January 2007

Mole news

by Suw on January 30, 2007

Well, it turned out that my mole wasn't precisely nothing, but it wasn't particularly anything either. It showed 'moderate cytological and architectural atypia', and was a 'dysplastic compound nevus', which all appears to mean that whilst it certainly wasn't a melanoma, given my family history of melanoma, it might one day have considered turning into one.
The long and the short of it is that I have to go back next week and have another 2 – 5mm removed from where the mole was, just to make sure nothing dodgy's been left behind. It's a shame – the wound had healed really nicely. But I don't mind. Better safe than sorry.

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On Google Maps, literally

by Suw on January 30, 2007

What more fun could one have on a hot*, sunny, Sebastopol day than making giant space invaders to be photographed by the Google photographers as they fly over the campus? Not much, I'd say.
Last year I was lucky enough to be invited to FooCamp and, whilst we were there, word had it that Google were going to be taking photos of the campus for their maps. So Tom Coates, Cal Henderson, Simon Willison, Paul Hammond, Chris Heathcote, Matt Biddulph and I put together a set of Space Invaders, oriented to the north (we hope) so that when it is displayed in Google Maps it'll look like the Space Invaders are actually playing in your browser.
I spent weeks last year, after I got back from FooCamp, randomly checking Google Maps to see if they had uploaded the images from their flyby, but no, nothing. Eventually, I gave up, assuming they'd been unable to capture a good enough image. But lo! News from Tom is that they have indeed got some cool images, and that they will be going live on Google Maps, Google Earth, etc., some time during February! How cool is that?

See those blobs? One of those blobs is me! It's hard to tell which one, exactly, but I'm definitely there.
And if you look at the the full-sized image, and zoom in on the O'Reilly lawn, you'll see the volleyball net as a thin line top to bottom. At the top right of that line you'll see a grey two-man** tent, with a beige one to its right and a blue one below that. That's my tent! Well, strictly speaking, it's Kev's tent, but hell, it's still exciting to think that the place where I froze my ass off on the first night (and was saved from freezing my ass of on the second night by the kindness of Stewart Butterfield who lent me a spare sleeping bag) should end up on Google Maps.
I'm so excited!
* Hot, when the sun was out and you weren't in the shade, anyways.
** If they are very slender and very friendly men.

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Engagement 2.0*

by Suw on January 26, 2007

Yesterday was Dydd Santes Dwynwen, or St Dwynwen's Day, which is the Welsh equivalent of Valentine's Day. Both Kevin and I enjoy appropriating whichever holidays, festivals and notable dates we fancy from other cultures – he celebrates Cinco de Mayo, the “Mexican holiday where they celebrate beating the stuffing out of the French”, as he puts it.
So last night we went out to our favourite restaurant, Andrew Edmunds in Soho, for dinner, followed by the American Bar at the Savoy, to celebrate Dydd Santes Dwynwen. (We sat on the left there, with a lovely view of the Thames that you can't see in this photo.)
Img Savoyambarwc2 160-1
It was just a perfect night out – wonderful food at Andrew Edmunds, as always, and just sublime Pol Roger champagne at the American Bar – made even more perfect when Kevin asked the pianist at the Savoy to play a song for us. The pianist suggested Frank Sinatra's The Way You Look Tonight, and whilst he was playing, Kevin drew a box from his coat pocket, opened it up, and asked me to marry him.
In the box was a diamond, and two beautiful amber-coloured citrine to go either side of it. The ring itself is being made by a friend of ours, Nigel, and it won't be ready for a while yet, but to see the stones that will go in it was just wonderful. I have to admit, even though Kevin and I had discussed the ring, and even though I had an inkling that he might ask on Dydd Santes Dwynwen, being the gorgeous old romantic that he is, I still teared up when he asked.
My engagement ring stones
It was just amazing. And of course I said yes. And the staff in the bar came over the congratulate us, the pianist announced it to the other patrons, and all round it was just lovely. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry, and ended up doing a bit of both.
Of course, as soon as we got home we did what any newly engaged coupled would do. We announced it on Twitter! Lots of lovely messages from our friends via email, text, IM, IRC and Twitter, and this morning, blog posts from friends JR, Dan and Euan. Can't quite believe that they managed to blog it before we did! But I'm rectifying it now, and Kevin's already posted his account on his blog.
I honestly can't describe how happy I am. Kevin has made my life wonderful – he's so supportive, tender, caring and adorable. Every day when he goes to work I miss him, and every night I look forward to him coming home. We've both had some tough times over the 15 months since we met, but we've helped each other through and neither of us can imagine life without the other. I never really knew what it was like to be really, properly in love, but it's this: I am grateful for every moment I am blessed to be with him, and I am filled with nothing but joy and excitement for the future.
So, off now to write a few emails, make a few phone calls, and let a few more people know. Oh, and I suppose I had better set up a wiki for organising the wedding. I guess this is Engagement 2.0!
* It's just been pointed out to me that the phrase 'Engagement 2.0' sounds as if I've been engaged before, which I haven't. Instead, think more 'Web 2.0'. As Kev and I just decided in IM, Engagement 2.0 is like Engagement 1.0 but with client-side caching, lots of rounded corners and an aqua-effect fill. No, I don't know what that means either, but I find it amusing.

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Tended to by a celebrity

by Suw on January 23, 2007

My many thanks to Tom Reynolds, our celebrity EMT, for taking out my stitches yesterday in Cafe Nero. He did an excellent job, although it was rather fiddly as the stitches were pulled rather tight. See how neat my scar is though!
My scar

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The podcast with no name, part 1

by Suw on January 23, 2007

Stephanie Booth and I decided ages ago to do a podcast, just to talk about this, that and the other. It's taken us a while to get our act together, but eventually, last week, we turned on Skype and Call Recorder and we just, well, had a chat.
This is roughly what we talked about:

  • San Francisco, web geek paradise
  • City sizes (see this London-SF superimposition map)
  • Segways
  • The cat/geek Venn diagram (Twitter error message)
  • I really want a Wii
  • IRC screen names
  • The difficulties of pronouncing S-u-w
  • When geeks name children: A unique identifier or anonymity?
  • Stalkers and geoinformation
  • Perceptions of security
  • Giving out your phone number and address, and personal boundaries
  • Airport security (background)
  • Risk and expectations of risk
  • Naming our podcast… something about blondes, apparently
  • Clueless marketeering from the Fabric nightclub in London
  • The repercussions of having a blog that people think is influential (even if you don't think it is)

Download the 16mb MP3. Read Steph's blog post about it.
So there we are. Not the slickest podcast around, but then, I don't like slick. What's the point of making a podcast sound like a radio show? We might look for some sort of intro/outro music but I've no interest in trying to be too polished.
We'll probably do a podcast every fortnight or so. What we'll talk about I don't know – I rather like keeping it flexible, so we can talk about whatever comes to mind without thinking 'Oh, that's not on-topic!'. Whether I'll continue to post them here, or on Strange Attractor also remains to be seen. I currently can't post anything to Corante anyway, because they are having significant problems with their installation of Movable Type (which should be renamed Immovable Shite, frankly. Six Apart should be ashamed of themselves.).
Anyway, enjoy! And let us know what you think.

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If you're not reading Vince

by Suw on January 18, 2007

You should be.
How can you resist anyone who can weave this so effortlessly into conversation:

Yes, that’s a good idea in theory, but I can’t possibly do it because of these monkeys that have just flown up my ass. Seriously, look, my last poop was 90% capuchin.

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My mole hole

by Suw on January 11, 2007

Alas, poor Moley, I knew him Horatio.
The offending mole
I had a dodgy-looking mole removed from my upper left arm this morning. Luckily my doctor is also a minor ops surgeon so there was no need to go to hospital – the doctors' surgery is all shiny and new and purpose built and comes with a variety of treatment rooms, one of which I frequented this morning.
It's been a long time since anyone's come near me with a scalpel, but my doctor was very good indeed – the worst part was having the local anaesthetic, but even that wasn't anywhere near the level of the kind of thumping migraine pain that afflicted me on Christmas Day. Once the site's anaesthetised, there's just that strange tugging as he cuts the mole out and then carefully sews up the resulting hole.
My mole hole
We chatted throughout the whole procedure, and all in all it was a hassle-free and non-stressing experience. There was even laughter. It's nice to be be able to say it, but the level of care was extremely high, and my level of faith in my doctor even higher. When the NHS gets such a pounding every day in the press about this or that misadventure, it's stuff like this that reminds you that the media just love their scare stories and that the majority of people working in the NHS, like my doctor, are doing their best and their best is, in fact, very good indeed.
The offending mole will be sent off for analysis, and whilst we both expect it to come back as entirely normal, it's better to be safe than sorry. Being fair, and there being melanoma in the family, any abnormal-looking mole is best removed, just in case.
Kev took pics of the wee beastie (in situ), which I'll post here when they are on Flickr. Meantime, I'm left with a slightly achy arm that I'm going to have to keep dry for a few days, and three stitches that I am hoping Mr Reynolds will be able to remove for me in due course.

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WordPress and importing/exporting content Part 2

by Suw on January 9, 2007

Last month I was struggling with trying to import all my old posts from Blogware into a local WordPress install. Well, I finally managed to get it sorted, sort of.
The Blogware import script, written by Shayne Sweeney, that I had found via Chris Pirillo didn't seem to work. Every time I tried to use it, it just… did nothing. Kevin Marks had a look at it and my Blogware XML file, and suggested that I try importing it in smaller chunks. The Blogware XML indicates individual blog posts with <item></item> tags, so as long as you don't split the file inside an <item> tag you're ok. I ended up splitting my archive into nine smaller files and the importer worked fine.
Unfortunately, Blogware's export script makes no differentiation between a line break and a paragraph break, so posts are run together without paragraph breaks. Every one will have to be edited by hand to add the paragraph breaks in.
I have no idea why Blogware have done this. In fact, it's an ongoing bugbear of mine that developers the world over seem to have some weird bias against the paragraph break, even though it's important. And no, a paragraph break is not simply two line breaks one after the other – it is a different beast and it should be respected. It's in situations like this where you see why – by not respecting my paragraph breaks you turn my blog posts into one great big ugly blob of text. Cheers.
The next challenge was importing stuff from Blog-City. Kevin Marks took Shayne's original Blogware import script and tweaked it a bit, giving us this Blog-City import script. There are no categories in Blog-City posts, so they all get dumped in a 'Blogcity' category, which is fine for my purposes.
The first problem was that Blog-City had created two archives of photograph upload data, so I had to delete 150 pointless 'posts'. We then discovered that Blog-City had two dates in its XML archive:
<dateopened>2004-04-04T00:00+00:00</dateopened>
<dateupdated>2004-04-04T15:30+00:00</dateupdated>
Kevin assumed that the 'date updated' date was the date to take for determining when a post was posted, as it has a time stamp, but unfortunately it has absolutely no relevance to anything. I suspect it may have been the date stamp for when the post was exported. The date opened date, however, is the one you want. But it has no time stamp. It seems that I pubished all my blog posts spot on midnight. Wow. How OC is that?
This means that on days when I posted more than once, I have no way of telling which post came first (and I can't go back and check because the lovely people at Blog-City deleted my blog). For my purposes, however, this is not a problem, but it is rather shoddy work if you ask me.
Initially, the import script was ignoring the differences between line breaks and paragraph breaks too, but whereas we could find no cure for this in Blogware's export, Kevin was able to cure it for Blog-City, so I have my paragraphs. However, some of the encoding's screwed, so Kevin had to make a special case for apostrophes in order to turn them from a mush into proper apostrophes. Some of the encoding remains screwed, but I'll have to fix that by hand.
So now I do have all my posts in one database. Any new comments will be missing, but in general I have everything up to 6 December 2006. That's enough for me for now.
My next decision is, do I stay with Blogware or leave? But that's a topic for a different post.

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Welcome to the Blogosphere!

by Suw on January 8, 2007

I'm happy to say that my T'Other has finally got himself his own blog. It's fantastic having him on Strange Attractor, of course, but that's our work blog and frankly we talk about work far too much already. So Kev's started himself a WordPress blog: A little Jack with that? There, he says he's going to talk about 'wine, wilderness backpacking, food, writing, books, travel, music', but whatever he writes, I know it's going to be interesting.
So head on over, and read his first post on the bottle of Taylor’s Quinta de Terra Feita Port 1996 that we drank on New Year's Day with friends. It was, I can confirm, a gorgeous port, really lovely Рboth the perfect aperitif for the beginning of a new year, and the perfect topic for an inaugural blog post.

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