This story's got legs, hasn't it? If you haven't heard it, the Welsh Assembly Culture Minister announced the wrong winner at the Wales Book of the Year awards ceremony on Tuesday night, despite reading it off a piece of paper - Tom Bullough, who thought he'd won, got as far as the stage before he was told it was actually Dannie Abse. Mind you, Bullough's blog has now exceeded its bandwidth, so maybe he's got some useful publicity out of this. Probably not enough to make up for the public humiliation, mind.

I was at this ceremony last year, as our friend Robin was one of the contenders, and I remember thinking it was unusual in being one of the few awards left where the winners didn't know in advance. I had no idea that not even the presenter knew either - I'm sure that'll change now.

But what on earth did that card say? "The winner isn't TOM BULLOUGH! He's one of the runners-up along with Nia Wyn. The actual winner is Dannie Abse."

Wish I had my proper camera with me...

Patients' rating of the quality of their NHS care will affect hospitals' and GPs' funding in England in the future, ministers have announced.

So good hospitals will get better, while bad ones will get worse, until we're left with a very few good ones (given that funds are limited) and a whole load of bad ones which can't get the funding to attract better staff or buy newer facilities.

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

for the food. This was the dessert, apparently an elderflower and lemon balm parfait and a gooseberry er.. goo :) Tasted like very expensive mango kulfi to be honest.

The next night we went to the Circus restaurant, where I seem to remember having crab, followed by lamb (for the first time in months) and Eton mess.

And the main course, turbot in a mussel and pea veloute (one of those hundreds of gastronomic words that mean "goo"). There was some mash under there, too, with chives in.

...in Bath. I did take a fair few pics with the proper camera, but as usual I documented food with the mobile. I like to remember meals I've spent a fair bit of dosh on :) The meal was in the Olive Tree, the restaurant attached to the Queensberry Hotel - very posh, we were staying there as an present from Catrin's parents.

Anyway, this was the starter - salmon in sloe berry and fennel vodka! Before that was a little appetizer in the form of a cup of beautiful butternut squash soup, too.

Bloody hell - we're working late in the office again, so we ordered some pizza. Quite a lot of pizza, to be honest. When the guy delivered it, I apologised for not having the cash for a tip (which was why we were paying by card), and he left, obviously displeased. Within a minute or so he was back, verbally abusing us for being "the worst people he'd ever come across" and asking "hands up any of you who've got a girlfriend." He's apparently the manager. Unbelievable. He stormed out again, forgetting his pizza bags. They're still here.

Because of a computer problem, Warren Ellis hasn't been able to update his (excellent) free weekly webcomic, Freakangels, this week. So instead he wrote a little note explaining this, and tacked on the end as a bonus was this answer to an old FAQ:

I still get asked with appalling regularity "where my ideas come from."

Here's the deal. I flood my poor ageing head with information. Any information. Lots of it. And I let it all slosh around in the back of my brain, in the part normal people use for remembering bills, thinking about sex and making appointments to wash the dishes.

Eventually, you get a critical mass of information. Datum 1 plugs into Datum 2 which connects to Datum 3 and Data 4 and 5 stick to it and you've got a chain reaction. A bunch of stuff knits together and lights up and you've got what's called "an idea".

And for that brief moment where it's all flaring and welding together, you are Holy. You can't be touched. Something impossible and brilliant has happened and suddenly you understand what it would be like if Einstein's brain was placed into the body of a young tyrannosaur, stuffed full of amphetamines and suffused with Sex Radiation.

That is what has happened to me tonight. I am beaming Sex Rays across the world and my brain is all lit up with Holy Fire. If I felt like it, I could shag a million nuns and destroy their faith in Christ.

From my chair.

See, this is the good bit about writing. It's what keeps you going. It's the wild rush of "shit, did I think of that?" with all kinds of weird chemicals shunting around your brain and ideas and images and moments and storyforms all opening up snapsnapsnap in your mind, a mass of new and unrealised possibilities.

It's ten past two in the morning, and I'm completely wired, caught up in the new thing, shivering and laughing and glowing in the dark. Just as well it's the middle of the night. No-one would be safe from me right now. I could read their minds and take over their heartbeats with a glare.

Faster than the speed of anyone.

That's how it works.

Check this out. Even non-Welsh speakers can tell that "must" is not the Welsh word for "must", for example. Ditto "please."

Actually, every single thing is wrong - the whole thing is virtually incomprehensible. I suppose the Welsh on that bottom line might translate something like "The building of sites is dangerous, please keep children on walking" if one were bloody-minded enough to try to get some sense out of it.

This is, I suppose, what happens when you get that bloke in the office who went on a day taster course to do the Welsh (instead of, for example, paying my mate Robin).

UPDATE: Obvious in hindsight, but Telsa reports it's a really, really bad free machine translation system. There's more info here, if you speak Welsh. Actually, if you don't, you can still go there and zip to the end for some examples of really well-known Welsh songs translated into awful English, with a challenge to the readers to guess the songs. Here are a couple I know (although I couldn't recognise them):

Grade good crookedly the she persuading / Signs the Volvo medal tongue the dragon

...

With Gwen he ear I / he was the firstly I pass group posts

The first one is Datblygu's incisive masterpiece Cân i Gymru - "gradd da yn y Gymraeg, ar y Volvo bathodyn Tafod y Ddraig" - usually translated as "A good grade in Welsh Language, and a Dragon's Tail badge on the Volvo."

The second is, of course, Catatonia's Gyda Gwên - gyda gwên, o glust i glust / fe oedd y cyntaf i basio'r pyst - better rendered as "With a smile from ear to ear, he was first to pass the posts."

I can sort of see how the second one happened. Heaven knows what went wrong with the Datblygu song, though.

...is still in the industry! Working as marketing manager for Mythic Entertainment (now part of EA), who are working on the Warhammer MMORPG. Due out in Autumn. A Warhammer MMORPG. Ugh.

Anyway, great picture down that first link. He's not changed a bit.

This is just sad. A tiny British games developer (there's only three of them, apparently) has produced a point and click adventure (remember those?) which has managed to get a wide - albeit budget - release in the States. Whereupon it becomes obvious that an awful lot of the artwork is ripped off from other games. Really - go and have a look, they've just taken screenshots from Oblivion, UT2004, Morrowind and a few other games and slapped their own stuff over the top. Here's an example - on the left, LoL, on the right, Thief: Deadly Shadows:

How did they think they'd get away with it? Perhaps they'd promised an all-singing, all-dancing 3D game for their new reworked version, realised they couldn't do it, and panicked. However, the wikipedia entry suggests there were allegations of plagiarised art from that earlier Amiga version, so maybe this really was something they thought they could do with impunity. Or maybe they used the stolen artwork as placeholder - to be replaced later with their own work - and didn't have time, or perhaps foolishly showed it to the publisher who loved it. Hm.

The more we think about that last possibility here in the office, the more likely we think it is. Many smaller publishers don't know much about games - their expertise lies in retail marketing. They wouldn't recognise the stolen images, and perhaps wouldn't understand why perfectly good placeholder art needed replacing. They also wouldn't understand why the new artwork would take so long to do, pressurising the developers still further. Who knows?

I'm not excusing them, but I can see how a bedroom coder team could get themselves into such difficulties.

UPDATE: I'm not one to judge by appearances, but look - three dodgy geezers from Maidstone.

Ow. Hopefully it'll stick.

If one were of a nervous disposition, one could add this news story to this news story and get somewhere scary.

A month before the project is due to finish, no-one says to a civil engineer "Actually, we don't like the cantilever bridge idea, could you just change it to a suspension bridge? And keep everything else the same."

Still incredibly busy, hence the silence. It's tough here at the code face, and the amount of overtime being done by everyone here is just ridiculous. But you never know, we might actually be winning.

Ah well. Here's a cute story about a piglet who's scared of mud!

Blimey!

Went up there a couple of weeks ago, but I've only just had the time to sort out the pictures.

Radio Lux, one of the bilingual Welsh rock scene's biggest groups, playing to an apparently empty field - a rare sight. They'd been asked to open the festival so people were still slowly turning up, and I think the mist put a few people off. They were bloody excellent - the true successors to the Gorkys' psychedelic throne, with more upbeat, accessible songs and jangly guitars, but the same whimsical and unpredictable air. They've learned a lot from working with Euros Childs. A really tight live act, too. Shame they only had time for a half-hour opening set before heading up to another gig in Llandudno - I think they did this one as a favour to their old friend and bandmate Sam, who organises the festival. They've got stuff on Myspace, but then who hasn't?

A misty day at Aberystwyth Castle's annual free rock festival. Appearances are deceptive, though - it was really warm, and Catrin got a sunburn.

I did need a bit of relaxation - I'd finally got out of work at six in the morning that day; that's a solid 21 hours of frantic coding. My brain was fried. Some of my colleagues didn't leave the office until six hours after that...

Working with another company's code is not made easier when you have to look for a condistion in the intercations folder.

From Dan Crisper: Web 3.0 = ( Web 2.0 - Northern California )

One of our coders, trying to explain something to one of our artists: "Stop looking at me like I'm trying to show a dog a card trick."

UPDATE: a different artist has just casually dropped into the conversation the wonderful simile shaking like a shitting dog.

OK, the dentist has closed my teeth (which have been open the last two weeks, and yes, that is as weird and grim as it sounds), having squirted about three different kinds of antibiotic down there, and given me a prescription for two other kinds. That should do the trick.

not exactly secret now, is it?