i am sparticus: Words

Wedding Adverts

Sample tasteful advert

Shortly after getting engaged, we updated our status on Facebook to reflect this fact. Immediately after doing this, all the adverts changed to more targeted ones. This is not surprising or particularly evil, after all, if I tell a company I am engaged and they say "ah well, can I give you a flyer about these people's wedding service instead of these cheap phone calls" that seems entirely fair. But this got me to thinking, what will happen to the adverts when I actually get married? And so I composed this with the intention of making lots of jokes about how the adverts will change the longer you've been married, but I couldn't think of any jokes to be made about marriage that wouldn't be along the lines of "so, you're going to break up?" and that made me sad. So I resolved not to make those jokes, and instead hope that they'll send me an nice e-mail after fifty years (okay, a holo-e-mail) saying "gosh, well done you two".

Babble

From now until I forget next week, this page is going to serve as a place for me to cite every time someone talks about the tower of Babel and means exactly not it.

Example one from the BBC about some iTune hacking. The BBC cite some woman explaining that

'The digital media landscape has become a tower of Babel, alienating and frustrating consumers. Our goal is to provide a simple and well integrated solution that the average consumer can use to eliminate the headaches associated with their expanding digital universe," she said.'

No; in the story of the tower of Babel; everyone spoke the same language, that's one of the points of the story. The digital media landscape is like the world after the tower of Babel.

Wedding List

Obvious questions not asked by the Amazon Wedding List FAQ

• "My fiancé has added the complete boxset of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to the wishlist, how do I remove it and ban him from adding it again?"
• "Why do you use fiancé consistently instead of fiancée? Is this some sort of sexist male-noun preference?"
• "Are we allowed to open our gifts before the wedding day?"
• "The understanding of lots of my older friends and relatives is that a wedding list is supposedly for the purpose of setting up home, how do I explain to them then that anything under the PC and Video Games section is for this purpose?"
• "Currently the odds in the office are 3:1 on jilted in the aisle, can I spread bet against not getting my gift back?"
• "I have searched for 'wife' on your website, but it's returning no pages, am I doing something wrong?¹"

¹ I did this a few hours later to see what you'd get, unsurprisingly you get over 10,000 items, what is odd though, is that when I searched for wife the Listmania sidebar had a link to one of Mark Meynell's list. I probably saw that man two hours ago at lunch (though can't remember doing so. This is odd to say the least.

Foyles Vs Flat White

Normally I drink coffee in Ray's Jazz Café, which is the coffee shop above Foyles on Charing Cross road (well, actually normally I drink it in my house, but when I'm feeling posh, or need to go out, or have bought comics from the comic book shop on the other side of Charing Cross road), but on Friday I had a meeting in the West half of Soho and being that Ray's is on the East edge, I decided to actually track down the possibly-award winning Flat White and try that out. Here are my observations:

• The coffee is damn good
• The music is better than Ray's (I'm biased against music that doesn't have a tune so it was going to really)
• It has worse seats and a worse view than Ray's
• I prefer the design of the cup's in Ray's, but like the free saucer in Flat White
• The generally French accent in Ray's is slightly more pleasing than the generally Australian accent in Flat White
• The generally Australian service in Flat White is slightly more pleasing than the generally French service in Ray's (actually, Ray's isn't nearly that bad).

Mark's coffee house non-review is brought to you by iamsparticus.com. If you know of a coffee house you'd like reviewing, please send Mark approximately £2.00 and an hour time in-lieu and he'll go and write non-witty comments about it.

12.5

So, in the ho-ha of losing my domain name for a few days last week, I decided to redesign my website. Then I forgot how much work that could be, so instead I just tweaked the .css (/geek) file and simplified / cleaned up this design somewhat. Mostly I removed a whole bunch of extraneous stuff but a full feature list runs below:

• Increased white-space
• Harder to find links
• No Facebook tie-in applications
• Entry titles are now links for ease of use
• A maintenance of iamsparticus policy of sullen refusal to turn the title header picture into a link back to the front page¹
• An assumption that all entries are written by Mark
• Allcaps titles
• Seven extra pixels
• Slightly less blue
• A renewed commitment to completely fail to understand how <ul> and <li> tags actually work
• A positive step towards the national target of removing all <br /> tags by 2009

¹ Seriously, whoever first coded this website really didn't want that to happen. Ever.

Yes, I Am A Moron

I let my site domain name expire. In fairness, I only let it happen because I didn't receive the e-mails. Because I hadn't updated my e-mail account details. Because I'm a moron. Problems now solved, we have plenty of internet till I forget next year. Because I'm a moron.

Wedding Countdown - 8 Months and 2 Weeks

Things That Are Probably Under Control For This Stage of The Game

• Venues.
• Legal business.
• That awkward business of who does what and how much credit they get, and do we really want to invite so and so because they probably won't come and they're a bit rude.
• Her

Things That Aren't

• My Hair
• The ever expanding reception playlist, which as fun as making is, can't be what your organise the reception around.
• Seven thousand different ideas.
• Me