Fred Bloggs Weblogs

Urgent Threats

2011-03-31T13:56:00.002Z

A frantic email sidles its way into my inbox:

I know this might come as a suprise to you,but I made a quick trip to Madrid in Spain and was attacked by thieves.My bag,valuables,credit cards and passport were stolen.The embassy has cooperated by issuing a temporary passport.I need funds to settle outstanding hotel bills,ticket and other expenses.

To be honest,i don't have money with me at the moment. I've made contact with my bank but the best they could do was to send me a new card by post which will take 2-4 working days to arrive here. I need you to lend me some Money to sort my self out of this predicament, i will pay back once i get this over with because i need to make a last minute flight.

Western Union or MoneyGram is the fastest option to wire funds to me. Let me know if you need my details(Full names/location) to effect a transfer. You can reach me via hotel's desk phone and the number is, +34 ...

Best regards,
AlexT

Note to scam artists: try to make sure that your mark has actually heard of the person you are impersonating. In this case, I had to websearch them, and only then vaguely recognized their name as someone else distantly in the CS biz. I suppose you could argue that this is just a scattershot approach aiming to hit someone who will fall for it, but the problem is, like the traditional 419 scams, at some point even the dumbest user will start to twig that there must be something up when they received dozens of advanced fee fraud solicitations.

On the plus side, at least the country code matches the content of the message, and the from: address looks somewhat plausible.

On the minus side, one day someone is going to get robbed in a foreign country and need their friends to wire them some money, and no one will believe them.

More Misdirected Mail

2010-05-09T13:34:00.001Z

Another erroneous email comes flooding into my inbox.

Hey gary and carol!!
I'm not sure if you got my texts, my phone is acting strange and not letting me call anyone! I'm in Bend and my dad says you are here too. I'm going to an artwalk in downtown bend tonight, if you are going to be around you should give me a call! My number is xxxxxxxxxx. If not, we should grab coffee or something tomorrow before I head back to school! Hope to talk to ya soon.
Caitlin
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

If you are in Bend, then I am sorry to hear it.

The Elders of Scion

2010-04-18T21:58:00.001Z

Simon was an unremarkable boy, who grew up in an unremarkable town and went to an unremarkable school. One day a remarkable thing happened to him, the first remarkable thing that had ever happened to him, as he returned home from football practice.

A tall man strode confidently up to Simon and said, "The Elders of Scion have been watching you. We see great potential in you. From now on, everything you do will be guided by agents of the Elders of Scion. This will lead you to greatness". Then he turned around abruptly and stomped away into the twilght.

Simon thought a great deal about this encounter over the next few days. Surely this could not be real? He was, after all, quite unremarkable. Although, Simon had always believed that beneath a veneer of unremarkability, he did indeed have a great potential for greatness. Could there really be some kind of secret organization called the Elders of Scion that would help him achieve great things? It seemed unlikely, and there was no entry on the topic in the big encyclopedia in the school library.

However, now that he was watching out for signs, Simon started to notice strange events, out of place. When he played football, he seemed to get more passes to him. He scored highly on a test that he really hadn't prepared for. Then he tried asking out a girl in his class that he liked to see if the Elders of Scion could affect even that, and she said yes.

As time went on, Simon came to recognize the actions of the Elders of Scion everywhere in his daily life. Things seemed to just work out for him. Buses showed up just as he began to look for one. He got a job at a local hotel that paid well and didn't really require him to do anything. Life went well. Of course, to keep the actions of the Elders a secret from others, not everything went perfectly, but enough things went his way that he was sure that they were looking out for him.

After school, Simon got a job with the first company he applied to. It was a company that did something complicated with money that no one person who worked at the company fully understood. Filled with confidence, Simon knew he didn't really have to work too hard, and instead went to meetings, and told people exactly what he thought they should do. As a result, he quickly got recognized as a visionary and promoted.

Almost before he realized it, Simon found himself the youngest chairman of the whole company. He had everything he could ever want. He had a beautiful wife, and a beautiful home, and two beautiful daughters, and most beautiful of all, a very large amount of company stock.

But something nagged at Simon's mind. Yes, clearly he had benefited from the help of the Elders of Scion in reaching this position. But was there more to it? How many others were in his position? What else could the Elders do for him? What more did they have planned?

He decided that he would have to find the Elders of Scion, and learn all their secrets. But this was difficult. No one he mentioned the name to, casually, would admit to having heard of the organization. Not even those he most suspected being agents of the elders gave any indication that they knew what he was talking about. There was only one thing for it. He would have to find the man who had first told him about his destiny.

The number of people you would have to interview to find one man who talked to an unremarkable boy almost twenty years ago would be huge. But fortunately Simon could afford to pay private detectives a high hourly rate to do that for him. And, after several months of dead ends, at last came the news that they had found the man. What's more, they said that they were certain that he had a strong connection to the Elders of Scion.

Simon knew that he had to talk to this man in person. So he found himself at the door of an unremarkable semi in an unremarkable village near where he grew up. The man was confused to see him, but let him in anyway.

"The Elders of Scion? I was in them long time ago." he admitted to Simon. "Bit of a waste of time, if you ask me. I remember I saved about a grand to get 500 CDs made up, but we only shifted about twelve of them. Got the rest in a box in the attic, I think. How come you've heard of us?"

Simon, a little confused, told the story of how the man had changed his life, and how everything since then had been influenced by the Elders of Scion.

The man looked confused for a while. Then a short laugh erupted out of him like a belch.

"Oh, that! I'd forgotten completely till you reminded me. I was pissed. I'd been rehearsing with the rest of the band, and had a couple of beers while we were at it. On the way to the offie to get some more, I saw some scrawny little kid, and decided to scare him with some made up story. Are you telling me you really believed that?"

There was an awkward silence, and Simon soon left.

Things didn't go so well for Simon after that. A change in the market wiped out a lot of the company's investments, and a boardroom coup that he didn't see coming ejected him from the company. His wife quietly started sleeping in the guest bedroom, and his daughters were angry at him because he wouldn't buy them ponys.

He started taking long walks in the countryside, kicking his way through autumn leaves. He thought about how ridiculous his life had been, based on a silly superstition about a non-existent conspiracy centered around him.

But, over time, things started to improve. He got headhunted to a consultancy firm that didn't really need him to do anything. His daughters started talking to him again when he bought them the latest must-have toy, a robotic cat that would hiss and scratch you if you ignored it. And he began an affair with one of the secretaries at the consultancy, something he'd been meaning to do for a while but never had the time for before.

Simon still drives off into the countryside and goes for long walks. Every now and then he sees a child running or playing alone. And when he does, he tells them that the Elders of Scion have been watching them, and they see great potential. From now on, their actions will be helped by agents of the Elders, and great things await them.

Mostly, the children look back blankly, not understanding the words. Some of them accuse him of being a child molester, and tell him to piss off. But for one or two, a light goes on in their eyes. Of course they have always had potential, and now they can realize that potential, thanks to the Elders of Scion.

As I was going to Manchester...

2010-04-17T13:38:00.001Z

...I met:

A 40-year old black man in Plymouth
The ward sister in a paediatric hospital in Cardiff
A woman in Crosby who had been burgled
My father who ran a youth club
A young man in London whose flat has been burgled five times
My mother, a magistrate in Newbury for 30 years
A man in my constituency called Clive Stone who had kidney cancer

What a busy evening!

epstopdf rotating issue

2010-03-06T19:27:00.005Z

Another post more for my own benefit and future reference.

epstopdf often rotates figures that you'd prefer it didn't. That's ghostscript getting a bit eager. The following kludge will fix it:

export GS_OPTIONS=-dAutoRotatePages=/None

before running epstopdf as usual.

Edit:

Or
export GS_OPTIONS="-dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress -dAutoRotatePages=/None"
to embed fonts as well...

NetFilch

2010-01-03T15:06:00.003Z

For no one's real interest, but because I've done this for the past couple of years, here are all the films that I watched on NetFlix in 2009. Fans of privacy invasion might try to use this to break the anonymity of any future releases of netflix user data, but since I'm disclosing pretty much everything that would be announced, I fail to see what it might get you.

Previously I have added some commentary on each film, but I'm not sure that I can be bothered to this time. They mostly speak for themselves, or at least for the combination of my odd selection of tastes and my habit of randomly ordering my queue so I never know what is coming next.

Casablanca
Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium
Fanboys
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
The Evil Dead
Naked Lunch
Titan A.E.
Watchmen: Tales of the Black Freighter
Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Burglar
Pan's Labyrinth
Saved!
Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst
Ocean's Thirteen
Afro Samurai: Season 1
A Clockwork Orange
But I'm a Cheerleader
The Girl in the Cafe
Grey Gardens
Sicko
The King of Kong
Tenacious D in: The Pick of Destiny
Run Lola Run
Being There
Ghost Rider
Murder by Death
Collected Shorts of Jan Svankmajer: Vol. 2
No Country for Old Men
The Last King of Scotland
The Weather Underground
The Monster Squad
Following
Superbad
Logan's Run
Princess Mononoke
The Kid Stays in the Picture
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
National Treasure: Book of Secrets
A/k/a Tommy Chong
Superman Returns
District B13
Kevin Smith 2: Evening Harder: Disc 2
Man on Wire

Why I (don't) blog

2009-12-13T00:17:00.002Z

It seems to be quite a few months since I wrote anything. Laziness, is the main reason. Also, Facebook. Now that facebook makes it easy to post an idle comment about anything that's on my mind, it makes the need to write here seem less urgent.

However, Facebook isn't everything. It also encourages more short form comments, so there's less scope to witter on at length about trivia. And, since it's done under my own name, and visible to everyone who's ever met me, there's a lot more incentive to self-censor and tone down. So I should probably make more effort to be more longwinded, obnoxious and tedious in this forum. Let's see if I can manage more of that in 2010.

More more misdirected mail

2009-06-24T18:41:00.003Z

More exciting mail plops into my inbox evidently intended for someone else. First, a text from a Florida (813) blurts out "Hi missing u". Which is all very well and good, but what am I supposed to do about that?

And then a receipt from a site offering white water rafting excursions in Canada:

Online payment Submitted on 2009-06-23

ARRIVAL DATE (yyyy-mm-dd): 2009-06-24
RESERVATION NUMBER: 56630
PAYMENT MADE BY: John H
PAYMENT EMAIL: jXXXXXXXX@hotmail.com
PAYOR PHONE: 416 XXX XXXX
PAYOR EVENING PHONE: 416 XXX XXXX
PAYOR CELL PHONE: 416 XXX XXXX
STREET ADDRESS: XXX Park Ave.
CITY: Newmarket
PROVINCE / STATE: Ont
POSTAL/ZIP CODE: L3y 1V1
COUNTRY: Canada
CC TYPE: vis
CC NUMBER: xxxxxxxxxxxx9908
NAME OF CARD HOLDER: John Hxxxxx
PAYMENT AMOUNT: 277.05
EXP DATE MONTH: 5
EXP DATE YEAR: 2012
COMMENTS: Fxxx you Holly

Not quite sure what the obscenity (uncensored in the original email) in the COMMENTS field is all about -- who's Holly?

Travel Arrangements

2009-06-03T17:44:00.002Z

A usually haphazard journey. Plane arrives half an hour late into LHR. Sitting near the front, I manage to get out quickly with all my luggage from the overheads, and pace quickly so that I'm second to passport control. Waltz in with no trouble at all, and with only a minor diversion around the back of a baggage carousel to avoid a troublemaker being pinned down by two police, am cleared through customs with the usual indifference into the UK proper in less than 15 minutes from deplaning. Check that, American border security.

Zoom to Heathrow express (or HEX to its friends), pick up a ticket, and get on the last train that fits my schedule with a minute to spare. End up at Lon Pad, collect my 10 quid single for Brstl Tmpl Mds, and even have time to pick up a sandwich from Boots, though chagrined that my selection does not somehow qualify for the meal deal. Relax, and try to ignore the pitiful whines of the old biddy who does not realize she is on the wrong train until the ticket collector informs her that this is the 12.00 to Bristol, not the 12.06 to Penzance. Wonder how someone can not only ignore all the platform signs, but also the repeated announcements over the intercom. Observe that she isn't even carrying the phone number of the person she is supposed to be meeting there, and decide that she clearly can't travel much if she was expecting no delays or reroutings.

Arrive BTM only 5 minutes late, see that the weather is more pleasant than I remember, and so decide to take bus instead of taxi. Debus about three stops sooner than I ought, but walk the rest of the way anyway. Arrive at hotel to discover that there was a bus stop right out front. Get to room, find it to be possibly the smallest hotel room I have ever stayed in, though am expectant that tomorrow's will beat it further. Slump, sleep. It's surprisingly good to be in England in June.

Wget this

2009-05-30T00:08:00.003Z

I think I've mentioned before my netflix obsession: I want to be able to receive a disk from my selected set of movies without knowing what's on it till I start to watch it.

Well, this system works fine, but occasionally I do at least want to know how long this weeks movie is, and maybe even what genre it's in. This is trick, because there's no easy way to do this on the netflix site without learning the identity of the movie. So I decided to hack together a system to do this.

I could have tried to figure out how to use the netflix API to do this, but all that authentication stuff seems complicated. So instead, I decided to hack together something via feedflix: this is a third part site that shows you statistics about your usage. After logging in, it shows you a link to your current movie. So if I could just get a bot to simulate logging in and clicking on the movie, then I could scrape out the relevant details. Well, of course, it was much more complicated than I had thought. As well as dealing with cookies and session keys and the like, there was one particularly nasty bit: the site would return an authentication code which you had to post back with the log in form. Mostly this form is randomly chosen letters and numbers. But sometimes it would return a string with other characters like + in, which seemed to cause a problem when I would post them back. So I had to borrow someone else's trick, and run perl on the string to URL encode it. As a result, I think that this is quite possibly the nastiest little shell script that I have ever concocted. I'll paste it in, mainly to offend people who have any clue that it means:


#!/bin/bash
EMAIL={my email address}
PWD={my feedflix password}
WOPTS="--cookies=on --load-cookies cookies.txt --keep-session-cookies --save-cookies cookies.txt -olog"
BASEURL=http://feedflix.com
LOGIN=/login/
TMPFILE=movie

rm cookies.txt
wget -O$TMPFILE $WOPTS $BASEURL$LOGIN
AUTH1=$(grep authenticity $TMPFILE | cut -d\" -f12)
AUTH=$(perl -MURI::Escape -e "print uri_escape('$AUTH1');")
echo $AUTH
wget $BASEURL$LOGIN $WOPTS --post-data=authenticity_token=$AUTH\&email=$EMAIL\&password=$PWD\&commit=Login -O$TMPFILE
MOVIE=$(grep "href=/movie" $TMPFILE | head -n1 | cut '-d=' -f2 | cut '-d>' -f1 )
wget -O$TMPFILE $WOPTS $BASEURL$MOVIE
grep Duration movie -A 1 | tail -n1
grep Genre movie -A 1 | grep -v div 
rm $TMPFILE

Vile, huh? And it'll probably break on the next movie that comes through, so I'll have to figure a way to patch it up then.

Chip Chop

2009-05-13T17:20:00.001Z

Getting back to my office with some sesame chicken and rice, I noticed that the pair of chopsticks I had picked up was deficient to the tune of one. I didn't really feel like going back to the canteen to get another one, so scouted around my desk for an alternative. I found a plastic knife, which I used with my one chopstick to make an ad hoc pair of chopsticks. Result? It's actually easier to eat rice with one chopstick and a plastic knife than it is with a pair of chopsticks. Good to know.

Stamp Duty

2009-05-11T21:14:00.002Z

I thought that I had already posted a lengthy and tedious whinge about the cost of stamps which I could link to, but it looks like I didn't so I'll have to recreate it on the fly.

A while ago, I found a letter that I had sent returned to me with a little "returned for postage" sticker placed on it. "Returned for postage"? What on earth does that mean? It had a first class stamp on it, which had been franked. I shrugged, put the letter in a new envelope with a fresh stamp, and stuck it back in the mail.

Of course, exactly the same thing happened. And so I went to my local post office, and asked them to explain what this meant. The clerk helpfully explained that the price of a first class stamp had gone up from 41c to 42c. "So what?" I asked "This stamp just says "First class", so it should be good for a first class letter. Apparently not. The stamp I had, which looked like:

is apparently only worth 41c, though there's nothing on it to indicate this.

I then paid the extra 1c of postage, which apparently was enough (and got a receipt for it), and my letter was taken away to be delivered. But now I had a big roll of what I thought were first class stamps but which turned out to be merely 41c stamps in a 42c world. So I bought 100 1c stamps, and proceeded to stick them on every letter that I send (the clerk eyed me when I asked for 100 1c stamps, as if to say "are you sure?" -- well, it's only a dollar for me).

This was just a few months back, but on the news today I heard some earthshattering news... the price of a first class stamp has now gone up to 44c. Oh, great. Now I need to stick 1 41c stamp and THREE 1c stamps to get my letters delivered. Damn you, USPS! Damn you! I was fooled into believing that you had sold me some mystical "forever" stamps, but it turns out you got me good and proper. Well, the jokes on you, since these 1c stamps must cost way more than 1c each to produce and process.

Puzzled by all this confusing stamp price palava? Then maybe this website is for you.

AVOD

2009-04-05T21:01:00.002Z

Another day, another 8000 airmiles and 14 hours in the sky. Putting aside the toll that this places on the sky, I tend to focus more closely on the personal toll that it takes, what with 12 hour time differences and the resultant crippling jetlag. So as usual, I distract myself with the provided in flight entertainment. This time is was Continental's AVOD system again. In the configuration I saw, it finally had a decent selection--about 300 movies and 150 short titles--compared to the 20 odd movies last time I encountered a version. It might even be getting more stable -- it only had to be rebooted once on the way out, and not at all on the way back. (That said, I had a row of 3 seats to myself on the way back; one screen was locked up through the whole trip, and a second hung after I had been prodding it for an hour or so. Fortunately, the middle screen survived to the end). The selections are still a bit idiosyncratic, especially on the "short program" front: most titles (TV shows) have only a couple of seemingly randomly chosen episodes with no apparent logic. Although, if you are a fan of the CSI franchises you can see just about every episode ever. UI is still flaky: only one fastforward/rewind speed, and rather unresponsive/laggy, so when you see something on screen and tap to resume, it's usually a couple of minutes away from where you want to be. And still no fast way to jump back to where you got to before the last crash/reboot.

The music side of the AVOD system still needs more attention. It had a rather clunky user interface, where you navigate by genre, then by CD. When you play a track from a CD, the track plays out, and then nothing happens. That is, there's no way to select an album and just listen to the whole thing through. A new feature is the "jukebox", which lets you add up to 50 tracks, and will do a track advance at the end of each song. So you can find an album you want to hear, click on each track in turn to add it to the jukebox, and then listen to the album. An "add all" feature would help here, although the whole metaphor is pretty broken, and is probably anathema to the iPod generation. I also miss the "radio channels" from the pre-On Demand days, which would have a 2.5 hour selection of music, which could be good to just stick on and not bother about choosing what to listen to: sometimes, you don't really want to be so Demanding.

The system as a whole is coming along, and it helps to pass the 14 hours (although not as much as simply stretching out and entering an altered state of semi-consciousness). I wonder what the policy is for rotating off the larger library of TV shows and movies: a few more flights, and I could exhaust the things I actually want to see.

Send in the clowns

2009-03-10T19:49:00.003Z

It's at times like this that I'm reminded of the story about the depressed man who went to see a psychiatrist. Times were hard, with many people out of work and hungry. The man told the doctor of how miserable, depressed, alienated and lonely he felt. The doctor listened patiently, and at the end he said "I know just the cure for you. Tonight, the great clown Pagliacci is in town. Go, see his show and you will be filled once again with the joys of life."

At this, the man slumped further in his chair, and said, "But doctor... what the hell kind of prescription is that? I've just told you that I'm on the verge of suicide, and your advice is to go and watch some stupid clown show? How will that solve my problems? What crackpot medical school did you go to so that you come up with pointless fatuous suggestions like that? At least offer me prozac or something, you worthless piece of crap."

Nasty Search Queries

2009-03-09T20:40:00.003Z

It's been a while since I posted any search queries that have brought people here, but it's long overdue. Most egregious from the recent batch was a query for "yes minister appleby/hacker slash", although I have to shoulder some responsibility for that since I briefly mentioned the topic back in 2003. Worryingly, after inventing the concept as a ridiculous dummy five years ago, it seems to have genuinely come to pass, at least judging from the search results. I'm not about to actually click on any of them.

QAM, QAM, lovely QAM

2009-03-08T01:19:00.003Z

I've been happily surviving without any source of live television for a few years ago. It's a combination of pretty awful local over-the-air reception (which is only compounded by the impending switch to digital), and obscenely expensive cable fees for even basic programming. It hasn't bothered me much, but it would be nice to have some access to live information in the event of a major event, political happening, or large emerging news story. For the presidential debates, I was able to pick up some webstreams, though these were a bit shaky, and for the oscars, I just drove over to Princeton for an hour to see them.

Well, I recently switched my internet service from 3Meg DSL (which barely counts as broadband these days) to 15Meg Cable. I casually wondered whether this would let me pick up any TV off the coaxial cable. Nothing via "analog" or plugging in to an over-the-air ATSC decoder box, as you might expect (the installation work order even indicated that I had been given a "video block" for free). But, after some fiddling, I discovered that I could pick up the local channels via QAM: Quadrature Amplitude Modulation. The kind cable company was fulfilling its FCC obligation to provide customers with unencrypted QAM versions of the channels. So now I can pick these up, albeit via a computer with an appropriate decoder card, which isn't that satisfying. Maybe when I upgrade a television, I'll get one with an integrated QAM tuner and use that.

Also while switching to Cable internet, I made the mistake of hooking up a machine which is usually shielded behind a router. I left it alone for an hour or two, and returned to find that it had been hijacked: I'd left a VNC server running without a password (I normally access the machine only on the internal network), and some crim had abused the hospitality. I was tipped off by the fact that the antivirus software had been uninstalled, the software firewall disabled, and other general nastiness. I wondered if I would need to scrub the machine and start over. Actually, delousing the machine was not too hard. I identified all the files that had changed in the intervening time, which led me to a couple of new directories, in windows/system/programas [hint: I don't usually label my directories in spanish] and thereabouts. A couple of new processes were running, as well as a couple of familiar named processes which were running as a user rather than as kernel (ie they were pretending to be something they were not). A new service, cunningly named ms-java was also installed. I killed and deleted the processes and files, and removed the unwanted service. Unless there was some additional nasty rootkit business going on, I think I got it all (subsequent virus scans and spyware scans didn't turn up anything).

What was interesting is what all this badware was doing: I didn't spend too much time trying to disentangle it, but I got the general idea. There was an IRC client installed, presumably to allow the machine to be controlled from afar; there was also an FTP server set up. Probing into it, I was rather galled to find that the server was serving up some of *my* files. Fortunately, these were only some music and video files that I'd downloaded. These had been copied into the programas directory, and were being served from there. I got rid of all of that, but was still curious to know how automated this was: had the whole attack been done via standard scripts, or had some kid pwned my machine, and manually been probing through my files? Fortunately, there wasn't anything too important on the machine, but it's still rather worrying to see how easily---and how quickly---some kid can get in. Sure, I left a door wide open, but it's always a surprise to be reminded how cavalier people can be. Anyway, I managed to get the whole thing cleaned up within a couple of hours of infection, so no lasting damage done.

A pair of nickers

2009-03-08T01:15:00.002Z

Fans of bank robbery will be delighted to learn that there was another bank robbery last week after I posted about one last Tuesday. The same bank was hit on Thursday (after I walked past it on Wednesday). In fact, it was the same bloke what dunnit, and the police have someone helping them with their inquiries. So that's all right then.

Is that a sandwich in your pocket?

2009-03-03T04:12:00.002Z

Gawker rather downplays the latest edition of Masterpiece Security Theatre, in which an innocent german teenager is harassed for possession of a sandwich. He had packed the sandwich in his bag, forgotten about it, and ticked the "nothing to declare" box on his form. The punishment for this mighty crime? A fine of $300. "He lied on an official document!" the snide voiceover snarls. Well, the US customs form is a little misleading on this matter. The relevant question reads

"Are you bringing with you:
a. fruits, plants, food, or insects?
b. meats, animals, or animal/wildlife products?
c. disease agents, cell cultures, or snails?
d. soil or have you visited a farm/ranch/pasture outside the United States?"

"Fruits, plants, food or insects" -- well, "food" is a pretty catch all term to be buried away in this list. But put next to fruits, plants and insects, makes it confusing. Are they referring to some special kinds of food? Why not just say "food" if that's what they mean? Given that I've brought in packaged snacks (quite often, ones that I bought in the US to begin with), and just been waved through without further question, what does this really mean?

Maybe just to be safe, I'll tick all these boxes. I mean, there's bound to be a few microns of soil stuck to the bottom of my shoes. And which of us isn't carrying billions of "disease agents" without realising it? I know I am.

"The Bin Bag Murders are Back On!"

2009-03-03T04:07:00.003Z

Well, not quite. But excitement! Before the great snowstorm which dropped a grand total of, er, about two inches of snow, there was apparently a bank robbery about ten minutes from where I dwell. And look--he's wearing a hat! Could it be another copy-cat hat burglar?

HS-USA

2009-02-19T03:34:00.002Z

"Homeland Security USA" is disturbingly compelling. It revels in showing drug busts, illegal aliens, and other dodgy business. This clip shows everything that's wrong with TSA's "security theater". Can you guess what's in the bag? Isn't it inevitable?

Balderdash

2009-02-08T14:06:00.001Z

Another reason why people with silly names should not be allowed in government.

"I did right thing over Baby P" -- Balls!

A little late to the party, but...

2009-02-06T01:40:00.004Z

"Goto" considered harmful.

Configuration

2009-01-22T14:41:00.002Z

This weekend, I indulged in the popular pastime of "formatting the hard disk and reinstalling the operating system". The machine in question had been accruing cruft for about 6 years, so it was probably about time, although the act was finally prompted by some particularly inadvisable malware tinkering.

As I went through the usual setting of options, installation of important software, and disabling of the usual irritants (if I have a "recycle bin", then I really don't need a confirmation dialogue every time I delete something), my mind returned to the question of exactly how much time it takes to turn a fresh install into something usable. Even just installing all the service packs and 'critical updates' takes several hours and half a dozen reboots.

Which in turn made me think of the new US President. As far as I can tell from the news reports, he has been reconfiguring his country. Enabling the FOIA that was disabled by the previous user; removing the Guantanamo extension, and so on. Wonder how long all that will take.

More misplaced messages

2009-01-22T04:15:00.002Z

Please claim these if they are yours:

Cheryl,

Great speaking with you today again, and I look forward to reviewing your resume and speaking with you more in depth on Friday. Have a great week.

and also

DR. Cody:
DID YOU KNOW THAT VENLAFAXINE EXTENDED RELEASE TABLETS ARE THE ONLY WAY TO PRESCRIBE 225 MG OF EXTENDED-RELEASE, ONCE-DAILY VENLAFAXINE HCl IN A SINGLE TABLET?

No I didn't -- and don't call me cody.

Academic Spammer

2009-01-15T22:55:00.002Z

More spam continues to pour in from professional Spammer Nikos Mastorakis. You can always tell real serious spam from the casual mailing list junk, because it addresses you by name, and makes weaselly suggestions, like "We would like to add you as an invited speaker". These people are the sleaziest, lowest of the low. I wish they would all get lost. I have tried to unsubscribe, as usual, and will see if it has any effect whatsoever.

More misdirected mail

2009-01-15T18:37:00.002Z

Further dispatches from my Inbox:

"Hello Ms.Cyndy ,

I am a new graduate student in the department of Electrical Engineering. I have been advised to meet Dr.Tamal Bose by Cynthia Hopkins. I would like to discuss about my courses and research prospects. So in this regard i would like to have an appointment with him. Any time on thursday and friday would be fine with me.

Thank you
regards
Rohitesh"

And also:

Re: I have sent you an e-card
> To view the card please click the following link:
> http://www.ecards.co.uk/display_Ecard.php?ecard=2_KmZcb3E56Kw7

Thanks for my card lovey. I have sent a picture of Clare and Eva.

Hi love hope you are having a good day. mads has gone to her swimming lesson with your Mum. She is good at swimming, especially jumping in. She likes to try and get the teacher wet who is standing on the side!

see you tomorrow Cxx

And also:

Hi Gra
Hope all ok with you and that you are having a good week.

We are all trying hard to keep warm - had to scrape the car this afternoon - and it ws only 3.30 - shows how flippin freezing it is!!!!!
Haven't got any gossip - Emily is pondering what to do for her birthday - so far we've only had about 12 million conversations about it!!!!
Take care
Love Julia XXXX

Also on the subject of the weather:

Dear Graham,

I'm just getting ready to come and visit you. It's very cold and grey here, hope it's sunnier in Harrow.

I went shopping with Susan yesterday in Bury St. Edmund's, but managed NOT to buy anything. I was too cold to look.

Looking forward to seeing you soon.
Lots of Love
Mum and Dad,

All fascinating, eh?

Narked Video

2009-01-01T20:20:00.002Z

I mentioned the new VOD system on Continental 757s before I left, and I got another chance to have a go on it on the return trip. It was an even more surreal experience second time around. This time it only crashed once (requiring about ten minutes for a reboot), and when it did crash I was only a few minutes into the start of a film, so could recover fairly easily. But this time the choice of movies was even more odd and arbitrary. So odd that I took the effort to write them down. The 19 (what, 19? Surely that is too many for any human to contemplate?) film choices were:

Bachelor Mother (1939)
Bottle Shock (2008)
Fred Claus (2007)
Ghost Town (2008)
Happy Feet (2006)
Ocean's Eleven (1960)
The House Bunny (2008)
The Mummy 3: Dragon Emperor (2008)
Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants 2 (2008)
The Women (2008)
Austin Powers 3 (2002)
Bullitt (1968)
Catch Me If You Can (2002)
It's a wonderful life (1946)
Philadelphia (1993)
Rebel without a cause (1955)
Spiderman (2002)
Spiderman 2 (2004)
Walk the line (2005)

It's hard to put a finger on, but there's something truly odd about this list. It's a balance of recent dreck, mediocre movies and some older movies. But whose idea was it to put "Rebel without a cause" on the list? Why begin the list with a nearly 70 year old rom-com that no-one's ever heard of? I found the whole experience quite odd and baffling.

Obligatory End of Year Wrap Up Post

2009-01-01T16:13:00.003Z

In 2008, I wasn't organized enough to keep a list of which books I read as I did in 2007, but it was probably rather less than 50. But, thanks to Netflix, I am able to easily recover a list of which films made it through my rather idiosyncratic random selection system again. So here they are, along with my sardonic short reviews:

Man on Wire: not to be confused with Man on Fire.
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer: Completely unmemorable
Porco Rosso: You'll believe a pig can fly!
The Yes Men: Pranksters take down the WTO
Kevin Smith 2: Evening Harder: Disc 1: Diminishing returns
Man on Fire: not to be confused with Man on Wire
Wishful Thinking: irredeemable weak rom-com
A Few Good Men: the truth hurts
Helvetica: You'll believe a font can love!
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: can't get you out of my head
The Cat's Meow: the truth Hearst
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End: and don't come back
Collateral: Damaged thriller
Adaptation: A proper Charlie
Chasing Amy: If you seek Amy?
Quadrophenia: Where do the Who live?
The Sting: Call the police!
Blade: Good clean Vampire fun
The Cheap Detective: The Falk Guy
Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic: Same jokes, different order
Steamboy: Steam punk
The Collected Shorts of Jan Svankmajer: Eat my shorts!
Ralph Nader: An Unreasonable Man: You'll believe a man can lose an election
Howl's Moving Castle: More Miyazaki Madness
King Kong: Gorilla goes Ape
D.E.B.S.: Oddly positioned lesbian love story
The Godfather: not the head you want to be given
Sketches of Frank Gehry: mind the sharp edges
All the President's Men: the truth brings down the pres
Street Fight: dirty politics in Newark
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington: best fillibuster in movie history
North by Northwest: crop-duster
Lost in Translation: Come again?
Ocean's Twelve: A sequel too far
Van Helsing: Mindless action
Maxed Out: apparently we're borrowing too much
Why We Fight: to feed the military-industrial complex
Silent Running: psychopath murders crew in space
Starter for Ten: UBris hubris

Blimey

2009-01-01T16:06:00.003Z

It took me a couple of listens before I noticed the rather staggeringly puerile single entendre in Britney's "If You Seek Amy". I must be getting older. I suppose it's destined to remain an album track, unless someone decides to edit it into something else ("If see ukulele", maybe?). You can listen to it care of YouTube, and enjoy the almost witless user comments. Bet Kevin Smith is wishing he'd called his film "Seeking Amy" instead, though.

Talent Shows

2008-12-21T16:12:00.002Z

Big music excitement in the UK this week, as the nation tries to decide which version of "Hallelujah" is best: Jeff Buckley's soaring version, or a cash in copy from a talent show contestant. The result will be known later today, though it's pretty much a done deal thanks to the popularity of the talent show in question. "Presenting" the Top 40, alleged personality Fearne Cotton rather spoiled the tension by announcing "We'll be talking to the number one artist, whoever that might be." Er, right.

Praying to the Wireless Gods

2008-12-21T12:09:00.002Z

I have a photo of two frollaborators (pointless portmanteau of friend and collaborator) kneeling in front of a hotel window on the 14th floor, with their laptops on the windowsill. The reason being that in this way they could just about pick up a WiFi signal. I'm now in a somewhat similar position myself: laptop hoisted up on a couple of conference proceedings next to the window, in order to catch the signal of a neighbor whose password I've borrowed. Since they are the only people in the world still using B, the signal is weak and a bit flaky, so I can only pick it up from this one location, so it doesn't really feel like "true" wireless -- it has the same pauses and cut-outs more familiar from dial-up, which was my solution for my Maidstone trips in previous years. It's quite weird to go back to the model of actively having to connect to the internet to check email or look something up, and then disconnecting. I don't recommend it.

XBMC vs VLC vs MPC

2008-12-15T04:13:00.002Z

AC asks "So XBMC is better than VLC?"

Well, maybe, but it's not quite a fair comparison. XBMC I use in its original incarnation, on a softmodded xbox to stream content off my main server. VLC I've used as a desktop video client, but I got increasingly frustrated with it: it would have problems rendering video occasionally: failing to show anything, but stopping and restarting the video would fix it. It also seemed very slow to seek. So I've gone back to my previous desktop solution: MediaPlayerClassic, plus ffdshow and possibly another codec pack or two ("Windows essential codec pack" seems to do the job, and is not obviously full of adware crap).

Well, you did ask.

Video on Deplane

2008-12-11T20:50:00.002Z

Continental is proudly trumpeting the installation of VOD on its 757s, about a decade after it would have been cool. This means I will get slightly less work done when I am returning from trips abroad.

The last CO flight I was on had this system, and it's a bit rubbish, actually. It crashed about 3 times during the flight (maybe there has been a "firmware" upgrade to fix this: waiting for a firmware upgrade seems to be the modern equivalent of praying). The selection of content was pretty dire: the press release trumpets "25 movies and 25 TV shows", as if half its passengers aren't already carrying that much with them in their pockets. Any half decent system needs to have at least 50 movies and 150 episodes to have a decent chance of having something worth watching. Lastly, because it kept crashing, I'm now in the position of having seen about three movies most of the way through. Like many other systems, the only way to navigate through the movie is via fast-forward and rewind. Fast-forward on that system I pegged at roughly 8x, meaning that when the system crapped out after two hours of a long movie, it would take about 15 mins to get back to where you were; not really worth it for the last five minutes of, er, "Speed Racer". (don't tell me what happened). I did this for one movie, by going to the toilet while it was running forwards. Still, fast-forward and rewind are terrible ways to seek through video content. As I've probably opined before, but can't be bothered to look for, the main actions I want to take are "Wait, I missed that bit of dialogue -- go back about ten seconds" and "Hmm, I've seen the first half of this already, jump forward in large chunks till I get to something new, then let me go back and forth a bit till I find where I want to be." Modern video clients, such as the superlative XBMC, have lots of options for doing exactly this, but other things seem obsessed with the idea that I want to emulate an almost extinct analog linear tape based system. Ffwd and Rewind are artifacts of tape, and must be destroyed. That is all.

TV on the radio

2008-12-02T14:20:00.001Z

Daily Mail gets itself into a frothing, incoherent rage... over nudity on the radio.

What should I do now?

2008-12-02T04:03:00.002Z

As usual, I will be returning to the motherland in December. As a result, I'll be at a loose end (in Loose) from mid-December to the end of the month. Exercise usual means of communication to influence my movements to intersect with your locale, if you so desired.

No2ID3?

2008-11-28T04:01:00.003Z

I've wittered on about the difficulty of finding the ideal digital music player before, though I'm too lazy to find the link. I recently picked up a cheap 8Gig refurbed player since it was on offer, and the headphone connector on my current model is going again. Unlike the various models that I've owned previously, this one is based on ID3 tags.

Who thinks that this is a good idea? Even assuming that you have got your entire music collection all tagged up nicely via CDDB or similar resource, how is that any way to navigate your files? The whole folders approach has worked reasonably well on computers for the last few decades. It gives a nice flexibility for people to arrange things how they like, according to whatever idiosyncratic hierarchy and arrangement happens to appeal to them. In particular, it's particularly terrible when it comes to audiobooks and radio recordings: I want to listen to one of these at a time. But under the tag system, it's just horrible to navigate through these. Not least because the tags on these things are inevitably buggered, and it doesn't seem worth the fuss to try to fix them.

So I'm not all that thrilled with ID3 tag browsing. Unless anyone can suggest a sensible way to get them to behave, I think I'll stick to file browsing in future.

The internet alphabet

2008-11-13T15:37:00.003Z

If you have a copy of Firefox, it comes with a google search bar built in. Start typing in this search bar, and "suggestions" pop up -- presumably, the first of these is the most frequent. This changes over time. I didn't pay much attention to this, until I started typing something beginning with 's', and the first suggestion was "Sarah Palin". That's scary. So, here is the "Internet Alphabet" of top suggestions for each letter. Your results may vary based on country, time, history, and other randomness.

A is for Amazon
B is for Bebo
C is for Craigslist
D is for Dictionary
E is for Ebay
F is for Facebook
G is for Google
H is for Hotmail
I is for IMDB
J is for Jennifer Hudson
K is for Kelly Blue Book
L is for Limewire
M is for MySpace
N is for Next
O is for Obama
P is for Photobucket
Q is for Quotes
R is for Runescape
S is for Sarah Palin
T is for Target
U is for utube
V is for Verizon Wireless
W is for Wikipedia
X is for X Factor
Y is for YouTube
Z is for Zip Codes

Van Buren!

2008-11-06T19:26:00.004Z

I noticed that since Monday evening, I've been getting lots of hits on "Van Buren" "Lowest place in hell". I think it's because at about that time Dorris Kearns-Goodwin sang a little snatch of that song. (Hulu embed probably doesn't work outside the US Empire).

So, yeah, here's where you can get the lyrics, and find out how to get hold of a copy.

More PDF font embedding hijinks

2008-11-06T19:10:00.004Z

I've complained bitterly before about the stupid requirement of many publishers (IEEE, ACM) to embed all fonts in a PDF document -- including the "base fonts", which any compliant reader must be able to render. Because of this, it's actually quite hard to persuade many pieces of software to embed base fonts, because, why would you ever need to do this? This can lead to quite a stalemate, and a lot of frustration.

I had a nice system all working, but in my latest work I've been using Gnuplot with the PDF terminal. This outputs directly to PDF, and avoids a bug in Gnuplot when generating bar charts. All well and good, except that the resultant PDF does not embed the base fonts. And there's virtually no documentation on the Gnuplot PDF terminal, certainly nothing that talks about this.

So, after a lot of frustration and swearing, I came up with the following ugly hack: run the pdf through ~~gnuplot~~ ghostscript with the pre-press option, and output to pdf. Here's the command line I came up with, though it might be more complex than it needs to be:

gs -q -dSAFER -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=tmp.pdf -dCompatibilityLevel=1.3 -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress -c .setpdfwrite -f $1

Where $1 is the name of the input file, and tmp.pdf is the name of the output.

The ironically named "PDF Express" system has yet to verify that the resulting compiled file does the necessary thing, but I'm reasonably confident that it will work now.

Things that continue to annoy me

2008-11-03T18:47:00.001Z

People who use "epsfig". It's 2008, folks! Use \includegraphics, for goodness sake.

Abs' Hen Party

2008-11-01T14:45:00.001Z

More from the "mail sent to my email account that was clearly intended for someone else" file. Today's missive seems to concern the planning for a party for some hens, or chickens, or something. Anyway, here it is in case the proper recipient happens to be reading:

Abs' hen party December 6 2008 Hi everyone Just an update on the hen party front - at this stage we're thinking the day (Saturday December 6) will go something like this: Afternoon ice skating at Somerset House (with mulled wine first) Drinks then dinner at a private room - venue to be decided. We'll make sure there's somewhere for us to get changed out of our skating threads. Dancing at the Pigalle Club near Piccadilly, there will be a show and then live music all night long. It's meant to be loads of fun and we'll all need to dress up 50s-style! Remember, all of this is a big secret from the hen! If you could all let me know asap whether you can make it, and if you would like to come for the whole thing or only certain parts let me know too, as we'll need to book and buy tickets etc quite soon. I'll get back to you with costs etc before locking anything in. Looking forward to it! Sophie and Hannah xx

Moral Victory

2008-10-30T22:34:00.002Z

I recently called my credit card provider in the UK to query why I was being billed for a month when I had paid off the balance in full the previous month and not spent anything on the card in the interim (it was something to do with some scam the credit card companies pull by charging you interest on cash balances differently from anything else). The drone on the phone refused to admit fault, but reversed the interest charge of 76p in a show of goodwill anyway.

I just checked my phone bill, and that call cost me $2.79.

But the important thing is that I WON. OK?

When all is sed and done

2008-10-03T19:59:00.002Z

s/maver/d/ on:

"I've joined this team that is a team of mavericks... I think that's why we need to send the maverick from the Senate and put him in the White House... He has been the maverick. He has ruffled feathers... A team of mavericks, of course we're not going to agree on 100 percent of everything... People aren't looking for more of the same. They are looking for change. And John McCain has been the consummate maverick in the Senate over all these years... Also, John McCain's maverick position that he's in, that's really prompt up to and indicated by the supporters that he has."

Certainly, suspending his campaign was a maverick move.

Not remotely related

2008-10-03T19:50:00.003Z

Today's two songs that sound vaguely like each other for the first few seconds, if you squint, and then bear no resemblance to each other whatsoever, goes to:

Granddaddy -- Underneath the Weeping Willow

K9 & Company -- Theme Tune

Intro Outro

2008-09-28T15:53:00.001Z

Today's Intro compare and contrast:

Again, start both at the same time -- instant Mash-up like it's 2001!

If xkcd told you to jump off a cliff?

2008-09-26T13:41:00.002Z

Geohashing often invites its players to jump in a lake, but tomorrow's new jersey location seems to be in the middle of a railway line

Easily Confused

2008-09-23T15:00:00.001Z

Compare and contrast the first five seconds of these two youchoob embeds:

Now start them both at the same time.
Oh well.

Dem Bones

2008-09-12T02:28:00.002Z

I make a point of seeking out any cheesy US effort to depict the UK, so it was high hopes that I checked out the Season 4 double episode of "Bones". The show started off promisingly with that other Deschanel girl and Angel in "Oxford University" where apparently it's traditional to give lectures while wearing gowns (actually, that may well be the case) in drafty dining rooms (again, just teetering on the brink of plausibility. In fact, the only palpably implausible thing about the whole episode (not counting the plot) was the fact that it gave the impression that Oxford was a suburb of London. And since they're both on the Thames, it's not impossible to see why you might get that impression. The plot was ridiculous. Rather than bother to do a feature length episode, it consisted of two normal episodes strung together which will presumably make for easier syndication. The first was some dubious parody of the British class system, featuring an oxford Don and his Scotland yard sidekick, presumably in some hilarious mirroring of the main characters. This could have been the start of some tedious spinoff Bones:London. This was promptly dashed in the second half when the don was offed. Yes, spoiler alert, but the show itself opened with a massive spoiler for the end of season three which I hadn't yet seen, so I don't care. This could have been slightly more interesting, but instead I spent the entire time wondering where I had seen the Scotland Yardie before, until the magic of IMDB came to the rescue and pointed out that it was that one off of Torchwood who was featured in all the initial promotional material, and then killed off in the first episode, and then brought back for "Why do they keep killing Suzie?". Anyway, those are all the interesting things about it.

Get Fry!

2008-09-12T01:56:00.002Z

I was trying to watching the latest Stephen Fry documentary on living with the printed word, but found it incredibly distracting that the choice of backing music seemed to be the theme from Get Carter. Youchoob embeds FTW:

Product Placement

2008-09-12T01:07:00.002Z

What links
Oxford Comma by Vampire Weekend and

Katy Perry?

Answer:

Chapstick.

Fantastic.

Compare and Contrast...

2008-09-05T03:17:00.002Z

Who said the following:

"For the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback"

"I fell in love with my country when I was a prisoner in someone else's."

Free Will

2008-09-03T23:25:00.001Z

A message plonks in from my bank, of all people offering a "Free Will Review". You what? Someone can verify whether or not I have free will? Exactly how am I supposed to trust what I hear from a third party on this subject? Oh, wait a moment, I've just got it.

Come again?

2008-09-03T20:19:00.003Z

The spammers at WSEAS are stepping up their campaign to claim legitimacy (here's a tip: stop spamming people first). Skimming through the anonymous "WSEAS team" contains the rather surprising outpouring:

ARE YOU A WSEAS YOUNG STUDENT? COME IN OUR FACEBOOK? http://www.facebook.com/people/Wseas_Friends/1402856134

Say what? I believe that there are sites on the internet devoted to that sort of thing, but I'm not sure that it's really any way to gain academic standing.

Philosophy

2008-08-28T15:42:00.001Z

Your philosophical question of the day:
Why is PowerPoint still unable to wrap text around objects in 2008?

Must Read

2008-08-25T03:58:00.003Z

As you are by now no doubt well aware, I often receive misdirected emails since one of my email accounts has a fairly simple name. This latest one is quite intriguing, since it raises so many intriguing questions. As is my habit, I am posting it here in the hope that the true recipient will find it. I'll also do my best to recreate the full HTML styling of the original.

Must Read

Ok hon have it your way,I can see you want nothing to do with me right now,I wish you could have told me,not have stole from me,but it happen,Will I deleted you off my yahoo,took you off fubar,and I pack my blackberry away,seeing I have another cell phone now.I wont be paying the bill on the first.I'm leaving Oct.3rd to Sanfors,Tx,I have a freind there that owns a house that told me to come down with Keith,my mom and the babies,I dont want here in Vegas and I dont want around Dallas,and if and when you get tired please come back to me I will always love you,If you make it there please get a divorce,the way you left I have to wonder if you ever did that to someone else,maybe i'm not even marry to you,I'm going to try and find that out while i'm in Tx,I told onyx you where not coming back,that you used us for what you could and moved on.My address down there will be P.O.box XXX Sanford,TX 79078 So if you ever need me you have 2 e-mails now and my address to get a hold of me,Why did you take that wedding ring and tape it so it would'nt fell off?How long did you plan on doing this to me?No wonder you where sick it was guilt.How long did you stop loving me?Or did you ever love me?If you ever get the balls could you write me and tell what the hell happen.You not working and us living the way we did was all on me I guess.I have a feeling this is what you do everyone and you will do it to your cousin to.It wont be long you wont like New York.I hope you Do get to Canada maybe you will one day miss me,if you think about it I only did things to try and make you happy.Oh well I do hope to hear from you one day,G___ C____ remember your wife you abandoned.

Well. Should I reply to this message and find out more about this situation? Or just keep my nose out of other people's business?

Taking the train to Turkismuhle

2008-08-15T21:41:00.002Z

Nearly finished in my preparations so that I can, to use a euphemism that almost no one in the world will understand "Take the train to Turkismuhle". During my travels, I will have intermittent Internet access.

I don't know if you are aware of the services provided by Intermittent Internet Access (IIA). They are so useful that I think I might switch to them permanently. Having IIA basically means that I don't get to see any messages that require me to do any work, respond in a timely fashion, or otherwise put myself to effort. But at the same time, any message that happens to be cc'ed to me regarding someone else's projects, I can see immediately and respond to within seconds complaining, suggesting more work that could be done, or otherwise making the recipient's day less enjoyable. I would recommend Intermittent Internet Access to anyone -- unless I need them to do something for me.

Doves and Planes

2008-08-11T01:26:00.002Z

Every few years I get obsessed by an MIA track and listen to it over and over again. This year, it's been Paper Planes, a rather unsubtle tribute to the drugs industry. (YouChoob embed)

This was probably set off by hearing it in the middle distance while waiting for Santogold to come on in Central Park last month.

Anyway, I happened to be listening to the radio, which was playing "There Goes the Fear" by Doves, and I thought to myself, 'hmm, these two sound quite similar'. Judge for yourself (another YouChoob embed):

Of course, I'm entirely wrong. Well, the tempo's off for one thing. Maybe the bassline is a bit similar. Still, any budding DJs out there want to try one of those trendy "mash-ups" I've been starting to hear so much about?

Kafkaesque?

2008-08-10T23:30:00.003Z

You can't do this. From the Times:

"Hawes, an Oxford graduate and university lecturer, emphasises his total admiration for the literary Kafkaesque genius who wrote brooding classics such as The Metamorphosis, The Castle and The Trial..."

You can't describe someone as "Kafkaesque" when they are, in fact, Kafka. I'm not having, if only because that was used as a joke sometime back in the 90's (quite possibly by Lee and Herring) as 'Kafkaesque author Franz Kafka"...

Reading, Writing and Arithmetic

2008-08-08T00:28:00.002Z

If students are learning to play western classical instruments, then they will learn to read staff notation. But if they're learning uilleann pipes, or tabla it's arguably less important.

Apparently, it will soon be possible to get an A in GCSE literature without being able to read or write a word of English. According some passing twonk, "If students are learning about western classical literature, then they will learn to read English. But if they're reading Brazilian or Iranian literature, it's arguably less important.

Greetings the stranger!

2008-07-30T00:08:00.003Z

I know you shouldn't post too much spam for fear of encouraging them, but I did very much enjoy this tragic phishing attempt:

Subject I looking for a friend Good day! --- You are disturbed by administration of dating sites of Australia. You are a member of this group. One of our members interested in you. There is the message from this Member* - name "Miraslavna" This WOMAN wishes to get acquainted with you. --- Greetings the stranger! Hello from big country Russia. I have read your profile, and i think you a very interesting person. I see you as a pleasant interlocutor. I want to know you better and to exchange photos and not more informstion about each other. I will be very glad if our relations will not stop on that and we will not communicate only using Internet. I'll be glad to meet you one day. Write me if you want to my e-mail: quattromira4@gmail.com Also a use MSN and ICQ messadger to contact my friends, so if you have It, I'll tell you my contact details. I will tell a little bit about myself: I'm very nice, sociable girl. I'm 25 years old, growth 169, my eyes are gray-blue, hair -blonde, weight is 54 kg, I have a sports constitution. I visit fitness centre regularly to support the figure and to feel Vigorously. If you are self-assured and think that you can deserve my attention then write to me)) Mira.

Radio Radio

2008-07-29T17:22:00.002Z

What I want: a portable radio, digital tuning, with an inbuilt battery (like mobile phones and most mp3 players these days) so that I can charge it / use it while plugged in, and then carry it around the house without having to find several dozen C batteries to power it.

Ideally, it could also access my wifi connection and stream internet radio stations, but that seems to be too much to ask. As it is, no one seems to make radios with inbuild rechargeable batteries. Why not?

Hasbro

2008-07-29T17:21:00.003Z

Hasbro are a bunch of melon-farming cork-soakers, since their actions have cut off my games just when things were getting interesting. Damn their eyes!

Edit: Oh, it's even worse. There are alternate "official" scrabble versions: one for players in the US, one for international players. I like to play scrabble from the US against people in the UK. So that rather screws up any hope there. Damn all your eyes again!

Refund this

2008-07-27T20:24:00.003Z

You may dimly be aware of a class action suit against Virgin Atlantic and British Airways regarding collusion over 'fuel duty' expenses. To claim a refund, you have to go to their website, and fill in details on all flights that you took with the airlines between August 2004 and summer 2006. But what kind of anal retentive has enough information stored to be able to remember that kind of detail nearly four years later?

Well, apparently I do. I went to my spreadsheet that lists which flights I took and when (I keep it partly to tally my carbon footprint, but not to make any attempt to remedy it), and looked up the dates in question. The only flights I would have taken would have been transatlantic, US to UK. This told me when I could have taken flights, but not the carrier. For that, I dug out my credit card receipts from the months in question, and looked up the details of who I travelled with, and when. This included one flight on Virgin in December '04. So I filled the details in to the website, and sent it off. In sixth months time, I confidently expect to receive a rebate cheque. Since the total cost of the flight was $300 at the time, the rebate amount could be at most a dollar or two. So, more good uses of my time, I guess.

The Plib

2008-07-24T17:11:00.002Z

I'm constantly wanting to refer to The Plib, but no one seems to have transcribed it onto the Internet, so I've done it myself.

The Plib (Peter Cook as E L Whisty)

I was talking to you about my plans to think of something absolutely new and revolutionary which would change the whole face of the world. Well, I just thought of it. It's called the plib. It's an amazing thing, the plib, I thought of it in the bath. It's very simple and small and amazing. It's very peculiar that nobody thought of it before. It's about quarter of an inch long and quarter of an inch wide, and it's completely round and white. And what you do is drop it into a glass of water and it fizzes. Then, you drink down the plibby substance, and it cures you of anything. Isn't that wonderful? If you've got rheumatism in the knees, all you have to do is take one plib and within seconds and all your troubles are over. And the amazing thing is that it works for every kind of disease. It's a really wonderful invention, the plib. I went along to the patent office with it yesterday to register it in my name. I went in there and I said "Excuse me, I've just invented the plib and I want to get it patented before anybody steals the idea." And they said "Oh yes, what exactly is this plib of yours?" So I explained to them what it was and they were very interested and asked to see one. So I had to tell them I hadn't exactly made one yet. It was still in the 'ideas stage'. What I wanted to do was to patent the idea first and then do the research to get the plib into production. They said that wasn't possible unless I actually made a working plib. I'd never heard such rubbish in my life! It's the people who have the ideas who deserve all the credit. I mean, anyone can make a rotten old wooden wheel, but it takes brains to think of the idea of the wheel. I wonder what happened to poor old Einstein? He had that wonderful idea about splitting the atom and causing enormous explosions. I suppose if he came along to the patent office with his diagrams, they'd've said "Ah, I'm sorry Mr. Einstein, but I'm afraid you'll have to show us one of your explosions before we can grant you a patent." Serve them bloody well right if he'd blown them up. I shouldn't think he ever managed to get the idea patented. Very sad really, he ought to be getting sixpence ever time there's an atomic explosion. They cheat you out of everything these days. I tried arguing with them but it was no good. I said, "Look here, my good man, if you don't register my plib, I'll get on to my very good friend the Duke of Windsor, he'll come round and smash you round the face". And he said "Oh really? How very interesting. Perhaps you'd like to have a look at a very new invention that's just come in". I said I would. And he reached under his desk and got out a long spindly pole with a sponge on the end of it, covered in horrible sticky muck -- I think it was fig jam. He said "This is a very fascinating device that we in the patent office call a 'nit-poker'". Then he banged me in the face with it and kicked me down stairs. I don't think government officials should be allowed to behave like that. I shouldn't be surprised if he hadn't stolen my idea about the plib.

Care less

2008-07-22T22:09:00.002Z

There's probably a complex grammatical way of describing a phrase like "I could care less", when what the speaker means is "I couldn't care less", but the meaning is clear in the event anyway. I recently encountered a new one of these: while in Bristol Airport, my flight was delayed (Why? The explanations given ranged from "for technical reasons" and "awaiting air traffic control", neither of which made any sense). The tannoy announcement was ended with "We apologize for any convenience this may cause." Now, you used to hear this occasionally and think to yourself "ho-ho, they've got it mixed up". But I've heard this repeated so often, that I think it's becoming part of the language, and unthinking drones are repeating it, ignorant of the literal meaning, and assuming that it is a genuine apology. Of course, any sentence that begins "We apologize" is clearly bogus: there's virtually no setting where it is meaningful to have an apology from a collective group of people. I'd rather not hear this; since any situation where there is a tannoy announcement of an apology, you can equally replace it with the statement "Everyone with any connection to this organization is entirely indifferent to your plight", I think I'd rather they just not bother. About a decade ago, rail stations in the UK took this a step further by having entirely automated announcements with apologies, which further highlighted this inanity -- a computer program was being made to fake an apology for the late running of the 9.25. I doubt that anything has been done about this obnoxiousness.

Evolve this

2008-07-18T12:25:00.002Z

Momentous events in the world of UGC: the tedious and unfunny "Evolution of Dance" is about to be knocked off the top spot of youchoob's most viewed chart by commercial productised pop anagram Avril Lavigne. Possibly this part of an orchestrated attempt to take down the dancer with some dubious hit inflation techniques, but so what? Another benefit is that this screws up the fitting of skewed power law distributions to the most popular videos.

Cart Talk

2008-07-13T10:16:00.003Z

Everyone loves Car Talk. I disappear off to Bristol for a week, and all anyone can talk about is how much they love Car Talk. So on my return, I decide to check out the TV version which has just launched in the US. Well, I say the TV version. Basically, there's now a cartoon that stars the protagonists of the show.

And it's... well, the thing is, I don't know what it is. I think the creators don't really know what it is. It's basically a kids' cartoon, voiced by the Magliozzi brothers. In the style of these things, a host of new characters have been added, such as a harassed NPR producer, and a load of other car mechanics. And it bears no other relation to the radio show whatsoever. In which case... what's the point?

You can just about make out the thought process that went into this. The radio show is great, but consists of people calling in to have their car problems diagnosed over the phone. So, the natural thing would be to do a live action version of this. But, showing phone calls on TV is not so interesting, and Top Gear has already carved out a large slice of the "dicking around with cars" market. So, take the other thing people love about the show -- the interplay of the two hosts -- take that entirely out of the context of cars, and give them silly little adventures to run around in, like Duck Tales or something.

And of course, it doesn't work. Or at least, there's no real point for an intelligent adult to sit and watch it. It reminds me a lot of "Clerks-The Animated Series", which did a similar thing. Except that almost worked, because it was vaguely related to what had gone before, and was tolerably amusing in places. This show ("As the Wrench Turns" -- why?) is more like "The Real Ghostbusters".

It probably didn't help that I was incredibly jetlagged when I watched and (and still am as I write this), and that I fell asleep ten minutes in as a result. But... when I heard that there was going to be a TV show, my initial thought was "but that can never work", and in this case at least it is surely justified.

BBC Who

2008-07-06T13:17:00.002Z

On a roll, since I managed to watch the DW finale before getting on the plane, and thus totally avoided all spoilers. Although, in retrospect, having it crafted by RTD was sort of a spoiler in retrospect. The ep was good, but not as great as it could have been (or as great as the anticipation made it). Too many plot holes to mention, and some may still not have seen it, but probably the extra twenty minutes could have been trimmed without any great loss.

Anyway, now I have a UK IP address, I can enjoy watching the BBC's IP layer. I'm not sure why people are so excited about it, it's certainly not as much fun as watching the TCP layer or ever the UDP layer. Still, when in Brizzle, do as the Brizzolians do, I suppose.

Sledgehammer/Nut

2008-07-04T01:09:00.002Z

Problem: You have some frozen chicken, but you don't need all of it to make a curry. However, it's all frozen together in one big lump.

Solution: Place frozen chicken in plastic bag. Hit repeatedly with hammer. Extract sufficient pieces of chicken. Curry.

Bobby Davros

2008-06-24T03:12:00.002Z

The all-new who shoo continues to be slightly better than you'd think it would be (including, for example, Catherine Tate managing to be not annoying). Notably so in the most recent episode, Turn Left, which manages to sneakily fulfill the requirement for a "doctor-light" episode by having him dead for most of the episode. It rather bluntly underlined the case for his 'meddling'. But who would have expected that the most dramatic performance to have come from Bernard "Right Said Fred" Cribbins? Still, one thing haunts me about that. In response to the "New Labour" camps, the line "that's what they called them last time" resonates with my mind. I'm sure I've heard a similar "last time" comment used somewhere recently but, out of all the media that I consume, I can't think where. Still, you know my methods, Watson, so apply them. I have a strong suspicion that it was in Rumpole -- quite possibly Rumpole and the Reign of Terror. Either that, or someone describing the bush administration ("administration"? surely not the right word. Unless in reference to the administration of punishment).

YouWhat?

2008-06-16T15:50:00.001Z

More evidence that YouToob commenters are the dumbest creatures to evolve on earth.

"Onion" Movie Not As Good as the Newspaper

2008-06-04T02:46:00.002Z

As you'd expect, the "Onion Movie" is a dreadful mish-mash of lame, overlong sketches that would have worked better as just headlines. It looks like something you'd expect to be branded "National Lampoon". You could tell quite how long it has been gathering dust before being ejected onto the marketplace by the fact that Rodney Dangerfield has a line in the movie (from another movie) and he's been dead for four years now.

Terrible advice

2008-06-02T02:54:00.002Z

This article entitled "How to entertain yourself at airports" is quite staggeringly useless. Top tips include "Watch tedious droning sports or news coverage" (I spend most of my time at airports trying to get away from being force fed lowest common denominator televisions blaring), and "go to the shop and buy a book of sudoku", along with "find some cheap food". I think from now on I shall just go and hang out in the executive lounge to get myself away from such tedium.

Recant

2008-06-02T02:51:00.002Z

I wonder if the hidden message in the advertising poster for "Recount" is intentional. It shows Re in one colour, and Count in another. The 'o' is a hanging chad, which threatens to fall at any minute, leaving behind...

Pun-awful

2008-05-29T14:49:00.002Z

Did you hear about the politicians who climbed up the famous Paris landmark? The Lib Dem and the Lab made it safely to the top, but the Tory fell.

Pac-a-mac

2008-05-28T02:23:00.002Z

When I was a large child, I often fancied myself in the role of MacGyver, but had fairly few opportunities to put this into practice.

Tonight, as I was walking away from the mailbox, I thought to myself, as I often do, that it was particularly foolish to have placed a drain so close to the box--someone is bound to be walking away with their keys and drop them down there. At the same time I was juggling the large amount of spam mail and letters from my employer informing me that they had lost a laptop with all of my personal details (social security number, salary, inside leg measurement, that sort of thing), when my keys jumped from my hand, landed on the drain with a clank, and slid through the gap with a miserable clang.

"Oh, sugarhillgang", I muttered to myself, as I squinted through the grate to see the keys just visible in the near darkness. But not to be daunted, I went back to the house (which fortunately I had left unlocked), and proceeded to collect some tools. First, I tried to heave up the drain cover, but it was stuck down tight. Then I tried to use a broom handle to gather the keys, but it was too short. A flashlight cast more light on the situation. I thought about dangling a magnet down to pick them up, but some experiments in the kitchen demonstrated that this was unlikely to work. Instead, I gathered up a paperclip, fashioned it into a hook, tied it with string to the end of the broom stick. Dangling this down the drain and directing the flash light and with only a little more swearing, the hook snagged the keys. Slowly drawing it up, and anticipating disappointment at any moment, I was delighted to recover the ring.

In conclusion:
-- It's amazing what you can do with a paperclip and a piece of string
-- Put the keys away safely before tripping past the drain
-- I am a genius

That is all.

Delightful

2008-05-26T00:54:00.002Z

Have you ever went over a friends house to eat and the food just ain't no good -- I mean the macaroni's soggy the peas are mushed and the chicken tastes like wood so you try to play it off like you think you can by saying that you're full and then your friend says "Momma, he's just being polite; he ain't finished" (uh uh that's bull). So your heart starts pumping and you think of a lie and you say that you already ate and your friend says, "Man, there's plenty of food", so you pile some more on your plate while the stinky foods steaming your mind starts to dreaming
of the moment that it's time to leave, and then you look at your plate and your chickens slowly rotting into something that looks like cheese. So you say "That's it, I got to leave this place. I don't care what these people think. I'm just sitting here making myself nauseous with this ugly food that stinks." So you bust out the door while it's still closed, still sick from the food you ate, and then you run to the store for quick relief from a bottle of kaopectate.

Call This Progress?

2008-05-25T15:25:00.003Z

I took a break from my hectic schedule of misanthropy yesterday to see the summer blockbuster movie "I, Ronman" (I think it's supposed to be a sequel to "I, Robot"). The lead character is Tony Stark, not to be confused with Tony Shaloub as Ian Stark. When is the big screen adaptation of "Stark Raving Mad" going to arrive? When?

For all the movies big action and special effects, it's worth noting that the three main moments of tension are as follows:

Waiting for a progress bar to reach 100%
Waiting for some files to be copied onto a flash drive
Trying to complete a task before a battery runs out of power

It makes you wonder why millions of Americans flock to the cineplex for this kind of entertainment when they could be out there having similar exciting adventures simply by trying to operate a laptop computer running Windows. It makes you wonder if in a few decades all these movies will look very silly and archaic.

Rights Lapse for "Bizarre" Song

2008-05-25T15:10:00.002Z

New Zealand songsters OMC had a worldwide smash in the mid-nineties with How Bizarre, which catalogued a sequence of mundane events followed by the exclamation "How Bizarre". The song ended with the enigmatic come-on "Wanna know the rest? Hey, buy the rights!". Following a frenetic bidding war, the rights were optioned for a record $5M NZD ($3.50 US). However, a decade later, the option has lapsed and the "How Bizarre" movie seems unlikely to ever be made.

The project was troubled from the start. Over a dozen different screenwriters were brought in to submit drafts. The movie was originally planned as a vanity project for Jim Carrey, but subsequently Adam Sandler, Brandon Fraser, Corey Feldman, and, following one particularly radical rewrite, Whoopi Goldberg. While the project is officially described as "still underdevelopment", it seems unlikely the full story promised in the song will ever be known. In response to this wholly predictable and unremarkable series of events, the song's singer and composer Pauly Fuemana commented "How Bizarre!". --- AP

Stupid Things I Have Read in Wired This Month

2008-05-18T21:49:00.003Z

Wired Magazine (you remember magazines, they were like websites, only they only updated once a month) usually manages to make several ridiculous or idiotic statements each issue. This month, the first was in the very first article, on prediction markets. It reads "The big blow came in January, when the markets gave Barack Obama a 91% chance of beating Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire. Clinton won..." and proceeds to use this as an opportunity to pour scorn on the very concept.

But wait-- the market predicted a 91% chance. How does the fact that the 9% chance came up refute the very existence of such markets? If the bookie's favourite always came in first, there wouldn't be much point in betting (well...). You expect a basic lack of understanding of probability theory in most mass market publications, but you'd hope for something a bit better in a tech mag. And you'd be disappointed.

Lies, Damned Lies...

2008-05-18T21:40:00.003Z

In the attached over-exposed picture, you can see an advertisement for a local (real) estate agent [They're called Real Estate Agents over here; presumably, there was once a problem with fake estate agents]. It took me a very long time to work out what the main graph was showing. Perhaps you can figure it out more quickly than I did?

Achievement!

2008-05-15T22:35:00.002Z

Yay! My web page is now the number one result for querying my surname on google. I call that a result.

And, just as I am writing this, I learn that I have been given 5 extra days of vacation a year.

Puerility

2008-05-15T00:06:00.002Z

Is there enough pathetic juvenile innuendo-laden humour in your life? You know, I don't think there is. So have this embedded video of AC-DC's wonderfully tacky single-entendre "Big Balls"

Makes you wonder if this record could have been the inspiration for The Upper Crust, a band who play their entire set in perriwigs, and are responsible for such songs as Rock'n'Roll Butler, Finished with Finishing School, Ascot in My Dickie, and (below) Let them eat rock!

And now, with pictures

2008-05-11T21:55:00.003Z

As I've mentioned before, my email address gets quite a lot of mail that seems to be intended for someone else. Today was a first though: a cameraphone picture sent directly to my account. The picture is below

Note that this is actual size (must be a pretty lowres camera then). The return address is a cell phone number in New York somewhere, I think -- the area code is 585.

Also sent to this address recently is a stray invitation to connect to someone I've never heard of on LinkedIn, and the following urgent missive:

My name is Dustin Heenan from Prairie Plumbing and Heating in oshawa, we are currently doing some work in your building on 250 Bayly st in Ajax. We are trying to tie some underground in on site right now, but my plumber is having a difficult time trying to make sure that he is tying into the sanitary on site and not the storm with the new plumbing work being installed. Is there any chance that you have a set of orginal drawings for the base building of that plaza so that we can be sure of what we are tying into. Any chance you could get back to asap that would be great as we are trying to do this work over the next couple days. Much appreciated. Take care

Hand Gestures

2008-05-11T01:07:00.002Z

In society, we have a small number of hand gestures for certain key activities. There must be something special about these activities -- that they need some amount of emphasis, or to be communicated in noisy environments or across a crowded room. Here are all the gestures that I can think of (add more in comments if you think of any). Picture them in your mind as you read them:

Drink/drinking
The bill (in a restaurant)
Driving
Phone / call me

Yesterday, I realized that we have silently agreed on a new gesture in the last few decades: Mouse click

I find it interesting [and, as usual, I feel it unnecessary to provide the obvious caveat that you probably won't] that these gestures are weird exaggerations of the activity that they represent. Also, note how some are more common that others: I can think of a gesture for eat/eating, but it seems much less standard than drink/drinking. Similarly, there is one for typing (well, really, any keyboard activity such as piano playing), but it doesn't seem as useful as the mouse one.

Have I missed any? Do "the kids" have a hand gesture for texting, or hanging out on the Face Book web page? As I've said about many things in the past, I'm sure that there's a sociology thesis in there somewhere (probably titled something like "Evolution of Colloquial Sign Language in The Internet Age"), and probably no one will ever write it.

Word Up

2008-05-08T15:58:00.002Z

When reviewing papers, I usually try to note which ones are written in Word, since this usually correlates well with a bad paper. It's usually pretty easy -- although body text in TNR looks quite similar, italics, mathematical notation and subscripts are usually clear indicators. Lately though I seem to have been finding it a little tricker to tell at a glance. So I've resorted to checking one clear indicator: ligatures. I'm sure it's possible to insert ligatures in Word, but no-one ever does it, so a quick search for ff or fl helps resolve the matter.

This is 1999 calling...

2008-05-06T21:04:00.003Z

I was going to post about how much better things have got in the last week in terms of unsolicited phone calls, when I got a call from a [muffled] internet service provider. Given that my current ISP is a nice person with an open-WiFi router, I was slightly more prepared to listen than usual. The rather incomprehensible caller went on to explain that they had a special offer available on accelerated dial-up service that could be up to six times faster than...

Wait a moment. *dial-up* service? People still sell that? I mean, I'm sure that there's a market for it in rural areas and for people temporarily shafted by their phone company who takes over a month to get DSL service up and running, but surely that's a fairly small market, and not worth nuisance-calling over. So, after expressing my surprise, I told the caller to get lost, and when they insisted that their dial-up service was too good to miss, I started to vaguely threaten them with the federal DNC (it'll be nice when I've been on there long enough for it to be enforcable, of course).

Still, dial-up service in 2008? Wow.

I love u

2008-05-02T13:44:00.002Z

New York Times shows that it is unable to spell the name of the Labour party.

Meanwhile, results in the Johnson / Livingstone (Seagull?) race are painfully slow to arrive. I'll just ignore it for another few hours, then.

Still, nice to see some kind of STV system in use. Maybe second preference votes will decide the race?

Misheard Lyrics

2008-05-02T13:13:00.002Z

There's a song buzzing around my head that I've heard a few times on the radio over the past few months, but not caught the name of.

It features
-- A sort of childish singing (possibly a sample?)
-- The lyrics "the way you move is so (natural? good to me?)"
-- "Do your dance, do your dance" or similar

Can anyone tell me what it is really? Idle web searching on various permutations over the above fails to reveal the answer. Embedded youchoob link of the video for the first person who can tell me.

I'd Like To...

2008-04-30T03:00:00.003Z

From a rather breathless article in the WaPo that teeters along the line between reporting and entrapment, comes the deathless description of a "crude acronym for attractive mothers".

CAFAM? Can't really see that taking off. Can you really not say that in a newspaper?

Wireless Internet

2008-04-24T14:59:00.002Z

Phone line finally hooked up yesterday: part of the problem was that the phone wires weren't actually connected to anything before a nice man came and tied them together. Amazingly, Verizon don't seem to be able to promise any kind of internet connectivity before the end of the month. Maybe I will give them a call to see if anything can be done about this.

I was also suddenly reminded of something: within a couple of hours I had started receiving spam phone calls: for a newspaper, and for satellite TV. I suddenly remembered the National Do Not Call registry. Since it was a new phone number, it was listed, so I am doomed to receive junk telemarketing calls until my new registration kicks in.

Little Boxes

2008-04-17T15:05:00.002Z

Having spent the weekend putting things into boxes, and then putting those boxes into bigger boxes, I then spent the last few days taking things out of boxes again. Somehow both directions feel like they involve increasing the amount of order in the system.

Is that increasing entropy or decreasing entropy? Thermodynamics would suggest that I am engaged in a futile struggle against the increase of entropy. My intuition was that information theoretically I am increasing information, but I guess that's wrong: since the highest entropy is a totally disordered (random) system, then by putting things in certain places, I'm reducing the amount of information stored in the system.

Sarky Bastard

2008-04-12T18:59:00.002Z

I occasionally suffer from Netflix theft, especially when I am traveling: the website insists that the latest disc has been dispatched, but there is no sign of it a week or so later. Clearly, someone is intercepting the discs and keeping it for their own immoral purposes. I lost "Crank", a tongue-in-cheek action-fest to this fate a few months ago.

Now I have encountered a new twist. I got home from France last week, expecting to find "All The President's Men" in my mailbox, but finding it gone. I was too busy to do anything about it, so figured I'd give it a bit longer, and then go through the process with netflix to get a new disc sent out.

But getting home today, I found a familiar red envelope in my mailbox. Not the disc I had been promised, but the next one in my queue. Checking with netflix indicated that they had received the ATPM disc back on wednesday, two weeks after it had been sent out originally.

The most plausible explanation I can come up with for this is that some unknown miscreant intercepted the first disc, and after some time, put it in the return envelope and sent it back to netflix, who duly moved onto the next disc.

For some reason, this strikes me as incredibly cheeky.

Heston's Hands Finally Cold, Dead

2008-04-06T13:16:00.000Z

Let the prying commence.

Fact, Meet Fiction

2008-03-31T23:41:00.004Z

The identity robber, meet the identity killer:

Also, why is the BBC so snotty about allowing me to embed their youchoob videos? If I try to go to the 'what do you reckon' video, I just get rebuffed for being in the wrong country. What does this achieve, exactly? Anyway, the sketch was better on the radio, even though it's pretty much word-for-word identical.

Doing The Do

2008-03-29T14:30:00.002Z

To lighten the mood a little, I always like to come back from a foreign trip with a small example of popular culture there. So, from France, I give you "The Do" with "On My Shoulders", a cardigans-esque tune that seems to be very popular on french radio at the moment, possibly because it is not as clear to a non-native english speaker quite how clunky the rhyme-scheme is. Enjoy: [you choob embed]

28 Hours Later

2008-03-29T13:37:00.002Z

By popular request of Simon, an update to my previous travel post.

Keeping up the tallies, plus a couple of points to Air France for Radiohead as background music and a dinky cup holder, but now minus several million for canceling my flight on Thursday morning from Nantes to Asterix DeGaul airport. No reason was given, so as far as I could work out, it was because it was a little rainy. Maybe it was some kind of extended knock on effect from Terminal 5, but it's hard to blame BA for everything, especially when I have Air France to blame.

The consequence was that I got to ADG about an hour after my transatlantic flight had departed, and since it was on a different carrier, I got no help whatsoever from Air France. They even had the gall (ha ha) to be completely indifferent to my plight. My only option was to wait 23 hours until the next days flight, and since I am allergic to camping out in airport terminals, I sought out an overpriced and nasty hotel which my employer will be surprised and not entirely delighted to foot the bill for (yay for corporate credit cards).

Also, while we are keeping score, a few thousand off for Air India, who the next day decided to delay their flight by four hours. Four hours doesn't seem too much in comparison to the 24 hours due to Air France, but it certainly seemed to drag. Also, note that if they had chosen to incur this delay on Thursday instead of Friday, I could have made it home a day earlier.

Half a point to the ground staff for giving me a voucher for lunch to make up for the delay, but minus several score for the fact that the only place that accepted these vouchers had no hot food, and I had to satisfy myself with a baguette. It was a very nice baguette, but after a week in France I was getting pretty fed up with baguettes, and had been looking forward to something hot and bad for me, like a beef burger or something. It also felt like something of a sneaky con trick, since this place was on the far side of security, making it seem almost impossible to get back to the main part of the airport where there might be a wider selection of meals. Isn't there some con where you pay a large amount for some supposed attraction, but when you go through the door you find that you are out on the street, and a fire door has just slammed shut behind you? If there is, then it felt like this.

At least the in-flight entertainment was working on the AI flight. I was hoping to be able to find Dhoom 2, which I still haven't seen, but it was not around, so instead I settled in for the gloriously mindless Transformers. This turned out to be somewhat irritating, in that the film attributed the Beagle 2 mission to NASA/JPL instead of ESA; and claimed that the invention of the laser and the transistor was due to the discovery of Megatron frozen in ice: presumably, they would also claim that this led to the invention of UNIX and C.

My progress back home was also hindered by a sequence of individuals irritants, including:

* Newark deciding to have on only 3 immigration officers to deal with the simultaneous arrival of three planeloads of visitors (so my usual technique of pegging it from the plan to the immigration hall, elbowing all and sundry out of the way, had only limited effect -- reducing my queuing time from about an hour to half an hour in my best estimation).

* My immigration officer being unusually nosey, asking not only who I worked for, but when I last entered the country, wanting to see my petition documentation (who is anal enough to carry that kind of thing with them every time they travel? Well, I am , apparently), and generally slowing the whole process down for everyone. It could have been worse, I suppose. I overheard him asking the person in front of me what his salary was, which seemed odd in the extreme.

* A customs officer, as I was trying to leave the customs hall with my backpack and small shoulder bag, querying whether this was all the luggage that I had. Yes, I like to travel light as possible. Isn't that a good thing?

* An overly chatty taxi driver, who chided me for a small tip. Maybe I'll just not give a tip at all in future.

All of which got me home at midnight on Friday, when I had been reasonably expecting to be home before 7 on Thursday. So thanks to everyone who made this possible. Air France probably bears the brunt of the responsibility, so I will add them to my list of officially unrecommended airlines based on them having screwed me over mightily without any appearance of apology or restitution, which currently reads:

Aerolineas Argentina
Air France
United

Avoid these dreadful companies at all cost.

To put a less negative angle on things, it wasn't a complete disaster. At least the reason I was originally scheduled to rush home has been rescheduled. And, thanks to the wonders of modern communications technology, I was able to spend Thursday night in the company of a university friend in central Paris celebrating his birthday in a faux British style pub (with continental prices), which made it almost seem worth it.

Local differences

2008-03-24T18:53:00.001Z

The french for 118118 is 118218. But the french for 888 is 888 (and 889 is the original english version, when it works). Weird, huh?

Airline Reviews

2008-03-24T18:13:00.002Z

Air India is actually more fun that I had been expected. Seating has nice legroom, but a little threadbare, and no pillow! I managed to enter a state of semiconsciousness for about six hours, despite an annoying man next to me continuously invading my airspace. Surprisingly modern (given the surrounding seventies style saffron decor) in flight entertainment system: movies on demand, and a touch screen. Didn't feel like using it much though, which is probably a good thing, since the touchscreen was misaligned by about half an inch, in particular making it impossible to use the navigation buttons at the bottom of the screen. Still, continental, why can't you manage something like this? It also had a mysterious USB port just below the screen -- I wonder why? For power? To allow you to bring your own MP3s? No one seemed to be using it, so I didn't find out. Also: a little mesh bottle holder, which would be really handy, if people didn't keep confiscating my liquids all the time.

Air France for a short but sweet flight (the kind where you start to descend as soon as you reach cruising altitude) had less of interest. A neat cup holder on the back of the tray deserves to be used elsewhere. Check in was bizarrely disorganized: had to wander around CDG for ages, then when I finally found the right place, was told I couldn't check in until 90 minutes before departure. Rest of the world, it's at least 90 minutes, not at most. But one big point in their favour: the music playing over the tannoy while boarding was 'nude' by Radiohead. Makes a big change from the tedious light jazz fare in the US.

All of france seems to be currently closed for easter (barring, of course, the possibility that it's always like this), so I'm in my usual jetlagged semi-comatose state. I can't follow any of the french language channels (including a weird version of countdown where the contestants get to choose which letters they get. So instead I'm watching a dubbed version of the buffy musical episode, which must have been incredibly difficult to accomplish, given the pun-ishing rhyme scheme. It only works for me because I know the tunes so well.

Uninvited

2008-03-20T14:01:00.002Z

I received an email titled "Invitation to Okinawa". 'Oh great', I thought. This is going to be a tempting workshop in Japan on a subject close to me heart which would be ideal for me to attend -- but do I really want to travel all the way to Japan (again)? I'm traveling so much this year, can I really fit any more in?

Then I opened the message, and discovered that it was a transparent 419 attempt. What a relief that turned out to be.