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I’ve added two new menu items to this site, both connected with my YouTube activites.
The first is a simple link to my YouTube channel, which has so far been a glaring omission here.
The second is a new category for YouTube news. This is where I will file posts of relevance to YouTube users, not posts of my YouTube videos. Since I do have a semi-official role on the YouTube help forums, I can sometimes give a little extra insight into certain matters. Not much extra insight, and I am not allowed to tell you about some of the coolest stuff, but some people might find a semi-insider’s view useful. (Everyone else will be bored to tears, of course.)
It’s been a while (again) since I’ve updated this blog, but as I have some time on my hands, I really should remake my vows to post here once or twice a week at least.
So, for the benefit of those three or four of you who read this site and don’t keep an eye on my YouTube channel, here’s a video of a recent trip to the town of Hammelburg. Which pretty much speaks for itself, so here it is.
It’s summer right now, and so I don’t have to go out teaching as much as normal. That’s not a bad thing, because it means I can keep an eye on the cats for the next few weeks as well as pay more attention to my site, but it does mean that this site runs the risk of turning into a cat blog.
And one of the things that’s truly astounding, even though you know you should have expected it, is just how fast Bonnie and Clyde are growing, and how their characters are developing. It’s interesting, because Clyde seems to be gaining in not just agility, but self-confidence. At first, it seemed that Bonnie would be the leader, but Clyde has been winning more of their wrestling matches recently (“recently” being a relative term, since they’ve been with us for less than a week) and putting her in her place.
That’s coincided with the rate they’ve grown, which is visible after even such a short time. They’ve both grown, but Clyde more than Bonnie, who is now noticeably bigger than her. They’re still very small: this morning I had both of them on my lap at the same time, but that won’t last.
They’re both worryingly intelligent, Bonnie more so than Clyde. I suppose it’s too early to say whether Bonnie is going to have the brains and Clyde the brawn, but the way things are going, nothing is going to stop them when they get older.
My wife pointed out to me that whenever we open or close a door, while Clyde is looking to see what happens at his eye level, Bonnie is very studiously watching the door handle. She is going to be one of those cats that can open doors. For his part, Clyde, on being shut out of the bathroom, will look for way in from the room next door.
At least Bonnie’s house training is coming along nicely, mostly due, we think, to Clyde being a good example. But she still hasn’t quite got the hang of burying her poo, which usually sits on top of the litter. That wouldn’t normally be a problem, but Bonnie’s poo stinks so much, we have to open a window. We haven’t had any more accidents, which is the main thing.
Which I suppose is as good a note as any to end this entry. For the record, both cats are asleep right now: Bonnie in the other room, Clyde on my dest (his favourite spot being next to the printer).
It has finally happened: we have acquired cats. They’ve been with us now for about two days (as I write this) and already it’s as if they’ve always been here.
They didn’t actually come from an animal shelter after all. They came to us more-or-less by happy accident: a colleague of my wife had a friend who had a cat which had just had a small litter. The one slight drawback as far as we were concerned was that they were born on a farm and more used to a barn than a house. In the event, the owner had realised she’d need to give some of them away as pets, and so made sure they had plenty of human contact (the first four weeks are crucial) and were at least partly house-trained. We got them at about 8 or 9 weeks of age, about the youngest you should ideally adopt cats; that way we know they should have got the hang of personal hygiene, but haven’t got too used to the idea of unlimited freedom.
There were three in the litter: we took the two that usually played together, while the third was more attached to the mother. At the moment, they’re up here with me: our house has two floors (not counting the cellar), the upper floor containing my office and some currently unusued rooms (one will eventually be converted into a classroom). This is ideal, because for their first few weeks we don’t want them to run around the whole house: the stairs are really nasty, and we have to make sure they can use a litter tray. We can shut the door to prevent them getting onto the stairs but still give them the run of most of the upper floor.
It’s just as well, because we discovered that the female, whom I have called Bonnie, hadn’t quite worked out that a litter tray can be for pee as well as for poo. They’d also, it seemed, never had anything special to sleep in, so when my wife brought in a small cardboard box with a fluffy blanket, it was a matter of three minutes before the blanket was impregnated with the odour of eau de Bonnie. After a similar accident involving another blanket was narrowly averted (and a surprised Bonnie plonked unceremoniously in the litter tray), we think she may be getting the idea. Hope springs eternal (although we hope that Bonnie’s pee doesn’t).
Otherwise they’re no problem, except for getting up to the kind of mischief kittens always get up to (they’re only allowed in my office if I’m in it, due to the large number of chewable cables). They weren’t even fazed by the car journey: they wore expressions of puzzled intrigue. On arrival here, they took a few minutes to pluck up the courage to leave their carrier, inspected the room and went to sleep. Since then it’s been one long marathon of play alternating with snooze.
Bonnie seems to be initially the bolder of the two and tends to be the first to investigate, but her brother Clyde is sometimes the first to experimentally bat something new with his paw. The ping-pong ball, which they were introduced to today, seems to have been an exception: Bonnie was immediately taken with it, chasing it all over, while Clyde clearly wanted to inspect it first before deciding whether it was safe. Bonnie is also a great softie, and will even start purring if she thinks you may be about to pet her; Clyde is a little more reticent, takes longer to trust people, and often doesn’t want to be petted at all — but when he wants attention, he’ll demand it with a certain vehemence.
The plan is that for a few weeks, they’ll stay up here, with space to run around, some ancient chairs and mattresses they’re allowed to chew and claw to pieces, and various toys, scratching posts and so on. Once we think their perception of depth and sense of balance have improved to the point where they won’t tumble down a marble staircase, we’ll introduce them to the rest of the house. The great outdoors will have to wait until they’ve been neutered, so until then it’s a question of making sure they don’t get bored (that’s when they start shredding the wallpaper).
The attached video was made yesterday. The old sack, which we brought from the farm to ease their transition (probably unnecessarily in the event, as they took to their new home like ducks to water) has been replaced by a clean one we had hanging around.
Recently, YouTube got into a spot of trouble with a security flaw, which they had to fix in a hurry. Without getting too technical, somebody discovered a way of inserting HTML in video comments, causing all sorts of mayhem.
Because the exploit involved typing <script> in the comment, part of the brute-force fix the powers that be have forced upon innocent users simply edits out any occurrance of the word “script”.
It’s similar to the way a profanity filter works, except that these filters normally replace the offending string with a row of asterisks. YouTube has decided simply to make it vanish, as if it had never been typed.
Of course, the problem is that the word “script” occurs in ordinary English, so a comment like “Was the script difficult to write?” becomes the unintelligible “Was the difficult to write?” which allows much to the imagination, to the enrichment of all.
It gets better. Not only is the word itself filtered out, but any occurrance of the sequence of characters embedded within a longer word is similarly edited. People often refer in their comments to the video description, which must now be called a “video deion”.
This is a variant on what is known as the Scunthorpe problem after a town in England whose name regularly falls foul of profanity filters. It contains, you see, an obscenity, which most people are completely unaware of until it is pointed out to them by obliging profanity filters which render the name as “S****horpe”.
How much more entertaining it would be if profanity filters worked on the same principle as the YouTube security patch. Because then the name would be “Shorpe”, which doesn’t shove the presence of foul language in your face, and, as an extra bonus, has readers engaged in a fruitless search of Google Maps for the place in question (I’ve checked: the nearest match is Thorpe).
There are so many other words that inadvertantly include naughty words, and instead of being defaced by the classic — sorry, “clic” — asterisks, we could make entirely new words and abbreviate our language in the process (making books a tiny bit shorter and thus saving paper and other valuable resources).
It would be great. City-dwellers could live in skysers, people wanting to know the time would simply glance at their wrisches, and borderline alcoholics could be discouraged from drinking by the knowledge that rum is made from fermented moles. I don’t know why nobody thought of this sooner.