Anyway, all that aside, I had been convinced that the Marmite you can buy in Canada, although it is made by the same company and in the same packaging is watered down. It’s the wrong colour for a start. Canadian Marmite looks like diarrhoea and doesn’t have the translucent inner glow of British Marmite. I thought I was going mad, why would there be a difference? Tonight, I came across some old packages of British Marmite I had nicked from a hotel in Norwich in 2003 so I finally had a comparison.

Firstly… Hotel packets of British Marmite:

(Yes, I know the sell-by date is 2005, we will ignore that. It’s not like Marmite changes over time).

Now Canadian Marmite:

(You can tell it’s Canadian, it has English and French labels, so no cheating here).

Now some anaemic toast:

(Yeach, do people really eat toast this colour?)

And now, the Marmite on a knife:

I may as well have stopped here really – It’s obvious that they are completely different. In the interests of Science, however…

The Marmite on toast:

I have no idea WHY Canadian Marmite is so completely different. It costs pretty much the same in Canada as it does in Britain. It doesn’t taste bad, it’s just a little weaker and you have to spread a lot more; plus there is that whole bodily fluid thing going on with it. People who may claim that the 2003 Marmite is blacker because it is old, well you will just have to trust me. I could have used the British Champagne Marmite which is just as black but that wouldn’t have been like-for-like.

There is no conclusion to this. I just figured that rather than waste a posting ranting about Google I may as well expose this curious Marmite Conspiracy.

So let’s pretend for a moment that Google isn’t a great encompassing blob of an alien life form and it is in fact different organisations some of which I can be nice about and let’s ponder Picasa.

I have been using Picasa from the start – I don’t know why, it’s not very popular to use Picasa, especially for somebody who doesn’t like Google. I should probably be using Flickr or Deviantart like all the cool kids do but I like Picasa desktop and I like the way it talks to Picasa Web Albums and I like the way Picasa Web Albums are nice and easy to use. But there is more.

Firstly, my Picasa crashed a few weeks ago. I was not happy, I use my Picasa a lot on my laptop for trying to keep tabs on what photos I have on here that I haven’t moved to the Desktop and the huge photo archive I have. Every time I loaded it, it crashed and told me to send a crash report – As long as I didn’t hit “OK” it would carry on working so that was good but I submitted a crash report anyway.  I wasn’t expecting anything, I submit Microsoft crash reports on a weekly basis and have never had any feedback at all but apparently the Picasa team actually read theirs. and a nice chap called Fernando Corrado asked me to test a new version which promptly crashed too. Eventually after 2 days of trying new versions and tweaking things the Picasa people discovered I had a screwed up installation of Quicktime that was causing some previews to die and created a fix. My Picasa now works properly again and it is nice to see such a quick response for what is really, free software.

Anyway, armed with a working Picasa and being generally impressed so far with the new face recognition, I decided to let Picasa run riot over my desktop.  I started it about 48 hours ago now and it claims to be 14% of the way through recognising faces (which is odd because 4 hours ago I restarted it and it claimed to be 21% of the way through).

It is sloooowly indexing 3 terabytes of disk on a 3.5ghz Pentium and has found just under 5,100 folders full of photos. It has found over 1,500 photos of me now ranging over 25 years, some of which have me wearing glasses, funny hats and in one, a Pippi Longstocking wig and a diamond fairy tiara (Hey I get bored in Wal*Mart sometimes). Every time I look at it, it has dug up more and more obscure photos of people with terrifying accuracy and it is still going strong. It also seems quite good at sharing the facial information (via my Gmail account I assume) between my laptop and the Desktop. I am deliberately avoiding asking what Google will do with the huge amount of data I am giving it but I am pretty sure now Google could track me pretty well with its hidden spy cameras since it even recognised me in my tinfoil helmet. Damn.

(Why wouldn’t Picasa let me link that from my Picasa album? Weird)

I can’t find much wrong with it – There are some pretty useless filters in it (why would I want to find all purple photos, or all orange photos?) and some seemingly useful filters missing. One really useful thing would be for it to be able to detect naked photos  (ok, let’s call it a porn filter). There are very few good tools for detecting porn by flesh percentage and *ah hem* “body features” on Windows – Hyperdyne’s Snitch and Media Detective are the only two I can think of and they cost more than I paid for my copy of Vista. It is a feature many people need and want so go on Google, add it please?I suspect all the tools are in there, although please… It will freak me out if you start being able to identify people without faces, that is going a little too far ok?

And now for the downside. Don’t worry Picasa, this isn’t about you, I have nothing but praise for you today and this weblog entry would have stopped here if I hadn’t needed to register a Gizmo5 account for Jess today.

I merrily browsed to http://gizmo5.com only to be redirected to http://www.google.com/gizmo5/ and told:

Gizmo5 Has Been Acquired by Google
New user signup has been suspended and will return when we re-launch.
To receive information about the re-launch please enter your email address.

This is not useful… I needed a Gizmo5 account today and now Google own it I assume that the useful “Forward to Skype” feature will end up broken since Skype are in the business of selling Skypein numbers and won’t want Google Voice numbers supplying this for free. I assume it will also create a mess because Google Voice is only available in the US and Gizmo was available everywhere. Plus of course, it’s a pain since I wanted an account today dammit! Grrrrr.

On the plus side, this means I didn’t have to write a Weblog entry that was full of praise for The Evil Empire.  Got to take some good out of everything I guess.

(I also wonder why WordPress wouldn’t allow me to have that last line in a paragraph by itself… This thing has a mind of its own I swear)

“It’s Important to be Regular…
Now posting once a week whether I have something to say or not.”

This got me thinking that I haven’t written anything in here for nearly a year and it may be a good idea for me to write something here occasionally, even if I do have nothing much to say.

I think one of the problems is that when I decide I want to write something I deliberately leave it a week or so to see if I still feel the urge to write about it then. If I remember then I will write about it but more likely, I’ll make a note somewhere that I should write about it in the future and then never bother. Blogging seems to be pretty impulse driven and if you force yourself not to write in a reactionary way then the impulse vanishes and the Interwebs ends up with a whole lot less shit.

On the other hand, as the Crabby Old Fart says; it is important to be regular whether it needs it or not – So I shall try.

Amen.

It’s quite simple really… North American toilets just aren’t made as a comfortable place to read. They are too low and it seems offputting and potentially perilous to be quite so physically close to all that water in the bowl.

In England people have traditionally retreated to the bog to sit and read and get away from the other people in the house. It’s sometimes the only privacy they ever get. People started to read on the toilet because we tended to use ripped up newspapers to wipe our frozen botties in outside loos. It gave us something to do whilst we were trying to shiver out a poo in the wind and rain and even though now our toilets tend to be inside and somebody invented Andrex¹ the reading habit has carried on and no English toilet² would be complete without a pile of toilet books. The upshot of this is that North Americans have never been exposed to books like “The Book of Heroic Failures” (volumes 1, 2 and 3), “The World’s top 20 Serial Killers”, “Not a Lot of People Know That” (by the esteemed Mr Caine) nor in fact, any Gyles Brandreth books at all.

You know… This is probably why Americans don’t have pub quizzes too. It’s all starting to make sense now.

¹: Does anyone else still object to the slogan “240 sheets per roll”? It’s not true, at best you can get about 30. If you are a vegetarian, your mileage may vary.

²: Note, toilet, not bathroom, the toilet has the throne position here not the bath – And come to think of it, most American bathrooms don’t even have a bath, especially the ones in cafes – What sort of a rip off is that? Grrr!

³: Did you spot that I moved from they to we mid-posting? I can’t be bothered to correct it since it amused me.

Ok Man, see you later.

Their new training site is called “Train to Gain” and of course, given my general despair of the world as it is today, I would have assumed they’d have named the website “train2gain.gov.uk”. But no! It’s actually called “traintogain.gov.uk”.

Well done that department! Credit where it’s due.

For a long time, a few people have been reminding me that I promised to write a posting about the top ten ways I have nearly killed myself.  I keep meaning to do this but I am easily distracted by Youtube videos, kittens and dust which makes me a very unreliable narrator.

On the plus side, I am congenitally stupid so I have a wealth of events to chose from; on the down side, I have a crap memory so when it comes to putting them on paper – I simply forget.

I was tempted to do this as a list, you know like that Letterman guy does but then I would have to rank them and that takes real thought. I am also none too happy with the concept of “nearly killed myself” since most of my more amusing (after the event) mishaps would not have involved my death. I rarely get embarrassed so dying of embarrassment would not have been an option.

With this in mind, changing the title to “A random babble about some of the most stupid things I have done, most of which would warrant me inclusion into the Darwin Awards” not only makes it a lot less snappy but also puts less effort onto me to come up with the goods in a concise and easy to read form.

Be warned, this will be a long babble so I am putting one of those click-to-read-more thingumys here now.

I started my career at the age of three when somebody put a teddy-bear I wanted on top of my wardrobe. Being resourceful I built a little tower using a bedside table as a base and scaled the thing. I did reach the teddy before the whole thing collapsed bringing me down on my rear onto a glass which then, quite cruelly decided to break and embed itself into my bum-cheeks. I still have my first scar from that one.

I don’t remember much else over the next few years. I knocked myself out for a few minutes on the Isle of Man docks running across gang-planks, one of which had a plank of wood across it. I rode a bike off a school roof, got stuck up a very large tree, got a knife embedded in my head throwing it at a tree, blinded myself for a couple of days and had a somewhat irresponsible habit of climbing up any scaffolding I ever saw and climbing over people’s houses. Rusty drainpipes have nearly caused me death or serious injury many times. So far, so good as far as injuries go. I have a rather odd scar in my arse, I have a missing front tooth (playground incident), a fingernail that no longer grows properly after chopping the corner of a finger off (dropping a manhole on my hand whilst exploring sewers) and I sometimes have problems using one wrist (jumping from a swing boat onto a bus-shelter roof and accidentally getting my wrist caught in the ropes). Other than those and a few burns, pellet, dart and arrow holes, I was doing pretty well.

This all said, I don’t think I should be held responsible for anything I did before I was 18 so we’ll gloss over all of these. Of course those few years of my late teens had a couple of incidents. I was still climbing more than I should have and I still hadn’t ever heard of ropes. I still say that our poster campaign at Leeds University was the best ever though. Leeds has a long single corridor which goes around the whole main campus at level 10 and often goes over lovely long bridge routes.

People would often put posters for events up on the windows since it is the main route. This was great except the porters would remove the posters overnight and that was a waste. I had the idea that we should put the posters on the outside, facing inwards. Those posters were still there for months after the event had taken place. Many people would argue that this was resourceful as opposed to stupid, and I would agree.

A more stupid event possibly came after being thrown out of a pub when rather drunk and still needing a wee one night. In a temporally premature display of Le Parcours I decided to vault over the fence across the road.  Unfortunately that fence was a motorway bridge leading to a 40 foot drop onto Bradford’s underground ring-road. Ah well. As you can probably guess, I did manage to hang on and hopefully recovered with some dignity intact as well. That last bit, I probably made up.

One of the first major stupid events came in the first year of my 20′s I think. This may have been the first to actually injure me. I shall paste my write up of this one as it stands.

When I was an undergraduate, at Leeds Uni, I ended up by some weird
method working for the Organic Chemistry Unit as a research assistant,
and, because at the time I had nowhere else to live, I moved into
the Chemistry dept, with another person I discovered lived there...
There were 2 of us living in a building that looked like an old
Victorian school - Occasionally hiding from security guards.
I was a programmer working on 3D rotation of molecular structures
for the front end of a drugs design system - I knew nothing at all
about organic chemistry so I would build virtual houses out of
molecules and use them to test my software.  I was sacked in the
end for all sorts of weird things including leaving a pint of cider
inside a computer.; being drunk pretty much all the time and oddly,
writing poetry in the comments sections of all of my code - I think
4 times more comments than actual code was the general observation,
they were just heathens!

We had a few interesting night-time episodes, mostly fueled by the
fact we spent all of our time absolutely drunk and I had made master
keys for the whole building anyway during one of my more sober
periods...

One I remember was trying to light a Bunsen burner, to heat up a
pan of stew... We couldn't find a match or anything anywhere so we
filled a sink with water, put paper towels all around the sink and
floor and were chucking pieces of sodium in hoping we could catch
the paper towels alight... That was not a success... My patent moth
trap was good too... a glass tank of conc. HCL with a lamp underneath
it... The moth went down and "Poof!" no more moth.

That was all fun and games, till the one night we were in a phys.
chem lab turning coins into tinfoil ... You get a beaker of conc
nitric, and you drop a coin into it... You then fish it out with
your fingers (being careful because it gets hot) when it is about
the thickness of foil - They are really cute because the designs
on the coin actually stay so you get these really cute but stupidly
thin real coins - Oh, and brown fingers - Conc nitric isn't bad for
your fingers as such but it does stain. I think I was feeling very
strange that day and decided it would be fun to mix everything
liquid I could find with everything powdery... I asked my colleague
if it would blow up and he said probably not, so I did... I do sort
of remember the clouds of boiling hot sulphuric acid, and I do
remember coughing up tonnes of blood as I was dragged out with him
muttering something about fume cabinets and stupid twats.

Ever since then.. I have been a bit wary of anything to do with
Chemistry, and my lungs have never been terribly good since then
either. Oh and I rarely drink any more much, either... I think my
kidneys suffered those few years.

We’ll gloss over much comment on this one though, I have been told I am an idiot many times in the past so I don’t need to add more. I didn’t document many incidents at this time however, I did set my room on fire as a 1st year undergraduate and had to sleep with my hand in a bucket of water for a week because of the injuries I caused myself dragging the burning piles outside. Fire is often one of the things that causes me problems as can be seen from this little email exchange to the Wiseguys group…

• From: Michael Lawrie
  Subject: Re: Aztec women versus the Ninja slime
  Date: Wed, 1 Apr 92 9:19:25 BST
  
  >   >my thigh, I have never had a bruise that big before! Oh well... I set
  >   >fire to my bedroom shortly after, that wasn't my week...          ^^^
  >    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  > I have to ask.  I HAVE to ask.
  
  It's not that exciting really, I am used to setting fire to things 'coz me and
  fire don't seem to mix. It all started when my venus fly trap finally died, I
  have this theory with plants that they need a bit of adrenalin to make them grow
  better, so if one fails I line the rest up and let them watch their old friend
  being cremated... I poured the petrol over the fly trap and took out a Zippo,
  it was empty so I had to fill it up, as is usual with zippos I managed to spill
  half the petrol over my hand and arm, and dabbed it off with some tissue which I
  then dropped on the floor.... Anyway, by now in a hurry to get this cremation
  over, I lit the zippo, lit the plant, accidentally lit my arm, somehow managed
  to light the tissue on the floor and eventually threw the whole lot into the
  bin (minus the arm but plus some eyebrows and a lot of hair off the back of my
  hand). This then set fire to the contents of the bin until I put the lid on,
  but that didn't last long since being a plastic bin it melted the bottom. The
  plant sprayer then came in useful for the 1st time ever and saved my carpet
  from too much more damage, if I'd used it on the plant in the 1st place none
  of this would ever have happened I doubt!
  
  You may be thinking "What a plonker" by now, believe me, although on a larger
  scale it doesn't begin to compare with the time I set my terminal on fire
  because I was balancing a lit Zippo on a pork pie... But that's an even more
  convoluted story!
  
  --
  Michael Lawrie, systems group.
  HICOM: Communications and information for the world HCI community.
  
  From: Michael Lawrie
  Subject: pork pie. (fwd)
  Date: Fri, 10 Apr 92 9:28:34 BST
  X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL0 (LUT)]
  
  I'm afraid you'll get this twice now, coz I screwed up the last one, I
  could have left it as it was but I guess it demands some explanation  
  
  Forwarded message:
  >
  > I was sitting on Cheeseplant's house yesterday, quite happily spodding
  
  (Cheeseplant's house, a UK talk system thing)
  (Spod, to spod is to sit on talk systems or muds wasting time)
  
  > away, and filling my Zippo with petrol. Fine, as usual I wasn't really
  > concentrating so I poured petrol all over my hand and desk. Now I don't
  > like petrol on my hands so, to get it off, I lit it - Fine, it burned
  > off so I shook it out and must have touched the desk top. I was on the
  > phone to Jon too at the time and the desk set alight. I dropped the
  > phone, moaned a bit and put the desk fire out. I thought that was it
  > so I let the Zippo burning balancing on top of my pork pie to burn off
  > the overfill of petrol... Then someone knocked at the door so I had to
  > go and answer it - It was Jayce come to get me to go home, so I started
  > to lock up - Went into the terminal room and turned the photocopier off
  > but accidentally turned the wrong plug and turned Polly (one of the
  > VAX-Stations off instead). Screamed and ranted about this for a couple
  > of seconds and walked back into my office to check the network was
  > still ok, I walked in the door to find my keyboard was on fire in a
  > pretty impressive display of large yellow flames and black thick smoke.
  > Managed to blow this out, sulked a lot about the charred hole in my
  > desk where the Zippo had fallen off the pork pie and finally examined
  > the keyboard (which was still working funnily enough). Anyway, at this
  > point people noticed Polly had gone and came to hassle me about why their
  > edits were failing, so not only had I set fire to my desk I also had an
  > audience of people who wanted to go home, wanted to make sure their day's
  > work wasn't ruined and were witnessing the charred remains of my desk and
  > keyboard.
  >
  > In all, yesterday night was not the best night of my life.
  
  --
  Michael Lawrie, systems group.
  HICOM: Communications and information for the world HCI community.

The next few years was relatively free of any major incidents. In Leicester, I used to cycle home drunk and asleep far too often and would often come around after having crashed into a tree or a parked car. This isn’t quite as bad as it sounds since I would only ever cycle home at about 4am when the streets were more or less deserted.

Diving is a relatively safe hobby these days as long as you follow the rules. Obviously, I don’t but that is another matter. I have enough self-knowledge of my own stupidity not to scuba dive to extremes and this helps. Unfortunately the same isn’t always true for Freediving. I learned to dive when I was 9; I couldn’t swim (and still can’t) but I have no fear of water so I just work out some sort of agreement with the sea where it doesn’t hassle me and I don’t mess it up with my drowned dead body. This has accidentally made me a very good freediver which is odd because the combination of not being able to swim and being shit at holding my breath would seem to be serious downsides to this ability. People ask me how long I can hold my breath; so far my answer has always been “Long enough not to be dead – So far”. I have pushed this to the limits twice now.

The first time was pure stupidity and pride. I was swimming around a group of trainee divers about half a kilometer off the shore and about 60ft down and I cramped. Cramping isn’t cool; when you can’t move your leg, you can’t kick and when you can’t kick you can’t swim to the surface. Oddly, I am not sure whether through inexperience with Scuba or sheer pride (I am tempted to go for the second) my first thought wasn’t just to try and head for a diver and grab their emergency breathy-thingy, my first thought was to stay attempting to look cool and drift behind the reef so that they wouldn’t see me panic and die. Of course, I did manage to get behind the reef where I could use my one good leg and arms to kick off and get to the surface. But I did learn a lot about safety that day which I pretty soon forgot.

A couple of years later, I was doing my Master Freediver training and doing a qualifying dive which has to be constant ballast and over 100ft. At this time a 100ft dive was a walk in the park but I still had to do it to get my certification. Freedivers are generally healthy creatures, they meditate to lower their heartrate, they avoid caffeine and alcohol and foods that are bad for you; they are masters of their own bodies. As a result, they tend to look pretty cool. Before my dive, I had managed to get 2nd degree sunburn over half my body and was on 1200mg of Ibuprofen every couple of hours, I had just gone to Wendys and had a half pound cheeseburger and chips with a pint of diet coke and I had just slipped off to a local shop to have a couple of large cups of coffee. My heartbeat was well into the hundreds and wasn’t going anywhere lower for a long time. In fairness to me, I did my 113ft qualifying dive quite well. The problem was, when I went for a deeper one afterwards. Throwing up at 100ft is not a pleasant experience and not one I would wish on anybody. Not only does it lose you all your air, it also hurts like fuck.I did make it to the surface; I also didn’t do any deep dives again ever after that and I always dive with a tiny emergency tank now. You can’t say I don’t learn my lessons the hard way.

Over the next few years, I have been relatively accident free I think. I blinded myself for 3 days, I accidentally shot myself and then crashed my car later when the concussion hit me, I fainted syphoning petrol with a hose pipe and purely accidentally I nearly broke my back standing on a cat on the stairs during a 5 day power cut (it was dark, the cat is evil, what can I say!). A few people have tried to kill me, mostly deliberately and mostly in an unplanned way (although one did try to electrocute me) but so far they seem to have not managed.

I shall stop here for now; it is 7pm and I need breakfast. Bacon, egg, eausage and chips and maybe even fried bread. I shall carry on killing myself in more conventional and tasty ways.

Keep breathing folks.

They just voted out the only one I actually liked; she was relatively sweet and quite cute (not that you could tell from her glamour shot in today’s Star) and the rest are utterly boring and generally intolerable.

Ah well! That was easy.