… Ladies.

There’s also an atypicalreview redesign coming. If I had any sense of timing at all, it’d be ready on April 4, a date to which I’m not counting the days to at all, no sir, not me. But I almost certainly don’t, q.v. paragraph one.

Finally, and because there’s no way in hell I’ll get around to reviewing it, I’ll briefly mention The Surgeon of Crowthorne, a book about murders, schizophrenics and the English Dictionary. It’s a peculiar read — constantly interesting but not particularly engrossing, if that’s possible. You get a good perspective of the almost insanely daunting task of making a comprehensive dictionary, which would be pretty tricky today, but even more ridiculous without computers. But just as interestingly, you get a good idea of how horrible it’d be to be a bit mental¹ 150 years ago.

Linking to books is trickier than linking to movies, where IMDb is king. I’ve gone with amazon.com above, but in future perhaps Shelfari will be a better bet. It’s kind of like a social networking site for reading. Is anyone else using it? I started importing my library from Delicious Library and got rather bored rather quickly.

In any case, the title didn’t match the cover for Crowthorne — which has clearly gone through some name changes in its time — but this may be fixed by the time you visit, as Shelfari allows you to suggest changes to its information a la Wikipedia, which is pretty neat. If anyone is inspired to sign up, I’m here.

1. Not the technical term, as I understand it.

I should have reviewed Doctor Who‘s 2008 Christmas special as well, but ultimately it was just a little unremarkable, and so I’m having trouble remarking on it. There was a giant frickin’ robot stomping over Victorian London, and I can’t think of anything to say. That’s disappointing.

I still love those dots. I could change the subject to anything at this point and no one could argue. Unluckily for you, I’m changing it to the size of text.

I’m in the middle of a disagreement at work about what size text is ideal for a website, and what size is ‘standard’. A quick survey revealed that most of the more famous sites these days don’t drop below 13px. The Age hits 15px, as does The New York Times. Some have said the standard is 12px, but I don’t see the evidence, except in old timey 90s sites. Somewhere along the way I think everyone realised that there was no point in squinting. Or, more likely, we got bigger screens and so weren’t that fussed any more about squeezing everything in. Or, perhaps we actually decided to try to come close to vaguely respecting the default font size specified by the user.¹

1. Which is a bit of a joke, of course, because your average user probably never even thought about specifying the font size. And, if they did, they’d have to specify it at 20px just to get 16px on most sites.

So I’m minus two reviews, we’re about to get to the Doctor Who finale and my dreams of catching up with the schedule have been dashed. I have films I want to talk about. Zodiac. Pirates of the Carribbean. Blades of Glory. I mean, I could just say, here, “Good but slow,” “Ugh but Keira,” and “Funny but a bit tepid.” But I want to waffle.

I can, however, still write blog posts, I think. So here is one.

I’ve been learning about financial stuff at work recently. All sorts of things that I knew nothing about are opening up to me. General ledgers, natural accounts, accruals, commitments, cost codes. I thought I had a handle on GST, but there are things about that I find I had no idea of. I’m somewhat embarrassed that I can actually find reconciling a monthly account interesting. I can’t decide whether my ability to be fascinated by the most apparently dull things is a skill or a curse.

And now, five things that are pissing me off:

1. This iPhone business. I can’t believe those ungrateful whingers in America are daring to complain that the thing has been overhyped. At least you can buy one! Spare a thought for the less fortunate than yourselves. No no no, not starving Africans. More fortunate than that. Closer to yourselves but not quite. Three months behind you in television, no iPhones. That’s us. Selfish buggers. Someone needs their priorities straightened out.

2. Drifters. Those pedestrians who start to gently drift across the pavement just as you’re trying to overtake them on that very side. One day I’ll snap and I shouldn’t be held accountable.

3. My inability to think of a third thing.

4. The stuff I mentioned in the very first paragraph of this post.

5. Point 3 again, but now with a more ‘five’ related theme.

Not that my responsibilities are particularly lofty now, but there’s something oddly satisfying about having them, regardless. Even getting shouted at for a failure of a system that I’m now responsible for (but wasn’t when the problem occurred) was vaguely enjoyable. I found that quite surprising. I also find that I get great satisfaction from finding better ways to do things, and fixing processes. In normal life, this urge has been manifested in a desire to switch everyone to Firefox, which hasn’t always been popular; but people are far more interested in your meddling when you’re offering to optimise something they’re paid to do every day.

Amongst the downsides to a proper, nine to five job are the trains. In the past, I’ve avoided peak hour, and now I find that peak hour is doing its darndest to avoid me. Cancellations, late trains, full trains, slow trains, trains with sick people on them, trains stopped because of suicidal gymnasts… Give me another month, and I shall be that horrid person writing incessantly to the Mx about how crap everything about our public transport is.

Meanwhile, my disturbing myspace dalliance has been all but supplanted by facebook. Draggable modules. Tagging photos. Interactions with ma.gnolia, last.fm and picnik. It appeals to almost every aspect of my web-nerd psyche. However, occasional reviewer (sob) Andy Cocker still scorns my interest in social websites.

In atypicalreview.com’s future, I see more Who reviews, a late Spider-Man 3 review, a brief rant on Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, and a new writer’s take on the best 10 episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When I find the time.

I don’t know why the notables on the front page stopped turning up. It’s something of a mystery which I’m hoping a fresh install of SimplePie will solve in a “I never quite worked it out” sort of way. They’ll be back soon in a slightly expanded way, with yet another subtle tweaking of the front page. It’s amazing; once you get bored of the shiny factor, sliding review titles suddenly seem massively pointless.

I also don’t know whether Torchwood, the new Who spinoff, will be any good, but early signs are encouraging. SFX Magazine have a little run-down of all the characters which is one of the most encouraging things I’ve seen. Early vibe seems to suggest it’ll be a little like Angel (Whedon’s shows are a major influence according to Russell T. Davies) but with aliens instead of demons, brits instead of yanks, and added swearing.

This encourages my fervent hope that one day, I will see an episode of science fiction telly where something horribly wrong, life-threatening and scary happens, and a character says simply, “Fuck”.

And then I thought; this stuff would be awesome for our canada pictures too. So here’s the relaunch of Andy’s fantastic journal of our travels at the end of 2003 and the beginning of 2004.

And at around this time, I discovered that PC Firefox seems to prefer it if you load the javascript for our stats program, Mint, first, and then the three Lightbox javascripts after that. Amusingly, IE started complaining at that point that it liked things the other way. So I’ve had to do a few IE tests to get things in the right order.

Of course, being a bit of a Javascript n00b, I have absolutely no idea why it’s doing this — but at least it’s fixed. The Canada Gallery should work on both IE and PC Firefox (and everything else). The Warrior Within screenshots might not work in IE at time of writing. Or, neither of them might be working for you at all. Let me know if there are any issues. Except for there being no thumbnails for any other game reviews save the one I sent you to. I know about that one.

[update: I switched from Lightbox to Litebox. The difference is subtle but speedy. I also discovered that I was an idiot; there was a mint extension called outclicks causing the javascript issues. It's since been updated to fix such issues.]

Because, frankly, people do care what sort of person you are, they care about your personality, they care whether you’re willing to take shit from the Prime Minister.

And surely — though it occurs to me I’m probably wrong about all of this — surely they want to see you smile, and laugh, and act like a human.

In any case, on a different note — I can’t comment on rumours that I still haven’t gotten atypicalreview’s new layout working correctly on Internet Explorer. There’s certainly no point speculating as to whether there are still pages out there that are practically unreadable. And any insinuations that the comments only got anywhere vaguely near complete today are baseless attacks on my character. That is all.