Beki's blog

What is your favorite scent or smell and why? 
Submitted by Nebraska Plates.

My favourite scent is Cartier's 'Declaration'. I know it was originally designed to be a man's fragrance, but it makes my nose happy. I could sit and sniff it all day long. A friend of mine gave me a load of perfume samples as a Christmas present one year and that was in amongst them. I put it on and felt my mood lift, such a sensational scent.

My favourite smell is breakfast cooking; fresh made coffee, fresh bread, eggs bacon and sausages in a pan.

What are some things that are worth (and not worth) spending money on? 
Submitted by pinejar.

I object to spending money on anything that's designed to be thrown away, flushed away, sprayed into the air and dissipated or left to be smelly. Planned obsolescence gone wild trying to convince us we need to spend more money on the best softest toilet paper, the strongest refuse sacks, things to make our homes smell artificially sweet or things to make the dirty job of cleaning more convenient. If a room smells bad, then I open a window. If something needs to be cleaned I get the hot soapy water and apply elbow grease; here's a strange fact for you. Heat kills germs. Heat in fact will kill as many germs as disinfectant will, making the disinfectant which kills all but the nastiest bugs both redundant and dangerous. We live in a throw away society, surrounded by the urge to waste resources in order to line the pockets of fat cat companies.

I also object to spending money on our over taxed road system. I am taxed every which way but Christmas every time I turn the key in the ignition of my (old and battered) car. I pay to tax the car direct, I am taxed through the nose every time I refuel with diesel prices hitting the magic £1 a litre here, I am taxed again on every spare part I must buy to maintain my vehicle and I am taxed again on the labour to fit those spare parts. Living where I do a car is not a luxury, it is a necessity. I could not survive here without my own private transport, and yet I am subsidising those two car families who run little Chelsea-Jade the mile to school in gas guzzling 4X4 luxury and then run to the bottle bank to recycle the weekend's Pino Grigio bottles and believe themselves to be green.

Things which I believe are worth spending money on? Underwear and perfume. Both should be the best quality one can afford, but should be just enough to do the job required and no more when in use. Does that make me a hypocrite? No; buying the best quality means that less goes further. I don't need to drown in Cartier Declaration for the subtle scent to become a trademark, and my underwear lasts longer and looks better than cheap tat.

What was the best football highlight of the past week?

Football? Not I; I'm a rugby fan. The rugby highlight of my last week was being given an "All Blacks" shirt which had originally been stripped from an All Blacks prop forward, but that's not why I love the shirt. I love the shirt because of who gave me it.

When I've enough happening in my life to make my posts interesting I don't have enough time to update. Ironic isn't it?

About a month back I packed the daughter and headed up to Oban for West Highland Week, meeting friends up there who were part of the committee and running out in their little boat to help with race management. We had a fabulous time, the motion of a small boat in the sound of Mull, gorgeous scenery that brings back happy memories, good company, fun things to do, new friends and old, gentle flirtation and taking photographs of pretty boats.

I promised friends that I'd let them have pictures of the week - I have loads as you can probably imagine, put someone with an eye for a picture in the middle of a pretty scene and even though I only had my mobile phone some of these came out pretty well.

Digging back though old comments to my livejournal while deleting 500 odd notifications I stumbled across this link provided by one of my "geek team". I remember now the frantic coding, the dropping of pages to allow the site to go live with reasonable (if temporary) content. The scramble when the .php code had to be rewritten as the site went live, and then the sigh of relief when it was all over. Followed by two straight days of tech support when people couldn't get the hang of logging in on the new format. I remember eating snatched meals at my desk for three months straight, letting the ME symptoms rule my world for everything other than just sitting in this seat coding content,  working full time on a volunteer project for which I get nothing more than a warm feeling. There are I think only three people in this world, perhaps four, who know the wo/man hours that went into that project.

Now I look at the site and I know that technically I have got it as good as I can get it (without my geek team it would never have happened) and yet it still isn't good enough and never will be. Why? Because I can't do the last bit; for that I have to rely on everyone else. It's lacking content. Index still looks as it did when the site went live and it was never meant to look that way for longer than a fortnight, but without input from other volunteer specialists it'll stay looking that way.

As the article says it's not really that important anyway, one more screen in the millions. Accessed by about 1000 people a month. It's the author's last page which rings true for me: "the reward is: I did a thing, and I doubt I'll ever do anything like it again. One, two, three: I will never get enough praise; of course I failed; and what I did was not particularly important. The best thing to hope for is that in time and with much more effort the work will become transparent to its users, that it will be taken for granted. That's life with websites." I really couldn't have put it better myself.

Would you sign a prenuptial agreement? Why or why not?
Submitted by Lantastic.

Yes. Without a doubt. Absolutely 100% definitely yes. Assuming that you could produce a prenup that was totally watertight under UK law. I've been married twice, both times I thought it would be forever and it wasn't, so having been both bitten and burned I'm that bit more careful. I'd never dispute a prenup either. Once I've given my word I will keep it to the very best of my ability. My bottom line is that if a relationship fails I'd like to walk away with exactly what I walked in with, no more, no less. To be able to part as lovers and stay friends means that I have to be fair; I don't care if the other person is being fair or not. In my experience as long as I'm fair the other person will come round in the end. 

Last time I googled this I came up empty but this time I hit a winner, three sites all answering my question. I have a set of cushions with mangled almost-Latin on them. I knew it wasn't ipsum I was looking at because I know ipsum well enough to recognise it. But I still couldn't trace the source of what had to be a quotation from somewhere even with the bad grammar. Turns out the designer took phrases from Horace's The Art of Poetry and chopped them, they should read;

“Ut ridentibus adrident, ita flentibus adflent
humani vultus.Si vis me flere, dolendum est
primum ipsi tibi: tum tua me infortunia laedent,
Telephe vel Peleu; male si mandata loqueris,
aut dormitabo aut ridebo.”

“With those that smile, our face in smiles appears;
With those that weep, we burst into tears.
If you wish me to weep, you yourself must first feel grief.
So I shall feel your sorrows as if they were my own,
O Peleus or Telephus!
But if your language isn't fit, I'll sleep, or smile”.

In other news I have another car.

Just general opinion as someone who does graphic design in a small way; What on earth were they thinking? It really does look like a graphic representation of an act indecent in public. Yes I cleaned that up and worded it carefully.

If you're UK based it might be worth hitting the BBC website vote page and registering a vote for a possible alternative. If you're not UK based the link is still worth a click so you get to see what I'm semi-ranting about. What really annoys me is how much the designer(s) were probably paid to come up with something that obviously wasn't looked at properly or market tested at all.

Talking to family on Saturday night I realised that I need to accept that I have grown up, accept that my religious beliefs are not the same as they were even 5 years ago. The hat no longer fits; it's time to retire it.

You'd think that a book on HTML/CSS would be a reasonably safe way to spend time. Dry geekery for the purposes of bringing myself up to date before finishing yet another major volunteer project. Taking my mind off yet more personal rubbish to lurch from in the form of the head on collision in the car last week by filling my head with code seems reasonably sane. But no; there hidden in example texts were a half-dozen Shakespeare sonnets. The text jumps out and bites me, bruised heart and battered ego slapped about again. I ought to just give up and call the men in white coats. I seem to have this irrational urge to have reality make sense and of course we all know it never will. The other problem is of course that the Men In White Coats have this place on a list. They say they won't come back, "not after last time".

I think I'll just go play with the fairies at the bottom of the garden instead.