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December 26, 2004

I'm an evil criminal

[Some of you already know this story. I'm recording it here for the sake of the people who don't, and so people who know part of it can have the complete picture. Also it gives me somewhere to point people.]

I'm sure this comes as news to nobody; I mean, most people reading this have probably broken some law at some point — either some minor misdemeanour, such as speeding, or maybe experimenting with drugs in their youth, or something more major like losing the password for an encrypted file, the mark of a true terrorist. But no, I actually got caught in the act, by a carefully orchestrated police sting.

See, a couple of weeks ago, I was caught selling alcohol to a minor. In a carefully planned police operation, 18 bars in Nottingham's city centre were visited on a busy Saturday night, by 4 minors accompanied by plainclothes police officers. In 10, the minor managed to get in (in many cases past door staff), and to get served alcohol. Including at Number 10, the high class establishment (*cough*) I currently work in. In fact, I served him.

3 hours later, they came back and told me what had happened, and the possible consequences: if they chose to prosecute, I could face a fine in the region of £200, and a criminal record. My boss (as licensee) could have lost her licence, although it being a first offence was more likely to get a fine somewhere between £1500 and £20,000 — this despite not even being on the premises at the time. A few days later we (and all the other evil perps) had to report to the city's main police station, and as it happens she only got a caution, which I believe remains on her record for 6 months. I got an £80 fixed penalty notice, which presents me with two choices: I can pay the penalty, never need to admit guilt, and go on with my life; or, I can refuse to pay, and demand my day in court. This latter approach risks a much larger fine, a criminal record, and loads more hassle. It's a no-brainer.

It appears there is no defence of entrapment in UK law, if it seems that the suspect was not coerced into doing something they would not normally do. It also appears that, under the Licensing (Young Persons) Act, 2000, and therefore section 169A of the 1964 Licensing Act, what I did is certainly illegal. It's not entirely clear whether or not I had a defence under section 169A(2), but it's a slim enough chance that I wasn't about to demand my day in court.

Ironically, the reason I'm going to be more careful in the future isn't really the risk of further fines, or penalty notices; while obviously I'd rather not have to pay them, I could probably work something out, or get bailed out by my parents. But if it happens again, my boss would lose her licence; that would really, really suck, because she's lovely, and the only reason I'm still working in that crappy pub. So since the incident, I've been ruthlessly asking for ID from anyone looking under 21. Please, if you get asked in a pub somewhere, don't be offended; we're just in fear for our wallets, and our bosses' licences.

Meanwhile, your recommended reading for today is Barlow being far less cowardly with the law than I.

Posted by James at 23:22 | Comments (0)
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December 25, 2004

A Rubbish Christmas

According to BBC News, people here in the UK will generate an awful lot of extra rubbish this christmas, including 24 million extra glass jars from all the cranberry sauce and mincemeat, 6 million christmas trees weighing 9000 tonnes, 83 km2 of wrapping paper, and over 4000 tonnes of aluminium foil.

Just recycling all the glass jars would save enough energy, apparently, to make 60 million cups of tea. Now, I make that one each. So if you do your bit for recycling this christmas, I reckon you deserve a cup of tea in return. Go on, treat yourself. Mine's a decaff coffee, it seems...

I'm less sure about christmas trees, though. I'm not convinced most people bin them, these days — tips tend to have a garden waste section which is just as easily accessible as the general rubbish bit, and they certainly don't fit in most dustbins. Anyway, surely we should be encouraging people to grow fast-growing trees in large numbers, and bury/compost them at the end of the year; surely this locks up carbon in the ground, taking some CO2 out of the atmosphere... Any passing environmental science gurus want to comment on that one?

Anyway, back to watching trash on TV and digesting copious turkey. :-)

Posted by James at 17:16 | Comments (0)
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Critical Festive Thinking

I do hope you're all enjoying Christmas; while I don't have any religious reason to celebrate it, I can join in the orgy of consumerism and time off from work with everyone else anyway, right? Meanwhile, the always-excellent Church of Critical Thinking offers this excellent seasonal poem

Unrelatedly, I've now enabled moderation of comments, to foil those pesky spammers. You can bypass the moderation, though, if you have a TypeKey account, by signing in via the link in the comment interface. I'll try process the moderation queue pretty regularly, anyway.

Posted by James at 01:17 | Comments (0)
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December 24, 2004

Decaffeination

Today, I am mostly drinking decaffeinated coffee. It's actually quite nice (I managed to buy my usual brand — in fact, this was the only 5065 coffee the shop had) but the headaches are starting already. Yay addiction. Guess I'll start on the beer later.

Enjoy the festive season, whatever you choose to spend it doing, folks! I'll be mostly spending it playing another silly online game I think, although my portfolio's all tied up in HOGMANAY at the moment...

(One administrative detail: I realise my LJ feed probably exploded messily all over people's friends-pages. Sorry. This was caused by the upgrade to MT3, meaning I had to rebuild all the feed files. Feeds should now be full text, though!)

Posted by James at 13:11 | Comments (0)
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December 23, 2004

A slight change of style

So, I finally gave in and installed Movable Type 3. Expect to see some kind of moderation/authentication system for comments appearing shortly, along with a complete redesign (I'm not hugely keen on the default templates).

Everything is probably broken. I'm interested in hearing what, though, so I know what to fix...

Posted by James at 02:25 | Comments (3)
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December 18, 2004

Easy as ABCDE

Since I've been audioscrobbling, I seem to have started listening to my own collection of Ogg Vorbis and MP3 files again, instead of random online radio stations. Sadly, a couple of months ago, a tragic accident with an Ubuntu installer saw me format over said collection, and I hadn't got round to re-ripping things. Hence I've been spending a lot of time ripping CDs lately, and it seems there are two big names in Open Source CD ripping — sound-juicer and abcde. Both support most of the output formats you could ever want to use, although abcde handles a few extra. However...

sound-juicer is a very simple GUI application, with almost no configurability — on the up side, this means it often Just Works, and maybe even Does The Right Thing. This makes it very quick to start using, and probably quite friendly to the average non-geek (or at least, the average non-geek who has already got as far as running Linux). The down side is that when it doesn't do what you hoped, there's not a lot you can do about it. The entire range of configuration options covers the source CD drive, the destination folder, the structure of the path/filenames (chosen from a limited set of examples) and the output format. Not even a quality setting! There is also no way to control how sound-juicer handles CDDB data; in fact, this is what finally drove me away from it. If there are multiple listings in CDDB for a given album, s-j will simply choose the first. It is also completely unaware that an album may be multi-artist, and so the metadata in the resulting Ogg files is all but useless. Great.

abcde is almost entirely unlike s-j. It has a detailed manpage listing the bewildering array of configuration options and command line switches, and appears to only have a command line interface. This isn't a huge issue for me, but for the average non-geek could be pretty off-putting. For the geek like me, though, abcde is fantastic. Despite the huge range of options, when run with no configuration, switches or paramaters at all, it reads the first CD drive, shows me all the CDDB listings it can find for the album, and asks me to choose the most accurate. Then, in the case of a multi-artist CD, it asks me if the track names as given contain the track artist names, and if so, in which of a choice of 6 formats covering just about all the variations I've seen. Result? A directory with a sane name, filled with Ogg Vorbis files with good metadata.

So I suppose I'm saying that, if you're trying to choose between these two, you should choose abcde if you can. It really is A Better CD Encoder.

(You wouldn't believe me if I said I only opened this edit form to post an entry about stuff that happened last weekend, would you? Maybe later then.)

Posted by James at 15:11 | Comments (3)
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December 08, 2004

Audioscrobbling

More people have been talking about Audioscrobbler and last.fm lately, so I finally got round to signing up. I can't help but wonder if this will change my listening habits — will I be less inclined to put xmms on random shuffle, in case people find out I have Eminem MP3s? Will I be inclined to play my coolest tracks more often solely for the image it presents to the world? Will it stop me listening to things like URN and soma.fm?

I think it's far more likely that, as with delicious, and orkut (remember that?), I'll just give up using it after 2 days and leave a bizarre profile in my wake, with a short burst of activity and then nothing at all.

Time will tell, and I can't see it taking long.

Posted by James at 00:52 | Comments (0)
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December 05, 2004

May contain traces of mole

Over the last week or so, I've thought of (and mostly written, in my head) at least 3 of what could have been quite interesting blog entries (typically while walking home from lectures). Every single one of those ideas has been lost to the black hole that is my medium-term memory. In addition, I increasingly often find myself wanting to note something down, either for myself or someone else, but I'm atrocious at keeping track of little bits of paper.

So I've given in and bought some notebooks, thanks to clc's continued advocacy. This might mean I post a lot more often — alternatively, it might mean I never post at all, having consigned my thoughts to my notebooks. If you're lucky.

Posted by James at 01:40 | Comments (0)
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