Far too much drink consumed today, especially for a light drinker. I’m sitting here in bed trying to follow the letters as they wander across the screen. As far as PCW is concerned, today was Christmas. We broke off at lunchtime and went to Soho Pizzeria to mark it (and Jason’s birthday). It was good to get out of the office as a group - it’s not something we do often enough, apart from going to the pub on the odd night now and then.

We went to the Nellie Dean to play pool, which was quite an eye-opener. Leo had told us that Laura was very good, but Clive turned out to be a real pro, and he thrashed us all. We stayed there until seven, only popping back to the office for a brief check of email, and then I was intending to go home, but Laura somehow managed to talk me into going to AKA for the Canon Christmas party.

The invite for this came through weeks ago and as soon as I read the words smart dress, no jeans I put mine in the bin, so I was fully expecting them to be snotty with me on the door. When we arrived, though, at what turned out to be a stylist but slightly up itself bar near a multi-storey car park the other side of Centre Point the turnout was still quite light. So, no problems there.

The concept was ‘Stars’, and a range of lookie-likies (read wannabes) were mincing around in the crowd. Edina and Patsy looked rather Lorraine Kelly and Gerry Hall, and when Patsy spoke she had Bubble’s voice, while Posh and Becs looked like a woman with sunglasses and a man who shaved his head. How these people make a living doing this I don’t know. The Anne Robinson wannabe looked like… well, a woman with ginger hair and glasses, actually. She looked more like the genuine article when we took her picture, but the real life equivalent was less impressive. Until I downloaded the pictures and you could clearly see where the ginger wig stopped and the black hair peeped out.

We all dropped out business cards into a bucket for the draw to win loads of Canon kit like film cameras and digital video cameras. I was quite shocked when my name was drawn out. I was half way through eating a chocolate penis (!) at the time (I haven’t a clue whose they were) and unpeeling one of the Christmas decorations. I went up to pick one of the silver envelopes to see what I’d won.

It turned out to be a WWF-branded polar bear. For a nasty couple of hours I assumed this meant it had something to do with that stupid American wrestling, but I’ve come round to the idea it’s probably actually the Worldwide Fund for Nature.

I left shortly after. The room was going quite wobbly. I wandered slowly back to Liverpool Street and bought water to sip slowly on the train home while I sent text messages to practically everyone in my phonebook. They were probably quite irritating. Fortunately I’d planned ahead and left the car at home this morning. I was regretting it - it had been so cold walking to the station on the way in that my ears practically froze - but at least it didn’t mean it had to spend the night locked in the car park.

I took a taxi back to the flat and was shocked at the price of transport in Chelmsford. It cost 15p just to go around a roundabout. Admittedly it was a big roundabout, with three lanes, but I thought it was a bit excessive.

Rather strangely, over 400 files went missing from my web site this morning, including the whole of the online diary. Fortunately I’d backed up the whole site yesterday morning, apropos of nothing, so I was able to restore everything but yesterday’s entry.

It’s a very strange thing, but this week I have had no problem at all getting up early in the morning. I was out of bed by seven yesterday - something of a record for me, and had showered, dressed, made and packed breakfast and drunk half a cup of tea by the time LBC called for the breakfast show trail. It all went rather well. I was talking about how Intel scientists are riding around London on the number 73 bus watching how we all work, how we use PDAs and mobile phones, and writing reports on this to help them build better products. Very conspiratorial - perhaps some listeners went to work wondering who was watching them after that.

When the Intel people came in to talk to us during the show they were very animated. Clearly very interested in their jobs, and they said they’d been observing the LBC people in the newsroom shouting at each other over the tops of their monitors. They said they’d been interested in the roof-slung TVs and all the data feeds coming into the travel screens but wouldn’t reveal what we were doing right or wrong.

I guess they have the ultimate job for busybodies. Loads of chances to spy on what everyone else is doing, and the excuse that they’re never really off-duty to fall back on.

The rest of the show seemed to absolutely fly by - there was so much going on. AOL has launched a new version of its online messenger, which seems to be getting through the ITN firewall - for the moment. So, we fired it up and ended up chatting to people all around the world. Two from America and two from Germany. One of the American listeners, Adam, actually turned out to be from London originally, and he sent over his phone number so we could call him.

Gail came in so we could do a chat about the best tech gifts for Christmas. Lots of good suggestions, but it’s surprising how difficult it is to get through ten ideas in 26 minutes, minus time for travel news, a couple of ads and the news at the top of the hour. We rushed the last few, but I think we probably got away with it. I’ll have a listen on the archive over the weekend to check.

Had a nasty shock mid-afternoon while trawling the net. I found a site that was almost a mirror image of my own. The more I dug around it, the more familiar it got. The same links, the same rollovers where the green words turn to black and get underlined, the same ruler bars, even the same scroll bars. I downloaded its cascading style sheet and compared it with my own. Letter for letter, colour for colour, it was identical. Surely no coincidence as it is such a complex bit of code. Even the class definitions were the same, and appeared in the same order.

I gave Roger Gann a call. He’s trained as a solitor so I wanted to see where he thought I stood. He said it amounted to copyright theft, so I sent the guy who put it up a snotty note:

Hi

I see that you visited my web site a few days ago and posted to my tag board, and that since the event your site has been rewritten to resemble my own. In doing so you have broken the laws of copyright and passing off.

Specifically, you are using a style sheet that is, character for character, identical to my own. That is my original code. This constitutes copyright theft.

Your layout is substantially similar to mine: your site uses identical rules, the same link-rollover states, identical scroll bars and a substantially similar format for your title bar and menu. This constitutes passing off.

I would like to give you the opportunity to change the design of your site so that it no longer reflects my own. I will review your site over the coming days and if substantial changes are not made within a week, I shall be forced to take action on this matter.

Best regards

Nik

I checked it from LBC a couple of hours later and it had disappeared, to be replaced with a note about the site being redesigned. There was a reply in my email:

I’m really sorry about this; I have removed my site while I work on another design. I think your site is really good but I didnt want to really ‘rip it off’ in this way, just a lot of people complained about the dark style of my old site.

Anyway, I will look forward to reading your article in PCW, and I hope I have sorted everything out to your satisfaction.

Regards

I was furious at the time. Absolutely livid, and I bent Gordon’s ear about it all the way from PCW to LBC. Will said it was flattery, which I guess is right, but it didn’t make me feel any better.

On a brighter note, I’ve now had three emails since tweaking my entry on FriendsReunited. Very interesting one yesterday from someone I knew from the year below me. He seems to remember all sorts of things about me that I can’t remember myself…

Just saw your entry in the friends reunited thing. thought I’d drop you a note. I think I got a tape of you doing an advert on Link FM I’m currently doing a contract for havering, looking after IT in schools… Including Campion. Am Married and currently living in Harrow. Hoping 2 move 2 Czech Republic, in a couple of years. I remember telling you that I fancied Lorraine Franks in St Helens playground at the fete one year. And you telling me about the computers at your dad’s work, that had had the ’sound chips removed’ as they were business machines. Funnily enough I saw XXXXXX a couple of days ago… She’s working in Emerson Park School now… Anyway time to go.

I haven’t got a clue who Lorraine Franks is, but then I’m terrible at names. I wonder if the second part of the sentence in front of it was supposed say that she was who he’s married. If so, he’ll be the second person I knew from school who’s got married to someone else we went to school with.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 7th, 2001 at 11:56 pm and is filed under Journal, Picture story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.