Monthly Archives: August 2005

Time for some Tiesto

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J goes and rents a carpet-cleaning machine for 24 hours. Get it upstairs, fill with water and detergent. Go plug it into an extension with 3 other plugs. Go to machine, push switch. Lights flicker, no life in machine. Hmmm.. remove plug, stick it into another unrelated socket. Same behaviour. Yell about stupid damn machines, that we expect money back etc etc etc. Empty machine. Take it downstairs. J says “Why not try it one more time”. I plug it into the main kitchen socket – 4 plugs. Click switch on machine. It blew every plug. The kitchen shut down. F*ck. Come upstairs – yep, every plug that was in operation in a socket when I switched the machine on has a dead fuse. It’s 8:30pm on a Friday night. Happy ? Me ? yeah.. right… Trip out to friendly local open_too_early-til-too_late shop, buy all his fuses. Restore electricity to all.
So now it’s time for (fairly loud) Tiesto, some jaffa cakes and a bottle of Vanilla Diet coke….

Google-hug ?

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Give them your mobile phone number and they’ll give you a GMail account.
Hmm… they promise to never reveal or sell your phone number to any third party but read that small print finely. If you use their desktop search, you’ve already agreed to this:

Google Desktop Search may collect certain non-personally identifiable information that resides on your computer, including, without limitation, the number of searches you do and the time it takes to see your results. Unless you (and the users to whom you distribute in accordance with these Terms and Conditions) choose to opt out, either during installation or at any time after installation, non-personal information collected will be sent to Google.

Note – ‘including’. They are looking at information that resides on your computer. What info ? License keys ? Mp3 collections ? Images ? Porn ? You have let them look at what they want, when they want and then do what they choose with that information. That’s nice. I’ll bet you wouldn’t want me looking at your HD, or your boss, or your other half – but Google is lovely and cuddly and totally trustworthy isn’t it. ‘Course it is.

If Microsoft released such a product in such a way, there would be people yelling about the evil Bill Gates, nasty Microsoft blah drivel blah – but just because it Google all is sunshine and smiles ?

From Googe Watch:

  • Google records everything they can: For all searches they record the cookie ID, your Internet IP address, the time and date, your search terms, and your browser configuration.
  • Google retains all data indefinitely: Google has no data retention policies.
  • Google won’t say why they need this data: Inquiries to Google about their privacy policies are ignored.
  • Google’s immortal cookie: Google was the first search engine to use a cookie that expires in 2038. This was at a time when federal websites were prohibited from using persistent cookies altogether. … Google set the standard because no one bothered to challenge them.

I’m not against Google per se, but I can’t get my head round the fact that Google release something and people run to snatch it all up when if that very same product were offered by almost any other company at all, people would stand back, ponder and say “But why …?”

New!! Search Google Talk! Find out what customers are saying about your products! Get the edge on your competition!

Talk to your customers ! Google are delighted to announce the all-new ‘Talksense’ ! Customers using Google Talk at the basic level are now having their conversations monitored by algorithms that will determine the content of the speech and if appropriate will play a short infomercial. Buy your TalkWords today! (All races and genders available, sign language extra)

Target your junk mail ! Google can now supply you with information on people who have talked about your product because we monitor everyone, all the time and with this you can refine your marketing strategies to maximise your cost/profit lines. Google. We care xx

It’s new, it’s Google-Cell ! We’ve got their numbers, we know their provider and we know their location. So when they are out and about, if they pass within 300 yards of your store, we’ll ring their phone and play YOUR invitation for them to browse your wares. (Hey … we aren’t giving your phone number away at all. Just using it to bug the hell out of you by getting ads to phone you.)

….
Google-hug anyone ?

Be interesting to see if this gets anywhere down under:

“Google’s extraordinary gain in market cap from nothing a few years ago to close to $US80 billion is more due to their massive misappropriation of intellectual property than anything else,” he said. Link

Bandwidth

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You shouldn’t hear me wittering about it – for a while anyway. I just jumped to a Medium Orange which is 15gig more than I was on. That gives me more space which I suppose I should find a use for (the server directories are incredibly tidy you know) and ASO are now promoting the fact that they have Ruby on Rails as part of their package so playing with Typo …. got to …. need to …. want slidingcommentsdammit :)

MMORPG’s – which one ?

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In a previous life, I played something called ‘Elephant’ (?). I’ve played Diablo2 online, and that’s about it.
So ….. and I’ve asked this over at BritPulse too, what’s a good MMORPG to get started with ?
- Decent learning curve
- NO payments online (none, not a bean, not a cent/penny/pound)
- Theme doesn’t matter hugely
- Game purchase would be okay but I’d rather not as that will have everyone saying WoW and it also presupposes the hardware.

Indranil in #wordpress pointed me at the Kingdom Of Loathing which I’ve had my first day of adventure on (with 8 bonus adventures because I ate 4 bowls of cottage cheese!) and judging by the forum it’s pretty busy over there too.

But what else should I be trying ?

It’s Wednesday

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I was told once, years ago, to never ever trust anyone who said the ‘d’ in Wednesday. Strangely enough, they were right both times.

Blogs …. blog blog blog. I’m running 3. This one here which will continue almost as it had. I have another now which is a purely personal blog. Nothing private about it exactly, but I do want to tap out some thoughts but keep those thoughts away from here. After that post a few days ago about having an ‘honest’ blog and saying I wouldn’t, I changed my mind. It has got a focus of what was starting to surface here more – at least I could see things even if you could not. So that’s one. The other blog is http://podz.wordpress.com where I’m not sure just yet what I’ll be writing about – except the next post which is about WP versions. So this blog will change – but I have not the slightest idea how / when / by how much. Not a clue. Does it really matter ? No, I don’t think so.

And in other news…. the WordPress Reference Center is now back at http://wrc.os42.com in the very capable hands of Shadow, I just submitted a wee patchette to WP and I joined my local freecycle group.

The Times goes gutter

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In their report of the so-called ‘Piano Man’ they have the headline “Piano Man: German, gay and gone home. What the hell has the fact he is gay got to do with anything but some stupid journo on an alliteration kick ? If you read the story then the fact that he is gay does not impact at all – it just doesn’t figure in the story except as a footnote, an aside, an extraneous fact. Yet some Twat at The Times reckons it must obviously be good enough to use in a headline. Murdoch Press. Fools.

Bird flu is not news ?

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Progress of bird flu across Russia tracked by European scientists
GPs briefed on bird flu pandemic
Dutch to shield poultry from flu
Poultry ban ‘not needed for UK’
Britain lets poultry run free despite the threat of bird flu
High cost outbreak also took a vet’s life
Europe steps up attempt to halt lethal pandemic
and then today we have
Flight H5N1 is approaching Britain. Brace for impact
Scary stuff. I obviously have no idea what great plans are in place for the protection and caring of the population, but I rest easier knowing that Tony Blair, his family and colleagues are no doubt fully protected. Let’s face it – His Tonyness (great stuff there Clarkson!) is pretty much quarantined from Real Life anyway.
Bird Flu. Very very scary indeed. Nowhere would be safe.

Edit: I just realised my use of that title is odd. IF this bird flu does pass to humans – as it has done – and IF it then mutates to human-to-human transmission, it could kill tens of millions of people. It’s in Europe. And that list is all the news ? What IS being done and why are we not being told more ? It may be the case that as individuals that we can do little, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be told does it ? Or are the authorities afraid of .. something ? Some reaction ?

Busy busy here.

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Lots of furniture putting together going on here, along with bathroom fittings, paint, blinds etc. (I never ever ever want to put up another blind. I am destined to live my life without ever getting one 100% perfectly level and it’s all the fault of the concrete lintels. True is that. Honest. Yeah.). J said we needed a new vacuum – seeing as I do all that stuff I said no we did not – quickly adding that I needed new shinies (not had a new gadget in forever!) but I’m still having to work on that angle. Chance of success ? I’d rate a 60% ….

MT …. ‘changed significantly’. Hahanot. Still says ‘Rebuild’, still takes more clicks to publish, still is way too much for a weblog and slow with it. So … that’s deleted and WP installed in it’s place. Hardly a surprise is it I guess coming from an established WP user like me but honestly – if it was what I was after, I would have used it. But it wasn’t.

It’s the sex !

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Been playing with Greasemonkey scripts. One script shows by using strike just which links have been ‘nofollowed’ – amusing when you find a blogroll that is liberally sprinkled with the attribute. Another is showing cookie information – it’s fairly incomprehensible – but the main BBC news page is odd. There is a news ticker just under the banner and that ticker is reading a cookie. Can’t seem to grab the info to try and see just where / what it is after .. unless it’s just UK, but then I can see ‘windows’ in there. And there’s one for phpMyAdmin which could be good too.

My eldest daughter has informed me that the latest terminology for something being good is “the sex”.
She’s 15.
So when she describes something as being “the sex” I am to rest assured that all she means is it is good. Whatever IT is of course. I had to enquire about this because her sister and she had swapped bedrooms, and she had sorted her room, got the computer hooked up, got the ‘look’ right and I asked how she liked it. She said “It’s the sex”. You’d have asked too !