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April 30, 2004

Parcel Farce redux

So, after all my recent fun with Parcel Force, they were going to keep my parcel on hold today (oh, well, yesterday now...) and not deliver it. Only somebody neglected to tell the drivers this, since around 8am I got a phonecall to tell me it was on a van. Gah! Anyway, after much panicked discussion, and persuading them to send their driver on a significant detour, they finally delivered the parcel safely into Nicky's hands, looking somewhat bashed and battered. But hey, at least it got there, and the books inside seemed to be OK.

What amused me, though, was the note written on the parcel by the driver who attempted to deliver it last Tuesday. You see, he apparently got as far as Pershore Road, and then completely failed to locate what I can only assume is a stealth hospital. For whatever reason, he has written on the parcel "What number? All residential??". I realise, of course, that courier firms can't recruit the best and brightest as their drivers, but I have to wonder how a man who can't spot this hospital from pretty much where that photo is taken (the accessible end of Pershore Road) wangled a job driving a honking great big van. His name's Ian, and he drives route 141, by the way, if Parcel Force happen to be reading...

Your regular scheduled programming now resumes.

Posted by James at 01:04 | Comments (0)
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April 28, 2004

Parcel Farce

What's the point, I ask you?

I mean, what's the point having a place like this to rant and rave about things, and then not ranting and raving? No, I don't know either, so here I go (though I'll probably post the same rant to Digital Fury shortly). I am, as previously discussed, expecting some books to arrive from Amazon. These parcels, it turns out, are being shipped to me by Parcel Force.

So, on Monday, April 26th, Parcel Force duly came to my parents' front door and put a card through it. They may have attempted to deliver the parcel first — my experience suggests they probably didn't, but let's give them the benefit of the doubt here, since we don't know. That night, then, my mum phoned them up, and arranged that they'd deliver to her workplace the following day instead. This story should stop there. Really, it should. They could have just turned up with the parcel, handed it over, and that would be the end of that. But no.

No, instead they decided to simply do nothing. Absolutely nothing. Because you see, they later decided the address she'd given them was an "incomplete address" — after all, simply knowing that the building was called Clifton Hospital and on Pershore Road, and its postcode, is quite ambiguous. It could be any of the, ooh, 6 buildings that postcode covers. 5 of which are bungalows. Or at least they could have got back in touch, left another card, called her back, or something. Alas, no.

So we fast forward to today. Now today is something of a crunch day in the life of this parcel — if the parcel doesn't arrive today, I'd have been better off taking free delivery from Amazon, since I wouldn't see the parcel for a fortnight or so anyway (because of when Nicky is next likely to visit here, and when I'm next likely to visit her/home). So when it didn't, my mum got back on the phone to them, discovered the above about the "incomplete address", and told me what was going on. I was annoyed. I'm still annoyed, but 45 minutes ago, when this happened, I was annoyed. Anyway, the final outcome of all of this is that Nicky is, being such a kind and generous soul, going to go and collect the parcel for me, from Parcel Force's depot in Leyland, on her way down here tomorrow morning.

As I was getting directions from the (very helpful!) man on the phone at Parcel Force, though, something occurred to me. These directions were very familiar. It was, in fact, as if I'd followed these directions before. In fact, the last time I had something delivered by Parcel Force, a very similar chain of events happened, ending with me driving >20 miles to their depot. So that's 2 for 2 now; Parcel Farce are fast becoming a parcel delivery service that excels at getting a parcel 80–90% of the way there. Maybe they should make that their specialist niche, then; at least nobody would have the right to complain about them.

Posted by James at 19:16 | Comments (0)
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April 27, 2004

Photo Of The Week

Sensibly kitty, get away from the tesla coil...

(Taken by Khalid Schofield, who seems to do this sort of thing a lot.)

Posted by James at 15:34 | Comments (1)
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April 26, 2004

I need help.

As mentioned elsewhere by Carl, there is a TV advert, in which a kid (probably male, and most likely a cheeky northern monkeh) says, of the product in question, something along the lines of "but, a caterpillar could've pooed on it!"

Neither of us can remember what this advert is for, nor can we find it on the web. Please, if any of you can remember, answer in a comment before we both go completely insane! Until then, enjoy these adverts for Warburtons (3.0MB) and Vauxhall (4.9MB). I should add, really, that this is all actually susie's fault.

Posted by James at 22:24 | Comments (3)
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April 24, 2004

Accidents happen

It's amazing what can happen by accident. Why, just the other day I was talking to someone on IRC who had managed to narrowly avoid accidentally having sex. Shortly after, someone appeared whose friend had accidentally dumped his SO via text message.

So I suppose in comparison, accidentally ordering books from Amazon is nothing. Wending it's merry way to me, then, is a package containing Eats, Shoots and Leaves, The Blind Watchmaker and Fowler's Modern English Usage. Whoops.

Posted by James at 17:29 | Comments (2)
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More low effort blogging

That last entry took a lot of effort, for what felt like a fairly poor result, in the end. So, I'm back to the low effort stuff again.

What's your stand on...

Abortion?I like to use the phrase "anti-life", on the grounds that it lets me call the other side "anti-choice"
Death Penalty?I'm finding this a disturbingly tough call to make. I want to say "hell no, the state shouldn't kill", or "justice shouldn't be about vengeance", but, well, I can't. The state already does kill, and our justice system already is, at least in part, about vengeance. And hey, it's got to be cheaper than keeping someone in prison for the rest of their natural life. The hard part, for me, is the irrevocable nature of the sentence; if you imprison someone unfairly, you can free them, and try to compensate them, on their release. I don't think resurrection has become terribly simple, yet. So all told, I suppose I say no to the death penalty.
Prostitution?Should be legalised, then carefully regulated.
Alcohol?Mine's a pint, thanks. I think the current state of the UK drinking laws isn't so bad.
Marijuana?If it really is as harmless as is widely claimed, then, yeah, I'm all for it being legalised. Of course, it's often taken with tobacco, which is known to be harmful, but this seems more like an argument to ban that, than to not legalise dope...
Other drugs?This varies too much from drug to drug, and I don't have enough specific knowledge to make those calls. Ask the BMA, or WHO, or something.
Gay marriage?I can understand that, for instance, the catholic church doesn't want to recognise gay marriages. Fine. Rinse and repeat for any other religion that opposes gay marriages. What I haven't heard any justification for, though, is the state not allowing them. I can't see how it's anything but discrimination.
Illegal immigrants?It'd be nice if legal immigration was easier, and other such truisms.
Smoking?It would be very hard indeed to ban smoking. For one thing, millions of people are addicted to nicotine, in the UK alone. For another, the treasury is addicted to the large sums of dosh smokers hand over, every time they buy their death-sticks: yes, the cost of running the NHS would also drop, were smoking to be banned, but not for a considerable period after the ban, due to the latent effects of long term smoke inhalation. A sane yet completely infeasible solution would be to increase the minimum age at which one can smoke by a year, every year, starting one year from today. Hence anyone who can legally smoke now can continue to do so, but anyone who can't yet legally smoke will never be able to (give or take people close to the limit, who would be able to for part of the year. Yay for edge-cases.) This keeps some incoming revenue to fund the treatment of those smokers who aren't yet dead, while over several decades practically eliminating smoking, at least in public places. I'd settle, though, right now, for people not congregating outside the front doors of non-smoking buildings to smoke — it's distinctly unpleasant to have to walk past a dense group of smokers, just to get in and out of a building.
Drunk driving?Drunk drivers should be prosecuted on the basis of what harm they could have done, not what harm they did. Being lucky enough not to kill someone shouldn't get them off being strung up, or whatever the appropriate punishment is these days.
Cloning?Cloning and related research offers great potential for new and improved medical treatments. Missing out on this would be a terrible shame.
Racism?I can't stand intolerant people.
Premarital sex?Fun!
Religion?I don't have one. Other people do, that's up to them; just as long as people accept that not having one is up to me.
Downloading music?Downloading music and never buying any or going to concerts is bad. Downloading music to make a more informed choice about what to buy seems fair, to me.
The legal drinking age?I could live with it being lower, but I'm reasonably happy with it where it is.
Suicide?Not today, thanks. I'll use this space to hang my claim that euthanasia should be allowed in appropriate cases, and should be the choice of the patient, not the family.
Coffee?Should contain no milk, and no sugar. Should be strong. Decaf is just wrong.
Vivisection?OK, so maybe not all of these questions were in the original, but I chopped some I didn't like out, and fancied some replacements. I am strongly in favour of the use of animals in scientific research, where useful and appropriate. Lab animals are, in general, well cared for. Also, while there are, I'm sure, calm and rational campaigners against animal testing, I tend to associate their campaign with the lunatics that firebomb laboratories, and show infinitely more compassion for animal life than human. These people are dangerous, to people around them, and to their cause.

Posted by James at 01:10 | Comments (0)
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April 22, 2004

Adopt-a-whistleblower.

18 years on, Israel's most famous prisoner emerges, arms aloft (Donald Macintyre, in the Independent)

Yesterday, a man who had been in prison for 18 years, 12 of which were spent isolated from other prisoners, was released. At his release, he was met with a mixture of adulation and death-threats. He can number the CND among his supporters, but I don't count that against him. He has been described as a hero, and as a traitor, and I will be incredibly surprised if he survives the next 12 months or so.

But that's not my point. No, my point lies in the following paragraph:

"Nick Elov, a 74-year-old American who has legally adopted Mr Vanunu in the hope that he can secure US citizenship, accused the Israeli authorities of endangering Mr Vanunu by leaking his plan to live temporarily in the holiday apartments attached to the upmarket Andromeda Hills complex in Jaffa."

I should explain, in case you've not heard the news, don't remember much about Middle East politics in 1986, and haven't followed the above link, just what's going on here. Mr Vanunu was abducted in Rome 18 years ago, drugged, and flown back to Israel, by Mossad agents, after he released secret details of Israel's nuclear weapons program to Peter Houman, a journalist for the Sunday Times. He remained in custody, rightly or wrongly, until yesterday.

Now, this man who released state secrets to a foreign newspaper, and served 18 years in prison for doing so, has been released under the condition that he doesn't do anything dangerous like, say, approach a foreigner or a reporter, or look as though he might leave the country. The government have, one way or another, leaked details of his intended whereabouts in the near future — it does look a lot like the intent there is that he'll be killed, and while it'll be a terrible shame, the government will be able to attribute it to extremists, yadda yadda. I simply find it ironic that he has come out and accused them of endangering his life by doing so — for a man who betrayed his country by releasing information, this seems somewhat hypocritical. I suppose the difference is that he was arguably doing The Right Thing, whereas a government trying to cause the death of one of its citizens is probably not.

But this still isn't my point. No, rather my point is that I had no idea it was possible to be adopted at 49 years old, certainly not for such a strained reason as to try to get US citizenship. The mind boggles.

While I'm on my soapbox, though, I note that Israel has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (whilst all these people have), nor the Biological and Toxic Weapons Convention. Still, probably nothing to worry about, right? I mean it's not like they have a leader with hawish tendencies or anything, is it? Certainly not! It almost makes you think those people muttering about Armageddon might be onto something... Of course, this isn't to say Israel are the only nation who can be faulted in this way, nor that I think a nuclear war is likely to happen in the immediate future. Still, it's far from reassuring. Sleep well tonight, eh folks?

Posted by James at 17:43 | Comments (2)
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April 20, 2004

The return of the meta-blog

Sorry, I promise this won't take a second.

Kevin pointed out, after I whinged about ampersands, that I could use an MT plugin that does what I want. I happened to mention this on IRC, where clc1 picked up on it, and noted that mt-textile does the same thing, as well as lots of other niftiness. So here I am, trying out things like strong markup, and emphasis. Er, that is to say, *strong* and _emphasis_. Because I'm a nice person, I'll spare you the entire repertoire of simple markup — this has nothing to do with my being lazy, at all, oh no.

1 Why yes, this is a gratuitous footnote to see how they worked. How did you know?

Posted by James at 21:54 | Comments (0)
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April 19, 2004

Punctuation hate

Today, for one day only, I hate ampersands. Or I hate Moveable Type. Or I hate HTML. One of them, though. Bah!

(No, seriously; why can't MT detect that I've typed an & in my text that forms an invalid entity and turn it into "&"? Of course I've had to type those as & and & respectively, now...)

Posted by James at 23:46 | Comments (2)
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Link Splurge #3

I have recently been indirectly accused of zero-effort blogging, and really I have to plead guilty. So, in a bid to counter this, and try have some actual worthwhile content around here (yeah, yeah, I know) I'm going to share all those links I wanted to post but didn't really have more than a few words to say about. So, here comes part 3 in an ongoing series...

I could go on, but I'm not that cruel. We now return you to your scheduled broadcasting.

Posted by James at 20:25 | Comments (0)
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April 18, 2004

Page 23

So, I've written this entry once already (on which more later), but here goes again. There is a meme doing the rounds, which I saw on Aquarionics, here, which gives the following instructions:

  1. Grab the nearest book.
  2. Open the book to page 23.
  3. Find the fifth sentence.
  4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

I've just been unpacking my books, having got back to Uni today, so I can just grab the first from my nice organised bookshelf. It won't last, but it's nice while it does... So, from Introduction to Algorithms, by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest and Stein (aka "CLR". I always feel sorry for Clifford Stein, though I guess he did only appear for the 2nd edition.) here it is:

"The time taken by the Insertion-Sort procedure depends on the input: sorting a thousand numbers takes longer than sorting three numbers."

Wow, such insight. :-)

Posted by James at 16:53 | Comments (0) | TrackBacks
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April 13, 2004

YOUR BLOG A PLODE

(The title makes more sense with a little context.)

Those of you reading this on Livejournal (here) might have noticed my syndication feeds have gone mad and caused LJ to repeat various entries — other syndication systems are probably similarly affected. Sorry about that — one of my trained army of monkey slaves pressed a wrong button, making strange things happen. He says he's very sorry, and it won't happen again. He's right, it won't — we're eating his brain for dinner, tonight. Must go, the pan should be hot enough by now....

Posted by James at 17:43 | Comments (0)
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SMS Of The World

Experts talk up text security, from BBC News Online

The tiresome details of David Beckham's lovelife aside, this story once again highlights the least secure part of almost any modern electronic communication — the person at the other end of the line. After all, it doesn't matter how cleverly you encrypt your message, if the person who can decrypt it is just going to run off to the News of the World at the first opportunity and make big money.

But really, I just wanted to point out the amusing picture/caption on the article; if messages are as incomprehensible as the one shown, of course they're hard to bloody intercept! Do people really still send things like that, in this day of predictive text and phones that can concatenate up to 3 messages together?

Posted by James at 11:24 | Comments (2)
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April 11, 2004

What a tidy, organised web we weave

Today, I have been mostly trying to improve the way I use the web a little. I've never really gone in for keeping a bookmarks file, or similar, and as such I often forget to check often-updated sites for new content for months on end, and miss things I'd like to have seen. It also means I have trouble finding pages I've read and found interesting, weeks later, if I want to check some detail.

From today, I'm fixing that, thanks to Bloglines, a free web-based RSS (and other format) feed aggregation service, and delicious, a "social bookmarks manager" apparently. I've tried to use it before, but got bored, but I'm giving it another go, with bookmarklets and everything. My delicious links are available here, then, and there's probably an RSS version of them somewhere.

Posted by James at 23:30 | Comments (0)
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April 10, 2004

Fun and games

I'm probably way behind the times on this one, but that sodding penguin game has two sequels which are similarly fun (all require flash type stuff). Apparently JoWood have signed those responsible, which should be a load of fun, given some of JoWood's other releases.

Meanwhile, I've been busily playing Agents (still!) and frozen-bubble, and looking nervously at the list of things I really ought to be doing before term starts again; still, maybe I can complete both this week, and return to my usual levels of productivity, or something.

Posted by James at 00:24 | Comments (5)
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May contain traces of chemicals

Multi-coloured chicks for Easter, from BBC News Online.

I'm remarkably unconcerned by this story, on the whole; it seems a neat trick, but not especially useful or anything. However, it gives me a good chance to rant about the general stupidity of the world at large...

"Triple D Farm and Hatchery, in Palmer, injects the eggs with dye to produce multi-coloured baby chicks."

Well, no, it produces coloured chicks, which happen to be differently coloured from the other chicks, but the chicks themselves are no more or less multicoloured than they were before...

"The dye, which the farm insists does not contain chemicals, is injected into ordinary chicken eggs a few weeks before Easter."

ARGH! STOP THAT, YOU MORONS! "Chemicals" are not some dangerous force out to get you, chemicals are literally everything around you. Water is one of these highly dangerous chemicals, so obviously the dye doesn't even contain that...

Your normal complete lack of service now resumes.

Posted by James at 00:10 | Comments (0)
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