JANUARY 31

I SPOTTED this on the way to Borders this afternoon:

Here's a closer look:

It's on the front of a half-built house on Ocean. Well, I say half-built, it's been half-built for about four months now. But whoever wrote it deserves an award.

JANUARY 24

WELCOME to sunny Southern California...

It's still absolutely chucking it down and earlier tonight there was a tornado warning for Long Beach and Fullerton, although it was rescinded without incident. But the weather is certainly making driving more interesting than normal - I've had to start concentrating on the roads for one thing, and tonight I took the 710 home for the first time in ages as it's slightly less busy than the 605 and also slightly less waterlogged. But it still took me nearly an hour to get home (it's usually 30-40 mins) thanks to torrential rain and tons of spray.

JANUARY 23

AFTER last night's shenanigans with the boys in blue black, it was nice to have the day off. We ended up going to have a look around the Queen Mary, and here's a load of photos from our day out.

The submarine in the foreground is the Skorpion, a Soviet attack sub that's now a floating exhibit. The ropes at the top of the photo of the are a mooring line.

Our plan was to head to San Pedro next but it started drizzling, then raining, then absolutely pissing down so we headed home.

JANUARY 22

SO TONIGHT I leave the office at about 11pm (I was the last one out) and make my way to the car park so I can dive into the Mini and head back to the LBC. To get to the car park I have to go through another one and then cross the street. I reach the road, look left, start to cross, look right, see two police cars parked about 50 feet up with coppers walking around them and think, "Shit! Jaywalking! Bad!" So I quickly get back on the pavement and start walking to the pedestrian crossing. I'd got about 10 feet and just pulled the Chocolate out of my pocket to call Ev when one of the cops shouts, "Hey! You! Come here!"

My first thought was, "Oh crap, I'm going to be done for jaywalking". (Jaywalking is some quaint custom here that means you have to cross the road at proper crossings and not just throw yourself into traffic and hope for the best like in Britain.) Anyway, I turn around and start walking back towards the police. As I get closer he starts shining his torch in my eyes so I naturally put my hand up to stop him blinding me. When I get within a few feet he asks me where I've come from. I tell him from the News-Press building. That's when he tells me to face the wall.

So I turn to my right and face the wall of Billy's Diner, although bear in mind I'm about six feet from it - it's not like I'm forced up against it or anything. By this time another cop's wandered over to have a look. The first one tells me to put my hands on my head, which I do. Then he presses my hands down on my head and starts patting me down as if he's looking for a weapon. In case you're wondering what was going through my mind at this moment, it rhymes with "bot the duck?" The other one asks me where I've come from, so I tell him from the News-Press. He asks me where it is, so I tell him. Then the copper who's been patting me down spots my ID badge, takes a look, and lets me go. I ask what's going on and he just said they were looking for someone. To be fair he did thank me for my cooperation but it was an interesting end to a busy day.

JANUARY 21

EARLIER tonight I was having a look at to see if my photo of Southgate Tube Station (the circular building in the above pic) had made it onto Google Earth when I spotted something odd:

Lovely. And thanks to Dad for sending the following photos of the floods at home. Looks like the Hope & Anchor is buggered again.

JANUARY 20

AFTER the TV was delivered and set up yesterday we visited a wildlife preserve near Seal Beach. As usual I took the wrong lens (the 105mm instead of the 300mm) so instead of getting photos of the birds, here's some photos of the general area. We are planning on going back at some point so I'll make sure to take the right lens.

JANUARY 19

OUR new telly turned up today. The old one, pictured above shortly before it was taken to a remote field and put out of its misery, gave us almost four years of sterling service and will be fondly remembered for at least a couple of hours.

Here's the new one, a 42" plasma.

Oooo, there goes the rebel base.

Of course it's impossible for us to get anything new without the cats taking an interest. Iestyn tries to ward off a Star Destroyer...

...while Emric checks out Han Solo's breath. On the downside, Ev just spent half an hour on the phone to Circuit City trying to explain to some service centre muppet that we couldn't print the rebate form as the link on CC's website is wrong. We eventually found the form on another company's site, so hopefully we'll get $200 of the telly's price back. Result!

JANUARY 15

THIS is a Rolls-Royce? This thing is HIDEOUS!

AND we've only just seen in the New Year and already the shelves are filled with Valentine's Day tat.

JANUARY 14

TONIGHT we mourn the loss of our TV. After emitting several loud pops and giving off a smell of burning dust in the middle of Rock of Love 2, Ev switched it off and unplugged it. So we now have to find a new telly, preferably in the 50" range as our current dead one is 54".

What's especially annoying about this is that the TV played up last week to the point where we decided to get a new one. Ev placed an order for a 50" plasma set which we cancelled when ours started working again, only for it to bugger up tonight. On the upside at least I won't be assailed by sodding Oprah when I get home from work.

JANUARY 12

HERE'S some random pics I took today with my new 28-105mm lens:

JANUARY 8

BACK in late December I was desperately searching the shelves of the local Target for a Christmas pressie for Ev that didn't involve Harry Potter or Six Feet Under when I spotted this:

The annual puzzle of what to buy Ev was wiped from my mind by the stunning combination of a razor, an mp3 player and the magic word "free". In fact, I think this is the first time since I moved to America that I've seen the word "free" used without a disclaimer.

For a second or two I hesitated. Entranced by the box's promise of free batteries I stood staring as Christmas shoppers swarmed around me and this conversation went through my mind:

"THIS IS THE BEST THING EVER!!!!!"

"On the other hand it's not like I'll ever use it. I mean, all the songs on Sellout are also on my PC and there's no way this thing has better speakers. And I don't really need another razor."

"BUT IT'S ONLY SIX DOLLARS!!!!"

"Well, I don't know. I mean where am I going to put it... Six dollars? BUY IT YOU MORON!!"

This is what I got in the box. The black blocky thing in the centre is the dock.

The speakers fold out, the front part clips on and the lead goes into the iPod's headphone jack.

Here it is with Sellout connected. To be fair the sound's not that bad considering the size of the speakers and the build quality. For six dollars I could hardly expect more.

I did eventually get Ev a pressie, an 8-gig iPod Nano which she took back as she felt she wouldn't use it. I can't say I blame her - the Nanos are hugely overpriced and our cellphones hold almost as much music. At least she likes her Six Feet Under DVDs and Harry Potter audiobooks.

JANUARY 5

PERHAPS we should have taken Ev's Corolla on a shopping expedition to Trader Joe's, Ralphs, Target, Hallmark and the dry cleaners. At least the milk fitted behind my seat.

JANUARY 3

SOME of you might have experienced a slight malfunction in the smooth running of Planet Mut over the past few days. Basically, you might have seen the famous photo of Emric's poo appearing all over the site. First off I want to apologise for this and if you'll give me a min I'll explain what went wrong.

After the last MySpace hotlinking attack - when I had to rename and replace 11 different images some moron had flooded several forums with - I decided I'd had enough of having my photos and bandwidth stolen and started looking around for a way to prevent hotlinking. One method that came up over and over is changing the .htaccess file that sits on Planet Mut's server.

A .htaccess file is a small text file that can be altered to permit or deny access to parts of the server and the files stored on it. There is code you can add to the .htaccess file to stop hotlinking; it does this by only allowing permitted URLs to display images. On top of this there's a line that will detect hotlinking and replace the image being linked to with one of your choice (you can probably guess which image I chose).

Sounds straightforward, right? Wrong. I went through about six different hotlink-blocking scripts until I found one I wanted and then I tested it by phoning my cousin in London at 3.30am California time (11.30am UK time) to have him load random pages to make sure they displayed properly, which they did. "Great," I thought, "that's that sorted."

A couple of days later I got an email from a friend who wanted to know why Planet Mut was suddenly full of crap (or at least more than normal). "Er..." was my succinct reply; I didn't know why either. I asked him to delete his temporary files and reload the page, to no effect. He was using Internet Explorer 7, which I stopped using months ago, so I fired that up and checked. Everything was fine. But I started to worry as it occurred to me that just because one person in London was not experiencing an overload of feline crap didn't mean everyone else was. So tonight - or, more accurately, very early this morning - I checked my stats.

Oh shite. On the one hand I've had 214 unique visitors and 5,900 hits over the past two days thanks to StumbleUpon, but on the other hand the most-seen file is nohotlink.jpe - the photo of Emric's crap which the .htaccess file displays when someone tries to hotlink to my pics. Then I looked at the most-visited pages and noticed that for some reason they were linking to http://planetmut.com - no www. So I clicked them and was overloaded with pics of catshit (remember that every image is replaced, in other words if it doesn't look like a typewriter font, it's going to be turned into poo). Bugger, bugger, bugger.

What I guessed had happened was I'd got the .htaccess coding wrong so it was serving up a helping of Emric's Tootsie rolls no matter what requests were made to the server.

So off around the Interweb I went in an attempt to find an answer. I rewrote... er, I mean copied and pasted a slightly different script to go in my .htaccess file and have tested both http://www.planetmut.com and http://planetmut.com in Firefox (v2.0.0.11) and Internet Explorer 7 and they seem to be fine; the right photos are showing up, anyway.

So this is where you - my reader(s) - come in. I need people to test the site to make sure that it's now working properly. If you could check the pages under "Stuff", too, that would be great. If you do see catshit then try holding down CTRL and pressing F5 to reload the page direct from the server (although remember that the poo pics are supposed to be on the MySpace Sucks pages). If this doesn't work and you still see pages full of the offending photo, please, please email me so I know if this problem is sorted or if I have to find another solution. Thanks for your help.

JANUARY 2

THANKS to Jules for sending over this photo of Tiffany's Christmas window display on Bond Street in London.

JANUARY 1

HERE'S some photos I took of the New Year fireworks over the Queen Mary.