denyerec.co.uk

Much as I hate criminals, chavs, thugs, louts, hooligans and doley scum who do nothing but destroy this precious isle and the best intentions of its noble and proud inhabitants, I’m also not a big fan of the state. Having privacy slowly stripped away and our right to do whatever we want on our own time is not on, by any measure. A lot of people get agitated by the notion that if you’ve got nothing to hide then what’s wrong with other people having a look. I say that’s nonsense, as anyone who’s ever read a Philip K Dick novel will tell you. Once you give an authority the power to collect and catalog and monitor everything, you’ve essentially surrendered your entire life to them. Now, so long as you play nice and don’t rock the boat you can live out your 80 years (approx) in blissful oblivion under the impression that all is good with the world BUT, if you’re unfortunate enough to slip through the cracks you’re going to find yourself in a world of hurt when “The computer says no.”

What if the kid you bullied at school gets a job at the “Ministry of Information” and decides to get back at you? What if all of a sudden the government makes drinking milk illegal and can trace every purchase of milk everyone has ever made, ever? Sounds ridiculous, but then the Nazi’s rounded up people with long noses. In the USA they want to make mobile phones the centre of your retail experience so you make purchases based off centralised phone credit. Cashless societies are flawed for many reasons, but a cashless society which can track your movements as you make your purchases…? The mind spins at the utter wrongness of it. Sure all that information in the hands of a noble and un-corruptable force would be of no danger to anyone, but sadly we don’t have Lensmen and western governments have already proven that they don’t give a crap about human rights. (Apogies to Opera users, Amnesty Internation evidently need to hire a proper web developer!)

Anyway, back to the title of this mini-rant. You all should remember Robocop and the infamous ED-209 (If you don’t then shame on you, it’s a film history icon). You should also know what happens, then, what happens when the system malfunctions or, more critically, the system creators want to subvert the otherwise noble intentions of an automated law enforcement system. Just a good job that Murphey remembered he was human afterall…

You might be wondering if someone slipped me something in my tea but no, this was all kicked off by another BBC article about Flying Police Death Drones. Ok,so I might be leaning a little heavy on the drama here, but you can see where I’m going with it. How long before they have automated drones that “Automatically detect suspicious behaviour”, how long before they’ve got tazers or tear gas?

I’m all for rounding up the undesirables, the thugs and retarded goons who stab children and have anger mangement problems that would make Adolf Hitler look like a nice guy, but I can’t help feeling that it’s going to go down in a way that’s good for Government and very, very bad for the public.

I had some out of memory errors recently, which is naturally absurd for a machine with 4gb RAM (Yes I know XP doesn’t support it, but it’s future proofing in case Vista ever works out or Adobe release their products on Linux…(And yes I know Vista can’t boot with 4gb of RAM either properly without hacking yet, but by the time I get around to it I’m lazily hoping they’ll have fixed the issue…)) Anyway, back on track, I came across a post regarding a potential fix to some common out of memory errors over at Kevin Dente’s blog. I’ve implemented it, the world has yet to implode and I haven’t come across an error message yet. Fingers crossed.

This site has a fairly high page rank, as does my business site Sozu, though because Sozu is under redevelopment and has been stagnant for over a year it’s not faring too well in the old search engine listings. Thus I wondered if name-dropping on my blog would have any bearing on the ranking of Sozu. Seemed like a fair strategy, some people set up entire networks of pointless sites to crosslink for search engine purposes so… Meh.
Anyway, the first test will simply link through to it using the text Loughborough Web Design to see if that encourages any movement. The next test, coming later, will involve some paragraphs of text explaining the subject in an attempt to engender “relevance” in the link.

Sorry for the really boring post.

The bastion of reliable, unbiased and journalistically adept reporting the BBC brings home a little gem today about how woefully optimistic UK educational establishments have become. You can read it by clicking the following sarcastic and search engine optimised link text: High Standards for UK Universities.

One could argue that as I made it through the whole system without dropping a grade that this was already painfully obvious, however I’m sure you’ll agree that the comparison in entry test questions really slams it home. The Chinese one has so many lines! Now at first glance you might think that this is OK, as the Chinese language has lots more lines in it than English so naturally, they’re used to dealing with such problems. However on inspection you see that the problem reaches further than simply counting the number of lines, though in fairness the UK questions isn’t really a lot more developed. Some people could quite honestly sort that one out without the aid of a logbook or calculator in no time flat.

There is more, though, even beyond considering that the Chinese question is set for people not even into University yet and the British one is set for first year students. At Loughborough University (UK) I’m told that maths was causing such a problem for entry students to Engineering that to remedy the problem they simply dropped A-Level maths as a requirement! Maybe they realised that A-Level maths was a joke beyond help and that it really didn’t matter anyway, or perhaps they’re suffering from the same disease as the rest of the system, slackening standards to boost pass rates and make everyone feel jolly good about themselves. Looking back, our A-Level maths was a damn sight easier than that of 5 years before and the current offering, in A or AS form, is down at the O-Level standard of years gone by. Should we just get over it and outsource our education too?

I went to university at Loughborough. Many a night spent out with friends in town or at the union and no real trouble witnessed or heard of. In the last 6 months there have been rapes, assaults, brutal knife attacks and now someone’s been shot in the university union, on the campus itself. The BBC reports (vaguely) about the university shooting.

I’m sick of this crap. I’m sick of mindless thugs ruining the place, destroying property and lives because their tiny minds know no better. I’m sick of chav doley bastards breaking into our homes, wrecking our cars and fouling the streets with vomit, needles and piss.

The police are clearly ineffective, the education system has failled and public awareness can only reach those who can read and, more importantly, give a damn. What’s next? Martial law? Vigilante groups who will dispense justice in the only way these brutish fools understand? I have no idea, but it’s plain to see for anyone who cares to look that right now, in this age of Big Brother and heightened security, nothing is working. Perhaps the police are too busy chasing imaginary terrorists that they’ve no time for the real problems.

Ironically, my GF and I are in the process of applying for her permanent leave to remain here. As soon as it’s approved, maybe we’ll be applying for permanent leave to remain somewhere else.

(And yes, I’m aware that everywhere has crime, but when a dead-end sleepy town like Loughborough ends up with gunshot victims, it’s time to ask questions. Also, no-one in Australia, Sweden, Switzerland or pretty much anywhere East of here knows what a Chav is, and that can only be a good thing.)

Cor blimey. The almost rabid pace of new posting is almost enough to make my webhost break a small cyber sweat! Three in one month is surely more than the machine can handle, perhaps they need to upgrade it to Vista… It’s fast better stronger, right? 😉

Anyway the point of this post is to bounce people towards the Second Life Scam, which may or may not be true, but if an economist is prepared to sink ten thousand dollars into testing a theory, I’m more inclined to think there’s a little meat on it. Afterall, if there was real money to be made doing it you can bet your arse they’d be staying mum and pouring millions in. The oulook is that Second Life is essentially a cleverly designed pyramid scheme, where only a few participants at the top of the stack are able to extract any reasnoble sums of money in $USD, wheras everyone else is restricted by a withdrawal scheme more squeezing than Paypal’s, which is saying something.

They could, of course, be spreading disinformation to prevent other investors from diluting a rich profit market, but the arguements put forward do seem to make sense.

Damn clever scheme, though.

As was kindly pointed out to me it turns out microwaving things to make them clean could be a bad idea. A bad idea, that is, if you’re stupid enough to microwave anything with no water or fat in, for half an hour, unattended.

If you’re foolish enough to set things on fire like that, perhaps you shouldn’t have been left to live on your own in the first place…

I legally indemnify myself from anyone burning down their house etc and take no responsibility for anything at all. Anything.

It never occurred to me before now, but something tipped me off somewhere out there on the big wide web to the fact that you can sterilise things in a microwave. Why this blatantly obvious fact had until this point eluded me makes me feel somewhat ignorant, but I digress. Kitchen cloths and sponges are microbe hotels. They LOVE it in there with the old food, old fat, moisture… Quite delightful really. It doesn’t take long for a sponge or blue cloth to start to smell a “little off” and this delightful scent will gladly spread itself around on dishes and surfaces washed with it.

The solution? Whack it in the microwave for 2-3 minutes on full. Cloths might take a little less but the sponges (If wet) 2-3 minutes. Needless to say after a quick (And somewhat steamy) blast my previously significantly stinky sponge is reduced to a slightly worn-out but sterile state.

Joy.