bobtfish

anti_girl and I will be LIVE on Stroud FM tonight from 8pm-10pm - Drop us an email on showwithnoname@live.co.uk and join in with the the craziness!!

I should probably update this at some point.


It can wait. There are more important things going on in my life right now.

But it won't be long, promise.
(I know how you lot wait with baited breath for every single one of my posts) :P

Mathematically Correct Breakfast

An ideal knife could enter on the black line and come out exactly opposite, on the red line. But in practice, it is easier to cut in halfway on both the black line and the red line. The cutting surface is a two-twist Mobius strip; it has two sides, one for each half. After being cut, the two halves can be moved but are still linked together, each passing through the hole of the other. (So when you buy your bagels, pick ones with the biggest holes.)

Previously, previously.

Hey Guys,

Unfortunately with our last release, and its instability, we were forced to roll back releases. Unfortunately in doing so, it would seem that our notification system has been broken somehow. Our engineers are working on this issue as quickly as possible. We hope to have a patch within the next day, so we can deploy our code and fix the notification system at the same time. Please *bear* with us ;)

Currently all notifications are being queued up so they can be processed as soon as the fix is pushed and verified to be working correctly.

Thank you,

Taxi has a sticker on the window reading "partial zero emissions vehicle". I am unfamiliar with this "partial zero".

Indeed.

...
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Previously, previously, previously.

I find myself feeling sad for some reason? I know paying my bills and debts is a good thing but it has left me feeling sad for some reason?

Its all rather odd, i wnated to spend some money on nice presents for the poeple i care about instead i paid things off. :-(

The up side is i have one more payday before christmas so i can still do shoppings YAYS but its not what i would have wanted i would have liked more time.....

And i still have to get my mum a birthday pressy with very little money :-(

oh well nothing i can really do excpet keep working insane hours and hopefully be clear of this nonsense soon, it just that i really enjoy christmas and i enjoy giving my loved ones nice things i know will make them smile.

i am just being silly i know but i wanted this yerar to be exciting and stuffs i know i am just being a big child but Christmas should be exciting and special and i want to it to be

instead i am left feeling oddly pessimistic about life ............

Oh well better get back to answering the phones

This week's Show With No Name:

1st December 2009 part 1

1st December 2009 part 2

...now with added Swannee whistle!

Thanks for listening!

After 6.5 weeks slowly trekking west across Saharan North Africa, the first view of the European mainland came from the front of the FRS fast-ferry about 10min away from the port of Tarifa on the southern Spanish coast. Normally on a clear day, the owner of the last hotel I'd stayed at in Tangier had told me, you could even see the southern Spanish coast from the walls of the Tangier medina, but as it was mid-November and with colder, cloudier weather in the strait, it obscured our destination until halfway across. Stamping back into Spanish soil was fairly straight-forward, and the free connecting coach to Algeciras left fairly quickly afterwards, trundling east along the coastal road.

By leaving Tarifa, I realised I had inadvertently crossed off another milestone, having visited the southernmost point of continental Europe (I'd visited Nordkapp in Norway - the northenmost point - roughly two years previous); I used the short 30min hop across Spanish soil to adjust to the rapidly-spoken Spanish tongue on the local radio station heard on the coach. A few hopeful words to the friendly coach driver in mangled Spanish however won me a free hop across Algeciras, from the carpark outside the port to the Comes-San Sebastian bus station about a kilometre away: I must say I've never hitchhiked in an empty 5-star coach before! As the driver signed out, I was able to switch to a connecting service to La Línea de la Concepción ("La Línea") - the Spanish town along the Gibraltarian border - 10min later at 1530hrs; and was standing outside the Spanish turn-off to the Gibraltar border crossing about an hour later.

( Sun 15th-Mon 16th: Gibraltar )

The flight was uneventful, and before I knew it we were descending into Gatwick Airport. England welcomed me back in the traditional manner: wet, grey, and in absolutely miserable conditions. By the time I'd got stamped back into the country through immigration, retrieved my rucksack and was standing on the railway platform for a train, it was 1700hrs, freezing cold, raining, and the sun had already set, the last badly surprising me; I'd forgotten how much flying away from the direction of the equator could drastically change sunset, being too used to watching set around 1800hrs until now. By the time I got into London 40min later, evening transport peak-hour was in full swing, although I managed to get a seat easily enough swinging a rather sandy rucksack around a District Line tube. Finally, by 1900hrs, I retrieved my housekeys and let myself into my flat for the first time in nearly 7 weeks, gratefully shrugging off my rucksack for the last time in the darkness of my lounge room, before running around reconnecting the power and hot water for the evening. It turned out to be another long day for me: I left for work around 30min later and proceeded to work a full 12hr night-shift, crawling into my own bed for the first time 28hrs later on Tuesday morning after my early morning in Gibraltar the day before.

And that wraps up my trip notes, scattered over the last few days I've been able to find time to consult my written notes or my memory. I really must tell myself not to stretch out my holidays as close as this: working the day I left and the day I arrived back as well was insane, but it did get me an extra two days' worth of holiday. I was away for 45 days in total: my longest-ever holiday....ever: no wonder it took a few days to return to normal. Working nightshift for 4 nights in a cold and wet country after nearly 7 weeks of static hours, plenty of sunlight and another language really threw me out badly, and as a result took me far longer than expected to recover again. I'm usually very assiduous in typing up all my trip-notes as quickly as possible once I'm back before they begin to mnemonically degrade, but this time.....well, let's just say I'll never come back from a 7 week holiday and straight into work literally right after. Ow.


Now, the one question many people have asked me, both during my holiday and not long after returning: which was my favourite country? The two that clearly stand out have got to be Libya and Algeria, for similar reasons: mostly the complete lack of hassle from the locals. It's amazing how constant pressure to buy something can really ruin the atmosphere of a place, and yet my memories of walking through Libyan and Algerian souqs and marketplaces without a single person forcefully suggesting stepping into his shop for "special discount for you!" were probably some of the most influential. It's a shame exactly how mass tourism can spoil a country, and warp its expectations from those set to exploit it as well. I admit, sticking to mainly major cities with an established tourist trade across Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco probably didn't help, but that's what seem to stick in my mind. It wasn't just the financially-tainted attitudes either: Libya and Algeria also had unique drawcards. For Libya, the beautiful Punic-Roman and Graeco-Roman ruins littered across the Libyan coast were simply breath-taking - here Cyrene and Leptis Magna really stood out - and the underground city of Ghadames was utterly fascinating. And for Algeria, its French-influenced capital Algiers was a surprising attraction - I hadn't expected to like it as much as I had - but by far and away the ultimate highlight of the entire trip was the week in the Sahara in the country's far south-eastern corner....and it's for that reason alone I would probably put Algeria just above Libya on my list. Only just, mind, but it was enough. Morocco was lovely - the Fez medina was that country's highlight - and Gibraltar was absurdly enjoyable to be completely honest....but it was the Saharan safari that will stay in my memories for ages to come.

Linguistically, I think I did rather well. Virtually everyone spoke English in Egypt and the major cities of Tunisia and Morocco (and Gibraltar naturally), but not so much in Libya or Algeria. The Arabic I had learned in Egypt didn't serve me as well as I thought, as Egyptian Arabic was different enough to peg me out. Nouri had explained that while most Maghreb Arabs understood Egyptian Arabic, it was too different from Modern Standard Arabic to be of much use anywhere outside Egypt, which was a shame; English sufficed in Libya. My greatest advantage, naturally, was my French, which has improved immeasurably since arriving in Tunisia, and now having absorbed quite a few extra Maghreb words and phrases. Many times, especially across Tunisia and Algeria, listening in on the local dialect yielded a fascinating, and slightly confusing, mix of French and Arabic, different in each country. It wasn't just code-switching between one language and another: I recognised all sorts of French influences in some very Arabic sentences, and vice-versa, a complete melange of the local versions of Arabic and French. It reminded me of my Belgian family speaking Brussels dialect: for me, it's a mind-boggling fusion of Wallonian French and Flemish that I can barely understand, yet I can recognise the influences within it; a similar sort of fascinating linguistic conundrum greeted me here.

As is usual, I had to adjust speaking and thinking in another language after a long period of disuse, which was fine after a short while. What surprised me actually was my ability to switch between French and English, literally between sentences: as I was the sole French speaker of our English-speaking group, I found myself many times as the translator between the locals and the tourists, a position surprisingly I don't tend to find myself in very often. As I usually travel by myself, my mind gets used to speaking in one language and tends to sticks to it: I usually find rapid switching between two different languages difficult - and this was true to begin with once in Tunisia - but by the time I was translating English jokes into French across a Tuareg campfire I'd adjusted to switching multiple times in virtually the same breath. And also, as previously mentioned, my ability to speak on a multitude of difficult subjects with Moroccan locals in a language that wasn't native to me more or less successfully showed just how much my French appears to have matured.

Yes, well, I'm sure all that isn't too important to you readers, but it's my journal, and I found it all quite fascinating. :P

All in all, a truly amazing 7 weeks away. I've made my first impressive visit to the African continent, and seen 6 countries of cultures, language, history, religion, food and travel enough for many years to come: the Pyramids and the Sphinx, war cemeteries, exquisite ruins, an underground city, the site of Carthage, the medinas of Tunis and Fez, the Kasbah of Algiers, the truly memorable week in the Sahara, and the Rock of Gibraltar, just to name a few.

Photos, in the usual place, may take a little longer to put up however, due to sheer number alone. Keep an eye out after the New Year, once I'm able to sort, prune, translate, and eventually code them all in.

Some googling and testing revealed the following undocumented XML-RPC methods, which expose a number of nice functions from the client side.

All are in the LJ.XMLRPC namespace of course:

getfriendspage
sendmessage
setmessageread
getinbox
addcomments

These were gleaned from: code.livejournal.org/trac/livejournal/browser/trunk/cgi-bin/ljprotocol.pl

It seems only paid users can call addcomments.
This codebase is over a year old, it looks like they aren't using that repository. I believe there may be other methods. The iPhone app developercosysoftware_en some upcoming functionalities in his app that don't seem available from these methods. He claims to have gotten LJ to extend the XML-RPC interface, but won't disclose what these new functions might be.

The LJ support is useless. Is there another way to contact LJ devs? Anyone with XML-RPC client should implore LJ to update their documentation.

New site up and running and I'm to the point of editing the main index page. On the page it says to reference this


You'll want to customize this page. Read the instructions at http://www.livejournal.com/doc/server/lj.customize.index.html for help.


to update the page. The only thing I see that might relate in there is the section about updating a language file.

Should I update it the normal way by creating it in my CVS local directory and syncing it over, or is there a different method for site pages like the main index?