I found this in a copy of the Metro last week…

I do!

Wandering the depths of Facebook, I came across this lovely site.

It shows you how Blackburn used to be – back in the day. It’s pretty interesting

Isn’t so bad.

It’s expensive, but it has a decent taste. And I certainly don’t feel as guilty as I do after a can of dental-industry exciting Mountain Dew.

You should try some if you get the chance. It reminds of what drinks should taste like, drinks that are free of HFCS and aspartame.

So as you can see OMAHM has changed yet again. It’s still work in progress, but I’m leaning towards an updated version of the green and grey scheme of years past.

So I’m still planning on adding more little tweaks (and lovely CSS3 things like rounded corners), but they’ll only be supported in modern browsers like Firefox and Chrome.

Oh and Opera, but no one uses Opera.

A clearly-disturbed man threw himself or fell (it is still unclear at this time) in front of a train at Manchester Picadilly, a few hours before morning rush hour. Obviously, this caused a lot of disruption and cancellations to most trains going via the station (mainly those between Liverpool, the airport and Preston).

So when they announced it on the train I was on, many people began to laugh or complain about how they were going to be late. Really?

Is that the first thing that comes to mind when you hear someone has killed themselves? Now, I don’t know this person, so I’m not going to mourn this loss – but there will be those out there that will do so. So I can at least show some damned respect – something the vast majority of commuters seemed to lack yesterday.

Even worse, when a replacement train arrived and I got on, some middled aged woman behind me decided to encourage people to move into the middle of the train by trying to push me over. Not just once, but repeatedly.  Now, obviously she failed, since she was around a foot shorter, but still. Then complained that I wasn’t moving, so I should step aside and let her by.

So not only were they disrepectful, but they had recently undergone a manners by-pass to boot. How gracious!

On a lighter note (if there is one), I made it into the Manchester Evening News tonight. Yup, just below the middle of that image, the green hat and hoodie combo bending over for his daily Metro is me.

I’m in the news, in an article regarding a suicide. Ehh…

I’m alive, honest.

Just really busy with work, Tim Vine, and the socially retarded masses of the daily Manchester commute.

I’ll write a proper entry or three in a day or two, when my workload will have been reduced.

I hope.

*gulp*

…about Facebook, is that you can communicate with anyone – famous, strange, hairy or just outright K..silly.

Anyway, I’m friends with BT – the music artist, not the company who was responsible for the amazing This Binary Universe (one of the best albums ever, IMHO). In an effort to promote his new album, he asked his Facebook friends to ask questions – so I asked him were my pants were.

Unfortunately, he never replied.

Nor did Rob Dougan when I told him I wanted to be a tree when I as a child.

My new headphones arrived. No longer due I have to endure those Segal-kicks to the ears!

I shall be cranking it up in Manchester for the morrow.

When they’re not breaking things, the implementation team at Facebook HQ are actually quite clever.

One of the prime sources of spam is email harvesting. Bots that traul the internet, scraping anything that looks even remotely like an email address, before sending it back to the Evil Headquarters. To stop this, people generally type something like:

chris dot seaton at omahm dot net

To a human, that’s easily understandable. Generating the pattern matching to find something like that would be a nightmare. However, that not the most particularly user-friendly method of displaying this information on screen. So Facebook appear to be using ImageMagick (a PHP extension that allows you to create images on the fly) to generate the email address as an image.

I don’t know how old this technique is, but I thought it was pretty clever.

That said, this approach isn’t entirely secure. There are image-processing bots that can convert text in an image into a real text – which is why you see those annoying CAPTCHA things at the bottom of registration forms.

Cool nonetheless