It's Hailing Taxis!

A quick thought: do taxis actually work? After being in some danger of missing a flight after a cab failed to show up and a new one had to be procured at short notice, I thought back on all the hours (probably three or four hours in total) I have spent pacing up and down awaiting a taxi to arrive. It's got to the point where, if I have to book a cab (and I realize that I do this quite rarely, probably because I hate the waiting so much), I have to book it sufficiently long in advance that if it doesn't show up I can ring up and call for another. Which seems to rather defeat the point, now that I think about it.

I don't like taking taxis as a matter of course. If there's a way to do it on public transport then I prefer that, even if it adds up to an hour to the journey (which is probably what you need to allocate to allow for the cab not turning up). But if you have to be at a station or airport early in the morning, or you have a lot of heavy luggage, then a taxi seems to be more necessary.

If you can go somewhere that there are always taxis hanging around, like, er, out the front of an airport, or, er, New York, then it's OK. But even at most railway stations, there always seem to be taxis out front, except when you arrive at one and want to hail one.

I think the source of my anxiety and irritation is that it's a very one-sided game. If the taxi you ordered never shows up, then there's not much you can do. They probably have enough business that theloss of your fare is no great loss. And because ordering a cab is such an impersonal business, you never really know who let you down, so it's not like they lose your custom.

I think the only solution is to institute some private system by which individual members of the public can own and operate their own automobile vehicles. It will be dreadfully inefficient, there will be all kinds of probelems from inexperienced operators, the problem of where to store all these additional vehicles and so on, but given the problems with using taxis, I think it must be the only option.

Blog Entry

These spammers are just getting lazier and lazier. Here's the latest message I received, in its entirety:

%SHORT_SENTENCE %LONG_SENTENCE %LONG_SENTENCE
%SHORT_SENTENCE
%LONG_SENTENCE
%SHORT_SENTENCE %SHORT_SENTENCE %SHORT_SENTENCE %SHORT_SENTENCE %LONG_SENTENCE
%LONG_SENTENCE

What am I supposed to make of that?

Anyway, I'm back from Italy and still somewhat jetlagged. That means I wake up early in the morning, but am still tired all day since I've not had enough sleep. Also, it's too hot in America right now.

Thoughts on Italy: they do like their pasta, don't they? Right now, I'm so fed up of pasta that if I see another ravioli I will scream.

I flew with TAP (Air Portugal). This actually worked quite well, inasmuch as they didn't steal my bags or send me to Amsterdam instead of my intended destination, as has happened on previous trips with non-US carriers. (admittedly, I didn't let them take my bags, and instead stuffed everything into the overhead lockers). I think they did their best to ruin things for me, by playing "Cheaper by the Dozen 2" on every one of the flights I took. I overcame this by ignoring the films entirely.

I watched "FlightPlan" last night, which I had been looking forward to, but it turns out to be completely awful. The basic plot is The Lady Vanishes, but on a plane instead of a train. And the shoot out at the end isn't as good. The plot makes no sense whatsoever, and is completely implausible if taken at face value. It only makes sense if you assume that the missing child really did never get on the plane, and that the whole thing (including the last forty minutes or so) is really just a psychotic hallucination of the main character undergoing a complete breakdown. And even then it's still a bit rubbish.

How To Serve Man

There's a lot of exciting music coming out at the moment. But a lot of the buzz surrounding some artists "discovered" on the Internet turns out to be just as manufactured as 90s boy bands. So here's something which deserves to be the smash hit of the summer. I first mentioned the awesome ManServant last year, when a bootleg of the first single fell into my hands via a complicated chain of custody. It was probably the best thing I heard all year. It's still the best thing I've heard this year. Back then, the response to the news here was one of widespread confusion, as often happens. Well, now you can hear the song yourself thanks to the wonders of the Rupert Murdoch publishing empire: NaiveLaFemme, the principal member of Manservant has graciously placed the song on the "This is my space" website organisation (it's apparently a web site apparatus that allows and encourages such things).

"No Means Yes" still delivers a searing gutpunch of guitars and lyrical imagery of regret, pain and awkwardness. The only flaw in the song is that at just over 3 minutes in length, you have to stop what you are doing every three minutes to start it over again.

So, all you superstar DJs out there -- download a copy of this song, burn it onto a CD, and put it on repeat play for an hour at your next gig. You won't regret it. Spread the word. Manservant is the best new band *ever*.

Route 78

I'm just about to set off for Italy for a week, so, uh, screw you, and all that. Anyway, I recently received an empassioned message from Trixie for more telly recommendations. When I get a few hours spare, I might get around to it. In the meantime, I trust that you are already aware of the twisted humour of "Robot Chicken", from the minds of top movie start Seth Green and his buddies who employ a large team of slave animators who take children's toys and turn them into a weekly satire on pop culture. They're midway into their second season now, and a recent episode had a nice touch. In a segment on "Numb-chuck", one of the characters was thrown off a road bridge onto Route 78 West to Clinton -- which is one of my favourite roads! Nice one, Seth and co!



Anyway, off to the airport, and thence to Bologna, where I can hang out with the Bolognese.

Numb3rs Stations

Numbers seem to be very popular at the moment. There's the mysterious "Mein Fraulein" Craigslist postings, the numbers-in-blog-comments-spam and now most recently I've been getting numerical spam sent from myself.

To be more precise, I received two very short messages with the From: address faked to be the same as the To: address, to two of my email accounts (one old Warwick one that I thought was long dead). One has Subject: 455 and Body: 5556 (wrapped up in HTML/body); the other has Subject: 557 and Body: 5556. This is surely too short to mean anything?

Perhaps it's like a lot of the spam that I receive, mere incompetence on the part of the spammer. Quite a few messages I get are clearly spam and have a completely blank or empty body.

In other news, no one has so far announced that they have claimed the free iTunes in a previous posting below. Perhaps no one cares. This is potentially devastating for the iTunes economy, since it suggests that the iTunes currency is practically worthless. I suppose that everyone is speculating in the AllofMP3 instead.

One Minute Man

After I recently commented on b3ta as a news source, I was wondering if this was referring to a news story that I hadn't heard about (about Trident nuclear weapons?).

Then it dawned on me.

Ouch.

Wieeeeeeeeeeee!

No, not Wii, but Wie. Apparently this is happening about a mile from where I live. Very weird (or Wie-rd). Last year the US PGA was down the road at another gold club near by. Conclusion: I live too close to too many golf clubs. How can I claim to be as street and down wid it as I clearly am when I am surrounded by such symbols of opulence? Fo' real. I am living in the wrong 'hood.

Uninvited visitors...

According to my web logs (not the same as weblogs), there was a visitor here at about 8am this morning from house.gov. Specifically:

01 Jun, Thu, 08:24:27 housegate10.house.gov MSIE 6 Windows XP

That address sounded strangely familiar, so I had a quick web search and found the following: this reference (it's actually a proxy through which most House traffic [Not To Be Confused with House traffic, dedicated to the TV show House] passes).

Unfortunately, the arrival time doesn't coordinate with any particularly juicy search queries or interesting referrers. A few weeks I got a couple of links from a yahoo group called b4ta, but was unable to find the message linking here.

I scream, you scream, we all scream for iTunes

As threatened before, I am now going to give away five free iTunes. I've had these cluttering in my inbox for a few weeks now, and they are no good to me. Perhaps you, casual blog reader, can make use of them. Just go to the (US only, I think) iTunes store, and enter the following code:

Code: FMLP7YXY9W4N

Et voila. Free, gratis and for nothing. Your only requirement on accepting this free offer is to post a comment on this entry listing the five songs that you bought with this. It's only fair.

(I have no way of telling when this has been used, so please let me know if you try it and it doesn't work, so I can update this post).

Enjoy!

Going Hard

Ah, at this times I remember the joy of being a teenager trying to get a computer to boot once more. A recent online shopping expedition rewarded me with a new hard drive, and what could be easier, I wondered, than formatting and partitioning it, popping the contents of my old hard drive onto it, and swapping it over as the new master. Trivial, right? It even comes with a nice bit of software to make the whole thing as easy as Pi.

So I spend a while messing around in the internals of hughanchor the desktop, and a few hours for the program to do its copying work, and switched over the cables to see the effects of my work. XP flickers along, loading settings as it is wont to do and then... nothing. A blank screen. Fortunately, I know what I am doing. I pull up task manager with a swift CTRL-ALT-DEL, and discover that, I can connect to the internet, Opera works fine. I can fire up a command shell, or even a bash, and do everything I want to do. But whenever I try to summon up a new instance of Windows Explorer, the task bar flickers and then disappears again. Iexplore similarly fails to boot up. It's all very mysterious. I though that maybe something had gone wrong in the copying, so I switched the drives back (the original copy is still alive and functioning) and repeated the procedure... with the same effect. I'm quite perplexed since everything seems to work almost perfectly with the exception of no explorer. Is there anything that I could possibly do to fix this small distinction? So far all I can think of is to run an rsync between the two drives to see if everything really is copied accurately, and then to try a Windows repair if that doesn't fix it. Any other suggestions? In the olden days if all the files were the same then the system was the same, but now that there are all these mysterious registries and system restore points, I don't feel quite so sure any more. Of course, the usual recourse to the internet is no help whatsoever, full of idiots with stupid problems that have no resemblance to my own unique privations.

Going Soft

I must be going soft in my old age. Although I enjoyed X-Me-N-3 a little, I've neglected to allow my old friend Robert Eger to review the movie. Robert has reviewed the first two films in the series (here is his review of the second film, his first is lying about somewhere else). So I had to have him in to finish the job.

Robert Eger Hates The Movies - X-Men Thre3: the last stand.

Oh joy. You aren't waiting at all for any x-men films, and then three come along a once, only spread out over six years. That's just great. Well, at least this one is the last one, since this finally wraps up the tedious trilogy of superweirdo flicks. What's that? It broke box office records on its opening weekend? Great, then I confidently predict that we'll be in for another dozen spin-offs by the end of the decade. Thanks a lot, you tedious, predictable sheep.

So, that's this one all about then? Well, I know that some of you reading this may be fool enough to actaully want to see this tripe on celluloid. So, in the interest of avoiding too many gratuitous SPOILER ALERTS shrieks, I will carefully hide the identies of the main protagonists using a careful code that only I know the key to.

The film begins at the start of another year at Hogwarts. But Harry (Huge Ackman) and Ron (Someone Else) are mopey, because Hermione (Famke Janssssssssen) has been missing all summer. Ron takes off after receiving a screecher, and very soon he is missing too. Meanwhile, muggles are becoming increasingly aware of the threat posed to them by the wizards, and have developed a new formula that is able to "cure" wizards of their thinly-veiled-metaphor-for-sexuality. Dumbledore and his old nemesis stroke golf buddy Voldemort (and, by the way, have you noticed that Dumbledore is an anagram of Voldemort? Is that another hidden clue?) decide to put aside their differences and team up to fight the muggles. It's the wacky good cop/crazy cop partner comedy that you haven't been waiting for! Anyway, to cut a long story short, Dumbledore dies at the end (or does he, yawn), and Voldemort falls to rise again, same old story.

Like just about every other piece of celluloid excrement currently hitting up against the white screen, this film is all about the special effects. Everything in this movie is computer generated, from the minutest detail in the script to Vinnie Jones (in fact, no Vinnie Jones was used in the production). A quite spectacular sequence will make you believe that Patrick Stewart had to do some work to earn his million dollar pay cheque.

X-Men: as usual, three mutant thumbs, way down.

Your revision

Thanks once again to the glory that is the dumb internet that passes bits around without too much thought, I was able to spend friday evening eating roast dinner (not actually anything to do with the internet), drinking cheap red wine (ditto), and watching the Eurovision Song Contest (ah, that would be it). I had tried to keep the result a surprise, but this plan was scuppered by, of all people, National Public Radio, who on the Sunday after the contest let slip the result.

I've missed seeing the contest for the past couple of years (I think the last one I saw was in 2003 when I got obsessed with the Austrian entry [the actual entry where I explained in great detail the genius of his pasta-based lyrics has either got lost in the internet, or else I never actually wrote it]). As a self-acknowledged fan of everything camp, kitschy, glittery and novelty, this year's contest was a delight.

[RSS readers may have to open this entry to appreciate the full effect, if it works]



Latvia (or was it Lithuania? I'm always getting those two mixed up) led off with the awesomly hummable "We are winners of Eurovision Contest Song Competition!". They should have won with that.



Much has already been remarked about the German entry, in their controversial decision to feature a country song. International readers may note that the Teutonic peoples are not known for their life as cowboys, rounding up the cattle and having hoe-downs. Still, at least this entry from "Texas Lightning" wasn't as bad as it could have been: it could have been performed by Texas.



I had a soft spot for the Danish entry, in which the implausibly named Sidsel Ben Semmane revived the sixties dance flash-in-the-pan, the Twist, about the shocking ignorance of today's youngsters of forty-year-old dance crazes. The lyrics feature the fledgling romance between Johnny and the conveniently rhyming Connie, and ends with a plaintive cry that you should "be sure you know how to twist" before attempting to seduce your potential assonant conquests. I'm not sure what it is that appeals to me about this song: perhaps it's the mind-numbing simplicity of the lyrics, the utter anachronism of the tune, or the jaunty costume of its teenage performer. Er...



... which leads me on to the British entry, "Teenage Life", in which an implausible middle aged bloke in a tracksuit and a chorus of graduates of the Sylvia Young School in their late twenties dressed for a night out at the abhorrent SchoolDisco (TM) belt out a cod rap paen to the tribulations of being a teenager with enough fake emotion that you could almost believe that they could remember back long enough to when they were at school. The song was quite catchy though, so I was surprised that it did pretty abysmally in the voting. Perhaps it was something political, to do with Blair, Iraq or 9/11.

Of course, the main problem is that the lyrics make no sense.

What did you learn at school today?
That's what the teachers used to say

Firstly, when did your teachers ever say this? At least on occasion my parents would naively enquire what I learnt at school today. But why would teachers ever ask this question? If they were any cop at being teachers, then they should have a pretty good idea what you learnt, since they just taught it to you. (I refuse to enter into any complex discussions of the distinction between what was taught and what was learnt; this doesn't make sense and that's that).

Why do they always give advice ?
Saying "Just be nice, always think twice"
When it's been a long since they had a teenage life

Yes, why do they give advice? Especially when it is so anodyne as "Just be nice, always think twice". Although, again, in my entire life, no teacher ever gave such advice. Even if they had, it's surely sufficiently banal not to excite any response of great irritation that provokes young Darren to brood on it into his thirties before finally responding with an embittered and decidely Love City Groove/Love City Groove-influenced "rap" on the subject.

I could go on with how silly this song is. But there's not much more point except to remark on the fact (And getting told off Mr T how my life would be) that Al Franken and Mr T. share a birthday, and are about the same age.



And there's Bloody Las Ketchup! I'm sorry, I'll write that again, it should be Las Ketchup with Bloody Mary. As any experienced bar person should know, you don't make a Bloody Mary with Ketchup (it should be tomato juice and tabasco sauce). Still, surprising to know that "professional" singers such as Las Ketchup (who had a worldwide smash with, was it the Macarena? Or Gasolina? It'll come to me in a moment) could compete in the decidedly amateur Eurovision. In their last incarnation, there were only three of them, but now there's four, which, considering they are sisters, is a pretty good trick. Also, according to the official Eurovision website, "All four of them are young, attractive and friendly.". Which is good to know. Perhaps they are friends of Allen's.

While their last hit eventually emerged as a rip-off of Rapper's delight, I did not detect any obvious plagiarism here. Apart from the chorus of "Duty Free, Duty Free, Duty Free, Duty Free!", which was an obvious homage to Keith Barron.



Oh, Lordi, Lordi, Lordi.

Yes, at last we come to Lordi, the performance that had everyone talking. Before we begin, the anal-retentive/borderline Asperger's in me feels compelled to point that this is the Eurovision Song Contest, and that the official rules (which I've not actually read) insist that the prize should go to the best song, not the best bunch of blokes dressed up in stupid, stinking plastic costumes. (perhaps the youtube rendition of the performance is a little too blocky to see what is going on; try the googlevid encode instead).

Still, the lyrics do offer some solace:


The walls come down like thunder
The rocks about to roll
It’s the Arockalypse

On the day of Rockoning
It’s who dares, wins

Careful observers will note that what they've done their is taken words and replaced certain pieces with the word "rock". Very clever.

Anyway, that's enough of that. Let's finish by reliving some highlights of Eurovisions past:



Alf Poier -- Weil der mensch zählt



Gina G -- Ooh, ah, just a little bit

Unfortunately, I have been unable to find any archived videos of the performances of Love City Groove or Guildo Horn and the Orthopedic Stockings (they were his support band).

Utter sots (anag)

One thing I feel I have to add to the ongoing Da Vinci Codswallop farago. I looked through the book a year or so back, and was suitably unimpressed. But the acknowledgments mention William Tunstall-Pedoe, pedlar of the really very good Anagram Genius software. It turns out that all those dodgy anagrams around which the plot of the novel turns (oh yeah, SPOILER ALERT, like I care) were generated using W T-P's nifty bit of coding (for more details, see here). Oh, Dan Brown. How you have fooled us with your computer generated illusions! (although, perhaps it would have been better if he had just let the computer write the whole book).

I have a great deal of fondness for AG. Mostly because, using a nice "trial version" of the software, I was able to find that Pamela Anderson is an anagram of Anal Promenades (I forget exactly why I was looking for this; I believe that Baywatch was the toast of the town at the time). It also informed me that various people known to me were anagrams of, variously, Virgin's Testes, Smiling Doll, and Nazi Leader. There are no good anagrams of my given name or my assumed name.

The esteemed Mr T-P hangs around Cambridge, and I must have seen him in the bar a few times. I beta-tested his follow up work, the technically impressive Crossword Maestro, one summer when I had nothing better to do. Disks were passed around from pigeonhole to pigeonhole. It was very cloak and dagger.

X-Men Soda

In one of my rare ventures into the outside world, I went over to New Brunswick (the city, not the province of Canadia) to watch X-Men: 3: the last stand: more colons: last night. It was pretty tolerable entertainment (although: shock! horror! Dumbledore dies at the end. No, not really). Probably the highlight was recognising one of the locations (supposedly in San Francisco) as the Sheraton Wall Centre in Vancouver. Also known as the venue for SODA 2005 (which I attended, eventually).

The Emporer's New Sound

According to the BBC, I'm not supposed to be able to hear this. But I can, very clearly. Take a listen. I presume it is the insistent oscillating high pitch whistling sound, not the background rumbling and other low frequency sounds that I'm not supposed to hear. But I can, quite clearly. Can you?

Or am I just making this all up, and there is no sound at all? It's a bit tricky, when you think of it. Equally, if I can hear it, and people say they can't, how can I be sure they aren't lying too?

Charmingly Spam

I received quite the most naive, innocent and useless spam in a while today which, having my time on it, I will now inflict on you:

From: Allan 
To: []@[]
Cc: []@[], []@[],
     []@[], []@[]
Subject: hanging out with you

Hello my dear friend
I was looking throubgh the web few weekas ago and found
your probfiale. Now I deciaded to eambail you to get to know
you better. I am coming to your country inb few weeks
and bthought may abe we can meet each other. I am pretty
looking girl. I am 25. Do not reply to this address
directly. Email me back at []@freemailserv.com

Two days on, and no one has requested 5 free iTunes. I am secretly delighted that no one I know indulges in this tomfoolery, and assume that most of them must instead obtain their digital music either via self-creation from CDs or from Russian sites of dubious legality.

Free Money Now!

A few weeks ago I was complaining (as usual), this time about the way in which iPods and iTunes are becoming part of the economy. Well, it's just getting worse and worse. After completing the booking of my flight to Chester's International Airport yesterday, the airline has sent me... a voucher for 5 free iTunes (approximate retail value: $4.95). It used to be that you'd get 500 free airmiles, which was a reasonable concept -- at least it has some connection to the purchase just made. But why replace that with iTunes? A proprietary, DRM'ed, specific form of digital music. I don't have an iTunes account, and nor do I wish to have one. Open protocols like MP3s and Ogg were good enough for my grandparents, and they are good enough for me.

Consequently, I don't want this "free" "gift" of a partial right to listen to a crippled digital encoding of Coldplay or Dido, or whatever (as far as I can tell, all iTunes are actually MOR AOR). By rights I should simply destroy the launch codes, but I am wise and benevolent dictator. Therefore, I'm prepared to give away these codes to anyone who wants them, if you can come up with a convincing reason why I should (I did contemplate just posting them here directly, but there's a good chance that some semi-automated robot would just come along and swipe them). There is a single code for five iTunes, so no splitting, and I suspect that it is only valid in the U.S.A. version of the store (more arbitrary and unnecessary restrictions from the rights owners). Since no one is supposed to be reading this, you have a few days to claim them, after which time I will just post the codes and leave it as a free for all. Enjoy the melee!