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I poke my head above the parapet of my own distractions to bring you this little chestnut of warm, fuzzy news: Girl slashed in classroom attack

Ok, so I was being sarcastic about the warm fuzzies. I left highschool maybe 10 years ago (Bloody hell. I feel old now.) I can pretty much state that the worst that ever happened was a fist fight,a couple of broken bones and a knockout. There were grudges and hard feelings but nothing that would have hospitalised anyone.

Now we’ve got girls knifing each other up in class?

Maybe this is how Rome self destructed, the populus turning in on itself and decending into anarchy. Or maybe the senate was hit by a 15-year old female knife gang…

Does anywhere in the world seem “nice” anymore? Please send me details of real estate prices and the cost of milk. Of course, it could be that the modern media is just getting better and better at bringing us the bad news? It would be silly to dismiss out of hand the possibility that there is no more wrongdoing in the world now than there was 50 years ago, except now we’re kept abreast of every single peice of it and can no longer live in blissful ignorance. I’m not old enough to say and to harp on about how “Things didn’t seem so bad when I was 10″ seems a little trite as I’d never watch the news or a read a paper and there was no available internet to tell me of the latest stabbing in Scotland, or shooting in California.

Can anyone tell me, definatively, if things really are getting worse?

…and get kicked out of shopping centres.
El Reg has a peice on some sane people being kicked out of a shopping centre. Why? They were distributing a harmless, correct and informative flyer at the same time as some Pro-ID henchmen were touring the self same shopping centre.
So the henchmen had a word with staff, who had a word with the police who had more than words with the 4 calm “Protestors”. I’d take that as an indicator that we don’t need ID cards to propel us into a police state…
Read the full article on The Register.

Because I like them and think they’re dead right, click right away to view a copy of the No2ID flyer.

Also, have a link over to the No2ID website.

I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this but in CS2 if you zoom in to 1600% and then try and use the SHIFT key to constrain the movement of a guide to the grid (1 pixel increments) it deletes the guide instead. Zoom out to just 1 stop less (1200%) and shift+move works as expected, locking the position of the guide to the pixel grid.

Funny that.

I also find that sub-pixel guide positioning in a raster editing program is a bit weird, but maybe thats just me.

The BBC has a peice up called Plastic surgery prizes condemned, covering Zoo Magazine’s offering of breast implants as a competition prize.

Not too fussed about the article either way, but I did happen to notice that the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons abbreviate themselves to BAAPS.

Oh how I laughed. They even have a website.

Extra Extra! Rice genome unravelled say the BBC. I wonder if in 40 years time they’ll discover that the billion-odd people eating the stuff will all be doomed to die young from bowel cancer or suchlike?

I just don’t trust it. I’ve looked at sourcecode and thought “Hey, now I can hack in X,Y,Z” and not always, but almost always it’s never that simple and side-effect free. And computer code is many orders of magnitude simpler than biology.

Walking through the market the other day I espied a couple of traffic wardens fishing around one of the gardening stalls. Turns out they weren’t buying, they were sticking a ticket on a tray of illegally parked begonias.

Should have seen them trying to get the clamp on the sweet peas.

Join me in lament, the world as we know it will soon be over.

The time of the machines has come.

Following a discourse in good old channel #Webdev, it ocurred to me that although my work is for sale (Yes, it is true…) it’s not nearly well advertised enough. In fact the only mention of it is in my website FAQ which thanks to its lack of advertisement no-one seems to read. (I get a fair number of emails , one could say I received them frequently, asking questions which are answered in the FAQ.)

The willpower to put up a full-blown automated sales system is not within me, not only that but I really don’t want to turn into a bargain-basement stock salesman which, if you sell images above 1024×768 is rapidly what you’ll become, afterall, no-one gives a crap about photographic rights these days anway. On the flipside, I’m not actually selling anything anyway at the moment so you could argue something is better than nothing. Would the images find their way into the public domain? Would someone use them as their own, build them into a website, print them in a brochure or a flier after paying only a small fee to “Use it as a desktop wallpaper” ?

One line of discussion was about music and the way in which an awful lot of people don’t pay to listen to it.
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