Andrew weighs in on the London election results in a lovely post over on /dev/null:

It's overwhelmingly likely that the next four or so years won't be an era of innovative initiatives in London. Don't expect things like the Paris bicycle hire scheme, bold new green initiatives, pioneering public transport policy (something Ken Livingstone was actually really good at) or forward-looking visions for a metropolis at the centre of global culture. We can almost certainly expect the congestion charge to be abolished or "rationalised" to the point where nobody has to actually pay it (except perhaps for those pesky cyclists who get in everyone's way), and the axe to fall on Ken Livingstone's public-transport expansion programmes (you can forget about the city tram or the East London Overground reaching Clapham Junction), and quite possibly on Transport For London itself, abolishing this Inefficient Socialist Bureaucracy and flogging off individual tube lines to bus companies. The daily commute won't get any less slow or cramped, though at least those who own cars will have the option to drive. Also, if Crosby's previous client is anything to go by, expect the ugly politics of division and the "culture war" to come out, to see Johnson publicly beating up on cosmopolitan elites and "un-British" foreigners, to mass applause from the Daily Mail readers who voted for him. Certainly, Ken's celebrations of multiculturalism will be replaced by fields of Union Jacks, with Land Of Hope And Glory blaring through the tannoy. But the good side is that it'll be really easy to find parking at the Olympics.

Is everyone in London a fucking idiot?

Today's mad code:

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Oh, that's sad. The BBC will be playing a 'classic edition of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue' tomorrow at 12 noon on Radio 4.

Looks like I'm having occasional problems with Captchas being falsely rejected again. Anyone else noticed this?

The internet is to human interaction as Pringles are to potatoes. Companionship and closeness are processed into an unrecognizable slurry, then reconstituted as an unnatural recreation of their original incarnation. We start as social creatures, isolate ourselves into small rooms writhing with power strips, then make friends with similarly sequestered people, trying to re-create the very communities we're avoiding.

There are a lot of people I genuinely like whom I've never met in person. I care about them, at least enough that if they got arrested I'd gladly PayPal them bail money. Nonetheless, here's something I will never say: "Wow, this party is so great, it's almost as cool as a message board!" Even I am not capable of that level of sarcasm, and I'm a professional sarcast.

Went brilliantly - bloody marvellous production, but one of the hardest we've ever done in many ways: it was very difficult getting people together to rehearse, and the language was astonishingly difficult. We could have had better audiences too, but then the publicity er.. wasn't. Oh well. Pictures soon!

Scanned in Atari 2600 box covers.

Phew... that went really well, and my voice did hold out (thanks for the advice, Mel - I didn't have time to get the stuff today but might well have a look tomorrow.)

Anyway, there are still seats left for both performances tomorrow - Llanbadarn Church, doors open at 2pm for the matinee and 7pm for the evening. If you're around, come along - it's a good show (although a complete bugger to learn!) You can pay on the door, too.

Hello, you lot. Castaway's latest production - Tony Harrison's adaptation/translation of the medieval Passion - is going up tonight in Llanbadarn Church. Doors open at seven, there's a matinee tomorrow afternoon and another evening performance too. Judging by last night's dress, it should be good. Provided I get my voice back!

Compare this piece at the BBC about testosterone fuelling the market crisis with this short allegory by Dan Crisper...

I have a gun, a revolver, it holds six bullets, it has one or maybe two rounds in it, not sure, don't know for sure, can't really tell, I'm in a room, millions of other people, all of them have guns, maybe some of them have more bullets than me, jesus we've all got guns...

A phone running Vista? For fuck's sake.

That's a cryptic picture, isn't it? It's a picture from the tapas bar in town on Saturday night. As it was Catrin's birthday and we're sort-of-nearly-regulars, the nice lady made us free drinks - sort of brandy, hot chocolate the cream in a tiny wee shot glass; I forget what it's called. Very nice.

I would have blogged more last week, but I kept thinking I should write about our weekend away, not quite getting down to downloading the pictures from the camera, and also worrying about turning the blog briefly into a Slides From Our Holiday sort of thing - "and this is us with that nice couple from Surbiton."

Anyway, here's Verity Stob on installing Linux, incorporating a No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency parody.

Oh blimey.

Sadly, though, not mine. It's a 1968 MGC Roadster that Catrin hired for me as a birthday present back in November, for this weekend (our wedding anniversary). Two days I've had it and I really don't want to give it back. It's hard to drive, but so much fun! We've been all over Wiltshire and a large wodge of Gloucester in it, of which more later.

It's been one year of marriage today, and I'm a very, very happy and lucky man.

Intriguing recipe I might give a go.

I've just found a Wav in my music collection, allegedly of the Cure's Friday I'm in Love. Just one problem - it's 4.5 gigabytes long. So I converted it to MP3 with Lame (bringing it down to a mere 350Mb) and played it, and it seems to be six and a half hours of silence. Whuh? I mean, I could play the whole thing just to make sure...

Via Lore, one of the few blogs about the dark, forbidden delights of Norwegian Black Metal cakes. Genius, and tasty!

Boiled down to its very essence, metal is nothing more than a mixture of molasses and alienation. By that definition, these cookies are black fucking metal. Packed full of grim and evil spices, they will leave you feeling despondent and isolated within their stronghold of flavor.

(again) This N800 lark gets a lot better when you've got a Bluetooth keyboard! It does seem to have a slight tendency to autorepeat if you try to use it on your lap, but still, it seems pretty good. It's a cheap one, too - the iGo UltraSlim Stowaway.

The April Fool's jokes are coming thick and fast today. First there's the BBC's wonderful flying penguin gag on Breakfast (apparently spammed by email to every BBC employee), then there was the XKCD/Questionable Content/Dinosaur Comics switcheroo, then two or three stories on the Reg, Virgin/Google's Virgle Mars colonisation gag (check out the whole site, there are videos by Page/Brin and Branson and all sorts of goodies). Then there's YouTube's rickrolling of absolutely everyone, and finally a couple of regular newsletters have been co-opted into the prankage.

Oh, no, spoke too soon - there's just been a flurry of emails at work discussing a new direction for one of our current projects which would take a lot more work but be potentially very lucrative. The whole exchange got progressively dafter and dafter until we realised we'd all been had by the studio manager and chief designer. The bastards.

I can't believe anything any more - people now send me perfectly serious emails, or ask me what the time is, and my response is "O RLY?"