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Long-time readers of Fuddland might be aware that I tend to support Comic Relief’s Red Nose Day whenever it comes around. In the past this has been in the form of sponsored commenting, donating an amount to the charity based on the number of comments I receive on Red Nose Day.

This year, due to living in a foreign country and suffering complications of bank accounts and general relative skintness, I decided on a different tactic to show my support: I waited until someone else had a genius idea, and then proceeded to wheedle my way into it.

Thus, I’d like to wholeheartedly recommend to any, all and more of you reading this to make one, several or indeed nine purchases of Shaggy Blog Stories.

A collection of 100 short humorous pieces from the UK blogosphere. All profits from the sale of this book will be donated to the Comic Relief charity. Contributors include Richard Herring, Andrew Collins (BBC 6Music), Emma Kennedy, James Henry (TV’s “Green Wing”), Abby Lee (Girl With A One-Track Mind), Catherine Sanderson (Petite Anglaise), Zoe McCarthy (My Boyfriend Is A Twat), novelist David Belbin, Anna Pickard (The Guardian), and a diverse selection of some of the UK’s most talented bloggers.

Should that list of well-known names not be enough to encourage a purchase, then perhaps the tingly news that the sixty-fourth contribution to be found within its pages is from this very weblog. In the interests of intrigue, I’ll not be telling you which of the 1,656 [including this one] entries I’ve written over the last almost-five years it is. [Oh okay, one clue: it’s not the one you’re reading now. That narrows it down a bit.]

For full details of all the contributors, and more of the story behind its creation, I’ll point you in the direction of the book’s brainparent and masterminder, Mike Troubled Diva. I’m chuffed to bits to have made the final cut, but even if I hadn’t, I’d still be pimping this book like … I’m sorry, I’m just far too English to finish that sentence. Just go and buy it, and I’m sure you’ll be chuckling at at least 99 of the stories.

Take 50 images from Flickr with the same tag, average them into one image and the results are—remarkably—some rather pleasing abstracts. This one is made up of photos with the tag ‘eye’.

Check out the rest of the set. [Via Stuart.]

i’ve just found out my old coursemate and the woman who first told me about actuarial work [damn her!] has been keeping a weblog as she travels around south america. follow anna’s travels, currently somewhere in brazil.

forget making your own mr potatohead — make yourself your very own mr picassohead.

steve of weyoftheweb and his ‘jacket potato and baby gravy’ post has just made my day.

the control arms million faces petition: anyone recognise face #6164? [ignore the sunday morning bedhead.]

i admit it: i watched derren brown play russian roulette live on television and i spent the last ten minutes of the show standing up because i was too nervous to sit down.

as our man at the beeb notes, the first part of the show — the whittling down of 12,000 applicants to be the one person who puts the bullet in the gun — was quite fascinating; the games brown had devised were simple but [thankfully, in the end] effective.

did he always know it was chamber number one, and pretend he messed up by firing chamber five into the air, for added tension? it certainly looked like he was nervous after his apparent misjudgment, but who knows?

i’m not the first to say it, i won’t be the last, but here it is anyway: derren brown’s just pissed all over blaine’s strawberries.

oh, and it’s always good to have an excuse to remind people of the darwin award winner who played russian roulette with a semi-automatic pistol.

the puzzleblog numbers game just became a whole lot less fun due to one of the google ads that support the site linking to the countdown numbers game solver.

in the comments to my previous entry about puzzleblog we touched briefly on the possibilities of making a computer algorithm which finds the answer through exhaustive searches; mrtn and myself talked about this further, artificial intelligence being suggested as a way to avoid a lot of the dead-end calculations.

i’ve no idea how this particular routine works, but judging from william tunstall-pedoe’s cv he may well be the cleverest man in the universe, so it’s bound to be fairly nifty coding — ranking solutions by ‘intuitiveness’ and problems by difficulty. shame it doesn’t appear to be open source, i’d have liked to have a look under the hood.

a great idea for a weblog, and [i think] powered by typepad, is puzzleblog — every day two new puzzles are posted, one scrabble based, the other is like the numbers game from countdown. good for a few minutes of brain-wracking distraction.

speaking of countdown, its afternoon-quiz companion is fifteen-to-one, and as i write my mother is sitting in their studios as a stand-in in case one of the other contestants falls ill or doesn’t turn up; this privilege is a result of being a winner on a previous show — let’s hope she gets a chance to shine again. go mum!

any time i moan about being a poor student and how i can’t afford to save up for nice new things, or take lavish holidays, or get onto the first step on the property ladder, remind me about the global rich list and how, at this moment in time, i’m still in the top ten percent of earners worldwide; ninety percent of the world’s population earn less money than me. obviously you’ve got to take into account relative costs of living, but it’s good to have a little simplified perspective thrust in front of you once in a while.

[via tom coates and quite a few others.]

this is a plug [socket, plug, geddit? *ahem*] for a new website called popmates, created by a chap called andy knight. andy sent me, along with a few other people [scaryduck, phil price] that i know about, an email asking if we’d mind linking to his site — it was created as part of his masters degree, but he’d like it to get it off the ground beyond his degree.

not one to deprive a fellow student of trying to claw their way out of debt, i’ve obliged his request [after checking it wasn’t some cunning new form of spam, of course — although i was fairly sure it wasn’t spam since it came through my contact form and actually used the name dvd a few times in the text, rather than something generic]. here’s the lowdown, from his email:

blimey, google’s getting cleverer. it isn’t just about the best search engine out there — it now does sums.

in a simple case, a google-search for ‘2+2’ doesn’t throw up a list of pages that contain the phrase ‘2+2’; instead, google tells you that 2+2=4.

but that’s not all — perhaps the most useful part of this feature is the conversion of units: search for ‘10 miles in kilometres’ and you get the answer: 10 miles is about 16 kilometres.

it’s not easily fooled either: the nonsensical ‘24 hours in light years’ results in a normal search, because the units are not comparable: a time cannot be converted into a distance.

the more i try, the more i discover: it knows about pi and the golden ratio. sadly it won’t write me my phd thesis, so there’s still a few things for the google programmers to work on…

i’d like to present two awards this evening.

the first goes to the best demonstration that knowing css code does not necessarily make a sensible design. yellow on blue is bad, but blue on blue? *gibber*

the second is the ‘no shit sherlock’ award for pointless scientific studies, today’s winner being the new zealand team behind the discovery that young men download porn. not that i have ever nope no never ever done that kind of thing. nope. okay maybe a few times, but i was researching for a book, right?

i was pointed to www.fudland.com by a friend who had a spot of trouble finding my site — wha…?

depending on who you ask, the internet is shit or the internet is not shit.

i’ve got to side with the latter opinion myself; the internet is such a fundamental part of my daily life that i’d be fairly masochistic to continually use something i thought was shit.

although my shower is a bit shit [it sometimes switches off the water heating elements at random intervals, somehow knowing the precise moment i’m about to get shampoo in my eyes, treating me to a ‘refreshing’ blast of cold water as i bash it around until it has had enough and switches back on the hot] and i still use that daily. hmm, perhaps i am a masochist after all…no, i don’t think so. i don’t generally try to humiliate myself on purpose, i’m far too good at doing that by accident [evidence? exhibit a; exhibit b; exhibit c; exhibit d; exhibit e…].

anyway, as i was saying: the internet is not shit; it’s the greatest means of communication ever invented. you just have to know how to use it.

this post is the equivalent of those episodes of american sitcoms where they splice in bits of old episodes rather than write an entirely new one.

there’s nothing like reading about a good bit of inutile scientific research being carried out by someone else to drag you out of a bout of fuddblues. possibly in response to the clear need to assist some beginners in the art of tea-making, a researcher at loughborough university [known around these parts as looga-barrooga] has been testing the necessity of each of george orwell’s eleven rules for making the perfect cup of tea. briefly, these are:

i adhere to most of these rules, but i have developed my own versions of some of them, based on my preferences and the tools at my disposal:

• my favourite tea is a blend from uganda, tanzania and kenya, and i can’t get it in loose form from the local supermarket, so am forced to use bags;
• i don’t have a ceramic teapot, but i do use a metal one — which i heat using some almost-boiled water;
• six spoons [or bags] sounds a bit much — i’m a subscriber to the ‘one for each person and one for the pot [subrule: if making only one cup, then just use one bag]’ school of thought. obviously these two rules coincide given the right number of people and mug-size.

orwell himself admits that his tenth rule [add milk to tea, not vice versa] is controversial, but argues that it is easier to gauge how much milk is needed, as the strength of the tea is not known until it is poured. however, i add the milk [semi-skimmed, mostly for health reasons but i do agree that creamy milk doesn’t suit tea very well — it’s better for coffee] first and pour the tea onto it, because i’ve made so many cups using the same tea, teapot and mugs that i know exactly how much milk i need. it now seems there is a sound scientific basis for doing it this way round — something to do with the milk proteins unfurling. if i’m making tea for others, i’ll usually put out a jug of milk, and leave it up to them to decide when and how much milk to add — it’s as personal a preference as taking sugar.

the sugar thing is also mildly controversial. i’m a convert: i used to have lots of sugar [up to five spoonfuls!] in my tea, up to when i started university, but decided to cut it out almost overnight, and now much prefer tea without. whilst orwell frowns upon it, i can understand those who do have sugar — tea without it can taste quite bitter if you’re not used to it, but they really are quite different drinks, with and without sugar, and not taking sugar enables you to appreciate the many varieties of tea to a much greater degree.

that’s the great thing about blogging: you get to put forward your views on the really important things in life.

there’s a cool new utility for bloggers who don’t have ‘trackback-enabled’ blogs — such as blogger-hosted blogs for example.

ben and mena trott, developers of movable type and the trackback system, have written a beginner’s guide to trackback for a detailed explanation, but the way i think about it is this:

imagine two bloggers, called [for unneccessary confusion] jeff and geoff, who both have blogs with the trackback feature. suppose jeff reads a post on geoff’s blog, and it inspires him to write a post on his own blog — either carrying-on the train of thought of the original, or disputing what it says, or anything that could be considered a response to geoff’s post.

once jeff has written his post, he can send a ‘trackback ping’ to geoff’s blog, which automatically tells it that there’s a post on jeff’s blog which refers to a post on geoff’s blog, and gives it the details [post title, permalink to the post, that kind of thing].

now someone who reads geoff’s post will be provided with a link to the post on jeff’s blog, allowing them to easily follow the thread of the topic from blog to blog.

i myself use trackback on my own site to link posts that are related. for example, the recent egg-freezing debacle started in one post, and there were two others that followed on from it, but were not the next two posts written. a trackback link at the bottom of the first two posts in the series enables the reader to skip to the next post in the saga.

up to now, this all depended on your blogging software [i believe the official term is ‘content management system’] being trackback-enabled, which — despite the creators of the technology making it open source — has not been taken up by the other popular blogging tools. however, simpletracks is a helpful compromise.

if, in the above example, jeff did not have a blog that used the trackback technology, he would have to get the ‘trackback url’* from geoff’s site, enter the relevant field in the simpletracks form, then fill in the rest of the form using the information from his own post. once ‘ping’ is clicked, simpletracks does the job of informing geoff’s blog that jeff has written a post referring to geoff’s post.

i’m not sure why trackbacking hasn’t been adopted by blogger et al, as i think it’s a good thing [if it weren’t for my no-capitals policy, that’d have a capital g and a capital t] — hopefully they’ll be able to see it taking off more rapidly with the advent of simpletracks, and incorporate it properly.

[just in case i haven’t used the word blog and its derivations enough in this post, here’s another one for luck: blog.]

*e.g. the trackback url of this very post is http://fuddland.org.uk/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/1205.

i wonder how many people have genuinely been taken in by my credit card details?

i love this bit in the faqs:

[via bent back tulips]

disclaimer: if you yourself are duped and enter your own card details, don’t come crying to me.

whilst trying to figure out the best way to get from neasden to enfield yesterday — and i mean ‘best’ in the sense of ‘easiest’ rather than ‘quickest’ or ‘most pubs’ — i discovered the brilliant transport for london journey planner.

all you need to tell it is where you’re starting from and where you want to end up — these can be tube stations, bus stops, addresses, landmarks or postcodes — and it works out a variety of different means to make the journey. don’t like buses? then tell it to not use them. want to do part of the journey on a bicycle? no problem. want the route with the least amount of walking? sod off you lazy arse. oops, i mean: yep, it does that too — seems like they’ve thought of everything.

the guardian very thoughtfully gave away a great freebie yesterday: a dvd containing a high-quality version of honda’s ‘cog’ ad [you may remembering me wondering if it contained cgi], together with a ‘making of’ documentary, a flash-powered guide to each component [what its real function is], and a couple of bits about the honda cars themselves.

if you missed it [or live somewhere other than the uk!], i’ve just noticed that right now [i.e. who knows how long this link will be valid for?] you can order a copy of the dvd direct from honda, for the small price of putting yourself on their mailing list for the rest of your useful life.

play.com selling ‘transformers: the movie’ for four and a half quid!

it’s been a while since i linked to any news stories, and i’m starting to get withdrawal symptoms, so here are my two favourite stories from the last couple of days:

• i love it when old, thought-lost, recordings are found, so the news that readings by the likes of j.r.r. tolkien, p.g. wodehouse, arthur conan doyle and virginia woolf have been discovered by the british library is perhaps as close the literary world might get to ‘the beatles anthology’ phenomenon;
• just about all i want to say about ken livingstone’s remarks about bush is: yay, go ken go! he used to be my local mp you know?

american history not being one of my specialist subjects, i had to check out what livingstone meant by:

according to americanpresident.org, harding didn’t exactly have an easy time as president, and his story might even serve as a lesson to bush: even your chums could betray you if you give them enough power.

this has just reminded me of something i read the other day: a transcript of an interview bush gave last month. at one point the questions were regarding bush’s confidence in the coalition’s strategy for iraq, and he began praising the people involved in its’ devising, in particular, tommy franks:

yeah, because that’s a good qualification to look for in the person in charge of a war: they went to the same high school as your wife.

go check out the recently redesignaged comovedy, now in minty fresh mt flavour — look at those navblocks pop in and out! cooooooooool.

as noted and linked-to by a great many people now, the new honda ad is way cool. however, i have a nagging suspicion that it’s computer generated — i really don’t want it to be, but at some points the objects seem to have a decidedly cgi appearance [for example, the car radio\speakers\windscreen sequence]. but what’s really been bugging me is: what’s the name for those kind of films? i’d like to be able to search for more of them — they were very popular in the early eighties, around the time of the great egg race — but i can’t think of a suitable or likely name: “chain reaction sequence objects films” doesn’t really throw up anything useful.

i still can’t see the april fool story in today’s guardian [if they did one], but this bbc news online story has to be one.

for my own part, i believe i successfully fooled rob for a couple of seconds with my dummy forwarded email ‘from’ the organisers of the cancún conference, which informed us they were cancelling the conference because of the current political climate. shame rob didn’t read it until after noon!

Read the rest of “this is where the fun starts”…

Read the rest of “funny ha ha”…

Read the rest of “blog rocking beats”…

Read the rest of “on the verge”…

Read the rest of “funny taste”…

Read the rest of “powers of 10”…

Read the rest of “by the light of the silvery moon”…

Read the rest of “qotd”…

Read the rest of “tick tock”…

Read the rest of “time to switch to spirits”…

Read the rest of “happiness where are you?”…

Read the rest of “protest the protest”…

Read the rest of “inflatable vicar costs extra”…

Read the rest of “well done play.com”…

Read the rest of “don’t think…”…