There is a girl sat in my line of vision, and she’s been mining and consuming the contents of her nose since she sat down. Flagrant, shameless and apparently delicious. She must know something I don’t, I’m trying to pluck up the courage to ask for a taste.

People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, but they can sure talk like they might. Dreads on white guys, in some circles, is a pretty big no-no. Therefore, it stands to reason (the justification, I’ll never truly understand) that white, ginger guys should be shot on sight for the offence. I don’t know why this is, but I know it is, so I’m ready for that.

With that pretty hefty disclaimer out of the way, unfortunately, your appearance says a lot about you. Stuff like your hair style, clothes, piercings, tattoos are all things you choose and even if you don’t care what they’re saying, they still speak volumes about the sort of person you are.

Now, take the worst fucking hair style in the world; the faux-hawk. This hair style says you like the thought of being a little alternative, but don’t have the balls to take a razor to your head. Not only is it obvious that you’re just a guy with normal hair, but it’s also obvious that you just combed it up to a point and gelled it into oblivion. This is not committing to an image choice, it’s tentatively suggesting that you might like Biffy Clyro’s new stuff, or you heard the Arctic Monkeys when they were only on myspace. Like it or not, the way you look cements a first impression, and “fuck, that guy looks weird!” is a much more positive response to your existence than “fuck, that guy would be pretty hardcore if he had some balls!”.

If I know you, and you have a faux-hawk, I’ve always hated it about you and wished you had a better hair style. We will never be best friends. That’s almost definitely ok with you, but I’m offended by your lack of spine every time I have to look at you. You might not think I look great, but that’s ok; you’ve got a faux-hawk.

Yes, you.

I was linked to a quote on twitter by someone way higher profile than me, and it appears to have sparked a bit of a debate, so I’ll weigh in.

Honestly, I’m shocked that in 2010 I’m still coming across ‘web designers’ who can’t code their own designs. No excuse.

I 100% wholeheartedly agree with this. How can you possibly design for the web if you don’t understand the limitations of the platform? Sure, you can draw a picture of a website, but will it work? If you’re lucky. Not EVERYTHING you can draw is easy or even sensible to interpret to a website layout, so you’re really limiting yourself or risking a substantial backlash if your design process isn’t influenced by a knowledge of CSS, browser inconsistencies and all of the cool little things web browsers can and can’t do.

I have to work with quite a few people who are “web designers” but don’t know HTML and it’s the most frustrating thing. It’s so clear when you’re working with a design of someone who doesn’t know the platform.

A couple of responses were to do with top chefs not working in their own restaurants or product designers not making the products they design. That has missed the point entirely (which is odd, because the source of one of those comments is incredibly well-respected) – chefs CAN cook, and could do it beautifully if they wanted/needed to. Product designers MUST know about the production process of the product they’re designing – you couldn’t just sit down and design a car or an aeroplane without knowing about production, materials and the thousands, probably millions of things you need to know about the product and production process.

So, from now on, if I work with you in your design capacity and you don’t know HTML or CSS, you’re not a web designer, you’re a website picture drawer.

There must be some reason that Americans are so against social healthcare. There has to be. Can someone give me a reason for it? I feel like I’m missing something fundamental, because it just doesn’t make sense to me.

Imagine this, Americans, if you will. You work every day of your life. It sucks. Instead of paying your HMO payments every month, you pay a smaller amount to a government-mediated healthcare agency. Now, imagine that you’ve been paying this “national insurance” your whole life. You’ve never used it. You’re retired. You live on a state pension and your savings. You’re in a car accident and break your leg. Your government doesn’t try to weasel out of paying up for your treatment. EVERYONE pays for EVERYONE else’s healthcare. When you’re ill enough that you need medical attention, you get treated. You don’t have to spend your time in hospital arguing about the percentage of your treatment that will be covered. You don’t have to sell your house to pay for meds or an operation, because everyone is paying for everyone else’s treatment. Imagine that. A society where everyone is on the same side, all helping each other stay healthy.

And, there we have it, the only plausible reason that the US media would be justified in this outrage – they’re representing a people who don’t want to help their fellow man. It’s either that or the media I have access to represents shareholders in medical insurance, whom I can’t imagine will be doing too well out of the healthcare reform bill.

If you’re American or you know someone who is, I’d love to hear something on this, because I only ever hear that it’s unpopular; never why, and I just don’t understand!

Just so we’re clear, I’m not saying it’s perfect, and there are a lot of people who complain about the NHS, but we complain about waiting times, not dying because we can’t afford to pay for treatment. That’s the kind of math I can do easily.

Of why I married this woman. She’s trying to teach the cat that Sookie and Bill love each other in True Blood. All the cat wants to do is sleep and look at me disapprovingly.

If you’re a fan of anything artistic or licenced and a user of the internet, then you know that licence vendors are in the throes of an everlasting seizure about what to do regarding content and the Internet. At the moment, we’re in lockdown mode. If a video hasn’t been licenced for your country, forget watching it. If Universal doesn’t think your country exists, I hope you don’t like music. Do you think that any self-respecting artist wants to keep their content away from customers? Not on your life. Artists are egotistical individuals, and they feed off credit and profit equally.

Amongst the many positive things you could say about the internet, the fact that it’s made country boundaries borderline irrelevant is probably my favourite. You can communicate directly with someone from anywhere, and where they live doesn’t come into it (unless they live in China). In fact, the only people obsessing over what country you’re in are people who flat-out don’t get it, or are stuck in an age where it actually mattered. Licencers are pretty much top offender on this one. They have a product that doesn’t require any delivery charges, can be consumed pretty much anywhere that has a computer and a phone line and yet it’s still more difficult for me to watch the latest season of Heroes when it first airs than it is for me to buy a teacup from the other side of the world. It ain’t right.

Why is it taking so long for the recording industries of the world to capitalise on the Internet as a distribution platform. Not a week goes by when I don’t hear that some company is in dispute with Apple over performance rights for song demos, or Spotify because they’re broadcasting music that isn’t licenced for a specific country (does that even make sense anymore?!). It seems that they’re happier to chase down and try to punish the few than they would be squeezing money out of the many!

The main reason for this came from the BBC’s commentary of Oinkgate (it’s a pattern, and I’m sticking to it!). I learned something I didn’t know about the site’s “owner” – that he has/had around $300,000 sat in PayPal accounts. The upkeep for a site of that popularity isn’t going to be cheap, so the fact that he was able to accumulate that amount of money and keep the site going is indicative of an ability to profit from this model (as an aside, if the owner of Oink was the scumbag, ripoff merchant he’s being painted as, there wouldn’t be $300,000 sat in PayPal account – it’d be sat on his drive. The fact that he didn’t spend the money indicates to me that he was either undecided on what to do with it, or was rainy-day saving it. Well, it’s raining pretty hard on him right now! If I’d donated any money to Oink, I’d be absolutely fine with it going towards his legal costs!). So, what we have here is a website with a (supposed…) subscription model and 100,000 users max, netting the owner of the site $3 per user profit. If you can’t see where I’m going with this already, you may as well close the window now. All you need on top of that is track previews to see if what you’re downloading is actually worth the money and you’ve got yourself a profiting business.

Now I realise that this sounds almost identical to Spotify, but with one important inclusion for me – the fact that my money got me something quantifiable. Spotify charges a lot of money (an amount that I’d be happy to pay for a good download subscription service, by the way) for what you get, and I think they’d give you more if they weren’t being constantly hounded by record companies to stay within their anachronistic constraints!

In conclusion, recording industries of the world, stop fighting the people you rely on for money. If you’re really about maximising profits, try giving us something that we actually want, for a reasonable price, for a change. You’re never going to stamp out piracy, but when you try to make things harder for the pirates, you’re actually making it harder for the people who legitimately acquire your product (see DRM, region encoding, copy protection, serial numbers, the list goes on…). If you need some help getting something started, I hear Alan Ellis, 26 is pretty good at this sort of thing.

I guess this is the updated version of personal enrichment brought about by lack of TV; my mind has been being stimulated over the last couple of weeks. I’ve basically had an internet embargo going on, due to being busy with family stuff and a general unwillingness to go near my computer during my time off. It’s been refreshing.

Fortunately or unfortunately, however, it’s caused me to look at the way I use and abuse social networks and the repercussions that has on my relationships with people. Taking the most frequently accessed, Twitter and Facebook; there are times when I basically have nothing to say to people in real life because they already know everything that’s going on in my life. They know that I tried and didn’t like Starbucks, they know what song I like at the moment and they know what I’m doing this weekend. With some people, this starts a bit of dialogue that would, otherwise, not be there for lack of social networks, but it’s really the same few people. That’s not to say that I don’t value the digital interactions I have with people, because I really do, but I feel sometimes like it cheapens physical encounters because there’s nothing to talk about any more.

From this, I could go two ways, I suppose. Either stop using social networks in an attempt to try and personalise communication with people (as opposed to spitting in a crowd and seeing who gets wet), or stop seeing people in real life. There’s obviously a happy medium somewhere in there, but I’ve never been good at finding that so I feel like I’ve reached a bit of a fork-in-the-road. What’s more, is I feel like I’ve already made my decision. I’ve not posted to Facebook or Twitter for the last few days and I already feel like I’m having better interactions with people. I don’t have to preface everything I say with “I don’t know if you saw on Twitter, but…”, which is rewarding in itself. And now, here I am having a characteristic, verbose brain dump with lots of words and no real structure.

If I was going to commit Web 2.0 Suicide, I wouldn’t want to do it permanently. I’ve only used these networks to get back in touch with people I haven’t seen for ages, or to continue talking to new people I meet – it would be counter productive. I think I’d try to be more graceful about it; leave a final message on each network with contact details and a desire to talk and hopefully stir up at least one proper conversation. Maybe I’m being non-commital and self-destructive (oxymoron?), but I keep feeling like the less effort you make to keep a relationship going, the less that relationship is worth. Social networks make relationships zero effort and, by extension, zero worth and I’m not satisfied with that.

Subject to major edits/rewrites/hypocrisy/reorders.

I both love and hate this. It’s a great way to get closure after an event, the outcome of which has already gone or is beyond your control. Being the incredibly witty fellow I am, I often miss out on l’espirit d’escalier, but if you’re the sort of person who gets abuse shouted at you from cars, I imagine it’s quite a frequent occurrence!

Returning from a jaunt, a delightful chap in a Chrysler Voyager wound his window down, especially to shout “pull your trousers up, you scruff” at me as he drove past (he didn’t do it as I walked past whilst his car was stationary, by the way. I’m pretty dangerous-looking).

It wasn’t until I was nearly home, having replayed the moment a thousand times already, each with me emerging the intellectual victor (and one time, doing a huge jump onto the roof of his car, punching through, pulling him out and throwing him under a bus. I should write a screenplay), it occurred to me: this contextually appropriate, piquant comeback, better than a million flip-kicks; “wouldn’t that make it harder for you to kiss my ass?!”.

When I tell people about this, you and I will know the true sequence of events, but everyone else will think I’m a quick-witted genius.

Everyone loves puppies (apart from you, Jem) and, as such, people (ok, I) tend to forget just how much work it is owning one. It’s not as simple as “pick up the poo, take him out for walks, get sleepy cuddles”, as people (ok, I) think it should be. You have to learn about them so you can spot when they need these things. You have to have lightning quick reflexes for those nick-of-time moments. You have to shout at those cute little faces. It ain’t right!

The rewards, however, far outweigh the drawbacks. Puppies are amazing. Yeah, they eat your shoes, and they don’t understand the 50th consecutive “NO!”, and they have very little regard for doing their business over the cracks in your nice, clean, wooden floor then kicking it throughout your house, but it’s so rewarding when you get through a whole day and you’re totally in sync.

This is, however, a massive responsibility and investment of time and energy. You have to be totally willing to drop everything you’re doing at any given moment to tend to a puppy. You can’t be sat writing a blog post and just ignore a whining puppy who needs to go out – you have to be up and at it! This goes for ANY time of day. Sleep is deprioritised, as are loved-ones, friends, cameras, code, video games, movies, TV shows and books (it’s a testament to my literacy how low down books are on that list) and there’s nothing you can do about it. This does have its advantages; you’ll get ridiculously good at going from any position to standing, clothed, shoed and alert; you’ll have a feeling of fulfilled responsibility and accomplishment; but, most of all, you’ll be on the way to having a well-rounded, well-behaved, house-trained dog.

Anyway, enough of my indignant, week-old wisdom on raising a puppy. If you’re thinking about it, please seriously think about the implications and the impact it’ll have on your life. Puppies are cute, but they’re so much more than that.

As a reward for wading through the wall of text, so uncharacteristic of this blog, have some pictures of Sudo, in chronological order.

6 weeks, 2 days.

6 weeks, 3 days

7 weeks

7 weeks, 6 days

We want another cat. Amelie is basically petrified of everything, so we figure we can introduce her to our friends’ cats to get her used to it. Tonight, we had our first ever cat party. It was pretty tense at the start, but Monty, Zuma and Amelie were very well-behaved. Zuma was mostly indifferent.

Amelie was behaving quite oddly. She’d run to Monty, squeak, then hiss at him. Monty seemed unperturbed. Amelie appeared to enjoy showing her new friends around when she calmed down a bit.