Archive for May, 2006
MySpace: full of crap
I haven’t linked to anyone slagging off MySpace for a while, so here’s a new one (some language NSFW). It’s long, frequently funny and gets extra bonus points for printing a pic of a Goth with the caption “I’m so goth, I shit bats”. But there are some serious/scary points in there too:
Before TV, people thought it would be an incredible tool for education and it would be used for benevolent purposes. It turned out that what people wanted to watch was crap, so the people who made TV made crap. This is what’s happening to MySpace. It’s a great tool at first glance, but the desire to produce crap by those in control of the content (the users) overwhelms the networking aspect almost 5 to 1.
The most depressing bit comes courtesy of the New York Times:
To expand ad sales, especially to big brands, Mr. Levinsohn plans to supplement the MySpace staff with a second sales force linked to the Fox TV sales department. He wants to expand one of Mr. DeWolfe’s advertising ideas — turning advertisers into members of the MySpace community, with their own profiles, like the teenagers’ — so that the young people who often spend hours each day on MySpace can become “friends” with movies, cellphone companies and even deodorants.
Engadget’s looking for writers…
…and yes, it’s a paid gig. The site’s looking for an afternoon/evening editor, night time editor and weekend editor for the main site, a morning and afternoon editor for the Mobile site, an HDTV expert and a podcast producer. Interested? Here’s what you need to do.
Flippism
I keep meaning to mention Prof. Batty’s Flippism Is The Key blog. It’s hard to categorise, but I really love the writing. Today’s post, The Pack, is another good one, encapsulating the bad side of school days in a few hundred words.
Ooh lordy, it’s Lordi
This Google Video proves beyond doubt that Finland deserves to win Eurovision. Lordi (pictured) have recorded the country’s official Eurovision entry, and the song sounds like a cross between Slipknot, Kiss and Cher. Extra points for the superbly bad video, too…
[Video link via Metafilter]
The new MacBooks
It’s not a surprise that Apple’s replaced the iBook with the MacBook, but what is surprising is that they support external monitors both for mirroring and for extended desktops. In other words, you can use a MacBook as part of a twin-screen setup (albeit without much graphics horsepower: the MacBooks have on-board graphics). Prices start at £749.
ID cards, again
If you’ve nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear. My arse. Devil’s Kitchen links to an Independent story that says:
An internal investigation at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has found that civil servants are colluding with organised criminals to steal personal identities on “an industrial scale”.
Ministers have been privately warned that the investigation will show that hundreds of thousands of stolen personal details have been ripped off from official databases, often with inside help. Key personal details such as national insurance numbers can be used to commit benefit fraud, set up false bank accounts and obtain official documents such as passports.
Sony’s sat-nav may be a bad buy until August
This wee beastie is the Sony NV-U50 in-car sat-nav system, which would be brilliant if it weren’t for one teeny-weeny problem: some of the map data is out of date, particularly in Southern Ireland and parts of the West of Scotland.
Sat-nav without up-to-date map data isn’t ideal. It means encountering huge scary roundabouts that the sat-nav doesn’t know about, or discovering that the sat-nav thinks you’ve gone off-road when you’re pootling along a dual carriageway. I mailed Sony to moan, and they say:
While there are no updates at present, there are plans to release these in DVD format in the near future. This has been tentatively arranged for August/September. These maps are currently under development by Navtech.
No indication of whether those updates will be free, mind you. I suspect not.
The Bad Pint
The following scenario should be familiar to any Guinness drinker. It’s the morning after the night before and you’re dying. Your head’s pounding, your eyelids are like lead and you expend what little energy you have making far-too-frequent trips to the bathroom. It’s not just a hangover, though. You’re suffering from the aftermath of A Bad Pint.
The existence of the Bad Pint is hotly denied by some people. These people are usually called “girlfriends” or “wives”. So you have a conversation that goes like this:
Wife: Jesus. You look terrible.
You: Yeah, I feel terrible too. Must have had a bad pint.
Wife: Oh, of course. The Bad Pint. Nothing to do with the way you drank your own body weight in booze.
Your wife or girlfriend is right - but so are you.
The Bad Pint really does exist, and it’s the reason why I stopped drinking Guinness when I moved to Glasgow. With lager, you can be pretty sure that you’ll get a safe pint no matter where you go. With Guinness, on the other hand, the quality varies widely - particularly if you drink in the sort of pubs where people don’t usually order Guinness, such as pubs whose customers are younger than eighty.
When you order a Guinness in a pub that doesn’t cater for many Guinness drinkers, there’s a 50% chance of disaster. That could be a contaminated pint that tastes distinctly of bleach, or whatever foul chemical pubs use to clean out their beer pipes, or it could be a pint that’s bad in some other way, such as a watery gloop instead of the creamy goodness you’d expect from a pint of Guinness.
If you’re sober and someone gives you a Bad Pint, you make a face and immediately take it back to the bar. However, when you’ve already slugged back a half-dozen pints, moved to a new pub and then been given a Bad Pint, you’re pissed enough to think “ach, I’ll drink it anyway.” The thought of fighting your way back to the bar, persuading a dead-eyed barman that the pint’s crap and then choosing something watery instead of Guinness is simply too horrible to contemplate. So you drink it, with no thought to the horrific consequences.
You’re right: the Bad Pint really does exist. But unfortunately, your wife or your girlfriend is right too. While the Bad Pint is a terrifying reality, the only reason it goes down your neck is because you’re completely and utterly pissed.
A routine matter
Something terrible happened this morning: my newspaper arrived an hour late. I know it sounds daft, but it’s completely buggered up my day.
I’m not sure when it happened, but at some point over the last few years I realised my mornings took a specific pattern - and if that pattern was disrupted, it cast a shadow over the whole day. I don’t know if it’s an age thing or just a weird brain thing, but each day I follow the same pattern: go downstairs, put on the coffee machine, grab the newspaper and then read it in a very specific order. So weekdays are the Guardian, and the order is:
* If it’s Monday, read MediaGuardian first; if it’s Thursday, Technology Guardian.
* Pick up the G2 supplement and read the back page first, then start from the beginning
* Pick up the main newspaper
On Saturdays, it’s:
* The Guide supplement
* The magazine
* The financial and business bits, and then
* The newspaper proper
And on Sundays, it’s:
* Sunday Times first: Style, then Culture, then money and business bits, then the Ecosse supplement, then the Driving supplement, then the paper proper, then News Review, and finally the paper proper
* Now, the Observer: magazine first, then business & media section, then the financial bits, then the weekend review, and finally the paper proper
I’m a bit like Rain Main in this respect: if we have guests and they grab a bit of the paper just as I’m due to read that particular section, it feels really weird if I skip a bit and read a different supplement. If the paper’s late (or on Sunday, if one of the papers doesn’t arrive, or a supplement is missing) then I end up mooching aimlessly around the house, and if I have to go out and get the paper mid-morning then it’s pretty much a waste of money, because I won’t be able to concentrate on it because the Paper Moment has passed.
I do the same with the Web, too: there’s a particular order in which I do things online, so I always start off by checking email and then looking at my various RSS feeds in a particular order - so reading Engadget before checking out my friends’ blogs, or reading MetaFilter before checking out The Register is a major no-no.
Do any of you have similar routines, or am I just weird?
How to make the press report good science
There’s an interesting discussion on Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science site about the way in which the media regularly publishes scare stories, but never prints the evidence that shows the stories were bollocks. The article talks about a favourite scare - mercury fillings in your teeth rot your brain, or something - which has been thoroughly debunked; the debunking hasn’t been reported.
Bad Science reader Tristan has a genius suggestion:
I think positive science stories should be turned into conflict ones. For example, the mercury fillings one could have got much more press if the authors of the research had offered to head butt anyone who still said mercury fillings were dangerous.