denyerec.co.uk

Last night (13th May) I went to see Derren Brown live at DeMontfort Hall.
What can I say except damn.
He makes no secret of the fact that his whole act is based around well known human psychologies, but the way he handles people on stage like puppets on strings is nothing short of the work of a Jedi Master. Even though you can pretend to understand the psychology behind it when you try and explain each demonstration you inevitably hit a brick wall every time leaving you thinking “How the…”

There are only 2 more dates on the tour at Cardiff and Belfast and they’re more than likely sellouts like DMH was. As soon as I get wind of another live tour I’ll be pestering people to go and see it.

Witty, superbly entertaining, well presented, informative, funny and frighteningly intelligent. For the price of 28.5 king sized Marsbars, a night’s entertainment that comes highly recommended from me.

Well I’m doing OK. No near misses yesterday and I’m feeling confident 😉
A quick browse through the BBC today revealed this breath of fresh air. Finally a vacuous lawsuit rejected, I want to see more of these to be honest. The story is of a ballerina who was sacked because she was too fat. She tried to go for the kill and get £1,000,000 in compensation by claiming that ballet was an art of the soul, not of the kilogram.
Ok lady, try telling that to the poor sap in tights that has to get you airbourne.
If it was an art of the soul, I’d be using it to do the gardening and lift cars over my head. If you’re not fit to fly, lose some cargo!
I reckon unfair dismissal suits are going to crop up in the airline field soon. Airlines hire slim, svelt and small people because they fit down the aisles and they don’t contribute greatly to fuel load. If you’re a 300lb knuckledragger then don’t be shocked if you fail the interview, deal with it. Obesity to me represents a certain lack of willpower, and when it comes to apportioning blame don’t try and sue your boss, your partner or your favorite burger bar. No. Write your legal claim backwards and hand it over to the guy in the mirror.

A rather odd thing happened the day before yesterday that I intended to blog instantly, but forgot about until now. I took a phonecall at around 1900hrs and on the other end of the line was a rather happy-to-talk-to-you assistant calling on behalf of Barclays Bank. I’ll call him Jim. I can’t remember his real name.

Me: Heeeeello?
Jim: Hi there, I’m Jim calling from Barclays Bank. I’m pleased to inform you that you’ve been randomly selected as one of ten thousand customers to benefit from a special insurance cover option.
Me: Go on…
Jim: You’ve been selected to receive 60 days free accidental death cover, after which there’s no obligation to continue but should you wish to, it’s only fourteen pounds per month, and will cover you fo..
Me: Can I please just interrupt you there? I’m not intending to die accidentally before June, and there’s no way I can afford fourteen pounds a month to cover me after the trials over, so there’s not much point continuing from here.
Jim: *laughs* Ok, no problem sir. Thanks for your time.
Me: Thank you Jim, goodnight.

True story.
I got off the phone and wondered “Hey, how wierd would it be if I died accidentally before June?”. Then I started wondering if this was some kind of portent, or if they know something I don’t.
Either way, I can’t afford the £14 and if I do accidentally meet my maker, what the hell do I care if I had insurance or not?

58 days to go before I can stop randomly changing my route to the shops, closing the curtains early and hiding my garbage in other people’s binbags. 😉

Once again my early (Hah!) morning glance over the BBC pulled this article about printer economy to the fore. It’s true that people are being liberated of their cash in a dastardly fashion by the ink vendors, not least when they return to the store they purchased the printer from to buy their cartridges. Why so? Well, PCWorld might do you a good deal on a printer but I guarantee they’re going to bend you over and take you for everything when it comes to replacing the ink… 😐

I think it’s time the modding community got a hold of this one. Afterall, how hard can it be to custom-build a super-reservoir, similar perhaps to the old Canon approach of having 1 colour and one black cartridge, or having one large black tank that occupied the same space as the two smaller ones.

There’s money in this, I can smell it.

Anyone remember by 2 seconds of fame in the national press last week at the hands of Digital Music Maker magazine? Well, an article in there focussed on a new tachnology used for dynamically creating vocals. It’s not an autotuner. It’s not a sampler. It’s a 100% purely synthetic vocalist and by the sounds of it, it has a better set of lungs on it than the entire UK top 40. Not that that’s saying much…

Check out the Vocaloid. It’s kinda creepy.

I am trying to debug something. PHP’s lack of support for unsigned int’s is awfully irritating and the workaround, when I am certain it’s working properly, I will put up here.

It’s been driving me insane. In fact, the breadcrumb trail of problems reminds me of a skit I first came across in a book by Arthur C Clarke called Profiles of the Future. Based on a poem by Jonathan Swift the quote is accredited to Augustus De Morgan, and reads as follows:

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.

Regarding the book by A.C.Clarke, it’s well worth a read for anyone who is into the exploration of sci-fi ideas brought a little closer to ground.

As you may or may not have noticed, I didn’t post anything yesterday. April Fool’s Day is a weird one and I don’t know if I like it yet. What I *DO* know is that for about a week, the internet becomes even less reliable than it normally is. I’m not going to post a list of confirmed april 1st windups, but BluesNews has a fairly comprehensive list.
Turns out the worm in one of my earlier posts regarding Internet Explorers critical security flaws was an April Fools. Silly me thinking that the joke was the browser 😉

Last night #webdev on the Quakenet IRC network suffered an attack of what I am now dubbing “Red Button Syndrome”. Red Button Syndrome (Or RBS for short) is a condition present in a great many humans and can be summed up with the following example:

“Dave? Dave, I’m off out now for about 5 minutes. Whatever you do, don’t press that big red button.”
“Ok mate, no worries, I’ve got you covered.”
*click*
-Insert embarrasing consequence here –

I don’t know whether psychologists bundle this in with “The Human Condition” (TM) or not, but it’s observable behaviour. Adam and Eve, Adolph Hitler, #Webdev… The incident in question relates to a rather nasty Internet Explorer exploit. According to my stats, 50% of my readers have still not taken my advice and are still running the default MS browser. Well guys, you’re at risk, so whatever you do DO NOT click on this link.

Fire away Firefox and Opera users, you’re good to go.

Why do we do it? I don’t know. Perhaps curiosity really did kill the cat, then we ate the cat and thought “Hey, curiosity isn’t such a bad thing afterall.” Maybe we’re all just hopeless at taking other peoples’ advice and will only believe once we’ve seen things with our own eyes. Personally, I didn’t click the link. I was told not to, because it was a virus, so it did not get a click. Why other people find it so hard I’ll never know…