Being a list in no particular order of stuff that we already know but that this weekend has confirmed.

• Jenny cannot drink more than one glass of Kir Royale without becoming utterly and amusingly drunk. No other drink has this effect on her.
• It’s not a weekend unless you visit Sainsbury’s at least once for every day of the weekend. Bank Holiday Mondays are included in this.
• There are only three basic plots for Sex and the City. (In this it’s very similar to Scot-wean-toon Oor Wullie, but with more, um, willies.) A Men are bastards/unnecessary B Women are sassy C Maxing out your credit card every episode is consequence-free.
• It’s impossible to buy a REDACTED in Bath, no matter now often you visit the REDACTED shop, largely because it’s never fucking open.*
• We could eat kedgeree for breakfast and dinner. In fact on Monday we did just that. We ♥ kedge. Bonus fact: when I first knew her, Jenny hated fish, rice and curry. Getting her to eat all three in the same dish for breakfast is proof, were any needed, that you can change someone.

* Censored so that D&L don’t have any inkling of the amazing† costume that I’ll be wearing to their 70s party on Saturday.
† Lame and overworked

I really am having a great time with my new DSLR, getting to grips even with doing stuff on full manual rather than relying on Program AE or Av/Tv. I’m loving the creative control of my f/1.8 lens; the selective focus in this photo of Jenny and her dad is intentional.

And today we went to Dyrham Park, a National Trust property near Bath. Though there were some beautiful landscape shots to be taken, my attention was caught by the selection of old wooden wagons and agricultural implements in the outhouses.



High-res and other shots, comme d’habitude, on Flickr.

I like that I’ve finally got iChat, my instant messaging application, house-trained:

What do you do with £500-worth of high-spec digital camera goodness? Why, take slow-mo shots of an aging Staffie eating grass, of course.

Well that was fun, wasn’t it? This is my ninth day off in a row – a record, I think, since starting at Future – and it has been all kinds of fun. What was originally planned as a week of Cornwall camping was cut short a little by the weather; though we were actually very lucky – the evenings were calm and dry – we did get caught in the car in some torrential downpours, and spent the second night in the tent fearing that we were about to end up in Kansas as the wind whipped around us. The campsite we stayed at, however, was rather lovely; it had a river running through the middle of it, and campfires were allowed. We were quite tentative on the first night (picture below) but on the second we got a real crackler going. It was all very ‘man make shelter; man make fire’. Props to wife for not being too grunky throughout the whole affair.

But we’ve had all sorts of fun back in Bath, too. There have been DVDs (hey, Cloverfield is good, isn’t it?), cinema visits (hey, The Dark Knight is good, isn’t it?) fancy meals out and trips to Westonbirt Arboretum where I played about with my cheap-but-rather-rewarding new Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II lens. Since I took some photos for Mrs P’s Arts Week at the end of term, a couple of her colleagues have asked if I would take some portrait shots of them and their families, and I wanted a lens with a nice wide aperture to let me work in low light and to get some nice bokeh going on. (I’m never sure how to pronounce ‘bokeh’, which I know is an anglicised spelling specifically designed to make it obvious how to pronounce the Japanese; how should a gaijin pronounce ボケ味 so as not to appear like a twat, oh Japanese-speaking-brother-in-law?)

Despite having lived here for well over a year now, it was only this week that we went to the baths for the first time. We’d been to the Roman ruins a couple of times before, but this was out first visit to the new Thermae Bath Spa. It. Was. Idyllic. The rooftop pool is paradisal, and by lying on your back with your ankles tucked over the side and one of the big floaty foam tubes wrapped around you, you can soak up the sun in near-silent bliss.
No dog walking today as some manner of sporting event prevented us from find anywhere to park up at the university. Never fear: the relentless, pitiless and pointless stream of pictures-of-dogs-you-don’t-know-taken-by-someone-you-probably-only-know-a-little will resume next week. Stay tuned!

Finally we got a tent that was easy to put up. So easy, in fact, that our conviction that the first one we bought was actually faulty has only been strengthened. Having given it a dry run in the back garden this afternoon, we’ll pack up the car and head for deepest Cornwall on Monday. I’d like to get as far down as Land’s End – having been to John o’ Groats as a child – but given that the forecast for next week is a little rocky this may be a vain hope. We may be ‘forced’ to ‘endure’ the ‘lack of adventure’ to be found in a cosy, family-run B&B.

I’d like to take this opportunity, too, to make it clear that my technique for folding up a tent – doing a roly-poly along its length to get all the air out so it rolls up tight – is perfectly legitimate and not at all embarrassing. To me.

I will have my laptop with me next week – I have some freelance to polish off; it’s not that I can’t live without it* – but we’ll probably both be offline by choice until 2 August. Keep an eye on my main Flickr account and the photoblog account as we might throw some photos up there.


* No, really. I’d have my iPhone anyway.

Pretty, pretty Sandy! Pretty boy! Look at that pretty face! He’d been in isolation and this was one of his first walks; he was literally jumping with excitement – bounding up to shoulder level – when he was brought out of his cage. He was very bright; though initially foxed by some of the swing-gates that we encountered – trying in the first instance to poke his head straight through the bars – by the time we were on our way back he knew just how to snake through them. Pretty, clever boy! Flickr pics here.

Since my iPhone is in iPhone hospital being nursed back to iPhone health, and since neither of the O2 shops I went to had any loan phones, and since I gave all but one phone of my past mobiles away, and since that one remaining mobile is missing a charger and is in any case locked to Vodafone... deep breath... I bought this little guy on eBay.

I had one when I were a lad, and really liked it. I’m enjoying rocking the retro vibe – BT Cellnet, for fuck sake – but WTF is with no predictive text, monophonic ringtones and, of course, no pissing web access? I can’t, as Aston was wont to comment, work in these conditions. Roll on Friday...

Meet Ozzie, the most doleful of Staffies. From his gummy eyes to the bald tip of his tail, this walking tragedy was nevertheless a real sweetheart who, whenever Jenny or I fell behind, would turn round and stare mournfully until the whole pack had caught up.

And now, excuse me while I fall asleep face-first into my keyboard. Despite taking Friday off, this has been a prodigiously busy weekend and I’m pooped.

What ho, stout traveller! Think you’ve read everything there is to read on the internet? Rubbish! Here’s a list of links that keeps me amused all the live-long day. Some are perennial favourites, some one-off del.icio.us bookmark scraping, a couple are probably NSFW but all are at least mildly diverting. Have fun.

spEak You’re bRanes If you don’t know about this site — which comments on the braindibble left behind by the Great British Public™ on the BBC’s Have Your Say pages — go and visit it now. I guarantee it will take forty minutes out of your life. Read the archives too.

Rehabilitating Mr. Wiggles [NSFW, kinda] A filthy comic strip about a foul teddy bear.

Top 10 TED Talks Not, as someone dear to me thought, ten talks by a man called Ted, but the most-viewed short videos from the TED conferences. Go and watch Jill Bolte Taylor's stroke of insight which I only recently saw even though it’s been doing the rounds on t’internet for ever; I’d be fascinated to see if the kind of disconnected young people we pin so many of society’s ills on would be able to point and laugh at a woman in such an odd emotional state, given her utter conviction. Mathemagic is cool too, and the colour-changing octopus in David Gallo’s talk is mesmerising.

Fazed Slightly pot-luck-ey, given that you don’t really know what each link is, but it’s usually worth clicking on.

Digg Folks knock Digg, but poking around the front page usually throws up at least one link that’s worth your while. Also try the Upcoming page so you can be ahead of the curve and say “oh, yeah, I saw that yesterday; good, isn’t it?” with conviction. This means ladies will want to have sex with you.

Wulffmorgenthaler [NSFW, kinda] Another ’toon strip. Of variable quality, but when it’s funny, it’s fu-neee.

xkcd After years of seeing occasional strips from this ’toon popping up all over the web, I decided to RSS the sucker. Very worthwhile, even if there’s a good 32% of the gags that go straight over my head.

Photoshop Disasters Wonder, as thousands of pounds-worth of cutting-edge hardware and software are wielded by chimps and fucktards.

The Big Picture I know, I know, everyone’s linking to it, but it is genuinely good; big pictures with usually very useful short captions.

ProCon Feeling virtuous after all that frippery? Go and read up on controversial subjects at ProCon.org.

I do, by the way, apologise for so much doggy nonsense on this blog, but the way I figure at least I’m posting something. Without our weekly walkies, this site would be terminal, and not in a Unix-ey kinda way.

Robbie — another Staffie since we find ourselves loving their compact, brassy charm — was a-dore-able. While for the first half of the walk he was all about the forward momentum, once he’d tired himself out a bit he became much more affectionate and would roll on his back to have his tummy tickled, submit to all sorts of velvety-wonton stroking, and even jump up next to me to have a cuddle when I sat on a log. He was the most outwardly affectionate of the dogs we’ve walked, and though he was happy to trot back into the home — and was delighted to see his carer again — when we walked away after giving him back, he tried to follow us. Bless.

He was a hugely muscled dog, and though small, he was capable of really tugging on the lead. His shoulder and hindquarters were just pure, solid muscle, of the kind that makes my flabby, sedentary body weep with jealousy.

In photography news, I need to start taking more control of shutter speeds. Lots of the shots I took today were too blurry, not because of ISO, aperture or available light but just because the camera was deciding that a slightly sluggish shutter would suffice. Tv mode needs more investigation, I feel. Some of the better shots are up on Flickr.

Yes, Gabriella was foisted on us again today, looking more dishevelled than ever from rummaging about in the long grass. Every day is a bad hair day for Gabriella. She was joined by Titch, and seemed much more lively than she had been in Troy’s company. They were quite sweet as a couple, actually, with Titch refusing to walk on if Gabriella was busy engaged in some post-sniffing or grass-munching.

The damp weather doesn’t auger well for this evening’s Crowded House gig at the Arboretum, but it did give me the opportunity to take some pretty, pre-release-Leopard-default-desktop-rip-off photos of dew on grass; download a desktop picture pack, here, licensed as . Lots more pictures of the dogs too, as always, on Flickr.

Or: Take two dogs into the shower? A moment of heart-stopping panic today when Troy (left) slipped his harness and went careering into an adjoining woodland; we could only hear him rustling around in the undergrowth. Just as I was about to call the home and tell them we’d lost one of their dogs, he popped his head up further along the wall and Jenny dropped everything – including Gabriella’s lead – and harnessed him back up again. Gabriella, bless her, just sort of stood there looking on and occasionally munching grass; no mad dash for freedom for her.

Troy’s boisterous-yet-lovable nature – he slipped his harness a second time, and was a wilful little bugger – led us to christen him Oliver Reed, and Gabriella’s grizzled old lady looks earned her the name of Elaine Paige. The naming-of-random-animals-that-don’t-belong-to-us continues.

Left my 400D in the office on Friday, so pictures are courtesy of my PowerShot S70; found it more difficult to process the RAW images to give me a pleasing finished image than with the 400D, and I’m still not entirely happy with the finished result. It’s a bit flat. Hey ho.

The perfect magazine, for me, should be just like a roast chicken* – bear with me on this, and excuse the crunching gears of metaphor and reality.

• There should be a real feeling of anticipation before you begin reading.
• You should be excited about getting started on a nice bit of breast – the big main coverfeature that attracted you to the magazine. And it should be mighty satisfying...
• ...but there should also be delicious legs and wings – smaller features that are just as delicious as the main ones but that you didn’t necessarily buy the chicken for.
• And even when you think you’ve finished, there should be a few little regular treats – the oysters, say, or bit of crispy skin – that you tend to forget about before you actually start eating the chicken, but that when you remember about, you’re really glad the chicken’s, um, editor, implemented them some years ago.
• Even then – after the breasts, legs, oysters, skin and everything else have been eaten – there’s still some enjoyable picking to be done. Captions to be read, sidebars to be enjoyed, letter to be read; that sort of thing.

I think that I should start an editorial and management consultancy course where I espose various ‘x-as-x’ food-based analogies for every kind of product imaginable. Except food, which I would of course compare to magazines, cars and luxury cosmetics. Who’s with me?

* Assumes you like chicken, and that, like me, you’re a breast man.

Ladies and gennelmen, the pride of the 9-year old me: a Legoland (Denmark) driving licence. The look of glum, detached resignation on my face belies how pant-wettingly exciting it was for me to drive a tiny, blocky electric car around a fake road system, stopping for red lights like a good little Scandinavian.

Today, we walked a greyhound. I say ‘walked’. I mean ‘stood in close proximity to while she rolled around in the grass and snuffled into the undergrowth’. It was ironic that of all the dogs we’ve walked, the greyhound’s circuit took by far the longest thanks to Nelly’s insistence on flopping her butt down with a thump and rolling around in the long grass.

She clearly hated the kennels, and for the first time we felt oddly guilty about handing a dog back to the (very nice) staff. The other dogs we’ve walked seemed to have a pretty stoic attitude – “OK, well, thanks for that walk, friends; no hard feelings OK? I’ll just be here in this cage if you need me...” – but we really got the impression from Nelly that every time she gets taken out for a walk, she hopes she’ll never be taken back; we felt like we’d betrayed her just a little.

In the last month, Receding Hairline has had visitors from 148 countries, including countries I blush to confess I hadn’t even heard of. (Kyrgyzstan? New Caledonia?)

This is by way of being a completely manufactured introduction to a rather pretty little question that formed in my head the other day: what accent do people ‘do’ when they do an accent of your country?

Let me give you an example: when people do a Scottish accent, chances are it’s going to be a Glaswegian, or at least broadly-west-coast-of-Scotland accent. I blame the big yin. And so I’m imagining that when people do a generic American (Cope, I’m looking at you) accent, it’s usually specific to a city or at least region of the States. Ditto for Welsh (you saw that coming, huh?), Irish (Susan?), German and so on.

So given that I have so many international visitors, I’m hoping y’all will oblige me in letting me know in the comments what city or region tends to define the accent that represents your country when people do an impression of you and your compatriots talking. Rope in friends, enemies, colleagues and those with whom you have never worked before. I’ll do a special page somewhere on the site if I get enough responses.

A little guidance

1. It’s not about what accent actually is the most representative of your country; it’s about listening to the accent that people from outside your country ‘do’ when they’re being Scottish or French or whatever.
2. This is about national accents, not about ‘what people sound like who try to do a Brummie accent but fail’.
3. For a given value of ‘national’. In my world, ‘Welsh’ is national, rather than ‘British’. You decide.
4. This only really works in my mind with places where English is spoken natively, but I’m assuming the same will hold true for other major languages spoken in different countries. What does a Québécois think a Parisian sounds like doing an impression of a Québécois? Of course, I’d love to hear that British people speaking English with a mock German accent all sound Bavarian on whatever, so just have at it in the comments.

(The only one that I’m thinking is probably going to be difficult is ‘English’ itself. When I were a lad growing up in Scotland, an English accent was always an unbearably posh RP-meets-early-Queen-Elizabeth-II, but that was probably as much to do with a tiresome background anti-Englishness than any notion of a coherent English culture. But knock yourself out in the comments.)

This old lady's most endearing physical characteristic was the two little head-mounted leathery wontons that she calls ears. Her most endearing personality trait was her slightly grudging and undemonstrative affection; I lay on my stomach at one point to take some dogs-eye view shots and Jade walked straight towards me, tucked her head against my shoulder, and just stood there leaning against me.

Note, we'd have to change her name if she was ours. We'd go with ‘Gloria’.

A big shout out to my brother-in-law for supplying so many of the stickers that make an appearance on my MacBook; I thought it was about time I posted pics since it's getting pretty complete and since the old iBook got so many positive comments. More stickers, as always, gratefully received.

Mrs P and I slipped smoothly into roaring twenties mode at the weekend, courtesy of a parental-sponsored weekend away at Bibury Court Hotel. I was born to order afternoon tea in the drawing room of a quietly mouldering country pile, and I did it with aplomb. I also filled my memory card with shots of the achingly-picturesque Cotswolds landscape, though unfortunately the weather only started to pick up once we were on our way home. There are a few below, and there are more on Flickr. I apologise in advance for my floral, depth-of-field-ey macro obsession.

Things we've learned about Big Dogs from Fraser, today's walking companion:

1. We lack upper body strength.
2. Big Dogs do Big Shits.
3. Some dogs don't really care much about hoomans; Buster and Fraser were more disdainful towards our presence than any cat we've ever been snubbed by.
4. We really want to walk – and photograph – a dog that doesn't need any sort of face furniture; we completely understand why Buster had a muzzle and Fraser had his face-strappy second lead arrangement, but you can't help but feel sorry for the little guys.

In other news, I appear to be unable to post a photograph without trying new ways to create a subtle vignette effect, a thing photographers have been trying to eradicate with better optics for years. I wonder if there are support groups I can go to; “Hi, my name's Chris and I put an archaic low-end photography effect on any picture I take with my expensive semi-pro camera.”

How many Newton users does it take to change a light bulb?
Foux! There to eat lemons, axe gravy soup.

(Apologies for this gag's vintage; I've just read it for the first time and it made me giggle.)

So you're walking along and you notice that one of your shoelaces feels a bit loose. So you bend down and retie it nice and tight. Straighten up, and then three steps later you realise that the other shoe, which until you retied its mate felt perfectly snug, now feels ridiculously flappy-aroundey. God, I hate that.

* Whenever I get irritated about inconsequential stuff like this, the image of Mr Brennan, looking on with a mixture of pity and wonder that any one man can contain so much petty anger, comes unbidden into my mind.

I can't get a chance remark of Jenny's out of my head; yesterday she observed that roses are at their most beautiful just before they die. It sounds incredibly trite but it's no less true because of that, and the vase on our windowsill is just on that cusp of bloated, straining beauty she's talking about. It sounds like a great lyric; now I only need the talent, time and money to turn it into a song.

But it would probably end up sounding like Phil Collins.

There are seaside towns populated by clean-limbed and bronzed Adonises. There are seaside towns that have a faded Victorian charm, all peeling paint and rusting iron railings. There are seaside towns that slumber quietly, nestling up against the crook of an inlet.

And then there's Weston-super-Mare. Which is as depressing a fly-ridden cesspit of a town are you're likely to visit before making your one-way trip to the nethermost reaches of hell. And so this is a public service announcement: under no circumstances think "Oh, I know what would make a nice bank holiday Monday day out: Weston-super-Mare!" It will only end in tears. And a possible car-wide suicide pact.

Blargh. Here's the equation of my life at the moment:

One dead hard disk + One chipped front tooth + One inexplicably painful y-ligament + Piss-poor + (Long nails + showering quickly + a painful nip in a surprisingly intimate area) / (Walking a dog + Making two huge lasagnes) = Meh.

So yes, not sure what's going to happen with my chipped tooth (and no, I have no idea how it happened) as I'm having a hellish time finding a dentist in Bath. The hard disk has been swapped for a rather lovely 250GB Western Digital Scorpio, so that's a bit of all right. There's bugger all I can do about the cash situation – apart from whoring myself out to sister Future titles for freelance – and the lens from Mrs P's glasses spontaneously popped out today while watching telly.

Never mind. Today we went up to the Bath Cats and Dogs Home and walked a long-legged Jack Russell cross called Buster. He was a cute little thing, though he had to wear a muzzle as he's 'dog-aggressive'. I refused to go and see the cats as I'd have been unable to walk away without secreting some old and mouldering puss somewhere about my person. More dog-walking is in order, I reckon, and I have a horrible feeling that we're on the brink of physically threatening our octogenarian neighbour-landlord until she agrees that we can keep a bugfuck crazy retirement-age pet.

We do also, however, have some fun things planned. We're signed up for Crowded House at the arboretum, Ben Folds at the academy in Bristol and, perhaps best of all, a hot air balloon flight at the end of May courtesy of an almost year-old housewarming present from my folks.

Oh, and my lasagnes promise to be fucking epic.

Sooo, yeah. If you're anything like me, every day when you pick up your mail at home or work, you think how nice it would be if somebody just decided that day to send you a really nice, big-ticket gift. A couple of days ago, that actually happened to me: a satisfyingly chunky box turned out, upon opening, to contain my dream camera, a Canon EOS 400D. It was a present from my mum to mark her retirement from teaching* and it has totally reawakened my passion for photography. I'm tingling at thought of all the stuff I have to learn, opportunities I can take and accessories I have to know about.

I started looking through my late papa's film SLR bag, and found that although the lenses are the wrong mount system (FD rather than EF; apparently non-optical adapters are available for about £27 on eBay – any experience, folks?) the flash (semi-)works in the hotshoe, so the missus and I had fun taking big washed out stylised portraits. I might get one of the adapters after payday partly because I like the idea of using my papa's stuff from his AE-1, and partly just because one of his lenses is a sweet-looking 200mm telephoto. The 400D means that I'm shooting in RAW really for the first time, and, um, it's quite good, isn't it? I'm loving the flexibility, but hating the disappearing gigabytes. I think the time may be ripe to migrate to Aperture or Lightroom, but I need to talk to people who know more about the two before deciding which one to go for.

So, yeah. I know that this sort of stuff is neither big, clever, nor particularly difficult to achieve, but I'm still really loving it.

A reminder: I have two Flickr accounts. My cameraphone account is out-and-about snaps, while my main account will hold all my 400D shots.

* Yeah, I don't know why her retirement was a reason to buy me a beautiful DSLR, but don't draw attention to this, mmm-kay? Particularly since she very sweetly also bought Jenny a 32GB iPod touch as well. Yay, my mum!

Having taken a sneaky day off work, Mrs P and I decided to slope off to Longleat Safari Park; all manner of safari-themed japes and scrapes ensued, and the day was proclaimed a success by all concerned. The highlight of the day (apart from the rhinos, which were fucking cool, by the way – I totally want to come back as a rhino) was a terrified-but-excited Jeff feeding a deer some of the special Longleat deer food. The stoopid deer didn't seem to understand that it was supposed to wait while I put some of the little pellets into my wife's hand before she moved her hand out of the car to feed it, and so kept thrusting its very fuzzy and adorable head inside the car to get at the cup of pellety goodness. Amid much excited shrieking, the task was eventually accomplished: one fed deer, one wife-hand covered in deer-spit. Witness the tongue-lashing she's getting below. More animal magic chez Flickr.

Some people see God's face in crisps, some see the Virgin Mary in slices of tomato. At the moment there's a slightly spooky face formed by clouds and the sun showing on my EarthDesk desktop.

Incredibly short, incredibly compelling TED talk about what Leonardo da Vinci looks like. Healthy scepticism is a good thing, but it's difficult to argue with the conclusion, particularly when it's put across with such understated confidence.

Grammar nazis are so last century. Welcome, friends, to the brave new world of the typography nazi. Below are ten mistakes that everyone makes, an explanation of why each is wrong, and details on how to fix them. At least, you'll see how to fix them on the Mac; under Windows, you'll need to dig through tables of Alt characters. Have fun. (If you decide it's time to be more accurate with your type on the Mac, get PopChar.)

Such typographic faux pas are not as potentially dangerous as grammatical fuckups – there's little chance that using a period instead of an interpunct will obscure or confuse your meaning – but they are nevertheless wrong, at least for the time being. The large-type heading for each section contains an example of a typographic mistake; if you can see what's wrong in each one before reading the explanation below, give yourself a pat on the back. Then examine your life priorities.

One last disclaimer before we get started: by ‘mistakes everyone makes’, I include my lazy-assed self and exclude you if you're a professional typographer. Or just someone who care about the little things in this amoral pit of a world…

"What's wrong?"
OK, an easy one to start. Yup, those aren't proper quote marks; they should be ‘sixty-six and ninety-nine’ quotes. The mistake happens because typewriters, pushed for space, decided to have only one neutral quote on the keyboard, not dedicated opening and closing quotes, and the convention stuck.
THE FIX: alt-[ and alt-shift-[ for double quotes; alt-] and alt-shift-] for singles.

New in iWork ‘08!
Of course, now we have word processors that do smart quotes for us automatically, everything's cushty, right? Wrong. If you type the above sentence in Word or any other modern app, it will think that because you type the first ‘apostrophe’ in a sentence, you want an opening, ‘six-style’ single quote. Instead you actually want a ‘nine-style’, closing apostrophe, so you have to enter it manually – or type two and go back and delete the first – so that the sentence reads New in iWork ’08!
THE FIX: As above.

I am 5' 10" tall
So those 'straight' quotes aren't for proper quotes, but they represent feet and inches, right? Wrong. They're not actually for anything. Feet and inches should be represented by primes, which look a bit like straight quotes tilted slightly to the right. If your browser supports the characters, the above statement should read: I am 5′ 10″ tall.
THE FIX: Sorry, but this is a bugger to fix. If you're in InDesign or QuarkXPress, use the glyphs palette. Otherwise, OS X's Character Palette – check the International pane of System Preferences – is your only salvation.

10.5″ x 9.4″ x 4.5″
You fix one problem, and another one just bloody well comes along. So, hurrah for getting the primes right, but using a lowercase X for the ‘by’ character is another lazy I-can-see-it-on-the-keyboard-so-I’ll-just-type-it thing. Correctly rendered, the above measurement should be 10.5″ × 9.4″ × 4.5″, not 10.5″ x 9.4″ x 4.5″.
THE FIX: Again, a tricky one. You'll need to break out the character palettes.

14º and overcast
This is a really subtle one, but that degrees symbol you see up there isn't a degrees symbol at all. It's actually an O ordinal, used, inter al, in Italian, Portuguese and Spanish to denote masculine gender.
THE FIX: alt-0 gives you the ordinal, while alt-shift-8 is a true degrees symbol; alt-K is a ring above accent. [thanks, silverpie!]

Some - indeed most - use hyphens incorrectly
A hyphen – the kind of short dash you see above – should really only be used when linking words such as ready-made. It shouldn't even be used mathematically to represent a minus, as there's a dedicated character for that, too [thanks, Dash Nazi!]. Most other uses mandate an en dash – as here, for example – or when planning meetings from 1–2. Changing fashions mean the the long dash—this one, called an em dash—is rarely seen, but where it is, it's usual to render it without the spaces on either side or with special hairline spaces instead.
THE FIX: alt-hyphen for an en dash, alt-shift-hyphen for the em.

Only £17.99!
Again, laziness and the democratisation of typesetting mean that we've lost the use of the correct interpunct in prices. £17.99 should be correctly rendered £17·99. After decimalisation in 1971, a period was only supposed to be used if technical limitations meant that a middle dot couldn't be printed.
THE FIX: shift-alt-9 types an interpunct [thanks, Nic!]

Nobody cares...
Quite probably. But what you see above is just three periods, not a true ellipsis. Want a proper ellipsis? OK then… (In this font, three periods looks like this, much more tightly packed...)
THE FIX: alt-; types a proper ellipsis.

These (honest!) are brackets
No, those are parentheses. Brackets [like these ones] are used to add in information missing from a sentence you shouldn't change – such as a direct quote – or to add information outside the voice of the original text. And don't think you're smart using angle brackets to replace quotation marks when writing French; <en français> is horribly wrong, and you should instead use proper guillemets if you want to write «en français».
THE FIX: Just be aware of the difference, and don't call parentheses brackets! [Note that Lise makes a very good case for me being wrong in the comments, but I'm not so sure. More research is needed...]

3 1/2″ and 5 1/4″ disks are obsolete
Though complex fractions have to be created individually, most mainstream fonts have the characters for a quarter, a half and three quarters. 3½″ and 5¼″ not only look better and are more accurate than the use of the forward slash, but they're clearer too. 3 1/2 looks like ‘three and one or two’, and you obviously need the space in there otherwise it becomes 31/2. In this age of decimalisation, 3.5″ or 5.25″ are, of course, alternatives, but there are some uses where a proper fraction is more sympathetic to the source or context than a forced decimal.
THE FIX: You're going to need your character palettes again. You didn't just tidy them away after the last time, did you?

Well, how did you score? Do you have your own typographic bugbears? Or am I just an insufferable busybody who will hasten myself to an early grave, getting my panties in a bunch about stuff that doesn't matter a damn? That's what the comment box is for…

I might just order one of these puppies. It's a neat Canon all-in-one, and though it's entry-level, it's Canon entry-level and it's the from the current range. The real clincher, though, is the price. With £20 cashback, it's £17.99. And given that my otherwise-excellent Canon i6500 needs ink, this is justifiable as a money-saving exercise...

£17.99, people!

I suggest you all buy one now. And if you buy it through this link, you get Amazon's free delivery and I get a smidge of commission. Cashback offer ends April 13th.

“I was a producer of materiality and I am ashamed of this fact”
“Everything I designed was unnecessary”
“Design is a dreadful form of expression”

So says Philippe Starck. Christ on a bicycle. [via]

So a while back we got a letter from our friendly neighbourhood council informing us that we had strayed into a bus lane in our car.

They're right; we had, though Bath is a bastard of a city to navigate round, and it's all too easy to do this by mistake. We know, we did it; so of course I paid up. A small, spiteful but ultimately tit-numbingly stupid part of my brain, though, wanted to force the council to rescind the fine, because if you look closely at the bottom right of the frame showing us pootling along in our car, you see the legend Evaluation period has expired. Please buy the Elecard MPEG2 Video Deco[der]. Thieves and brigands the lot of them.

To add insult to injury, we'd been snapped on Mrs P's birthday, a day that even before this letter arrived we had agreed had been something of a birthday-tastrophe. Ah well.

In other news, we briefly visited Liverpool yesterday for the world premiere of Karl Jenkins' Stabat Mater in the city's Anglican cathedral, and I was absolutely entranced by the cathedral building. It's incredibly masculine but without being repressive and bullying – a real feeling of benevolent, trustworthy authority. A few (quite poor) pics on Flickr.

I've never formally been assessed, but I'm quite sure I have a mild case of OCD or would fit somewhere on the autistic spectrum. Witness the work of a day: our newly-optimised big-set-of-shelves-with-telly setup. It might not look like much, but it gives me a warm glow of satisfaction. So, let's have a look at what my OCD has wreaked, shall we?

The big black box at the bottom left is a Drobo, basically a big, extendable hard disk. It stores all the programmes recorded by the Mac mini (just below the telly) and those DVDs that I have ripped to H.264 to be watched using the mini's Front Row feature.

The DVDs you see represent only a fraction of those we own – we didn't have TV in London for years and so bought far too many – but they're arranged in a particular way. They're not sorted alphabetically but rather by colour; both Jenny and I have visual memories and find it easier to remember the colour of a DVD spine rather than whether we filed Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire under H or G. All those that have been ripped to the Drobo have a little black sticker dotted onto the top of their spine so that if we go to watch a film and it has a black dot, we know it can be easily accessed from Front Row. I also know which ones I still have to rip.

The Mac mini is hooked up for sound to my beloved, ageing Technics stereo, and the balance is adjusted to give true stereo even though the screen is offset from the centre.

My brother-in-law bought a PS3 when he was in Japan but can't currently use it, so you see it sitting up next to the speakers, with its wireless controllers on the shelf beside my collection of Penguin 70s. Currently I'm being shit at Colin McRae: Dirt, and the young lady and I are rockin' out to SingStar; I really want to get some Blu-ray movies and try them out on our shiny Samsung TV, but that particular luxury will have to wait for a) a little disposable income and b) some decent movies on Blu-ray that I don't already own on standard def. (The TV, incidentally, has two HDMI inputs, so both the mini and PS3 are hooked up over sweet, sweet digital connections.)

The router – that nice pre-N Netgear model – is on the shelves too. It's positioned beside the Penguin 70s, on the shelf just above the stereo, in such a way that its blinking lights are hidden from Jenny when she sits in her usual place, but I can keep an eye on it from my seat.

And the finishing touch was added with an hour of backbreaking contortion with a hammer round the back of the unit, tacking all the wires in place so it all looks neat.

Now wasn't that interesting?

After no fewer than four visits from an 'engineer', we finally have a working fridge again, and I thought I'd share with you this line from the wife's email bringing the joyous news.

“Man said it would take 24 hours to cool down/freeze up properly and gave the helpful advice of ‘put some ice cubes in it to help it along’. Oh yes. Let me just get this tray of ice cubes I've been keeping up my arse.”

The ’Format Crü were chez Phin today for a photoshoot – very Homes & Gardens – and while everyone including Jenny was hard at work, James and Graham indulged in a little Blues, caucasian-style.

Our eighties-themed Philm Club was all kinds of fun, but Jenny gets the prize for best party idea by getting us to make top hats – chocolate, marshmallow, Smartie – which I then supplemented with the chocolate/corn flakes concoctions much beloved of nursery schools. Add to that lunch at the Marlborough Tavern, cream teas and my nouvelle cuisine extravaganza on Saturday, and the three of us were required to waddle slightly when we