Just received a spam with this in the body:

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

That’s the so-called “Processing Key” that unlocks the heart of the Bride, enabling her to see herself through the eyes of the King. During this season, the industry would have seen a growth of about 10 per cent slide in net profit for 2008, underscoring why its board has recommended issue of bonus shares in the ratio of 1 equity share for every 2 equity shares held. Further, the company plans to add local channels in an unspecified number of metro DMAs throughout 2007 and 2008, but would not say where.

No comment :)

I’ve been having trouble focussing my eyes for the past week. Turns out I have some kind of macular dystrophy. My right eye has a blurred and displaced area (about the size of my thumbnail at a range of 30cm) which makes bits of text bend and blur when I try to look directly at them. My left eye is fine but seems unwilling to help my right eye out - presumably after years of laziness.

Apparently I’m too young for it to be conventional macular degeneration. I think that’s supposed to be a consolation of some sort. It’s all a bit freaky given that I spend about 80% of my waking time staring at a screen. Can’t do that right now for more than about half an hour without getting a headache.

The good news is that it happened once before about five years ago and either went away or my brain got used to processing the distorted image. This in spite of having been told it was both incurable and degenerative. Of course right now I’m using the eye-power I have reading whatever I can find about the condition.

So I guess I might be a little less always-on than usual. The effect is much less pronounced when I focus near infinity. That’s an excuse to get out more if ever I heard one.

It’s not just me then:

You know the one I mean; when you visit some site that you haven’t been to for a while, long enough that you’ve changed browsers or something expired, and it asks you for your your username and password and you don’t have the vaguest idea, so you guess, and the browser says “Remember this username/password?” I always get a sinking sensation, knowing that my immediate future probably contains email confirmations (which will probably end up in the spambucket) and half-forgotten password (is the answer case-sensitive or not?) hints. I confess to rankly superstitious behavior, telling the browser “No, don’t remember it.” in the hopes that the general orneriness of things will cause me to guess right. I know some Internet Identity gurus, and they say “It’s about so much more than single sign-on”, but dammit, do I ever want single sign-on; and I can’t be the only one.

Link.

I love junk. So I’ve created a Flickr group (Beyond Repair) for pictures of things so far gone they’re not likely to recover.

If you’ve got any pictures that fit the bill (and a Flickr account…) please sign up and add them to the group.

Oh, I see I have to write some more so the image doesn’t overflow the story box. Gotta love CSS eh? I mean, I do like CSS. I just can’t help thinking that if they were designing it from scratch now they’d do a few things differently.

I spent three hours last night converting a fairly simple table based layout to CSS and along the way triggered all sorts of bizarre browser bugs. At one point I had Safari rendering the page non-deterministically: on one refresh it’d render as expected and on the next it’d leave a huge amount of whitespace at the bottom of a fairly innocuous DIV. Ho hum.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting (Holiday Buyers Spurn Tunes As Industry Picture Worsens) that, after a brief recovery, music sales are down some 20% this year compared with the same period last year.

They’re blaming all the usual suspects - high prices, CD burning, competition from other sectors and - of course - ’sharing’. I think there might be another reason. Since I transferred all my old CDs onto my iPod I’ve realised how little of the music I owned I’d actually listened to properly. So I declared a moratorium on music purchases until I’d heard every track I already owned at least once. It just seemed profligate to buy new music until I’d cleared the backlog. I’ve been chugging through them (and some of them are pretty dire) for a couple of months. As a result I have only a thousand or so unheard tracks left now.

So that’s my contribution to the downturn. Of course I’m boycotting Sony BMG so even when I’m back off the CD buying wagon I’ll give them a miss - but apart from that I should be ready to start lobbing my hard earned cash down their greedy little gullets sometime in the new year. Let’s hope they can hold out that long.

Gogopuffs, or should that be Gogopuffs (hello Randal)? And while I’m at it Todmorden Porn.

Have a nice day.

Learn how to identify the value of mailing list contributions by the shapes of the threads here.

Next someone needs to turn it into a heuristic and embed it in a mail client. It’d save me about three hours a day…

I found these just a few hundred yards from where we live. The guy who’s garden they’re in seems to have a real thing about this green and pleasant land: he’s also built a couple of four foot high replicas of Big Ben and a tiny version of an archetypal English village in his garden. More pictures light allowing - it seems to be dark about 23 hours a day round here at the moment.

It’s not like the world really needs another URL shortening site but I had a short domain name handy so…

Introducing lyxus.net - for all your URL shortening needs. As an early adopter you’ll get a really short URL.