It’s amazing how much gashness it’s possible to write in a very short space of time.

Take updates on this site, for instance. How long does it take me to write the typical one? Probably about as long as it takes you to read them. That may be a little bit of an exaggeration, but not by much - I’m sure it takes me longer to find hyperlinks and come up with a hilariously witty headline than it does to write the entry itself.

Of course, I’m a perfectionist. Writing the entry may be as quick as a flash, but it takes me many minutes of clicking the magical Admin button, waiting for the ‘Browse News’ page to load, clicking the Edit button and hacking away to make me happy.

Why didn’t I split the Browse News area into multiple sections? It may have been all right when this thing had no content, but man it takes a long time to load now.

No matter. At least it doesn’t take half an OOOUR.

Why am I writing about my amazing abilities to pour forth utter drivel into cyberspace? Well, actually, it’s because I’m partaking in that most sacred of activities: procrastination. I’ve been doing it a long time, and it’s a tough habit to break.

I’ve been procrastinating so long, in fact, that it took me until 1am tonight - or this morning, whatever - to begin work on a 40-page project report.

A 40-page report that had to be handed in in 14 hours.

Had, mind you. The timer is currently at seven and a half hours and counting. Downwards.

I think I may have pushed myself too far this time. Even my ability to type bullshit nonstop doesn’t quite stretch that far.

Posting this clearly isn’t helping, but it’s taking my mind off the inevitable. And isn’t that what procrastination is all about?

You know what they say about using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.

It’s bloody stupid, that’s what they say. And, by and large, unless you find yourself stuck on a desert island with only a sledgehammer for company, with a self-inflating liferaft tucked safely away inside an enormous peanut, they’d be right.

Having heard about the wonders of XML from all sides for months - hell, I’d even sampled the delights of XML in C#, where retrieving data is pretty much a one-line chunk of code thanks to the devilry hidden within System.XML - I thought I’d use it to store the runtime settings for my C++ application.

More fool me for spending HALF AN OOOUR trying to wrap my head around the various XML libraries out there. Half an hour? More like two days. They’re vast, overcomplicated and completely ill-suited to doing anything less complex than running a nuclear reactor while juggling XSLT transformations with your eye stalks.

You’re also expected to extend them with reams of your own code before you can even begin to play with them.

Fortunately, before I went completely insane, I had a look around for an alternative. And I found a great one. A C++ class that reads data from a humble .ini file? Invoked with a single line of code?

Exactly what someone should have written for XML.

If you’re anything like me you’ll find yourself wondering the oddest things in unguarded moments. A recurring train of thought has me musing what delights were on TV the day I was born.

Thanks to the excellent archivists at the BBC and their crack team of “BBC 2.0″ geeks (who must sadly suffer the worst label ever created), now I know. You can too.

So what did I miss as a day-old baby? I missed a Tomorrow’s World item on an exciting new hydraulic cutter that would go on to be known as the “jaws of life”. I missed convicted paedophile Jonathan King making an appearance on Top of the Pops. I missed kinky old Frank Bough telling us about the good value of new cars on Breakfast Time.

Most devastating of all, I missed the first and only BBC1 showing of one of the worst Doctor Who episodes ever recorded.

Find out everything you ever wanted to know about BBC programmes, and stalk your favourite BBC stars across thousands of meticulously cross-referenced items, on the Infax catalogue.

I have given up on my quest to listen to my entire music collection in alphabetical order.

I got as far as ‘Ay’.

God, it was a stupid idea.

It’s a funny thing, your own music collection. Given enough time for your tastes to change, the contents of it can seem like a complete mystery - or, conversely, a refreshing change when you revisit some old favourites.

The latter is something I don’t do often enough, so - as I will be sitting constantly in front of the computer for the best part of the next week - I am trying something not attempted since the days of GTA3 and its built-in MP3 player.

I am listening to my entire music collection, in alphabetical order, artist first. With no skipping.

It’s going to be a tough slog. I’ve only just started, and I know ‘Abba’ is just around the corner. I’m tempted to cheat and delete some Beatles tracks, because I have entirely too many. Oh, and The Pros and Cons of Hitch-Hiking lurks somewhere.

But no, I’ll stick to it and see how it goes. Keep track of my progress on Last.FM.

It may be 3am, but today is my one-year anniversary of signing up to Audioscrobbler, now better known as Last.FM. What has it taught me?

It’s taught me that apparently I like Pink Floyd, quite a bit. And Roger Waters. I can understand the Floyd - I rarely listen to a single track, so every time I listen to them I rack up a whole album’s worth of play-time - but Roger Waters?

All right, so Amused to Death is good - relatively speaking, and we’re talking relative to The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking here - but did I listen to it on a constant loop for a few days? And then blank the incident from my memory?

It’s scaring me, man.

What else has it taught me? That I am the world’s biggest fan of Pete Shelley and Howard Devoto. Apparently. Oh dear.

Note: I know for a fact that the above is not true, and not just because I don’t even like that album too much.

I am also suitably embarrassed that ABBA are ranked higher on my Top Artists list than, say… well, everyone past position #15.

Embarrassing revelations aside, Last.FM is a fantastic service and great fun to have a poke around. Sign up if you haven’t already - a voyage of dubious discovery awaits you.

Oh, and if you want to laugh at the whole of my profile, feel free.

C++ is a confusing, excessively low-level programming language for someone used to the relative safety and comfort of the well-designed, garbage-collected world of Java or C#.

It makes a distinction between objects declared locally and objects declared on the heap. Local objects disappear, Java-style, as soon as they go out of scope. All well and good. For every object you declare on the heap, you get a pointer back. You must keep track of these - if you lose them, the objects they point to aren’t gone; they hang around, clogging up vital memory. You just can’t access them any more.

There’s a document entitled “How to Shoot Yourself in the Foot”, which serves as an amusing comparison of various programming languages. The entry for C++ says:

You accidently create a dozen instances of yourself and shoot them all in the foot. Providing emergency medical assistance is impossible since you can’t tell which are bitwise copies and which are just pointing at others and saying “That’s me, over there.”

Sounds about right to me. You see, multiple pointers - even multiple pointers passed between multiple objects - can quite happily point to the same object, which makes for extra headaches when it comes to deletion time.

Delete the object from the ‘wrong’ pointer? All the other pointers are now pointing to invalid areas of memory, and your program crashes when it tries to dereference them. Forget to delete the object at all? Your program sucks up more RAM than OpenOffice on a spreadsheet binge, and the only way to free it is to restart your program.

But the worst thing about pointers is how useful they can be, or so I’m told. No more creating copies of objects to pass around, even if it does happen automatically - so inefficient, pfft! - you can just refer to the exact same thing from multiple places!

It’s just a shame it gets incredibly confusing fast.

There’s a new episode of Consolevania out, and what a scorcher! In every way possible.

You see, this particular episode is Consolevania XXX, focusing on the best the games industry has to offer “adults”. Judging by the fact that the likes of GTA San Andreas were seen by some to herald a new age of maturity in gaming, you can see where this is going.

Fortunately, only one of the games featured tries to be anything other than decent, honest-to-God porn. There’s terrible-looking adventure game Lula 3D, some porn version of the classic CU Amiga giveaway Bally 3, and the motherlode: Hentai 3D.

I’ve never seen the point in hentai, so excuse me while I find the idea of a game based around it to be hilarious and not titillating in the least. The concept is simple: you get some computer-generated Japanese ladies thrown onto your screen, you make small talk with them - er, if that’s what you call dialogue choices including “hey you little bitch”, or something along those lines.

And then you dress them up and insert things in them.

The most impressive part? There’s even a tentacle scenario. And the saddest thing? It’s graphically very nice. I did have a screenshot here, but it’s been lost in the mists of time and the vagaries of the Internet - just as well, really.

Hentai 3D. Get a demo here, if you’re a freak.

The BBC are staging a live event in Manchester city centre next Friday to mark Easter. While their previous version of the concept, Flashmob the Opera, went well and made great telly - set as it was in a busy commuter station and not in the middle of scally country - I’m going to start being cynical about the success of the Manchester version.

Inspired by yesterday’s Grand National (I’d love to be able to place a deadpan “my horse died, by the way” here - but I can’t), I’m running odds on various outcomes. You can’t actually bet on these because my name isn’t Mr Ladbrokes, but hey.

The current odds then:

Everything goes fine - 10-1
A load of scallies stand constantly around in the background and spend more time mugging into the camera than you’d think humanly possible - 3-1 (J. Fav)
It rains a lot and everyone buggers off home early - 3-1 (J. Fav)
Scallies steal one or more outside broadcast vehicles before joyriding them around the M60 and driving them into the sea - 100-1

I’d go for an insanely long-odds spread bet comprising all of the above.

Slight changes afoot at huz.org.uk. I’ve removed the Huz FM feature, partly so I can listen to Crazy Frog in privacy, but mostly because people keep arriving here after Googling for some of my misspelt ID3 tags and it’s been getting on my nerves.

I’m getting a bit tired of this site in general. Yes, again. What should I do about it? Concentrate on a specific subject? Just keep rambling here whenever I fancy it, despite the fact that the results are completely incoherent and not worth reading? Or nuke the thing from orbit and mount the smouldering ashes on my mantlepiece?

Answers on a postcard please.