Darkest before the dawn

No, wait, still my parents house.

Mine looks like this:

Where you can see that the insurance people have given the damp people permission to get the work done. The floor's been taken up, the floorboards are also being taken up, joists are being replaced, and fungus-resistant stuff is being applied liberally. Along with much muttering of "Who the hell were the cowboys who did the last job?"

It's a bit shit, being utterly constrained to the bedroom all the time, but it should only be for a few days - and last night we were out at a concert anyway, seeing LCD Soundsystem at The Barrowlands in Glasgow. They're one of Julie's favourite bands, and it's probably my favourite venue, so overall it was a good night out. Helped even more by a delicious meal at The Dhabba, a stonkingly good North Indian restaurant, which I heartily recommend, particularly as they have a half-price deal on main meals so long as you're out before 8pm. I had lamb on the bone that was to die for. We had dinner at their sister-restaurant Dakhin (similar, but South Indian) last year, and that was similarly delicious.

Anyway - renovators are here for two days, then the skirting boards, etc. need to go back on, then the plasterer/painter will make it look like nobody was ever here, and then we can finally get the new flooring put down in the living room that we've wanted for an age. And eventually this will be the flat that we actually want to live in (after the kitchen has been ripped out and replaced with a less stupidly arranged one).

Delicious LiveJournal Links for 11-18-2010

• Differences in brain development between males and females may hold clues to mental health disorders
  (tags: brains gender psychology mental_health)
• IQ scores fail to predict academic performance in children with autism (unlike with neurotypical people)
  (tags: autism iq academia education)
• Google TV - not ready for average users. Soooo looking forward to getting Tivo!
  (tags: tv google technology)
• Daydreaming may make you unhappy
  (tags: happiness psychology attention mind)
• Fascinating breakdown on Twitter trial - old people 71% in favour of prosection, young people only 22% in favour
  (tags: twitter statistics uk freespeech law)
• Obama Administration Claims Unchecked Authority to Kill Americans
  (tags: obama politics government rights usa)
• UK Minister abandons net neutrality.
  (tags: internet isp government network technology)
• Zemeckis to direct Wizard of Oz remake using original 1939 script. File under COMPLETELY POINTLESS.
  (tags: movies wtf)
• Google gets into the fashion business with "Boutiques"
  (tags: google design fashion)
• Burying bad news? The stories you might have missed when the news was swamped by the royal engagement.
  (tags: media news uk)
• Ballmer and Gates: Here's why we're not breaking up Microsoft
  (tags: microsoft technology business)
• National survey of the UK's cheating spouses finds that horse and cat owners are predisposed to being unfaithful.
  (tags: uk statistics relationships)
• French pop radio station to launch in the UK. Personally I think that the French do some things well. Rap, for one.
  (tags: france music radio uk)

Interesting stats

Over here are some YouGov stats (which I linked to this morning) talking about the breakdown over who is in favour of prosecuting over the Twitter joke debacle.

The first interesting stat was the split by age - 22% of 18-24-year-olds were in favour of prosecution, versus 71% of those over 60 years old. Whether that's the nature of making jokes being age dependent, or the nature of Twitter, or both would be fascinating to disentangle.

A more subtle stat I noticed was the figures for people who voted LD at the last election, versus people with a voting intention of LD now - with the percentage of people in favour of prosecution falling from 47 to 44, and those against rising from 42 to 49, indicating that the people who left the liberals were less in favour of free speech than those that remain.

You got your malware in my XSS

This is for your primary browser by choice - I feel terribly sorry for you if your work locks you down into IE4, but I'm wondering about what you do when you have options...

[Poll #1645914]

There had better be a really bright fucking dawn after this

So, at 4:30 I got a phone call from the damp experts. Telling me that the rot wasn't just in the four joists near the (wet) wall, but also in the other joists along the edge of the room. And that I needed to talk to the insurance people and clear this with them.

So I phoned my loss adjuster, to discover that he was on holiday until Monday. So I phoned head office and got passed on to their replacement. Who ummed, erred and then told me to go for it.

So I phoned the damp experts back, and they told me that because of the way that my flooring is laid (from the window towards the door), and because it's clipped together, if they were going to get to the final joists they were going to have to take up _all_ of the flooring. Which means clearing everything off of it.

The problem being - there's absolutely nowhere to put it. The bed has about a foot on three sides, and touches the wall on the fourth. The living room is already packed full and covered in dustsheets. That leaves the kitchen and the bathroom.

Which is why we're about to take the movable contents of the study, and fill the kitchen end to end. And then hope that they get the flooring taken up, sorted, and put back down by tomorrow night, so that we can get back into the kitchen again. Because we don't fancy takeout for _every_ meal until Monday.

It's a joy, it really is.