the French don’t believe custard exists

Cas is currently… smilie

This post is a shout-out to the Brainy Snail. Yes, I am alive and no, my computer hasn’t blown up. It’s been a close run thing on both counts, but we’re hanging in there. Just.

If you all will care to look down at the Blogstalking section of the sidebar (or if you are reading this in RSS, here) you will see that we have had visitors from Santiago, Chile. Welcome 🙂 That’s visitors from every major continent now. Woot! If you know of anyone in obscure and far-flung places of the world (bear in mind I am in the south of the UK, so pretty much everywhere is far-flung), please let them know about Bright Meadow. I need more readers east of Germany and south of Greece. Ok, so I don’t need exactly, but it would be nice. Consider that your Minion Task of the Week tm.

Todays word is lassitude: lack of vitality or energy, which is pretty darn accurate for a random word. I am going to take it as a sign that todays post doesn’t have to be either very long, or very interesting. Toodles.

don’t try to solve serious matters in the middle of the night.

Cas is currently… rain smilie

Todays Sunday Roast will be, I am afraid, a short one. I can’t even vouch for it’s quality. Things have been… not fun… this week at Meadow Towers and this has impinged on my cooking abilities it seems (just how far can I stretch this roast dinner metaphor before it cracks under the strain, do you think?).
Still, eat up, and don’t forget the leftovers if you have room at the end.

Web 2.0 – A good appraisal of what Web 2.0 is, its bad points as well as its good points.

Door thwarts quick exit for Bush . Thanks to Minion Moose for this one. Made my morning.

Google and Anonymity.
With the related – GoogleAnon.

Go Flock Yourself. Yes, that is the tag line of the blog flocksucks.wordpress.com The sheer vitriolic glee with which this blog is written is just making me salivate. This is one time you really don’t have to agree with what someone is saying to enjoy how they are saying it. And, you know, there’s been an awful lot of tosh spoken about Web 2.0 – it’s about time somebody stepped up to the plate and said “Hang on, you bunch of lemmings…”

Open Web Design. So I find a design I like… and no longer have a site for it. Lol. Anyway, there’s some pretty shiny designs here, all available free to download etc. Hence the name of the site! Useful resource.

Meebo. An intriguing little something to play with – a totally web-based IM client that lets you sign into existing accounts (ie MSN). Not played with it really as I can’t spare the time to chat to people, but it looks exciting. Especially if you are on networked computers you can’t download messenger/AIM/insert-IM-client-here for whatever reason (ie school/library). Still alpha, but keep an eye on it.

Xmas light video. The word you are looking for is “why”?

Royal Society: rent-seeking is more important than science. Keen blog-watchers might have notice this appear in the del.icio.us research-stream in the sidebar on Saturday, but I thought it was important enough to Roast it as well, just to make sure you saw it. I could rant away for hours, but Cory has pretty much said all I want to say, so I’ll leave it to him.

A Consuming Experience: Playing MP3s on your blog: beginners’ introduction. There’s been some excitment about this, so I thought I would point out this handy ‘how to’ guide. I would, however, draw your attention to the bit about legality?

i got a smile on

Cas is currently… smile smilie

I’ve been trying to come up with a shiny logo for the header-section of the new blog design. Just to let you in on a little secret – I suck at design. I know what I like, but lack a single original bone in my body. This has, understandably, hampered me in my search for a new logo.

Then I, quite unexpectedly, ended up in a mutual link-love-fest with the good people over at Successful Blog and discovered that I seem to already have a logo (I am now an SOB apparently).

brightmeadow.blogspot logo

So it’s a bit basic, but I prefer to think on it as elegant, which is what I’ve been aiming for with the rest of the design. I seem incapable of being stripped-back, minimal, or elegant in real life, so it’s nice to think I can manage a little bit of it in my virtual life.

Just occasionally, it takes someone you weren’t expecting to make you look at old things in a new way, to make you appreciate what you have, and to make you sit up and take notice of what you might have forgotten in the rush.

It might be someone who, on a day you were feeling down, unexpectedly says they’ve always liked your smile. It might be an email from a reader who says “you made me laugh today, thank you”. It could be something as simple as the girl in the checkout saying “your hair looks nice”. Or it could be your supervisor saying “I love what you’re doing, every thing is going to be fine”.

So what has made you sit back and go “oh” lately? What made you stop, smile, and make a tiny re-evaluation in the way you view the world?

And because I don’t say it enough, you are all lovely people, and thank you for letting me entertain you for a few minutes in your day.

I’m as excited as a very excited person, who’s got a special reason to be excited

Cas is currently… mad smilie

Just 24 hours after telling the CC not to get excited, we never get snow in this country in November, we… go and get snow in this country. And it’s November. Yay! Pretty snow!

At the same time, keeping an eye on the coverage in the papers of all the disruption caused by a few inches of snow, I can’t help but think that we British really do get uncharacteristically excited about a lot of frozen water. Not even that much frozen water if I am to be honest (one thing with living with a Canadian – you’re no longer permitted to say “that’s a lot of snow” to anything less than about three feet).

A fall of mere millimeters (like they had back in my native Somerset) is enough to close dozens of schools. 5 cm will block roads. I just looked at a ruler – 5 cm isn’t much. About the length of my thumb in fact.

What happens to the great British spirit of keeping going regardless of the odds when we’re faced with a quantity of snow that would just about frost a cake, but not much more? We see snow and (excuse the expression) freeze, like so many rabbits in the headlights. Entire villages can get swept away, and we rally round wonderfully. How we dealt with the Blitz in WWII even spawned a phrase to describe it: “the Blitz spirit”. We’re renowned for being able to cope. Along with drinking lots of tea, queueing with equanimity, talking a bit posh, and having a mad royal family, it is arguably one of the more famous British stereotypes.

Yet give us some sugar-frosting on the fields, and we go into a tailspin. More snow falls in an average five minute flurry in Guelph, than fell in the storms that caused so much kerfuffle last night. Though in our defense, British snow is a “different sort of snow”. Wetter, apparently. Maybe that makes it so much harder to deal with?

My point? Oh, I don’t really have one. *1* I was just commenting on how wonderfully silly the average British person can be on occasion. And if you have plans to take over the world and, admit it, who hasn’t planned a little light world domination in their spare time? Just bring a snow-machine with you when you try to take over the British Isles.

Endnotes:
*1*I’ve had a migraine most of the day. You can’t expect reasoned argument after that, can you?Back
*2*I am not holding my breath for snow in So’ton though: apparently, due to being on (more or less) the coast; the way the wind normally blows; and lots of other meteorological/geographical reasons I won’t even pretend to understand, we very rarely get snow. Winchester just 20 minutes away on the train, yes, Southampton, no. It was the same in Liverpool – why can’t I ever live in a place where it snows? *TANTRUM*

cute and cuddly boys…

Cas is currently… surrender smilie

I have been trying to think of something to blog about today, and I have zip, nada, nothing. My folder of shame is actually empty. I had a back up plan of writing something based on the ‘word of the day’ i get each day. But todays word was ‘maelstrom’ :

Maelstrom: a large, powerful whirlpool; also, a violent, disordered, or turbulent state of affairs.

Not exactly inspiring me – to be truthful the only thing that springs to mind is talking about depression and the like, and I don’t think any of us want that.

So, I shall stop talking and just leave you with a picture of a fluffy penguin, because (whilst they are evil) they always make me smile.

bambiesque? as does pertain to bambi

Cas is currently… grumpy/bored smilie

WARNING: What follows is a passive-aggressive grump. I have no excuse, other than I am, well, in a grumpy mood today.

We all have one in our address books – that one person who doggedly believes every piece of spam they get in their inbox. That one person who continually passes on the “WARNING! Email this to ten people or you will die a horrible and painful death!” emails. I have one such person. She used to be one of my closest friends in college, but I don’t talk to her much any more. This is for a variety of reasons, but no small part is that she doesn’t have a current email address for me.

What?! I hear you cry? This girl is your friend, but you haven’t given her your new email address? (To be honest, not so new any more). Why does she still languish under the impression that your hotmail addy is the address you check constantly?

She is incapable of sending email that ISN’T spam, that’s why. She is the forwarding queen. She is the one person who spammers and phishers go to bed at night praying for.

I had thought that as she approached her mid-twenties, she would start to develop some common sense, or at least a mild level of skepticism. Alas, that is not to be.

The pick of this weeks spam email from her is something pretending to be from hotmail, the text of which goes as follows (all spelling EXACTLY as appeared in the message. Can you spot their six mistakes?):

Dear Hotmail User,
We understand that you have previously recieved many messages that have stated the closing of accounts not being used within our servers. This message, however, is your final warning. Within this message is encoded a small program that will located and debug your account when sent to fifteen other Hotmail users. If you do not send this message to fifteen Hotmail users within 24 hours of recieving the message, your account will be PERMANETLY SHUT-DOWN. When and if you send this, we hereby grant that you will no longer recieve such messages as this one.
We realize that this process is becoming an annoyance, however, and this is the final message you will recieve from the Hotmail Announcement staff. Thank you for your time and cooperation.
Sincerely,
Calvin W. Kreantz
MSN Accounts Coordinator

Now, not only does the text of this scream “SPAM, PHISHING, SPAM!”, but it was delivered as gif.

Yup. Poor Brunhilda.

I’d email her back, except my actual valid communication would just get drowned out by all the “FW:FW:FW:FW:TRUE FRIENDS” and “URGETN! IMPORTANT INFORMATION WITHIN!” in her inbox. Perhaps if I put “VERY IMPORTANT MESSAGE FROM HOTMAIL STAFF” in the subject header she will read it?

maybe I could learn something if I beat you about the head with a sturdy ladle?

Cas is currently… banging head smilie

I was wondering what to talk about in this mornings blog post, then this post from Improbulus popped up via RSS, and I thought why not? So I plugged Bright Meadow’s URL into the Marketleap Link Popularity Check tool et voila, 458 links found.

Ok, so that only classes me as a “limited presence” but phooey to that.

Going into the results in more depth (oh, come on, you’d do the same!) I found two links I wasn’t expecting – one from a blog post back in 2002 thanking my site for emailing him some links (needless to say, not me, but proof that blogspot recycles domains), and the other from CNET.

I had been wondering why a lot of people had been coming to view my little grump about Google Print, and this would probably explain it. In CNETs piece “Reaction mixed on Google Print beta, mine is the third “blog community response”.

Now, of course, this is a huge ego boost. A fair few people out there commented on Google Print, yet what I had to say was one of the few responses chosen. I wasn’t misquoted or even quoted out of context. The journalist took a few moments at least to scan the article and pull out (one of) the more pertinent paragraphs. Still, I am a little on edge because it has illustrated a point I made a while ago – referencing something someone said without contacting them. I had no idea I’d been linked to by CNET, and would probably still be in the dark if I hadn’t done a quick vanity search this morning. It’s a common enough reporting practice in blog-land, one I am all too guilty of myself, but when you’re on the receiving end it does make you stop for a moment and think.

Still, on the whole I am just a teeny bit smug. You write the words, then let them go off on their own into the big wide Internet, and it’s a pleasure to get proof that a few are doing rather well for themselves.

Now, if you will excuse me, my ego is now nicely stroked, and I really should be trying to hammer out an introduction and conclusion for the TFH (thesis from hell). I am not sure how well this is going to go, because I had a mammoth 15 minute session with the counsellor this morning (ten minutes of which were spent in silence), which has left me in tears of anger and frustration, shaking from head to foot with the desire to strangle the woman, and having changed counsellors. Still these things are sent to try us, what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, and all that.

When to tell the godhead that this thesis has actually broken me?

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