never again, was by Irish act An Emotional Fish. They were very much in the vein of another of that summer's big acts, the Hothouse Flowers, but carried a curse worse than death - they were signed to U2's record label. At the time, U2 were seen as the biggest and most tedious stadium rock act on the planet. This was, of course, complete nonsense, but the baggage transferred to their protoges. The lead single, Celebrate
, sunk without trace, charting at number fiftysomething.
This was particularly unfair, because the song is four and a half minutes of pulsating grouchiness. I can still quote couplets like, "That's the trouble with reality, it's taken far too seriously. I do hope god is good to me, and Santa-claus..." And the way lead singer Gerard Whelan just snarls the title line, "Yeah, celebrate," you just know he's being completely and utterly ironic.
Yes, I am deliberately leaving something dangling, not telling you all the surprises in this song. The Lefsetz Letter wrote about this slice of genius last year.
Those of you who remember it from first time round, those of you who are intrigued by my description, it's here. (Yousendit link, will expire next Wednesday, yadda yadda yadda.)
Those of you who feel obligated to mark something around this time of year, yet have no particular desire to remember it, and every reason to forget, this is your tune.
Snow and so-and-sos
20.02, Sun 19th Mar
Well, The Snow in the Summer or So-So is still broken, and I hold out no hope that it will be unbroken in the forseeable future. So, here's what you're missing.
( Not The Snow In The Summer, So So or Otherwise. )
Mood: 
resigned to the fate
Music: Commonwealth Games highlights
More good stuff you won't find anywhere else
21.44, Tue 14th Mar
Well, with the RSS feed still broken and nowhere near fixed, it looks like I'll have to paste all the latest news from The Snow in the Summer or So-So in to here. Again.
( Read on. )
How to suck eggs
10.36, Sun 12th Mar
It would appear that Livejournal's feed of The Snow in the Summer or So-So is broken.
I suspect I know how this happened: my copyright announcement (at the top of the feed) was post-dated to 31/12/2019. This may have tripped something in Livejournal's feed reader, ensuring that it's looking for posts dated from 2020 or later.
The incorrect date has now been removed, but the feed is still not updating. So far as I'm concerned, this is an error in Livejournal's RSS parser; the standard action is to err on the side of treating all posts as new.
It is possible that this error may correct itself, as all feeds time-out two weeks after the original posting. I've also placed a formal error report, which readers may (but probably won't) wish to follow.
In the meantime, here's what you're missing: ( Snip! )
Hello, Mary. Hello, June.
18.42, Thu 9th Mar
Two parish notices. 1. There will be a scheduled Livejournal system outage between 6am and 8am UTC tomorrow. This is in addition to the unscheduled system outages that have been happening for the past six months.
2. NTL subscribers in ex-Telewest regions (as we must now call them) now have ITV4, a mere four-and-a-half months after the channel launched. Good news for fans of Once and Again
, Letterman
, and the Tour de France. Reports also suggest that the cable company will also be getting the CITV channel from launch on Saturday; this is the children's channel from ITV, and not the Edmonton-based general entertainment channel.
Back when I gave up on my paid account, I said that Livejournal and its new owners see its contributors as a resource to be sold. Now, former owner Brad Fitzpatrick has announced that Livejournal is to sell advertisements.
( Commercial time! )
Ultimately, this is a very poor idea, aimed more at increasing Six Apart's bottom line than improving the service for the company's customers. Do it well and it won't be a complete show-stopping disaster, just merely terrible.
It is, of course, perfectly possible to block any element from displaying on a page, if you're prepared to work hard enough. An HTML re-writing engine, like the Proxomitron, will allow a determined person to remove any advertisement, and I look forward to publishing instructions to disable Livejournal's commercials.
History will show that this is not the time when Livejournal jumped the shark.
If you wish to leave a response to the substantive part of this post, please do so in the formal discussion thread.
Mood: 
predictably hacked off
Question time
18.36, Wed 8th Mar
One for the Lib Dems on the panel, I suspect. Has Julia Goldsworthy ever appeared on BBC-1's Question Time programme?
In other news, chocolate to Choccers; to the women of the world, enjoy; and to Jiggers, a thought.
For everyone, my new favourite radio station.
Culture vultures
18.51, Sun 5th Mar
Many happy returns to-day to The Heiress, quiet but not forgotten.
I see that bookings are now being accepted for the London production of Wicked!
, which will be starting in September. At least one of you expressed an interest in seeing this show when it reached these shores.
Very pleased that Daz Sampson has won the Song for Europe
competition. The UK needed to send a performer, rather than a reality-show singer, and Mr Sampson fits the bill, for Eurovision is - at least in part - vaudeville.
Some of you will have missed my investigative research into one of Mister Blair's recent claims. There is more, much more, good writing there.
While Livejournal is no longer my regular platform of choice, I do have a lot of admiration for Lucy Catastrophe
Music: A-Ha - Analogue
Money or No Money
19.24, Tue 28th Feb
So, the spewsomely-shirted sprite that is Noel Edmonds has been trying to give away money to people. How many times this month did he give away more dosh to people who called in and paid good money to Endemol than to people who were actually entertaining?
( Bet now! )
See you towards the end of next month, I reckon.
Xetra Time
14.53, Sat 25th Feb
Ach, hello, mein freunde. Here is the result for the Xetra Dax challenge, which closed yesterday at 5870.79. Yes, I am mug enough to compute the answer down to the last decimal place. You'll thank me for all the scraps at the end of the year, it'll cover a penny of the winner's postage.
Who scored? Mr Cheekbones was off by less than 100 DAX points, so makes 9.9 in my contest.
Mr Pokery also came within 100, and scores 8.7.
Mr Weaver was 250 under, he gets 4.8.
Sir Quirks scores 4.2, Brigadier Bother 0.9, O'Mel 0.1, and Mr Feet fails to score.
All of which means we have a new leader. Who? Find out here.
In other news... we're still just one LTL winner from declaring Sir Quirks' prediction correct ... the Lithuanian proposition is top-ten in the final, but ain't a winner ... both Guido Fawkes and Recess Monkey have bet that Rev Blair will leave the pulpit by the Oecumenical Conference in October. He will, of course, make way for the small yellow mug that could.
See you within the week!
Music: Brainstorm - Thunder Without Rain
Not The Culture Show
20.12, Thu 23rd Feb
Some culture for you.
1. Joss Wheedon spoke with Simon May'o this afternoon. BBC Listen Again, "Real" audio required, interview begins just after 1h20 into the programme, will expire at 1pm UK time next Thursday. (Edit: Also available here for the next month or so.)
2. Angle
, the story of a vampire able to do basic geometary, will be playing on the (UK) Sci-Fi channel from Easter. It's the first time the opening series has been shown on a sensible channel without being hacked to death.
3. Bad news for the good Doc as Personals
tour is pulled.
Music: The Culture Show on Constable
Wembley, Boober, Red!
19.06, Tue 21st Feb
Ah, hello. Mystic Mug here, with the latest news on a busy week in the 2006 Prediction Competition. On Friday, we have the result of the Xetra Time Challenge; at any day, the February Deal Debate could resolve itself; and we have news on the FA Cup Final at Wembley. With the result, here's the silver-voiced James Alexander Coffeepot:
Locations of FA Cup Finals:
Wembley nil, Cardiff two
As everyone expected, Wembley will not be ready for the English cup final on 13 May, so it has been moved to Cardiff, where it will join the Welsh cup final.
Everyone? No! One indomitable prognosticator stuck his neck on the line and said, "Yes! Wembley will be ready!" Never mind, Jiggers, nothing for you on that prediction, and half a point for all the people who disagreed with you, Mr Feet, Sir QK, Mr Weaver, and Mr Bother.
Full results, and the scoreboard: in the usual place.
Playing catch-up
18.44, Sun 19th Feb
A fantastic week-end away, that was. Gave me an awful lot to chew over, think about. One or two ideas might come to fruition sooner rather than later, so stay tuned.
Before properly starting, a round of introductions. Dr Itchy, M Maestro, would you be so kind as to meet Mat GB, for his Labour needs to go post seems to have caught fire in a way that a tea-drinking monkey never did. I"ll have more to say on that subject to-morrow, on me main blog.
Some quick responses to posts you lot have made.
Thu 21.44: Good stuff. One step back, two steps forward.
Thu 22.09: Louise Arbour. Well said. One of my chums from so-called when Ms Arbour stepped down, fretting that she had done everything of value in her career. Very much not so!
Thu 23.46: The BRITS. Yeah. Crap-o-rama. Glad I spent Thursday evening watching The Two Ronnies
, an episode first aired on 10 April 1971 - the chaps made a crack about the previous week"s Eurovision being their warm-up, and Ronnie C being the Jack in Clodagh Rodgers" box.
Thu 22.47 (-5): Good on yer. More strength to you.
Fri 11.57: It is relatively easy to move from not having one to having one; it is more difficult to go the other way. If you are in doubt, as I think you are, try living without for a little while. If you feel guilt about not making the payment, I"m sure that it"s possible to make an additional donation to cover the parts you do use (radio, online...) In the second part, a message saying "This is by design."
Fri 14.03: Modulo other events over that week-end, and finding a decent hotel room, it"s a distinct possibility.
Fri 10.24 (-5): Curiously, that"s what I"ve been thinking about this week-end. The best answer: that there is some meaning behind my existence, behind my life here. I don"t know what it is, I don"t particularly want to know what it is, but there is a reason for everything. My sub-challenges are to live out that reason, and not to impede other people"s reasons. Except where that is part of my reason.
Fri 17.48: Well, hurrah.
Fri 18.52: When closing time is these days. It used to be a fixed event at 11pm, but now I"ve got no idea when chucking (out|up) time is.
Fri 13.37 (-6): No, because (when it"s that particular carbonated beverage I"m after) I"ll ask for a cola, forcing the server to mention the appropriate brand name. They"re all the same, if you ask me.
Fri 22.00: Well, hurrah. You never wanted us to even suggest that you had it in you, when you did all along. And you darned well knew it.
Sat 09.32 (-6): Barmy office workers are part of the territory. Is it all coming back to you now? Mother is going to have to take you there. Not only to see Mel play, but then to stay on for one more night and get the difficult signature on a replacement card. And now I am going to get confused, for your hyphen is bringing to mind the eponymous host of Des Chiffres et Des Lettres et Des Lynam.
And finally, a parlour game for a Sunday evening. (Or Monday morning.) How much would it cost to ban smoking now? Make your guess, then read the worked demonstration.
Mood: 
energetic
Three, two, one.
20.04, Tue 14th Feb
==> Daft Headlines of the Day: Shooting delay under fire.
==> Belated birthday greetings to ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
rhymeswithspoon, to muruch, and to perfectlyvague. May every day be as good as you would like.
==> I'm sure the royalists amongst us will appreciate the new community celebrating the Queen's forthcoming birthday, </a></strong></a>. It's a shame that the group has rather been taken over by off-topic posts, and the various maintainers really need to get a grip. Or they'll be thrown into the Tower and forced to subsist on a diet of warm beer, soggy vegetables, and copies of the Daily Mail. Beheading's too good for them!
Music: Daugherty: Ghost Ranch
What's going on?
16.54, Sat 11th Feb
My thanks to Mystic Mug for clearing out some of the detritus yesterday, and I trust that the cobweb was no match for a bath in hot soapy water. Here are some thoughts.
Premise 1. The operating company here is a bunch of amateurs who would have difficulty running a bath. They make Hilary Armstrong look like an organisational genius. I have better things to do with my life than to be wound up by the inactions and errors of dunderheads. But if they want a low-level war, I shall give them a low-level war.
Premise 2. I do have some connection with everyone who reads this. Some of you I count amongst my closest friends, others of you are wise, or entertaining, or open doors, or make me think. All of you are people I can learn from. And I don't think it's equitable to take from you without returning anything.
So, balancing out those factors, here's the plan for now. Subject to revision later.
* There will be occasional posts here. My outlet for original writing will remain The Snow in the Summer, and I encourage readers to visit from time to time.
* Very little here will be my original work. There will be quotes, lyrics, pointers to other interesting things. Nothing I would particularly miss when St Andrea's Fault swallows up St Francisville.
* I will still read your journals, and respond in whatever manner I see fit.
* There will be the odd scratchpad post, such as this one, where I'm working a thought from draft to diamond, and will appreciate the input of my peers.
* These thinking posts will be the only one where comments are enabled; if you wish to bring something to my attention, I would recommend email. Why? Disabling comments ensures that Livejournal is not a primary means of communication, and it acts against Sixapart's best interests.
* I don't believe that Livejournal takes its privacy policy, its terms of service, or user security as seriously as I do. To that end, I do not have faith that the featured security features work reliably and in the advertised manner, and I will not rely upon them.
* I don't anticipate that Livejournal will make the reforms needed to satisfy my various benchmarks, so I shall not be supporting it financially. Why? Because Sixapart is obsessed with maximising revenue at the expense of everything and anything else.
I would respectfully request anyone wishing to donate money on my behalf to stop, and give it to a more worthy cause. One will be linked from my userinfo. And that includes this new "A Virtual Flower For You" scheme. It can only spread viruses, as some of us have been saying for the past nine years.
So, let's away.
--> Peter Do'herty's prison dairy.
--> Some of you who recall the success of Star Academy in 2003 may be pleased to hear that Dismal's ABSuck has bought the format. Bet you won't get a final as good as Parks / Griffin / Goode. (And, yes, I was a bit harsh on Mr Griffin there. Sorry, mate.)
--> If you've not been reading The Snow in the Summer lately, you'll have missed quite a lot, including Lashings of Yellow.
--> I shall shortly be off to to-night's CBSO gig. Mmm, new compositions.
Mood: 
contemplative
Live from the Nile
19.02, Fri 10th Feb
Korff. Splut. Um, hullo. Mystic Mug here, with the result of the African Cup of Nations. And with an awful lot of dust. Does no-one ever clean out this journal any more?
Well, the final has just finished in Cairo, and ( if you don't want to know the result, look away now. )
The full scores are on the website.
I shall be back. Unlike the spider who is trying to make a cobweb up the inside of my handle. Begone, beastie!
Music: Eurosport's coverage
That about which we shall not blog.
18.19, Sun 29th Jan
Last week, I promised a thoughtful post on Sixapart's business model. You're not going to get it.
Overnight, something has happened that requires a lot of my attention, and something that I'm not comfortable talking about in public at this time. My mind is not focussed on the trivialities of life, and by the time normal service resumes, the thread (I hope) will be consigned to history.
For those of you who were interested, the rough draft, the notes I took, are posted as a backdated entry. I shall not be polishing them into a proper post.
I think it's best that I take a formal hiatus from posting to this journal. I don't know whether it'll be a matter of days, weeks, longer. Yes, I will still be reading yours, if you'll allow me to, and responding where I see fit.
Close friends can expect an email from me in the next few days indicating what's happened; for the rest of you, I apologise for the cryptic nature of this message, and I hope to explain more in due course. Right now, I need to be elsewhere.
Mood: 
indescribably sad
Music: Stina Nordenstam - Proposal
Sixapart's business model
12.00, Sat 28th Jan
This is a rough draft, the notes of a post I intended to make on this subject. I shall not be finishing them.
"The one thing that wears on me is this idea that blogging and online communication fits a single model, that all people have the same needs, and that people are Wrong or Not Getting It for using similar tools in diverse ways." - Roger Benningfield
If my writing is republished in communities and the folks can tag, hack, annotate, or comment on it without my awareness, then what you’ve done is make me into a one-way broadcast station. Is that what you want to do? Make webloggers into little mini non-profit broadcasters? Whether we want to fit this role or not? - Shelley Powers
The current round of hype is about social software, but only in the sense that it’s about monetising social software, by the classic mechanism of enclosure. (Enclosure: appropriating something that exists outside the circuit of trading and ownership and managing the supply so that it can only be obtained within that circuit. Or: stealing it and selling it back.) The blogosphere isn't a walled garden, it's a wide-open common where nobody has ownership rights. An enclave that can't be strip-mined isn't walled in; all that's happened is that the predators - who would put their own fences around it if they could - have been walled out. Long may they remain so. - "Phil"
From a piece written when Sixapart bought Livejournal:
"I can't imagine [Livejournal users] going anywhere fast but i can't see them being happy either, nor can i see them continuing to contribute economically.
My biggest concern is that a merger will stunt the cultural growth on LiveJournal that makes it so fascinating."
"Of course, since it's a strict company policy not to talk about or promise future features and functionality, we're probably not going to respond." Sixapart's PR man, same time.
My comment: I think the biggest change is in the culture of Livejournal's staff. Before Six Apart purchased the organisation, when the staff made a mistake (the serial_adder account, ferinstance), they came clean, admitted their error, and apologised. The independent Danga was humble and human.
Now, even when Six Apart is clearly barking up the wrong tree, they don't apologise, and don't even acknowledge the strength of feeling against their changes. Six Apart has lost the humility, they're pretending to be gods who know everything, and cannot countenance the mere possibility that they might be wrong.
That, my friends (and my Friends), is what's getting on my wick these days. Six Apart is staffed by mortals, and mortals cannot replace gods.
Here endeth the lesson.
1: 24 (Bloomsbury, Camden, Kensal Rise) 3 mins