In 2010, Canada is hosting the G20 summit.

So where did the other 12 come from?

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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…

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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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?

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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.

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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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would rather die than have that happen. I must intervene. allegra 120mg daylight by this time, the sun above the horizon—and still nothing happened. I

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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Submitted on 2009/12/18 at 9:48am

Thanks thanks thanks! I was looking for something along the lines of this (baseballs) for hours and couldn’t find it.Cheers

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Submitted on 2009/12/16 at 6:42pm

Thanks mate! I’ve been looking for this for a while now. Also, what theme are you using for this blog? I can’t find a good one to use for my own.
Anyway, subscribed!

Cheers

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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Submitted on 2009/12/14 at 9:36pm

I can see that you are an expert at your field! I am launching a website soon, and your information will be very useful for me.. Thanks for all your help and wishing you all the success in your business.

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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Submitted on 2009/12/19 at 7:42pm

hi there

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Many people would be happy to land on nice tits.

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Submitted on 2009/12/18 at 7:00pm

Hey … I stumbled on your site by mistake. I was looking in Bing for Registry software that I had already bought when I came upon your site, I must say your page is really informative, I just love the theme, its amazing!. I don’t have the time today to totally read your entire site but I have bookmarked it and also will sign up for your RSS feed. I’ll back around in a day or two. thanks for a cool site.

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!

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I’m currently sat on a train at Taunton station, and at the time I write this paragraph my computer tells me it’s 10.00am. I left Tiverton Parkway station at 9.04. This train was due into Paddington at around 11.30.

The reason for this delay is because ‘somebody in the Bridgwater has solen the signals’. Now, I know it’s not the signals themselves that have been stolen, more the signal cables. A while ago, again on a London trip I made, my return journey wasn’t actually late per ce, but it was the first train out of Paddington all evening – a 10.30pm train that I caught was the first to leave Paddington for the West since about 8.30 (a cancelled train which, incidentally, would have been the last train to go through Taunton, Tiverton, Exeter et al and therefore the train I would have caught had I not driven to Bristol.) Again, delays of quite a magnitude caused by somebody just outside the M25 boundary stealing signalling cable.

What possible use could they have for this cable? I guess signal cable is just a heavy-duty electrical cable as it just sends electrical pulses down it. Who would need that cable, except railways? Who would buy the cable off the people who stole it? Unless it’s some hard-strapped heritage railways probably not many uses could be found for it. Of course, I do not know; I did warn you that this was a rant.

For kicks then? Possibly. Causing disruptions to what must be a good couple thousand passengers across a railway network.

(I have just heard a whistle which means we’re probably leaving Taunton now, at 10.09. The train hasn’t started moving yet and there are still whistles going on on the platform…)

I don’t know what the capacity of an HST is. A quick search (and it was quick I’m afraid) yeilded no results. (Now we’re moving, computer time 10:11.) Actually, the update of the train departure proved a point there.

We’re on single block working at the moment, one train in, one train out between Taunton and Bridgwater. Our journey between leaving Tiverton Parkway and leaving Taunton took around 65 minutes. I will see how long it takes to get to Bridgwater to see now many trains could have travelled up the line from there onwards.

It’s quite interesting hearing what people are saying on their mobile phones to their loved ones (not ‘Aagghh I’m going to die!’ unfortunately). There is somebody who has said that they’re using stop-go boards on the line (that would be quite interesting actually). (We’ve stopped again now – 10.13 – waiting for what we have been told is the second train ahead of us to clear the section. So that’s at least two trains disrupted, not to mention the trains since it happened around 6.30 this morning.)

I’m kind of losing my train of thought here (no pun intended – seriously) so please bear with me.

Yes, I was talking about what people have been saying in their mobiles. We’ve had the stop-go boards, we have somebody on here who appears to be going to an interview at, what I assume will probably be an office of Marks & Spencer’s who was apologising that they would be late, we’ve had somebody who seems to be in the middle of a corporate merger and is unable to make the official handover (or something like that).

Believe it or not, when we were first told about what the problems were, there was a tiny ripple of laughter pass through the carriage at the thought of somebody stealing signals. Of course, that was almost an hour ago now, and I think a lot of people have realised that it’s not really a funny thing that has happened.

Something has happened which has reminded me of it happening. We’ve had a few announcements – recorded ones mind – saying ‘Would the train manager please contact the driver?’ which I’ve never heard before, even when I have been on delayed services. (Last year, there was flooding on the line between Exeter and Tiverton, which meant that I couldn’t get down to Exeter to get my ‘megatrain’ service to Waterloo, so had to get a single to Paddington which again was late running. A Cross Country service came down and obviously couldn’t continue, so turned around and took us all, initially to Bristol to change, but it turned out it was only as far as Taunton when we were told that the HST in the opposite platform would be going direct to Paddington and we should get that one. OK, it did go direct to Paddington, but there was a looooonnnnnggggg wait at Taunton, and although we were a fast service, we were stuck behind a slow service as far as Westbury. anyway – I think I’ve digressed from my point slightly!) (10.22 and still waiting the other side of Taunton.)

I wonder what other pre-recorded announcements the driver has to play with, or whether he has the ability to do live ones. I remember a while ago being on a train where the train manager seemed to have been a failed radio presenter (no snickering at the back there please). “I’ve been John, your train manager for this journey. Your driver was Mike, and your canteen staff were Janet and George. This has been a First Great Western service to London Paddington, thank you and see you soon.” (then added the “all change please, all change” which I think is something they have to say when a train terminates)

Have you had one of those days when things start to go right, but very soon go wrong but you carry on regardless?

This is one of those days I think. Just like the story I told earlier about last October when there was flooding. I could have just turned around and gone home again, but no, I will continue!

I’m kind of running out of things to say here. This started out as a rant, but has kind of petered off a bit. I sent an email at work like that once. It started off as a proper rant at people who were having a go at me for no real reason, or where there was a reason but the reason meant it was ultimately their fault. (I should have taken that sandwich mum made me…) The email started with good intentions of being rant like, but kind of ended up as a ramble by the time I finished. And given that most people seem to read the first sentence of what I write and the last sentence, all the meaty stuff in the middle was pointless.

In that vein, I guess I should finish now as the people who have read the first sentence will be coming back to join the service now.

It’s 10.30. I left Tiverton Parkway station roughly on time at 9.04. I need a coffee so will go up to the buffet in a bit. We are currently waiting outside Taunton. I don’t think we’ve even gone under the Obridge yet. Oh well. I will update you.

It’s times like this (well this is the only time really) that I think I should have a Twitter account, then people would actually be in a better place to read my random rants like this. You know, I was introduced to Twitter before it became ‘famous’ with Stephen Fry being the unofficial spokesperson for it. Now everybody has an account and it’s kind of lost its geekiness.

We’ve just been told that I can’t have a coffee because the buffet car boiler has broken down…

* sigh *

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There seems to be more leaves on the roads (and probably railways too), the colours seem to be a bit of a richer browns, oranges and yellows than they have been in the past.

Ah well, the weather isn’t great so that’s a bonus.

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