Manchester Pride

I promised to blog a bit about Manc Pride, so here goes.

Manchester Pride was very very busy.

The end.

Okay... a little more. We set off for Manchester on Saturday Lunchtime. We queued through the roadworks on the M6. We queued in the traffic jam snaking it's way through the city centre. We queued to turn our tickets into wrist-bands to get into the cordoned-off areas of pride. We queued to get down a heaving Canal Street. We queued to buy drinks. We wandered around and saw some of the sights until we got bored and headed back to the hotel to relax before heading out again for the evening.

The evening was like the day, but with more queuing.

It was too busy. It was about 45 minutes before I managed to get a drink, in the upstairs bar of AXN, which for some reason seemed to have decided it was going to be a quiet night and only put on 2 bar staff. Everywhere else was the same. All the outdoor entertainment stopped at 11pm, which caused the bars to fill up with even more people looking for entertainment.

Eventually we found sanctuary on the boat-bar outside Eden, and the evening started to look up. After a few drinks and a relaxing time there we elected to head back to the hotel bar, where drinks weren't cheap but were rapidly forthcoming. It was Summer's first night out en-femme, and her first experience of the GLBT community, which was a bit of a shame, as it left her and her wife with the impression that "gay nightlife = queuing". But they say they had fun!

We headed back into the gay pride area on Sunday and had a much nicer time. Well, apart from the moment Jess and I suddenly shot 200 foot into the air suspended only by two thin bits of elastic...

Are the stars out tonight?

Ooh, this looks like it could do for Astronomy what Google Earth does for Geography: Stellarium. If like me you've got an amateur appreciation of the night sky, I highly recommend downloading this free application, available for PC, Mac and Linux/Unix.

I don't work for Google

I'm a bit of a Google evangelist at work. Every time Google comes out with a new insanely cool toy I'm usually the first to say "look at this guys!", and quite often I've pointed people to Google's superior tools. I mean, who in their right mind uses Mapquest when there's Google Maps?

So recently it's become a running joke in the office that "Simon works for Google", which I've strenuously denied but played along with good naturedly.

What no-one in my office knows is that I have this site, and on this site I have Google Adsense ads, which earn me revenue. I got my monthly cheque in the post today, and I couldn't resist having this little exchange with one of my colleagues just before I walked out of the door...

"Mark... you know you said I should work for Google?"

"Yeah?"

"Take a look at this..."

I flashed him the cheque, clearly printed with my name and the Google logo.

"Crikey! What's that for!?"

"Services rendered," I said smiling, as I walked out the door.

That was fun! :-)

Why doesn't everyone have a domain?

I mean, how can people hold their head up high in this digital age when they don't even have their own domain name? I'm not suggesting that everyone should have their own website, it's a well known fact that only transvestites and kitten owners are required by law to have a website. No, what I'm talking about is a domain name that you can call your own for emails etc, and follows you around the internet like your own textual avatar.

So many people seem to make do with being "jenny_tv_2005@yahoo.com" or "yetanotherdavesmith@hotmail.com" when they could be "me@princessjenny.co.uk" or "dave@thesmithmeister.me.uk", and it costs a pittance!

For 3 pounds a year people like UKReg will sell you a nice .me.uk or .co.uk domain name and even give you free mail forwarding to any other email account.

If you're not sure what that means, take me as an example:

I own beckysweb.co.uk, but all of the emails that are sent to anything@beckysweb.co.uk are automatically forwarded to my gmail account. Because I own the whole beckysweb domain name (for 3 quid a year, remember!) I also effectively own all of the email addresses at that domain. This is handy in itself, I can give different people different email addresses and they'll still all get back to me. British Telecom think my email address is btjunk@beckysweb.co.uk. That way if they ever decide to sell on my email address to another person, and I start getting junk mail from that person, I'll know that BT sold them my address because it because the email will have been sent to "BTjunk". Clever eh?

Gmail has recently been cleverly updated to allow you to send on behalf of another address too. So even though I use Gmail as my email client, which has a address like boring@gmail.com, all my sent mail appears to come from beckysweb.co.uk. Even more cleverer huh?

I've also bought a domain for my boy email, at 3 pounds a year it seemed mad not to buy mysurname.me.uk. And that's also set to pump itself at my standard Gmail account. So all of my mail turns up in one place. Gmail will even let me choose which email address I want each outgoing mail to appear to come from. Granted, I have to be careful not to pick the wrong one sometimes! But I enjoy the convenience of collecting all my mail from one web-based location, and Gmail even lets you collect mail via POP, which means I can collect my mail via most any desktop mail client.

Gmail is the best free mail account by far at the moment, in my opinion. The only trouble is that you can still only get in via invitation from an existing gmail user, which used to be like hens teeth. But these days all existing Gmail users have invites coming out the wazoo, so if you'd like one just email me.

"But Becky," I hear you whine, "I don't want to stop using my existing email account! I like it! And what if Gmail gets crappy, won't you be stuck?"

Ah no, my dear, sweet, simple reader. The beauty of email forwarding is that if I get fed up with Gmail I can simply re-direct it elsewhere. So tomorrow beckysweb.co.uk might point somewhere completely different. It's just that at the moment I'm finding gmail a perfect match to my email needs.

As well as free email forwarding, UKreg also offers free web forwarding. So that if you do have a website or blog hosted on blogspot or whatever, you can point a your friendly domain name at it. It sounds a lot better if you say to people at parties "hey, check out my website, it's at www.SteveRocksBigTime.co.uk" rather than "hey, check out my website, it's at steverocks.server125.poxywebhosting.net.cz".

Oooh, I'm ranting about nerdy net stuff on my blog! I really need to admit defeat, buy a kitten and take pictures of it.

And before you ask, no I don't work for UKreg. I don't work for Google either... but that's a different story.

Preamble thin pretense for well-worn Shakespeare joke

The BBC have started advertising their autumn season with some strikingly colourful teaser trailers. In the trailers they've given
each clip a similar saturated look, so much so that at first I didn't realise that they were montages of several different dramas.

I don't know about you, but I'm really looking forward to seeing Johnny Vegas's bottom.

My quest for the perfect white eyeshadow

I promised to do some retrospective blogging once I got back and settled, so I thought I'd start with this little tale from my shopping trip on Friday.

I've talked before about my cosmetics fetish, and my favorite part of making up is the eyes. The eyes are the most expressive area of the face, and good eye makeup can really enhance this. I find this is the area where I can be the most creative, and I love seeing the ways that other girls do their eye makeup, particularly recently Miss K - those wide oriental eyes, what a great canvas to work on!

I like to mess about with different colour combinations and styles although to be honest I tend to stick to one or two "looks". I use a technique borrowed from the "drag" end of the spectrum, but toned down to be a bit more natural, but still dramatic and OTT compared to a "regular" girl's.

I like using white or gold just inside the brow to lift the brow line, blending it with a strong colour over the socket and eyelid, and a dark colour in the outside corner of the eye extending out a little way to widen and add drama the eye. I've got a horde of great strong eyeshadow colours, but I always had trouble finding a really good pure white eyeshadow. The Boots-counter jobs always seemed too silvery, or too pale, or just terrible at staying put.

So while I was in Birmingham Selfridges on Friday I thought I'd make a visit to their MAC counter. I love MAC stuff, as a tranny it presses all the right buttons. It's dramatic, well made, reassuringly expensive and they use Ru Paul as a spokesmodel, what more could a tranny want?!

The counter in Selfridges was very busy, but I knew there was a proper MAC shop somewhere outside the Bullring and in Birmingham town centre. After a bit of wandering about I found it in a side street. Like an up-market candy store they had all their 100+ eyeshadow colours laid out as samples to try... including 3 different kinds of white and one that was absolutely perfect. A white frost that went on sheer but was intensely white and blended well. Only one problem, they had none in stock!

It's times like this I wish there was some kind of tranny licence. These days I have no qualms about asking shop assistants about girly stuff (using the "my money's just as good as anyone else's" defence), it's just sometimes I wish they knew I was actually quite a dedicated tranny (albeit currently in male mode) who actually knew what he was talking about and was appreciative and aware of the different products on offer. Sometimes I worry that shop assistants think "oh it's just a tranny, I'll fob him off with anything". Maybe that's just paranoia.

Actually the assistant in MAC (who are supposedly more T-friendly than many) turned out to be quite helpful, and when I asked if she knew if the busy Selfridges counter would have it she offered to ring up and ask for me. Yes please!

They didn't. Would I like it if I rang the Harvey Nicholls counter?

Hang on... there are three MAC outlets in Birmingham?

Apparently so... and the third one did have the eyeshadow I was after.

Harvey Nicks is in a new-ish shopping centre in Birmingham called the Mailbox. It was the far side of the town centre from where I was... but worth the trek!

Thirty minutes later I was the proud owner of "White Frost"... the Perfect White Eyeshadow.

And the first person to get to try it was Sophie. During a vodka-fuelled session later that evening she asked (mad drunken fool!) to see what a "Becky" makeover would look like on her.

Oh... I also bought a dark blue eyeshadow, and a brown blusher cos I was feeling flush. The assistant reminded me that if you bring back six MAC empties they give you a free item. But judging by the fact that I've been using another MAC blusher for about 18 months and it's such high quality that it's gone down in level by about half a nanometre... I don't think I'll be having any empties any time soon!

Um... kind of a dull long-winded post about makeup. Sorry about that! I told you I was obsessed! Perhaps maybe some people appreciated the insight into makeup techniques, I can but hope.

Well, that's Friday restrospectively blogged... I'll get round to blogging the rest of the weekend eventually!

The weekend Hamster Sudoku really took off

I've just got home after 3 days away at Manchester Pride and environs, and I was planning to write about that tonight. Only to find that while I've been away my little project "Flickr Sudoku" is being talked about all over the internet!

It started on Friday when it got an out-of-the-blue mention by Tom Coates on plasticbag.org, who appears to have found the link via Siobhan. He described it as "one of the best uses I've seen for the [flickr] API yet".

I am so not worthy!

From there it then started popping up on all kinds of blogs, so much so that at one point it was even listed on del.icio.us's most popular page, which generated a load of traffic. At the time of writing it was stull number 8 on Daypop's top 40 of currently popular blog topics in the world. Pretty damn groovy!

Looking at my traffic logs the some of most popular tags to make puzzles from are...

• Hamster - it's the default setting for the game, and I think that the name "Hamster Sudoku" has kinda stuck as it's official title now!
  
  
• Cat and Kitten - proving that it must be the blog community visiting.
  
  
• Boobs - proving that my visitor demographic hasn't entirely changed after all.

So sorry about this rather self-congratulatory posting but I'm filled with a pretty rare warm glow from having done something that's not just of interest to people in or around the tranny scene, but appears to have busted out into the blogosphere proper. People are linking to my site because apparently I did something cool, and quite rightly the tranny thing is not an issue¹ at all.

Yay me!

¹Apart a rather sweet comment on the 4rthur links page: "Isn't Becky a clever um.. girl?"

At Jessica's

I'm still "on the road" as it were, staying at Jessica's apartment tonight after a two-day stint at Manchester Pride. It was a fun weekend, with a few negatives but mainly positives, I'll post a full report when I get back home. Also expect full details of "My Quest for the Perfect White Eyeshadow", "Summer's First Night Out", and "Me and Jessica Get Fired From a Catapult".

To answer the question from a couple of days ago about my definition "minor" shopping spree. Let me put it this way...

A second tornado hit Birmingham on Friday. Damage was extensive but localised to TK Maxx¹, Claire's Accessories², and the M.A.C. counter in Harvey Nicks³.

If you'd like to contribute to the Becky's Cashflow Emergency Relief Fund, please click on an advert on this page!

¹"£10 for a top? You can't afford not to buy 4!"
²"Ooooh... shiny things!!" Transvestite demonstrates the equivalent in taste and buying power of a whole classroom of 10 year old girls.
³"Ah, yes it it a little expensive Sir, perhaps Sir would like details of our indentured servitude plan?"

Shopmoblog

Bit of a minor shopping frenzy in TKmaxx, not done this in ages! Winter stuff is in already. The sad news is Bagpuss has apparently met a sticky end and been recycled as a scarf.

I need a long weekend

I've been wearing clear nail strengthening varnish for the last few days, carefully buffed so that it didn't look too shiny. Tonight I decided to take it off. So I loaded up a cotton ball with nail varnish remover and started to work.

The stuff seemed amazingly hard to shift. It just didn't want to come off! Maybe the buffing had somehow chemically bonded it with my nail??

After nearly five minutes of soaking and picking at the edges, I realised that instead of using a bottle of this... I was using a bottle of this.

Um... it doesn't remove nail varnish.

Pride comes before... another Pride.

After last weekend's outing to "Pride Lite" in Cambridge, I'm getting all set for more fun this weekend at the rather larger Manchester Pride.

I'm taking the day off tomorrow to shop for a few essentials (and a lot of non-essentials) before completing the first leg of the journey¹. So the blog will probably be neglected for a bit.

When I get back I promise to regale you with tales of the weekend. Including the first ever appearance by genuine tranny asylum seeker, Summer! :-)

¹ To Sophie's place. British Airways use Heathrow as a hub, British trannies use a third-floor flat in Derby.

PG12 Posting (Contains typefaces that may be disturbing for sensitive designers)

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the true horror that is...

A question...

When you change CSS to use only Comic Sans as part of National Comic Sans Day, can it still legitimately be called a Cascading Style Sheet?

I think that poor old Comic Sans has spent enough time as the typeface that everyone loves to hate, so I'm going to work on a font to take it's place as the Worst Font Ever.

It will take me a few minutes...

Meanwhile some light music.

Keep Transvestism for Transvestites!

Over the last few months I’ve noticed an alarming trend. A lot of people, including some of my non-tranny friends, are turning tranny. Completely “normal” people with no previous transvestite tendencies are crossing over the borders to transvestism. Some claim they are unhappy and oppressed in their orientations of origin, but many appear to be lured by our nicer clothes, improved job prospects, better parties, and higher educational standards.

Now, I’m not given to prejudice, but I do feel, as a natural-born transvestite, that this influx of new-comers is leading to an inevitable watering down and fragmentation of the tranny community. Many of them don’t even have a concept of the values and traditions that transvestites hold dear, such as guilt, purging, and self-delusion. Also, many of them show no desire to learn our language or customs. For example, there are already so-called transvestites living the lifestyle today that have never been to the Way Out Club!

So I say it’s time to take a stand against this influx of Jenni-Come-Latelys! It’s time to say enough is enough! It’s time to make it clear to them that we’ve Done Our Bit and that Transvestism is Full.

Of course, I’m not proposing a total ban on new transvestites. Many people have a legitimate claim to be a transvestite, and the community can gain from the skills they would bring. I’m just suggesting there should be stricter rules for the people we allow in from now on:

1. Every alternative lifestyle (including transvestism) should only have to accept a quota of straight individuals each year. Straight people seeking refuge should be allocated fairly amongst the non-straight communities. I am convinced that many straight refugees would be just as happy becoming (for example) a lesbian, given the right opportunities. It’s only the perceived attraction of transvestism from afar that means we’ve taken an unfairly large share of the load in the past.


2. People who set out to reach transvestite status should be stopped and processed at the first alternative lifestyle that they reach. For example, a person who has arrived at “a little bit, you know, poofy” on their way to transvestism should be held there until the proper tests are completed to prove they have legitimate grounds for leaving “straight”.


3. Once people have proved that they have genuine need to become a transvestite, there should be a compulsory re-education program to integrate them fully into the community. This should incorporate a minimum 10-year closeting period, including at least 4 purge cycles. Only once the necessary levels of guilt have been instilled in the individual should they be allowed full transvestite status.


4. To maintain the transvestite economy at grass-roots level, during the first 5 years all new transvestites should be required to buy all their clothes at Transformations.

This may sound a little harsh, but I believe that allowing just anyone to become a transvestite is removing our exclusivity and destroying the one thing that makes transvestism an attractive prospect in the first place. So, please join me in my fight to keep transvestism for transvestites, and display the poster below in your window, at your work-place, or on your web site.

Thank you and good night.

Farewell, Dr. Moog

The BBC have reported that one of the fathers of electronic music, Dr Robert Moog, has died at the age of 71.

I grew up listening to music that Dr Moog helped create. My dad was a big fan of artists such as Wendy Carlos and Tomita, and I kind of inherited his interest.

Tomita used custom-made moog synths, and he made a point of listing all of the weird and wonderful technology that he used to make his sounds. I used to love reading the album sleeves as a kid. In fact, the whole Moog sound it redolent of the seventies for me. It takes me back to a time when computer technology was just starting to become part of every day life, but was still exciting and "sexy", and I listened to "Switched on Bach" while pouring over my dad's OMNI magazines. (I used to love that mag, does anyone else remember it?)

I still listen to my "Best of Tomita" CD from time to time, not so much because it's good music (it IS, despite what Sophie and Jessica might tell you), but mainly because it reminds me of my childhood.

Walter/Wendy

Thinking of "Switched on Bach" reminded me that it's musician, Wendy Carlos, was probably the first transgendered person I ever knew about.

As Walter Carlos, he made his name as a pioneer of electronic music, producing (among other things) the soundtrack to "A Clockwork Orange". After SRS in 1972, she went on to create a lot more work under the name Wendy Carlos, including the soundtrack to the film "Tron".

I remember my Dad had a collection of Carlos albums and I noticed one day that the name changed from "Walter" to "Wendy" on the later albums. I asked one of my parents about it and they explained that Walter had had a sex-change and was now a woman. I can't remember the exact conversation, of course, but I distinctly remember thinking "you can do that?" and finding the whole concept intriguing.

Wendy is still around today, and is a true polymath, working in all kinds of creative and scientific fields. She's done some fascinating work on colour theory, for example.

The 'Rocky' road to femininity

It's not very often that a movie is released that's based on the real life story of a transvestite. When that film's about a kick boxing transvestite, and is winning awards, it's got to be something special.

Thai film's transvestite glove story

The BBC article described Nong Toom as a transvestite, but as she had a sex change in 1999 it's probably more accurate to call her a transsexual. Then again, I was in the ring with her... I'd call her anything she told me to!

T-shirt

This t-shirt reminded both Jane and me of someone. Any guesses? :-)

At the picnic

This little girl found a patch of mud at the festival and sat down to play with her pig.

If you go down to the woods today...

Yesterday the bears had their picnic. As well as the drag queens, lesbians, queers, a few dozen trannies (including Yours Truly), and a mixture of bemused/curious straight folk.

It was the 3rd annual Pink Picnic in Cambridge and I thought I'd go along and give it a try. And as Jane lived not far away I thought I'd invite her along too. :)

The clouds threatened rain but apart from a few spots it was thankfully dry. The even was held on the grounds of Cherry Hinton hall. It's East Anglia's biggest event of it's kind, with trading stalls, music stages, cabaret tents and various food vendors, all with the aim of fun and awareness of all things "Pink".

As it was Jane's first real experience of the real (rather than online) tranny scene it was nice to see a good representation of trannies there. A lot of whom it turned out I knew, just more proof of the relative smallness of the tranny community.

For a free event, it was pretty good, if a little strangely conceived in places. The location was almost totally un-signposted in Cambridge, making it really difficult to find if you didn't know the area. All of the trader stands seemed to be hippy overspill from glisten, there were a couple of token "gay" stalls selling garish rainbow bangles and slogan t-shirts, but mainly it was an assortment of new-age crystal and joss-stick vendors, which seemed a bit out-of-place.

After seeing a very good drag act in the cabaret tent, and some indifferent rock on the main stage, we de-camped along with a fair number of other festival-goers to the Bird in Hand, which was laying on evening entertainment, which turned out to be quite good. I had a really fun time, and I think Jane enjoyed herself too!

Cambridge, in it's own quiet way, is managing to create it's own yearly "pride", which can only be a good thing.

Just Jessica

It would be remiss of me not to mention that my friend Jessica has re-vamped her website and added a new blog. It's now looking really shiny. Go looky!

I helped her with it a lot. I told her the buttons should look different. She'd be nothing without me.

Closure

I wrote this letter while I was still fuming at FastHosts for cocking up my website, I've calmed down a bit now and decided that it's probably not worth the hassle to send it. But I need closure, and Fasthosts deserve a bit of bad publicity for messing me about, so I'm putting it here instead.

Dear Sir or Madam,

I am writing to complain about the mishandling of my hosting account and poor quality customer service I received from your company on 16 August 2005.

On the morning of that day I noticed that my web site was reporting lots of errors apparently caused by missing files, and when I looked on the site I noticed that a lot of files were missing from the file structure. I phoned your technical support department and was informed that the only way this could have occurred was that someone (or something) had accessed my site via FTP and deleted the files. I was offered no other option as to the cause and as I had no proof that this had not happened I was left with no option but to investigate further myself. The call lasted no more than a couple of minutes.

I was worried that someone had hacked into my account so I immediately changed my FTP password, and then I manually re-uploaded all of my website content from a backup. I then noticed that there were other problems. The ODBC databases and the ASP.NET content I was using was no longer working.

Also, I received emails from site visitors saying that the site was still showing as not available at their location, even though I was able to see it. After a lot more investigation I realised that my website had been moved to a whole new server on the Fasthosts system, from FASTHOSTS74 to FASTHOSTS15. External users were unable to access my site as the I.P. of the site had also changed, and this change had yet to propagate across the DNS servers.

I then investigated further in the Fasthosts control panel and found that my ODBC connection settings had been deleted and my ASP.NET service appeared to have been turned off. I contacted technical support again, and after some investigation they confirmed that my site had indeed been moved to a different server due to “resource issues”. I was told that this move should have been seamless and all my relevant data and settings should have been transferred to the new server. In this case it had not happened, and the support representative arranged to make my site content from the old server available to me in a private folder on my new server. He also agreed to turn on ASP.NET again.

Later in the evening I phoned up a third time as my ASP.NET service still seemed to be out of action. Shortly after that it was turned on and I my site was returned to normal.

I understand the necessity to move content from one server to another from time to time, and that I am not paying for a totally resilient service. This is not the nature of my complaint. I do feel however that your company failed in several areas on this occasion:

• If the work to move my site was planned by your engineers, I should have been informed before the work so that I could have expected the DNS problems, etc. If the work was unforeseen, an email shortly after it had occurred would have been appreciated.
  
  
• When I phoned technical support initially, I should not have been “fobbed off” with the answer that someone had deleted my files via FTP. The support engineer should have investigated a little further and seen that my site had moved and that there could be issues arising from that.
  
  
• When the engineer(s) moved my content to the new server they apparently failed to copy all my data. They also failed to copy across my ODBC settings, and failed to re-enable my ASP.NET access. This is not an acceptable level of IT “workmanship”, in my opinion.

This is my first major problem with your service since I joined, but it has left me with grave reservations about the ability of your technical staff and the quality of your technical support. I will be considering my future hosting needs carefully.

I would be interested in hearing your opinions on this matter.

An experiment

Virtual Barcelona

I'm loving Google Earth. I was playing with it today and noticed that they'd added a high-detail map of Barcelona. In fact, it was good enough for me to virtually walk up to the fort on top of Montjuic and take this screenshot of the port below:



Compare it to this real photograph I took earlier this year:



The shapes are flattened, but it's obviously the same place. Incredible!

Pattern matching: tr???ies

I was watching a film last night. It was a little tongue in cheek, but it was generally a sympathetic look at a section of society that’s poorly understood by the population.

They’re mocked by many, especially when they get dressed up and put on all the makeup. A few of them are quite casual about it, and only dress up for big social gatherings, but some of them have gone “full time” and live their entire lives in their new persona. One of them said that he enjoyed the attention and smiles when he went out into town dressed.

Some of people featured on the documentary had changed their names by deed poll, and one of them had even considered plastic surgery to make themselves appear more like the person they felt they were inside.

The film was Trekkies, a documentary about the die-hard convention-going Star Trek fans of the US. Trekkies are not to be confused with Trekkers. A Trekker is a casual Star Trek fan; a Trekkie is someone who lives their life almost as if Star Trek were real.

I’d seen the documentary before a few years ago, and was struck by the similarity between Trannies and Trekkies. We both have obsessions which are seen as ridiculous by some. And on both sides there are people who want to take it a lot further than others.

One guy said “if I had the money and I didn’t have any ties… I’d have plastic surgery to get Vulcan ears”. Replace “Vulcan ears” with “boobs”, and you’ve got many a t-girl. Not me personally, I hasten to add!

What made Trekkies interesting for me was that I was an outsider looking in, and it made me think about how outsiders must see the tranny scene. There isn’t really a big point to this posting, but if you’re a tranny I recommend seeing Trekkies and making the comparisons yourself.

Flickr Sudoku 1.3

I'm sorry I'll stop banging on about this eventually, but I'm still enjoying tinkering with Flickr Sudoku!

I've had it up on the blocks in the garage again and made some improvements. Version 1.3 features:

• Multiple AND tag searches. You can now search for pictures that match more than one tag, by separating the tag names with commas. For example, using "sky, tree" would show 10 random pictures with the tags "sky" and "tree".
  It will also handle searches for tags with spaces, so that "cat fish" will find images tagged with "catfish" or "cat fish", whereas "cat, fish" will find pictures tagged with "cat" and "fish".
• "Just get new pictures" button. You can now get a different set of pictures without destroying your work so far. This is handy if you want to see the same puzzle with a different tag or username, or you have two pictures in your stream that are very similar, or you've just got a boring set of pics.
  
• Larger search base. The pictures are now chosen from a pool of up to 500. So if you create a puzzle using pictures from your own photo stream you can expect to see some older pictures turn up, and it's less likely you'll get two similar pictures.
  
• Better randomness. The system for choosing random images, er, wasn't very random. Now it is. Completely.
• More puzzles. I sat down and added a dozen or so puzzles to the XML puzzle database. And now each one has a "friendly name" to add a bit of interest.
• Save your progress.You can now create a bookmark that stores precisely how far you've got with a puzzle, along with your settings for picture size, etc. You can even email a puzzle to someone else, if you know what you're doing.
  

I promise to blog about something else now. :-)

More filler material

And after the triumphant return of Evil Becky Answers Your Mail, how about some delving into my web logs for some more hilarious search engine referrals?

Yeah, that will fill a few blog inches!

The highlights from the last week:

• "how to feel girls boobs"
  Ah the eternal question.
• "boob shaped mouse mats"
  I seem to get a lot of boob-based enquiries.
• "biggins boob"
  Ok, that's enough!
• "richard whiteley funny sounds"
  I think he's stopped making funny sounds now.
• "poems about clean loos"
  A topic cruelly neglected by many of the great poets.
• "i am butiful escort"
  You are? How's that working out for you?

Evil Becky Answers Your Mail #5

I've not let Evil Becky out her cell recently, and the dumb emails in my "waiting for reply" file have started to back up, so...

Terry writes:

Hi gorgeous, you are the sexiest TV on the web. I love all your pics, especially wearing boots ( as this is my fetish ). Do you have any risky pics?

Evil Becky replies:

Hmmm... I don't think so. Try Siobhan, she has some of her climbing a tree. That looked kinda risky.

Tina writes:

hi
could you give me the name and address of the chatline you work for thanks

Evil Becky replies:

The name and address? Do you want a job? I work for the NHS. Give them a call and say you love talking dirty to people down the phone.

Fasthosts "support"

My conversation with Fasthosts support earlier:

Me: "Oh hi... I'm having big problems with my site. I'm getting loads of 404 errors and just now I've noticed that the home page isn't there"

Support Guy: "I've just looked, the reason why you're getting that message is becasue there is no home page. Someone must have deleted it in FTP."

Me: "Oh. Okay. Thanks." [Goes off worrying that Blogger, or a hacker, or worse, has started deleting files on my site.]

Now admittedly, that's from memory, but I'm pretty sure he didn't say:

"Oh, by the way, we've recently moved your entire site to a different web server, on a different I.P. address which will mean that the DNS servers will be misreporting you for a while. And we've forgotten to copy across your ODBC settings, and possibly turned off your .NET service..."

I would have remembered something like that.

What started off looking like something I had to fix, is starting to look very much something like Fasthosts should have fixed. And if that support guy had been intending to do support work and looked into my problem properly rather than fobbing me off with the first easy answer, I wouldn't have spent my lunch hour and the best part of the afternoon panicking that I had a security hole and changing all my passwords!

I'm not sure why Fasthosts decided to shift my site to a different server but it's becoming more likely that it's related to the sudden disappearance of a load of files from my site. I intend to have words with their support department when I get the time.

Eep

Beckysweb is back, somewhat bruised and missing a homepage and a couple of other things. The scary thing is, it currently looks like someone (or something) accessed my site via FTP and started deleting files, seemingly at random. :-/

At the moment there's only three suspects:

• Fasthosts - Who host my site and know my FTP password, and I'm not discounting the fact that something happened on their server that deleted a lot of files.


• Blogger - This is the scariest one. Blogger stores my FTP password and accesses my webspace every time I update the blog, and even every time someone leaves a comment. I wasn't worried about it before, but now it's leaving me slightly nervous.


• Me - It's not beyond the realms of possibility that my finger slipped or something while I had an open FTP window and I deleted a load of files. But highly unlikely.

I've changed my FTP password as a precaution, anyway, I'm off to investigate further.

By the way, big thanks to Gillian, Joanna and Siobhan (in chronological order) who all took the time to let me know there was a problem.

Flickr Sudoku 1.1

For the last couple of days I've been obsessed with improving Flickr Sudoku, and the new version is now online!

Thanks to some hints from Siobhan I've finally started to get my head round the Flickr API, so that now you can create puzzles from a user name, or tag, or both. I've also tinkered with the interface a bit, and added "presets" that create puzzles from preset flickr group pools.

It's been a pretty self-indulgent exercise, really, but I found it was an excellent way of learning a bit more about web programming, particularly JavaScript which I'd never really got my head around before. Because the project I'd pitched myself was tantalisingly close to what I was able to do, it spurred me on to learn how to do it.

There was also a great sense of achievement getting things like the answer checking function to work. It checks the validity of each set of nine squares with a simple bit of code like this:

for (var y=0; y<10; y+=1) {

checksum = checksum + (grid[i] * Math.pow(10,grid [i]));

}

Which creates a checksum that can only equal 9876543210 if each grid square contains all the digits from 1 to 9. Which I thought was a pretty elegant way of doing it. Anyway, with the new version you can can finally play becky soduku, which alone makes it worth all the work!

Stupid, thy name is User

A colleague of mine who works on the IT helpdesk was just talking to a user¹ on the phone, helping her with a problem. Through the wonders of remote-desktop technology he was able to see her screen display on his own.

Halfway through the call he said "okay, now I want you to right-click on that..."

So she wrote "click" in a text box on the screen.

Ahem.

Reminds me of a few years ago when I was a tech-monkey going out to users and helping them with their PC problems. One user complained that their PC was occasionally "eating" CDs.

I went along to investigate. She had a PC with the trayless style of CD drive, where you just push the CD into a slot in the front. She explained that sometimes she'd push a CD in and it wouldn't run on her system, and then it wouldn't eject. The next CD she put in seemed to work fine. It had been doing this for several weeks.

I looked at the front of the PC. There didn't seem to be a whole load of CDs crammed into CD slot. Then I noticed something. Between the CD drive bay and the next drive bay there was a narrow gap.

Suspecting the worst, I unscrewed the casing on the PC and lifted off the lid.

There, resting at the bottom of the case, was a neat pile of CDs.

--
¹ The IT term for people that bugger up computer systems.

A small clarification

I think I may have been a little too flippant in my last posting, 'cos at least two people seemed to think Flickr Sudoku was a spoof page about hamsters. :-)

So a bit of clarification:

Flickr Sudoku is a fully working pictorial puzzle generator. It takes pictures from groups or tags on flickr and turns them into a genuine sudoku puzzle that can be solved. It's also able to check completed puzzles for accuracy and will indicate where any errors have been made.

Some feeds are better for making sudoku puzzles than others, it tends to work best with lots of random pictures. While it's fun to have a sudoku board made of hamsters, it's quite taxing to solve cos hamsters are kinda similar-looking. :)

Here are some sample presets of good feeds for Sudoku boards (well they were good when I tried them earlier, the feeds are changing all the time):

catchy sudoku, from the "catchy colors" pool.

circle sudoku, from the "circle squared" pool.

And one for the sadists:
sudoku sudoku, made with the latest pictures with the tag "sudoku"

I'm working on improvements still, I've added 3 extra puzzle patterns tonight, which are provided by a separate XML feed so eventually there could be dozens of puzzles to solve. Siobhan also pointed me in the direction of the Flickr API, so I might be able to implement things like custom feeds from individual user photo streams. It kinda does it already, but not with any finesse!

In order of increasing grooviness

Sudoku is pretty groovy. It's a bit boring to look at, though, all those little monochrome numbers.

It would be groovier if it used pictures. Like flickr, which has lots of pictures. It would be really groovy if you combined flickr with sudoku!

And trannies are groovy, if you could somehow combine trannies, flickr and sudoku, that would be awesomely groovy!

I think so, but I'm kinda biased because i've written it:

tranny flickr sudoku

Well, you be the judge. I'm pretty chuffed with it because it's the most complicated web application I've ever written on my site. And I wrote it all by myself (with a few stolen bits of code and a couple of helpful hints from Jess!). Please let me know if there are any bugs, there probably are!

How about hamster flickr sudoku? That would be insanely groovy! ;-)

Latest blog tweak

I've added a blogroll section, because I realised I was reading a few blogs now but not really publishing the fact. My blogroll is fed by my Bloglines aggregator account, so it's a pretty accurate representation of the blogs I tend to look at.

I thought it was a bit unfair that certain blogs are rather alphabetically challenged and tend to be shunted to the bottom of blogrolls, so I've ordered them by "last updated", if you're wondering about the strange order. That way all the regularly updated blogs get their time at the top.

Of course, good old MSN pretends that it's "spaces" are updated every hour or so, just to be awkward.

What's in a name?

Jane asked me a question in an email tonight that I meant to blog the answer to ages ago...

"How did you come up with Enverite as a surname?"

It was basically a combination of pretentiousness, honesty and stupidity. I'd not really considered Becky having a last name, to be honest for many years Becky didn't even have a first name. But when I came to be active online, I seemed to need one. I could just have used my male surname as some t-girls do, but it seemed A) Not Very Girly and B) a bit too identifiable (there aren't that many people about with my surname).

It was at a time when I was deciding to be a bit more honest about the tranny side of me (despite the fact I was in the process of lying about my name), and I'd always liked the French word for truth, vérité, as in Cinema Vérité and so on. I also liked the idea (at the time) of having a surname that was unique and exotic.

"DeVérité" (of the truth) didn't sound quite right, but "EnVérité" (in truth) sounded better. I particularly remembered a passage that Gandhi wrote:

"I see and find Beauty in Truth or through Truth. All Truths, not merely true ideas, but truthful faces, truthful pictures or songs are highly beautiful. People generally fail to see Beauty in Truth, the ordinary man runs away from it and becomes blind to the beauty in it. Whenever men begin to see Beauty in Truth, then true Art will arise."

So in a way, being true to myself would reveal a beauty I'd tried to hide. (I told you this would be a bit pretentious!)

Almost immediately I started using it I started to think I should change it. Nobody knows how to pronounce it (it's "on-veh-writ-tay"), and nobody knows how to do the little acutes on the Es (on a PC - hold down CTRL and ALT and press E).

But then it was a bit too late to change it, so it stuck!

I kinda like it now, there's not many EnVérités out there (a Google search on the word turns up almost just me!) and if nothing else it's always a good conversation piece explaining how it came about!

A night at the Fox

Sometimes it's great to work without a net: dress up and go to venues where you're the only tranny; and sometimes it's nice to just dress up and go where you know you'll be welcome, in the company of other trannies.

I needed that kind of no-fuss night out last night. I happened to know that the Fox and Hounds in Little Bromley would have a few trannies in on a Friday night, including my friend Amanda who'd been working in the area, so I decided to make the trek across East Anglia to the oasis of camp that is the Fox.

It turned out that quite a few other t-girls had had the same idea. Walking into the bar I spotted Tina and Tracy (of T&T Epilation fame), Jaye Kaye (who's recently taken to Flickr like a duck to water), fellow King's Lynnite Amanda, as well as a few people who looked familiar but I couldn't quite place.

A good-looking guy with short blonde hair smiled and said "hello Becky!" with some familiarity, causing me to go into frantic "should I know who this is??" mode. I guessed it might be a tranny, so the mental identikit goes into operation...

...add some lipstick... a bit of eyeshadow... even out the skintone... now make the hair longer, maybe black? ... a bit of eyeshadow...

"Hanna?"

"Yep!"

Phew! It's always a bit weird meeting t-girls in boy-mode for the first time if you've only ever met them in girl-mode. It's also a minefield of tranny etiquette...

When a tranny in guy mode dares you to recognise them, you have to avoid guessing too quickly, even if it's blatantly obvious. If you get it straight away, it might suggest that they've not done as good a job of hiding their male identity as they'd hoped. For the record, Hanna's girl and boy modes are more strikingly different than most, and I don't think she'd be thin-skinned enough to be hurt if I had guessed immediately!

I was introduced to a couple of the other familiar faces I'd seen. One of them turned out to be Monica Cassidy, a girl I'd chatted to a few times online and had been trying to persuade me to come down to the Fox on a Friday for ages.

Friday night, I discovered, is Karaoke night at the Fox. I suggest that if you want to see Karaoke at its best, go to a gay pub. It's the only place you'll get a room full of people flamboyant enough to give their all at the microphone without the aid of copious amounts of alcohol (which while it loosens the inhibitions tends also to detract from the performance).

There's something quite special about a tranny doing karaoke with an unashamedly male voice. While Jaye Kaye belted out a fine rendition of "Smile Like You Mean It" by the killers, I texted Sophie...

They've got karaoke!

She texted back:

Do Louis Armstrong!

Sophie is one of the people who've witnessed my frankly uncanny ability to impersonate the vocal style of Satchmo. The first time I did it during a night out at the Pink Punters it virtually left her breathless with laughter. Did I dare inflict it on this unsuspecting Fox crowd? Especially as I'd never actually done it "properly" before.

I looked in the catalog of available tunes. There it was: "What a Wonderful World (L. Armstrong)".

Oh, what the hell.

There are some moments in my tranny career that I'll remember forever. Stepping up to the mic as the violin intro started and then watching the mouths drop open on the faces of audience as I started to sing full Satchmo style, is definitely a moment I'll treasure for a while! There was a huge cheer at the end, they seemed to enjoy it!

After that I got chatting to another t-girl who I vaguely recognised, Broxie. It turned out to be another example of just how interconnected the tranny scene in the UK is. We had lots of links in common. In a short conversation we discovered we were both on the Angels group, we'd both been at the Sparkle Fashion show (she'd been roped into modeling at the last minute), we both had blogs (but hers has managed to avoid being sucked into the tranniesphere, so far!), and we both knew people online like Jane from slothblog.

I look at the communities mingling joyously at the Fox, and the tightly-knit interconnectedness of the tranny scene in the UK, and the fact that we live in an age where a guy can dress up in a skirt and wig and nail Satchmo in karaoke...

and I think to myself, what a wonderful world.

Ooooooooooooh yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeah. :-)

Like tugging on a loose thread

Once you start tinkering with the a design of a blog, you just can't stop! I'm just posting this to make sure the new integrated comments area works okay.

If you're wondering what to buy me for Christmas...

How cool is the packaging design for the Doctor Who boxset?


(Cool but suspiciously fake-looking. Methinks they haven't actually produced this item yet!)

Mmm... clusters

Cool, flickr have added a new way to search through pictures: "clusters".

For example, tranny clusters,

and delicious nut clusters.

No Sophie, I still don't own shares in flickr.

Howl if you love Miyazaki!

Woah, this one really snuck up on me: Hayao Miyazaki has a new film coming out!

Howl's Moving Castle is the latest film from Studio Ghibli, the japanese animation studio he heads. It's due out in the UK on September 1st.

I've loved Miyazaki's films ever since I saw The Castle in the Sky as a kid and was amazed by the detail in the animation and the fully realised steampunk-like world.

A couple of years ago he released Spirited Away, one of the best animated films ever made. This was his first film to really took off in the West.

Miyazaki could be accused of making "kid's movies" but it's more true to say he makes movies about being a child. The sense of wonder and magic that a child can find in the most mundane things.

One of my favorite moments in any film ever is the train ride through flooded countryside at the end of Spirited Away. He perfectly captures the feeling of a train-ride from the point of view of a child. Strange people, fleeting landscapes, lives briefly seen through the window. When I was a kid I use to stare slack-jawed through the window on train rides for hours, just watching the world fly by. I guess Miyazaki did too.

I'm really looking forward to Howl's Moving Castle, I think I need to re-watch Spirited Away on DVD to get in the mood. And then maybe Princess Mononoke... Castle in the Sky... Kiki's Delivery Service...

The Official TG Spectrum

So many people talk about a "spectrum" of transgenderness, but have we ever seen this spectrum? No!

I thought I'd put things on a firmer footing by launching this:



The Official Spectrum of Tranny-ness. I've added an indicator with the positions of a few of my friends (including a couple of NTFs*), so from that you can work out where on the "spectrum" you lie.

(Any relationship between the marks on the spectrum to the "level of trannyness" of the individuals mentioned is purely coincidental. For the record, here are my actual thoughts on the whole TG spectrum thing.)

*Non-Tranny Females, Jane's suggestion for an alternative to the less-than-perfect "Real Girl".