Monthly Archives: April 2005

All Landlords Are Bastards

11

Repeat after me: All Landlords Are Bastards.
For want of a pressed metal lock that – if I could find one – costs less than 5 quid, they will withhold £100 of the bond. All Landlords Are Bastards. No way could we find one today, any hardware shops will be closed tomorrow (the large shops don’t do this lock) and tomorrow they want the house back. Until I hand the keys over, I am the tenant. Once I hand the keys over, anything I do will be criminal damage. I could cheerfully cause well over that amount of damage.

Update: J has agreed a trade with him. He gives us the money, we give him the keys. He’s not keen on the idea but who cares ? :)

Filling shelves and scaring people.

6

And so it continues. All construction done but there is still a ton of stuff yet to be unboxed and out away – isn’t it amazing just how much clobber you accumulate ? One of the better things about this move is that I get a room to use as an office / den / refuge and it is filling with books and games .. lots of games … so I’m taking the opportunity to check which (handheld) games I still have (GB / GBC / GBA / NGPC / Lynx – with an unopened copy of Batman Returns!) as I know for a fact that some of the girl’s friends have relocated the odd copy over the last few years. Current cartridge loss = 4. And I’m splitting my books into those unread / started / read. I like being organised sometimes :)

Tomorrow we clean the last house and meet with the landlady to get our bond money back. She gives us money, we give her keys. Until we give her the keys then ‘accidents’ can happen – shame if that were to happen but then if no money ……..

And P and me just wandered to the local shop – about 10 minutes walk away. This village is 3 miles away from the last one yet it may as well be on another planet they way I got stared at. One woman walking out of the shop seemed to momentarily forget to walk when she saw me, the shop staff eyed me very suspiciously, the local natives were struggling at times to stare without actually looking at me and I silenced one kid just by wandering past with P. Ho hum…..

I’m knackered.

Tiger … so f*cking what..

12

So the new MacOS Tiger gets shipped today (officially anyway) and in a few hours there will be Mac bloggers gloating about whatever new shiny is in that code and in the same sentence berating us Windows users for having the OS we do. It’s the same with Linux users isn’t it ? Ubuntu comes out, or the latest mandrake / Red Hat / Knoppix and they too shove their noses even higher in the air as they deign to communicate with someone who just happens to have a Windows machine sitting in front of them.

Can you lot just not shut up ?

Stupid people buy Macs too. Stupid people use Linux too. And no, it’s not necessarily the case that more stupid people use Windows but given the increased userbase it’s bound to happen that they crop up more.
I doubt I’m the only Windows user who is fed up to the back teeth of you lot whinging on, especially when if you want to play games you use a PC or some sort of emulation code. Both the above systems have holes in them too – as is acknowledged – but because it’s a niche market the hackers just cannot be bothered.

Labels …. it’s all about labels and just because you wear certain clothes / buy certain items does not imbue you with any special abilities. If you are cool, that will out anyway regardless. And if you are a dipshit ? Likewise ;)

Imbibing coffee

7

Woke at 4am …. strange house, strange noises, doesn’t ‘smell’ right so despite being very tired and with another 2 days of this ahead here I am tapping away and wondering when to reformat D:/ and look again at what files I keep. Just like moving house means chucking away some detritus, I’m looking at the digital data in much the same way.

And D’s hamster didn’t quite make the journey here :(

Semaphore

7

I’m sure that the communication of the change of webhosts for this site was done with a combination of semaphore, smoke signals and chinese whispers*. There are probably some errors somewhere but I’ll catch them in a while when we decide to throw in the towel for the day. (And if my brother-in-law ever again promises his help early with a ton of jobs that needed doing but then crawls around trying to convince me that his ‘hangover from hell’ is some f*cking badge of honour when all he did last night was fail to remove a bottle of rum from his lips then I swear I will hit him, especially when he then proceeds to try and make me look a dickhead to bolster his own rep. Twat.)

* Yea, I know how long it should take – I’m not in a great mood right now.

Oh, and Zen Internet rock.

Bits..

9

Scuttle 0.4.1 is out with a nifty search feature.

Stuart over at thebombsite linked ages ago to Crystal XP and as a consequence, the girls’ machine is running the Tux Shell Pack. Recently released has also been a “Longhorn inspired” Shell pack which I installed here 2 days ago and all has been fine. Does nothing for the OS of course, but it makes what was ugly, more tolerable. Windows only …….. after all, true geeks should just want a black screen and that flashing cursor ?

The domain (not this one) that I had with Web Mania is in the process of being moved. I had two periods of downtime which, following the other WM shenanigans as experienced by Root was not good and although it may indeed be a temp hiccup, it was severe enough for me to jump ship. last thing I want is for my testing / playing / gallery domain to fall over. Not that it affects here … was just saying ..

I rowed for a straight 30mins, completing 6.1km (L4) earlier – my goal of 10km gets closer !

Data Mining

4

Don’t you find this whole thing even remotely scary ?

My daughters are growing up in a world – a world that also very probably has the next leaders of every country already born – where everything you do can be monitored like never before. There is the search History “feature” that Google have now – I wonder how many arguments THAT will start (a bit like the “last number redial” on phones), Gmail and the myriad of other ways that our lives are electronically dissected and reassembled by various companies. Don’t you find it spooky that if a kid wants to be President / Prime Minister that s/he almost needs to make that decision NOW and act accordingly because the future will not rely on grainy b&w photos and dodgy typefaces, it is being laid down for posterity now. What they search for and blog about could return to haunt them – such is the power of data collection.
But do we want such clean-cut individuals ? I certainly don’t – but then as Google have revealed by mining here and returning nothing – we cannot trust these sources that proclaim that they are to be trusted. How easy would (will) it be for a future leader to remove (replace) unfavourable data ? How do we know it isn’t happening now ? Does Google being a private company make it’s information any better / safer / less biased ? No, not at all. I can’t find the links right now but does anyone remember the dismissing of the film 9-11 when it was released ? Al the links went to a site that Google pointed to, that Google rated as #1, that Google – being a US based company – was probably asked by GWBush to do because that very link dismissed the film ? Google unbiased ? Crap – that would be like saying eating McDonald’s food is healthy.

What’s scary though is the way that if data mining is invading our lives so insidiously yet meeting no resistance, then our children will (are) be data mined as a matter of course and as such they will neither contest the fact that it happens, nor will they contest the results. Isn’t that scary ?

Garbage In Garbage Out – I wonder if people apply that to computers but possibly not to sites ?

In some films, one of the characters will go to a place they recall yet find that someone else is living there, that despite what they have in their mind there is no evidence to support them and even evidence that contradicts their experience to the point that they doubt themselves. That’s what we are heading toward isn’t it ? If Search Engines can make facts disappear, they can make new facts appear too – and if Google says it, then it must be true !

Where did childhood go ? Being an irresponsible teenager ? Being able to make a ‘Fresh Start’ ? Making mistakes ? LIVING ?