Front offside bearing gone; £130 to replace it. Ouch. I suppose it’s better that they fix it than the wheel seize up halfway down the M56, though. Only the exhaust to get done now and it’s almost ready for a re-test. Huzzah.

“We’ll give you a ring back before half eleven and let you know what’s wrong and how much it’ll cost to fix”

Liars. I’m still waiting for them to call.

jez told me that a few things didn’t work any more now he’s upgraded to the latest version of Mozilla Phoenix Firebird Ultragerbil SpaceMonkey9001 Firefox.

To that end, I’ve just spent the last hour or so getting this page and the stylesheets to validate to CSS 2.0 and XHTML 1.0; it now does so, and therefore any rendering issues are a problem with your browser and not my code. Happy browsing 🙂

We’ve been promised it for ages, and it’s finally turned up. Of course, despite having nearly a week of warning, it’s obviously taken Manchester City Council completely by surprise, as it appears that not a single road in the whole of Greater Manchester has been gritted. Even the A6 through Stockport, one of the busiest A-roads in the country, was covered in the white stuff.

My Dad has the responsibility, amongst other things, for ensuring that the roads in another county in the East of England stay clear; if there’s even the merest hint of snow and ice, the phone doesn’t stop ringing as gritters are despatched left, right and centre. He’s been known to spend Christmas day and New Year’s day in the office, organising salt trucks and gritting lorries, before now. I can only conclude, therefore, that Manchester City Council are a bunch of slack bastards. But then, we knew that already.

I took a roll of B&W photos in the snow as it fell last night. I’ll stick them up once they’re developed.

I meant to post this about a week ago. I’ve had detailed stats running
on home.parm.net for about a month now, and I can now exclusively reveal
some amazing* results.

First of all, congratulations
to Lyle
who narrowly beat
Nayf to become
my top referer for January.

Secondly, congratulations to, um, the Livejournal RSS trawler, which was
the most frequent visitor to my site. The most popular page on the site is
still the main index, although the
RSS feed is only lagging behind by a
hundred or so page views.

The most popular theme by far is the default
journal theme, with the
red coming in with about
half as many hits, and the blue
a few less than that. Maybe I’ll set the default theme to be random and see what
impact that has on the results.

The search terms used to reach here are quite interesting, too – with the
most common being illiterate fools searching for “parm reading”, along with
simply “parm”. “Asshat” comes third, along with “smashing pumpkins”, and
Nayf will be
pleased (or terrified) to discover that “nayf blogs” is the fifth most popular
search term to hit home.parm.net.

Amongst the more amusing search terms are things like “problem putting
petrol in car”, “corporate grovelling pictures”, “coffee excrement csi miami”
and “parm dirty old man”. I can’t help feeling the person searching for
“lovely samantha photo isihac” might be a bit disappointed, though.

There’s also quite a few people searching for things along the lines of
“crazy taxi 3 geforce 4mx fix” – just so you know, there isn’t one. It says it
doesn’t work with a GeForce 4MX on the back of the box. Sorry about that;
blame nVidia for that one.

MS IE turns out to be the most popular web browser, with approximately 55%
of the share. However, this figure is probably skewed by the fact that 19%
of my hits come from the LiveJournal RSS trawler. Firebird is easily the next
most popular with 13% of my hits, followed by Opera at 6%. Mozilla, Galeon,
Netscape, Safari and Konqueror barely register at all.

As you might expect, then, Windows accounts for the lions share of hits,
with Windows XP being the most popular version.
NetBSD surprisingly comes second (maybe LiveJournal runs on NetBSD?)
and Linux third. MacOS trails behind that, and there’s even someone out there
reading this who uses Solaris. You’re a braver man than I.

I’m averaging about 230 hits a day, which translates into 185 actual pages
and individual visits per day. Which isn’t too bad, really. A lot more than
I was expecting, certainly.

I’ve been keeping track of outgoing referrals to other blogs, too, and
it seems I do seem to generate quite a few clickthroughs to other sites –
about 600 this month by people other than me (compared to about 1000 by
me). So it looks like I’m both a frightening stalker type and a
secret internet celebrity. Go me.

Jason pointed me (via UA) to an Early Day Motion filed concerning the battery life of iPods. The fact that someone could be bothered to table a motion on such a thing intruiged me, so I had a browse around the site to find out what other things have been put forward as EDMs – and there’s a veritable goldmine of stupidity, irreleventia and hilarity just waiting to be found.

For example, how about EDM #555, concerning the reintroduction of elephants to Angola? Or #535, concerning the factual basis for Robin Hood. Or maybe you’re in favour of passports for Horses? It seems even the government were upset that Ricky Gervais wasn’t put forward for a BAFTA, but were quite delighted when nearly 3,000 Santas turned out for a charity fun run. Even Michelle from Pop Idol gets a mention.

However, I must say that they might be onto something with this one, though.

Just added a bunch of new pictures to the gallery. These were again taken over Christmas and New Year in Norfolk. It’s my first real attempt to play with slide film and it has to be said, I’m very impressed with the results – the scans don’t really do the originals justice, but they’re still pretty good. I particularly like this one, and the backlit plants from my parent’s garden worked really well, too.

(in a few places, the jpeg compression hasn’t been terribly kind to the thumbnails – in all cases, the un-shrunk version [click on the thumbnail, then click on the enlarged image to get the original image] will be better quality)

Things worthy of cursing today:

• Garages in general, for being unable to do a single piece of work on my car until Monday, necessitating more time off work and more time without a car.
• HMV, for having 3 for £20 on Ninja Tune CDs. I was lucky to escape with only 3 CDs, to be honest. I could easily have spent 60quid or more; Ninja Tune just have so much good stuff. Todays haul included Bonobo – Dial M for Monkey, Kid Koala – Some of my best friends are DJs and (after waaaay too long) Mr Scruff – Keep it Unreal.
• The BBC, for reminding me how good Yes, Minister is.
• Play.com, for making it far too easy to order Yes, Minister DVDs.

In common with a (very) large number of other UK (and international) bloggers, I’m very concerned about the future of the BBC. The importance of the BBC to Britain (and, to some extent, the wider world) cannot be understated – on a cultural level, it has provided some of the best, most interesting and entertaining media output in living memory; but more significantly, its freedom from state control and lack of dependence upon corporate sponsorship means that it can operate as one of the few free and independent voices in today’s media.

The BBC has made mistakes in the past; doubtless, it will make mistakes in the future, too. It should obviously be help accountable for these mistakes, apologise for them, and make the necessary changes to ensure that such mistakes don’t happen again; however, it is important not to punish an entire organisation as huge and diverse as the BBC because of the actions of a few individuals – and, even more, it is utterly vital that the actions of these few do not mean that the independence and freedom of the corporation are compromised.

I’m happy to pay my license fee. Even when there’s nothing on the TV worth watching and when I’m complaining about the decline in the quality of the music on the radio, I will still continue to pay it; because the BBC is about more than just providing entertainment and some music whilst I drive to and from work. It’s about providing a wide base of media and information for the public, free from corporate and government pressures and interventions. And less than 50p a day is a small price to pay for that.

I said a couple of days ago, I hate my car. Today, I am reminded of why. It’s MOT is due shortly, so I’m doing some repairs I should’ve got done ages ago. So far:

• Two new tyres, balancing and tracking – £70
• New front exhaust section – £50
• New front left indicator cover – somewhere around £50

And then there’s the £35 for the MOT, always assuming it passes the damn thing. I should just give the garage my bank details and tell them to help themselves. I really, really hate my car.