Where Is Blogger Beta??

It's probably quite sad, but I am desperately waiting to be allowed to move my blogs to Blogger Beta. No, that's not the sad bit. The sad bit is that I am waiting so impatiently not because of all the snazzy upgrades that it will undoubtedly offer, but because it will allow me to do something that every other blogging service seems to already allow: Categorise my posts.

It probably won't make much difference to this blog, since it is a bit random and scatty. Maybe I'll sort it into Diary and Humour aspects or something, but I can't see it being major. On the other hand, I crave the ability to label my Unified View posts, as much for myself as for readers. I will probably have labels along the lines of Abortion, Animal Rights, Nature of Ethics etc, since those seem to be the main issues I deal with at the moment.

I realise that caring enough to post about this may seem odd. Still, this is after all a place for random thoughts.

Update:

Abi has been allowed to upgrade to Beta. I am quite jealous! :-p

On Gender Speech Patterns

Richard at Philosophy et cetera has a very thoughtful and accessible while good humoured consideration of how to deal with the patriarchal elements of surnames traditionally passing from father to family and masculine pronouns being used to identify generic people:

Gender, Family Names and Pronouns

I agree with most of it, but I think that merged surnames look lame more often than they do, and I tend to alternate the gender of my generics.

Well worth a quick read!

More Temp Work

Yesterday I spent 8 out of 9 hours either sliding leaflets into plastic sheets or using a machine to put studs in said plastic sheets. It wasn't too bad actually. I can happily live with mindless work as long as A) I get to sit down while I do it, B) there are no bloody conveyor belts and C) it doesn't involve dangerous equipment. This job almost satisfied all three.

I say almost because the studding machine did seem slightly menacing, although with a little care there were no hairy moments. There was this classic conversation when I was being shown how it worked though:


Pete: Um, how dangerous is the machine? How careful should I be?

Boss: Don't worry, if the guard won't go down all the way, the mechanism won't work. See?

[Puts pen in and pushes foot pedal. End of pen is smashed, shattering.]

Boss: [Pause.] Ah.

[Does it again. Same result.]

Boss: Hmm, that's not supposed to happen. [Pause.] Well, I'm sure you won't make any mistakes.


And I bloody didn't after that!

Probably the most annoying part of the day was that after the boss showed me where to put the leaflets, the old guy next to me came up and told me to put them in a bit further. Thinking I had misunderstood the instructions, I did as he said. Later, the boss came back and told me that was wrong, I should be putting them more out to the edge like he originally told me. Annoyed, I shot a glance at the old guy, who was watching. The boss must have noticed as later he asked me if that guy had told me otherwise, and when I confirmed it he told me that I shouldn't pay attention to him. So what, was it some kind of practical joke at the expense of the temp? If so, it was a bit rubbish. They've just now got a stack of them done wrongly. Doesn't hugley bother me. Maybe it was an honest mistake, although given how long the guy assured me he had been working there, that would be odd.

The experience wasn't bad really, and apparently I'll be going back there for a the rest of the week. Hi ho, hi ho. And all the rest.

The Hoff

What can I really say about this, other than that it's awful and yet addictive?

Jump In My Car - David Hasselhoff

The Making of 'Jump In My Car'

Now that is cheese, pure and simple.

I wonder if it will be playing in clubs soon?