‮hjap‮

Buggeration. It turns out that there already is a Paul Hamilton, he works for the RSC and is thus more successful and handsome than I, and naturally he's Equity-registered. So I'm not allowed to use my name for professional, performance-related purposes.

Insisting on the A J isn't enough, apparently. The rules have changed since Russell T. Davies or Richard E. Grant. This is Annoying. I don't even like the bloody name—my mother chose it—but the one thing I've always been most successful at was being Paul A J Hamilton, and now I'm not allowed to do that any more.

I need a new name. It's not going to be an issue until someone starts paying me for work, but I suspect it's better to start sooner rather than later.

From now on I want you all to refer to me as Loretta. I can pretty much guarantee that Pajhy McCloakGuy isn't taken.

I'm thinking about dusting off an old roleplaying character, but he's not likely to have sufficient Google presence. George Ominokouhai? Ian Spector Fuckup?

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I was awesomesauce bottled tonight. Gods, but I've missed the stage.

And now, a gift for my loyal readers: your very own pajh-inna-box. Go to cereproc.com, and select William (Southern English) from the Live Demo list in the topbar (requires Flash). You can make me say anything you like. If you make me say anything nice about David Cameron, I will find you and kill you.

scattergather is already finding it useful for phrases like please drink my booze, I do not want it.

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Gale force winds forecast today, up to 60 knots.

What a fucking day to be wearing a skirt.

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TRAPPED IN PEEBLES STOP SEND HELP STOP

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People are totally willing to pay me real money to talk into a microphone.

Form an orderly queue, ladies, there's enough pajh to go around.

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Random guy in queue in Scotmid: Thank you for the cookery.

I'm gonna live forever, I'm gonna learn how to fly.

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Jason Rust, Scottish Conservative Candidate for Edinburgh South West, has sent me a nice letter indicating that he looks forward to working with me in the future. Bear in mind that the elections haven't happened yet. Say what you like about the Tories, but they're not backward about coming forward.

The letter includes a nice headshot of Jason Rust MP. Tell me: have these two men ever been seen together?

It's snowed a bit today. Naturally the South-East has ground to a halt, the newspapers are panicking in an apocalyptic frenzy, and Sainsburys is full of people stocking up on cans and bottled water. I expect the looting to start any minute now. Hordes of bondage-gear-clad barbarians will be clubbing each other over the head to get to the last packet of organic rocket. All because it's a bit nippy today.

I came to work in my boots and changed into my shoes once I got here. That was the total inconvenience suffered today. Other than that, the world is all pretty and white.

Jesus Christ, people, put on a jacket or something. Or you could move to the south of France, where you'll never have to worry about winter weather occurring during winter, and I won't have to listen to you.

In other news: I aten't dead. How are folks?

I made mince pies for verdandiweaves' pseudo-party on Friday. Now I'm making more of them. The previous ones were just for the guinea pigs. These ones are important: they're to go to stormsearch's parents.

I made the mincemeat myself, and the pastry, and everything.

I don't own a star-shaped pastry cutter. No matter: I have a knife and an understanding of geometry. I want five-pointed stars made out of pastry: that's easy. I can make do with circles of pastry, made with a conventional pastry cutter, and a knowledge of 72° angles.

It feels faintly sacrilegious to be carving pentagrams into pastry for Christmas-themed mince pies. No matter: I know that I've got several millennia of culture that Jesus simply wasn't born early enough for.

And if the Abrahamic religions had anything going for them, then the resultant pagan munchies wouldn't be so damn delicious, would they?

( Food porn )

Sacrilicious.

A merry Yule, or Solstice, or whatever, to you all. Goddess bless us, every one.

The Hotel usually closes for three days over Giftmas. This year we've got nobody staying on the day either side, so I'm getting a longer break than usual.

I've got very little to do, so I'm sitting here with a Festive Irn-Bru waiting for my shift to end. Then I can have five days off, and get some laundry done. I love the fact that other people's holidays mean that I get time off.

ION, a very pleasant evening was had at verdandiweaves' and draugluin's on Friday for the now-traditional reading of A Christmas Carol. I made mince pies and they apparently tasted like mince pies are supposed to taste. Then, on Saturday, the entirely non-traditional pub evening with fire_sermon, mindwanders, cairmen and xenophanean.

Exhausting. I think that's my sociability quota for the next year or so.

I will not take lectures on professionalism from a bunch of raging arseholes whose sole job is handled by an automated system, when they can't even do that right and have to get me to bail them out.

Thank Goat that libel laws don't apply to true statements.

Thanks to an impromptu meeting this morning, today's already been three hours longer than it should be, and I've spent my booze fund on taxis rushing about the place. That was before I had to deal with this defensive bitch from $AGENCY. I need a holiday.

It seems there's no escape.

The old phone died with a pathetic whimper, but the nice people at the Orange Shop told me that I was due for a free upgrade. So now I have this thing with a 3.2 megapixel camera with Zeiss lenses, radio, mp3 player, video player, and an ARM processor core driving quad-band GSM, GPRS, and UMTS. I'm told it makes phone calls too, but I've not found that function yet.

All I actually want is something that will allow me to sometimes make phone calls when I'm not near a telephone. Instead I'm lugging around a billion times the processing power of the Apollo missions on my belt, probably. Meanwhile, even as they cram unsolicited silicon into my pocket, I can't help but think about all of those proteins going unfolded.

Having said that, the radio is quite nice. I'm rapidly learning about the current standard of voiceover talent, and thus that breaking into the industry really shouldn't be very difficult. On the other hand, given the quality of the scripting, I'm not sure I want to any more.

Hello to new readers that I've picked up during my sudden, and inevitably all-too-brief, period of Internet Fame. Hello to regular readers, too, while I'm at it. Hello, regular readers! We know each other already, sometimes even in person, and that's fantastic!

Regular readers will know that I’m a big Doctor Who fan. New readers should probably learn that, pretty damn quickly. Inspired by Emo-Doctor’s amusing whingeing in this comic (and partly by the Tam of Rassilon), I wondered today: what would Time Lords eat at a Time Lord pizza party?

This is the kind of philosophical quandary that plagues me on a frequent basis. I’m deep like that.

Behold: the Pizza of Rassilon.



More information, more glorious deathless pin-sharp prose, and more pictures, at the Kamikaze Cookery site. Those of you who are on Who fora, do feel free to link, blog, whatever. Go ahead.

I feel like I've crossed a nerd threshold of some kind.

It's a brand new day, and the sun is high. (I presume—this is Scotland, and I can't see it.)

The leader of the free world seems to be a reasonable chap, for the first time in years. And I have a nephew. 12.05am this morning, so he started annoying his mother at a very young age, and 8lb 2oz, which for the benefit of future generations is 3.69kg.

I plan to be a responsible uncle. What's an appropriate age for his first drum kit?

Website backed up, domain registry transferred over, new hosting arranged and paid for. Website backup turns out to be inaccessible, so will try to restore later. Lost my email for a bit, but now I seem to have got it back. Sort of.

I seem to have signed myself up for Google Apps, which seems to be like Gmail but more awesome, or at the very least more awesomely complex. Possibly it's also more Orwellian, which at least starts with the same syllable as awesome. And I have no idea what to do with it.

It would seem that I now have my pajh.org email going into this Google Apps thing, and all of the other emails from my intricate networks of forwards and filters is still going to Gmail. Now I need to decide which one of the two I actually want to use.

Any advice?

The entire blogosphere has erupted into a frenzy of adoration for Stanislav Petrov, who stopped the nukes form flying twenty-five years ago. Had he not done as he did, I would have grown up in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, eventually growing to become the leader of a mighty tribe. As it is, Western civilization was preserved, so what I get to do instead is sit around and make blog posts that nobody reads.

Oh well. Petrov never got any credit for saving the planet. I suppose I should learn when to cut my losses.

I never really understood the Higgs Boson. It's supposed to give mass to other particles by dint of its very proximity, in the same manner, it was explained to me once, as you get a cluster of people surrounding Maggie Thatcher at a cocktail party^[0]. But if the Higgs Boson is a boson, then it's a particle with mass, and nobody could ever explain to me where it gets its mass.

(Another thing I never got was the Hubble Constant. Galaxies are expanding faster the farther away from us they are, it is true, but due to the distances involved we're seeing those galaxies farther back in the past. So all it shows you is that the rate of expansion of the Universe is slowing, as one might expect. If anything, it should be called the Hubble Variable.)

Nonetheless, reports are pouring in from all corners of the Empire about the weird alternate universe in which we now live. clanwilliam turned into a beard-toting evil mastermind, but perhaps fortunately, one who couldn't get out of bed; and verdandiweaves missed Christmas.

For myself, the landlord turned up today and actually fixed things. Apparently the long-running problem we'd been having with the plumbing was the result of cast-iron pipes, which had filled with a hundred years of rust. That's why I've had no hot water for the last year. Who has cast-iron pipes? What's the one material most likely to cause problems on contact with water?^[1]

In further news: after a shaky start, work is actually going well, I've fixed all the problems, and $BOSS_1 seems quite calm. I think this new universe and I are going to get on well.

That said, when I get home tonight I'm firing up Rome: Total War and crushing the Gauls under my iron sandal. They've earned it.

(On a thread about why not to use text-to-speech software)

Imagine BloodSpell without Paul AJ Hamilton.

(and, independently)

Paul’s performance as The Master is, for me, the acting highlight of the film; his impassioned delivery in the closing scenes of the film still give me goosebumps[...]. For me, it was truly shocking to learn in the course of the interview that Hamilton’s prior acting experience was largely amateur.

(and this may be a good time to mention, again, that)

Paul AJ Hamilton is superb as the Master. His voice work suggests a background story that colors every line.

(...it might also be a good time to note that I wouldn't have included that last one unless it had cropped up, randomly, while I googled for the other two.)

I am apparently FAMOUS amongst people who worked on Bloodspell. Now it remains only for me to get to work on the rest of you ignorant bastards.

(Johnnie and Phil, I owe you both a pint. Ricky, if you're reading this, I think I owe you a pint already.)

And I should also point out from earlier in the first link that Text-to-speech engines are [...] not designed to be able to contain any emotive quality. Actually, it would seem that some of them are, and I might be working on one. I should know by the end of the month.

(It's something to do with phoneme extraction, I gather. They've not told me very much about it. I'm just a guy with a voice.)

There is something fundamentally wrong about moshing to hard rock while ironing a pale blue shirt for work, getting all of the little creases out and making oneself all nice and spick and smart for one's customers.

(Yes, I would have been less bothered had it been a black shirt.)

~

I love the way that, every year at about this time, all the long years of experience with leafleteer-dismissal come flooding back. And it gets earlier every year, too. Yesterday someone handed me a flyer, and without breaking stride, I looked at it for two paces then flicked it back over my shoulder at him. Judging by the outraged noise from behind me, I might have hit him. Or, possibly, he just really cares a great deal about giving people half-price entry to strip clubs.

I also love it when people care a great deal about their shitty jobs. It makes them so much easier to deflate.

~

Today, a guy stopped me in the street and told me I was on his website. I bit back the obvious retort (Really? I'm on my website, too), and took his business card. Turns out it's not a website, it's a Flickr photostream, but I am indeed on it.

I suppose this makes me a minor local celebrity now. Just like tef.

For research, I am watching cookery shows on iPlayer. I've discovered The Supersizers go Victorian (available for 3 more days), a rather amusing account of a week spent on a Victorian diet.

(Spending a week on a weird diet for television? Wish I'd thought of that.)

And then, towards the end, one of the guests at the dinner party is my son from the last production I was in.

That's weird, but not as weird as boiled calf's head.