"The Bin Bag Murders are Back On!"

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

"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

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...

"Goto" considered harmful.

Configuration

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

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

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

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

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:

1. Bachelor Mother (1939)
2. Bottle Shock (2008)
   
3. Fred Claus (2007)
4. Ghost Town (2008)
5. Happy Feet (2006)
6. Ocean's Eleven (1960)
7. The House Bunny (2008)
8. The Mummy 3: Dragon Emperor (2008)
9. Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants 2 (2008)
10. The Women (2008)
11. Austin Powers 3 (2002)
12. Bullitt (1968)
13. Catch Me If You Can (2002)
14. It's a wonderful life (1946)
15. Philadelphia (1993)
16. Rebel without a cause (1955)
17. Spiderman (2002)
18. Spiderman 2 (2004)
19. 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

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:

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

Blimey

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

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

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

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

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

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

What should I do now?

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.