Six rules for good guys in Bond movies:

1. Don’t be the first woman Bond shags, as you are bound to die horribly and brutally a short while later. Although if you’ve just slept with a wrinkled smoothie wearing a fake tan and a safari suit, this might be preferable.
2. Avoid accompanying Bond to carnivals and large crowded places where you can’t quite follow what’s going on. You’re bound to be quietly and efficiently killed by something mysterious you never saw coming, and die with a “huh?” look on your face.
3. Don’t stand near water; it always contains something with sharp teeth and a man-sized appetite. Avoid bridges with hinges in the middle. Don’t even stand on the edge. If this is the pool: O …you should be, like, over here: <

Empty Spaces is being highlighted on GBlogs today, so we’d like to say “hellooo” to you all in a delightful Leslie Phillips voice.

But really, following the unwritten rule of blogs (now written down: “all blogs not written by Anna Pickard are crap”), you should go here.

The realities of “uptime” for Internet sites is discussed by Steve Levin in an article that was linked on Slashdot, so you’ve probably already seen it. BB agrees wholeheartedly, while being a little confused by references to NOC teams and the huge cast of support personnel seemingly on hand for all web sites - surely all those jobs are done by one entity, aren’t they? Usually us.

Talking about defining uptime goals reminds us to avoid products that guarantee 99.99…% uptime. In a previous existence on a lower plane of being, BB worked for a company selling HA software - we won’t mention their name to avoid embarrassment (our’s). Initially, the product promised the standard four-nines of availability. Then one day, the person editing the sales collateral - who didn’t possess a great technical understanding of the subtleties (i.e. marketing) - thought, “Weeeell, why split hairs? Let’s just round the figure up!” So this HA product will now give you total uptime all the time, presumably by never ever failing over (which causes outage). That begs the question of why you’d need it in the first place, if your infrastructure is so reliable it never fails over anyway.

Actually, you don’t need it. No one needs that kind of confused trash talk near their production systems.

, Empty Spaces is an online journal. So we’d better not disappoint:

Crawled out of bed at 11am, rowed with mum - parents SUCK! Went to Foxy’s yesterday evening, LOL! Wore my new red Docs! Mike and Den were there! I told Den that his shoes were kewl and he replied something else that drivels on and on like this for entry after entry, oh ghod we can’t stand teenage diaries.

BB is vastly insulted by the suggestion that our stream of bile and cynicism is considered a mere diary, no matter how regular or passionate it might appear. BB is preparing to reassert itself. The “I” word is henceforth banned.

the other night discriminating against tent pegs on the basis of their sexual orientation: bent or straight. Then I swore at the pile of bent ones, which was bigger than the straight pile, and threw them out. No letters please.

I used to bend tent pegs with my foot, which was slow and tedious, but since buying a mallet I’ve discovered that I can bend many more in the same time. Now I regularly bend a quarter to a third of all my pegs on every camping trip, which would be good news for the plethora of outdoors shops in Manchester if any of them could lower their pretensions sufficiently to sell tent pegs instead of wackily-patterned “x-treeeem” trousers. Of course, it helps that I can uneeringly locate the rockiest patch of ground in any campsite, the one place where three inches of topsoil hides six feet of hardcore. I can’t teach you how to develop this ability - it’s a gift. Rather as some people can divine the presence of water underground, I am a rock diviner. Some innate sense guides me to the single worst place to pitch a tent in the whole of Wales. Often when I vacate a pitch, quarrying concerns and aggregate companies immediately move in looking for fresh granite reserves.

Once bent, tent pegs develop an incredible flexibility that allows them to be bent more and more into an infinite variety of shapes - every shape except straight again, in fact.

I also love camp cooking - don’t listen to anyone who claims they’ve often heard me moaning about how awful it is. There’s something about crouching over a blackened stove full of dangerously flammable liquid, clumsily stuffing burnt fragments of sausage in your mouth with your fingers, that causes everything to just fall away: centuries of civilised behaviour, appetite and weight chief amongst them. It makes me want to hammer a bone through my nose (if I can do that without bending it) and paint some cave walls. X-TREEEM!!

Just something in my eye.

Finally, a news story that looks so much better for the good guys and inconveniently awkward for the baddies when boiled down to a tabloid headline. “GOVERNMENT WANTS SNOOPER’S CHARTER” neatly encapsulates the RIP amendments and drowns out the various if’s and but’s from the Home Office at one stroke, instantly making them look like a bunch of nosey, arrogant bastards.

Apparently, David Blunkett withdrew the amendment after listening to his son, who works in IT. If that wields more influence with ministers than a panel of shifty civil service advisers, perhaps Euan Blair could be persuaded to take an active interest in socialism.

It’s not that I video-ed the match. I’m just sick of hearing about bloody football.

(Actually, nobody else round here wants to talk about football anymore either. What happened? Did it finally bore all of you too?)

Overheard on the tram last Friday evening, from young man with English flag painted on face (or perhaps it was a sign of the plague) who had possibly been drinking: > “Think I’ll go home and beat the wife ‘cos I’m an Argie baaaarstad!!!” Paul Gascoigne is Argentinian??

(It’s not that I want England to lose the World Cup, I just hope that “IN-GERRR-LUUUND” is destroyed.)

Compare and contrast (not that there is much difference).

How can we mark this momentous occasion? * We can celebrate the 600K per year saving to the taxpayer, through no longer having to subsidise her authentic recreation of a privileged 1920s lifestyle. Presumably, the tabloids will all be grateful to see the back of another benefit scrounger.
Note though that her forty million pound legacy will be going to her grandsons - who obviously need a good start in life - rather than paying off her overdraft. * We might wonder what to do with her former staff, almost all of whom will now be thrown on the scrapheap (which will double as their new home). BB suggests instead that they are all poisoned and sealed in the vault with her coffin so that they can continue to wait on her hand and foot in the next life. * We can yawn through countless articles about the future of the monarchy, as if this latest death means that we can finally, right now, at last, any second, this time we mean it, for certain declare the new republic. * We can have a quick look for that gaping “chasm” that has apparently been left in countless numbers of us, and wonder if there’s something on the other channels that might fill it. * We can reflect how fortunate it was that Buck Palace was bombed in the war, otherwise the poor thing would never have been able to look the East Enders in the face. Of course, one bomb on your little terrace house would utterly destroy it and leave you sleeping rough in the Underground until tower blocks were invented, whereas the palace was bombed nine times - and rebuilt! at your expense! - without serious loss. (She connected with so many common people, didn’t she?)

Still, at least we all know what a catafalque is now. (Answer: it’s a giant version of a catapault. At the conclusion of the service on Tuesday, the Archbishop will pull a lever and the Queen Mother’s coffin will be “catafalqued” into the air, through the abbey window, to land halfway down the Mall.)