The other part of it is that I enjoy freelance and I don’t like feeling that I’m doing it badly. The extra time should allow me to catch up with existing commitments before seeking out a few new ones.

The prospect seems to have given me a boost, even extending to some renewed enthusiasm for blogging. And today, my first day ‘off’, was good. I learned:

-I can see stereograms, but the ones with dots are shit.
-Pigeons actually bob their head so they can create motion parallax, and thus judge the distance of objects.
-A dog’s head with a man’s hands is inherently funny.

I came to it late – about two weeks ago, truth be told. I’d been struggling with IE, and have never liked FireFox enough to settle on it, resulting in an unhappy, slow and memory-hungry mix of both, depending what I was doing.

The billionth intrusive, annoying and slow FireFox update made me give Chrome a proper look. Within a day it was the default on the three computers I regularly use, chiefly because it:

-doesn’t crash
-starts quickly
-opens new tabs quickly
-has tear off tabs
-actually fucking remembers passwords if you ask it to
-doesn’t have an intrusive update every time you open it

But even once you accept that it’s just going to work properly and be useful, the details keep giving:

-if a site isn’t in your favourites, the star icon on the favourites button is unfilled. If it already is, the star is full.
-Chrome remembers the last favourites folder you saved a site to (Internet Explorer 8; why did you make this such a monumental pain in the cock?)
-the status/preview bar at the base of the screen is only as big as it needs to be, and it only appears when it has anything to tell you. It’s repositioned to avoid your mouse cursor
-the default new tab screen (detail above) is actually useful; containing thumbnail views linking to your eight most visited sites
-whether you type an address or search in the address bar, the appropriate result appears straight away
-Chrome can sync your favourites between multiple computers

It’s ironic, really, that I’ve discovered how good Google’s browser is at a time when I’m increasingly disappointed with the quality of its search results, but there you go.

On a typical day my manbag might already contain a notebook, a phone and a snappy camera.

Putting heavy items on top of these is normally fine. Putting heavy items on top of a two-pint bottle of milk on top of these is not fine, apparently.

On future typical days, my manbag might contain a milk-stained notebook and a phone.

But never again a bottle of milk. Or indeed that particular snappy camera.

Looking at the actual feed page it seems like there’s a problem – an 11 hour-time lag between a tweet and its appearance on the BBC page.

That and it looks fugly.

We use Google News among our sources. I’ve written before of my concerns regarding its apparent lack of judgement, but I still find it useful – particularly its new(ish) custom section feature.

Recently its results have begun to include the peculiarly car-headlight-bulb-focused Autobulbs Direct News, providing such fetishistic takes on motoring news as:

Bentley launches new vehicle, with gloss black finished car light casings

and

Car lights of Spyker supercars to be fitted in Coventry (where, in fact, the whole cars are to be assembled).

We’ve seen this kind of deal before: take a press release, rewrite it, crowbar in the term you’re trying to optimise for, publish and submit to Google News. Even so, a recent story went too far, mis-attributing a focus on headlights to a Virgin Money spokesman:

[Grant Bather] suggested that this could include cracked car lights or other damage caused in a traffic accident or claims that result from breakdowns or theft.

This is just naughty. There’s no mention of headlights in Bather’s quotes, or indeed anywhere else in the Virgin release.

Taken in isolation, tucked away in a news feed that’s written for Google, perhaps this kind of search-term loading hardly matters, but it depresses me all the same. I expected Google to become more wise than it was in 2007 to the quality of the news it aggregates.

Back then, in a few months of optimism, it was tempting for Charlie and I to believe that we were part of a potential new direction for journalism. Like us, we assumed, other journalists would want to maintain decent standards when writing news for the websites of corporate clients, and that Google would help by favouring those who bothered.

For me, our two motoring news feeds are all that remains of that belief.

Good, then, that Facebook has no such plans – but not all good.

I know many who hate Facebook, but after a couple of years I’m still finding it a (mostly) useful way to keep up with a wider circle of friends. And in a couple of years, it still hasn’t shown me an advert that interests me.

Bless them for including the thumbs up option, but I don’t think there ever is going to be an advert I like. Which is why I think I’d be prepared to pay a micro-subscription if it meant I wouldn’t see all the ones I don’t.

Spotify charges a tenner a month to keep the marketers out of your music, but Facebook’s content is cheaper because it’s made by us. With that in mind, perhaps a reasonable price for Facebook Premium would be 50p?

Facebook has said in the past that it’s not charging, and ruminations on a premium account tend to focus on extra functions it might offer.

If I was going to pay, I’d want less.

See, now, I hate adverts generally, and I reserve a special bile for ones in which two of my favourite TV people prostitute themselves at the altar of car insurance, but there’s a special circle of fiery condemnation reserved for an idiot who doesn’t recognise a DTMF tone.

Bear with me – it’s all about the Direct Line jingle at the end of the advert below.

Take a look: the phone ‘plays’ the first part, which is styled after a car’s horn, and the latter part – comprisinged of DTMF tones created by a landline phone – is ‘played’ by the mouse.

Trust me. Once you realise this it will consume you. For fuck’s sake; there’s a phone right there.

Lying awake in the small hours, agonising about this, I fear I finally worked out what happened: at some stage during the production process, somebody pointed out the discrepancy.

And was shot down by sorts who “don’t do” apostrophes.

I’m not clear on the point. The West Pier Trust says that it’s a requirement of the planning permission granted for the huge, elongated sex toy that will be the i360. Given that they’re not building this in the sea and that the wreckage has been quietly minding its own business for the last few years, I’m not sure why the mangled, barnacled beams can’t just be left there – surely after 144 years they’ve earned the right to rust away quietly?

I got some unremarkable photos of the work on Tuesday, when I felt fairly ambivalent about the recovery, but last night in the dark, without the familiar semi-submerged skeleton guarding its patch of the beach, the seascape looked miserably sanitised.

From Hove Lawns I found myself looking back along the front, imagining how it will look when a 150-metre dildo marks the spot. I’m actually reasonably in favour of the i360, but for the first time I found myself resenting it, and wondering why we needed a second tourist attraction at all.

I believe the plan is still that it will help fund the restoration and recovery of the pavilion island, which remains standing in the sea.

Let’s hope that, for the first time since 1975, they don’t fuck it up.