Great Thatcher-related quote

From the TV: "... when Thatcher was at a council estate victimising poor people..."


Heheh.

Ow!

Whatever way I was sitting at work today, it was obviously incorrect. My back is in bits, now. Well, not literally, thankfully, but you know what I mean.

Note to self; put more effort into sitting tomorrow.

Another fun currency error

From the BBC again:

You'd think someone would proofread these things... This one's a little more subtle than the last, but still devalues the dollar significantly.

Over 1000 dollars to the euro!

From the BBC:

The move follows a weekend of meetings with Dutch finance officials, after ING revealed it expects to make a 500m euro ($670bn) loss for the third quarter.

Note the numbers. Eek.

Feeling better

Yay, oscillating depression! Is it weird that I actually feel better after getting stuff off my chest on a blog?

Anyway, one fun thing came from that awful blog post; the following in a comment: "You're gay and I'm guessing the taker side of gay from your blog posts." For the record, I dispute the allegation (that I'm a bottom) but I find the idea that one can derive intimate details about peoples' sexual preferences from a blog amusing. Does it work on straight people as well, I wonder? "Margaret likes her men like she likes her fax machines; dripping in hot wax!" (Old fax machines use thermal wax transfer to produce an image.) Oh, I do hope so!

Anyway, nothing has changed, in particular; I'm just able to tolerate the whole thing more today. *Is a bit of a loony...*

iPhone adventure!

So, after lusting after one for the last year and a half, I finally decided to just go and get an iPhone. I'm bad at decisions. :S I was helped by the fact that my current phone is very close to death at this point, and is awful anyway; I got it a few years back when I had no money.

I wanted, ideally, the black 16 gig version; I'm not sure I like the look of the white one.

Fortunately, I live very close to Grafton Street, where there are two O2 stores and one Carphone Warehouse, plus another Carphone Warehouse in weird old Stephen's Green at the top of the street. So, I started there.

They didn't have them at all.

The other stores all had them... but, only the pay-as-you-go version. Now, let me explain the economics of the pay-as-you-go version. The contract one is 229 euro for the 16 gig version, and 45 euro a month. The pay-as-you-go one is 569 euro, and, wait for it, 1 cent per kilobyte data, up to 99 cent, then no further charge until 50 megabytes, then half a cent per kilobyte. Let me draw you a graph of that:

Yeah, that's sane. Since the big reason I want to get one is the lovely integrated browser and Internet-using apps, if I got a pay-as-you-go one, I'd be paying 30 euro a month just for data, before even considering calls and texts. And with the silly initial purchase price. Thanks, O2, but no thanks.

(This... interesting pricing model has been adopted by Meteor, my current provider, as well. As my current phone only has the silly little ancient, incredibly slow, WAP browser, this is useless to me.)

Two of the shops which had the pay-as-you-go version were unwilling to comment on when they'd have the contract one; the other said, uncertainly, that they might have a couple next week.

It's a funny situation, really; wanting to buy an extremely expensive phone, but not being able to. Bah. Amazing that there's still such a shortage.

They did, however, have the absolutely outrageously expensive new Blackberry. 500 euro or so, with contract. Why on Earth would anyone want that?

Technology I didn't even know existed is now in cheap consumer products

The other week, I was outside a crap club waiting to get in, when someone who I didn't know but who apparently me got me to take a picture of him and his friends.

...

The viewfinder of his camera drew little moving yellow boxes around all their faces. What? Can they do that? I missed this.

In an emergency, be sure to have a silly logo

First, there was CONELRAD. Yes, CONELRAD. It stands for Control of Electromagnetic Radiation. Nope, doesn't make any more sense that way, either. Convoluted system for warning people about emergencies and confusing planes using radio guidance.

From the same period:

Eek. Note the huge triangular sections of buildings flying around.


Then, there was the emergency broadcasting system. This nuclear holocaust was brought to you by Sesame Street:

And now, well, there's this:

The whole country is exploding! Except for Alaska. Sarah Palin knows how to deal with the Russians!

I'm not even going to address this absurd item:

Except to say that if you replaced 'terrorist' with 'Jew', and changed the fonts (which are awful; where does the Department of Creepy Name get its designers?), it'd fit right in beside the big Hitler poster. In case you hadn't gathered by now, I think that it's a really silly bloody name.

Hmm, I wonder what Soviet emergency propaganda was like? The Soviets generally had rather better graphic artists. I mean, look at this (I think it's a Soyuz docking with a Salyut):

Hmm, odd

I've just noticed that iTunes shows a little 'atomic' sign to the right of songs when you're playing them. Not the trefoil, the electrons-circling-the-neutron thing.

I wonder why.

Fifteen things I hate about me

I would strongly recommend not reading this article. I'm basically just writing it to vent, and if I did that in a text file on my desktop, well, that would look dangerously insane. Especially if it was my real desktop, rather than my laptop desktop; I don't think you can put text files on those. Also, I don't have a desk at home and I'm in bed anyway. Urgh. Please consider writing utter crap like this to be implicitly part of the following list.

By the way, yes, in case you were wondering, not a good day. Or week. Or month. Argh. I really don't know what I'm doing any more.

1. Constantly being subconciously convinced that I'm fat - Well, you see, I used to be fat, before I was 17 or so. As in I weighed half again what I weighed now. And never quite got the idea that I was fat out of my head. I can't really look at myself naked, for instance, never mind really being comfortable about someone else doing so. I can from a practical point of view acknowledge that I'm thinner than most people, but I can't shake the feeling that I'm fat.
2. Phobia of buying clothes - I don't really understand what this one's about at all. It's not a money thing; I have no particular objection to spending money. I just get terribly, terribly nervous when entering, or indeed walking past, a clothes shop. I can't choose clothes at all; I've no idea what would look good on me. The last time I bought clothes was well over a year ago, and the only time I'm even remotely capable of it is when rather firmly helped by a friend. It'd be tempting to say that this is purely a side-effect of item 1, but I have the same issue with buying shoes, and, surely, no-one has fat feet? That would be absurd. Oh, I have the same issue with haircuts, of course.
3. Guys - I'm generally convinced that no guy could possibly be interested in me. I think this is largely a byproduct of number 1. I tend to have difficulty talking to gay guys I find attractive, even if they start talking to me. In a situation where there are lots of gay guys, I tend to hide in the corner. If some guy does have an interest in me, as has happened once or twice (this is where it gets really weird) I tend to end up being totally paranoid about the whole thing and/or wondering why to the point of constructing bizarre hypothetical scenarios where they might be pretending to do so for a joke or whatever. This, perhaps understandably, tends to discourage them. Yep, I'm basically a loony.
4. Extreme awkwardness on meeting new people in a social setting - I'm really, really bad at it, especially if I have nothing in particular in common with them. I tend to act very oddly. This doesn't help with number 3, of course, but it doesn't help with making or keeping friends, either.
5. Short attention span - I have a tendency to strew half-abandoned projects around me like crazy. Then I have another look in six months, think 'what rubbish', and delete them.
6. Self-esteem - At times, I can't even walk along a street without thinking that people are judging me. I generally assume that they're all much better-looking, smarter, etc. than me. I hate seeing myself in a mirror (see items 1 and 2).
7. Conversation - I'm basically unable to have a conversation with someone who I have no common ground with. Even when I can have a conversation, I tend to be rather boring.
8. Weirdness - I'm a bit weird. I have unusual interests and tend to read obsessively about things that sane people find terribly boring. On the other hand, I can't stand sports, can't even identify celebrities, like a lot of music but am unable to discuss it, etc. Even in scenarios where people are expected to be a bit weird, I feel like the odd one out.
9. Incompetence - I'm not really terribly good at anything.
10. Tendency to bore and alienate people - Probably ties into just about everything above. I don't accumulate friends well. I tend to drive people away. I don't know why, it just happens.
11. The awful, awful thought of what I'll be like in 20 years - I mean, really, it doesn't bear thinking about. The male equivalent of a crazy cat lady, I should imagine.
12. Ugly - I really, really hate the way I look.
13. Envy - Horrible emotion. I overuse it.
14. Thinking about the above - I obsess about this stuff a lot. I know I shouldn't, but a lot of it is sometimes hard to avoid thinking of.
15. This blog - I mean really, it's dreadful. It encompasses almost all of the offensive qualities above (except for the clothes shopping thing, and frankly, I don't see how it could). For reasons which are unclear to me, about 150 people subscribe to it. What is wrong with you people?

So, why? Well, I was bullied constantly at school and had no friends there, of course, but this is pretty normal for gay kids and most of them grow up okay. The ugly thing is just an unfortunate accident of genetics, I suppose. I fucked up badly with college; at the beginning, I was too scared to talk to anyone, and later on, I was too fixated on being obviously not good enough for anyone to be friends with. Now, I suppose I just don't have as many opportunities for meeting people. I really wish I could go back to being eighteen and try to live that part of my life again, knowing what I do now. Perhaps several iterations would be required.

Oh, damn, this is such self-pitying drivel. Sorry. I'm depressed and lonely right now. This is why I shouldn't be allowed blog, especially after I've had a drink. I promise I'll link to something mildly amusing instead, tomorrow. 

Another fun webcomic!

Alex , a comic which turns up in the Financial Times. It's about people in the City of London. It's particularly amusing now, due to the financial crisis.

Fun web comic

This is a bizarrely compelling webcomic. It's a cartoonist who, instead of blogging, does a four-panel cartoon about his day. It's really addictive, but I don't really know why.

It's also rather sweet; him and his wife are cute together. :)

Also, I sympathise with this strip. I've done that. More than once. Though usually with locking doors.

Depressed

For the last few weeks.

Boys don't like me, computers are trying to drive me insane, and the global economy is teasing me about whether it's going to collapse or not.

Maybe I should become a monk. They generally don't deal with these things.

Of course, it mightn't work out so well. I might end up in one of those parishes with gay-marrying reverends (do the Anglicans have monks? I think they have one or two. I'd certainly prefer to be an Anglican monk than a Catholic monk, given the choice), and computerised attempts to end the universe (from an Arthur C Clarke, or possibly Isaac Asimov - more probably Asimov, actually; he writes about such things more - story in which a consultant from Fake IBM is helping some Buddhist monks with the computer they have rented with the aim of calculating all the names of God; the world ends when they have done so). I'm still pretty certain monks don't care about the recession, though.

Bah, silly boys, computers and sub-prime lending. And monks. Silly monks.

(Correction: It was Clarke, and the monks were just some unspecified form of Asian monks, not necessarily Buddhists.)

mnesia-related public service message

If, when making a backup of your cranky mnesia database (mnesia is Erlang's database system), you were to see the sinister failure message "tab copier iteration failed",  what would you do? Jump out the window in horror, right?

Scary though it seems, it isn't that bad. Shut down erlang, make a copy of your database, open up a new erlang (without mnesia settings), and, on each of the DETS tables (.DAT), do dets:open_file("myfile.DAT", [{repair,force}, {keypos,2}]).

With any luck, the copy should now be fine, and you can resume using that.

I accept no responsibility if this causes your computer to catch fire or something.

Big Brother (beta)

So, the UK government is looking at installing a system which will provide a searchable database of every URL anyone in the country has looked at for the last year or so. They want to do this to prevent terrorism, of course. Any sufficiently intrusive and/or silly government measure is to prevent terrorism, you see. Except the US war on drugs; that's just to provide a cheap labour force for when they liberalise prison labour laws and privatise the whole thing. You'll be able to rent your own serf! Anyway, back to the British Orwellian thing.

Has anyone thought about this from a practical point of view? It seems like it would be, at best, a very expensive project, and possibly verging on impossible. It's a lot of data.

There's hope, however. Google is known to be rather good at such things, and somewhat lax about its evil policy. They'd probably end up with a cutesy logo of a brown person being waterboarded in a bright-primary-colour torture chamber, of course, but that's a small price to pay for being able to make creepy surveillance queries allegedly related to terrorism in milliseconds.

At this point, all the UK police need is a name as creepy as 'Homeland Security'. It won't be easy. Give the Cheney administration some credit, that's a great name, like something out of one of those alternate histories where the US lost World War 2 and has gone Nazi.

End of the world averted for now

Dow Jones up a thousand. Hmm, wonder will it last?

Budget tomorrow. This is where we start paying for the bailout, you see.

New lows in web ads

I know that you don't want to spend too much time making your AdSense ad....

But surely you could at least use a picture that was the right size? (Click for best effect, by the way.)

Also, what a very pointless product.

Twitter spreads the gift of slowness

Twitter, popular Web2.0 thingy, is mostly known for being really bloody slow. There's now a site called twitpix, for hosting pictures for Twitter. It's beyond really bloody slow; it takes at least a minute to load a photo. It's operated by different people, and everything.

Presumably mere association causes painful slowness...

We interrupt this tedious blog to bring you an important announcement

I thought my IM app was a bit quiet today... Turns out that the domain for one of the Jabber servers I use (tcdnetsoc.org) has expired. Please feel free to add me on Google Talk (rsynnott@gmail.com) or MSN (confusingly, also rsynnott@gmail.com) instead. No stalkers, please!

From now on, I will only use IM provided by people who don't let their domains expire, or at least those who rarely do.

Twitter spam gets more targeted

Eeek! A cheap clone of Gaydar is following me on twitter !

I'm a masochist, really

I have no fewer than three blogs about database performance and scalability in my RSS reader. I mean, look at this thing. It's enough to make you very, very nervous.

*hates the horrible databases*

A disturbing thought

There is now a huge market for 'fairtrade' goods, that is, products, generally in the tea/coffee/chocolate traditional cash crop line, where the producers are paid a fair wage.

A nasty little thought on this; does it really pay the companies who produce things to produce them under dubious conditions in unstable countries with prehistoric agricultural methods, with prices fluctuating greatly due to local disturbances? Would they not be better off build up efficient communities around growing them, as used to be done with, say, iron-working? Maybe the whole fair-trade thing is, well, market segmentation.

Over-paranoid? Very probably, but a horrible idea, eh? I'd say it's far more likely that there's something nasty going on with the 'guaranteed non-blood diamonds' crowd, actually; blood diamonds are those from conflict zones and/or produced by forced or extremely exploitative labour. The people who certify their diamonds as not blood diamonds clearly have a vested interest in keeping a large part of the rest of the market bloody.

Also, why do we only ever hear about fairtrade coffee and similar? Other industries can be exploitative too, you know! The whole apple production thing in the US is very dubious, for example, and receives a lot of coverage from Human Rights Watch; Human Rights Watch was a group originally set up to monitor the filthy commies, but has now extended its mandate to peer over the shoulders of western-friendly dictatorships, and even, recently, the US itself. They have somehow twisted the concept of 'human rights' (originally, it seems, meaning having a leader who was in with a bad crowd) into encompassing ridiculous things like healthcare and a living wage. Filthy commies!

Anyway, the apples; US labour law is a bit strange about seasonal labourers such as apple-pickers, and indeed about agriculture in general. A lot of the normal rules don't apply. US labour law always struck me as very much legislation by the C++ standardisation model, actually; by the time it was put together, lots of people were already doing naughty things which ended up being grandfathered in. What, precisely, the consequences of regulating the apple industry would have been I don't know, but it certainly seems that the US avoided doing it.

Ramble, ramble, ramble; that's me.

Non-Swimming Pool

I tried to go to Trinity's swimming pool (I have a graduate membership) for the first time in a while yesterday after work. I was all changed, facing my fear of wandering about in public without much on...

There were scuba divers in the pool. Scuba divers! At first, I wondered if someone had been murdered there or something, but consultation of the clubs timetable told me that it was booked by the 'underwater' club that evening.

Sadly, this evening the kayaking club had gotten in first. Kayaking! What do they want with a swimming pool? I didn't bother popping in to check this time.

Tomorrow is clear, unless someone books it at the last minute to do naval re-enactments or similar, so I'll actually be able to go and swim in the swimming pool! Imagine!

Mushrooms getting you down?

Want to cook, but just can't face the horrendous chore of chopping mushrooms? Dunnes has got you covered! Punnets of pre-chopped mushrooms! What could be more convenient, or pointless? And at only twice the price of a larger box of intact mushrooms!

Wacky funtime with Obama and Palin!

It occurs to me that we don't really hear that much about either Biden or McCain these days. No, it's Obama and Palin everywhere you look. Two of the BBC's top five stories are about them at the moment; other highlights include an exploding snake.

First, Obama is taking his message to the people in the form of an iPhone app. Truly, Obama is the non-mad version of Ron Paul, thriving off the Internet. Please note that the iPhone application in question looks rather like the scary default blue/green theme which is default on Windows XP, and which sane people turn off immediately after installation. Actually, recent XP VM image from Microsoft, provided for the purpose of testing things in IE 6 and 8 (presumably Vista is judged to slow to be sensibly virtualised) and so on come with the saner theme, the one that Windows 2000 used, as default.

Second, and more worrying, Palin is saying that Obama is associating with terrorists. This is, apparently, because he's on the board of a charity with a man who was once involved in an anti-Vietnam-war terror groups. Now, allow me to lay out the major forms of terrorists for you, in rough bad-to-least-bad order.

Abortion clinic, gay bar etc. bombers (No legitimate complaint, always civilian targets)

Modern IRA etc. (No legitimate complaint whatsoever, like to blow up children, generally civilian targets)

Al Queda et al (Some legitimate complaint, vastly disproportionate and counter-productive response, generally civilian targets)

IRA in 70s (Legitimate complaint, disproportionate and counter-productive response, mixed targets)

Eco-terrorists, animal-rights extremists (Dubious complaint, minor attacks against civilians)

People who commit violence to avoid hundreds of thousands being shipped off to die in pointless war (Massive legitimate complaint, mostly military, police, government targets)

Mandela, Mugabe et al. (Massive legitimate complaint, mostly military, government targets)

Now, I'm not saying that these people were right to do what they did, although I would venture to suggest that they were more right than the current disgusting warmongering torture-justifying incumbent president of the United States, or the fundamentalist mad-woman who looks set to be the US's first female vice-president, president (and maybe dictator?), however, I think that serving on a bloody charity board with a university professor who used to be involved in a group which was dealing with a horrendous situation in a possibly unwise way is pretty innocent, don't you? The Republicans must really be running out of ideas if they have to stoop to this sort of smear campaign.

Americans, please vote CORRECTLY

The United States is facing its greatest crisis in decades. Not only is it embroiled in an expensive, pointless, unwinnable war, not only is it in economic meltdown, but it is on the verge of getting a complete fundamentalist nut as its president. I refer, of course, to Sarah Palin, McCain's heir-apparent in the highly likely circumstance that he croaks during his presidency. Seriously, she is mad.

Under the circumstances, there is only one thing any sane, sensible US citizen (there are some left, right?) can do. Vote Obama. Look, I like Ralph Nader. I think it would be wonderful if he became president, but it ain't going to happen. By voting for Nader, you are effectively voting for Palin. I don't like the Greens, but I can understand why some people would. Same scenario. I'm fairly certain that few people who read this blog are considering voting McCain, but if you are, you're an idiot. Really. McCain himself isn't absolutely awful, but his chances of surviving even one term are not good. Be sensible. You don't really want to see that Alaskan nutter the leader of the 'Free' 'World', do you? Please, oh please vote sensibly. You have the ability to reverse the rather nasty path that America has been going down; do it.

Entirely coincidentally, by the way, 2012, four years from now, is the year that Robert Heinlein predicted the US would become a religious dictatorship. Please bear this in mind before you vote for the close personal friend of God who fraternises with scary cult 'Jews for Jesus' and defies basic physics by seeing Russia from her window.

A solution for debt!

(Warning; not in the best taste. Does not constitute actual legal, financial or policy advice.)

So, apparently, Fannie Mae has forgiven an elderly woman's mortgage after she tried to kill herself when they were about to foreclose.

There are obvious potentials, here. Got 100 euro credit card debt? I reckon a nasty paper cut on the statement would be enough to get out of it; if you get your statements via th'Internet, just drop the monitor on your foot, instead. Car debt? Run over your hand.

I wonder what the US would have to do to have its massive foreign debts expunged? Nuke Chicago? Sarah Palin, soon-to-be-president-mother-of-her-people-and-close-personal-friend-of-god, should think about it; it's not like they vote for her anyway.