18 December 2010 (Saturday) - Party !

Whilst not 100%, I woke feeling surprisingly chipper, bearing in mind the quantity of ale I’d poured down my neck last night. Over breakfast I caught up with friends’ blogs, and after reading one of them, I spent a few minutes playing with a possible upgrade to the blogging software that I use.

Once you’ve entered your text into your blogging software, when you want to illustrate a point you press “update”. The Zemanta software then scans your text and suggests relevant images and links that you might want to include. When you’ve chosen an image, you just click in it and the software inserts the picture automatically into your post. The idea being that this saves you spending time searching the Internet for something appropriate by doing the search for you.

It sounded too good to be true. In my opinion it is too good to be true. In the first instance, like any search engine, as well as finding what you want, it finds a lot of random gibberish too.

And having found you a picture, it doesn’t so much add pictures to your blog, it adds links which bring up pictures from elsewhere on the internet. Links which someone else might later change or delete remotely. Like I once did when I found out that someone else was remotely linking to a picture of mine without asking me first.

I mention Zemanta because some of my fellow bloggers may well find it useful. But for a reactionary Luddite like me, Zemanta is (in my honest opinion) a classic example of what’s wrong with today’s IT. It does the job required of it. But in a laborious “round the houses” way.

And then with brekkie scoffed we walked up the town. We’d decided to walk up the town because we suspected the car parks would be heaving on the last Saturday before Xmas. We opened the front door to find heavy snow and were glad we decided to walk. We met up with Martin for a light (!) breakfast in the Gorge, and then bought the last of the Xmas pressies as the snow got thicker and deeper. After three hours my nerves could take no more shopping and we came home slowly, pausing along the way to gloat at the misfortunes of people who were driving in the snow. Most people were suffering from wheel-spin, one chap had managed to get his bumper wedged over the tow-bar of the car in front, and a double-decker bus had slewed across Bank Street.

But by far the most entertaining to watch was the queue of people who’d come into the top end of Beaver Road. Silly people! For those of my loyal readers who don’t know the geography of the area, there are several shops and businesses that can only be accessed by driving in through the top end of Beaver Road: since the council installed the road barrier there is only one way in and out of this area. As you come in, you drive down a slope. Which is easily done. But the snow and ice was so thick that no car could get back up that slope. I could have started pushing cars, but my back isn’t what it once was, there is a limit as to how many cars one can push, and pointing and laughing is easier. I’ve since heard that the police came to the scene, berated everyone for diving down a slope knowing full well they’d get stuck, and then left, leaving everyone stuck.

We came home and prepared for the evening. Tonight was party night – a dozen of us met up for a pre-Xmas session. The ale aficionados amongst our number were subjected to a taste test. My home-brewed wheat beer and Stout were poured out alongside four other commercially produced beers, and people were invited to randomly sample the ales. I’m quite pleased to report that my brews fared reasonably well in the blind taste tests.

We then scoffed ourselves silly, and did a quiz devised by ‘er indoors ^TM. I came third. I would have done better, if not for the Disney films round. And then we had a visitor. Satan (!) came to dish out pressies, and I think it’s fair to say that everyone was well pleased with what they got. A good evening, which ended too soon. I just hope everyone got home though the snow…

Meanwhile “Her next door” has found a volunteer to wash her pussy. And not just any old volunteer. It’s Santa himself. However Santa’s morals would seem to rather lax, as he’s running round in the nip.

“Nudey Santa” is getty jiggy with a loofah, to the shock, horror and amazement of the assembled throng. Or most of the assembled throng.

The chap with the cravat looks like he wants a go with the loofah too….