No Middle Name

43 degrees Celsius. That's not a temperature, that's a washing instruction. A preheat-the-oven-to setting. It's not what I was expecting for New Year's Eve. Nobody warned us that Melbourne got this hot. I've owned kettles that never got this hot. It was slightly cooler indoors (say around 37 degrees), but every time you went outdoors it was like stepping into an oven. Complete with that scorching wind that dries out your eyes. Everything was hot to the touch - chairs, door handles, even the sofa. I've think I've lost my own body weight in sweat today. I've compensated by eating lots. I'd hate to waste away. technorati tags: hot , melbourne , weather

Blogpatrol seems to have forgotten who I am, so I'm deleting the link. No more counter, no referrer information. Not that anyone ever visits this page (apart from me).

Well, I've just found my first flock problem. You can't type in html links directly. You have to use the link button or drag the links in. Just typing href... results in broken links. Grr. technorati tags: flock , blogging , technology

On Friday I managed to find Comics R Us in Melbourne. This was no mean feat. Armed only with an address (Level 1, 220 Bourke St) and a cursory knowledge of the CBD's grid system, I went hunting. I'd attempted this a couple of times before, with no success. The address was gleaned from the Yellow Pages , which furnished me with a map that got me into the right block. Every other time I'd sensibly been on the right side of the road for the even numbers, expecting 220 to be one of those large malls with lots of little shops inside. Every other time, I'd walked right past it. This time, I was on the wrong side of the road. To aid visibility, Comics R Us has their windows plastered with superhero pictures. You can only see this window if you're on the wrong side of the road. The door to 220 Bourke St is very small, and I wouldn't have seen it at all if I hadn't spotted a man dressed in black and looking a bit greasy going in. It also looks as though the door will...

So, I'm trying out Flock . Only about 6 months after the rest of the Intarweb, of course. I'd hate to be accused of jumping on a bandwagon. So far, it seems ok - I'm writing this post in it, for instance. If it helps me to keep this blog updated more often, then that's a good thing. technorati tags: flock , technology

TimTam Originally uploaded by No Middle Name . This is what makes Australia great. The things that matter, they do really well. So you have coffee shops that sell hot meat pies for you to enjoy with your skinny latte (so you can feel a bit more butch). They sell dim sim in the fish and chip shops. They worry about biodiversity and saving water, while driving cars the size of small buses. The pinnacle of Australia's greatness, is the Tim Tam. This small, chocolate-covered biscuit is truly a work of inspired genius. It is, to use Scary's phrase, this: fucking aces. Some may point out the similarities between a TimTam and the UK's Penguin biscuit, but they clearly have never tasted a TimTam. It takes the penguin round the back and gives it a bloody good hiding. The chocolatey goodness of the TimTam is fantastic straight out of the packet, but I can hear some of you saying "So what? I can get chocolate biscuits anywhere, anytime. I want something different, somet...

The ED SF Project , a Sci Fiction appreciation site (following on from the closure of sci fiction ).

We bought The Muppet Show - Season 1 on DVD yesterday. I wasn't sure if the kids were going to like it, and the jury is still out - at the moment the Muppets are trading on the success of Mna Mna (doo doo de-doo-doo) in the first episode and will need to pull something out of the bag soon of it's back to Robots and Shark Tale for us. DVDs are much cheaper over here in the colonies. The Muppets cost us $35, which is about £16, and they're selling it for £25 on Amazon (which is usually one of the cheapest places to get DVDs in the UK). Bravo, our Australian cousins.

Boo hiss! The best online SF publishing site, SCI FICTION is closing at the end of the year. Grr. Now how am I to achieve international acclaim? My plan was this: Write great story (possibly to include zombies/aliens/cats). Get it published on scifiction Collect awards Put feet up as money comes rolling in by the truckload I'm currently stuck on the first part.

You'd think that being unemployed would mean I'd be updating this blog every half hour, what with all that time on my hands. Unfortunately, being unemployed means that the only people I meet are my family, and the only things I do are apply for jobs, buy groceries and stare vacantly out through the window. Not exactly exciting blog fodder. This morning, however, I'm awake at 6:30 while the rest of the house snores. My back decided to wake me up about two hours ago, by being just painful enough to stop me from sleeping, but not ohmygodsomeonehasreplacedmyspinewithfire painful - you know, the glamorous kind of pain that leaves you looking pale and drawn in a hospital bed while pretty young nurses mop your brow, perhaps occasionally giving you a bed-bath. Or therapeutic oral sex. I've watched enough House to know that I've probably contracted Von Trapp's Disease, and only have 24 hours before all my organs liquefy and dribble out of my ears. First, they'll trea...

Now that we've been here for 5 weeks, I feel qualified to dispense my hard-earned wisdom. Firstly, visa choice. If you're coming to Australia, don't bother with a temporary visa - go for permanent residency, if you can, it makes things a lot easier. We're here on a Temporary Business Subclass 457 visa, sponsored by my wife's hospital. No problem, we thought, we can apply for residency once we're sure we like it. The problems are: you can't get finance for anything if you're on a temporary visa, so make sure you've got a shitload of cash available to you; you can't buy a home, you'll have to rent (well - you can buy a home but first you have to apply for permission with the Foreign Investment Bureau); you're unlikely to find someone who will give you a permanent job, since they can't be sure you're going to be around in 12 months' time (this is a problem for me, not my wife - who can't change jobs for 12 months anyway); yo...

Do you know what is the scariest thing about moving to another country? Everything. It's all new, and it's all scary. We've left behind family, friends, jobs, decent chocolate, and marmite. If you let yourself think about it for longer than a few seconds, you'd crap yourself. So, you don't. The people that do think it through carefully and thoroughly are the ones who say "oh, we thought about doing that for years, but we never went through with it". The vast majority of people who stay where they are, and are quite happy about it. We, however, are the sort that would always wonder "what if...", eventually becoming bitter and twisted, bringing it up in arguments 30 years later. "Yeah, well, little Johnny wouldn't even have been in the stolen car with the brazilian midget prostitutes, the cocaine-snorting donkey and the nuns if we'd moved to Australia, like I wanted to!" So, we went for it. Crossed our fingers, closed our eyes and...

En route to Australia. No blogging for a while.

Latigo Flint: Fuckin' Grrrr.

[Note to American readers who may have strayed here by accident: you'd call it a car trunk sale. Which probably doesn't make much more sense either.] This weekend my wife and I piled up our car with several years' worth of accumulated junk, and attended our first car boot sale. We're moving to Australia soon, so we're trying to get rid of all our household detritus, rather than pay lots of money to have it shipped halfway around the world. For those that don't know what a car boot sale is, and have clearly never watched a single daytime television programme in the UK, let me explain. To hold a car boot sale you will require the following: one field/car park (parking lot), several cars, lots of tat. The people with the junk and the cars pay the owner of the field some money for the priviledge of having lots of people stare at their belongings with disdain. Some of these people may then decide to give you some money for these items. It's like ebay, you display...

[inspired by the first line of the first song I listened to when I got to work this morning - who knows? this might be the start of a meme. Get on board now, before it gets popular and you have to start sneering.] "Come on, take my hand. I want to contact the living." I took Randall's offered hand across the table, and placed my other hand on the tv screen. It was hard to tell which was colder, deader. Randall had closed his eyes and was muttering under his breath. I'd never managed to work out what he said during these little anti-seances, but it seemed to help him. He'd drummed into me the importance of doing something, anything, of having a purpose. Not that we had ever managed to contact the living. We saw them hidden in the static on the tv sometimes, or in the reflections in windows. I could hear them in the other rooms of the house, but they would always be gone when I'd burst in, my "a-ha! caught you!" echoing off the walls. Randall said we h...

another test Originally uploaded by No Middle Name . I'll add some more words to break the line. One more test of this posting to flickr thing. I wonder if this will work.

Test post Originally uploaded by No Middle Name . I'm trying to get this thing to post automatically to my blog, via href="http://www.flickr.com">flickr . I wonder what will happen.

I'm just messing about with Technorati . I don't really know why. Move along, nothing to see here.

BBC NEWS | World | Europe | First gay marriage held in Spain : hooray for Spain! I've just checked and my own marriage doesn't appear to be any weaker or mean less to me. Phew!

I wasn't going to blog anything about the London bombings. There's plenty of other sites out there, with a huge range of takes on the subject. There's no need to add mine, especially seeing as it's only me that's going to read it. However, this news story caught my eye. Can you imagine how you'd feel if your first novel was about to come out, a film company had taken an option on it, and a big ad campaign was just about to launch it into the big time? Pretty fucking good, eh? And then the idea of your novel happens in reality. Then it's not such a good idea after all. You just know that one of the first thoughts of the author, while watching these horrible events unfold on TV, was "Bollocks. That's my novel flushed down the toilet." And then, the thought straight after that would be "Oh fuck, people are dying and I'm worried about my fucking book, I'm such a shit". When everything seems to be going well, that's wh...

Language Is A Virus - some interesting writing toys here. [via Metafilter ]

Kung Fu Monkey: 4th Generation Media John Rogers has an interesting post about guerrilla TV, and how Big Media can make some money if they just give up trying to keep things the same as they've always been.

You know that episode of the Flintstones where the doctor tells Fred that if he falls asleep he'll die? Yes, you do. Ok, just pretend you do for now. Anyway, Fred props his red eyes open with matchsticks, his increasingly heavy eyelids eventually snapping them. Well, that's how I feel at the moment. My daughter has been ill for this last week. The poor little thing has a chest infection, which means she's been coughing a lot. Especially during the night. She's also passed it on to my wife, who has also spent much of the week coughing in the small hours. I've been getting a maximum of about 3 hours continuous sleep a night. Yawn. I haven't been this tired and grumpy since the little 'un was born, and we were getting up every couple of hours to feed her. In the meantime, Blogger has added a thing to upload photos. Which is nice, and if they'd had it a few months ago I'd never have signed up to flickr . I'm glad I did though, I'm really getting ...

The BBC's excellent Cult TV site is to close on July 15 . Damn shame, get it while it's still there. [via Whedonesque ]

Alaska state flower Originally uploaded by GalleyWench . Between my office and the nearest supermarket, there is nothing. Just busy roads, lined with pothole-filled pavements and grass verges peppered with rubbish thrown from passing cars. Until today. Thanks to the weekend's sunshine the road to lunch is now splashed liberally with colour. Wild flowers have moved in. Marguerites are hiding the rubbish. Forget-me-nots are distracting people from the stubbly bald patches on the verges. Wild rose bushes leap out and point to the sky, yelling "Look, over there!" as you walk past the now-unnoticed steel crash barriers. The trip to Tesco's has been transformed from a trudge to a pleasant stroll. As usual, I saw lots of things to photograph but didn't have my camera, so a quick tag search of flickr returned the beautiful flowers you see here. I used to know the names of very nearly all the flowers I saw today. When I was little, maybe 6 or 7, I used to have a...

The wedding poster was a success. It didn't arrive in time for the weekend, my wife was presented with an empty frame and was duly confused. It turned up yesterday, and the missus was pleased, but it was too big for the frame we'd bought. So she nipped to the shops and now it's being framed. Which means I won't get to see it for another week or so. The only drawback is that now I've set a high standard for wedding anniversary gifts. This one was made by me, was very personal and she liked it a lot. If I'd been thinking long-term I should have started off small - like the books from amazon. Sure, she'd have been disappointed, but not as disappointed as she'll be next year when she gets crappy books from Amazon.

eclectech : the very model of a modern labour minister : a tribute to charles clarke and his id cards . Very funny.

The Dress , winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction short story competition. Really good, I'd read it if I were you. Go on. There's nothing anywhere near as good here, and probably never will be. [via bookslut ].

Wedding Poster Originally uploaded by No Middle Name . It's our first wedding anniversary this weekend, and I finally came up with a gift idea yesterday. The first year's gift is supposed to be paper, and at first I thought of a book from Amazon. But that didn't really seem right, even to a man of limited romantic sensibilities like me. Then I remembered reading about this guy making a poster out of pictures from iPhoto. A quick google later and I was convinced. It's a nice way of making sure the wedding pictures don't stay in an album on a shelf, or tucked away on the computer never to be viewed. The only problem was getting it printed. There are a couple of photo shops nearby that will print photos from CDs or memory sticks, but the largest they do is 15" by 10". I wanted to go for the big one: 30" by 20". More googling came up with photobox who seem quite good, and will do the big sizes. They'll even print it out on canvas stret...

I spent the weekend up to my nuts in XML-RPC shenanigans. It took me about 4 hours to add a web service interface to the dodgy content management system I knocked up for my wife to use on our family website. The php xml-rpc library is great, and made the whole thing really straightforward. Then I knocked up an applescript to allow us to upload an album of photos from iPhoto in one go. Previously we'd been uploading them one-by-one via a web page. Tedious. All was going well, until I got to the part where I needed to attach the image data to the xml-rpc request. In the php test client I'd written it was easy; read in the image as a string, and the php library would convert it to base64 and tag it as such in the xml. Bingo, Bob's yer uncle. Applescript's xml-rpc support is provided through the Apple Event Manager which performs the translation between applescript data types and the xml equivalent. It should convert binary data into base64, same as the php library. I coul...

I wish I could be as grumpy as Harlan Ellison : What annoys me is that Spielberg is such an egomaniac these days that it has to be "Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds". No, you puss-bag. It's "H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds", and it wouldn't kill you to put his f--king name on it. I have this image of Harlan Ellison zooming around on a wave of burning bile, like Iceman or Frozone but with flames, looking for fights instead of helping people. He's my hero. Kicking ass and taking names. No, just kicking ass and slapping H.G. Wells' name on things. I have no idea what a puss-bag is, but I'm going to make a point of calling somebody it today.

I just got an email from Blogger HQ informing me that I was the only person in the world not to have posted a review of Episode III, and that if I do not rectify the situation as soon as possible I will be forcibly evicted from the blogosphere. It was good. Not as good as the original three, better than the first two prequels. If every single line of dialogue had been cut out it would have been brilliant. As it was, I cringed every time someone opened their mouth. Especially Padme. She went from gung-ho action woman in the Phantom Menace, to simpering oh-Anni-please-woman in this one. Annoyed by Yoda, I was. Backwards talking, all the time, he should not. Okay it is, every now and again. Continuous reversal of syntax, infuriate it does. Kick more arse, he should have. Great warrior is he, when shut up he does. 100% waste of wookies. They did nothing. There should have been more wookies. More specifically, there should have been more wookie-based droid thumpage. Like the Ewoks, but able...

Yesterday, the final Star Wars film was released. You may not have noticed, there was little fanfare. Anyway, the whole interwebs were filled with chatter from people who went to see the first one 28 years ago to the day. It got me thinking: did I actually go to see Star Wars in the cinema? I've always been convinced I did. I would have been about 4 years old, but I can't remember going to the cinema to see it. I remember going to see Return of the Jedi with my mum, the same year we went to see Octopussy, the last year that there was a cinema in my home town. It closed down in 1984, I think. I can also remember going to see The Empire Strikes Back with my sister. I was racking my brains earlier today, trying to dredge up memories of Star Wars itself. I can remember going to see Superman with my brother and sister, in my sister's Wolseley Hornet . We had to go to the next town, since the vaguaries of the distribution system meant that they got films a few weeks before our to...

Three weeks ago I picked out a book from our local library: River of Gods , by Ian McDonald. It's nominated for, or has won, a sackful of awards. This is a book I should read, I thought. Awards = Good. That's a rule that's always true, right? The rule may well hold in this case, but I wouldn't know. I never got any further than the first 8 chapters or so. This was due to a number of things. Firstly, that I don't have that much time to read books these days; I'm either at work, or looking after the kids, or drooling insensibly in front of the television. Fitting in time to read around all this is difficult. Oh, and I have to talk to my wife occasionally too, otherwise I've found she can get a little irritable. Secondly, the book is big. 583 pages. Big books take a long time to read, they take a hefty chunk out of my free time. A book has to be worth that investment. The last really big book I read was Jonathan Strange , which was very good but at 80...

Here we go... the post that signifies I'm about to disappear up my own arsehole. I've added a little thing to the sidebar from blogpatrol , which counts the (lack of) visitors to the site, and tells me where they came from. It seemed like a good idea at the time, a way to find out about my readers. What I've mainly found out is that I have none. Which makes sense - I've not told anyone about the blog, so there's no reason for anyone to read it. I didn't start this thing to get readers anyway. It's supposed to be just for me. So why do I find myself obsessively checking the blogpatrol counter every day? Suddenly I want people to visit my site, whereas before - when I couldn't know anything about visitors - I didn't really care. Which brings up another point: is there any point writing things if no-one ever reads them? It would be very easy for me to neglect this blog, and have it join the thousands of other blogs in Blogger's big blog orphanage - ...

Image(632) custard Originally uploaded by photosam . About two days ago someone crept into my house, while I was asleep, sliced the top off my head, scooped my brains out and replaced them with custard. I'm not sure how much custard was involved. Based on the volume of my head, I'd estimate about 4 cans. It feels like it's packed in quite tightly. My ears are throbbing. Maybe that means it's going to start oozing out soon. It turns out to be surprisingly good for conducting thoughts. I can breathe, move, and drink coffee. All major functions are there. The only problem seems to be that any desire I once had to do productive work has gone. Thoughts related to my job are slowed to a crawl. I'd rather stare out of the window, than tippity-tap at the keyboard like a good little code monkey. Mind you, work-related thoughts have always been a little on the glacial side of speedy. I've tried coffeeing the custard into action. Doesn't work. I just end up wi...

The worst job I ever had was in a theatre, a few years ago. I had to look after Uri Geller. Where's the bad part of this, you're thinking. Sure, Geller comes across as a bit loopy, but he's not that bad, is he? It was my job to feed him and clean out his cage. The manager of this theatre, Mr. Bowyer, had a thing about psychics, mediums and the like. He'd book them for a night, get them in, lock the doors and then force them to prove their talents were real. No tickets were ever sold, they were private performances for Mr. Bowyer and a few of his larger associates. Margaret, who ran the confectionery shop in the foyer, said it was all because his wife had left him after consulting with a clairvoyant. She was told this by Doris, the cleaner, who was never one to gossip. Slander maybe, but never gossip. Brian, one of the ushers, said it all stemmed from Mr. Bowyer's father - who owned the theatre before he passed away, God rest his soul. He had been conned out of a wee...

Looks like Writing Parent is b0rked. I'll remove it from the list of links; it was a bit pants anyway. Their daily writing exercises, which weren't daily, were often along the lines of: "Take a picture, write about it." or "Think about something, then write about it". Grr. What I could do with is a RSS feed which provides different writing ideas every day. So that I could ignore it, and feel guilty. * Googles * Hey! I found one . Only it hasn't been updated since August, 2004. Arse biscuits. *More googling * Double arse burger with a side order of arse fries and a large arse cola. There's nothing. All the writing prompts/exercises sites are badly designed pieces of shit. And we all know how badly shit can be designed. Looks like I'm going to have to do this myself. *Sounds of sleeves being rolled up, pencils sharpened, papers smoothed* Right. Any minute now, I'm going to come up with something. I can feel it. *Tumbleweed. Somewhere in the di...

[This week's Creative Theme over at The Writing Parent ] I think it was Oscar Wilde that said: "To lose one parent is unfortunate, to lose both is careless." It might have been one of the characters in his plays that said it. Or it might have been someone else entirely, and at the moment I'm too tired to find out. He never extended the quote to cover the circumstance of losing all of one's ancestors in a frankly implausible time-travel accident, oddly enough, so careless will be sufficient. I'm not totally sure how I managed to do it. I was so sure I was right. It all seems so silly now. Too much to drink, too loud a discussion about paradoxes (what is the plural of that word?) in the pub, and one stupid, stupid bet. Rule Number One of the Temporal Driving Code: don't get into your vehicle when drunk, either on beer or testosterone. Rule Number Two: don't think that your logic and knowledge of physics is better than the universe's. It isn't. ...

Barcelona Sagrada Familia construction , originally uploaded by Andy Hawkins . I only recently discovered that "tired and emotional" was a euphemism for drunk . I'm so naive (you'll have to put the two dots thing above the i yourself, I can't work out how to get my keyboard to produce it). This weekend I went on a cultural tour of Barcelona. My fellow art lovers and myself took in many fine sights, most of which sold alcohol, and the rest were tanned and wore tight clothing. It was a stag do, after all. We did manage to take a look around Barcelona on Saturday, paying a visit to the Sagrada Familia Cathedral / Building Site as well as strolling past various other Gaudi creations. Take a look at some other people's photos . I didn't take my camera on the grounds that I'd most likely be too pissed to use it.

I had an interview lined up with a small firm on the other side of town. They made an exciting range of kilts, so they said, and wanted me to spit-shine their website in preparation for the hordes of uber-confident men that were currently constrained by the whole trouser thing. What the hell, it was work. Google had pointed me in the right direction, but when I got to the right area nothing looked familiar. It was a quiet part of town. Back in the good old days, when people still made things instead of just trying to sell things made in other countries, the streets would have been choked with trucks and people, the factories belching out smoke. Now everything was quiet, the shops were all boarded up and the factories dark and filled with pigeons. I was lost. I'd written the address down, cleverly thinking ahead, but not the phone number. There was a stray dog on the other side of the road that was sizing me up, working out how many meaty, bite-sized, chunks I was. A tinkling at the...

Crisis 2004 - 011 , originally uploaded by maarten_demont . "So, Martin, what was it you wanted to talk to me about?". Derek steepled his fingers and leaned forward over the desk, in what he thought of as his active-listening pose. He concentrated on projecting an air of "I am interested in what you have to say". The training course had made this aspect very clear, and he was keen to put it into practice. "...and I'd like to go through that with you beforehand...", said Martin, looking up for the first time, a slightly sheepish expression on his face. Derek resisted the urge to punch him. No punching, that was emphasised in the course too. "Go ahead, Martin". Derek wasn't sure what Martin had been talking about, or why he was in his office. Derek had been told to have an "open-door" policy, but he was sure it didn't mean you had to entertain your fuckwitted subordinates all day long. "Right, well, the board mee...

Two posts in, and the blog has already turned into a whine about how I don't do any writing. So, I'm going to use this: The Writing Parent - The 365 Daily Writing Prompts . I'll attempt one of these every day. Until I get bored. Or stuck. Move along, nothing to see here. UPDATE: Hmm. They don't seem to update their writing prompts as regularly as I hoped. Instead, I'll pick a random picture from flickr and write something about it.

I started off this post with an explanation for the title of this blog. Here's the short version: I have no middle name. Other people do, I don't. That's it. The blog post I wrote went on for about 5 paragraphs and was excruciatingly dull. So I've started again. This is something that happens a lot with me. I start writing things, realise they're really quite rubbish and either delete them or put them to one side and never go back to them. I write several different versions of the same opening paragraphs. Each one slightly different, but never quite right. I never finish anything. I tried using pen and paper at one point. This is something Neil Gaiman does. He writes his stories longhand in notebooks, then transcribes them onto computer. The idea is that this discourages you from tweaking and rewriting as you go, which is all too easy when using a word processor, and forces you to carry on until you've finished. Unfortunately, the thought that I have to choose ...

I've always wanted to be a writer. Even as a foetus, I yearned to put pen to paper. Even though I consisted of only a handful of cells, I dreamed of having fingers with which to grasp a biro and enough neurons to comprehend the concept of language. Honest. Okay. Maybe that isn't true. But I used to love the times at school when you got to write anything you wanted to. Usually this meant that the teacher had a lot of marking to do, or wanted to finish off the gin. I'd write thrilling adventure stories filled with dinosaurs, pyramids, mummies, spaceships, and aliens. Generally, they'd involve me being the leader of some expedition with my school friends filling out the parts of lackeys, minions, cannon fodder, and dinosaur chow. Sometimes they'd be illustrated in great detail and crayon. As school went on, the opportunities for writing things I wanted to write got fewer, and the need to write essays about sewage processing, Laurie Lee's memoirs, and what Romeo rea...