Monthly Archives: January 2006

Clicking balls in Monaco

Reply

Twenty years ago I was a student nurse doing an early shift on Lindley Villa at Gorse Hill Hospital. I finished the shift at 1pm, went into town and played snooker until very very late – if you never been into a snooker hall you really should. They are devoid of time. In a good hall it really is just the click of the balls and low talking – and then some time after that I got back to the flat we then lived in. It was then that J told me the shuttle accident had happened. Today – or parts of it – have been filled with names, faces, events and so much more all brought back by that moment in history – just like the “Where I was when Diana died” (I was heading in to do an early!) or for really old people, where they were when Kennedy was shot by whoever it was (that event was too early for me). I just realised – Lindley was the first hospital ‘ward’ I worked on as a student – and it was the ward I worked on when my NHS career finished too.

(Unrelated apart from snooker – at about that time I played snooker another day/evening/night. Somehow I got to the bus, somehow I got of at the right place and force of habit must have got me to the door. J says that when she opened the door, I fell in, crawled to the bathroom and told her to make sure I went to sleep in the recovery position.)

(Ikea today, waiting in the queue for something I came eye-to-eye with a bottle of Absolut Vanilla. I swear it was winking at me. I’m sure the days of me looking at alcohol and finding it more attractive are on the rise, but it’s cigarettes I want more and more often. Not that I will succumb to either weakness.)

Normally the events today (more has happened that the above) – just normal events in themselves (though quite how Ikea can be defined as normal is beyond me) – would have stressed me somewhat. Not to the point of burying myself in a cupboard (none big enough) or suchlike, but certainly I would have got impatient, glared at people, sworn many times, cursed, wondered about the educational and social skills of those around me and I might even have stamped my feet and gestured too. But not today. Today I think only one word can describe me: Serene

:)

Great games

2

An excellent thread at the Guardian’s Gamesblog with this post: Games you keep coming back to.

Mine:
Pilotwings on N64
I wish they’d have done a GC version – maybe they still will – but I love it. I’m 1 point off perfect (taking the photo of Nessie gets me every time)

SSX3 on PS2
The peak of the genre (pun intended)

Tetris on GBC
Loved that timed play

Too many games on MAME
Mentioned here before several times

N on PC
I will beat it !

and probably quite a few more …..

Love this quote from the article:

House of the Dead
……. I can pretty much play out the whole game in my head. This ability is absolutely certainly going to come in handy one day.

And the spam rises

6

Just noticed a note from drdave when I checked into Spam Karma here. SK has only had the very rarest of errors so it’s set to autokill every 4 hours. I’ve no idea why I picked that time scale ….. 49 spams it had caught. That’s a lot considering that Bad-Behaviour is also protecting this site. So I have increased the meaness factor of SK2 – hopefully it’ll still smile on real people. (And yes, I am perfectly aware of other solutions, but I am also even more aware that the spammers have beaten everything yet thrown at them and I don’t see that changing just yet. They are better funded.)

Edit: The spammers are pointing their code at a single post then throwing 18 spams at it in about 14 minutes – in alphabetical order (except for ‘hgh’ which is last …). The third of these little waves is part way through – not that you’d know from your side.

Edit again: IP 195.225.177.80 is worth a few hours of blocking.

Taking your attention

Reply

A couple of months ago, I saw a link to the Attention Trust. The aggregation of a single user’s interests had seemed to be a logical step for me before and this looked to be doing just that – basically tracking my attention. So out of curiosity I joined up. Hmmm…..
Here’s the deal as I see it – and I think my vision is pretty clear: I install a firefox extension, every web address I click on is sent to Root Markets (it’s all linked from the above). My data accumulates. I could then be approached by a company who say “Let us see your data and we’ll put you into a draw for a new car (for example)” because my ‘attention data’ is mine to do with as I wish. Then another company, and another etc. Root markets become the middleman by getting some sort of slice for letting the marketeers close enough to me. (Of course I’m sure that a company that got hold of a copy would never ever do more than they said. Oh no.)

Right .. so the data accumulates. It’s possible to use ‘local storage’ where an xml file is created on your machine but despite some instructions to the contrary, it is not possible to store your ‘clickstream’ on your own server. I have a database, I have the code but each time Firefox starts, the extension phones home and overrides what I have chosen. My data, my clickstream, mine to do with what I want but it must be stored where they want. I wanted to store locally because I wanted to watch what happened. I wanted to see if blocked sites really were not recorded (for the brief time the extension was here they were not recorded) and I wanted to poke about and see what data was being stored in the db but not output to the screen – curiosity, that’s all. So being stopped from doing that was extremely annoying. (If I knew enough I’d remove the phone home stuff from the .xpi file).

Two principles from their site:

1. Property
You own your attention and can store it wherever you wish. You have CONTROL.

2. Mobility
You can securely move your attention wherever you want whenever you want to. You have the ability to TRANSFER your attention.

Two responses from me:

1. No.
I am not allowed to store my data on my server.

2. No.
You are not telling me how or giving me the tools

Did I mention the data accumulates ? So 100,000 people could accumulate data on one of their servers. I’ll be extremely conservative – 10 clicks a day each. That’s 1,000,000 clicks a day. 7 Million clicks a week – which is an awful lot of attention data – and the company will not do anything at all with that unless you agree because it’s your data. Okay, I can’t doubt them on that – but it does become a case of ‘castles in the air’ doesn’t it ? The company stock / profile / whatever and that of the people involved climbs even if they have a ‘product’ which no-one can access. Weird. Not that the people behind this shouldn’t get returns for their work – indeed they should – but it seems .. very .. bubble-like.

Some other thoughts:
1 – You are creating a track of your web habits, a track that would be investigated and while you could take a sledgehammer to your HD, you can’t delete from a remote server. And who is to say that security services wouldn’t impose conditions on companies that say something like “You can’t destroy anything and you can’t tell anyone we told you that and you can’t tell anyone anything about that”.
2 – There would be a market in creating false attention data wouldn’t there ? Wouldn’t be too difficult to create would it ? (open firefox, run code, go bed. Awake to a solid block of data)

It’s a non-profit.. and ?

I really can see a reason why attention is important if you want to look at just clicks but then if you were to find two webpages in my browser history you would have no idea which I had looked at for the longest – maybe I’d taken the dog for a walk and not shut Firefox – and the time was being recorded in the db but not output to the screen (I’ll play later maybe again) – and I can see why someone might want to sell their data in return for something but right now I’m an extension free zone. Go read…

Harsh profits ?

1

News items:
Old lady knocked to ground and money for her bills stolen
Family with young kids get burgled / house burns down just before Xmas
Soon-to-be married couple have house burgled and money for honeymoon taken
I’ve seen each of the above – and others similar – in both the local and national news. And on each occasion the person(s) involved have ended up in a better situation than previously. More money is given, more toys, a better holiday is donated etc – so is having a mini-disaster something to be considered ? Maybe go halves with the ‘criminal’ and give a false description ? But then there must be a demographic of some sort at work. It’s proven that if you are white, middle class and female that your disappearance will make national news. It follows that the opposite generates no news at all. So with the items I listed, there must be variations that almost guarantee you will remain worse off. Something to bear in mind ….

Simon Hughes.

9

Simon Hughes says:

………the way he has handled media pressure after admitting gay relationships is a mark of his courage.

That, like most things MP’s say is complete bollocks. What will have really happened is that some skeleton from his past will have got in touch with a “So who is going to make me rich then Si ? The papers or you ?” and the cheapest way out was to say what he did. That is not the mark of courage at all – it’s the behaviour of a cornered rat.

My dog turned pink!

2

Out last night, Winston had a Halti on – it’s a better way of controlling dogs that pull – and last night he really didn’t want it on. So he would put his head to the ground or bury it in the grass while using his paws to try and pull it off. He did that a few times. I’m about to go bed around 11pm and I see him – bumps on his legs, on his face, on his ears and aside from the top part, he was pink. Literally. Being close to midnight options were limited so I stayed up til 2am with him as he was at times frantic with whatever it was and by 2, he was finally asleep. This morning it appeared to be gone, but then 2 hours ago he exploded into bumps and lumps. His skin was a nasty shade of pink – looked raw. Phone call made to vets and we shot up there – interestingly it’s the only time he has ever jumped straight into the car. Very probably allergic reaction, so steroid injection, anthistamine injection and antihistamine tablets (piriton!). Oh, and £40 for the experience (when we took Winston to Dog training classes, the trainer warned us to expect lots of vets bills around £40-£44 because apparently pet insurance for most dogs kicks in at £45 – if that IS the case, then I wonder how much vets get in kickbacks ?). Anyway, pink-lad is back and should be better soon … we have further instructions if it does not go well.

Side-effect of that 2am stoppage though was that I managed to tidy everything online here. Tons of things deleted. No tracking code, contact forms removed from everywhere, things reworded – and I’m trying to summon the motivation to make the changes needed for 2.0 …. meh.