Happy last-day-of-decade, everyone!

Ah, the Noughties. The decade in which we discovered that America won't let a little thing like the collapse of its only credible enemy take it off a constant war footing.



The decade in which one web boom ended...



And another began.



In one span of ten years, the US got its stupidest president in fifty years (see above), and possibly its smartest.



Meanwhile, we stuck with the usual suspects.



As did the UK.



Global warming went from something a little obscure to a major problem of the day.



We had another oil price spike.




House prices increased indefinitely...



Except when they didn't.



Of course, the end of the decade doesn't put an end to any of this stuff. I have no doubt that the Great Recession will stand astride the Noughties and the 10s like a Colossus made out of dubious securities and consumer debt, rather than the traditional bronze.

And there's another thing. What do we call the upcoming decade? The noughties was bad enough; the 'tens' seems totally unsatisfactory. I suppose we will just have to put up with it until the twenties, when we'll be back on safer ground...

Since 2000, I've gone from being in school to finishing college, working on server-side stuff for console games, and now working on web games. What will I be doing in 2020? Am I now typecast as a games programmer or might I yet escape and end up writing Enterprise Goat Management software, or whatever? Only time will tell. What were you doing ten years ago?

Oh, and anyone who leaves a comment that the decade doesn't really begin til 2011 will get such a slap.

Infuriating OpenOffice behaviour

Just discovered something horrible which OpenOffice does. Ordinarily, in MacOS, you switch between windows belonging to a particular application by hitting CMD-`; this is standard and handy and part of the windowing system, and I've never seen any application not honour it.

Until now. Using OpenOffice for Mac, CMD-` changes from normal to scientific notation in spreadsheets; they've hijacked the normal behaviour. Horribly annoying, and no good reason whatsoever for it. Grr.

Happy Christmas!

A weird one, this year... I'm never entirely at ease with Christmas. Anyway, hope everyone had fun.

Noted dreadful old bigot Jan Moir being ridiculous again

Remember Jan Moir? She's the one who masterfully demonstrated that being gay causes you to die, and got more Press Complaints Commission complaints than anyone, ever.

From an article on how the EVIL GOVERNMENT is going to tell children that domestic violence is bad:

Surely if you insist on lessons to teach small children it is wrong for men to hit women, then you are implying that all men are a potential menace. Won't the end result be the kind of moral indoctrination that teaches all infants how to hate men?

Wuh? Similarly, we should not tell children that it is wrong for people to murder each other, lest they grow up to hate humans.

One of the real problems to face women in this country is honour crime. Is the Government addressing this properly? No, of course not. They are far too terrified of upsetting any ethnic minority to tackle the issue.

No! The government is doing nothing about this rather rare and nasty crime, except prosecuting the perpetrators! Not good enough! They should probably set fire to some foreign-looking people, or something.

I love the use of 'real problem' there; are we to infer that while 'honour crime' (~12 victims per year in the UK) is a real problem facing women, conventional domestic violence (millions of victims per year in the UK) is NOT?

So, basically, the message seems to be that the government is unfairly attacking PROPER ENGLISH WIFE-BEATING, when it should be concentrating on the nefarious things that The Foreigns might do.

And then there's this deranged item.

Father Christmas closes the curtains and smiles. Up close, he looks cosy and content in his thick flannel coat - edged with ermine, how daring! - with its matching trousers and shiny boots.

He smells clean and resinous, like a cold wind shimmering through a stand of pines, and his cheeks glow like apples.

So, Jan. Gays, bad. Wife-beating, good. Foreigns, bad. Pornographic fiction about Santa, good.

I don't know what possessed me to look at her articles, actually; they're just depressing.

EDIT: Ooh, I just noticed this in the wife-beating article (on the subject of how things were just fine back in the good old days when the government didn't take a position on spousal abuse:

We did not rear a nation of monsters. We did not try to invade Poland or seize the silk routes. Did we get any thanks for this? No, we did not.

Jan Moir, thank you for not being quite as bad as Hitler.

Goings-ons with the ESB bill

We recently moved. Now, part of the process of moving is that on your last day, you take your final ESB reading, and tell them about it, then pay the remaining balance immediately. In theory, they would like you to move the account to your new place, but in practice this would require you to move out of the old place at the latest the day you move into the new place, so doesn't seem practical.

So, I gave the ESB the latest reading, and was told 'oh, you're in credit for LARGE_AMOUNT; we'll send you a cheque'.

It turned out that they'd been running on estimates of what our usage was, rather than actually reading the meter, for some time. The daytime electricity usage lined up, more or less, but they had massively overestimated nighttime usage... that is, the electricity for the storage heater. In fact, it seemed that we'd been on estimates since probably early this year.

Of course, early this year, it was cold, and we were using storage heaters a good bit. Shockingly, however, we were not using storage heaters all the time all through the summer. It would seem that their estimation procedure doesn't take this into account.

Now, we used to live in a small building, and I suppose it was a good bit of trouble for them to check all the time, but I can't help wondering a bit (because I'm a little paranoid) whether it's entirely accidental that they did proper readings when it was cold and then based estimates off them when it was warm. This basically amounts to an interest-free loan for them; they do eventually give the over-estimate back, but of course they don't pay interest on it. I'm sure it's entirely accidental, but it does work in their favour.

At any rate, it seems a bit crazy that they'd take estimates for a night-time meter (pretty much only used for storage heaters and the like, in most places) at a cold time, and expect usage to be the same in a warm time. Silly ESB!

Daily Mail discovers NUCLEAR FOREIGNS!

The Daily Mail discovers Vladimir 'Stalin' Putin's scary plan to build nuclear rockets!



NUCLEAR! NUCLEAR! SCARY NUCLEAR RUSSIANS.

Please note that this article is by that esteemed journalist, DAILY MAIL REPORTER.



Rarr! Gordon Clown!



Yes. Now that you mention it we should probably stop using those launchers designed by the Sumerians.

Word of the day: Lude. That's LUDE

GOP.AM was a link-shortening service launched by the US Republican Party, it seems, and then pulled after a few hours when it became clear that people were doing naughty things with it.

From the TOS:



There will be no lude content! Lude! I assume that this is where yule meets lewd? Jesus pornography and the like? I can see that America's God-bothering party wouldn't care for that.

EDIT: It's back up, and lude content is no longer banned. That's a pity.



Also, no HTML escaping! For shame, GOP! Here is Mr Obama, in your website!

Finally! Some compensation!

So I apparently look younger than I am; I get IDd a lot and so on.

Well, look. Apparently, this will make me live longer. Except, of course, that it's a BBC health article, so it's probably only true in the same way that red wine will cure or cause cancer depending on whether it's Thursday.

Fun with TV licenses

I recently moved house. As such, I need to move my existing TV license to the new address. Now, for whatever reason, the TV license business is controlled by the post office, an organisation otherwise chiefly noted for moving letters, and providing postal orders, and other odd old-fashioned things. So I suppose one can't hope for too much from their website...



Please note that you should be using a browser from at most eight years ago to be allowed pay for your TV license. Also note wacky capitalisation. Have you moved House?

I've used this site before, to renew my old license. This is pretty handy; they send you a letter with a reference number (different from the license number) and a PIN. I'm sure, though, if I simply want to change my address, they don't expect me to have the reference number from eight months ago...



Yes, yes they do. Bah. I'll ring them tomorrow, then.

Unsettling lift sign

I'm not entirely sure I like this In case of "emergency" business.

And as for the bottom sign, well, really, has smoking ever been considered acceptable in lifts? I'm pretty certain that even back in the day that it was legal to smoke on a plane, smoking in lifts was at least frowned upon.

I'm not sure what this says about my friends...

From Foursquare; my friends' favourite places are, apparently, well:



The Front Lounge is a gay bar; as for the roundabout...

Terrifying Facebook ads

Facebook ads seen recently:



Care for a wacky fetish?



Or if that's starting off on the wrong foot (ahem), why not sign up to this Internet bank for the manically insane?

I have no idea what it is I've got in my Facebook profile, that it shows me these horrors.

Clever new method of encouraging users to stay active

Recently, I've noticed that a lot of websites, when sending out reminder mails, or mails saying that someone has looked at your profile, or whatever, include a link to view the activity in question which logs you in automatically; they include an authentication key with it. Clever, because it lowers the barrier to the user doing something on your site, but surely sending what amounts to a permanent login, valid even after you change your password, is just a little insecure?

Setting the default browser in MacOS; gah!

Normally, I love MacOS, of course. It's brilliant; far better than icky old Windows (even the much-hyped Win7) and a better desktop system than Linux.

However, I just discovered something really rather silly.

I'm trying out Google Chrome on MacOS, as it finally seems to be in a usable state, and I like it on Windows. It lacks an acceptable equivalent to the brilliant ClickToFlash plugin, which I like to use to ward off horrible, horrible Flash, but apparently Firefox-style extensions are coming soon, so that will hopefully be remedied.

Now, obviously, if I'm trying this out, I want to use it as my default browser for the time being. How do you set the default browser in MacOS? The System Preferences app, perhaps? No, don't be ridiculous.



You set it in the General pane of Safari's preferences. Obviously. Default mail client? Mail.app's preference panel.

Of course, pre-Tiger, you did this in System Preferences but presumably that was just too sensible...

I'm obviously not the only person who thinks that this is a little silly; someone has actually made their own system preference pane to do it.

The Christmas advertising game gets dirty

Just saw two ads within a minute of each other.

The first was from Tesco, for Christmas food. They were highlighting the fact that some of their food is half-price for Christmas. Including... Christmas puddings! In other news, Easter Eggs will be half-price for Easter!

And then, an ad from another non-Tesco supermarket for their Christmas food. With a snatch of an instrumental from Christmas Wrapping by the Spice Girls. A song which contains the lyrics "Tesco has provided me with the world's smallest turkey." Nice try, subliminal advertising!

Erm... Okay, then

So I saw a reference to some character from the Diary of Adrian Mole, which I have never read, and googled it... Only to be presented with this:



I'm pretty sure someone in Italy is asking should they read the Diary of Adrian Mole or the Diary of Anne Frank, which is pretty disturbing, when you think about it.

Bizarre ad from Smith Micro

Smith Micro is one of those odd software digital distribution companies; you know, the ones with awful payment systems that don't work properly. Anyway, a while back I registered some piece of shareware through them, so I'm on their mailing list.

They just sent me this ad:



I thought it surely must be a parody, possibly at the expense of the ever-growing Adobe Creative Suite or something, but no, it exists...

BBC Have Your Say comes to the Guardian!

Comment on a Guardian article about the immediate need to do something about climate change:



Truly worthy of the hall of fame of ridiculous comments from BBC Have Your Say, Mail and Sun articles. You'd expect a little better from Guardian readers, though...

Generic personal drivel

So, I have, to some extent, put my life on hold for the past couple of years, due to busyness. I am finally, finally becoming somewhat less stressed, but it's strange; I'm not really sure what to do now. The great thing about being stressed is that it keeps you from worrying about less immediate stuff; I haven't dwelled on my apparent complete inability to have a relationship for some time, for instance, but now I'm involuntarily thinking about this sort of thing again.

I'm not sure where I was going with this post.

Foursquare!

Foursquare is, well, some sort of social network thing. I think. It's on the iPhone, and you can tell people that you've gone to places. And then you can become mayor of places (that is, places like coffee shops)... or something. Oh, here's a thing; to become the 'mayor' of a place you have to upload a photo. But can you upload a photo from the iPhone, with its... y'know, camera? No, of course you can not; you must use the website. Fools!

Anyway, if you're on this thing, add me! Because it's weird, you don't add me via a username, you add me via searching based on my name or phone number. This is all very strange.

Bonus weird location-based social network-oid thing: Google Latitude! I... have not idea what this is for. It works on the iPhone, quite nicely; you get the impression that Google is definitely moving away from doing proper iPhone apps in favour of nice looking web apps. But I don't really see the point. You add friends, and they can see where you were last time you used the app or something?

Poor, poor old Microsoft

Twitter has released a new mobile web interface. From the article:

This preview works best on @Webkit browsers – Android, iPhone, Nokia S60 and Palm Web OS phones all come with these browsers installed. Other browsers like @BlackBerry work too, but we haven't done all the fine tuning yet.

(Please note that Twitter is trying to spread a strange convention of using an at symbol when mentioning various things, to refer to their twitter feed. I shall not indulge it.)

So, Webkit and Blackberry, then. Not even a mention for poor little IE Mobile, which tries so hard to please, assuming that you like extreme slowness and rendering on about the same level as IE5?

Really, it is most unfair. Microsoft goes to all that effort (one assumes) and not even a namedrop? Not even "Microsoft's crap old IE Mobile, however, will not work"? A shame.

Reddit; now with guilt trips

Reddit's new "something is broken" page:



No, that's okay.

Lupins? In MY cereal?!

From the allergy information on a packet of Spar (or Centra, or Londis, or one of those things) corn flakes:

May contain traces of peanuts, shell-fruits (nuts), soja and lupin

Okay, okay, peanuts, fine. Soja - I assume that's soya. Shell-fruits (nuts)?! Who on earth calls nuts 'shell-fruits'?

And then... oh, then... lupin. LUPIN. I mean, really, what?