2008 — 20 Feb: Wednesday
Today (00:02) it's a lunch date with my friend Iris. Now, where the devil's the Dyson? Or should I get some sleep instead? But first let's have another delicious smile from Christa, shall we? This is from 30th April 2007:
Corrigenda
Nothing like starting the day with a correction, is there? The building shown here was near Hungerford, not Bedwyn. In fact, Geoff was kind enough to flesh out the details of our walk yesterday — "we parked at Kintbury (half way between Newbury and Hungerford), walked to Hungerford" (for coffee and a cake) "and then through Froxfield and Little Bedwyn to Great Bedwyn. Lunch there, and train back to Kintbury." There's (a lot) more about the Kennet and Avon here.
"Our post-walk ride took us from Kintbury, back through Hungerford and Great Bedwyn (where the Lloyd Stonemasons are), past Crofton (the pumping engine) through Burbage and alongside ancient Savernake forest to the outskirts of Marlborough (where Junior once took a series of fencing lessons). We re-joined the A4, then turned north into the upper reaches of the Kennet valley; down the valley through the old village of Ramsbury — seat of the bishopric for 200 years before it was moved to Old Sarum after the Norman conquest. (There actually still is a Bishop of Ramsbury — possibly the smallest place in England to have a Bishop, though no longer a cathedral.)"
"From Ramsbury, it was back through Hungerford, skirting Newbury in the vicinity of Highclere Castle and Beacon Hill. Turn East and over the top of Watership Down to Whitchurch, Winchester and home." Thank you, Geoff. In the words of the old joke, I'm no wiser but considerably better informed. It was, in Wallace & Gromit terms, a grand day out! Nearly 120 miles of good driving practice, too.
It was also rude and mischievous of me to describe his Sony TV as "little", but I calls 'em like I sees 'em. I've had a similar discussion recently with my chum Bob, who has a 30" HD Ready LCD screen — at that size, and with good quality digital terrestrial signals, there really isn't all that much difference between standard definition and high definition pictures. At least, not to my tired old eyes.
Reviving an old string of puns
I need a system to help me catch up on my reading backlog more effectively. This comes from the 5th February 1976 New Scientist1 magazine:
A marine biologist develops a diet which keeps porpoises alive almost indefinitely. The vital ingredient is seagulls. Returning to his lab with a bag of them he finds a lion asleep on the doorstep. He steps over the beast only to be immediately arrested and charged with transporting gulls across a staid lion for immortal porpoises.
And now?
Nothing for it but to get out on the re-supply trail, which (as I swing past my bank) will give me yet further opportunity to contemplate my continuing inability to pay in Christa's latest ERNIE prize, just arrived this morning. The wheels of probate could do with a touch of oiling, methinks. There is still what looks unpleasantly like a layer of ice out in the back jungle, too. Ho-hum.
Wait! The first full laugh of the day. Back on St Val's Day I briefly touched on the question of staying single versus settling. Well, I didn't, but there was plenty of bloggy chatter on NPR in response to an article by Lori Gottlieb called "Marry Him!" in The Atlantic magazine. I've now read the original, and hence my laugh:
I would say even if he's not the love of your life, make sure he's someone you respect intellectually, makes you laugh, appreciates you — I bet there are plenty of these men in the older, overweight, and bald category (which they all eventually become anyway).
Talk about waspish sting in the tail! Classy piece of writing. She even uses the word "behooves".
How much?!
When I was in the bank, I slipped effortlessly into Alan Bennett eavesdropping mode, as one does. There was a young lady paying in (I assume) into an account, and the teller started into her sales spiel about "Have you spoken to us about a mortgage, yet?" The reply was along the lines of "I'm still saving for the wedding.2 Can't think about a mortgage." That took me back... When Christa and I got married, it was in Windsor & Maidenhead Registry office, on a three-day special licence (cost, from memory, about £7) and exchanging a pair of Turkish puzzle rings3 (cost, from memory, about 50 pence each). The only witnesses were my parents. I note what looks, from this side of the millennium divide, like a very sexist bit of paperwork referring as it does only to the "Father":
No photographs. A nice restaurant lunch, and that was it. The alternative would have been a return to Germany (from which we'd just got back after my first "meet the family" adventure) and then a large ceremony in Meisenheim cathedral, probably at Christmas. To put it mildly, neither of us fancied that. What a pair of soppy romantics we were, to be sure. But, we were truly "solemnized", even if we did spend most of the next 33 years laughing! And we certainly each appreciated the other, and respected one another intellectually, too. Christa really was my soulmate.
Lady who lunches
Nice to meet up with you again, Iris. I'm delighted to hear that you think I'm "doing OK-ish". It's quite a hard job, being bereaved, but as long as the sun shines, the cooking incrementally improves, the car doesn't crash into anyone or anything, and people like you continue to keep a friendly eye on me, I will do the best I can to live long and prosper. As for the heading, we chose another "Dog & Crook" — the one in Brambridge.
And now (18:20) I've pre-heated the oven, and am thermally agitating some chicken goujons and lemon sauce. Is there no end to this constant cooking lark? I've finally remembered to unload the washing machine, too. But in slightly less mundane news, I notice a couple of DVDs managed to insinuate themselves into my shopping basket in Asda this morning:
- Cranford, the recent BBC costume drama with "everyone" in it, seemingly
- Run fat boy run, with Simon Pegg (of "Spaced", which made us both laugh, a lot)
Dig that crazy log rhythm
A couple of my readers have noticed my occasional references to the "search strings" that people have been using to bring them to the Molehole site. To my shame, when I was asked "How does that work, then, precisely?" yesterday, I had no ready answer. More to the point, my usual technical guru also claimed not to see (or even realise, until I provided evidence that it works) how on earth this could be possible. Specifically, when you click on a suggested link offered to you by (say) Google when you've just searched for "molehole david mounce", as 21 people have done so far this month, and your web browser is directed to my site, how does my server know what you'd typed into Google? Jolly good question.
Well, the Apache server keeps a whole slew of information about every web request that comes its way, writing all sorts of detail about each request into its server logs. And (happily) my hosting server has made an excellent choice in providing me with the AWStats server log analysis software. This feeds on the logs, and can not only detect and report the search engines used, but also the keywords and keyphrases used on these engines by my distant readers to find my site. Of course, the Apache server configuration needs to specify the writing of these parameters into its log files in the first place. Module mod_log_config appears to be what does the business, as driven by the string supplied to the CustomLog directive. I assume the "%...q" directive is key here. I assume that the query string is currently passed along as part of the HTTP protocol exchange so that your web browser can use the string to work out what to highlight on the delivered target web page to draw your attention to what you were looking for there.
But it still seems to me that if Google chooses to stop "leaking" this information there would be no way my server could then know what you'd typed into your Google search field. It obviously does know at the moment, though, because here's the sort of thing I see in the AWStats report:
I've never understood, by the way, why people are happy to type a URL into a search field when they could just as easily type it straight into their web browser in the first place.