Boom bang a bang

Can't help feeling that this is all going to end in widescale persecution of people who use rucksacks.

What's wrong with this picture?

Take a look at the picture on this page:



Can you spot the problem?

[edit: no, it's not the dodgy photoshopping on the cutout edges.]

Am about to finishing packing, with 1 hour to spare before heading out the front door and off to the airport... which is nice. Then I can finally relax. See you in europe, mes amis.

Can't get out of bed

I used to sleep as long as I felt like, by not setting the alarm clock and just seeing when I would wake up. This was reasonably effective, but eventually I got the impression that my body was taking advantage of this arrangement, and taking more sleep without replenishing my energy levels the amount it should. Then I saw one of these new "blog" [it's short for 'logarithm to the base b'] things which had a helpful title, How to become an early riser.

Here is a summary of what the article suggests: use an alarm clock.

This is quite effective, but I have found a convenient modification that makes it work even better. I have an alarm clock radio, which I used to have tuned to the NPR station, so I would be woken with a briefing of world events. This was usually so interesting, or alternatively, so boring, that I would end up snoozing away for some time longer. Then one day, when the signal was fading, I tried to retune the radio and lost the station entirely (damn public broadcasting and their weedy transmitters!). Instead, I stumbled upon my local "family radio" station, broadcasting 'good news' 24 hours a day. Now, it turns out that the time I want to get up (8am -- let's not let this get out of control) coincides exactly with a two minute program called "Creation moments". This little daily capsule of information gives reason after reason why all those scientists are being so silly, and that basic observable facts point indubitably to the conclusion that God created the heavens and the earth, and no evolution has happened at all, ever. Thus, god exists. QED. It's great. Everyday after listening to it, I jump out of bed, energized by the rhetoric, ready to face the day. For some reason most of the 'moments' seem to be about whales, but that doesn't seem to matter much. You'd think that having being doing this for years, the CM folks would be running out of unarguable proofs of god's existence, but you'd be wrong: go to the website and you'll see archives of hundreds and hundreds of examples of how all science is wrong and scientists are blinkered, cowlish fools. Praise the Lord!

London Calling

In an attempt to understand what's been going on in the world lately, I've be relistening to Radio 1's broadcast output from 9am to noon on Thursday. Thanks to the BBC's policy of sticking pretty much everything that is broadcast on the website, you can listen as the news slowly filters through, from "electrical disruptions" being second billing to the G8 summit at 9.30 am, to launching into full blown emergency broadcast system mode around 11am. Even when things seem bad, they still stick with the jokes and entertainment news until the Tony Blair press conference when it becomes clear that something is up. Contrary to popular belief, sometimes news travels quite slowly.

As I was beginning to pack for my European Vacation (starting Wednesday) I got out my bag of European stuff: credit cards, Euros, power converters etc. Amongst it all I found my honorary Londoner card:



which made me remember I'm a womble londoner of sorts. Anyway, I'll be arriving in London wednesday morning, but unless anyone is up for coffee in Victoria at some unearthly hour in the morning (probably about 9.15 am), then your best bet to meet up in the capital will be on Friday when I am planning a day trip in to the city. Contact me if you are around. And you know who I am, natch.

What?

Who thought that this would be a good idea?

By the way, which one's Pink?

Nice to see that Westlife is still going strong after eight long years, and that their celebratory concert, Westlife8 got such a good set of support acts. Even old Punk Floyd was on there, doing some of their greatest hits. But it was a shame that they had to try to establish their youth credentials by throwing in a cover version of 'Comfortably Numb' by the scissor sisters. Their slowed down, de-synthesized version managed to drain all the life out of this disco classic, and turn it into something more like a funeral dirge. They should stick to their own material.

Stonehenge!

50 Pence

I first heard the 50 Pence [update: he has his own entry on wikipedia? weird] tracks mixed up somewhere deep within a DJ Yoda/Greenpeace scratch'n'sniff session, but finally got around to locating the originals with some careful detective work (OK, 30 seconds on google, but you get my point).

Here they are:

In Da Pub

P.I.N.T.

I see Biddies.mp3

Meanwhile, James introduced me to the delights of Badwrong Falsepaul at christmas, and I found a copy shortly after. It's a delightful song explaining the conspiracy theory about the death of Paul McCartney in 1966.

Badwrong Falsepaul

And, carrying on the theme of odd mp3s I have collected, here is "Hold My Hand Very Tightly" from Rick Wilson of Your Sinclair fame... but I don't need to explain it, there's a helpful encyclopedia article or three (one two three)to explain it all.

Hold my hand (very tightly)

Phising for compliments

A large fraction of my incoming spam is phishing attempts. Which is handy, since it makes it much easier to filter: I just have to filter for simple keywords like "ebay", "paypal", "account", "unauthorised" and so on in the subject, and drop it into my spam file. Whenever I remember, I go through it and see if anything has fallen in there by mistake (usually not). This seems to have taken a lot of spam out of my inbox. One day I should get around to using some proper spam filtering software, but since I read my email through pine on a unix box and do most of my filtering using procmail, this might be more difficult. Or at least too much effort for me to bother trying. Incidentally, this is pretty much the same way in which I read email in 1995, which shows how much I am moving with the times...

Follow the leader

Where I lead, boingboing follows, only three months later.

The Flood

The first horrifying pictures are beginning to arrive... people's lives washed away by the terrible flood... children lying in the mud, crying... but, yeah, too obvious... fill in the rest yourself.

Now here's a thing. Brer Tony made a speech today in which he said "Of the top 20 universities in the world today, only two are now in Europe."

Only two are now in Europe? What, some of the others used to be in Europe but have suffered continental drift.

And which two universities could he be referring to? Possibly this is the list he was using, in which case the two in quesion are Oxbridge and Camford... funny that he should use an example that only refers to the UK and not really to the rest of Europe. Go top fifty, and he could have had his pick of Imperial, Zurich, Utrecht, Paris, Munich, Stockholm, and Edinburgh. But he didn't.

Conversations with my USB port

Me: Hello computer, here is my new digital camera.
USB port1: OMFG! WTF? Issa digital camera.
Me: Yes, that's right, it's a digital camera. I just plugged it in.
USB port1: OMFG! ROFL, LOL. I spose you want me 2 install it for you.
Me: If you wouldn't mind.
USB port1: LOL. kthxbye. Can I contact Windows update? Just this once? I promise I won't tell them about the warez and risque wallpaper that you have.
Me: Why not just read the files off this disk?
USB port1: WTF? I am teh l33t connecter. Are you sure? I mean, this disk may contain viruses and shit.
Me: It came with the camera. It's fine.
USB port1: What*ever*... am installing new hardware. Ooh! It looks like a digital camera.
Me: Yes, I just told you that.
USB port1: Gr8! Why don't I install some kickass drivers for it. Meanwhile, look at a cute icon of a camera.
Me: Get on with it.
USB port1: Booyakasha. OK, all done now.
Me: Finally.

Some time later:
Me: Hello again, plugging my camera in again.
USB port2: OMFG! WTF? Is a digital camera!
Me: What? Don't go through this again. You know what this is. We already spent ten minutes installing drivers for this.
USB port2: OMFG! ROFL, LOL. No that was USB port1 you installed it on. I'm USB port2. You know, the USB port right next to port1. I'm going to need to install some drivers. Can I go to windows update? Pretty please? I promise I will only make snide comments about your dubious taste in semi-legal mp3z?
Me: Oh, FFS...

See also the much funnier travails of Lucas Kovar.

Meanwhile, if anyone can tell me why every time you plug the same device in a different USB port the computer reacts like a character in a PKD novel, please let me know...

"We are dead clever and you aren't"

I just noticed that my favourite Enfield-based self-obsessed software company (no, not Ensoft, I mean the other lot) has a slogan, "Doing Difficult Things Well". Which strikes me as an exceptionally bad motto. Perhaps it's that I've always been wary of the adverb 'well'. What does this phrase mean, exactly? What led to this choice of words? The message that they are really trying to communicate is that they are clever. Much cleverer than you, in fact. That's why you need to hire them to solve your problems for you. But they can't say that directly. So instead, they just point out that the stuff that they do -- all of it -- is difficult. Really diffcult. But that's not enough. It's not enough to just do things that are difficult. Any fool can do difficult things. But it takes a special kind of fool to do difficult things well. And that's what they do. They do difficult things. Well. Well, they do difficult things. They do well difficult things.

But why stop there? Why not "Doing Difficult Things So Well we make them look really easy"? Or "Doing Difficult Things Well; While Caring Deeply about the Environment"? Or "Doing Difficult Things Well but Doing Easy Things Really Quite Averagely"? The list is endless. Apart from the fact that this is the end of the list.

It also makes you wonder how "Difficult Things" was arrived at. What other formulations were drawn up at great expense and then dropped? Possibly "Tough Stuff", "Tricky Shit", "Hard Problems", "Clever Gubbins", "Computery Fings" all were proposed before "Difficult Things" was accepted. What thought has gone into this slogan! Or rather, what thought has gone into this slogan? Too much, if you ask me. Oh. You didn't.

Now let's see if my awesome page rank can push this entry up above their home page...

Advance Warning

To all the players in the U of K, I'll be in England between 13 July and 31st, except that I will be in Germany 17--22nd. Provisional plans will put me in Maidstone, London, Oxford and Cambridge at various points along the way. Unless I get too tired, in which case I will sulk and stay at home. So, if you want to meet up for a cup of tea, a drink, or a seminar on the power of sublinear algorithms, let me know and I'll see if I can slot you in. Usually caveats apply: your home may be at risk, and may cause cancer. Take care.

Just back from Baltimore, but worth reporting that these Soviet-style posters are really being shown out there. Not clear whether these are evidence of complete lack of irony, or whether it is subversion by a graphic designer in the metropolitan transit authority.  

Missing songs found

boingboing and others report on the fact that iTunes has sold an average of 21 songs per iPod. Where do the other songs come from, they ask?

This is the wrong question. One of my friends has an iPod mini. "How many songs do you have on it?" I asked. "Eleven". It was ten, to begin with, but that was just silly.

So there's your answer: the reason that there are on average 21 songs sold per iPod is partly because sometimes, 21 songs is just too many to deal with.

btw, I've been away for a bit. I'm still away. I'll be back in a while. Is that OK?

4. Here's the real giveaway: this is Frist all the way (although, admittedly, this is what I tend to think of as the back entrance). Certainly you can see some goods deliveries going on. There we go, problem solved. Now all that remains is to do something to address Frist and his nooclear option [which hasn't really been resolved yet, just postponed].