What does the doctor have to say on this turn of events.

• Fuck Europe
• Fuck the Euro
• Fuck Gordon Brown
• Fuck Tony Blair
• Fuck New Labour
• Fuck Politics

and most importantly

Fuck off Brussels

We will probably get there in the end. I have a shitty red passport (although I am probably on most no-fly lists, and a fugitive from the Swaziland government) so it is basically inevitable. But does it mean I will be able to move to Germany and slouch of the state there? will it fuck. They have proper laws, and proper politics that protect it’s citizens. When moving to Europe will mean Britain values its citizens then you can unfuck all of the above, until then…

FUCK OFF!!!!!

It’s twatter, err, sorry, twitter gone nuts… and for free, oh, and the promise not to sell your personal data… but seeing as its opensource freeware all round, the data is also free, and so it is mostly given away for free - obviously you have the option not to use the service

twatter/identi.ca is a public timeline that subscribers can submit their menial day to while other subscribers can be informed of certain ‘tweets’ from their buddies. When facebook took off, I kinda got on that particular band wagon for a while, but this one… I’m really not sure what the point is.

For example, while I was hamming around:

• Matt was using gwibber and facebook.
• thomallen was having lunch with his wife
• sirclown82’s laptop froze completely to where Skinny Elephants wouldn’t work
• damcla was eating pasta for dinner

Since you can opt to get SMS’s from twatter (and this option is coming soon to identi.ca) when your buddy announces the above, you get charged… I suppose this is it’s own private irony, but it will lead to people policing it, or not using it. Hey, I’m all for more taxing of stoopid people.

In May 2007, there were over 111 twitter look-a-likies internationally… why? who knows, but there looks like there is a need to share every damn second of your life with your buddies… But see how difficult it is tweeting your vinegar stroke… Well, twitter are soon to offer a voice to tweet service… if they can keep their site up for longer than 5 minutes.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure there is a niche somewhere for this junk. I mean “it’s the telegraph system of web 2.0″ says an obviously deranged author and technologist (man I hate that word as well). I did find one fond reference that made me smile, and almost restored my faith in the stoopid. While googling about what twitter is, I found the wikipedia article, and the bit about twitters use in the media. Apparently some bloke got arrested in Egypt and didn’t have his phone confiscated: he then twatted his mates who then arranged for the press, the US embassy and a lawyer to get involved pretty quickly.

The other one that amused me greatly was the first trade union twitter service was set up in June 2008…

All out

These are words that you cannot say properly without guesswork or knowing the context, since the same written word has 2 completly different meanings, let alone pronounciations, for example:

Polish

• The noun meaning denoting being from poland
• The verb meaning to buff up to a shine

Read

• The act of interpreting something that is written or printed
• The past tense of the above

The use of “Ough”

This is a really annoying part of the English Language why does this have so many ways of being pronounced. 

• Thought
• Though
• Thorough
• Through
• Enough
• Cough
• Hiccough (Pronounced Hiccup - but originally correctly spelt hiccough until idiots got hold of the english language… o.k. more idiots, after those that spelt it like that in the first place)

I read a really cool essay on simplification of the english language once, and I can’t seem to find it any more… I’ll see if I can dig out out. But the other issue we have as a by-product of this madness is demonstrated in the following sentence - Count number of letter ‘F’s.

Finished Files are the result of years of Scientific study combined with the experience of years.

I bet you didn’t get all 6 of them, and I bet you missed most of the ‘of’s since we say it “ov” and when reading we are trying to interpret what we are saying not analysing the text.

<sigh> Well, at least it’s still in beta.

For information, I will be banging on about “built around Safari” throughout. I know that technically its built on top of the web toolkit that Safari is built on, but a lot has also been taken from Safari itself, so technically, until Chrome becomes a new product I will probably be coining the phrase Safari2 a bite later as well - deal with it.

While Google Chrome doesn’t have any really radical down sides, I don’t seem to be able to bring myself to use it as a fully fledged browser, and it only has a couple of interesting up sides - not nearly enough to cause me to spontaneously googasm.

The only reasonably cool thing I can see is the “application shortcut” feature. This is the bit that allows you to store a link and have it launch in a window without all the “chrome-isms” which aren’t actually all that many in the first place. The benefit here is that if you use web-mail for example, it can be saved as a link on your desktop, start menu or quick launch and… well, that about it really. pretty similar to actually saving a shortcut to the website in the first place. Google docs, Google mail… If you’ve just had multiple googasms, then Chrome does make these apps (and other web site/apps) look a little nicer - other than that though, not more features that I can see.

Another “nice” feature is the sumary home page. Instead of your normal google homepage the chrome homepage can be set to show you mini screenshots of the sites you have visited recently. Wooo. This page seems to be the only place you can access book marks as well.

It is pretty pretty. With Vista glass console the ‘etched’ banner is really nice, and it does resample scaled images a little nicer than Internet Explorer.

So where do I start with the “googrumbles”. 

The most annoying feature for me as a developer is that it is another flippin browser to code for. Not happy with the 2 mainstream browsers in the world - Firefox and IE - I now have to code for the third most annoying browser on the planet - Safari. Luckily the majority of sites I have visited that work smoothly in Firefox seem to work pretty well in Chrome. Ironically however the Cascading Stylesheet (CSS) changes you can add to control both Firefox and Safari toolkits invalidate the CSS - meaning that your site is technically not W3C compliant. Oh, and the flash uploader in WordPress does not work - even with the flash plugin plugged in and working.

My only other real annoyance is the complete lack of any useful plugins. You do get the dictionary “plugin” by default (which does not work in rich text fields by the way), but that’s about it. Since it is built around Safari though you can get Flash, Shockwave and Acrobat components as separate downloads from the vendors, however you are currently forced into needing an experimental version of Java to make anything javay work. JRE 6 update 10 will soon move into mainstream so this will become less of an issue. If you want anything like Firebug, Adblock, Fasterfox or nay of the thousands of useful plugins you can get for Firefox, well, tough. Maybe when Chrome comes out of beta people may start writing stuff for it

A couple of other niggles are that the browser has problems displaying lists in that the ball in LI items seems to render as a blocky plus sign, and the way you navigate the cursor though a text field is odd in the word boundaries.

In summary my beloved reader, if you got it already then more power to ya. If you are thinking about getting it, well, you can probably not loose any sleep because you don’t have it - you’re not missing much.

Those of you who know me will know that I don’t really listen to every word that is said in a sentence so I can multi task quite effectively, however before I honed the skill my brain would fill in the gaps with words that were topical for whatever reason… this tended to lead to some pretty interesting selective hearing issues.

It was my second or so trip to the good ole U.S of A and after a 7 hour flight in cattle class I was somewhat jet-lagged. Standing in the immigration line I heard a woman shout “I’m not black, if I can I’ll marry Ken”

A couple of things occurred to me, first, who the hell is Ken, and by the way lady, you are black - I’m English and on our forms … oh, African American!!!

Personally I would like to have seen hilary get it… Not in that way!!! But I guess someone who has a few bad days a month being in charge of the worlds foremost nuclear arsenal could be seen as a bad thing.

It’s interesting to note though, that a person who has a few bad days every month and a non-black black guy both outdid a decorated war pensioner in the popularity contest.

People who claim perpetual motion is possible - whack jobs.

People who claim over-unity is possible - whack jobs.

People who claim that magnets can power things for a long time - less of a whack job.

For them among us who don’t know what unity means in this context, and got confused about over-unity above, this is a buzz-word for “violator of either the first law of thermodynamics, the second law of thermodynamics, or both” so you can see, for a start, its a whole lot more catchy. Boiled down over-unity means you get out more energy out of your device than you put in.

I think that one of the closest to being validated example is Howard R Johnson’s magnetic motor. People only mumble under their breath that “Mr Johnson is a whack job, but whatever, he still violates the laws of physics.”

Actually though, magnetic motors have more going for them than you may think. Lets look at the first law of thermodynamics for a minute. This law states that energy cannot be created or destroyed and can only be transferred from one type of energy to another by the performance of ‘work’. For example a battery has a stored amount of energy, if you have a very closed loop of wire with a light bulb in, it will remain lit while there is still energy in the battery… but when the battery goes flat, where did the energy go?

Basically the energy gets turned into light that you can see as well as heat.

But, what if it powered a motor. And this motor was attached to a dynamo (a motor in reverse) and it charged the battery? This may seem to work for a while, but eventually the energy stored in the system would leak out because of noise that you hear as the motor spins as well as heat in friction in the motor spindle and windings.

So back to magnetic motors. When you see people’s response to stuff, alright you the videos are like alien autopsies, so obviously they are hiding something, but debunkers blame the hidden drill. In actual fact there is no physical reason why magnetic motors could not actually work. So where would the additional energy come in, how useful would they be…

Bear in mind that to magnetise something takes a lot of energy itself - just like a battery - so why can’t you use a magnet to power something. Also like a battery, magnets wear out with over use, over loading or banging with a hammer etc. So, the argument now turns to how much energy can you get for your expenditure.

If you buy a bunch of magnets cheap enough, then they will have already paid for the energy it took to magnetise them. So, if you can use enough magnets to replace a bunch of batteries, then technically you will have free, clean, energy.

Based on this model however, if you grow marrows from seed and then put that money to your electricity bill, the same thing is occurring - and the plus side is that no-one will call you a “laws of physics defying whack job”

Buddy: Google chrome is so cool, it has a spell checker built in.

The Doctor: Yeah, but so does FireFox.

Buddy: Yeah, but this is ‘built in’, straight out of the box and not a plug-in

The Doctor: yip. I’m moist. But if you wanted a german dictionary though, you’re a bit screwed as it only comes with US English, and you have go select another language in the options, and then it downloads an new plug-in, and this has been reported as a bug. Whoop!

And my buddy is right the spell checker magically scans all know human language to determine what you’re up to, or has every single dictionary built in… it’s just truly magical… check out the wobbly linage on that bad boy:

There are a couple of issues with the out of the box stuff, i.e. spell checker seems to be the only plug-in already installed by default, for example, you tube has an issue:

The best bit is that the link above for you tube actually came off their own chrome features site… Oh, and the one that comes up magically when you first install it. In fact the page you see straight away is really a bad advertisement for the product, as it to has issues with plug-ins.

So without even reviewing it, my advice is sure, join the bad-wagon of idiots rushing out to install the latest piece of stuff. If you wanna browse the web though, well I’m guessing you already have at least 2 products installed that do that already.

Commenting to the missus over my meatball marinara at how young parents are allowing their kids to grow up these days , LBC was commenting on compulsory sex education for 5 year olds.

What the hell is the world coming to.

There is preparing your child and then there is, well, stupidity. Don’t get me wrong, kids are getting down to the dirty a whole lot younger these days, and looking older a whole lot younger but a 5 year old being taught about sex. I am pretty sure they won’t be showing hard core pornography, but please. I appreciate that a lot of parents are unable/unwilling to discuss this topic with their kids at all, so the state should help out, but age 5?

I had to wait till I was 18 before I could find anyone to sleep with me, and even then it took a few weeks of work, and a whole lot of beer on the night, however I have friends who lost their virginity at age 12, and at this age I reckon kids could be able to handle the more basic components of sex, certainly the fun side, but AT AGE 5???

Yes, there are some cultures in the world that don’t really wait for puberty to start before marrying off their kids, but not at AGE 5!!!!

Back off Brussels!!!

When this is all over, and hopefully I am not wearing a very close fitting white jacket, I will be proud in the knowledge that even if no one else knows, you and I will know that not one single thing went according to any known plan conceived by human kind… yet we beat it anyhow.

If anyone attacks this hai-koo between now and that comfy sweater wearing moment, hide the stapler.

However, I just read a glorious story today. I may have to move to peru, as there may be as many as 8 fewer games to suffer this season.

being the paranoid type, I use PGP encrypted disks for a lot of my data. It can slow playback of movies, but I found that a quad core 3GHz CPU and SATA II seems to remove most of the latency

Anyhow, due to a lack of Vista support in my free edition of 9.3, just over ago I purchased a pukka copy of their (not inexpensive) desktop software. Recently the bit that mounts disks broke and now I can’t access my sensitive data. Turns out it’s only the latest edition that is compatible with XP service pack 3. My options are to forget about my data, or pay to upgrade to the latest version, and by pay they really mean pay. I can purchase (at the full retail price) the regular edition, or get a discount on their Pro edition, which is still more expensive than the entry level edition.

Another interesting consequence is that my support account has also been cancelled, apparently the use of the word “extortion” is against their acceptable use policy.

Dolphin loving is really not advised. True, Dolphins are among the mammals that have sex for fun, but with each other. They call it a blow hole, but please don’t try it as there is a muscle powerful enough to sever a leg… If you happen to be another bottle nose dolphin though…

http://www.nowpublic.com/environment/dolphin-blow-hole-job

You can imagine the branding board. Hmm, if we blame the fishermen for the death of the dolphins, we’d have to do something about it, I know, lets blame the tuna for the way people hunt it.

Besides, all canned tuna is dolphin friendly… well, unless you throw a can actually at a dolphin, but generally a small chunk of a dead fish cannot hurt a dolphin - oh, sorry, I forgot, there is the choke hazard as well.

There is another interesting angle. Apart from all the turtles and other porpoises that are being caught instead of dolphins, what about the over farming of tuna itself. Tuna is being caught in unsustainably high numbers that soon we will have no tuna left to be friendly to dolphins with. What we need is tuna friendly tuna. It’s probably a good job Linda McCartney is dead or we would probably have more sawdust based products filling our shelves.

Hey, no dolphins were hurt in the writing of this item so that makes it dolphin friendly to.

For the lower class morons among us:

• Fawning: (verb) means to gain favour though flattery.
• Doggerel: (noun) means a comic verse of irregular measure.

Any clearer?

Fuck off Paxman.

The thought of a bunch of doddery old blokes deciding how technology should be invested is a very worrying thought indeed. I think it will be fine though, as long as if women are allowed to be invloved, they don’t show anything above the ankle.

The interesting point that ties in with the incontinent elite is that they are going to have a debate, about issue arising from a security report from over a year ago… Well at least you can’t accuse them of knee-jerk over-reaction.

Oh how a lot has changed.

In the last 12 months I have crossed paths with British Airways on about 5 occasions and each one of them was wholly unsatisfying, bordering on downright shit.

Terminal 5, our flagship terminal with it’s 30 mile per hour baggage handling facility is, to be quite blunt, shit.

Today, picking up a family member it was over 30 minutes before before baggage started “arriving”. and a further 45 minutes until it was “delivered”. so what happened with this state of the art, 30 mile per hour baggage delivery system? Or, is it a 30 mile per hour baggage delivery systems because baggage really does have to do a 22.5 mile lap of London?

Oh, and while I’m at it, World Traveller Plus? forget it! Go the hundred quid extra and fly Virgin Premium Economy. What does the 300 quid “Plus” upgrade get you with BA? well, a seat that’s up to 2 inches wider and has up to 7 inches more leg-room, and headphone jack that STILL digs in your thigh if you are “big-boned” (can’t say “fat” in case I offend some lardy arsed twat). That’s it.

Virgin Premium Economy? well, take a look:

• A seat that’s up to 3.5 inches wider and having up to 7 inches more legroom.
• Preferential boarding with First and business passengers.
• Preferential baggage handling.
• Real cutlery (well, possibly metal substitute, but it looks and feels like real metal).
• Real cups for your coffee AND/OR tea.
• Coffee AND/OR Tea when YOU want it.
• Friendlier staff that are nearly always smiling, not just superficially when you talk to them.

BA, sort it out. You may have really some hot stewardesses, but unless they serve punters naked it won’t entice me back on an aeroplane of yours any time soon.

the Register post that launched a thousand rants took a turn today.

I can see the management meeting that signed this off.

Editor: So, what can we do to really put the wind up Google and their pesky street map project?

Reporter: A rousing story about a get-together sit-down prtest round the camp fire?

Editor: Hmmm… lacks luster, need some techno lilt.

Reporter: Hmmm… o.k. what about using their own technology against them! track their movements on Google Maps!!!!

Editor: SOLD!

At least there is one comment that makes me smile through the woeful head shaking- “The result is this wonderful Web 0.2 mashup charting their inexorable progress”

O.k. maybe I re-love the Register, but I don’t get this whole hatred toward the Google maps project. Sure for those who don’t like photographing their genitals in the reflection of a kettle they want to sell on e-bay, there may be a little embarrassment if you’re caught ‘flay-grande’ but are you so seriously worried that the unedited versions of you taking it up the shufter will make it onto the net? Or that some human may actually catch a glimpse of your guava when kissing good bye to the milkman?

Face it, your husband is gonna recognise his brother doinking his missus - do it some place else.

Invasion of privacy is being used to try and stop the rovers in opels, CRAP! if you like spanking the monkey with the windows open then there is no expectation of privacy, a person on the street can see you… so can a person with a camera. O.k. the 800mm telephoto lens used for 7 weeks continuously may constitute ’stalking’ however a car driving past in under second is hardly gonna capture your life story.

“PREPARE” I say.Take photos of you and the missus naked, blur out the faces yourself so that you can ensure a good job, and then post them strategically around the front of your house… In the words of Cartman Steve Austin “That’ll really piss them off!”

Bear in mind though, the privacy laws work the other way too. Remember the guy who was told to take down the 25 foot shark hanging out his roof… Oh, no wait, he won retrospective planning permission!!! So, a 25 foot penis anyone?

I am so looking forward to the things people will put up there in the same vein as the google earth conspiracy I commented on a while back.

Today’s post in the Register captures the moment.