This post marks the beginning of a new category of meta-posts, sort of a cross between a linkblog and a normal post. Each day may or may not have one, and each one may or may not have more than one paragraph. The idea is to use these posts as places to put brief notes on things for which an individual entry seems overkill, or things that may evolve into unique posts later, or things for which I can’t be bothered to categorise or think up a title for. We’ll see how it works. (link)

The Yahoo Mail Internet Cafe Awards get coverage on the BBC today. Unfortunately the site requires Flash to operate properly, which isn’t installed in my workplace. (Obviously, I shouldn’t be surfing anyway.) The Beeb mention a Cybercafe in San Fransisco in a laundrette being awarded a prize for the most unusual, but this certainly isn’t not unique – I used a laundrette-cun-cybercafe in Taupo, New Zealand. The most exotic I’ve ever used was in a family home in Jaisalmer in Western India, where the computer sat underneath the family’s shrine and almost seemed to form a part of it. (link)

And now for today’s sponsor…

Is Windows ready for the desktop? Maybe, but I’ll stick with Slackware, ta. Still, there’s some good points here for those of you who have to use it, for whatever reason.(via, link)

Problem with this kind of meta-post: They will appear as a single item in the feeds. This wouldn’t be such a big problem if I was correctly generating , but at the moment I’m not, and this reads the same as . I’ve been meaning to sort this out for ages (honest) – it just needs a little plugin magic for blosxom. It might help me make my atom feed validate, too, if I generate a hash of stories->modification timestamps as well as one for stories->creation timestamps. (link)

Y’know, I’ve noticed that my posts don’t seem to be appearing on the UK Blogs Aggregator. I’ve been listed there for yonks, and used to see my posts there. Perhaps it’s got something to do with my new URL, but my redirect script seems to work without any problems – follow the RSS link for Random and Irrelevant from the Aggregator sidebar and you still end up at my feed. Hmm… (link)

River of Beer Discovered in Germany (via, via, link)

More problems. One – my paragraph links are rubbish, as they’re relative. Two – my hacked-up version of wikieditish isn’t doing the Right Thing with entities. This is fine when you only edit a post once or twice, but multiple edits become a pain. I think I’m going to rethink this. (link)

It’d probably help if I knew what month it was, too. Ooops.