Blogmeet – Manchester Blogmeet 5, 8pm onwards, The Font (by Oxford Rd Station), Thursday 13th May.

I’ve prodded my old webcam back into service. It’s rubbish, and I’m not exactly a supermodel, but I’m a sucker for technology, especially if it’s old and rubbish.

• Scaryduck – Not scary, not a duck
• Mad musings of me – not literary, literal, or literate
• Green Fairy – ceci n’est pas un weblog
• custardblog – not yellow or gloopy
• Not you, the other one
• Sevitz.com – not the worst site on the web
• Not a blog

So, what’s that all about, then?

If people drove cars the way most of them use computers, they’d blame the car manufacturer for making it insecure whenever they had their car stolen after they’d left it in a public place with their doors unlocked, windows rolled down and keys in the ignition.

Also, they’d complain that all those gears and knobs and levers and buttons were too complicated to use, and so it’s not their fault that they burnt the engine out because drove all the way up the motorway at 50mph in 1st gear with the headlights on full beam, indicators flashing and foglights on.

And when they wrote the car off after ploughing into the back of a tractor because they hadn’t checked their brakes or tire tread depth since they bought the car, they’d complain that the manufacturers ought to make cars which never need servicing and run forever without any maintenance or upkeep.

And a final thought: if you’re reading this, but don’t know the difference between the World Wide Web and the Internet, then consider that you’re doing the computing equivalent of driving without knowing the difference between a road network and a bus service.

Coming in at number 1 this month is Why don’t I drink American beer”, for which I am the 4th-placed hit. Not bad, considering Molson Canadian Beer, the creators of the ad campaign featuring the aforementioned slogan, aren’t anywhere in the top 20 hits. The ever popular Moose Pics (5th hit), Giant Microbes (nowhere), Labyrinthitis (nowhere) and Parm Reading (1st hit) pad out the remainder of the top five, with The Smashing Pumpkins still riding high behind them, for some reason.

Other search terms of note in April were slim on the ground, sadly, but included Moosefest Windsurf (which can only have been from someone looking for this site, surely?), both Leather Tits and Wonky Tits, capturing and releasing mallard ducks in the uk, the wonderfully descriptive (and, one can’t help think, slightly optimistic) sailor moon porn that does not need anything to enter (you probably don’t want to follow that link at work), and the frankly utterly bizarre Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles Big Tits. In fact, that last one appeared several times, in several variations, so there’s clearly some demand out there for it – Square-Enix, are you listening?.

Oh, and I reckon the person who came here after searching for where can i find a blog website? probably found what they were looking for.

You know, I think there’s a good reason there isn’t a standard templated version of an ordered n-ary tree in C++. It’s unfortunate, then, that the way I found this out was by writing one myself. My head hurts now.

(I’d like to put the code up for download, actually, but I’m not sure if I’m allowed to – it’s possibly quite a useful piece of code for some other people, but as I wrote it at work, my company own it and I’m not sure if you’re allowed to see it)

Last night’s dream involved me opening a briefcase. This briefcase exists in the real world, and hasn’t been opened for about 8 years, for reasons which will shortly be made clear. It lives in “my” room in my parent’s house (as in, it used to be my room when I lived there, and I still sleep there if I’m visiting), and contains various deep dark secrets from my youth, like early teenage diaries and things. The briefcase is locked with a combination lock, and the code to the lock is the phone number of a girl I had a crush on a long, long time ago. Unfortunately for me, and for anyone else hoping to unlock said briefcase and reveal terrible truths about the teenage me, I have no idea what that phone number is. Except – obviously I do remember, somewhere in my deep, dark subconcious, because in my dream last night, I clearly remembered the number, and opened the briefcase. I’m sure it was the right number, but come this morning, I once again had absolutely no idea what it was. And I have my grandparent’s phone number stuck in my head instead. I hate to think what Freud would make of all this.

I am compelled to link to Jag‘s blog, and in particular, his food pages, which contain some particularly excellent recipes for Indian food – I particularly recommend the Channa Masala (try adding a bit of tamarind paste to it for a more sweet and sour style flavour). (thanks to zed via sarah for the link)

Jammin’ this week has Nirvana done in the style of a French jazz cafe, and Eminem as performed by Noel Coward.

Via MSDN blogs, Channel 9 is a set of video interviews with MSFT peoples about all sorts of stuff.

Apparently, in Ohio, you can still be executed even if you’ve been found innocent:

‘even though this new evidence may establish Richey’s innocence, the Ohio and US constitutions nonetheless allow him to be executed because the prosecution did not know [at the time of the trial] that the scientific testimony offered at trial was false and unreliable’.

How to deconstruct almost anything.

People are apparently still throwing money at the monumentally flawed Phantom.

Computers hate it when they’re anthropomorphised, especially when it’s to the extent that people are willing to queue for their “favourite” in a public cluster.

As of approximately 6:05pm today, my car has travelled over 6299212598.4 inches – or 44.38μlight fortnights – since its life began.

So, hurrah for my car.