I'm trying to keep everything all together over on the new version of CnV, so have taken the decision to no longer publish comments submitted here. I'm only going to post the occasional summary of new posts, and will probably even give that up after a few months. If you haven't changed your RSS feed yet, please do so.

Meantime, here's where the action is:

Wisdom of crowds, part 2: Hen nights
Wisdom of crowds, part 1: Honeymoons
Catch-up
Wisdom tooth update
ORG Day!
Toothless wonder
Gym progress

OK, we all know I'm a devoted fan of Neil Gaiman. Devoted, if possibly a bit rubbish at actually doing fan-like things, such as standing in line for signings, making it to any of his recent appearances in London, or buying everything he's ever released. I hang my head in shame for that and hope that he'll forgive me.

To make up for such shoddy behaviour, I hereby implore you all to go and vote for Neil in the 2007 Weblog Awards Best Literature Blog category. He's doing pretty well so far, but Pepys' Diary is creeping up behind, so he still needs your votes. It'll take just a second of your time, I promise you, so go vote!

A new post, that you can read on my new blog. :) And don't forget to change your RSS feed!

But to get it, you'll have to go to the new blog... Or get the new RSS feed!

I think I've pretty much imported all of the old posts, including the old Blog-City posts that until now had been stuck on my laptop. The formatting's all gone to hell in a handbasket, but when I have a quiet moment one day I might start trying to fix at least some of the more recent ones. The theme is temporary - it will do until I find one that I prefer. And there are still a few additional tweaks and changes, but overall, it's come together much faster than I had thought it would. I've even got it all set up in Ecto too.

Guess you had better update your RSS feeds now.

OK, so it's time. I have to move away from Blogware at some point, and the pain may as well start now whilst I'm already too busy to blog much. I have disabled anonymous comments on old post, turned off comments on new posts, and set all other comments to "moderate all", so that I can make sure that any comments that do get left on all posts are caputured and moved to the new blog. There will be very little activity here til I complete move over, so please accept my apologies for that. It might take a while - I'll post here just as soon as I have things sorted.

This year's carvings:


My witch and cat familiar.


Kev's Jack Skellington.

I love carving pumpkins. This year we got a proper carving set with tiny saws, a plastic 'drill' and all sorts. Made it much, much easier than trying to do it with a kitchen knife. Probably safer, too.

Me working on transferring the hand-drawn design:



Gutting the pumkin:

It's been a while since I've whined about my wisdom tooth, but it's that time again. It's been shifting about since April last year, on and off, with a series of minor infections, aches, and general unpleasantness. The other day I caught a look at it in the mirror, and frankly, it's just sitting there, rotting. So last week I went to see my dentist down in Dorset, to plead with him to remove it. When he looked at it last, a few years ago, he took an x-ray which showed that it was embedded too deeply to easily remove, and would need to be pulverised by ultrasound under general anaesthetic. Yeah, that didn't sound fun to me either.

Now, however, it's a different kettle of fish, as it's surfaced considerably, with only a small corner still hidden in the back of my jaw. So, it's time. I can't say that I've ever looked forward to having a tooth pulled out, but in all honesty, I am looking forward to November 15th, when a local anaesthetic and probably quite a bit of tugging will hopefully result in me being one tooth the poorer.

It also gives me a good excuse to take a few days off, as it's going to hurt like hell and I'm sure I'm not going to want to do much the day after. I can't wait.

Regular readers will know that I'm what you might call a bit of a fan of Mr Neil, so it should come as no surprise to discover that I've been rather looking forward to Stardust, the film version of Mr Neil's book of the same name. It's been a while since I last read the book - it's currently packed away in a box in my parents' loft, along with about 75% of all my belongings - but like all Mr Neil's work, it's a book of which I have fond memories.

Unlike the awful mess that has been made of another of my favourite books, The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper, I never much worried about what the film makers would do to Stardust. Mr Neil was involved, and occasionally gave us snippets of news, so it always felt like the film was in good hands and that the only thing we need do was to sit back and await the day.

Well, the day turned out, in fact, to be a night: Last night. Tom, MrA*, Phil Gyford (whose name I've seen around for ages, but had never met before - seemed like a lovely chap), and I met up at the Odeon Leicester Square and went in for a not-quite-full 8.25pm showing.

OK, so herewith the short review: It's wonderful. Truly, truly wonderful. If you are hesitant about going, then don't be, just go. If you hadn't considered going, then take my word for it and go. And if for any bizarre reason you'd written it off as yet another crappy fantasy film that's not worth your hard earnt readies, then put that thought behind you and go. Because this is a film that will warm the cockles of your heart. It'll make you laugh, make you smile, make you giggle, and make you feel all warm and fuzzy, when it's over you'll wish that it was just beginning.

Now for the long review (and I'll try not to give you any spoilers, but if you're concerned, stop reading now and just go see the film).

Tristan Thorn (the fabulous Charlie Cox) is 18, works in a shop and is hopelessly in love with the beautiful, but shallow, Victoria (Sienna Miller). But Victoria, who never seems to get herself out of her nightie, has got her eye on the more dashing Humphrey, who's more well spoken, gives her roses in comparison to Tristan's rather tatty daffodils, and who is better than Tristan at everything. Especially fencing.

Tristan, in an effort to woo Victoria, takes her on a candlelit picnic, spending all the money he's saved on a bottle of champagne. She's duly impressed by the champers, but drops the bombshell that she's expecting Humphrey to to propose to her on her birthday, in seven days time, with the ring that he's going all the way to Ipswich to buy. Poor Tristan vows that he would go to London - London! - in order to buy a ring good enough for Victoria. He would go to Paris! He would go to the Arctic to kill a polar bear and give her the head! Together, they see a star, falling from the sky and, ever the romantic, vows to find the fallen star and give it to Victoria as a token of his love for her. She gives him a week - until her birthday - to retrieve the star.

Meantime, in Faerie, the land on the other side of the wall for which Tristan's town of Wall is named, the King of Stormhold (Peter O'Toole) is dying. Traditionally, the princes should have assassinated each other, with the last one standing being able to claim the crown. But the trouble is, there are four left - Septimus, Primus, Tertius and Secundus. Well, three, after Septimus pushes Secundus off the King's bedchamber balcony. So the King resorts to magic - he bleaches the red out of the royal ruby and casts it into the sky - the heir that finds the ruby and restores the colour will be king. As the King dies, and his sons set off to find it.

But in falling to earth, the ruby knocks a star from the heavens, and so Tristan's quest and that of the royal heirs is intertwined... But then there are also the witches after the fallen star, and the missing princess and Captain Shakespeare...

I just popped over to Rotten Tomatoes to see what their reviews are, and out of curiosity I read some of the bad ones, and frankly, did these people see the same film I did? (No links - I frankly don't want to give them any Google juice at all.) Apparently, it was poorly cast... let's just review that a second. Robert de Niro as Captain Shakepeare, Claire Danes as Yvaine, Michelle Pfeiffer as Lamia, Mark Heap as Tertius (aaaah, Spaced). Even Charlie Cox as Tristan was fabulous, and I'd never heard of him before.

Another charge was that Stardust had no plot. No plot? Er, hello? Were you asleep? It's got plenty of plot! And no, it doesn't have too much plot, either. It's got enough plot to keep you happy, with enough unexpected turns to keep you interested, but not so much twistiness that you get lots and confused.

My advice? Ignore the bad reviews. They were obviously watching a different movie.

Highlights, then. Michelle Pfeiffer plays evil witch Lamia, who has two sisters, Empusa and Mormo. They want the fallen star for themselves - it has the power to restore their youth and beauty. As it is, they have only the littlest bit left of the last one they caught, so Lamia uses it to recover her looks so that she can go out into the world to get the latest star to fall. Unfortunately, every time she uses her magical powers, it erodes her now good looks, exposing the ugly witch underneath. First to go are her hands, then her hair... and eventually, in one rather hysterically funny scene (probably more to me than most), she casts a spell and her boobs rather precipitously drop.

Robert de Niro plays Captain Shakespeare, the ruthless captain of a lightening-harvesting airship - a ship held aloft by a huge balloon. There's not much I can say about de Niro's performance that wouldn't totally give the game away, but he's fabulous.

Ricky Gervais does a guest turn too. To start with, I was really annoyed - it was Gervais doing Gervais, in a really annoying manner, but his come-uppance is one of the most satisfying moments of the film. Indeed, when Kev and I were walking round the park this morning, we saw a flock of seagulls (that is, a large group of white, sea-going birds, not the 80s band), and Kevin said "Oh look, a flock of Rickies!"

But Claire Danes and Charlie Cox really shine as Yvain and Tristan. They have a real chemistry together, and there are moments when Danes truly shines. As with all fantasy heroes, Tristan has to grow up, has to turn from the self-absorbed boy he was into the man he's destined to become, and Cox handles that transition very subtly. Mind you, he has some help, not least from a haircut that magically (as in, magic is done, not as in 'that was a continuity mistake') makes his hair longer, and the acquisition of a really rather lovely set of clothes.



Indeed, when young Tristan got his new suit, Kev turned to me and whispered "I think I've just had an idea." Hmm, I had the same idea, and it has to do with what he's going to wear one day in February next year.

Stardust is a really wonderful film. It's got a wry, but subtle sense of humour. It's got real warmth and heart. It's smart, and not scared of being intelligent. But more than that, it's fabulously romantic, the kind of romantic that we need more of - not soppy or schmaltzy, but proper fairytale romance, the sort that's a little bit dark in places, but has a true and faithful heart.


* I'm not sure I should call MrA "MrA" anymore, not after seeing the documentary on Steve Ditko, in which came to light that he did a cartoon called Mr. A, all about someone who saw things in rather too stark a black and white. Maybe it's back to T'Other.

I just noticed that the emails from Blogware informing me that a comment has gone into moderation have been caught in Gmail's spam trap, and that there is no easy way for me to look at any comment beyond the 50th most recent. I fear this means that some of you may have left comments that never appeared, and which never will appear now because they are lost somewhere in the depths of Blogware's admin system.

I'm sorry about that.

I will be moving off Blogware onto an installation of Wordpress at some point, just as soon as I can get round to it.

As well as trying hard to find exactly the right shade of burgundy card for the invitations, I've also been trying to find exactly the right silks for my wedding dress. Having finally settled on a dressmaker, who not only can do exactly what I want but can also do it at a reasonable price and without throwing a strop about "design rights" and attempting to charge for quotes, I spent quite a bit of time trying to find the right fabric.

AnitaJane, my dressmaker, showed me a number of dupion silks by James O'Hare, some of which were lovely, but they didn't have any silk brocades, which we'll need for the insert in the skirt. Instead, I went off to Maculloch & Wallis, to see what they had, and found about half a dozen vaguely ivory-coloured brocades, and a few more burgundy silks. I also managed to get three brocade samples from Dalston Mill, but when you compared all the brocades with the ivory dupion, most of them were a long way away from being the right sort of ivory: too pink or too gold or too yellow. One was about right in shade, but it was a bit too subtle - from a distance you really wouldn't be able to see the detail. I thought I'd deal with this by beading it with pearls and burgundy Swarovski crystals, but that also seemed like an awful lot of work, not just because beading is quite slow and tedious, but also because it would require a whole new thought process about what would be an appropriate design.

Last week was Kevin and my anniversary - two years ago we had our first date, and so Kevin booked us in to one of our favourite restaurants, Andrew Edmund. We had about an hour to spare before our booking, though, so we wandered round Soho looking for a place to have a quick pre-dinner drink. That's a lot easier said than done on a Friday night in London, especially when a warm day has people grasping at summery straws, pretending that autumn hasn't really set in, honest guv. We ended up in a vodka bar that appeared to be mainly frequented by gangsters. You think I'm kidding. I'm not. Kev has a good street sense about these things, and I'd put money on there being various mafias present that evening. We finished our drinks and legged it.

On our way back from the dodgy bar, we walked down Broadwick Street, right past Broadwick Silks. They had some brocades in the window that immediately caught my eye, so yesterday we went back for a closer look. It seemed that they had a much bigger range of silks than Macculloch & Wallis, although M&W only put samples out on display, keeping the rolls themselves behind the counter, so it's really hard to judge. But Broadwick Silks' staff were dramatically nicer, letting me browse when I wanted to, and then helping me out when I asked.

I earmarked a few silks to examine further, then I told the assistant what I was doing and what I was looking for, and pointed out the rolls I liked the look of. She asked me if I had the fabric for the rest of the skirt, explaining that it is actually hard to match fabrics off a swatch, and that if I buy all the ivory I need from them, both the dupion and the brocade, then I can ensure a better match. She went on to explain that silks are dyed in batches, and that so long as the colour is within 10% lighter or darker - within "industry tolerances" - then it's deemed a match, but you can't really tell until you have a large piece to compare.

We haven't bought the ivory dupion yet, so she showed me the dupion that would go with the silks that I had chosen, and you could see it was a good match. I ended up buying 10cm of each, so I have a decent amount of fabric to play with. The assistant agreed that my choice was a bit more period than the alternatives - it's actually not a brocade, it's a dupion that's embroidered and beaded.

(For those of you who don't know, a brocade is "a rich fabric, usually silk, woven with a raised pattern, typically with gold or silver thread"; a dupion is "a rough slubbed silk fabric woven from the threads of double cocoons"; and a slub is "a lump or thick place in yarn or thread". There, I bet you thought I'd never explain.)

This is all very exciting! Firstly, it means I don't have to do so much beadwork as I had expected. Secondly, it's going to look more period, and thirdly, I can go in some time next week and buy the fabric I need, in time for my second fitting. Of course, on the way back towards Oxford Street, we passed two more fabric shops, so I don't suppose for a second that I'll be able to resits popping in to make sure that they don't have anything better, but I really do think I've found the right silks now.

You'll noticed that I said "second fitting" - had the first one on Thursday. Really all it was just having my measurements taken, trying on a corset again and making a few decisions on how I want to adjust the shape, and deciding on a skirt pattern. Pretty simple stuff, but it's exciting to be making these decisions and getting on with it all.

Of course, as the process progresses, I find myself changing my mind about things, and refining what I want. I was originally going to have lace trim on my corset, for example, but have since decided that pearls (or rather, Czech glass pearls, given that real ones are rather expensive to buy in bulk) would be more appropriate ... and less work. I still intend to use lace on the skirt, but I'm also considering whether pearls might not work better there too... it's a rather organic process, this, which means high cognitive overheads as I do more research and try to make decisions, but also gives me a real feeling of ownership. This dress, for better or for worse, will be a true expression of my personality, not just some pretty thing I picked out of a book.

Makes me wish I had room in my flat for a sewing machine.

I'm writing this on my old Palm Vx, which I dug up the last time I went home. In nearly pristine condition, it's a relic from my web designer days, when I needed to keep track of an awful lot of meetings and was given this by my boss to do so. As soon as I left that job, I found I didn't really need it, so it was put away for half a decade to emerge only now.



It's funny how stylish it still looks - actually, it looks nicer than Kevin's Tungsten T5, and if you can't see the screen, it could pass for something new. I used to be quite good at the Graffiti alphabet used to input text, and am quickly getting my chops back. Certainly it's quicker than trying to type on the Nokia E61's tiny keyboard. Battery life is fab, and the flash memory means no faffing around with stupidly long menu trees to save stuff.



The problem is that it doesn't seem possible to sync it any more. I have a serial to USB adaptor, and the Palm Desktop in both Mac and PC flavours, but the Mac refuses to recognise that there is anything there to sync with, whilst the PC sees the device but can't figure out how to talk to it. I've spent a fair amount of time fiddling, but nothing seems to help. Palm Vx and computer just don't like each other any more. Perhaps the laptops feel the ol' Palm is just too passé.

But hoorah! All is not lost. It turns out that I can beam documents from the Vx to my E61 using infrared, then I can Bluetooth them from the E61 to my Macbook. In theory, this works the other way round too, as the E61 can beam files to the Palm but in practice the Palm can't recognise the file contents, so displays them as truncated gobbledegook.

What this means is that I can't add any new Palm apps to the Vx, so I can't add AvantGo (which it used to have), so I can't cram it full of stuff to read. It is, effectively, a write-only device. There is not much else it can do that's of any use. Yes, the other apps all work, but I don't do much calculating on a daily basis, and an address book on an un-networked device is a bit useless. So really all I can do is write... No disturbances. No multitasking. No interruption. (Although also, no spell checker either.)

I've started to carry it with me wherever I go, and scribbling down scraps of blog posts whilst on the tube or, as today, on the plane. (Let's just say that going to Berlin and back in one day is not necessarily a habit I would encourage anyone to get into.) The amount of stuff I've got going on never seems to diminish, and time for blogging seems to be getting harder and harder to come by. But maybe by using the little lost moments on the tube I can get more written.

The unexpected benefit of resurrecting this old thing is the retro geek joy it engenders. At Future of Web Apps, everyone I showed it too cooed as if it were something new and exciting, like an iPod Touch. I think people have fond memories of Palms from this era - they were certainly nicer than many of their contemporary competitors - but these days Palm devices feel old and unloved. If only Palm would do a serious update of both their OS and their desktop. Syncing and conduits and stuff are just all so boring - we want it to just work, not to be a right royal pain the backside. (Although frankly, all syncing is a right royal pain in the backside, if you ask me.)

Anyway, I am not going to promise anything, but it is possible that I will get more blogging done now.

Maybe.

After finally getting all the right shades of paper and card to make our invitations, the next thing to get sorted was the wording and the typesetting. If you've ever bought a wedding magazine, and I pity you if you have, you'll have noticed that they tend to come with half a forest's worth of inserts, usually including at least one from a stationers advertising invitation printing. Some of those brochures even have suggestions of how to word your invitations, so I thought that it'd be a pretty easy thing to figure out.

Wrong.

Ok, so if you want to be traditional about these things, then there are a number of forms and rules that you have to follow. Firstly, who's hosting the wedding? The bride and groom? Bride's family? Bride, groom and both families? Bride's and groom's families? Groom's family? Divorced parents? Divorced parent who has remarried? Widowed parent? Old Uncle Tom Cobbly? All (of the above)?

We're being quite traditional in some senses, so my parents are hosting the weddings. Right, so that's:

Mr & Mrs Robert Charman

Now, do you "request the pleasure of your company" or "request the honour of your presence"? A not-so-quick Google discovered that you use "request the honour of your presence" for religious venues, and "request the pleasure of your company" for non-religious venues. Ok, so we're getting married in a public school (always feels weird saying that), ergo:

request the pleasure of your company

Except, these are for form invitations, where you're not stating the person's name. Each one of our invitations names the people invited, so:

request the pleasure of the company of

One then spells out the name of the recipient in full. I had a bit of a moment there when I was trying to figure out if it should be Mr Nigel Charman and Mrs Margaret Charman, or Mr & Mrs Nigel Charman. I ended up going with the latter, mainly for space reasons but also because it sounds a bit more formal. It is a wee bit sexist, but it is just too much to spell out everyone's name in full. The only time we broke with this male first rule was when we were inviting a friend and their (named) partner, and the friend was female. Just seemed wrong to be inviting someone we didn't know as an adjunct to someone we did!

The next bit's easy, given that my parents are hosting:

at the marriage of their daughter

I'm their daughter, I'm getting married, so no arguments there really.

Susan M....

Ok, so now we do have a problem. I don't mind my name in full, but it seems strange given that whilst Susan is my full name, my mother is the only person who uses it. Apart from immigration officials, and they don't count. Kevin preferred not to use his full name, so it becomes:

Suw Charman
to
Kevin Anderson

Still following me?

Then it's the date, which some people say you should spell out in full, e.g. Saturday, the sixteenth of February two thousand and eight. Now, one could slap an 'Anno Domini' in there too, just to pep things up a bit, but again, it gets a bit too wordy.

Now time for another couple of rules: The prepositions should be on a separate line:

on
Saturday, 16th February 2008 at 2.30 p.m.

And the date should come first. Except, of course, when it doesn't, and I've seen plenty of invitation examples where the location comes first and the date second. I can't find the guide that insisted it was the other way round, but that's what we ended up with. I also didn't put the prepositions on a separate line, because it just took up too much room. Ooh, such a rebel.

RSVP is to the Mother of the Bride, even if she did protest otherwise, and I chose to include email and phone as well as the traditional postal address.

And there we are! Done! Sort of...

Next up was the font. Again, easy enough to get ideas from samples and brochures, and my first stab at it ended up looking like it had come straight out of the pages of the Confetti stationery brochure, with a copperplate type font for everything except our names, which was done in a big swoopy calligraphic font, Edwardian Script IT.



I have to say, at this stage I wasn't particularly enamoured of our invitations, so I had a chat with my friend Matt Patterson, whose arm I twisted into agreeing to have a look at my typesetting. He gave me a few tips, the main one of which was to find a font with "non-lining (old-style) figures, i.e. numbers where they're the height of lower-case letters and some of them stick up (8) and others stick down (3, 9)." Inspiration!

A few of my friends are designers or into typography, so I asked around for fonts and links, and was given a selection of suggestions to look at, some of which come pre-installed on one's Mac. For the terminally curious, my shortlist was:

• Aquiline
• Aquiline Two
• Blackmoor LET
• Casablanca Antique
• Dominican
• Goudy Old Style
• Hoefler Text
• IM FELL DW Pica
• IM FELL English
• IM FELL French Canon
• IM FELL Three Line Pica
• JSL Ancient
• Lucida Blackletter
• Ludovicos
• Xenippa
• Zapfino
• Monotype Corsiva

There are some really nice fonts here, some of them with that sort of 17th century feel, which is appropriate given that the wedding has a very light 'somewhere in the middle of the last millennium' feel to it (I wouldn't go as far as to say "theme" because there's no way I can get MrA into doublet and hose, let alone a codpiece).

One thing I learnt is that Hoefler Text has all these really cool ligatures that you can enable:



That really got me going. Swashes! That long archaic s that looks like an f but with only half the crossbar, if anything. Trouble is, whilst Hoefler Text is nice, it's not exactly quite as old-style as I would like. I did experimental invitations with Aquiline, IM FELL English and Ludovicos instead, and after quite a bit of faffing about, decided on a mix of Aquiline and Aquiline Two for the main body of the invitation, with IM FELL English for the RSVP address - at low point sizes, Aquiline and Aquiline Two really don't work.

And it turns out that Aquiline has a nice long archaic s too. Question is, when do you use a long s, and when do you use a short one? I ended up on Andrew West's blog, BabelStone, reading two posts that he wrote last year: The Long and the Short of the Letter S, and The Rules for Long S. Both are really fascinating and worth a read. They conclude that the rules for the use of a long s are:

* short s is always used at the end of a word
* short s is always used before an apostrophe (e.g. clos'd, us'd, and in French books words like s'il and s'eſt)
* short s is always used before 'f' (e.g. ſatisfaction, misfortune, transfuſe, transfix, transfer, succeſsful)
* short s is sometimes used before 'b' (e.g. husband, Shaftsbury)
* short s is sometimes used before 'k' (e.g. ask, risk, skin, skill)
* long s is used before a hyphen at line break (e.g. neceſ-ſary, pleaſ-ed), even when it would normally be a short s (e.g. Shaftſ-bury in a book where Shaftsbury is normal)
* long s is maintained in abbreviations such as Geneſ. for Geneſis

OK! That's easy!

Having added in the long s in the appropriate places, I then started to think that the wording needed a bit of work - it just seemed a bit flat and uninspired. Obviously you can't faff around too much with things like time and date - they are what they are - but you can have a bit of fun with the rest of it. We ended up, after much agonising, with:

Miſter & Miſtreſs Robert Charman
requeſt the pleaſure of the company of

Mr & Mrs Nigel Charman

on the occaſsion of the marriage of their daughter

Miſs Suw Charman
to
Miſter Kevin Anderson

etc. etc.

Now we come to capitalisation. In modern English, we don't capitalise all that much, really, and the trend in colloquial writing seems to be to capitalise less and less. But I remember, years ago, seeing a reproduction of Shakespeare's First Folio, and he seemed to capitalise all over the place! It was explained to me at the time by my actor friend that this was to emphasise the key words, so that the actors could more easily remember their lines. I've done a bit of a Google to try to find out if that's true and if there were rules about capitalisation in Elizabethan English, but have so far been unsuccessful (although if there's anyone around who knows about these things, I'm still curious!).

In the end, I decided on capitalising the words that looked important. Then there was a bit of ... well, quite a lot of ... fiddling with the kerning and leading, and eventually we ended up with:



All we have to do now is finish putting them together and get them in the post. Turns out there are a whole bunch of conventions about how you write envelopes but, well, frankly? Bugger that.

Off for nearly 3 weeks, so no blogging during that period. Back after hols. Yay! Hols!

This morning, just before I woke up, I had a dream that my Wikipedia page was up for deletion, and that I was making the case for keeping it by saying that 83 pages had linked to it and that it's bad form to wilfully rot links.

I woke up somewhat bemused by my dream, but couldn't resist checking to see if my Wikipedia page is still there. It is, but only just - it's been marked for deletion, you see. (And it only has about six pages linking to it. I just had to check that, too.)

I don't see anything psychic in this as it was marked for deletion - or, as they put it, merging with the Open Rights Group page - on 17 August but my psyche never bothered to mention it until this morning. Maybe the ether's got really bad latency. Anyway, Betsy Devine spoke up on my behalf saying that the stub should be retained, and now a couple of other people have too, which is nice.

I have always felt a bit strange about my Wikipedia entry. On the one hand, if it had never been put up, I never would have said that there was any need to create it - I'm not convinved that I'm that notable a person, except in the areas of British digital rights activism and social software/blogging, where I would like to think I have made a positive contribution. On the other hand, now that I have a Wikipedia page, I'd be sad to see it go. That's human nature I think - having something taken away is worse than not being given it in the first place.

Later... It has come to my attention that my pages is being edited a bit now, with some more information being put up, which is nice. I could have done that myself, but Wikipedia policy is that you're not allowed to edit your own pages, so I've stayed well clear. But whether it stays, or whether it gets deleted still, only time will tell.