I can’t make up my mind, but this killed me:
Is there anything worse than walking through an abandoned sewer at night when a rat jumps onto the back of your neck and in your panic you fall to floor to roll around and crush it to death, then an hour later you realise that the label from your t-shirt is sticking out and the rat was only trying to tuck it in?
It’s hardly the biggest problem in the world, I know, but it’s bugging me: every few days, Firefox (3.whatever, Intel Mac and PPC Mac versions) ignores “remember me” login cookies. I’ve checked preferences and can’t see anything. Have I missed something obvious? As the Pirate with a steering wheel down his trousers told the doctor, it’s driving me nuts.
A few months ago, I wrote a column for PC Plus suggesting that bandwidth was a utility that should be available to everybody.
If unrestricted, fast internet access is something we need – and from where we’re sitting, it is – then perhaps the solution is to expand the USO, the Europe-wide Universal Service Obligation that means every EU citizen must be able to get a landline if they want one. It doesn’t cover broadband, but it could – and if it offered financial sweeteners to providers while mandating net neutrality, it could deliver unfettered high-speed access to everyone.
Today, The Guardian reports:
[Lord] Carter is understood to be considering replacing the universal service obligation under which BT must provide all with a phone line, brought in when BT was privatised, with a new industry-wide obligation to provide broadband for everybody.
In other columns I’ve suggested making the Internet nicer by automatically emailing every post, email and comment to your mum for approval. I’ll let you know if the government goes for that one too.
It boots in less than a fortnight. It doesn’t make our laptop shoot up to 100% CPU usage for no good reason, generating enough heat to cook a moose. It goes like lightning on machines that struggled with Vista. It’s very good. In fact, it’s great. Which is why Microsoft should give it away.
The rather sarcastic Stuff Journalists Like website (which, incidentally, would be an awful lot better if the writing was better) sometimes gets a little bit too close for comfort:
Stuff journalists like: writing a book
Buried under nearly every journalist’s notebooks, papers and clips is an idea for a book.
…Unfortunately, a good percentage of these ideas for books will stay just that as journalists are usually burnt out on writing after a full day day of writing for their newspaper, blog, Tumblr and Twitter.
I was looking for something this morning and stumbled across my Book Ideas folder, where I’ve written outlines and in some cases several chapters of four or five different novels. They’re pretty good, I think, largely because only one of them is about a journalist – and he’s only a journalist because it gives me a chance to have him mutilated by gangsters, which is always good. Unless you’re writing a children’s book. But every single one of them has run out of steam, sometimes at the outline stage, sometimes after five or six chapters. The enthusiasm flags and they become Great Big Scary Things That You’ll Never Finish.
Stuff Journalists Like nails the problem: you get brain-dead when you’ve spent all day working, and when you’ve been stuck in front of a screen all day the last thing you want to do after dinner is sit back down in front of a computer again. There are episodes of The Wire to watch! Partners to talk to! Videogames you still haven’t got round to playing! Exercising to do! Magazines to read!
You’d think that the natural ebb and flow of freelancing would be ideal for fiction writing, but it isn’t. That’s partly because work expands to fill the time available, so if you’ve got a spare day then the job you’re doing will magically expand to fill that time, and it’s partly because the time you don’t spend working is spent doing admin, hiding from the taxman, pitching for new work or dicking about on the internet and pretending it’s research.
Which makes me wonder, how do other people do it? Not necessarily writing, but doing anything creative when you’ve got a full time job, a family to feed and a very short block of time before you fall asleep on the sofa? Is it just about determination and willpower, or do you need to manage your “spare” time as ruthlessly as you do your work time? I’d love to hear other people’s experiences.
David sent me a link to this Sun story:
RANDY reveller Emma Modrate repeatedly performed sex acts on her boyfriend in the street in front of dozens of appalled passers-by.
The article includes a photo of 26-year-old Emma, which I won’t repost here because it hurts my eyes.
What killed me wasn’t the photo, though. It was this detail, which added a bit more class to an already classy story.
At one stage a tramp stood behind the couple and chatted to Dougherty while the act was being carried out, Durham Crown Court heard.
To be honest, I’m only posting this so I can use that headline.
Who cares? It looks nice though.
Full details here. Summary? Fast 3G, slide-out QWERTY keyboard, touch screen, 3 megapixel camera, GPS, integrated IM, SMS and MMS, accelerometer, Wi-Fi, 8GB on-board storage and Webkit-based web applications. It’s almost certainly going to cost a fair whack of cash, though.
It’s Friday, which means time for another Techradar opinion column. Today’s offering: why Apple and Microsoft’s keynotes sucked.
I love my job.
Today, I am mostly being spammed by Snuggie. It’s a blanket – with SLEEVES!
If you enjoyed the post, make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed.
© 2010 Gary Marshall. All Rights Reserved.
Powered by WordPress. Design by 
Bad Behavior has blocked 2205 access attempts in the last 7 days.
Recent Comments