Ian

It's long enough ago that I can't quite remember when I first used the web. It was before December 1995 though, because I remember the delight at the launch of the search engine AltaVista with the original altavista.digital.com address. (It was yet another thing I discovered via cix.)

In comparison to directories like Yahoo!, it just gave you the results for the search you wanted to do, and did so quickly. Very often they were what you wanted and it was rare I needed to look past the first page.

Unfortunately, their algorithm was vulnerable to key word stuffing - I remember an old page by Marcus that pointedly went through every possible variation of 'bisexual' and use of it as an adjective more than once in an attempt to improve its ranking.

Unfortunately (again) Compaq, who'd merged with (i.e. bought) Digital in 1998 decided to try and turn it into a 'portal', just like Yahoo! Rather than being somewhere you'd go to first, it'd be somewhere you stayed. Think of the increased ad revenue!

The combination of the two problems meant that the arrival of search engine Google at just this time meant that it became the home page for my browser. At least at the start, PageRank got rid of key word stuffed rubbish appearing at the top of the results and Google just gave you the results you wanted without trying to get you to stay on the site.

Obviously, both those problems have returned with a vengance and it's the AI slop that's the worst for me.

So my default search engine is now Qwant. Not perfect, but I'm a lot happier with it.

While I'm complaining about Google, I still haven't forgiven them for killing Google Reader (part of trying to force everyone to use G+, apparently) and the deliberate hobbling of adblockers in Chrome means I'm even more pleased about having stuck with Firefox than I was before.

In another first and combining the two, I adapted someone else's Firefox extension to add StartPage.com - which was the second place in the 'which search engine now' thoughts - as a search engine to do the same for Qwant and put it on github.

Elektra

I like the way that it makes no concessions to people who are not familiar with the Sophocles version of the story, it's straight into middle of the overall plot. The chorus are particularly wonderful and most of the staging worked for me, even if some of it is rather artificial.

The most obvious example is the way there's a 'THUMPSSS' noise every time someone says 'father' (THUMPSSS) - amusingly, someone stumbled over a line and said 'father' (THUMPSSS) too soon and whoever presses the THUMPSSS button either knew that it was a mistake or didn't catch it. "No" is said at a different pitch to the rest of the line every time too. And what was the airship doing?

It's fine, but the pricing is based on 'Look! Some actor who's been the lead in a Marvel film!' rather than anything else. If you do see it in London, go for the cheap seats.

The Haunted House

David Alnwick is a very good magician. He also likes doing story-based shows as well as his pure magic ones. As this new one is two hours long including the interval, it's unlikely to get to the Edinburgh Fringe, so I used it as an excuse to visit H in Sheffield where it had its premiere.

While I like his story shows because they are good, they're usually not as good.

This one is no exception, even if it does contain one of his best tricks... unfortunately added in slightly unnecessarily. Given the murder mystery of the plot, it would have been nice to see a version of another of his favourites. (Various audience members choose a card from a set where each has one of three things on it, one being relevant to them. In the best version of the trick, they're confessions about something they've done. The 'guessing' of which one they picked is done by pointing at them later and asking them things like "Why did you sleep with your brother's girlfriend??"*)

The big problem is that the solution to the mystery is too 'look at me, I wrote this, isn't it clever' for anyone to get or to think that you should have been able to get.

Again, it's fine but if it was chopped down to an hour, it'd be better.

Comet of 1812

Parts of it are fabulous, like the opening Prologue introducing all of the characters - not having read 1812, I just know Woody Allen's speed-reading of it joke** and the history it's about - and the opening of the second act:

"In 19th Century Russia, we write letters, we write letters. We put down on paper what is happening in our lives."

.. which is so wonderful for re-immersing you into the time, a commentary about musicals (where people sing songs, sing songs, on what is happening in their lives), and provides a fab way to show the position the heroine is in. I was surprised that bit got so few laughs when I saw it.

But other parts feel like the author had read Writing Musicals For Dummies, should that exist: "In anything that's not a comedy, it's very important to have a comedy song featuring an otherwise very minor character one third the way through the second half" etc. Fortunately, those bits don't take away too much and it is a very good show.

I do think it could have used what I discover is part of the wider plot in the book: after everything that's covered in this, one character Natasha is involved with ends up having a leg amputated at the Battle of Borodino while being next to another one. There's a song in that.

A bigger problem that shouldn't affect anyone else seeing it was that I ended up standing behind Little Miss Chatterbox and her friends. The third time she started talking to them during one of the quieter bits of the show, I leaned over and went 'AHEM' just behind her ear. She jumped. It took a while, but when she started for the fourth time, I did it again. This attracted the attention of an usher, so I explained (very quietly in the corner on one side) what was happening, and waved when she did it for the fifth, sixth and seventh times. The eighth time wasn't too bad - it was a very quiet whisper - and had she done that each time I'd have been less cross.

The end result was an upgrade for me from the back of the circle to the stalls during the interval...

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* There's a more family-friendly version too, where what's on the cards is something fluffy but still gets 'guessed' in a less amusing (to the rest of the audience) way.

** "It's about Russia."

I thought '2024' when I was writing the title, but my fingers got it right...

Road Trip Show

This is effectively Stephen Sondheim's last musical (there's another one, but it was never really finished). It had a very troubled gestation - there were three previous versions, different enough to have had different titles, before this version was settled on in 2008 - and partly because of that, there's not been a West End (or Broadway) production.

I liked it. It's certainly much better than his previous one, Passion, which made the mistake of arriving in London at the same time as excellent Donmar Warehouse production of the much better Company and I would rather see it again than A Little Night Music.

It has humour, a gay lead character, and intelligence. The lyrics are great, but unlike ALNM there is no great tune and none of the songs would really work as standalone pieces (not that that has stopped people including one or two in tributes).

It's on at Upstairs at the Gatehouse in Highgate for a couple more weeks.

Hold Onto Your Butts

It's not quite a shot-for-shot version of Jurassic Park as performed by two actors doing physical comedy, and a foley artist, but it's not far off.

It's been about twenty years since I saw the film, but I still recognised it all. If you haven't seen it (or can't remember much) I suggest doing so before going.. and I do recommend going.

It was an Edinburgh Fringe show and suspect there it didn't have the trailers at the start that do part of padding it out to 75 minutes. It's on at the Arcola before going on tour.

I saw it for £4 via Central Tickets - they have it until Wednesday Thursday at the moment.

There's a non-bi community website that I'm responsible for.

For most of its life, it was using WordPress. When its server was changed last year, I took the opportunity to change it to a 'static site generator' - it wasn't updated very often, doesn't want anyone's comments, and serving plain HTML files is much quicker and vastly more secure than something looking at a database to go 'Oooh, what's on this page?' each time.

It's obviously possible to generate the HTML in a plain text editor but it's not 1994 any more and it's very useful to be able to say 'here's the content specific to this page, the rest is as usual / like this / etc'. And that's what an SSG does for you: feed it some text in some simple format and it will gather everything together to make your webpage. Want to change the colour of the menu? Want to change the entire theme? It's likely to be changing a single line in a single file and, on running the SSG again, every page will pick that up. ( Read more... )

Shortly after these became a big 'thing' in the UK, I realised that they're small fan ovens.

We've got a fan oven, so why pay £100 for a small one?

Staying with someone who finds their one very useful was a small nudge.

Using the one in the Edinburgh flat that the niece has was another one: if there's just one of you wanting to eat after coming back after midnight, having the heating element much closer to the food making things quicker is a big plus, even before you consider the lower electricity usage.

So when Lidl said they were going to sell some for £14.99 from the 12th, I went 'Oooh'.

I was expecting to have to be there at opening time (8am) to get one, but - having missed setting the alarm to earlier than its usual 8am - wandering over there around 11am, I still found plenty of them.

In fact, there were three sorts. The 4L one I was after from Daewoo that was £14.99, a smaller (2L?) own brand one for the same price, and a fancier one from Tower for £44.99 that really is a small fan oven.

I checked on Amazon - yes, they really sell the Daewoo for £49.99 there and the reviews were fine* - and bought one.

The next time I went, around a week later, they seemed to have gone, but that ones at £14.99 were still there hours after opening did make me wonder if we have had 'peak air fryer' in that most of the people who want one already have one?

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* At least one of the reviews did make me pause for a second, because it described it as using an unreplaceable halogen lamp for the heat source, with a limited life. But the three year warranty made me go 'that's £5/year' and it turns out that they're completely wrong about that: looking inside reveals it's a standard heating element.

On the train to London, I was reading the Guardian website and saw a five star review for Macbeth starring David Tennant. It gave the dates it was on, but didn't think - as far as I could see - it was important to say at which theatre it was on.

A quick search revealed it was the Donmar Warehouse and the whole run is sold out..

.. except that they release some standing tickets at noon every day. (There's another small release of seats seven days ahead of each performance, but I was too late for that.) My evening was already arranged - see later - so that meant the 2.30pm show.

Setting up an account - it's been years since I've been there and a friend used his membership to get two tickets to everything - and starting to refresh the booking page just before noon revealed that about half a dozen seats were released then. Seventy quid vs fifteen quid for the standing, but they weren't available yet and I might miss out.. I grabbed one, especially as they were middle of the front row vs back of the small balcony.

At the end of the process, just after noon, there was one of the ten to twelve standing tickets left. Going in, there was a very long returns queue outside.

The show is fabulous. Shakespeare's Globe had a very good Macbeth this year, but this is even better. The trick is that you hear it via headphones - each of the actors is mic'd, even though they're very close (even if you're not on the front row - the Donmar Warehouse is a very small theatre) and assorted stereo sound effects are added by an audio engineer.

This means that you can have the actors whisper to themselves or others, and everyone still hears it in a way that's believable that no-one else on stage can. Similarly, assorted effects mean you can do in audio what you'd have to do purely in the imagination or practically. You don't need to have the wryd sisters vanish - they were only heard rather than seen in the first place. Anyone else hoping to win the Olivier for 'best sound design' can give up now: if this doesn't win, I will be utterly astonished.*

The current trend is to rewrite the gatekeeper character's speech when opening the gates of the castle the morning after the murder before. Here, they even lose the joke about alcohol provoking desire but taking away performance, but he does say that everyone has paid seventy quid to listen to a radio play..

.. and on one level that's true because of how important the audio is, but on another it really isn't, because there's lots of physical performance too.

It's on until Feb 10th, and I will be repeatedly refreshing the booking page around noon on at least one date between then and now.

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The evening show was The Time Machine at the Park Theatre very close to Finsbury Park. (That's a new venue to me, having opened in 2013.)

The premise is that one of the trio of actors is HG Wells' great-grandson and the story of The Time Machine wasn't fictional. The biggest laugh came from something an audience member said..

.. as part of the show, it's necessary to have a phone in order to receive a call from the future. The cast borrow someone's phone, and the cast are waiting for the call, when he says "It'd help if the phone weren't switched off.."

.. but it's good stuff. I paid £12.50 per ticket via the Central Tickets site but it was also available via Tkts for around £20, I think.

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* If anyone knows how I can place a bet on it winning, do let me know!

I'm not the only one who remembers the old mechanical credit card machines retailers used, am I?

They'd put your card in it, a three part plasticy paper / carbon paper / paper form over it, and then move a slider over it so that the raised numbers on the card appeared on their top copy and your bottom receipt, thanks to the carbon paper.

There's one expensive purchase, a disk drive for an Atari 800 microcomputer that was around £400 in 1983, that I got for free when the branch of electrics retailer Laskeys I bought from had a robbery and all the day's top copies were stolen along with the rest of the contents of the till. No top copy, no way for them to get the money from the credit card companies.

Of course, the reason I said 'credit card' was that instead of debit cards, we had what I think of as 'cashpoint cards' (thanks to having an account with Lloyds from 1981 to 1991 where they messed something up while I was away at a by-election - other banks had different names for ATMs) most of which doubled up as cheque guarantee cards and you'd use those with your chequebook to pay for stuff in shops etc.

Cheques were.. :)

A text just before 7am this morning told me that the account was ready to use, and an hour later an actual readable email told me.. the same thing, but also had the sort code and account number.

At 2pm a text and an email told me that the 'switch' to Nat West was in progress.

This evening, I log into online banking. It wants three random digits from a four digit pin plus those 'WTF are they thinking??' random characters from the password.

Once I get the text with a one time login code that takes a while to arrive, that works but argh! Too many notes Mozart, erm, too much thinking required Nat West! There is no way I could do this without writing the password down which undoes so much of the supposed security.

The app is somewhat simpler and soon I can log in on that via a fingerprint. (It's also quite keen to set up some facial recognition thing, but given the level of IT competence shown by them so far, I think not.)

The app also makes it easier to get one time login codes for online banking. How do I know that?

Well, I go to look at the previously unreadable email via and.. I'm logged out and have to log back in again. When I do that, I discover that the unreadable email was saying that the account had been created.

So... it'd been created yesterday, but both app and online banking wouldn't let me log in because it wasn't?

OK, let's change the password to something I can actually remember (argh!) click on security and.. logged out.

Log back in and go 'fuck that, I'm just not using online banking after this'. A bit more browsing finds there's an offer for some free (non-Nat West) software. Click on 'get me the code for that' and.. logged out.

It is a truly terrible user experience to the point where I am almost feeling like I should get more than £200 for being subjected to it!

Certainly, although it is possible to make three quid a month - pay in so much (it would go straight out), have a couple of non-tiny direct debits and use the app once a month - that's not going to be enough to keep it and it's going the second there's an alternative.

I saw a magician last night - Andrew McKinley. He remembered me when I saw him outside the venue flyering.

Apparently, I cost him a star in someone's review of last year's show because the reviewer was in the same day I was and I didn't hide that I knew exactly how he'd done all of his obviously (to me) entirely bought magic show. (It must have been at least a week into the Fringe when I saw him last year, but he still had the 'set list' taped to the front of the stage.)

It won't name me, but can anyone find a review of his show last year?

I can't. Even though it was, like this one, on the PBH Free Fringe and they don't get as many reviews as the paid-for Fringe does.

His show this year is a bit better. I know how I'd do the first trick - he's very specific in how he wants three audience members to go through a pad of paper to pick a 'random' page - but it looks good on stage.

The main trick is almost embarrassingly easy to spot though. After six or seven people are invited to write a word they connect with the title of the show, they're asked to fold it up in a very specific way and put it in a transparent box. That box is then handed to an audience member and at that point I notice that 'Oh, there's some paper between the real bottom of the box and a piece of black card or similar that people have been putting their bits of paper on top of within it.

Clearly at some point, he's going to turn over the box and get someone to pick bits of paper that he's written on.

As he takes back the box, he turns around and.. yes, turns over the box. He's making a joke at the time, but I bet he knows that my laughter was me spotting what he was doing.

I am a tough audience for magicians, which is why I appreciate how good some of Marcus's routine is. I know what's happening, but my eyes still don't believe it.

There was, as you may have heard, an incident in Nottingham in the early hours of the morning. Three are dead, and three others are in hospital following being deliberately hit by a van. This occured in at least three streets, over a mile apart.

In the middle of that story, the Nottingham Post story asks "What's the worst junction in Nottingham? Let us know".

Presumably, some automatic link generator - I cannot imagine that a human reporter thought it was appropriate - has seen 'van', 'killed', etc and gone "Oh, I know of another story about traffic deaths in Nottingham, I will link to that to boost its position on Google / get more visitors looking at the ads on it!"

Oops.