Monthly Archives: June 2010

Choice

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Read this: http://heartsapart.wordpress.com/2010/06/28/on-limelight_/

I hadn’t thought of it that way before but now I do my position on elective death remains unchanged.

“This is the greatest toy ever created. Here lies the secret to all happiness!”

If there is no happiness, if there is no peace, if there is no future or possibility of any sort of satisfaction then why not choose death? And it is the person who decides this, not some advocate, some doctor, some religious believer. And if you are such a person and you do say what they think is wrong then you demean them, you decide that this decision is wrong but others are right? Maybe you should assume 100% of the responsibility for them? No? Shut up then. And if you do, why so cruel?

If we have been given the ability to think and reason why can we not exercise that fully?

How clever is that?

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If you voted for the government you voted for this.

Inequality will now, without doubt, yawn yet wider again, as the distributional impact becomes depressingly clear. Many well-paid people, like myself, have now found they have been barely touched at all by the budget – not even my winter fuel allowance or Freedom Pass. But even the better-off will see local libraries, leisure centres and police stations closing, dirty streets and overgrown parks, fewer buses, the homeless back on the streets in 1980s numbers, rising crime and public squalor. The sense that the cuts were needlessly brutal will soon take hold.
Polly Toynbee – The Guardian

No tweet

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My last actual tweet was 10 days ago. The one since – I just checked – was an autotweet so doesn’t count. And right now I have no intention of going back. I have created another private account just in case but I have my doubts it will be used. Twitter clients are uninstalled so something mighty would have to happen for me to download, install, setup a client just to write a few words.
So why stop given I’ve been there awhile and make 4900 tweets? Because I don’t see the point. I began thinking about what twitter does for me and couldn’t figure out what it was. I still can’t. Here’s the thing – I have no read anyone’s twitter / tweets for 10 days, I have posted nothing there for 10 days and I don’t feel that I have lost out at all. Nothing feels missing and that is despite the volume of tweets. Okay so it’s not massive but it’s enough to develop a missable habit surely? Not here.

So if I can’t see the point of doing something, why do it?

No little bricks

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I liked in Windows 98 you could watch the disk defragmenting. Or at least you had something to watch as it rearranged all the little bricks of data into some better form of organisation. Right now J’s laptop is defragging to my left and Vista just has the twirly blue circle. Not as fun to watch. Her laptop had slowed over time – just like this mini which needs an OS reinstall – so it falls to me to sort. Not difficult, boring in fact. Made so by the fact it’s a Sony Viao laptop and that loads crap at startup which apparently one has to be pretty careful about removing. Far more fun to have a desktop with a clean install to play with. The PC my youngest uses has 11 entries in the log which hijackthis produces. The laptop has many more. Anyway, back when I first used Spybot Search & Destroy it looked for about 30,000 pieces of malware. It now looks for 1.19 million. That’s a seriously big number. The fact it is a Windows machine is a detail and Apple roll out Security Updates with increasing frequency but what is shows is the scale of the problem. Thankfully we have no Norton or other Symantec products installed. That would have made things so much more difficult.

Defragmenting hard disk (C:)... This may take from a few minutes to a few hours.
I told it to defrag, I’m okay with that bit. I started it. It began. So why not play the game and let me have a hint as to when it will end? I have a Win 7 installed on this machine. I’ll defrag that and see if I get little bricks.

portablueloo

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This image is taken from http://www.terena.org/webcam/.


There is a bright blue object near the centre of the picture. It wasn’t there yesterday, it will disappear late Sunday / early Monday. It’s a toilet. More specifically it is a urinal.

So of an evening after much beer men can use that instead of a street corner or the river. Must feel odd the first few times you use it (I nearly said flip it out in public) but it is also a really good idea. And it really is a toilet – watch and see the body language used later. At no other time anywhere do men use those positions. As my wife says though – what about the women?

Google. Bastards.

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So I wake to find that Google had disabled a GMail account. No reason at all. It cannot have been compromised – I use stupidly long passwords – I have not spammed, it is superlow volume, they just did it for kicks. As everyone who has ever tried to contact them knows Google has no Support team. No-one. Nothing. Support budget? $0. So the option to send a Support request is useless. And what do they want otherwise? My mobile phone number. Those “privacy means sod all unless you work for Google” people want another piece of my information just so they can give me access to my email account. So that account will be closed and I’m off to Hotmail or even another domain of mine. I barely use Google now and I’m no worse off and events like this just make my hatred of them burn brighter.

52

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I’m sitting in a english village and yet I can lend directly to someone halfway around the world. I – and every other Kiva lender – can help people to help themselves, to improve their life and those of those around them.
I think that is amazing.


I just passed the 50 loan mark at Kiva hence this post and I look forward to my 100th.

Kiva’s mission is to connect people, through lending, for the sake of alleviating poverty.

Kiva empowers individuals to lend to an entrepreneur across the globe. By combining microfinance with the internet, Kiva is creating a global community of people connected through lending.

Go lend $25.

Omar Hamoui needs a clue.

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In the history of technology and innovation, it’s clear that competition delivers the best outcome. Artificial barriers to competition hurt users and developers and, in the long run, stall technological progress.

The company that dominates search, that buys companies and so obliterates the competiton who cannot compete on development and that breaks the law is saying competition is good? Omar hasn’t a clue, not one. Idiot.

Seven and eight

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Final Fantasy VII opening
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2 minutes of a minimum of 70 hours gameplay and it can easily be 120 hours.

Final Fantasy VIII opening
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and this sequence is 5 times longer.

Have a dance
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Lawyers make me do this.
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