Monday, October 15, 2012
New and Improved
For some people, it’s ‘Danger: high voltage’; for others, ‘This won’t hurt’, or ‘For the children’. For me, the most threatening three-word combination in the English language is ‘New and Improved’. Usually, it heralds that sinking feeling when you return from your local Giant SupermarketTM to find your favourite korma sauce, scotch eggs or even shower gel suddenly cheap and tasteless, with whatever it was you liked about them jettisoned to cut costs.
After five decent-ish years with Waitrose Broadband, Richard and I returned from Brighton to the new and improved John Lewis Broadband. Can you guess what happened next?
I remember the shopping around we did after several terrible ISPs to find Waitrose Broadband, and it had mostly worked for us since, the odd problem and the odd oh-dear-we’ve-gone-over-our-download-limit-and-it-costs-how-much? aside. But it couldn’t last. They’re winding up the service into a new one. Improved, of course. And who are the new providers for our forced upgrade to an alleged cheaper, faster, unlimited service?
John Lewis Broadband, the epitome of respectable reliability, actually supplied if you look carefully at the small print by Plusnet, which claims to be good, honest broadband from Yorkshire. What could possibly go wrong?
Everyfuckingthing.
Us having made the shift in early September and them having taken a few weeks to action it, despite promises (warning signs there), we got home from Conference to eight days of zero internet and increasingly weary phone calls to find out what the hell was wrong. And they don’t even play Heaven 17 on hold.
As it happened, Richard had become very ill while we were away at Conference in Brighton, and once he’d recovered just enough to drive us home, I came down with it and was, as my rather too frequent saying goes, much more ill than usual. So things were quite fraught to begin with (and not being able to get online to NHS Direct. Obviously).
Imagine, then, the timbre of our phone conversations when we rang them three times on our first day back, for a total of two and a half hours, including the 45 minutes on hold after which they just hung up and made us go back to the start.
Imagine doing that – ringing them every single day for the next week for between one and three hours – each time having to slowly explain the problem all over again to a new munchkin, and do exactly the same tests because obviously it must be us, and not them… Until they admitted that they’d detected 2361 rejected (by their end) attempts by our correctly programmed (by us) router to connect, not all of them manual but by God it felt like it, and that it was in fact their fault after all.
They just couldn’t identify that fault correctly. Worse, they kept making promises. Here are just a few of them that we made a note of:
Imagine my genuine gobsmackery when, at long last, on merely the ninth day, this turned out to be the truth.
We’ve now had a connection back for a week, and I’ve caught up with most of the things I wanted to catch up with; it’s remarkable how something as simple as being internetless makes me feel crazed, depressed and as if I’d been exiled to Flatland. And I’m still physically very washed out, but mostly only as ill as normal.
Now I just need to gather my strength for the bills, and to ask, ‘Shouldn’t you be paying me?’
On the bright side, during our week of never-ending phone lies, at least we weren’t at the Labour Party Conference in which they attempted to rebrand themselves as Nineteenth Century Tories. Well, I can see a direct line in my own party and philosophy from the ones who were opposed to the Tories in the Nineteenth Century and are still, despite everything, far less conservative than Labour, so I can’t say I was impressed. Still less that it wasn’t even genuine Disraeli, who despite being an utter shit at least paid lip service to “One Nation” meaning that everyone had to get on: only the hollow marketing exercise that is today’s Labour Party could rebrand as One Nation founded on class war and hating the rich and not spot the contradiction in that.
But what do you expect, with Ed Balls boasting on the Today Programme that thirteen years of disastrous Labour Government left literally no economic problems at all? Or with Ed Miliband calling the Lib Dems “accomplices”, an accusation so ‘brave’ (as Sir Humphrey would say) that it would be a delight to see Mr Miliband’s face when charged as an accomplice to the Labour Government’s illegal war, illegal war crimes, illegal rendition, illegal collusion with Murdoch, and mostly legal but amazingly stupid total financial collapse. Accomplices? Bring it on, Inspector Knacker.
None of which meant there will ever be any chance of me switching to New and Improved Labour.
This morning, to come briefly up to date, I see that the Tories are out to demonstrate that they have not improved, and that they’re still at their old tricks. With the Conservatives having teamed up with Labour to protect the interests of the Tory Nineteenth Century and stop democracy coming to the Lords, the Lib Dems told them they could go fuck themselves over their preferred changes to Parliamentary Boundaries. This morning, it’s reported that the Tories have a brilliant idea to get the Lib Dems to change our minds: no, not actual democracy. That would be madness.
That Tory plan in full: ‘We’ll slip you a few million quid, and you change your vote. Deal?’
That’s not new (and certainly not improved). It’s exactly the way the crooked Tory Government in the Nineties – and the crooked Labour Government in the Noughties – were open for business, but unlike the other two, Lib Dems have never been for sale. If we move an inch on this, I’ll eat my blog.
After five decent-ish years with Waitrose Broadband, Richard and I returned from Brighton to the new and improved John Lewis Broadband. Can you guess what happened next?
John Lewis Broadband Plus Plusnet Equals No Internet
I remember the shopping around we did after several terrible ISPs to find Waitrose Broadband, and it had mostly worked for us since, the odd problem and the odd oh-dear-we’ve-gone-over-our-download-limit-and-it-costs-how-much? aside. But it couldn’t last. They’re winding up the service into a new one. Improved, of course. And who are the new providers for our forced upgrade to an alleged cheaper, faster, unlimited service?
John Lewis Broadband, the epitome of respectable reliability, actually supplied if you look carefully at the small print by Plusnet, which claims to be good, honest broadband from Yorkshire. What could possibly go wrong?
Everyfuckingthing.
Us having made the shift in early September and them having taken a few weeks to action it, despite promises (warning signs there), we got home from Conference to eight days of zero internet and increasingly weary phone calls to find out what the hell was wrong. And they don’t even play Heaven 17 on hold.
As it happened, Richard had become very ill while we were away at Conference in Brighton, and once he’d recovered just enough to drive us home, I came down with it and was, as my rather too frequent saying goes, much more ill than usual. So things were quite fraught to begin with (and not being able to get online to NHS Direct. Obviously).
Imagine, then, the timbre of our phone conversations when we rang them three times on our first day back, for a total of two and a half hours, including the 45 minutes on hold after which they just hung up and made us go back to the start.
Imagine doing that – ringing them every single day for the next week for between one and three hours – each time having to slowly explain the problem all over again to a new munchkin, and do exactly the same tests because obviously it must be us, and not them… Until they admitted that they’d detected 2361 rejected (by their end) attempts by our correctly programmed (by us) router to connect, not all of them manual but by God it felt like it, and that it was in fact their fault after all.
They just couldn’t identify that fault correctly. Worse, they kept making promises. Here are just a few of them that we made a note of:
- Switch your router off for 65 minutes and it will reset, after which you will be able to connect. No, that was a lie.
- We have reset your details at our end and it will be ready in the morning. No, that was a lie.
- Our faults team has identified the fault and I have actioned a modify order that will apply the fix and have you fully online in exactly 24 hours. No, that was a lie.
- That modify order was incorrect, but I have actioned a new modify order that will have you online in the morning. No, that was a lie.
- It is your fault after all – our faults team has identified that you can’t receive Broadband on your number. In that case, can we have a full refund for all the money we spent on what was therefore imaginary Broadband from you for the past five years? No, because that was a lie.
- We will ring you within 24 hours because I have personally made sure it will be corrected with the faults team and my line manager. No, that was a lie.
- I apologise that you’ve had to ring because we failed to call you back, and I won’t lie to you, I can’t fix it myself because I can see that they’ve been making the change you need on our server and for some reason our server won’t accept it, but I will call our faults team if you will wait on hold for just two minutes. Seventeen minutes later: no, that was yet another lie, probably not best for our blood pressures after using the words “I won’t lie to you”. At least on that particular day we were only on the phone for 47 minutes, because we were weary and fatalistic rather than icily polite in a furious way.
- And, of course, when I staggered out to our local library (which, being a Labour-and-Labour-Splitters Council, randomly blocks most of the sites I read) in a vain attempt to plough through hundreds of emails that were backing up, finding daily “Your broadband service is ready” emails from John Lewis Broadband. No, that was, very demonstrably and supremely aggravatingly, a lie.
Imagine my genuine gobsmackery when, at long last, on merely the ninth day, this turned out to be the truth.
We’ve now had a connection back for a week, and I’ve caught up with most of the things I wanted to catch up with; it’s remarkable how something as simple as being internetless makes me feel crazed, depressed and as if I’d been exiled to Flatland. And I’m still physically very washed out, but mostly only as ill as normal.
Now I just need to gather my strength for the bills, and to ask, ‘Shouldn’t you be paying me?’
New and Improved Labour
On the bright side, during our week of never-ending phone lies, at least we weren’t at the Labour Party Conference in which they attempted to rebrand themselves as Nineteenth Century Tories. Well, I can see a direct line in my own party and philosophy from the ones who were opposed to the Tories in the Nineteenth Century and are still, despite everything, far less conservative than Labour, so I can’t say I was impressed. Still less that it wasn’t even genuine Disraeli, who despite being an utter shit at least paid lip service to “One Nation” meaning that everyone had to get on: only the hollow marketing exercise that is today’s Labour Party could rebrand as One Nation founded on class war and hating the rich and not spot the contradiction in that.
But what do you expect, with Ed Balls boasting on the Today Programme that thirteen years of disastrous Labour Government left literally no economic problems at all? Or with Ed Miliband calling the Lib Dems “accomplices”, an accusation so ‘brave’ (as Sir Humphrey would say) that it would be a delight to see Mr Miliband’s face when charged as an accomplice to the Labour Government’s illegal war, illegal war crimes, illegal rendition, illegal collusion with Murdoch, and mostly legal but amazingly stupid total financial collapse. Accomplices? Bring it on, Inspector Knacker.
None of which meant there will ever be any chance of me switching to New and Improved Labour.
This morning, to come briefly up to date, I see that the Tories are out to demonstrate that they have not improved, and that they’re still at their old tricks. With the Conservatives having teamed up with Labour to protect the interests of the Tory Nineteenth Century and stop democracy coming to the Lords, the Lib Dems told them they could go fuck themselves over their preferred changes to Parliamentary Boundaries. This morning, it’s reported that the Tories have a brilliant idea to get the Lib Dems to change our minds: no, not actual democracy. That would be madness.
That Tory plan in full: ‘We’ll slip you a few million quid, and you change your vote. Deal?’
That’s not new (and certainly not improved). It’s exactly the way the crooked Tory Government in the Nineties – and the crooked Labour Government in the Noughties – were open for business, but unlike the other two, Lib Dems have never been for sale. If we move an inch on this, I’ll eat my blog.
Labels: Conservatives, Corruption, Customer Service, Labour, Lords, Personal, Technology
Sunday, July 08, 2012
BBC Lèse-Majesté: Hollow Crown, Hollow Schedule and Hollow Laughter
Last weekend, the BBC’s new Shakespeare series The Hollow Crown was given a fanfare on the cover of the Radio Times. This weekend, it was given a raspberry as a Sixteenth Century fictionalisation of Fifteenth Century history was sabotaged by Twenty-first Century programming, weather and sport. When these days all you should need to record a TV show is to select its Electronic Programme Guide entry and let your digital device activate on broadcast, the BBC managed to mess up both broadcast and EPG, leaving recordings across the nation as less Henry IV, Part 1 than Henry IV, Part 0.5.
Regular readers may be aware that I’m not exactly a fan of sport. However, I do understand that live sport will occasionally run over time and delay other programmes. In the olden days, when people were out they had to set their own video recorders and hope that the TV schedules advertised might bear some relationship to reality. In theory, these days the channel’s programmers can update the EPG for a delayed programme and everyone’s digital recorders will simply act on the new information.
This requires, as do all computers for the information you get out of them, that the people putting in the information aren’t completely incompetent.
There are many different varieties of digital recorder, so I won’t claim to speak for them all, but ours is fairly standard: it’s a dumb box that assumes its users are dumber, so there’s no manual override. In theory, this is to prevent someone setting a recording going, forgetting about it, and using up all the memory in one great lump. In practice, when TV stations are rarely known for sticking to the precise minute of their schedules, this would usually mean missing the end or the beginning of programmes, as almost all start a minute or two early or finish a minute or two late. There’s no option to press a button that says, ‘Keep recording until I stop, you bastard!’
To correct this obvious problem, the manufacturers do allow you to change the default setting on the machine so as to top and tail your timer recordings with a few extra minutes (ours is set to start three minutes ahead and finish five after; sadly, you can’t set it by channel so that the BBC gets the full five at the end for running over time, while channels carrying advertising finish on time so most recordings don’t end in an extended ten minutes of ads and unwanted programming). But this only applies to shows you’ve checked by EPG in advance; if you simply press “Record” for something going out live, it will stop recording the very second that the EPG (that again) says it’s scheduled to finish, and no amount of swearing at it will extend that.
I tuned in a few minutes before 9 last night to catch BBC2’s broadcast of Henry IV, Part 1. Or not, as they were still showing Wimbledon. Richard was away; I was meant to be, but not well enough; fortunately, this meant I could at least stop our EPG recording from saving us the tennis. So it clicked on at 8.57, and I switched it off, and waited. Within a few minutes, the EPG had changed to indicate a start time for the play of 9.15. So I selected the new EPG, and our machine started again at 9.12. It was still tennis. I stopped it again. Within another few minutes, the EPG had changed again to start Henry at 9.30. By this time, people who claim that live sport needs special treatment were losing the argument: the simultaneous broadcast on BBC2 and BBCHD was showing a mixture of interminable post-game sports babble, bits of game in daylight (and so clearly not live, unless the Isle of Dogs has suddenly switched to a different time zone from Wimbledon) and even minutes-long shots of the stadium in darkness from high above, cars driving away from it. Yet 9.27 and then 9.30 passed, still with no move to the scheduled programme.
By 9.35, the EPG had updated yet again to suggest a start time of 10pm. So I reset my digital recorder yet again… But noticed something was wrong. Henry IV, Part 1 was scheduled to show from 9pm to 10.55; on the first new EPG, all the programme times for the rest of the night were put back by 15 minutes; on the second, by half an hour; but this time, although the start time had been altered to encompass the hour’s delay, the BBC munchkins setting the EPG hadn’t altered the end time, with the next programme claimed to be starting at the original 10.55. Even though this couldn’t possibly be true, unless they were going to play the two-hour Shakespeare at double speed.
So I spent the next quarter-hour on hold with the automatic voices at the BBC, which eventually auto-hung up on me ironically mid-way through telling me for the 463rd that my call was important to them. Because I could see what was coming, even if the people who were paid to couldn’t.
You see, if you set a recording by EPG, then it starts when the EPG tells it to, and finishes when that EPG tells it to. If the EPG changes later, it’s too late – the machine’s had its instructions. So when the EPG changed a few minutes after 9, for anyone who’d set in advance and their machines had started recording at the proper time, it was too late. And the same for when it changed at about 9.20, and then 9.35. Had the people paid to programme the EPGs changed them in advance of the due time, even by a few minutes when it was bleeding obvious that they needed changing, then recorders would have sat patiently waiting for the live EPGs to tell them to start.
And if they’d bothered to put the correct end time for the eventual 10pm showing before about quarter past ten, by which time it was of no earthly use, my recording wouldn’t had stopped on the dot of 11pm, as I’d predicted it would an hour and a half earlier but the incompetents at the BBC hadn’t.
So, despite trying not to watch the play because I was hoping to wait and watch it with Richard, I had to watch half-way through for the moment when it stopped part-way into Henry telling off Hal. Then look again at 11.55 because, of course, it finished 3 minutes late on top of all the other lateness, which meant that the manual recording I’d had to start of the second half had neatly stopped, again, at precisely the moment the EPG said it was due to stop, half-way through Falstaff’s soliloquy. Splitting the play into three separate recordings, all because the EPG programmers didn’t do their jobs properly.
Richard is now home, and we’re now watching the hastily-arranged repeat on BBC4. It was announced immediately after the chopped-about first broadcast. The EPG wasn’t updated until today, of course, so you couldn’t set up for it right then.
Some might say that you can watch these things on the iPlayer. Well, yes, but if I’m going to spend two hours watching something, I’d rather do it on my big screen with no blurring and no buffering, and that’s what EPG recordings are meant to be for. And if you wanted to watch The Hollow Crown in HD, you’re stuffed. If you’re very, very lucky, the BBC might eventually release it on Blu-Ray – but, irritatingly, despite now making so many programmes in high definition, and ‘protecting’ them from copying with signals that mean you can’t back most of them up, those programmes they do release are usually just on DVD and not Blu-Ray. So, congratulations again, BBC, for making programmes in HD and then going to such lengths to prevent people watching them or keeping them that way.
And if you think that’s a rant, you should have heard me last night. Patrick Troughton used to say he didn’t do theatre because it was just “Shouting in the evenings” – I think our neighbours might agree.
After all that, the infamous ‘tennis as insult’ scene in The Hollow Crown’s finale Henry V in a fortnight is going to see almost bitterly satirical.
Regular readers may be aware that I’m not exactly a fan of sport. However, I do understand that live sport will occasionally run over time and delay other programmes. In the olden days, when people were out they had to set their own video recorders and hope that the TV schedules advertised might bear some relationship to reality. In theory, these days the channel’s programmers can update the EPG for a delayed programme and everyone’s digital recorders will simply act on the new information.
This requires, as do all computers for the information you get out of them, that the people putting in the information aren’t completely incompetent.
A Dumb Box and Dumber at the BBC
There are many different varieties of digital recorder, so I won’t claim to speak for them all, but ours is fairly standard: it’s a dumb box that assumes its users are dumber, so there’s no manual override. In theory, this is to prevent someone setting a recording going, forgetting about it, and using up all the memory in one great lump. In practice, when TV stations are rarely known for sticking to the precise minute of their schedules, this would usually mean missing the end or the beginning of programmes, as almost all start a minute or two early or finish a minute or two late. There’s no option to press a button that says, ‘Keep recording until I stop, you bastard!’
To correct this obvious problem, the manufacturers do allow you to change the default setting on the machine so as to top and tail your timer recordings with a few extra minutes (ours is set to start three minutes ahead and finish five after; sadly, you can’t set it by channel so that the BBC gets the full five at the end for running over time, while channels carrying advertising finish on time so most recordings don’t end in an extended ten minutes of ads and unwanted programming). But this only applies to shows you’ve checked by EPG in advance; if you simply press “Record” for something going out live, it will stop recording the very second that the EPG (that again) says it’s scheduled to finish, and no amount of swearing at it will extend that.
Last Night’s Stopping and Starting
I tuned in a few minutes before 9 last night to catch BBC2’s broadcast of Henry IV, Part 1. Or not, as they were still showing Wimbledon. Richard was away; I was meant to be, but not well enough; fortunately, this meant I could at least stop our EPG recording from saving us the tennis. So it clicked on at 8.57, and I switched it off, and waited. Within a few minutes, the EPG had changed to indicate a start time for the play of 9.15. So I selected the new EPG, and our machine started again at 9.12. It was still tennis. I stopped it again. Within another few minutes, the EPG had changed again to start Henry at 9.30. By this time, people who claim that live sport needs special treatment were losing the argument: the simultaneous broadcast on BBC2 and BBCHD was showing a mixture of interminable post-game sports babble, bits of game in daylight (and so clearly not live, unless the Isle of Dogs has suddenly switched to a different time zone from Wimbledon) and even minutes-long shots of the stadium in darkness from high above, cars driving away from it. Yet 9.27 and then 9.30 passed, still with no move to the scheduled programme.
By 9.35, the EPG had updated yet again to suggest a start time of 10pm. So I reset my digital recorder yet again… But noticed something was wrong. Henry IV, Part 1 was scheduled to show from 9pm to 10.55; on the first new EPG, all the programme times for the rest of the night were put back by 15 minutes; on the second, by half an hour; but this time, although the start time had been altered to encompass the hour’s delay, the BBC munchkins setting the EPG hadn’t altered the end time, with the next programme claimed to be starting at the original 10.55. Even though this couldn’t possibly be true, unless they were going to play the two-hour Shakespeare at double speed.
So I spent the next quarter-hour on hold with the automatic voices at the BBC, which eventually auto-hung up on me ironically mid-way through telling me for the 463rd that my call was important to them. Because I could see what was coming, even if the people who were paid to couldn’t.
You see, if you set a recording by EPG, then it starts when the EPG tells it to, and finishes when that EPG tells it to. If the EPG changes later, it’s too late – the machine’s had its instructions. So when the EPG changed a few minutes after 9, for anyone who’d set in advance and their machines had started recording at the proper time, it was too late. And the same for when it changed at about 9.20, and then 9.35. Had the people paid to programme the EPGs changed them in advance of the due time, even by a few minutes when it was bleeding obvious that they needed changing, then recorders would have sat patiently waiting for the live EPGs to tell them to start.
And if they’d bothered to put the correct end time for the eventual 10pm showing before about quarter past ten, by which time it was of no earthly use, my recording wouldn’t had stopped on the dot of 11pm, as I’d predicted it would an hour and a half earlier but the incompetents at the BBC hadn’t.
So, despite trying not to watch the play because I was hoping to wait and watch it with Richard, I had to watch half-way through for the moment when it stopped part-way into Henry telling off Hal. Then look again at 11.55 because, of course, it finished 3 minutes late on top of all the other lateness, which meant that the manual recording I’d had to start of the second half had neatly stopped, again, at precisely the moment the EPG said it was due to stop, half-way through Falstaff’s soliloquy. Splitting the play into three separate recordings, all because the EPG programmers didn’t do their jobs properly.
Richard is now home, and we’re now watching the hastily-arranged repeat on BBC4. It was announced immediately after the chopped-about first broadcast. The EPG wasn’t updated until today, of course, so you couldn’t set up for it right then.
Some might say that you can watch these things on the iPlayer. Well, yes, but if I’m going to spend two hours watching something, I’d rather do it on my big screen with no blurring and no buffering, and that’s what EPG recordings are meant to be for. And if you wanted to watch The Hollow Crown in HD, you’re stuffed. If you’re very, very lucky, the BBC might eventually release it on Blu-Ray – but, irritatingly, despite now making so many programmes in high definition, and ‘protecting’ them from copying with signals that mean you can’t back most of them up, those programmes they do release are usually just on DVD and not Blu-Ray. So, congratulations again, BBC, for making programmes in HD and then going to such lengths to prevent people watching them or keeping them that way.
And if you think that’s a rant, you should have heard me last night. Patrick Troughton used to say he didn’t do theatre because it was just “Shouting in the evenings” – I think our neighbours might agree.
After all that, the infamous ‘tennis as insult’ scene in The Hollow Crown’s finale Henry V in a fortnight is going to see almost bitterly satirical.
Labels: BBC, Patrick Troughton, Shakespeare, Technology, Theatre
Friday, June 29, 2012
Government Porn Filter Collapses In Security Nightmare
The Government yesterday erected a consultation page about online porn. It’s down now. A spokesperson said, ‘Look… This is really embarrassing… It’s never happened before*. Try again later?’ I’d rather they didn’t, but if they do get it up again, steel yourself, look at the horrid thing, and insert your… contribution.
This bloody stupid idea, cooked up like so many others ‘For the sake of the children’ by bullying social conservatives – it’s like the Labour Party were still in Government – is to automatically block porn through everyone’s ISPs and treat every adult as if they were a child, including the two-thirds of households that don’t have children in them.
What do they think the Internet is for, anyway?
I can’t help thinking that this is a sop from Mr Cameron to his raving right-wing backbenchers who weren’t happy with the last consultation, on same-sex marriage. ‘No, we’re still frothing conservatives who like sticking our grubby fingers into people’s bedrooms, honestly!’ is the message. ‘Let’s turn the PC clocks back to when everyone just had floppies!’ Never mind personal responsibility for parents; never mind that we’re having to put up with a lot of horrible things the Tories are doing because there’s much, much less than no money and we have to live with some cuts; there’s just no excuse for this. It’s illiberal, it’s bureaucratic, and it costs a lot more money. And, today, when the Government wants to get its jollies by costing a lot more money, it had better have a bloody good excuse.
Instead, this proposal is a proven car-crash less than a day into the consultation period – long before any law might come into force. Yes, shockingly, they launched the consultation just yesterday. And now they’ve had to suspend it because the online questionnaire has blown open the Data Protection Act by publishing people’s names, contact details and replies.
Yes, astonishingly, this cock-up has already proved why having a Government register of porn users is a terrible idea (even if you’re stupid enough not to read that sentence and work it out from first principles). There are already so many, many reasons why getting ISPs to hold everyone’s “Porn filter” records on their databases is wrong, whether it’s forcing every Internet user – or, rather, bill-payer – in the land to opt in in order to view porn. Such filters are a grotesque state-run invasion of privacy, when whether you look at consenting adults’ porn or not is nobody else’s business. Such filters are well-known for blocking medical sites, or helplines – so, far from child protection, they do genuine and provable harm. And just imagine going into your local mobile phone emporium to sign a new contract:
At this very moment forty-three years ago, the Stonewall riots – that’s proper Stonewall, not the Labour-licking corporate lobbyists – were into their second day. They were the start of modern lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender radicalism, and I’ve been listening to the Tom Robinson Band’s excellent Long Hot Summer in celebration. I don’t think there’ll be riots if the Government starts fiddling with people’s porn, though I’d be tempted, but it would certainly harm LGBT people, from LGBT kids unable to look up helpful sites to leaked information being of help to queerbashers. These proposals are simply wrong.
I have previously suggested as our core message: “Liberal Democrats – The Party That Thinks Sex Is All Right”. We should very much leave micro-management of people’s lives to the Tories (who want to boss you about because you’re bad) and Labour (who want to boss you about because it’s good for you). And Lib Dem Ministers, you should tell the Tories how daft they’re being.
I have a simple, cost-saving alternative.
If the government wants a list of masturbators in the UK, one already exists: the census. It’s guaranteed to be a far more accurate list than any wildly expensive new self-‘incriminating’ infrastructure would be.
Whereas if they want a list of wankers, just look at the register of MPs supporting this new censorship idea.
*Except for every single time any UK Government ever puts confidential information into a new IT system. You’d think they’d have learned by now.
This bloody stupid idea, cooked up like so many others ‘For the sake of the children’ by bullying social conservatives – it’s like the Labour Party were still in Government – is to automatically block porn through everyone’s ISPs and treat every adult as if they were a child, including the two-thirds of households that don’t have children in them.
What do they think the Internet is for, anyway?
I can’t help thinking that this is a sop from Mr Cameron to his raving right-wing backbenchers who weren’t happy with the last consultation, on same-sex marriage. ‘No, we’re still frothing conservatives who like sticking our grubby fingers into people’s bedrooms, honestly!’ is the message. ‘Let’s turn the PC clocks back to when everyone just had floppies!’ Never mind personal responsibility for parents; never mind that we’re having to put up with a lot of horrible things the Tories are doing because there’s much, much less than no money and we have to live with some cuts; there’s just no excuse for this. It’s illiberal, it’s bureaucratic, and it costs a lot more money. And, today, when the Government wants to get its jollies by costing a lot more money, it had better have a bloody good excuse.
Instead, this proposal is a proven car-crash less than a day into the consultation period – long before any law might come into force. Yes, shockingly, they launched the consultation just yesterday. And now they’ve had to suspend it because the online questionnaire has blown open the Data Protection Act by publishing people’s names, contact details and replies.
Why A Porn Filter Would Harm People (Kids Included)
Yes, astonishingly, this cock-up has already proved why having a Government register of porn users is a terrible idea (even if you’re stupid enough not to read that sentence and work it out from first principles). There are already so many, many reasons why getting ISPs to hold everyone’s “Porn filter” records on their databases is wrong, whether it’s forcing every Internet user – or, rather, bill-payer – in the land to opt in in order to view porn. Such filters are a grotesque state-run invasion of privacy, when whether you look at consenting adults’ porn or not is nobody else’s business. Such filters are well-known for blocking medical sites, or helplines – so, far from child protection, they do genuine and provable harm. And just imagine going into your local mobile phone emporium to sign a new contract:
‘Jan-ice! Pass me the porn register! This one looks like he’s not getting any…’But, as today’s security disaster has proven beyond doubt before the filter databases themselves are created, they are insecure. I can’t even say ‘An accident waiting to happen’ because, well, it’s just happened. They present a danger to people. A danger of being embarrassed for no good reason. A danger of being excluded from, say, your religious membership if they preach against pornography and – heavens! – your name is found to be on the list. A danger of being bombarded with unwanted ‘offers’ from the sex industry. Even the real physical danger of being targeted by extremist religious or other groups. These lists are by nature insecure and dangerous, whether the danger is simply of being forced into social conformity when in your own home for fear that your name will ‘get out’, or that people who want to market to you or do you harm will pay good money to get hold of such records.
At this very moment forty-three years ago, the Stonewall riots – that’s proper Stonewall, not the Labour-licking corporate lobbyists – were into their second day. They were the start of modern lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender radicalism, and I’ve been listening to the Tom Robinson Band’s excellent Long Hot Summer in celebration. I don’t think there’ll be riots if the Government starts fiddling with people’s porn, though I’d be tempted, but it would certainly harm LGBT people, from LGBT kids unable to look up helpful sites to leaked information being of help to queerbashers. These proposals are simply wrong.
Government – Get Your Hands Off Our… Hands!
I have previously suggested as our core message: “Liberal Democrats – The Party That Thinks Sex Is All Right”. We should very much leave micro-management of people’s lives to the Tories (who want to boss you about because you’re bad) and Labour (who want to boss you about because it’s good for you). And Lib Dem Ministers, you should tell the Tories how daft they’re being.
I have a simple, cost-saving alternative.
If the government wants a list of masturbators in the UK, one already exists: the census. It’s guaranteed to be a far more accurate list than any wildly expensive new self-‘incriminating’ infrastructure would be.
Whereas if they want a list of wankers, just look at the register of MPs supporting this new censorship idea.
*Except for every single time any UK Government ever puts confidential information into a new IT system. You’d think they’d have learned by now.
Labels: Coalition, Conservatives, Gay, Meddling In Things That Are Nobody's Business But Your Own, Sex, Stupid Ideas, Technology, What the Lib Dems Stand For
Saturday, September 10, 2011
Blogger’s Changing Things Again…
I’ve used Blogger for more than five years now; in part because it does the job for me, and because it doesn’t require technical knowledge to register on my cantbearsedometer. And, being a creature of habit, I’m happy with that. But there’s a little bit of me that can still go ‘ooh, shiny,’ when offered something new, and Blogger is now tempting me with an exciting new interface that gives me all sorts of extra features (without having to work for them). But there’s a catch: Richard was lured into this web of novelty, and it wiped out his template. So if you’re wondering why Millennium’s Diary suddenly looks completely different after five years, it wasn’t from choice (though he’s had a chance to play about a bit with a new template since).
So, does anyone who’s terribly tech-savvy – and who uses Blogger, if that’s not a contradiction – have any brilliant suggestions (though, yes, I have always kept my template saved somewhere in case my latest fiddle mucks it up)?
No to change! But give me new things for free! And don’t lose any of the old ones! I want a choice, and I want both! Do it all for me and I’ll complain whatever happens!
Dear god, I’m turning into a British voter.
“You’ve had this place redecorated. I don’t like it.”The trouble is, I’ve had a look at some of the new features and thought, yes, they would be quite nice to have. But I’m very happy with the template I spent some time tinkering with to my satisfaction some years ago, a slightly customised version of one of their old standard versions. And I really don’t want to have to lose it all, try to reconstruct it, or find out the hard way whether anything like it’s available the other end.
So, does anyone who’s terribly tech-savvy – and who uses Blogger, if that’s not a contradiction – have any brilliant suggestions (though, yes, I have always kept my template saved somewhere in case my latest fiddle mucks it up)?
No to change! But give me new things for free! And don’t lose any of the old ones! I want a choice, and I want both! Do it all for me and I’ll complain whatever happens!
Dear god, I’m turning into a British voter.
Labels: Blogs, Technology, Top Tips
Monday, December 06, 2010
My Computer and I Are Unwell
This hasn't been my best year for blogging, has it? Mostly down to my own ill-health, though my computer's recently come out in sympathy. As most of my interaction with the outside world or even thinking time goes through it, this is a bit of a blow. In short, I was rebooting and it suddenly got no further than the company logo (a Dell PC running Windows XP) before the screen went blank. My very limited skills have got as far as unproductively re-plugging things and then failing to start safe mode, which simply sticks on one screen half-way through.
So if I've been grouchy, unsociable, introspective and silent, which I certainly have been, that's made it significantly worse. If you have any brilliant tips, please let me know – in addition to not being able to use the thing, I'm ashamed to admit that my last proper back-up was three and a half months ago, so while not everything is irreplaceable I feel like a chunk of my brain's gone missing, including all my most recent trains of thought.
Tiresomely, having become very much more ill than usual in the Spring, I still am. I seemed to be improving in parts of August and September, which was a relief – balanced by the crushing let-down of getting much worse again (and while he's usually spared my collapsing during the day, all that noisy late-night throwing up is difficult to hide from poor stressed Richard, who could do with a break). So I'm not getting out much, and that's been nothing to do with the weather. Today is my Mum's birthday, and while I'd hoped to be able to go up north to see the family, no chance. Hopefully I'll at least be able to totter out on the particular day in mid-January when my hospital appointment's due… The one my doctor said would come up within 30 days when he applied for it back in August. Ho hum. Maybe I'm just still ill so as not to waste it? Nah, probably not.
I'd like to write something today about the government's rubbish new drugs policy and about Doctor Who and Christmas, but as I'm feeling pretty ghastly and as Richard's laptop (which he very kindly lets me nab from time to time) knackers my hands much more than my usual keyboard does, it's unlikely. So try to imagine that you've read them, and then marvel at how different your memories of my different articles are when you talk amongst yourselves!
So if I've been grouchy, unsociable, introspective and silent, which I certainly have been, that's made it significantly worse. If you have any brilliant tips, please let me know – in addition to not being able to use the thing, I'm ashamed to admit that my last proper back-up was three and a half months ago, so while not everything is irreplaceable I feel like a chunk of my brain's gone missing, including all my most recent trains of thought.
Tiresomely, having become very much more ill than usual in the Spring, I still am. I seemed to be improving in parts of August and September, which was a relief – balanced by the crushing let-down of getting much worse again (and while he's usually spared my collapsing during the day, all that noisy late-night throwing up is difficult to hide from poor stressed Richard, who could do with a break). So I'm not getting out much, and that's been nothing to do with the weather. Today is my Mum's birthday, and while I'd hoped to be able to go up north to see the family, no chance. Hopefully I'll at least be able to totter out on the particular day in mid-January when my hospital appointment's due… The one my doctor said would come up within 30 days when he applied for it back in August. Ho hum. Maybe I'm just still ill so as not to waste it? Nah, probably not.
I'd like to write something today about the government's rubbish new drugs policy and about Doctor Who and Christmas, but as I'm feeling pretty ghastly and as Richard's laptop (which he very kindly lets me nab from time to time) knackers my hands much more than my usual keyboard does, it's unlikely. So try to imagine that you've read them, and then marvel at how different your memories of my different articles are when you talk amongst yourselves!
Labels: Health, Personal, Technology
Friday, April 23, 2010
Has Microsoft McAfee Just Wrecked My Computer? Or, In Short: Help!
Update: If your computer has had horrible problems in the last few days, you're at your wit's end, and you're reading this on a different machine to distract yourself, this may well be the answer: follow the link in the comments, then get rid of McAfee Anti-Virus. I've used them for over a decade, but never again.
An update to my PC on Wednesday evening seems to have stopped it functioning properly. Anyone got any ideas? Taking a break from how ill I am, yes, now my computer seems to have come out in sympathy. So why do I think it was an update that did it? Because as well as stopping most of my programs from working, whatever did it has slightly redesigned Windows XP along the way. Anyone else spotted anything like that? Because it's a complete pain from where I'm sitting: I'm typing this on Richard's laptop, as nothing much on mine is working.
There's a bit of a cautionary tale here: my PC's five or six years old and I have no idea where any discs would be if I needed to reinstall anything; and, yes, I definitely regret not having done a proper backup for about six months. But here's where I start:
On Wednesday evening, Chrome collapsed a couple of times while I was browsing, so - as I usually do in such circumstances - I restarted my computer. It may have taken a little longer than usual, but once it booted up, that's when the problems started. I could tell at a glance that something was odd: the taskbar looked slightly different. It had suddenly boxed off the icons at the far right. And, checking, several other windows and bars had the same - a redesign that put in extra little demarcation lines, and sharper boxes. Don't like it, I thought, but Microsoft's done more irritating things.
And then it did them.
I opened Chrome - it couldn't connect to the Internet. Hey ho, I thought, switch off the router and let it cool down, and meanwhile I'll clear up my desktop a bit, having let it get very cluttered with manifesto pdfs and other thrilling accoutrements I've downloaded there for ease of access in the last couple of weeks.
I couldn't.
Suddenly, my computer no longer lets me drag and drop. Or right-click to cut and paste. Or use keyboard shortcuts to do it. Well, that's very odd, and a bit worrying, I thought. Let me run a virus scan just in case. Oh - my computer won't let me open up my antivirus, neither from icon nor program menu. That's not helpful.
I slotted in a memory stick. Maybe it just couldn't shift things about on the PC itself? Nope. Still no use.
OK, one more idea - I opened up Word. "Blong," went my computer, without the loudspeaker being on. That's not happened before, I though. I opened up a file. "This document could not be registered" popped up. Well, that's not reassuring. But I clicked "Save As" and, thankfully, that managed to pop a copy onto that memory stick.
Oh, yes, and that oddly redesigned Taskbar? Word didn't appear on it. So it's less of a "Taskbar" than a "Bar" now.
Being able to use "Save As" was a relief, I'll grant you. I've written a lot of stuff, and I'd hate to lose them all. But as far as I remember from last week's virus scan, I've got more than 600,000 files on my machine. That's going to take an awful lot of "Save As".
...Or at least it would, if any programs other than Word seemed to be working. Most of them that I've tried simply don't open up at all. I tried opening Excel this morning to add to my records; oh, crap. Excel opens; "Blong"; up pops "Cannot use object linking and embedding"; but then the program crashes before I can enter anything, still less save it anywhere else. Oh joy. I can't replace any of those records, either.
I left my computer on all night last night; my Virus Scan usually starts about 5am, automatically, every Friday. I thought, though I can't start it myself, maybe it'll do it on its own. Nope. Sigh. But back to the redesign: do I actually think it's a virus? I do not.
Aside from all my stuff being on my own machine, of course, there are problems using Richard's laptop: I get RSI and tendonitis, and while my own chair, desk and keyboard are carefully aligned to minimise this, Richard's aren't; similarly, I tend to swap my mouse frequently to my much clumsier but less painful left hand, and can't do that with Richard's; most importantly, my beloved might occasionally wish to use his own computer (imagine!).
Yesterday I spend the whole day being very ill and feeling weak as a kitten. I still feel very weak, but after getting a significant amount of sleep last night I have just enough energy to write this up and think about dragging myself out to accident and emergency. I would very much like a simple way to sort out my computer without having to take it to accident and emergency, too - because I don't know who'd be able to do it properly, or how much it would cost, and because if I totter up to the Royal London at Whitechapel for them to prod me, the sizeable porn stock in my head will not be embarrassingly accessible...
Any suggestions would be very gratefully accepted.
Update: As the comments below make clear, it was indeed an update, but turned out to be all the fault of McAfee. I am massively grateful to Phil, and wish fiery death upon all their motherboards.
An update to my PC on Wednesday evening seems to have stopped it functioning properly. Anyone got any ideas? Taking a break from how ill I am, yes, now my computer seems to have come out in sympathy. So why do I think it was an update that did it? Because as well as stopping most of my programs from working, whatever did it has slightly redesigned Windows XP along the way. Anyone else spotted anything like that? Because it's a complete pain from where I'm sitting: I'm typing this on Richard's laptop, as nothing much on mine is working.
There's a bit of a cautionary tale here: my PC's five or six years old and I have no idea where any discs would be if I needed to reinstall anything; and, yes, I definitely regret not having done a proper backup for about six months. But here's where I start:
On Wednesday evening, Chrome collapsed a couple of times while I was browsing, so - as I usually do in such circumstances - I restarted my computer. It may have taken a little longer than usual, but once it booted up, that's when the problems started. I could tell at a glance that something was odd: the taskbar looked slightly different. It had suddenly boxed off the icons at the far right. And, checking, several other windows and bars had the same - a redesign that put in extra little demarcation lines, and sharper boxes. Don't like it, I thought, but Microsoft's done more irritating things.
And then it did them.
I opened Chrome - it couldn't connect to the Internet. Hey ho, I thought, switch off the router and let it cool down, and meanwhile I'll clear up my desktop a bit, having let it get very cluttered with manifesto pdfs and other thrilling accoutrements I've downloaded there for ease of access in the last couple of weeks.
I couldn't.
Suddenly, my computer no longer lets me drag and drop. Or right-click to cut and paste. Or use keyboard shortcuts to do it. Well, that's very odd, and a bit worrying, I thought. Let me run a virus scan just in case. Oh - my computer won't let me open up my antivirus, neither from icon nor program menu. That's not helpful.
I slotted in a memory stick. Maybe it just couldn't shift things about on the PC itself? Nope. Still no use.
OK, one more idea - I opened up Word. "Blong," went my computer, without the loudspeaker being on. That's not happened before, I though. I opened up a file. "This document could not be registered" popped up. Well, that's not reassuring. But I clicked "Save As" and, thankfully, that managed to pop a copy onto that memory stick.
Oh, yes, and that oddly redesigned Taskbar? Word didn't appear on it. So it's less of a "Taskbar" than a "Bar" now.
Being able to use "Save As" was a relief, I'll grant you. I've written a lot of stuff, and I'd hate to lose them all. But as far as I remember from last week's virus scan, I've got more than 600,000 files on my machine. That's going to take an awful lot of "Save As".
...Or at least it would, if any programs other than Word seemed to be working. Most of them that I've tried simply don't open up at all. I tried opening Excel this morning to add to my records; oh, crap. Excel opens; "Blong"; up pops "Cannot use object linking and embedding"; but then the program crashes before I can enter anything, still less save it anywhere else. Oh joy. I can't replace any of those records, either.
I left my computer on all night last night; my Virus Scan usually starts about 5am, automatically, every Friday. I thought, though I can't start it myself, maybe it'll do it on its own. Nope. Sigh. But back to the redesign: do I actually think it's a virus? I do not.
Aside from all my stuff being on my own machine, of course, there are problems using Richard's laptop: I get RSI and tendonitis, and while my own chair, desk and keyboard are carefully aligned to minimise this, Richard's aren't; similarly, I tend to swap my mouse frequently to my much clumsier but less painful left hand, and can't do that with Richard's; most importantly, my beloved might occasionally wish to use his own computer (imagine!).
Yesterday I spend the whole day being very ill and feeling weak as a kitten. I still feel very weak, but after getting a significant amount of sleep last night I have just enough energy to write this up and think about dragging myself out to accident and emergency. I would very much like a simple way to sort out my computer without having to take it to accident and emergency, too - because I don't know who'd be able to do it properly, or how much it would cost, and because if I totter up to the Royal London at Whitechapel for them to prod me, the sizeable porn stock in my head will not be embarrassingly accessible...
Any suggestions would be very gratefully accepted.
Update: As the comments below make clear, it was indeed an update, but turned out to be all the fault of McAfee. I am massively grateful to Phil, and wish fiery death upon all their motherboards.
Labels: Personal, Technology
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Silly Season Stories – We Have A Winner!
We may be barely mid-way through August, but I’m going to stick my neck out and say we’ve already had the winner of this year’s “Silly Season” news stories. If you were listening to Radio 4 at about a quarter to eight yesterday morning, the Today Programme had a feature on the epidemiology of zombie movies, revealing that a zombie infestation would lead to the collapse of civilisation unless terminated with extreme prejudice. You can still hear it on iPlayer, but be careful – it’s followed by Anne Atkins on Thought For the Day, and she will eat your brains.
Apparently, research carried out at two universities in Ottawa using mathematical models of epidemiology warned that the only language zombies understand is tocut their goolies off chop their heads off at once, rather than pussyfoot around looking for a cure or containing the infectees. Although one of the UK’s leading swine flu advisers purported to dismiss the findings as “a little over-pessimistic,” expect our panicking Labour Government to issue swine flu warnings shortly involving guillotines, though with the saving grace of too long a waiting list to give many people the chop.
Of course, there is an ultra-violent alternative to this nasty ultraviolence. As any fule kno, sending that wet liberal Judge Dredd off in an armoured killer-truck to deliver a vaccine to the infected will work just as well, provided he can avoid such deadly perils as US Army vampire robots – of which more later, in case you thought they weren’t real – and the even more terrifying copyright lawyers for McDonalds, Burger King and the Jolly Green Giant (I have those issues, though if you own any of the graphic novel reprints, you’ll find four episodes curiously missing).
You’ll no doubt be aware that news programmes are infamous for sexing up their reports and distorting perfectly sensible and serious scientific works, so here’s a link to the full report, the sober and respectable When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infestation. One of the authors is Professor Robert Smith? – question mark included – which may help explain the erratic punctuation of the otherwise dull and unobjectionable title.
This morning’s Today Programme was much less interesting; I switched on shortly after half-six to hear Evan Davis exclaim “-anker,” and cheerily assumed he’d finally taken his mission as Today’s sole interviewer who tells it as it is to its logical conclusion. But instead of telling a Labour minister what he thought of them, it turned out to be an item about tragedies in Sri Lanka, meaning I started my morning with the burden of guilt over inappropriate levity.
Naturally, zombie research is far from the only “Silly Season” news story calling out for attention, but having precipitately offered the award, I should explain why I’ve ruled out two other obvious front-runners.
You might think that the clear favourite “Silly Season” story over the past few weeks is the thought that Peter Mandelson might become Prime Minster, but while in itself it’s absurd – OK, so he’s just about the only Labour minister who’s not a/ incompetent and b/ terrified right now, but he’s in the Lords until at the very least the General Election, probably for ever, he’s sufficiently hated in enough of the Labour Party that he could never win a Leadership election, and even Labour MPs aren’t stupid enough to inflict another unelected Leader on their party after how the current one’s turned out – many would object that the Government, while certainly stupid, are too dangerous to be labelled “Silly”. With the zombie infestation “New Labour” still pushing us very close to “the collapse of civilisation,” comparing so vile a condition to something as harmless as a world-threatening undead epidemic is in poor taste.
My favourite story of the “Silly Season” also has to be ruled out of contention for the “Silly” prize by virtue of being truly quite scary. In answer to the twin conundrums of soldiers’ body bags and climate change, the US Army has commissioned a battlefield robot. You know that episode of The Simpsons in which Lisa encourages a bankrupt Mr Burns to discover the effectiveness of recycling, with lucrative but horrific results? Well, imagine something probably less lucrative – except for the weapons manufacturers, natch – but far more horrific.
Yes, the US Army is looking to bring into service an “Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot,” or “EATR,” which can trundle around the battlefield killing people but, replacing soldiers, can’t be killed itself. And, to avoid wasteful fossil fuel use, it will run itself off organic matter that it finds lying about the battlefield.
Now, hands up at the back of the class anyone who can tell me a/ how likely it is to be able to distinguish civilians from combatants and b/ what the most prominent, juicily fuel-filled organic matter lying around any given battlefield will be? A clue to the latter: headlines like “Darpa’s Self-Feeding Sentry Robot Is Not A Man-Eater, Company Protests,” reminding me of nothing so much as Good King Yulfric the Wise the Third’s expostulation “The Evil Flesh-Eating Lord of Kraan is not a cannibal! I don’t know why everyone thinks he is!” from Hordes of the Things. The Guardian helpfully reported:
If you want a break from all this real-world undead horror, tonight at 11pm BBC4 is broadcasting Gods and Monsters, a rather lovely and barbedly witty film about the last days of James Whale, one of Hollywood’s foremost filmmakers and homosexualists. Ian McKellen stars as Mr Whale, with the lovely Brendan Fraser as his incredibly buff gardener. Both actors are superb, in a film that covers 1950s mores, Hollywood hypocrisy, being out as gay fifty years before your time, the trenches of the First World War and the making of probably the finest film of the Twentieth Century, Bride of Frankenstein. While perhaps the key scene is the tragic revelation of the stroke-reduced limits of Mr Whale’s talents, and what they mean for the characters, I still fondly remember the way we hooted with laughter at the death scene, and how everyone else in the cinema looked round and glared at us. That’s the peril of going to an arthouse cinema to see what, despite the po-faced patrons, is – like Bride of Frankenstein – a comedy about death.
Zombies On The Today Programme: How Could They Tell?
Apparently, research carried out at two universities in Ottawa using mathematical models of epidemiology warned that the only language zombies understand is to
Of course, there is an ultra-violent alternative to this nasty ultraviolence. As any fule kno, sending that wet liberal Judge Dredd off in an armoured killer-truck to deliver a vaccine to the infected will work just as well, provided he can avoid such deadly perils as US Army vampire robots – of which more later, in case you thought they weren’t real – and the even more terrifying copyright lawyers for McDonalds, Burger King and the Jolly Green Giant (I have those issues, though if you own any of the graphic novel reprints, you’ll find four episodes curiously missing).
You’ll no doubt be aware that news programmes are infamous for sexing up their reports and distorting perfectly sensible and serious scientific works, so here’s a link to the full report, the sober and respectable When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infestation. One of the authors is Professor Robert Smith? – question mark included – which may help explain the erratic punctuation of the otherwise dull and unobjectionable title.
This morning’s Today Programme was much less interesting; I switched on shortly after half-six to hear Evan Davis exclaim “-anker,” and cheerily assumed he’d finally taken his mission as Today’s sole interviewer who tells it as it is to its logical conclusion. But instead of telling a Labour minister what he thought of them, it turned out to be an item about tragedies in Sri Lanka, meaning I started my morning with the burden of guilt over inappropriate levity.
US Army Discovers Sustainability At Cyber’s Diner
Naturally, zombie research is far from the only “Silly Season” news story calling out for attention, but having precipitately offered the award, I should explain why I’ve ruled out two other obvious front-runners.
You might think that the clear favourite “Silly Season” story over the past few weeks is the thought that Peter Mandelson might become Prime Minster, but while in itself it’s absurd – OK, so he’s just about the only Labour minister who’s not a/ incompetent and b/ terrified right now, but he’s in the Lords until at the very least the General Election, probably for ever, he’s sufficiently hated in enough of the Labour Party that he could never win a Leadership election, and even Labour MPs aren’t stupid enough to inflict another unelected Leader on their party after how the current one’s turned out – many would object that the Government, while certainly stupid, are too dangerous to be labelled “Silly”. With the zombie infestation “New Labour” still pushing us very close to “the collapse of civilisation,” comparing so vile a condition to something as harmless as a world-threatening undead epidemic is in poor taste.
My favourite story of the “Silly Season” also has to be ruled out of contention for the “Silly” prize by virtue of being truly quite scary. In answer to the twin conundrums of soldiers’ body bags and climate change, the US Army has commissioned a battlefield robot. You know that episode of The Simpsons in which Lisa encourages a bankrupt Mr Burns to discover the effectiveness of recycling, with lucrative but horrific results? Well, imagine something probably less lucrative – except for the weapons manufacturers, natch – but far more horrific.
Yes, the US Army is looking to bring into service an “Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot,” or “EATR,” which can trundle around the battlefield killing people but, replacing soldiers, can’t be killed itself. And, to avoid wasteful fossil fuel use, it will run itself off organic matter that it finds lying about the battlefield.
Now, hands up at the back of the class anyone who can tell me a/ how likely it is to be able to distinguish civilians from combatants and b/ what the most prominent, juicily fuel-filled organic matter lying around any given battlefield will be? A clue to the latter: headlines like “Darpa’s Self-Feeding Sentry Robot Is Not A Man-Eater, Company Protests,” reminding me of nothing so much as Good King Yulfric the Wise the Third’s expostulation “The Evil Flesh-Eating Lord of Kraan is not a cannibal! I don’t know why everyone thinks he is!” from Hordes of the Things. The Guardian helpfully reported:
“‘We completely understand the public’s concern about futuristic robots feeding on the human population, but that is not our mission,’ said Harry Schoell, the chief executive of Cyberdyne Power Technologies, one of the companies behind the machine.”“That is not our mission”?! And, apparently, the EATR can be programmed not to recognise human flesh as a top source of nutrients. Well, I’m reassured.
If you want a break from all this real-world undead horror, tonight at 11pm BBC4 is broadcasting Gods and Monsters, a rather lovely and barbedly witty film about the last days of James Whale, one of Hollywood’s foremost filmmakers and homosexualists. Ian McKellen stars as Mr Whale, with the lovely Brendan Fraser as his incredibly buff gardener. Both actors are superb, in a film that covers 1950s mores, Hollywood hypocrisy, being out as gay fifty years before your time, the trenches of the First World War and the making of probably the finest film of the Twentieth Century, Bride of Frankenstein. While perhaps the key scene is the tragic revelation of the stroke-reduced limits of Mr Whale’s talents, and what they mean for the characters, I still fondly remember the way we hooted with laughter at the death scene, and how everyone else in the cinema looked round and glared at us. That’s the peril of going to an arthouse cinema to see what, despite the po-faced patrons, is – like Bride of Frankenstein – a comedy about death.
Labels: Comics, Frankenstein, Health, Labour, Radio, Stupid Ideas, Technology, The Today Programme
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Alternative Viewing
Richard has just put on The Andrew Marr Show, and he’s gone out to see David Cameron’s house, because the Tory Leader is now too important to come into the studio. Oh, god, and now it’s royal news. Much as I’m fond of Andrew Marr, and much as I enjoy his Prisoner fanboy opening titles, I’d rather watch almost anything else. Even ITV (well, on Tuesdays, when ITV4 at least is now repeating proper The Prisoner).
Before I go off to the bedroom to read instead, then, links to two online clips for your entertainment, one very funny, one loving.
I’m no huge fan of Microsoft, but I use a PC. And not being hugely technical, I tend to use my computer to type things into and watch things on, for which it’s adequate. I sometimes find Apple tempting because they have rave reviews from some people I know, and look pretty. But I can’t imagine touching a Mac with a bargepole for the foreseeable future. Why? Partly because learning to use a whole new system and worrying about compatibility with my last decade and a bit of PC stuff rates too high on my cantbearsedometer, and partly because of the Mac ad campaign.
No, ‘being just like everybody else’ isn’t a great selling point for me… But ‘excluding everyone else, because I’m part of a superciliously snobbish proselytising cult’ just utterly gets on my wick (and anyway, some of us prefer would prefer David Mitchell, at least if he hadn’t taken all that money from Apple). It gave a brilliant opening to giant corporation Microsoft to advertise the PC as something people-sized that breaks down barriers and lets people talk to each other instead, and that was a poke in the eye Apple fully deserved, the wankers. “Life without walls” is a Liberal message; ‘We are superior beings, so we can look down on 90% of people for being rubbish’ isn’t. Oh, and claiming that PC users are just following the herd when you’ve got massive market dominance in many other technological fields through your many iBrands doesn’t impress me, either.
So thank you, Forceful and Moderate, for this. It made me laugh.
Thanks, also, to the lovely Simon Guerrier for reminding me about this terrific recreation of a Doctor Who trailer from 1968. I’ve heard it before on audio and seen it accompanied by stills, but the CGI recreation of some of Patrick Troughton’s mannerisms is quite uncanny.
PS I love Richard very much, and this is not having a dig at him. It’s having a dig at Andy Marr luvvying up to the even-more-up-himself-than-Apple-with-even-less-reason Mr Cameron.
Before I go off to the bedroom to read instead, then, links to two online clips for your entertainment, one very funny, one loving.
I’m no huge fan of Microsoft, but I use a PC. And not being hugely technical, I tend to use my computer to type things into and watch things on, for which it’s adequate. I sometimes find Apple tempting because they have rave reviews from some people I know, and look pretty. But I can’t imagine touching a Mac with a bargepole for the foreseeable future. Why? Partly because learning to use a whole new system and worrying about compatibility with my last decade and a bit of PC stuff rates too high on my cantbearsedometer, and partly because of the Mac ad campaign.
No, ‘being just like everybody else’ isn’t a great selling point for me… But ‘excluding everyone else, because I’m part of a superciliously snobbish proselytising cult’ just utterly gets on my wick (and anyway, some of us prefer would prefer David Mitchell, at least if he hadn’t taken all that money from Apple). It gave a brilliant opening to giant corporation Microsoft to advertise the PC as something people-sized that breaks down barriers and lets people talk to each other instead, and that was a poke in the eye Apple fully deserved, the wankers. “Life without walls” is a Liberal message; ‘We are superior beings, so we can look down on 90% of people for being rubbish’ isn’t. Oh, and claiming that PC users are just following the herd when you’ve got massive market dominance in many other technological fields through your many iBrands doesn’t impress me, either.
So thank you, Forceful and Moderate, for this. It made me laugh.
Thanks, also, to the lovely Simon Guerrier for reminding me about this terrific recreation of a Doctor Who trailer from 1968. I’ve heard it before on audio and seen it accompanied by stills, but the CGI recreation of some of Patrick Troughton’s mannerisms is quite uncanny.
PS I love Richard very much, and this is not having a dig at him. It’s having a dig at Andy Marr luvvying up to the even-more-up-himself-than-Apple-with-even-less-reason Mr Cameron.
Labels: Adverts, BBC, Conservatives, Doctor Who, Patrick Troughton, Personal, Technology, The Prisoner
Saturday, August 16, 2008
Robots, War Machines and Why BoxClever Isn’t So Clever
If you’ve ever considered renting some appliance, a word of advice: unless you intend to keep it for ever, don’t hire it from Boxclever. I mentioned the other day that we’d bought a big new telly (working fine, and very happy with it) to replace the TV we’d been hiring, so the next step was to return the old one. Well, I rang Boxclever and said that, though it’s still working fine, we’d like them to take the telly back as we’d got ourselves a new one. They asked a few questions, they tried to persuade me… Then the stunner. The contract will be taken as a month’s notice. Fine, I said, thinking ‘Well, they’ve had enough money out of us over the last decade, a redundant £45 isn’t too bad a sting.’ A month’s notice from next charging date, so the end of September. Uh huh, I said. And that that’s when they’d pick up the TV. What?! So, I queried, they couldn’t take it any earlier than September 29th? No. Keep the money, I suggested, just take it off our hands? Not possible. Now, this isn’t a small TV set – it’s less wide than our new one, but very much deeper and heavier – and we do have a small flat, which is getting smaller all the time as it fills with stuff. And we could use an extra 490,000 cubic centimetres that aren’t being taken up by a large, heavy object that you can’t stack anything on top of.
I’m really not impressed by this customer service. But don’t worry, this entry gets onto more fun things as it goes on.
If you’re familiar with Character Options, who make all the rather impressive Doctor Who toys in every supermarket, you may know that they’ve just issued a tentative first set of “Classic” series figures (preceded by the Dalek Collector’s Set #1), and they look terrific. They’re also apparently taking the company by surprise and outselling the new set based on this year’s Doctor Who series by four to one. So, I suspect a second set of Classic figures may be confirmed – personally, I’m very much hoping that their ‘collect and build’ figure is the Morbius Monster, which would be both appropriate and funny. Oh, yes, that collect and build idea… The first set of eight individual Classic figures – or nine, as one pack boasts two figures – has a strong incentive to buy the lot, as each contains one part of the giant K1 Robot, so you need to buy every figure in order to assemble it. I’ve seen a fully assembled one, and it’s superb (even taking into account that it appeared in my first story and I have an instinctive bias).
However, my set had a problem. I was going to post a picture of the lot on here, but that’ll have to wait – because, when I came to assemble my K1 Robot, the first four sections locked together fine… But the right arm had nothing to lock into. The small plastic socket that should have been fixed inside the shoulder was missing, and unfortunately once you’ve snapped one of the components into place, they don’t separate. So if you collect the set and want to build your Robot, be careful. Look inside each of the holes around the torso to make sure they all have that little grey gripping socket before you start, and don’t fool around with putting things in the wrong sockets for a crazy weird robot before you settle down to build the proper look: the wind’ll change, and it’ll stick like that. As a result, I’ve had to ring Character Options’ Returns line and send the whole head and torso packaged up back to them for a replacement of all four components. Let’s hope they have better customer service than Boxclever. Belated update: they do!
In the meantime, I have eight rather cool figures; I’m particularly happy with the Zygon, as they’ve long been one of my favourite monster designs (even my Dad thought Broton looked impressive), and with a couple of others I’ll come to in another post [update: click on the link at the end of the last paragraph]. If you treat yourself, incidentally, don’t think you’re missing a bit with your SV7 Supervoc figure, another classy robot – though he’s pictured with a separate hand in the publicity, they abandoned that idea at a late stage, so they haven’t left it out by accident and you probably shouldn’t try pulling his hand off to see if it’ll fit back on again. The matching Dum robot figure should, however, come with a smashed robot’s head on a stick (a makeshift robot deactivator, if you’re familiar with the story The Robots of Death), the ‘dead’ robot’s brain parts painted inappropriately red to make it especially unsuitable for children (yay!), and a tiny little sliver of stickers should be somewhere in the pack in order for you to choose to label it “D84” or one of three other id tags.
Finally, if you can’t find these in the shops yet, after the sad demise of Tenth Planet I have three mail-order suggestions. There are those nice Voga people in Edinburgh, who are a little more expensive than recommended price but fast, reliable and with reasonable postage; there are Forbidden Planet, who are a bit cheaper than recommended price but post slowly and in dribs and drabs, as well as having a deeply eccentric website that tends to go down in the middle of orders; and there are Character Options themselves, who are dead in the middle of both elements of the other two, charging RRP as you might expect and delivering within about a week. If you order from them directly, you’ll find that they apply a £4.99 postage charge unless you spend over £50 (so if you order the whole set, postage is free)… So you may like to take note of two discount codes. If you’re spending under £50, entering “shipping2008AW” at the checkout will get you free p&p anyway, while if you’re spending over £50 in one go, you’ll have free postage anyway but you can enter “5discount2008OT” to give you a 5% discount. Happy shopping!
Should you fancy watching a few things on your computer rather than a big telly, here are a few recommendations from blogs I’ve been reading this week:
And finally… A couple of weeks ago we watched the latest in ITV’s Marple series, Towards Zero. Richard points out that we’d not normally have done so, as Towards Zero isn’t a Miss Marple story and ITV doesn’t make stories with Miss Marple (Marple is a place a couple of miles from where I was born; Miss Marple would under no circumstances abandon her spinsterdom to sound like a public schoolboy). However, we winced and bore it, mainly for the guest cast. You may have spotted the magnificent Tom Baker sprawling around telling rolling anecdotes, a bit like a much-cleaned-up version of himself. What you may not have noticed is that the character he was playing was called Frederick Treves. I was in my local library yesterday, and noted that in Agatha Christie’s play Towards Zero, the character is named Mathew Treves. By an uncanny coincidence, however, there’s a grand old actor by the name of Frederick Treves, who readers of this blog might remember from political thrillers The Politician’s Wife and To Play the King or, of course, from the Doctor Who story Meglos, in which he hammed it up opposite one Thomas Stewart Baker as a character called “Brotadac”. Which, as I’m sure none of the production team on Marple are aware, is an anagram of “bad actor”.
I’m really not impressed by this customer service. But don’t worry, this entry gets onto more fun things as it goes on.
Doctor Who and the Miniature Robots
If you’re familiar with Character Options, who make all the rather impressive Doctor Who toys in every supermarket, you may know that they’ve just issued a tentative first set of “Classic” series figures (preceded by the Dalek Collector’s Set #1), and they look terrific. They’re also apparently taking the company by surprise and outselling the new set based on this year’s Doctor Who series by four to one. So, I suspect a second set of Classic figures may be confirmed – personally, I’m very much hoping that their ‘collect and build’ figure is the Morbius Monster, which would be both appropriate and funny. Oh, yes, that collect and build idea… The first set of eight individual Classic figures – or nine, as one pack boasts two figures – has a strong incentive to buy the lot, as each contains one part of the giant K1 Robot, so you need to buy every figure in order to assemble it. I’ve seen a fully assembled one, and it’s superb (even taking into account that it appeared in my first story and I have an instinctive bias).
However, my set had a problem. I was going to post a picture of the lot on here, but that’ll have to wait – because, when I came to assemble my K1 Robot, the first four sections locked together fine… But the right arm had nothing to lock into. The small plastic socket that should have been fixed inside the shoulder was missing, and unfortunately once you’ve snapped one of the components into place, they don’t separate. So if you collect the set and want to build your Robot, be careful. Look inside each of the holes around the torso to make sure they all have that little grey gripping socket before you start, and don’t fool around with putting things in the wrong sockets for a crazy weird robot before you settle down to build the proper look: the wind’ll change, and it’ll stick like that. As a result, I’ve had to ring Character Options’ Returns line and send the whole head and torso packaged up back to them for a replacement of all four components. Let’s hope they have better customer service than Boxclever. Belated update: they do!
In the meantime, I have eight rather cool figures; I’m particularly happy with the Zygon, as they’ve long been one of my favourite monster designs (even my Dad thought Broton looked impressive), and with a couple of others I’ll come to in another post [update: click on the link at the end of the last paragraph]. If you treat yourself, incidentally, don’t think you’re missing a bit with your SV7 Supervoc figure, another classy robot – though he’s pictured with a separate hand in the publicity, they abandoned that idea at a late stage, so they haven’t left it out by accident and you probably shouldn’t try pulling his hand off to see if it’ll fit back on again. The matching Dum robot figure should, however, come with a smashed robot’s head on a stick (a makeshift robot deactivator, if you’re familiar with the story The Robots of Death), the ‘dead’ robot’s brain parts painted inappropriately red to make it especially unsuitable for children (yay!), and a tiny little sliver of stickers should be somewhere in the pack in order for you to choose to label it “D84” or one of three other id tags.
Finally, if you can’t find these in the shops yet, after the sad demise of Tenth Planet I have three mail-order suggestions. There are those nice Voga people in Edinburgh, who are a little more expensive than recommended price but fast, reliable and with reasonable postage; there are Forbidden Planet, who are a bit cheaper than recommended price but post slowly and in dribs and drabs, as well as having a deeply eccentric website that tends to go down in the middle of orders; and there are Character Options themselves, who are dead in the middle of both elements of the other two, charging RRP as you might expect and delivering within about a week. If you order from them directly, you’ll find that they apply a £4.99 postage charge unless you spend over £50 (so if you order the whole set, postage is free)… So you may like to take note of two discount codes. If you’re spending under £50, entering “shipping2008AW” at the checkout will get you free p&p anyway, while if you’re spending over £50 in one go, you’ll have free postage anyway but you can enter “5discount2008OT” to give you a 5% discount. Happy shopping!
For Your Viewing Pleasure…
Should you fancy watching a few things on your computer rather than a big telly, here are a few recommendations from blogs I’ve been reading this week:
- The lovely Andy Strange points us to Stephen Fry’s lecture on public service broadcasting. It’s witty, erudite and spot-on, and though Richard and I watched it at the time, as Mr Fry points out in his speech the viewing figures on BBC Parliament are not large, so thanks to Andy for finding it online. The lecture is a sterling defence of the BBC, which I have to admit is an institution I may have my problems with but still love passionately as the best of British, and which I fear is under deadly threat. If the Tories get back in, they seem hideously likely to dismember it – one of the few issues on which the vague noises that pass for policy emanating from the Tory bunker are actually even worse than the Labour Government.
- The lovely Simon Guerrier, to whom I owe several e-mails (sorry, Simon, if you’re reading) has analysis and a link to a rather terrific trailer for the BBC’s next Doctor Who DVD release, 1966’s The War Machines. It’s a super story with a great lead performance by Billy Hartnell, and one that was both heavily borrowed from the works of Terry Nation and was highly influential on the series’ future – taking the monsters to the streets of contemporary London for the first time. It also inspired in part Simon’s excellent novel The Time Travellers, which I also recommend. The world’s computers are joined together down phone lines and things (a racy, far-fetched sci-fi idea for 1966), at which point they fail to look at porn or send each other amusing clips of each other’s readouts, so far as we know, and instead built pseudo-Daleks with which to conquer the world. When the computers link up, humans will get completely hypnotised by them, too; well, they got that bit right.
- The almost certainly lovely – though I’ve not been formally introduced – Jennie brings a disturbing selection of reasons why John McCain should not be elected President, along with a devastatingly fine example of Rick-rolling. If you’re not sure who “Rick” is, he’s that gawky, lanky guy with the awkward dance moves who came out of nowhere to be suddenly incredibly popular and successful…
And finally… A couple of weeks ago we watched the latest in ITV’s Marple series, Towards Zero. Richard points out that we’d not normally have done so, as Towards Zero isn’t a Miss Marple story and ITV doesn’t make stories with Miss Marple (Marple is a place a couple of miles from where I was born; Miss Marple would under no circumstances abandon her spinsterdom to sound like a public schoolboy). However, we winced and bore it, mainly for the guest cast. You may have spotted the magnificent Tom Baker sprawling around telling rolling anecdotes, a bit like a much-cleaned-up version of himself. What you may not have noticed is that the character he was playing was called Frederick Treves. I was in my local library yesterday, and noted that in Agatha Christie’s play Towards Zero, the character is named Mathew Treves. By an uncanny coincidence, however, there’s a grand old actor by the name of Frederick Treves, who readers of this blog might remember from political thrillers The Politician’s Wife and To Play the King or, of course, from the Doctor Who story Meglos, in which he hammed it up opposite one Thomas Stewart Baker as a character called “Brotadac”. Which, as I’m sure none of the production team on Marple are aware, is an anagram of “bad actor”.
Labels: American Politics, Blogs, Digby Spode, Doctor Who, Stephen Fry, Technology, Tom Baker, Top Tips, Toys, William Hartnell
Tuesday, August 12, 2008
TV Delivery Good; Cyclists Bad
Not, perhaps, my greenest headline, but a reflection of my day. I’m sitting here watching the television. Well, not the television, technically, but the box it’s lurking in. Or rather looming in, as it’s quite a large TV set, with even the box for its stand pretty humungous. Having rented a big telly for years, we finally decided it’s much cheaper to buy and so I recently accompanied Richard to John Lewis for ninety minutes of merriment with a man from Grace Brothers as we decided on a set and he pretended to know how to operate their order system. Having gone in firmly determined on one size, naturally we ended up getting one slightly bigger, and since then Richard has been worrying that he’s gone mad (don’t worry, he’s as sane as ever). It’s that perennial problem; in the shop, they’re all enormous, so you think you’ve chosen one that’s quite reasonable, but get it home and suddenly you wonder how you’re ever going to manage it. Anyway, in preparation last night, we unplugged all the many attachments to our big old set and it’s now stuck behind a chair, blocking off all access to Richard’s computer. This means I have two televisions in front of me, but neither presently able to display moving pictures, and I feel strangely bereft.
On the other hand, both the guys who delivered the new TV were very friendly, and both were very admiring of our slightly extravagant DVD collection. Much as people who enter the TARDIS invariably exclaim, ‘It’s bigger on the inside than it is on the outside!’ our visitors tend to marvel at how such a small flat can have so many DVDs and videos crammed into it. These guys were not only friendly, helpful and quite good-looking, but picked out four TV shows in particular to enthuse over – as it happens, two of my favourites and two of Richard’s, so if we’d met them socially, we’d have got on very well. Unfortunately, when their van drew up outside and I bounded down the stairs to direct them up to our flat, one of them asked if I could manage the stand (it taking two of them to carry the TV). It’s rare that I succumb to the temptation to act macho, but I’m afraid I did earlier. I’m not exactly Mr Muscle, but I said I could carry it, and when each time I put the box down I was asked “Are you sure you’re OK with that?” I naturally said “Oh, yes, fine.” So both my wrists and my back are now rather painful and I’m thinking it’ll be a while before I pretend to be He-Man again.
In the absence of a working TV, and with Millennium lying on top of the crate and dreaming of Casino Royale, I’ve been looking at a few alternative sources of entertainment on the computer (no, no, missus). Good find: thanks to Mr Whyte for pointing me to a bittersweet Torchwood / Narnia crossover story, which amazingly makes me feel more positive towards both franchises. Bad find: my favourite home-made Doctor Who trailer has been removed from YouTube. Bah! So, dear reader, if at any stage you happen to have nefariously downloaded, recorded or otherwise ripped off a trailer for The Deadly Assassin cut in the style of The Matrix trailer, could you let me have a copy, please?
In more significant Doctor Who news, the series’ two nominations for this year’s Hugo Awards have come first and second respectively. Hooray! Steven Moffat’s Blink won the award, with Paul Cornell’s Human Nature the runner-up. I have to admit, I’d have far rather had them the other way round, and not just for Buggins’ Turn (Steven now having swept the awards for three years running) – for me, Human Nature was truly outstanding, even better than the book, and one of the best stories in forty-five years of Doctor Who, let alone last year. Blink was good enough and much better than the Annual story it was based on but, though I know very many people rave about it, for me it wasn’t a patch on Steven’s previous winners The Empty Child and The Fire In the Girlyplace, let alone Human Nature.
Getting out of the flat for a break after the delivery arrived, I walked under to Greenwich to get my hair cut – long overdue, and tomorrow we’re seeing my Mum and Dad for dinner, which means family photos. Tragically, while waiting I saw a picture in a paper of the most fantastic sarnie, after which tomorrow’s dinner will struggle to compete (a trip to Staffordshire seems very tempting). Now, I like walking through the Greenwich Foot Tunnel, but I have to admit to one pet hate. There’s not a lot of space there, there’s a curve to it that doesn’t aid visibility, and there are great big signs everywhere forbidding cycling. So what do cyclists do? They glide at great speed, a menace to all around and in front of them, either clinging to one side of their bike with one foot perched on a pedal or sitting astride but with their feet dangling away from the pedals. I think this is what’s called honouring the letter rather than the spirit of the law, but as far as I’m concerned, some maniac speeding towards me on a machine over which they have less control than usual doesn’t make me feel indulgent. I don’t usually carry a brolly, but I always feel the need for a particularly indestructible one on these occasions, just right for jamming into spokes. That, or carrying a supply of small, adhesive explosive devices. Grr. Oh yes, and then they cart their bikes into the lifts at the far ends and take up all the space. Gits.
Richard has now got in and is looking for a screwdriver. Wish us (mainly him, as I’m unlikely to do blokey stuff twice in one day) luck.
Special points on the coincidentatron for the friend who rang this morning to tell me that he’d just had a TV delivered from John Lewis…
On the other hand, both the guys who delivered the new TV were very friendly, and both were very admiring of our slightly extravagant DVD collection. Much as people who enter the TARDIS invariably exclaim, ‘It’s bigger on the inside than it is on the outside!’ our visitors tend to marvel at how such a small flat can have so many DVDs and videos crammed into it. These guys were not only friendly, helpful and quite good-looking, but picked out four TV shows in particular to enthuse over – as it happens, two of my favourites and two of Richard’s, so if we’d met them socially, we’d have got on very well. Unfortunately, when their van drew up outside and I bounded down the stairs to direct them up to our flat, one of them asked if I could manage the stand (it taking two of them to carry the TV). It’s rare that I succumb to the temptation to act macho, but I’m afraid I did earlier. I’m not exactly Mr Muscle, but I said I could carry it, and when each time I put the box down I was asked “Are you sure you’re OK with that?” I naturally said “Oh, yes, fine.” So both my wrists and my back are now rather painful and I’m thinking it’ll be a while before I pretend to be He-Man again.
In the absence of a working TV, and with Millennium lying on top of the crate and dreaming of Casino Royale, I’ve been looking at a few alternative sources of entertainment on the computer (no, no, missus). Good find: thanks to Mr Whyte for pointing me to a bittersweet Torchwood / Narnia crossover story, which amazingly makes me feel more positive towards both franchises. Bad find: my favourite home-made Doctor Who trailer has been removed from YouTube. Bah! So, dear reader, if at any stage you happen to have nefariously downloaded, recorded or otherwise ripped off a trailer for The Deadly Assassin cut in the style of The Matrix trailer, could you let me have a copy, please?
In more significant Doctor Who news, the series’ two nominations for this year’s Hugo Awards have come first and second respectively. Hooray! Steven Moffat’s Blink won the award, with Paul Cornell’s Human Nature the runner-up. I have to admit, I’d have far rather had them the other way round, and not just for Buggins’ Turn (Steven now having swept the awards for three years running) – for me, Human Nature was truly outstanding, even better than the book, and one of the best stories in forty-five years of Doctor Who, let alone last year. Blink was good enough and much better than the Annual story it was based on but, though I know very many people rave about it, for me it wasn’t a patch on Steven’s previous winners The Empty Child and The Fire In the Girlyplace, let alone Human Nature.
Getting out of the flat for a break after the delivery arrived, I walked under to Greenwich to get my hair cut – long overdue, and tomorrow we’re seeing my Mum and Dad for dinner, which means family photos. Tragically, while waiting I saw a picture in a paper of the most fantastic sarnie, after which tomorrow’s dinner will struggle to compete (a trip to Staffordshire seems very tempting). Now, I like walking through the Greenwich Foot Tunnel, but I have to admit to one pet hate. There’s not a lot of space there, there’s a curve to it that doesn’t aid visibility, and there are great big signs everywhere forbidding cycling. So what do cyclists do? They glide at great speed, a menace to all around and in front of them, either clinging to one side of their bike with one foot perched on a pedal or sitting astride but with their feet dangling away from the pedals. I think this is what’s called honouring the letter rather than the spirit of the law, but as far as I’m concerned, some maniac speeding towards me on a machine over which they have less control than usual doesn’t make me feel indulgent. I don’t usually carry a brolly, but I always feel the need for a particularly indestructible one on these occasions, just right for jamming into spokes. That, or carrying a supply of small, adhesive explosive devices. Grr. Oh yes, and then they cart their bikes into the lifts at the far ends and take up all the space. Gits.
Richard has now got in and is looking for a screwdriver. Wish us (mainly him, as I’m unlikely to do blokey stuff twice in one day) luck.
Special points on the coincidentatron for the friend who rang this morning to tell me that he’d just had a TV delivered from John Lewis…
Labels: Doctor Who, DVD, New Adventures, Personal, Technology, Torchwood
Saturday, August 02, 2008
If Sitemeter Is Destroying Your Viewing Pleasure, There Are Always Daleks
I wrote earlier on the unhappy phenomenon of many favourite websites crashing as soon as I looked at them. As I don’t possess the Hereditary Gaze of the Bishop of Zilbor, I mistakenly thought it to be a calamitous cock-up from Microsoft (I know – imagine!), but many helpful comments and Googling have revealed the culprit as Sitemeter. They changed their code yesterday, which for Internet Explorer users has torpedoed every Sitemeter-equipped blog (on any platform). So if you want to read a page, try hitting Stop as it visibly loads; and if you employ Sitemeter, please consider removing it. Apparently Sitemeter have yet to admit any error, but as of course I can’t read their own site either… How fortunate that I’ve always been too lazy er, cough, lacked the vanity to add a hit-counter of my own ;-)
So, to cheer up anyone experiencing problems with their Internet viewing pleasure, might I recommend tonight’s intermittent assortment of Dad’s Army on BBC2 this evening, somewhat overenthusiastically described as a “Dad’s Army Weekend” (half a dozen programmes tonight, broken up by the Proms, and one tomorrow). Still, the movie on at the moment’s mildly amusing, if lacking the intimacy of the series, and later on we’re promised the favourite episode of each of the writers. I’m hoping for Philip Von Madoc.
If you’re looking for cheer on the Internet, though, who doesn’t love Daleks (irony of putting them alongside Dad’s Army understood)? Well, thanks to the magic of online shopping, I received these in the post yesterday. Aren’t they brilliant?
The people at Character Options – who mass-produce the Doctor Who toys found in every supermarket – have just launched a new range of ‘Classic’ Doctor Who figures, which are likely to have a more limited release. First is the ominously-titled Dalek Collector’s Set #1, with three Daleks modelled respectively on the stylish silver originals with banded mid-sections from The Daleks / The Dead Planet / Whatever You Call The First One, the tank-like, gun-metal heavy soldiers of Genesis of the Daleks and the flashy Pimp My Supreme Dalek from Planet of the Daleks. I have to admit, I’ve wanted toys like these all my life, and unlike the crudely formed Dapol figures of the 1980s these are not just superbly detailed but each produced with slightly different moulds, from their dome lights to their lower bumpers.
The winner for me is the original design, which I’ve always thought looked very cool since seeing pictures in The Doctor Who Monster Book and is captured perfectly. The Genesis Dalek is very mildly disappointing; in theory a tank-like monster is the ideal Dalek for me, but rather than having a metallic finish it looks too matt and, well, plasticky (a bit like the grey Daleks in Remembrance). I’m surprisingly taken with the Dalek Supreme, though, which on screen is for me a rather tacky addition to a rather feeble story but in five-inch plastic looks rather fab.
Even better, the first wave of eight other ‘Classic’ figures includes such highlights as a K1 Robot to be assembled from eight parts (guess where you get them), the great Doctor I never thought I’d see as a figure looking absolutely smashing, a favourite monster that I’ve been pining to play with since I was about four, and – best of all – a double-pack of the most unsuitable-for-children Doctor Who toys ever yet produced (in the absence of anatomically correct Torchwood dolls with sixty-nine points of articulation). Hurrah! I’ll reveal which when I get them.
Ee, when I were a lad, the only Dalek you could get were a bright red one with a silly extra bit sticking out of the top of its head. There’s none of that nonsense these days, is there?
So, to cheer up anyone experiencing problems with their Internet viewing pleasure, might I recommend tonight’s intermittent assortment of Dad’s Army on BBC2 this evening, somewhat overenthusiastically described as a “Dad’s Army Weekend” (half a dozen programmes tonight, broken up by the Proms, and one tomorrow). Still, the movie on at the moment’s mildly amusing, if lacking the intimacy of the series, and later on we’re promised the favourite episode of each of the writers. I’m hoping for Philip Von Madoc.
If you’re looking for cheer on the Internet, though, who doesn’t love Daleks (irony of putting them alongside Dad’s Army understood)? Well, thanks to the magic of online shopping, I received these in the post yesterday. Aren’t they brilliant?
The people at Character Options – who mass-produce the Doctor Who toys found in every supermarket – have just launched a new range of ‘Classic’ Doctor Who figures, which are likely to have a more limited release. First is the ominously-titled Dalek Collector’s Set #1, with three Daleks modelled respectively on the stylish silver originals with banded mid-sections from The Daleks / The Dead Planet / Whatever You Call The First One, the tank-like, gun-metal heavy soldiers of Genesis of the Daleks and the flashy Pimp My Supreme Dalek from Planet of the Daleks. I have to admit, I’ve wanted toys like these all my life, and unlike the crudely formed Dapol figures of the 1980s these are not just superbly detailed but each produced with slightly different moulds, from their dome lights to their lower bumpers.
The winner for me is the original design, which I’ve always thought looked very cool since seeing pictures in The Doctor Who Monster Book and is captured perfectly. The Genesis Dalek is very mildly disappointing; in theory a tank-like monster is the ideal Dalek for me, but rather than having a metallic finish it looks too matt and, well, plasticky (a bit like the grey Daleks in Remembrance). I’m surprisingly taken with the Dalek Supreme, though, which on screen is for me a rather tacky addition to a rather feeble story but in five-inch plastic looks rather fab.
Even better, the first wave of eight other ‘Classic’ figures includes such highlights as a K1 Robot to be assembled from eight parts (guess where you get them), the great Doctor I never thought I’d see as a figure looking absolutely smashing, a favourite monster that I’ve been pining to play with since I was about four, and – best of all – a double-pack of the most unsuitable-for-children Doctor Who toys ever yet produced (in the absence of anatomically correct Torchwood dolls with sixty-nine points of articulation). Hurrah! I’ll reveal which when I get them.
Ee, when I were a lad, the only Dalek you could get were a bright red one with a silly extra bit sticking out of the top of its head. There’s none of that nonsense these days, is there?
Labels: Blogs, Comedy, Daleks, Doctor Who, Technology, Toys
Has Internet Explorer fritzed today, or is it just me?
Trying to read some of my regular blog fixes last night and this morning, I’m wondering if Internet Explorer has downloaded one of its brilliant new updates that’s trashed its functionality (which is usually fine for me, to be fair). Clicking on – for example – my links at the side of this blog to Simon Guerrier, James Graham or Unity, the page visibly loads, then suddenly aborts, and I have no way to get it back. It looks like they use different blogging software, so it’s not a Blogger problem. Anyone else in the same boat, or any suggestions?
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Labels: Blogs, Technology
