July 20, 2006

Social Notworking

"Social networking" websites are all the rage these days. I think most people I know, particularly in my age group, have been a member of at least one at some point, even if they don't recognise them as such. The famous ones that actually went by that name were Orkut and Friendster, whose main basic premise was that you signed up, told the site who you knew, and it told you who they knew. You could search for other people based on various criteria, for reasons of employment, dating, or whatever. The principle was sound, but the whole thing seems kind of pointless to me.

MySpace is at least a little more directed — the site was originally a music promotion thing, where bands could showcase their tracks, maintain a blog, etc, as you'd hope they might on their conventional websites, but this way MySpace would provide all the technological wizardry and the artists or their promoters could concentrate on the content. Now, of course, it's degenerated into the same sordid evilness that chatrooms and web forums did before it, where naive young teenagers are courted by seedy middle-aged men pretending to be rockstars/teenagers/priests, kidnapped, abused and murdered, on an almost hourly basis [Source: Daily Mail statistics department] . Apparently bebo is very similar to MySpace, but I must admit I've not looked cllosely at it.

And then there's sites like last.fm, which have no reason to provide "friends lists" and "groups", except that people seem to want them. They add nothing to the value of the site, at least for me, but still I play along and add people I know on the site as friends. I dread to think what the people behind last.fm are doing with all this data about who my friends are, though.

On the positive side, Facebook doesn't seem to have succumbed to the usual social networking rot just yet; I suspect this is because they limit who can sign up, to people with university email addresses, or email addresses with specific employers. And signing up with such an address only gets you access to the profiles of people in the same "network", in general. These restrictions a) keep the annoying kids out, and b) stop people getting randomly stalked/harrassed quite so much, a win all round.

To be honest, I'm only really on Facebook so that, in 5 years time, I'll still have some chance of being in touch with the people I went to uni with. Experience of leaving university before tells me I'm unlikely to stay in touch with more than a couple of my contemporaries by conventional means. It's a bit like a pre-arranged version of Friends Reunited I suppose...

Are there any other social networking type sites out there of interest? Do they all suck as much as each other? Answers on a comment, usual address...

Posted by James at 17:39 | Comments (1) | TrackBack
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May 20, 2006

Living together in harmony

So, you're off to university next year, or perhaps you've been there a year and you're having to move out of halls. You're going to be sharing a house with a bunch of people you vaguely know, at best. You may well be a little anxious about how things will work out; no doubt you've had the same dire warnings I got about people falling out over who pays the phone bill and who buys more or less than their fair share of washing up liquid. Never fear, help is at hand! Follow these top tips, and you'll get on famously with everyone you ever live with...

  1. Don't buy more than you have to. Don't forget, you're an impoverished student. If other people in the house are willing to buy more than their fair share of bread, milk, cheese and loo roll, let them — more fool them, after all. If people start to question whether you're really pulling your weight, stay calm. Have some justification ready, and some "facts" (don't worry about them being genuine!) about just how little bread, milk and loo roll you eat, and they'll not only accept it, but probably feel quite embarrassed that they even asked. They may even buy you presents to make up for the offence caused. You deserve them, don't ever forget how great you are.
  2. Your schedule should be their schedule. A lot of these damned layabout students like to laze about in the mornings, normally muttering something about having worked late the night before to get a coursework assignment done, or perhaps about not getting enough sleep because of the job they hold down to buy all that extra loo roll. Don't listen to them, they really are just lazy scrotes, and they're doing it on purpose. Singing loudly at 8am, or shouting to people 2 floors above you, is perfectly reasonable behaviour — think of it as doing them a favour! However, if they ever dare to make noise after your designated bed time (a very sensible 9:30pm, unless you've been allowed up specially to watch something on TV), you should be sure to let them know just how annoyed you are. Evil stares for a couple of days usually suffice, and once again they will realise your complete superiority, and practically beg you to be friends with them again.
  3. Your degree is more important than chores. Never forget that doing that Business Studies and Basketweaving degree is your lifelong dream, and you need to spend every waking minute concentrating on it, or relaxing; you can't possibly be expected to spend time on silly little things like washing up, or cleaning the house. If you do end up washing up, be sure to do as bad a job as possible, hopefully they won't ask you again. If you're very lucky, one of them might even do some of your laundry for you! If you've managed all the steps so far, you're well on the way to being the most popular guy/girl around.
  4. Your tastes are the only right options. You have way better taste than these guys. Take TV for instance. I mean, come on, they probably watch Countdown or something. Make sure you help them out by talking loudly over anything on TV they want to watch, but discourage them from talking over any of your favourite soaps — you've been working hard, harder than any of them, and you need that hour or so of escapism of an evening, before your cup of cocoa and bed. If they talk over the soaps, just be as disapproving as you can; don't worry, you are genuinely so much better than them, you'll be able to pull it off with ease.
  5. Variety is the spice of life. So, just because you've bought the cheapest coffee Aldi could sell you, don't let this stop you using someone else's Nescafe whenever you fancy a brew. Just let them know they're welcome to try your Aldi stuff any time, and it tastes just the same anyway, so what's the difference? Don't forget, this applies to all food and drink, not just coffee!
  6. Eww, rubbish! You're a cool dude, or dudette. Don't let anyone think you're the kind of person who would do stuff like empty the bin, or take the wheely bins to the street for collection. I mean, do they not have, like, maids for that? Bins are gross! (But, if you get any hostility on this one, just spend all day in your pyjamas/slippers — noone could possibly expect you to go outside then...)
  7. Shower and shower alike. Don't you just hate it when you get into the shower, and find you've run out of shower gel or shampoo? Well, sharing a house means this need never happen again! Just borrow someone else's, they won't mind — in fact, they'll totally understand! While you're there, be sure to leave the sopping wet mat on the floor afterwards; no doubt since your housemates are such slackers they'll have plenty time to pick it up when they're cleaning the bathroom later on. (Don't ever be tempted to do this yourself — what would people think!?)
  8. Going out. If you've been following all the advice so far, you'll be pretty damn popular. People are going to want you to go out and socialise with them all the time. But remember! If you give in to their demands too often, they might start to take your greatness for granted, and we can't have that. Try to limit yourself to going out with your housemates no more than once in a fortnight — that way they'll appreciate it all the more. If you have friends visiting from elsewhere, it might be convenient for you to make your rare trips out with your housemates coincide with seeing your other friends, too; think of it as making the best use of your incredibly valuable time and company! Don't worry about introducing any of your groups of friends to one another though, just get everyone together in one place and they'll get on fine — after all, if they're friends with someone as great as you, they must be great people too, right?

I hope you've enjoyed these top tips for student life! Good luck surviving the angry mob, around October or so.

Posted by James at 17:08 | Comments (2) | TrackBack
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November 08, 2005

Somewhat reassuring

The accident happened just minutes into a display which was being watched by some 15,000 people at Wicksteed Park near Kettering in Northamptonshire. A spokesman for Kettering General Hospital said two children and an adult remain in hospital. One child may be transferred to a specialist burns unit.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but, I find the appearance of stories like this about organised displays somewhat reassuring. The fact that a single stray firework injuring 11 people at a display is newsworthy means that, of the probably hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people attending organised firework displays last weekend, really rather few were injured by stray fireworks. Of course, it's sad that 11 people have been hurt, and I wish the 3 who remain hospitalised a speedy recovery.

According to statistics published this May, last firework season over 50% of firework related injuries occurred at private firework parties, with only 8% of injuries occurring at large public displays. Of course, the nature of statistics says that these charts could be used to show that indoors is the safest place to use fireworks, with only 1% of injuries being sustained indoors, but this is actually because nobody is stupid enough to use fireworks indoors. With, apparently, about a dozen exceptions, in the 2004 firework season.

As it happens, this year I missed both the big organised local display, and the little display/party put on by a local pub, since I was at work every night of the bonfire weekend; but then, once you've "ooooh!"ed and "aaaah!"ed at one set of fireworks, they're all the same, right?

Anyway, remember kids, organised displays are safer, and way more spectacular than setting off a bunch of rockets in your back garden will ever be. Also, setting rockets off along the street outside the local bus station isn't big, hard or clever. Thanks.

Posted by James at 01:45 | Comments (5) | TrackBack
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September 06, 2005

How big's a barrel?

Everyone knows oil comes in barrels. The price of crude is something like $60 a "barrel", and among its other horrendous effects, Hurricane Katrina has reduced world oil production by a couple of million barrels a day. But, almost none of this oil ever sees a barrel, instead being transported/stored in tanks, or via pipelines. Barrel is just a macro for "35 gallons".

Beer, on the other hand, almost always comes in barrels. In beer land, a barrel refers to 36 gallons, but in the cellars of most pubs you'll mostly find barrels of just 11, or maybe 22 gallons. Except casks of ale, which tend to be 9 gallons or multiples thereof.

I hereby propose that people stop using "barrel" as a unit, and just use it as a term for a type of container. Right now. Thanks! Anything else is just too firkin complicated.

Posted by James at 01:34 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
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July 18, 2005

Well under a quid

Nobody likes to feel ripped off. And a lot of people do, when they drink soft drinks in pubs. But, is this fair? Everyone seems to assume that because there's no tax on soft drinks, they should cost significantly less than beer.

Now, first of all, let me make a suggestion — if you're thirsty and can't bear to part with £2 for a pint of coke in a pub, I suggest drinking cordial with soda water. Most pubs will charge well under a quid for a pint of blackcurrant and soda; if you're feeling flush, consider asking them to put a small dash of lemonade in it as well, it tastes lovely.

That settled, what does a pint of coke in a pub actually cost? Well, to you, around about £2. To the pub, the syrup to make that pint of coke has probably cost £35 for a bag-in-a-box of syrup, which gets diluted 5.4:1 - apparently that's 141 16oz servings of coke in an ideal world, which I'm going to call 105 pints1, after you allow for what ends up in the drip trays behind the bar and so on. So, the syrup mix in your pint alone costs 33p. Then, there's the cost of having someone come out to maintain the dispenser, to fill up the gas cylinders, and the (marginal, admittedly) cost of the water. It wouldn't surprise me if this lot took the price to 50p on a pint of coke. Now consider that, of your £2, 30p is lost straight away as VAT.

So, £1.70 goes to the pub, who lose 50p of that straight away on supplying the drink. The rest has to pay for the glass you have the coke in (and replacing the glass when it breaks), the ice (and maintenance of the ice machine) you have in it, the slice of lemon, the bendy plastic straw, the staff to serve you the drink, to collect your glass, to wash the glass before it gets reused, to slice the lemons, to collect the ice from the cellar, to supervise the people doing all of the above, to organise their wages and make sure their tax is correct... and then, at the end of it all, it would be nice if the pub could make a profit, don't you think? It might encourage people to continue to run pubs.

Compare this to a pint of, say, Grolsch, in my local. As I understand it, he effectively pays about £1.14 a pint for his barrels of Grolsch, which then retails at £2.35 a pint. 35p of this is presumably VAT, so his "margin" is 86p, compared to £1.20 on the coke example. So, sure, the margins on coke are bigger, but not as significantly as some people would have you believe.

If anyone has any better figures on this stuff, I'd be interested to see them. I only started looking into this to see who was right out of the people who told me "coke in pubs is a rip off, it costs them something like 2p/litre", and the landlord who told me that he actually saves money by just having 2 litre bottles from Tesco behind the bar, instead of a postmix machine (so, he's paying about 50p a litre upwards, depending what offers are on). Turns out the truth is somewhere in between.

1 This is assuming 20oz == 1 pint; I'm not too hot on this Imperial stuff, so if somoene knows better please shout!

Posted by James at 03:35 | Comments (4) | TrackBack
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June 21, 2005

Dear NTL

Dear NTL.

No, 192.168.100.10 is not a good IP address to give to a customer. Not even for an hour. Please choke to death on a giant bunch of cocks.

Lots of love and hugs,

James.

Update: apparently, this address is what the cable modem provides when it loses touch with NTL. So, they weren't explicitly providing it, they'd just dropped my line. Which I suppose is somewhat less fuckwitted.

Posted by James at 02:56 | Comments (4) | TrackBack
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May 22, 2005

A bit of a joke

[Warning: may contain traces of football. If you find football mind-numbingly tedious, you might want to look away now]

I've come close to posting an entry like this for months, and UEFA's current crackpot scheme, which has only just come to my attention, finally swung it. Modern football is rapidly becoming completely insane.

Take the Scottish Premier League. There are 12 teams in the division, and they play each other around 3.5 times a season. After everybody has played 33 games (3 fixtures against each possible opponent), the league is arbitrarily divided into 2 halves, between 6th place and 7th place, and the remaining games are played solely against clubs in your own half of the table. So, it's quite possible for the team in 7th place (Kilmarnock, 49 points) to end up with a better record than the team in 6th place (Motherwell, 48 points), purely by having "easier" matches towards the end of the season. If anyone can tell me why on earth this is considered a good idea, I'd be interested...

Or how about the somewhat ironically named/branded "Champions' League"? The English FA (among others) now gets to enter 4 teams into the competition each year, making it more like a "highly-placed teams league"; perhaps the old name, the European Cup, was more fitting. This season's final will be contested by last season's Italian league champions, AC Milan, and a team which finished 4th in the English league, with 60 points, 15 points short of 3rd place, and 30 short of the league champions. Of course, it's somewhat disingenuous for me to complain about this, since I'm delighted that Everton have qualifed for next season's tournament, but it still seems a bit of a joke.

And then there's the away goals rule, as used in the Champions' League and UEFA Cup. In this season's Champions League semi-final, AC Milan won the first leg, at home, 2-0. In the second leg, away at PSV Eindhoven, they lost 3-1, making the score 3-3 on aggregate. I can't see why this means AC Milan played better, and deserved to go through to the next round, but apparently it does. (Non-football fans may be confused by this — hell, I am. Milan went through because they had scored more of their goals away from home than PSV.) Even more crazily, in the 2003 semi-final between AC Milan and Inter Milan, two clubs which play their home fixtures in the same stadium, AC Milan once again won on away goals, following a 0-0 draw in the leg designated as their "home" leg, and a 1-1 draw in the leg designated "away". Because, you know, that's really sensible. What ever happened to extra time and penalties? (Hmm. Looking at these 2 anecdotes alone, the rule seems to favour teams that are good at not conceding any goals at home. Is that really the intended effect?)

Is football alone in all of this? I don't follow other sports closely enough to see all the big hairy warts in the rules, but my hunch is that any sport which has become heavily dependent on television revenue, and so has its rules partly dictated by the television networks, will have strange, arbitrary seeming rules, intended to enhance the "spectacle" at the expense of sanity. I'd love to hear any examples of this in the comments. I'm also wondering if football has actually always had rules like this, and I've just only noticed the recent ones...

Posted by James at 17:26 | Comments (17) | TrackBack
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May 13, 2005

Gypsy asylum seeker terrorists

Apparently, to apply for a passport in the UK, you need to get 2 identical photographs (so no using those machines that take 4 shots in succession...) of yourself signed by either "a professional person", or someone "of standing in the community", who has known you for 2 or more years. Oh, and they need to sign your form too. For bonus awkwardness points, I can't be related to the person, even as an in-law, nor in a relationship with or living in the same house as them.

Of course, if I was the sort of criminal that wanted to get a dodgy fake passport, I'm sure I could get one of my friends to lie that they'd known me for a bit longer than they have; it's only inconvenient because I'm not willing to break the law. Great security measure there, guys! I'm sure that'll foil those evil arab gypsy asylum seeker terrorists who've come to steal our women/jobs.

Oh, and if you lose your passport, you need to report this to your local police station, however big a waste of your time and theirs you may feel this is.

In other news, if I can get a passport before then, I'm going on holiday on June 2nd! If I can't, I'm, er, not. Tumtetum.

Posted by James at 19:27 | Comments (3) | TrackBack
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March 23, 2005

From the "pointless limitations" department...

Why do manufacturers of high tech gadgets insist on imposing arbitrary limits on their functionality, for no discernable reason? I'm not talking about limiting the amount of memory in a device to lower the cost, or anything, but about limitations that someone had to go out of their way to add to the devices' firmware...

A few weeks ago, my housemate Chris had a great idea — rather than spend valuable beer money on a cool ringtone for his phobile moan, he recorded the introduction and theme tune to "The A-Team" directly from the TV, using his phone's mic. Excellent.

When I tried to do something similar, I found that while my T610 (allegedly a decent handset) has the ability to record up to 30 seconds of audio and store it in some suitable format, it is not then able to make this file into a ringtone. Sigh. It clearly has all the requisite bits of hardware and software, but for some reason Sony-Ericsson have elected not to allow their customers to do this; I can only assume the mobile networks like the revenue stream from people buying ringtones, and lean on the manufacturers to leave out features like this.

Meanwhile, clc seems to have found just as pointless a limitation of his iPod — one which doesn't even merit a cynical explanation like the one above.

I guess all hardware really does suck. Oh, except my new iAudio M3 :-)

Posted by James at 03:55 | Comments (0) | TrackBack
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January 27, 2005

Paging Dave Winer

Dear Dave,

On behalf of the rest of the blogosphere, I would like to congratulate you on your recent award, most arrogant post of 2005. You've done us all proud! It's just a shame you're no more in the running for any of the other awards than, say, I am...

See, you didn't invent podcasting: at the very least, Harry Gilchrist was audioblogging ages before you, and Wikipedia's entry on podcasting, while mentioning you as playing a big part in the automation of the process with enclosures (which, given they're part of your spec, you can take complete credit for) and special aggregators, neither credits you with the first proper implementation, nor with coining the term. I didn't invent podcasting either, but hey, I don't claim to be eligible for any awards.

Regarding best technology — deary me, Dave, you don't even have a comment or trackback implementation! The google-powered citations thing is cool, but, doesn't really offer much over a standard search function to the average user. In fact, I tried to use it to find out when you first mentioned the term "podcasting", but it wouldn't let me page through the results, so I couldn't. Great.

Sorry, but I think there are far, far cooler bits of technology out there. As for Best Weblog and Best Technology Weblog... well, my mummy says my blog is better than yours. Sorry.

All the best, and I hope this blogging thing works out well for you.

Cheers,
James.

[I emailed Dave a link to this article; I'll keep you posted about his response, if any.]

[Update: Dave says "Wow!"]

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January 04, 2005

Public Inhalation

On Monday, Toby posted an entry about smoking in public places where he proposed a free-market style alternative to a smoking ban. I fail to see how this proposal is noticeably different from the status quo, which suggests to me that, not only does it not work in theory (as I will demonstrate), but it also doesn't work in practice (as recently demonstrated in East Yorkshire).

The proposal doesn't work in theory because people are not divided neatly into social groupings of smokers and non-smokers. I don't smoke, but one of my housemates smokes regularly, and the others "occasionally". If there were a mixture of smoking and non-smoking pubs here in Beeston, I imagine when we went out we would invariably end up in the former type of pub, so I as a non-smoker would gain nothing at all from the existence of non-smoking pubs. Only pure non-smoking groups would be likely to frequent non-smoking venues, and I would be surprised if these groups are numerous enough to make running a non-smoking venue profitable. I can think of few social groupings I'm in that are exclusively made up of non-smokers, but perhaps I'm atypical — answers on a comment/trackback to that one, please!

So I don't know what to do about the problem of smoking in pubs, and other public places, to be honest. I do know I'm fed up of my clothes stinking of smoke, of my hair stinking of smoke, of coughing up crud after every night out, and of enduring the smell of smoke while I'm out. I also know I'm even sicker of these things happening to me at work1. But while I can't see a solution other than a ban, banning something because some people find it unpleasant doesn't appeal to my fluffy liberal values. Banning something because it's a danger to the health of people nearby seems more justified, but the people in the smoky pub (with the notable possible exception of the staff) are there entirely out of choice, so the number of relevant affected people is relatively low.

So if a ban isn't the right answer, and a purely free market system won't work either, what will work? Anybody?

1 You might choose to argue that I'm entirely free to find a job somewhere else, instead; this isn't entirely accurate, though. When I took on my current job, it was chosen because the hours would fit around my existing schedule, and with no relevant experience any other pub might have been less keen to take me on. I couldn't afford to factor smokiness into the decision as well.

Posted by James at 03:22 | Comments (6) | TrackBack
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