Some time ago I wrote that of all the silly ppl on this stale planet who I desperately wished had a blog but didn’t was Stephen Fry.  I wrote it but I can’t seem to find it so maybe I didn’t, maybe I dreamed it, well I am so sorry for dreaming!  Sheesh.

Well guess what!  Bet you can’t guess after that introduction, betcya with poos on top.  Yes he’s started one!  Started it last month in fact so why the heck did no body tell me?

As some of his commenters have pointed out, he doesn’t appear to have quite grasped the concept yet.  He’s so far only made 2 posts, which isn’t surprising considering that both are veritable dissertations.  Still it’s well worth taking a year out from your life to read them because, well it’s Stephen Fry!

Well, I’m probably experiencing the most tremendous amount of relief that anyone, anytime anywhere could possibly experience, as I have just now come back from being the best man at a big friends wedding. I have successfully, done a speech in front lots of strangers and friends, and survived it. Goodness gracious me.

I think I might pass out now.

Hmm, oh one more thing. My blog is experiencing some strangeness right now. I seem to be being flooding by comment spam and akismet hasn’t been trapping all of it. Problematically, my wordpress installation seems to be stalling every-time I mark all as spam. So i’m not sure what to do about comments.

Gaygamer was DoS’d last weekend.

Bit late with this one, but i’ve been busy OK!?  Apparently, at first it seemed like some silly kid doing some lousy DoS attack for kicks, flooding them with pings and all that, but after a while it was apparent they weren’t going to stop and eventually they started noticing hate filled rants on their forum.

I find this quite scary because I had rather hoped that the internet blogging community were quite a liberal bunch, but if a quirky gaming blog can receive homophobic attacks then nowhere is safe right?

If you subscribed to my websites feed prior to this month please resubscribe, the feed is now located at http://feeds.feedburner.com/ItchAndBeMerry or http://feeds.feedburner.com/thatkidweekly for the podcast.

For the past week or so my feed has been all arsed up and I have only just now spotted it (tweerp).  It was due to a buggy version of one of my wordpress plugin called “Ultimate Tag Warrior”.  Updated the plugin and it seems all is well now.

My therapy homework for this week is to spend 5 minutes per day browsing a small store (not a large supermarket). Bet that sounds ridiculous.

I’m not sure I understand Open ID anymore. I had come to know of it as a protocol (in effect) allowing you to identify yourself via your closest, or most prized internet presence. So you can identify yourself via your blog. For instance I have an openid server plugin installed on my wordpress blog, so whenever I see a site which accepts an OpenID login, I simply point to my own blog and because I’m already logged in to my blog via a cookie, most of the time I won’t even have to issue a password. But now it seems that openid identities are being created by people outside of their primary internet presence, using public openid servers. I dunno, but this just seems to miss the point. Or maybe I never knew the point.

The calendar flicked over t0 march today meaning that virgin media’s carriage rights for sky’s standard channels expired.  It’s pretty funny, the channel number for sky one has been hijacked and replaced by a Virgin branded VOD commercial.  Another, Sky News has been replaced by a hillarious pun, the channel is now called “Old Sky Snooze” and is a static message spooling off that same memo signed by richard branson.

It’s all so odd.  It was only a week or so ago that are Telly was still just Telewest and it was all so friendly and inoffensive.

Trying out some clipping service called <a href=”http://www.clipmarks.com/”>clipmarks</a>. Wonder how it will look when blogging a clip.

clipped from www.itchmerry.com Written in Buzz with nothing more than my fingers this stark plodder has some bleeps and bendy bleeps and what seems like a particulary untalented drummer in the room.� It’s from 1999. Cash & Mouse

Update: Well hmm, way too much branding going on there for my taste. And it escaped my markup. The cheek.

I need to go on a publicity drive, yesterday Social Meter was all the buzz and just go a look how unpopular my blog is lol. I’ll still carry on blogging, and I don’t think I even mind that much, but it would still be a nice if someone read this damn thing.

Hold on, it’s in even more of a state than it was yesterday, there was just under 100 google links, now there’s none. Hmm, maybe I shouldn’t take that thing seriously.

It’s a good day on the MAMPtel front, mysql.org have finally made available universal mac versions of all their tools. Previously the Query Browser was only PPC and it had many a bug when run through rosetta. They’ve also now tied up all the tools into one download, they don’t even seem to offer them individually anymore which is odd.

I’m stuck on Zelda 3. I’ve reached the dark world, and there’s this eejit boss who wears some kind of head armour you have to bash with a hammer, it’s driving me mad, I just know I’ve come close to chinning the bastard but that just makes it all the more annoying. UGH, games!

I am so so so so so so so so so tempted to get an EyeTV Hybrid. As I’ve said before i’m sure, freeview reception is still in a dire state in Sheffield but we do plan to move soon, and also it’s only a matter of time before the reception is improved, although we might have to wait for analogue to be shutdown. Anypoop, the hybrid looks great, you just stick it in a USB port exactly like the EyeTV 2 for DTT, and has the same great (or so i’ve heard) software but it supports both Analogue TV as well as Freeview. So I could get it now and put up with analogue until I can pick up freeview. And I’m kinda desperate because I don’t have a TV of my own at the moment, nor do I want one ruining the feng shui or whatever you call it of my room, mind you I’ve put up without for this far and it is kinda a nice feeling not to own a TV.
Another useful thing, it also has composite/S-VIDEO input so I could use it to play consoles. I’m really looking forward to the Wii, but I won’t have anything to play it through so this would probably do the trick quite nicely. Oh course, it won’t be HD (is the Wii even HD?) but I don’t care that much.

Anyway, yeah, I really really want one but I can’t find it anywhere except this one place who seem to be over charging for it by about 20 or so quid. I guess I need to wait for the other stores to get them in before bargains can be sought.

It’s suffocatingly humid in my room, i’ve got a noisy A/C but i always feel kinda guilty turning it on Watching this show Paul Merton’s made about silent comics I was reminded about the dvd release of the silent sci-fi Metropolis from a few years back, it had an extremely dire soundtrack, which sounded like some horribly cheesy 80’s synth pop, but without the charm that could often entail. I then had a sudden idea/urge/what-if to make my own soundtrack for Metropolis. When playing it back you’d have to be quick to play both the film and my soundtrack at the same time… but it could work? Ack, who am I kidding, I’ll never get around to doing it. Such a dreamer I am.

I’ve another idea. This is a blogging engine idea, but it’s so obvious that I’d be very surprised if it hasn’t already been done, but as I haven’t seen anything of the like so far I’ll explain it anyway. What if, when commenting on somebody’s blog, if you have logged into their site using open-id, or typepad or any one of those authentication systems their blog pings back to your own blog to tell your blog that you’ve made a comment on their site, and also send a copy of the comment text along with the ping. Then, your blog could keep an archive of all the comments you’ve made on other folks blogs, maybe even have a latest 5 comments down the sidebar or somewhere. I’m so positive that could be useful that I think I might even have a go coming up with some kind of MT Plugin. That is… if it hasn’t already been done, I’m sure it must have? Of course, the big caveat is that everyone will have to implement the plugin on their own blog before it can become useful.

So one of the first thing’s I do of a morning is to wake up the mac and check bloglines, in the hope that the sooner i do that and catch up on the gossip the sooner I can get on and do other things. There’s getting to be too much of the damn stuff though and i’m not sure what the reason is, partly I suppose it is that I keep adding more blogs to my feed without taking some of the oldies out, but also I think the blogs such as boing-boing and gizmodo with their multiple contributors are just writing way too much these days. They go on and on and on. I think there should be some way of filtering out posts, maybe by tag, say choose on bloglines not to have any posts that are talking about microsoft in your feed. A rating system might be an idea as well, although that would be very difficult to implement, it could involve a 5 star rating against each blog post and each time you rate a post it’s sent to some kind of central service such as technorati, and then when you RSS Reader collects todays feeds it can check each post against the ratings at technorati and bin any that are below 3 stars. Well, i dunno, it’s an idea.

I’ve been messing with tags again today, removing the more pointless ones from entries and removing spaces from those with multiple words. Also, strangely it seems that MT-Tags does actually add keywords as a sub-catagory of “tags”, even though when I first installed it I ended up with a million and 1 primary catagories. So i’ve tidied that up now and I feel a lot better for it.

So yeah, I was playing with my tag cloud thing and randomly clicked on one of the technorati links, one that took me to http://www.technorati.com/tag/meadowhall and ooh, all of them but 1 are mine. No wait, I don’t remember ever calling my blog after my real name “Mark Gilbert”, so what’s this. OMG, what are the chances of that, a name-sake also blogging about meadowhall. Wait, even more OMG, he lives in sheffield, and he blogs about similar things as I do. Have I got a split personality? Am I running 2 blogs and neither personalities know of each others? I’m scared. Funnily enough my other blog isn’t half bad, think I’ll subscribe and keep up with what my split personality is getting up to. He must quite like my name, i mean his name, mine his um, the name to have bought the domain. Myself, I hate it, but that’s probably a low self-esteem thing. I wonder if we’ve ever bumped into each other.