chez dafyd

So, when I said that I’d be blogging more frequently, it looks like I lied. Sorry about that. No real excuse – just didn’t have anything to say.

I’ve still not got a proper job, seven months after graduating, which is incredibly frustrating. I’ve been doing odd bits of freelance website work, which keeps me busy, but I don’t think counts as a job, and certainly isn’t what I wanted to be doing. Lots of applications, lots of rejections, lots of not hearing anything at all. Most frustrating? Being told that you’re “over qualified” or would “feel restricted by the role”. Frankly, I don’t care – I just want to work!

Still, light at the end of the tunnel, and all that: there’s a 50-50 chance that I’ll end up in the States, where there’s an even bigger jobs market in which to not find work. I’m also seriously tempted to take a PGCE – teaching seems to tick all the boxes on my “what I want from a job” list, and they pay you to train, so that may be what I’m doing next year if the dates work out. I’ll keep you posted.

In the meantime, a snippet from an email I received from East Midlands Trains. Seems they need to revise the difference between “less” and “fewer”…

I’ve decided to sort my books. I have four bookcases in my room, giving 21 shelves, and another two cases in the attic. Lots of books, most of which are where they are simply because that’s the only place there was room for them.

So now they’re not on the shelves, but rather on the floor. Yay. All are being catalogued and sorted, and will then be reshelved according to an approximation of the Dewey Decimal System. An approximation, because there are various books/types of book that I want/have to put in different places.

Various facts and figures:

• I’ve catalogued 750 books so far, and haven’t started on those in the attic.
• I’ve only found 3 duplicates (as in, exactly identical books). One’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, one is Pears Ultimate Quiz Companion, and one is a 1964 Livres de Poche edition of Zola’s Germinal.
• There are 34 Harry Potter books on my shelves, in five languages, with only the one duplicate.
• Somewhat inevitably, the busiest Dewey numbers are 440 and 840 (French Language and French Literature, respectively).
• The ISBN was invented before the barcode.

The BBC homepage at 2.15 this afternoon…

So, I’ve been told off several times in the past couple of weeks for not having blogged since the beginning of August. I sincerely apologise. It was not my intention to let down my, literally, dozens of readers. Truth be told, I broke my blog publishing system just after that post, and I simply never got round to fixing it. Until now.

So, shiny new site. And a shiny new domain at dafydjon.es – see what I did there? (dafyd.me.uk/dafydjones.co.uk will continue to work, of course – I just have some ideas for the different domains that may come to something eventually.)

I’m quite a fan of my Snapshots pages, which presents all of my photos from Flickr in a new light. Sort of. (Geeky aside: there’s some heavy-duty PHP fu happening with the Flickr API pulling those photos in here – if you’re interested, I’d be happy to explain what’s happening.)

The Footprints page tracks what I’m doing elsewhere on the web, just in case you were bothered.

There will, inevitably, be broken links and files that no longer exist. If you’re looking for something in particular, give me a shout and I’ll hunt it out for you. Oh, comments on blog entries now work properly. Yay.

There are various things that I want to add, features that were on the old site that I’ll be bringing across as well as some super-duper new stuff.

For those who care, this is version 5 of my site. Version 4 was (more or less) alive for just over four years. Definitely time for an update.

So, more blogging to come shortly. Much has happened over the past few months, some of which I will be sharing.

I just caught this BMW advert, narrated by Donald Sutherland, during the Grand Prix:

Pretty advert, sure, but it’s that last card, the tagline, that annoys me. Any GCSE student – let alone a copywriter at a major agency, working on a huge campaign for a massive client – could tell you that you can’t say “less emissions”. It should be “fewer emissions”, as “emissions” is a countable noun. I’d be perfectly happy with “less gunk emitted”. Even “less gas” would be fine. But absolutely not “less emissions”.

That said, Fowler says that

less can be idiomatically used with plural nouns when these denote something closer to an amount than a numerical quantity, as with distances, periods of time, ages, and sums of money: less than 5 miles to go | less than six weeks | children less than three years old | less than £100

In this context, I suppose, “emissions” is denoting the total amount of gunk being emitted, so this could, feasibly, be correct. I’m not convinced, though – it just seems sloppy to me, using ungrammatical English to fit the meter of the tagline.

The Engine Room (a blog about language, not cars) has an interesting discussion about the same thing…

I’ve had my shiny new iPhone 3G for four weeks now, and while I love everything about it, I can’t help but feel that there’s more that it could be doing…

Fortunately, Apple has enabled users of the iPhone to download additional applications for the phone through the App Store, which works very much like the iTunes Music Store, except that instead of downloading music you’re downloading full-blown programmes to provide extra functionality.

Of the dozen-or-so that I’ve downloaded so far, the Facebook app is probably the one I use most, providing (almost) all the functionality of the website in a quick, shiny, touch-optimised interface. The Google app ties in nicely with the GPS functions of the phone to keep search results relevant to where you are (a search for “pizza” finds your nearest takeaway), for example. NetNewsWire does exactly what the Mac application does (or it did, until the latest iPhone firmware update killed it – a fix is in the pipeline).

I love the Apple Remote app, which lets me control iTunes on my Mac/PC from anywhere in the house. Last.fm provides me with a huge number of streaming songs, based on my listening history, with which to supplement my iPod playlists. Shazam does what it has been doing for years, identifying music based on a few seconds of it – perfect for pub quizzes…! The TubeStatus app will doubtless come in useful the next time I’m in London.

Did I mention that all of these apps were free? There are, of course, others that cost, including a few fairly decent games, but I’m happy with what I’ve got. Almost.

I can think of a few things I’d like my iPhone to do for me that it doesn’t at the moment:

• Flight tracking. There’s a Dashboard Widget to do it, so why is there no iPhone app to track planes?
• Trains. A National Rail arrivals/departures app, based on the live National Rail data. Surely this can’t be too complicated?
• TV listings. The Radio Times listings data is perfect for an iPhone app, isn’t it?
• SlingPlayer. Apparently this is coming. It will be awesome.
• BBC Radio. The new iPlayer is very flair, but because it wraps the Now Playing/Listen Again streams in Flash, they don’t work on the iPhone. I’d love for the Beeb to develop a nice touch-friendly interface for Listen Again, so I never have to miss The Archers… They’ve done it (sort of) for the Podcasts.

If any of these already exist in the App Store and I’ve missed them, feel free to point me in their direction…

Also, now that the BBC has its embeddable media player working, any chance of embedding full iPlayer programmes on external sites? Can’t be long…

According to this week’s Doctor Who, the Doctor’s phone number is 07700 900 461.

Alas, “The number you have called has not been recognized”. BBC, you disappoint me. Why feature the number so prominently (full screen, at least three times) if it doesn’t do anything? Would it really have been that difficult to put a recording of David Tennant at the end of the phone?

Somehow, I think next week it may prove important…

Update: Seems the number falls within the range of numbers reserved by Ofcom “for drama purposes”. Pity.

Still can’t work out what happened last night. I have a vague feeling that the idea of them being “one second in the future” will be important, as will the Doctor’s spare hand. And I wager John Simm (The Master) may make a return… after all, we’ve seen everyone else.

Quick update: four exams down, one to go.

That one is in nine days time.

Tonight: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, midnight screening at the Gala, Durham.

More later…

Life on Mars is one of my favourite television series Of All Time Ever. This disturbs me a little… but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. It could be awesome, it could be rubbish. I’ll be watching.