In 2005, the world watched as the G8 summit was held in Scotland and Bob Geldof cashed in on it with the Live 8 concerts.
In 2010, Canada is hosting the G20 summit.
So where did the other 12 come from?
June 28, 2010
June 21, 2010
Random Button
Earlier on, I was setting a video taping at work and the Sky+ box I have there was tuned to Discovery Science. On air at that moment was a programme about a building. Not overly interesting really apart from the fact that the university they were at was Plymouth UK (I’d imagine there is a Plymouth in the US and that there’s a university there…).
And the lift in this building had a button marked R which is for Random. So people can press this button and the lift will pick a floor at random to take them to. Apparantly, this is to get people to explore the building more than they would do.
So I started to think, what other places and things would benefit from a Random Button?
- MP3 or CD Players: OK, has already been done. And they do benefit from a Random Button.
- TV Remote Controls: Have you ever flicked through the TV channels and found something quite interesting on that you wouldn’t have found otherwise? Think about it…
- Internet: Browse the Internet by pressing a random button and see what happens.
- Sat Nav: Have a Random Button on a sat nav device, press it and see where it takes you. Hopefully it won’t drive you off a bridge or onto a railway. I think they’re getting better now though.
- Food: There’s a line in ‘dinnerladies’ where the main character Bren says that she takes the labels off her tins of food at home so she doesn’t know what she’ll have until she opens it. Perhaps Internet shopping sites should have a ‘random basket’ button which will just fill up your shopping basket with random items up to a certain amount.
Actually, this is harder than I thought. Any ideas?
* Footnote: As it happens, there were some other intresting quirks of this building – one of which was that it can create music based on how people pass through the building. I did actually tape the programme which I might watch at some point, maybe post the relevant bit here so you can see what I’m babbling on about…
May 17, 2010
A Poem for Fairy
Who would miss somebody who didn’t exist?
Who never was?
But who could have been.
Does the existence of you in my mind
make me strange?
Make me silly?
Make me human?
One day you will have a brother
or a sister
and I won’t cry for you no more
but I will remember.
I will remember the life that could have been.
Poem for Fairy by Richard Graham is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. Please let me know if you use this poem anywhere! Photograph attached to this post is Superfairy by p!o (Pietro Bellini) on Flickr, used under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND licence.
May 10, 2010
Weather
I heard on the radio the other day that this May has, so far, been the coldest May since 1996. I also remember that the summer of 1996 was rather hot, warm, and unrainy.
You can make up your own minds as to where I’m going with this, so I shall leave you at it.
That is all.
April 16, 2010
Electioneering
OK, two things I will point out first – 1. At this moment in time, I intend to vote for nobody. Not ‘not vote’, but I intend to spoil the ballot paper, and will encourage anybody who does not want to vote because all politians are wankers (as I do) to do the same. If you do not go to the polling station, then they won’t think about anything. If you go and spoil the paper, they will have that counted as a non-vote and it will get counted as a mark of protest. The problem I have is that nobody will read this (probably) so my spoilt ballot won’t count. Hey ho. 2. I didn’t watch the debate on ITV last night, nor did I listen to the radio broadcast on Radio 4. I did however hear about it and from all accounts, Nick Clegg (not to be confused with the other Nick) did quite well and, usually in elections I am a ‘Lib Demmer’ as I believe people who vote Lib Dem have never been called before. (I hope that is the case; I’d love to coin a phrase…)
I now bring you to today’s B3ta newsletter, and more importantly the ‘Stupid Fight‘ which takes messages from Twitter, so you can find out who’s fans are ‘more stupid’. It uses SCIENCE apparantly (their caps, not mine) but I don’t know the algorithms behind it, and quite frankly, I don’t need to know.
The B3ta issue suggested that they’ve been comparing @labour, @conservative and @libdem with each other.
Well, I’m using a more interesting method. The most intelligent Twitting celebrity I know is Stephen Fry, or @stephenfry to use his Twitter name. Surely then, his fans are among the most unstupid Twitterers there are. Therefore, by comparing Mr Fry’s fans (I could not call somebody with his intelligence by his first name) with those of Messers Brown, Cameron and Clegg (I could not call somebody with their stupidity with their first names) I should get a good guage of the intelligence of the voters in this country and perhaps an idea of how the election will go. A lower score is better.
@stephenfry -vs- @labour: ‘Oh dear. @labour’s fans are more stupid. Heaven forbid you use punctuation.’ – 274 for Mr Fry, 413 for Mr Brown.
@stephenfry -vs- @conservative: ‘The honest truth: @conservative’s fans are more stupid. Someone’s going to claim they were being ironic.’ – 274 for Mr Fry, 640 for Mr Cameron.
@stephenfry -vs- @libdem: ‘Our survey says: @stephenfry’s fans are more stupid. Fortunately, you can always block them.’ – 274 for Mr Fry, 125 for Mr Clegg.
Hmm. That would suggest that the @libdem fans are more intelligent than @stephenfry’s fans.
Just out of interest, let’s try the BNP, everybody’s favourite fascist current political party.
@stephenfry -vs- @bnp: Mr Fry’s 274 is met with only 377 for Mr Griffin. I’m not entirely sure what to make of that – the fans of @bnp are cleverer than those of both @conservative and @labour.
Finally, can I just say that I’ve never worked out why the Conservative Party haven’t used the fact that the word ‘Conserve’ can (sort of) be found in their name in any of their campaigns? I may of course be wrong here, but hey ho.
March 31, 2010
Damn Apple…
Writers note: This may be incorrect in terms of timescales, but for the point I wish to make it doesn’t really matter.
A few years ago, when something was to be done on the computer and the makers wanted to sound ‘hip and cool’, they would put an E in front of it. Sometimes a capital E, sometimes a lower case e, sometimes with a – , other times without, and in one case that I remember, even the € symbol was used. The word ‘email’ has had many similar permutations, e-mail, email, E-mail, eMail* and soforth.
Then Apple came along with the iPod (actually, I believe the iMac came first), and since then, the E has been replaced with an I. Even the BBC have succombed to it with the iPlayer. People who want to sound ‘hip and cool’, or ironic, put a lower case ‘i’ in front of their product name, for instance I could start calling this website iStupid or something like that. Don’t worry, I won’t – for a start it’s too much work.
In 1997**, Microsoft introduced a HTML tag that was, as is often the way with Microsoft, suitable for Internet Explorer, has since been extended to pretty much all browsers, and while it has been depreciated in the latest version of HTML, is still widely used, both on older sites which haven’t been updated since 1997 (I believe I made a post about that a while ago talking about ‘large’ images) but also on new sites. It can be quite a useful thing really, and I will readily admit that I am currently working on a site that will use this tag. The tag is, of course, the inline frame, or ‘iframe’ or ‘IFRAME’.
Or, and this brings me onto the point of this post (if there was one), the ‘iFrame’.
This has probably been going on for a long time (this question to Yahoo! Questions was posted, according to YQ, 9 months ago) but the first I heard of it was about a week ago when a post containing this snippet was posted to the Creative Commons mailing list:
If I include SA content within an iFrame in my course (with no modifications), that would seem to not require my entire course to be SA?
To be honest, it is probably just as well that the inline frame is being depreciated. Otherwise, thanks to Apple, we will have a generation of websiters who think that it is an iFrame.
The only advantage as far as I can see, and to be honest, it really doesn’t bother me (honestly!) is that if it continues, Apple will, in a possible reverse of fortune, be credited for the creator of the inline frame because of the preceeding ‘i’. Possibly.
I may be speaking nonsense.
Footnotes:
* The most irrititating use of this that I know of is that all emails sent from work to external email addresses still refer to them as ‘eMails’ in the disclaimer. This means, to me, that there are certain aspects of the IT department at work which are still stuck in the mid 90s. I cannot pinpoint when the term was generally agreed to be ‘email’ with no silly capitals, but it hasn’t been the case for many years now. Also, I remember reading a while ago how disclaimers to emails were generally pointless and, despite many containing threat of legal action, not legally binding.
** Even though at the beginning I said that dates weren’t accurate, this date is (or at least, according to Wikipedia.)
March 29, 2010
The difference between men and women…
Yes, okay, that was a little bit of a heading to pull you in this time.
However, I was at Tesco in Tiverton on Friday, and on my way out remembered that I needed to get some cash out of the cash point so went there. Only one of the two machines was working, and the queue, all males, was standing in the usual place for queueing at these particular machines, despite the fact that it was raining rather heavily at the time, and that all of us in the queue except for the person at the machine itself (which is convienently located under a roof) were getting a bit wet. Nobody else joined the queue behind me, until I was at the machine itself (which, as I mentioned before was under cover) when this was when the women started to withdraw money. However, the women queued to the side of me, remaining under cover.
These are the two facts. The men queued in the correct place (there are footprints painted on the floor where Tesco want people to stand when they wait) but got wet, while the women queued in the incorrect place but remained (relatively) dry.
I looked at it this way: the men queued and were not worried that they were getting wet, while the women didn’t want to get wet.
How do you look at this?
March 25, 2010
Birthdays
It has been a little while since I posted anything here.
Well, that’s not strictly true, I did post a couple of photographs a while ago and if you were on this site while I was doing my Tube Challenge back in February you will have noticed that my twitter feed on the right hand side of the page was being updated periodically.
Such is life though, sometimes loads of things are happening, and other times not much stuff is happening.
Birthday in a few days though. Yay.
The thing is, I’m at that age where I don’t really bother about birthdays. I’ve asked a few people and they’ve said the same sort of thing. When you’re a kid, you start counting down to your next birthday the day after your last one. “There’s only 364 days until my next birthday!” (although to be fair, Christmas does get in the way too). Then you reach around 14-15 and they start to get a bit dull. Then you turn 16, and you are legally an adult and can leave home, and, how shall we put this, legally copulate, and until a few years ago buy ciggies (now you can have sex, live on your own, but cant’ smoke…)
17 is next, and you can get your driving licence, followed by 18 when you are officially properly an adult. You now are allowed to vote (oh yeah, that’s coming up again soon isn’t it…), buy alcohol (and now tobacco products as well – silly thing to do to up the age in my opinion, but it happened after I turned 18 so I don’t really care that much). And – as I found out – until you’re 19th birthday, you can still get free education and if you choose to do so, free NHS stuff and also your parents get child benefit and, in the case of single parents, child support.
When you’re 19, you celebrate your birthday by going to the pub and getting wasted, much like any other Friday night but this time you’re wearing a badge, and the same with your 20th. And for 21 that is the final one. I’ve never understood why to be honest, because there isn’t anything you cannot do when you are 20 years and 364 days old that you can do when you are 21 years and 0 days old. But anyway, the evening is spent much in the same way as 18-20, only moreso.
Then you hit 22 and there might still be some of that yayness in you, but from what I’ve heard from people, it usually goes. Until you reach around 35, hit your pre-midlife-crisis and start to celebrate birthdays again.
Personally, I shall be turning 24 on Tuesday, and will be celebrating it down the pub, possibly getting wasted but maybe not as I could be driving. Ah well. We shall see.
January 6, 2010
Snow, January 2010
I’m actually quite irritated today. We’ve just had two weeks off work for Christmas. I’ve got nothing against that, but I was beginning to get a little bored, as per usual during extended times off work. So, I was actually looking forward to returning to work on Monday. Monday was good. It was what is known in management terms as a ‘Staff Development Day’, free of students and on this particular Monday was free of ‘academic staff’ (lecturers) who were all up at Petroc Barnstaple for their training – sorry, staff development. There were a few things going on, but generally it was quiet and I managed to get on with stuff I needed too.
Yesterday, there was a little bit of snow around, but not too much. There was some forecast for the afternoon, but generally it looked as if it was OK. Nope. At around 10.30 Mum phoned me and told me that it was beginning to get a little heavy up in North Molton, and that I should make sure I’m careful to get home. At around the same time, a global email was sent to all staff informing us that because of the weather in Barnstaple, they were closing and sending people home. It was suggested then that I should probably go home myself, so about an hour and a half in to my second day back at work I started back home.
To be fair, the weather was quite bad and it was probably good that I went home and there were some pretty heavy spots of snow on the Link Road on the way back. I did video this – as well as my journey into work yesterday – but the video is upside down (because of the way that I attach a camera to my car windscreen) and will need a bit of work on it before I view it here.
So today, a day off. Most people would be glad I suppose, but not necessarily me. OK, an expected unexpected day off (it is unexpected, but it was expected at the same time. Confusing I know, but I assume you understand what I mean) is usually a good thing. But after two weeks being bored at home doing nothing to have a further couple of days – tomorrow will probably end up being the same – it’s not really for me.
Anyway – I did get some photographs around North Molton earlier on of the snow. It’s been quite deep really as you can see in a couple of the shots – over 6 inches; I went to measure it to tell somebody what the depth was but it was only a 15cm ruler and I lost it in the snow. It’s still in my front garden under the snow.
December 20, 2009
Spam Comments
Bear with me, this could be a long one.
Those of you who remember my pre-WordPress site will remember that I disabled the commenting system due to a stupid amount of spam messages that I get. Now I’m here on WordPress, the spam comments still come, and although I have a plugin attached to the site to stop such automated comments, the occasional one slips through the net.
Some of them can be quite amusing sometimes.
Observe.
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Comment not complete, but never mind. The amusing thing about this one is that it was in ‘response’ to the post I made a while back about East Devon College and North Devon College becoming Petroc, something which is still not lying too straight locally.
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These two are a little bit more bizzare. They are from the same person / bot. The following one too was on the same page of my site.
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Care to take a guess as to what page of this site that these comments have come from? Yes, that’s right – 101 Things to do with a Dead Hamster. Apparantly they also make good baseballs. And I am an expert in that field, and somebody wants to launch a website with the information about Dead Hamsters on. And, as you asked, the theme I use for this is F2 v0.9. I have also used in the past Fusion 2.1 and Stylevantage 1.0.
But on with the comments.
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Thanks. I’m not entirely sure from reading that what your thoughts on ‘Revenue Protection?’ actually were, especially as it was only a minor post and you state taht your views are now complete. But you’re welcome.
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As I did have some software on here that did tweak the registry (and apologies for anybody who stumbles across my site looking for Wihi Shus – it’s not here at the moment though I might put it back again; if you want it, let me know) this one isn’t quite so odd, well not really THAT odd (except my software was free not buyable so if you bought my software you were ripped off!). However, this was also on 101/hamster. Again, the theme is F2 so look for that as they deserve the credit not me.
That will do for now folks. Depending on the content of comments, I intend to allow through the majority of comments on this post, just to see what they’re like!