Trying this with Fflwff could result in broken bones, nerve damage and severe blood loss. Mine, not hers. I may give it a shot, though.

Note to readers: Never play Cat Buckaroo with any potentially cat damaging objects, such as bricks, television sets or Collected Works of Shakespeare.

(Thanks John!)

How to get rid of dirty marks from your screen. (Thanks Dan.)
Windows Longhorn demo - should convert any Mac user back to Windoze in an instant. (Thanks Vince.)

I really want to meet these native Latin speakers and businesses who need specialist Latin websites...

With a team of specialist Latin translators, programmers, designers and localisation experts, Translation Express can localise your website from Latin to Latin or Latin to Latin or any other language from or into Latin.

(Via NTK.)

I started using a new stats logging service, Stat Counter the other day, to see how it stacked up against Site Meter. They both offer slightly different ways of looking at your stats, (and neither give the same figures as the actual Blogware stats), so I shall probably keep both going because I am, after all, obsessed.

But, looking at my Stat Counter stats today, I did notice that my page loads/unique visitors/returning visitors graph looks very much like Cradle Mountain in Tasmania:


My stats


Cradle Mountain

Uncanny, huh?

I remember reading once that we humans live on a 25 hour long circadian rhythm, which we are constantly re-adjusting to fit into our 24 hour day.

Now, consider the whole time zone thing. Time zones are a real drag. I have a little clock sitting on my desk which is set to PST (-8 GMT) so that I know whether my PST friends should be in bed or not and, therefore, how much coherence I should expect from them.

(Although most of them actually live on PVT - programmer variable time - which is calculated using a complex equation combining T (local time), D (time to impending deadline) and C (volume of caffeine consumed). I've given up trying to rationalise PVT to GMT. Doesn't work.)

Anyway, the frustrating things about time zones is that the people I want to talk to are often asleep when I want to talk to them. So I'd like to propose something which would, I think, solve the problem quite elegantly.

If we reset every clock to be on the same time and we redefine a day to be 25 hours long, then everyone would be up and awake at the same time. The 25 hour long 'iDay' would 'move' in relation to the 24 hour 'natural day', and so everyone would take it in turns to be up during the night. For example, today it might be 10am and light here in the UK, and 10am and dark in San Francisco, but later on it would be the other way round.

Of course, every 25 days we'd be back where we started so we could have new 25 day iMonths. Our circadian rhythms would be happy with a 25 hour day, so it'd be easy to slip into this new system. The draw back is that we'd have 14.6 iMonths in an iYear, but I think that's a small price to pay for not having to worry about time zones anymore.

I would like to suggest that one of the new, as yet unnamed iMonths be called Suwary. I think it should be slotted in between the new iJune and iJuly. The other new iMonth could be named in a public competition, and the spare 0.6 of an iMonth would be a worldwide extra public holiday, just because I think we really do all work too hard.

So, who's with me?

Please don't blame me for this.

(Thanks Kate. Again. You're a bad influence.)

You know, one of those days where absolutely nothing on your über-long to-do list seems even remotely tolerable, let alone interesting. I have no urgent tasks, nothing which can't be put off til tomorrow (or rather, Friday at the earliest as I'm off up to London again tomorrow). I have lots of things that I ought to do, but nothing I have to do and consequently I don't feel like doing anything at all.

I hate moods like this. And in moods like this, I hate being self-employed and working from home where it is only too easy to mooch about and waste time and generally be unproductive. I need to oik myself up and just get on with something. Anything. So long as it's not nothing.

On a completely unrelated and uninteresting note, the new carpet that's being laid right now stinks.

I have no idea who first said that if a writer isn't writing it's because he isn't reading, but I realised today that if a writer isn't writing because they aren't reading and then they start reading in order to start writing they'll very rapidly find that they still won't be writing because they're reading and you can't read and write at the same time, regardless of whether you touchtype or not.

I'm not writing. But I am reading. Or at least, I would be if I wasn't so tired that my eyes won't focus.

Arse.

Well, today is turning into a disaster day. Not because anything in particular has gone wrong. Far from it, as nothing much has happened today to go wrong. But today is still a bad day for me. I work for myself, and when I should be working on a grant proposal (involves obtaining large sums of money, therefore very important) I find myself instead sucked in to the world of Heartless Bitches International. Instead of boring the pants of myself by yet again writing letters saying why my project deserves funding, I have instead spent most of today chortling quietly at the rants against Nice Guys (i.e. insecure pricks who blame their crap love life on everyone but the person to blame - themselves - then claim that women don't like nice guys). If you have something really important to do today, then I recommend visiting HBI just so that I'll know that I'm not the only one who's going to hit 5pm with a large feeling of guilt having wasted too much time.

But of course, HBI isn't the only way I waste my time during this critical grant-application period. Oh no. Blogging is taking over my life. You know how it is - you start off wanting to get one little thing off your chest (or where-ever else you keep it) and you end up an hour later with a 59 page dissertation on the state of the world, your life, and those prats that drive large noisy boats past my house at 6am without turning their fucking engines off. Wankers.

Ok, maybe that last point is just mine, but you get the gist.

But when it's 6am on a Sunday morning, I really do get the urge to launch some sort of large, pointy missile at the noisy, arrogant, selfish gits. Sadly, the urge to go back to sleep is somewhat more powerful.

And talking of sleep, I did it again last night. I laid there in bed, drifting into that blissfully interesting hypnogogic state, and wrote this whole blog, my grant proposal, and the first two chapters of a would-be best seller chick lit hit. Then I fell properly asleep and the whole lot went. Every last word. So much so that I can't even remember what it was that I was going to rant about today. Arse.

Right... there's no footy today, so no excuse. I'll just have lunch, then pop round to the shops, then I'll read one more rant on HBI, then I'll really get right down to work. Honest. No, I will. Promise... Hmm, I do have a few emails to reply to, and then I'll get back to work. Oh, and last night's washing up...