Category Archives: Internet

meh

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no energy for upper case today. tv repair man (assuming it’s not a woman) is coming around between 2 and 5 to have a look at the tv. the speakers resonate when there’s a specific frequency being played which is usually deep voices (for some reason, without a trace and ncis are the worst offenders although it’s possible we don’t watch enough other stuff to notice it). so they’re bringing some more speakers and hopefully a ‘main board’ to repair the tv.

real shame because i loved the lcd tv, and i hate it when technology fails.

we had half planned to go out for breakfast but grete reminded me they were calling in the morning to let us know when they were coming around, and i had this image of us missing their call, them putting it back to tuesday and me spending my entire two week holiday waiting for the tv repair guy (unless it’s a gal) to turn up.

weather is shit anyway so no paddling in the ocean for us today. grete (and myself i may add) want to try and get to the beach if it’s warm enough and paddle without shredding our feet like we nearly did in brighton. the council in brighton should ship in a billion tons of sand and get rid of that pebble beach shit[1]. i’m sure sandy beaches support more types of natural wildlife, like paddlers and sandcastle builders or something.

so i’m sitting here, in the muggy dampness of the height of the british summer (it’s raining) waiting for the tv repair bloke (unless it’s a lass) to turn up so i can start my holiday for real. which probably describes my life, always waiting for something to happen so i can start my life for real.

and then you look back and think ‘shit, that was life, that i just let go by while waiting for it to start’, or something. i think i read a quote recently from someone, let me see if i can find it, meh can’t find it, never mind, it was really insightful and sharp. basically, stop waiting for it to happen, this is it.

which is good advice, when i look back in a few years i’ll probably wish i’d done just that.

maybe i’ll cherish the day i blogged without using the shift key.

we’re planning to visit tracey and stuart at the end of the holiday, and visit fiona in the middle (although i need to talk to fi and confirm details), there’s the beach (and we may have to go paddling in the rain, and if we do we will, fuck you british summertime), birmingham sea life centre looks neat although the ticket buying process scared me (really, i had nightmares) and we have to go and see hellyboy 3 (no spoilers from anyone ok?). the mummy got bad reviews and i may just wait for it on dvd.

maybe i’ll have another cup of tea in my favourite cup (from lindisfarne which we visited during our honeymoon two week tour of the uk, during which we took in 5, maybe 6 different locations!) or maybe i’ll watch some olympics on tv.

fuck it, i’m on holiday, i’ll do both.

edit: visit to fi sorted.

[1] i have half a mind to start a facebook group dedicated to convincing the uk government to do just this.

Vacation!

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I’m on holiday, which means one of three things for the blogging.

1. it’ll go up in frequency.
2. it’ll go down in frequency.
3. frequency won’t change.

I’m glad we enumerated all those options, otherwise there may have been confusion.

As for the holiday so far – we can describe my mood in one word – tetchy.

The stress of the previous week suddenly vanishing leaves me hanging in mid-air with my legs spinning in that Fred Flintstone kinda way, and that means I’m tetchy. I’ll be ok in a day or so (i.e. I’ll have migrated back to merely grouchy).

My memory sucks

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I envy those people who recount with clarity tales and funny moments from their past. I can’t, my past (anywhere from around 30 minutes ago to the point where I first sucked in a gulp of air) is a hazy blur of forgetfulness. Let’s get this cleared up first though, I had a good childhood, my mother is great and did an amazing job, my sister is great and her family is wonderful. I love them both dearly (although I don’t think I’ve ever verbalised that to them). I didn’t suffer any more than average as a kid due to bullying at school (although I was bullied), and while we weren’t rolling in cash my mother made an amazingly small amount of money go miles and we had enough.

So, I haven’t blocked out my childhood memories because they sucked, I just don’t really have a lot of memories, and the ones I do have are hazy and I’m really bad with dates and timelines.

I remember going and seeing the first Batman movie, but can’t remember when it was in the context of my life, for example. I think it’s because I don’t spend a lot of time trying to recount my past memories, these things get stronger if you remember them over and over. So perhaps if I sat down and wrote down memories they would lead onto other memories and more things would come back. Thinking about some things certainly causes them to behave that way. But anyway, in general, I don’t have a good recollection of my past.

Why am I telling you this? Well, I started writing a blog post about the Rocky Horror Picture Show and wanted to put a disclaimer saying my memory sucks, and wanted to be ‘clever’ and link to a post about how my memory sucked. So here it is. And this isn’t a plea for hugs, it’s just a statement of fact, which explains why some of my other posts and future posts have screwy time lines.

Self referential blogging at it’s best.

Efficient disappointment

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I used to browse to something like 10 or 15 different websites and check for updates, blogs mostly for friends. It passed the time. I used to get disappointed after about twenty minutes of browsing that none of my friends had blogged anything new. After another 20 minutes I’d forget and go and check again. Then someone reminded me about Google Reader. So I spent an hour setting it up so it’s got the feeds of all my friend’s blogs. Now it takes me 15 seconds and one click to get disappointed that none of my friends have blogged anything.

Technology in Action.

Vanity, messing with technology or just functionally rich?

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I’ve added a ShareThis button button to the template so it shows up at the end of each post. I can’t decide if I’m deluded enough to believe people might want to actually share the garbage I spout (the Vanity option), or if it was just because I quite liked the idea of how it worked and wanted to play with adding it to the template (the messing with technology option) or whether I just felt the blog needed it to be technically complete (the functionally rich option).

Anyway – you decide. But make sure you tell your budies as well!

Favourite word today: Puckish (yes, watched Bones last night).

The changes Google has wrought

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I’m sure that these changes aren’t all purely because of Google, but you have to admit that the market penetration it has, has pretty much changed the face of the Internet. There’s a bunch of stuff I love that Google provides (blogger – has it’s faults but for free what can you say, google mail – matches my needs perfectly, google reader, google talk, etc., etc., etc.) but the core feature that I love is how they’ve turned search into something else.

Search isn’t about finding pages any more, it’s about finding answers. In ye olde days, Alta Vista was about finding the web page you knew had the information you wanted to know. Someone had written something about China and you needed to find out, or someone had a page on the web listing time zone information and you needed to track it down. Now, Google tells you what you want to know if it’s something which is simply a fact or can be sourced and tracked.

Want to know what time it is in China now? Type “what time is it in China” into Google. It doesn’t just bring you back some pages, it’s flat out tells you the time.Wondering how many pounds there are in a kilogram? Don’t go searching for a website that lists all the conversions, now just ask Google. Wondering how to spell a word? Just misspell it with Google, and it’ll suggest the right spelling.

Wondering what the weather is like in New York, but don’t want to spend weeks trawling the web to find a web site which tracks it? Ask Google about the weather. Google does maths, it converts units, if you tell it where you live it’ll look up movie times for you. The list is huge and it’s not just about finding content any more, it’s about providing content using common search terms.

I don’t reach for a dictionary, I don’t reach for an atlas, I don’t reach for books, I just ask Google. It’s no wonder the verb ‘to google‘ has made it into popular use. People talk about the move to a semantic web, I really have little clue how the whole thing is going to turn out, but you can’t deny that Google’s so called search engine has changed how a generation of people look for information.

Why do I blog?

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I was chatting to a friend, saying I was on a blogging spree, and that I’d thought about blogging about why I blog, but had felt it was too self referential. So she suggested I should blog about the fact that I’d decided not to blog about blogging 🙂

So here I am, blogging about it.

I’m not sure why I blog. I accuse myself of vanity sometimes, thinking that anyone might actually care to read the random shit that I’m thinking about. But maybe even if I was the only person here, I’d still blog. People write diaries after all, with no intention of anyone else ever reading then. But then, why am I not writing a diary, or a private journal, why do I choose to blog publically?

Maybe it’s a pretense at keeping in touch with some friends, since I am clearly unable to keep in touch any other way. I guess allowing comments adds the illusion that it’s a two way keeping in touch process. To some extent it is a way of letting my friends know what I’m up to, but then, what I’m up to is pretty much the same as 10 years ago, and it’s not much, so I could get away with posting a boilerplate entry every 10 years.

Since I started using bulletin boards and the ‘net I’ve always made ‘diary’ style posts, somewhere, at some time. Even when I haven’t been blogging I’ve made posts in forums or other locations which have basically been reflections and blogs. I thought about taking some of them and re-posting them as blog entries on here, just to keep everything in one place, but I’m not sure of the overall value. Most of them are ‘of the moment’, and I’m not sure anyones going to trawl back through the stuff here just to find a forum posting I made in 2004 which might have been a blog entry had I been blogging at the time.

I like to pretend I’m creative and that in some way blogging is my creative outlet. I pretend I’m actually just too lazy to write a whole book so I blog to fill the need, and that if I wasn’t lazy I’d write a book (the reality is that I have loads of ideas for the first two paragraphs of a book and then nothing else).

Maybe I just like inflicting my random thought processes on the world, in the hope that I can shape it to more closely resemble how I think it should be. Maybe I’m blogging my random thoughts so that I can understand how I think the world should be. I think that’s probably it, that by writing my random thoughts, pretty much as they come to the front of my fingers really helps me understand my view, because I don’t always know where this stuff is going. I never knew I was going to write this paragraph for example until I was three quarters of the way through it.

So I guess I’m exploring, how I feel and what I think, about the most trivial and pointless things in life, and then pushing it out onto the internet, home of the trivial, land of the pointless, so that people with the misfortune of knowing me may feel obliged to sit through it and wonder why the hell they just wasted 10 minutes of their lives.

Welcome aboard.

Hans Reiser leads police to Wife’s body

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I dunno how many of you followed this case.

Hans Reiser invented and developed a filesystem (the part of an operating system that handles how files are stored on disks) called ReiserFS that was efficient and robust (so it was quick, and it didn’t lose data very easily if your machine crashed).In 2006 his wife disappeared, and eventually he was charged with her murder although they never found a body. In 2008 he was convicted by jury of first degree murder.

While sad, the case was interesting because Reiser is a notorious ‘geek’. Many other ‘geeks’ initially thought he couldn’t have done it and his social skills (being a geek) would let him down in the case. The case against him was pretty circumstantial, but that evidence was also very compelling. His mother’s car had a front seat missing and the floor was soaked as though it had been washed, and he was never able to clearly explain why, for example.

Anyway, today he led the police to where he buried his wife’s body.

What really makes this case stick out in my mind is that it highlights one of the most confusing elements of law for me. A legal case is supposed to be fought so that the accused (who is presumed to be innocent of any actual crime) can fairly explain the truth, and the victim can fairly explain the truth (or someone on their behalf) and then a jury can decide how much is true and if any actual crime was committed and what punishment should be provided.

But our legal system appears to be guilty people (let’s be honest, how many of us think when someone is up in court that they’re actually innocent really, unless we know them) lying about their actions in order to hide the truth while the prosecution tries to build up enough insinuation, evidence and accusations that the jury feels compelled to find them guilty.

I dunno, just feels a bit wrong. Clearly this is a naive view of law, but sometimes I can’t get my head around it.

Blogging choices

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I’m happy running my own web software (like hosting my own WordPress stuff such as onelinemoviereviews or full blown CMS stuff like BookThing or forums like the TNT Website, and Wiki’s such as the TNT Wiki), I’m happy writing my own little bits of web software (like the original blogging stuff I wrote over at my earlier site which I won’t link to out of desperate embarrassment over the content), and I’m happy using hosted solutions from other people (like Blogger, or LiveJournal). I constantly vacillate between the options mentally, although I haven’t allowed that to reach the real world since I moved over to Blogger a while back.

With fully hosted services you let someone else worry about the storage, up-time, security and in the case of most of them these days, they’re free. You pay in flexibility. I have whatever features Blogger has, or if I moved to LJ, then whatever features LJ has. When you host your own stuff, you get to worry about the cost and security, but you can throw as many features in as you can find plugins for your various bits of software. When you write your own software, then you really get to worry about security, and if you’re like me you implement 1/10th of what you dreamt of and get bored really quickly.

So I guess I won’t make the mistake of writing my own stuff again, and I’m here to stay with either a hosted service or a self-hosted solution. I like the idea of moving to WordPress self-hosted, but I think I like it because I’m geeky and interested in that sort of thing, and I wonder if it’ll truly enhance, improve or change my blogging experience at all? Maybe I’ll get bored really quickly and want someone else to patch and update the software. Maybe eventually I’ll get tired of paying however much a month I currently pay to host 4 or 5 websites of my own and rue the day I stopped using Blogger. Is Blogger worth sticking with? Should I move back to LiveJournal or consider WordPresses free hosted service? And then of course I realise that I go through blogging spates, like this one, once a year or so and soon it won’t matter because I won’t be writing anything on the blog anyway.

It’s a truly trivial thing to think about, maybe my soft western life is so easy that the only thing I have to be concerned about is how best to feed my vanity through blogging solutions. Maybe it’s an extension of my work and I just like working out the best way to solve computing problems. Maybe I should get out more.

Maybe I’m just pining over the ‘current mood’ option in LiveJournal posts …