9:50pm: The Mormon meet-up
It seems like everybody wants to know all about my meeting with the Mormons. I can report that it went very well. They were extremely polite and friendly, and were never pushy. One, whom I shall call Elder Utah, was very talkative and confident. The other, let's call him Elder Idaho, was much quieter and didn't seem quite as relaxed. Both of them are nineteen, and I think they said they're somewhere in the first year of their two-year mission to Scotland.

( Oh, right, this is kinda long. I guess I should put it behind a cut... )

12:56am: Anyone else got Firefox 3?
Has anyone else installed Firefox 3? I've now had three crashes, plus it seems to use more CPU and keep the laptop fans spinning noisily more of the time. (I'm running it on Windows XP Tablet Edition on a Core 2 Duo.) Memory usage seems a bit lower than FF2 before, not that it ever caused particular problems before. I do like the new features, but I'm surprised how unstable it seems. Oddly the crash-reporter has only kicked in for one of the three crashes, and I'm not sure why. I'm disabling all the extensions I can to see if it makes a difference. The only one that seemed potentially troublesome and off-the-beaten-track was GeckoTIP, which makes text entry areas cooperate with the tablet text input panel.

1:28pm: Mormons
Some Mormons came to the door last night. (I've forgotten their names, but one is from Utah and the other from Idaho.) I quite wanted to talk to them, but the house was quite a mess and I don't think Keirstan would have been too keen to have them in. So I'm going to meet them for a chat in a nearby park on Monday.

"Why?!", I hear you ask. Hmmmm, good question. In part, I feel a little sorry for them: they're quite young and they've been sent off to far off lands where there isn't a lot of sympathy for them. (I asked them how it's been going and if people have been friendly, and they had to think a bit before saying something diplomatic, something like "we've had all sorts".) In part I'd like them to leave with a good impression of 1. Dundee and 2. atheists. And finally, I just like the chance to meet people who are different from me, especially when I don't feel like I'm imposing upon them.

So, two questions: one, do you talk to Mormons? I don't think I've ever had Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses or anyone like that come round my door before. And two, is there anything in particular that I should bear in mind while talking to them? I'm not looking for a confrontation or a debate or to try to convince them that they should abandon their faith or anything like that. I just want to be friendly and find out a bit more about them. I'd rather not accidentally seriously offend them.

10:23pm: Firefox, why do you torment me?
Tried to download Firefox 3. Server too busy. Eventually managed to download it very slowly. Then I installed it, and the installer hung at the last page - it said it was done, but wouldn't let me click "Finish". I killed that and started Firefox. It spent ages trying to connect to the overloaded server to look for add-on updates. It couldn't find any anyway. Then it said something like "thankyou for installing firefox 3 (release candidate)". Within half an hour it crashed. (I can't remember the last time FF2 crashed on me.) Very disappointing. I was quite excited, but now I'm wondering if I should go try Opera instead.

EDIT - 2 crashes and counting...

9:24pm: Salad

Top Three Awful British Salads

#3 Shredded iceberg lettuce, half a tomato and chopped cucumber. No dressing.

#2 Anything with mayonnaise.

#1 The donner kebab salad - just like #3, but with twice as much lettuce, shredded extremely thinly, and very soggy.

Why are salads here in general so repulsive? It took me more than a decade to discover that salad wasn't necessarily horrid.

11:52am: Mii Fun


Can you tell who they are?

10:38pm: TV changes input spontaneously
I've been playing a lot of the Wii recently, and I've noticed some strange behaviour from the TV, which is a Sony Bravia. Every time I turn on the TV and start using the Wii (in AV input #3: component), after a while, somewhere vaguely between 5 minutes and half an hour, the TV spontaneously switches to the Virgin Box (which is on AV input #1: SCART, and on standby). As far as I can tell, it doesn't happen again so long as the power remains on. So who's the culprit? The suspects:

The TV remote

I think it's unlikely. It happens enough that I'm pretty sure that the remote hasn't always been in a position to do it. Also, the fact that it never seems to happen twice in the one power-cycle seems to count against this possibility.

The Wii -OR- the component cable

I suppose this could be possible: perhaps an interruption of the TV signal would make the TV think it's been disconnected and change the channel. I'm still not sure why it would only happen once per power-cycle.

The Virgin box

Another possibility: I think SCART devices can signal to the TV that they have turned on and it should switch to them. Perhaps something's causing it to send this signal occasionally?

The TV

This might be most likely. It would be the only thing that really explains why it happens once per power-cycle, although even then I have no idea of the mechanism. It would be a right pain, since it's the most expensive of all the things that might be broken!

Anybody got any guesses what could be wrong?

5:51pm: Technical question regarding GMail, LJ and time zones
I have a query for anyone who might have a more thorough knowledge of permissible date formats in email. I've noticed that whenever I get comment notifications from LJ, GMail displays the wrong time. For example, I got a notification at about 12:02+0100. GMail displays the received time as 7:02PM. The actual header in the email says:

 Date: Mon, 12 May 2008 11:02:55 UT

Both my system clock and my GMail account time-zone are set to UK. It seems that GMail is interpreting this time in a -0700 time-zone, which I'd guess to be PDT, since that crops up in the email headers for all the timestamps added by the Google servers. I guess the question is whether "UT" is an acceptable time-zone indicator for an email. If so, why isn't GMail parsing it correctly? If not, is it an LJ bug? Should they be using "+0000" instead?

Or then again, is this something peculiar to my account/computers?

12:19am: Bad Wii
Got a replacement Wii. Carefully installed cables. Started it up. Entered date, time, etc. Set up wireless internet and downloaded update. Started Mario Galaxy. "An error has occurred..."

Gah. It looks like it is the game that's duff, but in some strange way that means it works on the Wii at work but neither of the ones I've gotten. I guess it's better for the game to be bad than the Wii, but I really don't know what could be wrong with it. There are no obvious scratches on it, and the error isn't even a disc read error, just this painfully generic one. Very frustrating.

EDIT - Got a replacement Mario. Things are looking better now. Although frustratingly I tried to copy across the Miis I saved on the Wiimote and now it says I'm not allowed to edit them because I didn't create them. So you have to copy them slowly by eye, or just start over. It's like DRM for kids. Weird.

11:13pm: Wii!
We finally got a Wii. And, apparently, a broken copy of Mario Galaxy. Or maybe it's the Wii that's broken. Wii Sports plays, but while Mario Galaxy appears on the main menu, trying to load it results in a black screen for a while, followed by the less than helpful "An error has occurred". Cleaning it didn't help, and it didn't look scratched. I'll try it on a different Wii tomorrow and see what happens, but it sounds like it's 50/50 whether it's the game or the Wii that's broken.

In the meantime, our Wii friend code is [EDIT - removed, because we're probably going to get it replaced].

EDIT - Nope, make that a broken Wii. Mario Galaxy seems to work in the Wii here at work. Gah.