Things that annoy me

Currently in Buenos Aires (great city by the way!) and chilling out after a fairly hectic week travelling and because there is free fast internet in this pariticular hostel (The Hostel Inn - Buenos Aires), so here I am surfing away and reading various news articles, catching up on emails and all that and I come across a train of articles from Slash dot that grabbed my attention..

• The View from the top


• The View from the top: Redux


• Warcraft: Another point of View

Now as many of you know I've been interested in computers, games and psychology for quite a while and this is why I was fascinated by these articles, the fairly recent phenomenon of MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games) has interested me partially from the gamer side but more from the psych side of things..

Tired and slightly enebriated at the moment (4 pesos for a litre of beer) so just trying to get my head together with what I want to say, there are basically two points I want to make:

Point 1: Addiction

Addiction can take many forms, the usual process is developing a chemical addiction that leads onto a (harder to break) psychological one. One of the things I am consistently surprised about is comments like this:

"It is not comparable to a drug addiction in any way. It's not physical, it's mental. You had the choice to stop at any time. It's only when people started disrespecting your power that you gave up."

Quite simply (and sorry mum & dad to this) I used to smoke and yes this is initially a physical addiction (the nicotine) but when you stop smoking that only takes a maximum of 3-4 weeks for it to completely clear from your system (it's mostly gone in the first few days the rest is your body no longer needing/desiring that substance), so if addiction is only 'physical' why the hell 4-5 years later do I still feel the occasional craving for a cigarrete?



When people get it through their thick skulls that addiction and mental illnesses cannot be treated as purely physical illnesses the world will be a better place.

Point 2: Misguided anger

"All the time you are putting into WOW, you could be putting somewhere else. The real world has problems. If everyone that played WOW stopped playing it, turned to their neighbors and community and said what can I do to help, that would be an accomplishment. Getting to lvl 60 isn't. In 20 years no one is going to remember you did it, no one is going to care."

I am quite passionate about space travel/research and one of the most common complaints when any money is invested in anything to do with space (in particular science missions to the other planets in our solar system let alone possibilities of manned missions) is that the money could of been spent on more worthy causes.. My irke with the above quote and that general argument is that the world has a hell of a lot of really worthy causes (for me space is a more worthy cause than some others, though not all)...

That kind of statement is designed to do 2 things, it is designed for the writer to feel superior (not just to the target but also to everyone else) because they obviously have more 'lofty goals' even though they are spending some of that critical time reading articles about World of Warcraft and complaining about people who play it.

It is also designed to try and get you to do something out of guilt (in this case it is just a generic go and help out your neighbours), I actually agree with a lot of the end goals, they are actually worthy causes and I personally spend time on lots of them (raising money for various charities, spending my time on writing software for medical research, spending time with family and friends, talking to those different from me, generally trying to leave the world a better place than when I arrived...) but to me the ends does not justify the means, if you want me to help with a cause ask me, don't tell me I shouldn't of had that sandwich or that I shouldn't of spent that time doing whatever... The point is don't tell what I shouldn't of done, tell me what I can do.

This is actually my biggest peeves it is why I will:

• Flick the channel during guilt ridden requests for donations


• Walk past a hawker for the best restaurant in the world


• Ignore the issues that people like this wave flags about (there are many worthy causes in the world that I'd rather spend my time on)

and so ends yet another rambling rant...

B

Bored?

Try Virtual bubblewrap

Internet Banking while travelling

Just a short comment on this topic.. As we've been travelling around we've needed to check our bank accounts:

• Checking how much money we've been spending
  
• Paying that important credit card bill
  
• etc...
  

You know the deal, but one of the challenging things is that you don't ever really know how secure the net cafe you are using, sometimes (I think once in Peru) you come across a pc that is actually secure (it's got a legitimate copy of XP, virus scanner & a firewall) but mostly you don't get any of those...

The end result is that I spend anything up to an hour (depending on how reliable/fast the net connection is) checking and securing the pc before I can do any banking (or whatever secure stuff I may want to do)...

Luckily there are lots of downloadable tools that I can use for free for a limited time period, but ideally what I'd like is a little usb key that I can plug in and it tells me whether or not this pc is secure and gives me the option to make it secure (if I've only got 15mins I don't want it to automatically secure it)

Ok, that was a random rant (not even a good rant at that), but it's just something that I've been fighting with recently... Also an idea for a product, particularly for travellers but also as net cafes are becoming more and more common

B

Hot showers

Just a small note for those of you wanting to travel in South America and 'possibly' make use of a hot shower... Here are some instructions found at a hostel in Nasca

1. Turn tap on (to let freezing cold water out)
   
2. Now turn on electricity switch, must be done after water starts running*
   
3. Hot water should now be coming out of shower head (watch out for those electricity wires)
   
4. Do NOT turn off water when you've finished shower! Instead reach over and turn off electricity switch (with soapy wet hands)
   
5. Now you can turn off the water...
   

As far as I can tell a lot of the showers have a kettle element in the shower head (with semi-covered wires running to the walls)... I for one feel very safe.

* For those that are curious that electricity switch resembles the classic Frankenstein power switch (think bare metal lever)...

Keeping track of travels

Just a quick reminder for everyone if you want to keep track of where we´re up to in our round the world travels just jump onto our other blog :-)

Hope you´re all well and having fun!

B

in Peru

Well we're now in Peru and having a blast of a time, we've recovered from Jet Lag (well, mostly...) and have done some wandering around Lima... It's a nice enough city, but I can understand why so many people recommend not sticking around in Lima for to long... There really isn't that much to see, but some impressions I've had so far:

• Lima is more affluent than Mexico City (on a whole)
  
• Everything is really cheap here (a 6 pack of beer costs S/.12.55 which works out to be about 2.50 pounds)
  
• Keyboards over here are taking me a little while to get used to, similar to some Dutch keyboards but with some extra variations...
  
• Inka Kola, which is kind of like Creamy Soda has tartarzine (sp?) which is a chemical that was banned in the UK about a decade ago... Still quite tasty though (if you don't mind the fluro yellow glo)
  

Off to Nasca on the morrow (damn exciting to do so!!)...

B

It's real

Yes, it's taken quite a long time to come around, but finally the day has happened. I am now a married man! :-)

It was a beautiful day with my beautiful bride, and I couldn't help smiling the whole way through it :-D

To everyone who made it, thank you for joining us for our special day, for those who couldn't I hope to see you in Melbourne in December!!

Next, the adventure to come!

B

Air accidents

Saw this on one of my favourite comic sites this morning (Bunny).

It says:

http://www.airdisaster.com/view_year.cgi?year=2001

Air Accident (The Entire World - pop.est 6,630,000,000)

2001 1,752 Fatalities (including 9/11/01 passengers)



http://www.statistics.gov.uk/STATBASE/xsdataset.asp?vlnk=5680

Accidental Falls (The UK Alone - pop.est 60,441,000)

2000 4,281 Fatalities

Just a kindly statistical reminder -

You are more likely to die falling out of your bed in the morning than in a terrorist attack...

...so someone please tell Mr Bush to stop freaking out.



Have a cup of tea, that seems to work out quite well

Gig tonight

Off to see The Cat Empire tonight.. Really looking forward to it :-)

"This was an early description of the music and the Band: Where reggae meets Hip-Hop, where jazz is played with dirty hands, where a Cuban line meets an Aussie rule, where nothing seems in place but sounds like one place played in an earthy chord. This is the Island where The Cat Empire was born?"

is one way to describe their music :-)

Google - temporarily unavailable

Google has quite a nice home page option (go to: www.google.com/ig), where you can add on your own panels...

I've got some news items, a list of weather reports from a couple of countries (I can compare London to Melbourne) and a few fun things..

One of the first panels I made use of was Google Mail (as I don't get email to that account too often, and so I don't need to check it all the time), however in the last week or so it has been broken 'Information is temporarily unavailable', this really disappoints me about Google, as they used to be so responsive to problems, fixing them so quickly... Maybe they're just getting too big, they've got too many meetings to go to and so now 'temporarily broken' no longer means minutes (or maybe hours), now it's weeks, maybe even months....

Is this a sign of things to come?

As an additional bit of evidence, blogger (which is owned by Google), recently introduced 'Word Verification' when doing posts (I can totally understand why they've done it as well), however it has now broken all the 3rd party tools that you used to be able to use to do the posts... Including Google's own Toolbar, where you don't even get an error message, you just get 'NULL' after you submit (or save) a post... And of course you post that you just carefully wrote, is now missing...

B

Fridge theives

Got this email this morning... An 'interesting' way of dealing with certain freeloaders:

If you are hungry or thirsty there are plenty of shops on Brick Lane & a reliable Tesco round the corner. There’s also a man who arrives calling ‘anyone for sandwiches’ who arrives in about 15 minutes selling food and drink if you find it difficult to leave the office. For those not wishing to spend money or exert themselves, there is water in a machine or taps in the kitchen to drink from - and sugar cubes if you’re hungry.

Unfortunately the food and beverages in the fridge are not for general consumption and I now join the club of those who can no longer afford to support someone else’s thirst or hunger for my hard earned PJ Smoothies. The current rate of 3 missing per week became too much so I decided to personalise the latest batch. Whoever took one today/yesterday may have noticed it had already been opened and had a slightly different taste and constituency. Still, sharing is caring as they say… especially when it comes to juices.

B

conversations

Perhaps some friends should take heed of this advice (you know who you are):

"The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the right place but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment."

- Dorothy Nevill

Who needs the 'n' key?

I mean seriously, how often do you need to type out the letter 'n'.. It's not that essential is it?



B

Cracker of a game!

That was an absolutely nail biting, enthralling, fantastic game! :-D



I hope to see Aus do well against Italy on Monday. Also keep your eye on Ghana, they're shaking up some of these old school European teams :-)



B

Does England exist?

Woo Hoo!

Aussie, Aussie, Aussie!!! :-D

So true

"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; In practice, there is."

- Chuck Reid

So true

"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; In practice, there is."

- Chuck Reid

Bombs in chips

From The Age:

"Workers at a British factory making chips were evacuated twice last week after bomb parts turned up in potatoes imported from France and Belgium, site of battles in World Wars I and II. The Scarborough plant was emptied on Friday after a worker spotted a shell tip among potatoes as they were being cleaned for slicing."

In many ways funny, in others it's amazing... Just think what would of happened it that shell tip hadn't been spotted, and it had of gone into the slicer. Would it of produced a nice bang?

What will the think of next

I was in Boots today (a UK pharmacy), and I happened to notice this interesting little product

Magicool Hotweather Cooler

Thinking that sounded like it would be useful when heading to warmer climates, as it:

Instantly cools and refreshes your body and face on hot days and muggy nights.
CFC free, non-toxic and does not discolour fabrics.

I thought I'd look up what the magic ingredients were. I expected a list of incomprehensible numbers or maybe a patented chemical disclaimer, imagine my surprise when I found aqua; yes that's right, the secret (and only) ingredient is non other than water.

All for the bargain price of £4.99

B

Back from Mauritius!

Well we're back from the surf, sun & beaches of Mauritius, had an absolutely fantastic time.. (congrats J&V!).. Been back a week and it's been a full one!



I'll shove up some photos soonish, but just wanted to say howdy to everyone, so there ya go..



Oh, and for Ryan, check out: Questionable Content, I think that one was written for you!



B

Blogger & Dungeons

On the way in to work this morning I noticed two posters (no way near each, just happened to walk past them), the first one was for the London Dungeon, with a catch phrase of "Make yourself uncomfortable".. The other was for the Hellfire Club. It got me thinking that perhaps the Hellfire Club should make it's catch phrase be "The Other London Dungeon".



I didn't say it was an interesting thought!



On a completely different note, blogger is being annoying at the moment, did a couple of posts to my other blog over the weekend and it's cracking it at me, when I tell it to publish it just sits there "Publishing: 0% complete", yep as I've been typing up this one, it's still 0%. Argh!!!



B

Happy Easter 2006!

Just a quick message to everyone, hope you're all having a wonderful easter and that the easter bunny brings you delicious chocolate eggs that are the special non-fattening variety... :-)



Or we could just go with the theory that one of my old house mates was a fan of

"Calories don't count if everyone else is eating it"

B

Giving up on Nokia

Been a while since I've posted (lots of stuff happening in life & work at the moment), but today's post is partially a rant and a statement that I am no longer a fan of the Nokia mobiles :-(



I've had a Nokia for the last 10 years of my life, I've been exceedingly happy with them, they've been solid reliable and I've been able to leave them on for days/weeks/months on end.. But no longer. My latest Nokia (bought just under a year ago) the Nokia 6230 was initially quite good, until that was (about 3 months into owning it) it stopped ringing, yep you read that right, it would not ring, it would vibrate, but not ring (I could also no longer use the 'loudspeaker').. No worries, still under waranty I took it back to get repaired..



Repair process

Now the repair process is quite easy to understand, they simply do a hard reboot, very similar to reinstalling an OS on a computer, one of the side effects is that I lose all my settings/phone numbers/games/photos/music (couldn't listen to it anyway)/etc... Now this is ok, for a once of repair of a glitch, problem was over the last year (including that first 'uck up) my phone stopped ringing about 17 times (not counting or anything). The fix was always the same, and would last for anything from 2 months to (in one extreme case) 4 hours.



As you can imagine, not happy... With either the quality of the mobile phone or the quality of service, if I'm having such consistent problems I should be given a replacement phone, the next model that actually works would be nice..



As such, I'm no longer a Nokia customer, I am now a proud Sony Ericsson owner... And if anyone asks me what mobile they should use, I shall no longer be recommending Nokia phones (well at least not anything made after 2000). And that is the end of my rant.



B

Life

Missed out on yesterdays daily saying :-( (my bad), it's funny how life gets in the way of plans... :-)



On a different note, looks like my house will no longer be in mine in a months time... Feels kind of odd (but also good)...



B

Next weeks sayings

Ok, I've got 3 more sayings to track down for next week... And I'm opening up the board for suggestions.



Some have already suggested Strewth! and Oh, yeah!, but given that I've already done a few Aussie ones, I'd like to go with something else, any ideas?



B

Finding origins

I've not been intending to do a post about this, but what the hell... For a few weeks now I've been running a blog where each day (Monday - Friday) I try and track down the origins of sayings/words/slang/phrases... It's actually been fairly fun, but today's one!!!



Argh!!



Bloody hard to track down, it took me nigh on 4-5 hours of following obscure lexical and etymological links and tantalizing references before I got (what I think is) the complete story... Satisfying to do though :-D



If you're at all interested the blog is: Daily Saying and today's post of Grouse has so far been the hardest one to track down.



B

Is Atheism a religion?

Listening to Off The Wall, and during a discussion on religious vilification (the danish cartoon issue). Emmanuel Goldstein raised an interesting point:

"To say with certainty there is no god. You have to have some kind of faith system in play there..."

To claim something you can't possibly know (ie: what happens after death, be that harps vs pitchforks or that nothing happens) denotes faith in that belief. Interesting viewpoint...



B

Multiple blogs

One of the problems of having 2 blogs is that occasionally I write a post for one, and mistakenly post it to the wrong one... I just did that for the last post (MSND event - yes it was meant to go on this blog, I sent it to the wrong one first).



Argh!

MSDN Event

Just a random geek post to say I've just spent the day at a MS tech conference, over what's new in VB.net, gotta say I like what I see. I especially like the idea of the my namespace and the way they've implemented the code snippets (oh and the refactoring helpers, very nice).



Plus it was nice to not be in at work :-)

Give Peas a chance

Spotted this on the Odd Spot (from The Age)

Englishwoman Louise Arnold is having therapy to overcome a fear of peas. The Cheltenham woman flees restaurants if she spots peas in meals and gets anxious in supermarkets. She gets little sympathy, however, from friends, who bought her a T-shirt saying: "Give peas a chance".

There was an article in the Metro the other day about the same woman (but I missed it), still funny though ;-)



B

New house mate

Yay! After meeting various nutters, nice & quite, weird & quirky people, we've finally:

• Agreed on a person to offer the room to
  
• And they've accepted!
  

Now we can have our evenings/Sundays back to do... umm.. watching TV?



B

Birte's birthday

It's been a good weekend over here in sunny (but cold) England, and today was the lovely Birte's birthday... She wanted to go and see an Elvis impersonator on Saturday night, which was a surprising amount of fun (aside from him not being that good a singer, and not really looking that much like elvis [what with him being black and not as good hair]).



There was a really nice stroke to my ego that night though, as I was standing there (with Celine, Maya & Claire) I got a tap on my arm from behind me, turning around there was a girl sitting down pointing towards the other side of the table. On which there was another girl with a camera, I had time to hear

"She thinks you're cute and wants a photo"

before being blinded by the flash, I hope I didn't look too much like a stunned mullet.



I said my thanks and that "I hope my fiancee agrees with you" (to cover all bases), and turned back to my friends. :-D



It's nice getting compliments, it's nice to give them too. The person receiving them may not respond in the way you hope, but they're unlikely to respond in the way you fear.



And that's enough good feeling/rambling from me.



Happy birthday Birte!

Happy St. Paddy's day!

Now to go drink some guiness! :-D (or shall I drink some Irish Whiskey?)

Living in London is cool

Ok, this'll be a very random post (considering the last one)... But living in London is sometimes really cool.



This one is for Dan, Rob, Loud & Mark (everyone else can ignore as they see fit).



I was helping Matt move in yesterday (Saturday) which was all fine and good, but on my way home I realised I was driving through the centre of London, over London Bridge while listening to Capital FM.



cool



B

Weird night

Just got home from a nice night out in London, at a place called The Spitz (which is near where I work and also on the edge of Spitalfields Markets [hence the name])..



Anyways, the Spitz is a bit of an alternative music venue and myself & Ryan (housemate) were out having a good time listening to some funky blues, when right at the tail end of the night this girl comes up to me and says

"I'm British born and bred.. and you disgust me."

Like the title says, weird night... I have no idea what her problem was, did she think I was foreign and was making some kind of racist comment? Did she think I was British and because I was at the club with a guy, that I was gay? Did she think I looked at her weirdly and so wanted to get back at me?



Intellectually I know it's not my problem and it's her issue... But I'd be lying if I said it didn't bother me, though the thing that annoys me the most about it is that I was having a really nice night, tapping my feet along to the music, chatted to some random strangers about Belgium beer. And now my night's had a dampner put on it because of some random nutter, which is going to colour my memory of the venue and the music...



Argh!!!



Oh well, I'm going to read/do something so that I can fall asleep thinking about something else entirely. Night people.



B

Usability

Just saw this quote on Joel on Software, made me laugh...

"Bad usability in the design of aircraft controls can result in what is cheerfully referred to as CFIT: Controlled Flight Into Terrain"

See: Usability in One Easy Step (First Draft) for more info

A reality show I can get into

I've been complaining recently about the amount of reality shows on the tv... But now there's a reality show I think I could get into: American Inventor aparently it's like 'American Idol' except for geeks.



Instead of saying a straight out No! For this reality show I think I could raise it up to it has potential..



B

spotted on gadgetopia

Formatting a blog

Just a random post because I've been playing with the blog template on this site so that I could add the above text.



If you're reading this from an aggregator or don't know what I'm talking about, I've added a small header so that visitors are reminded about our fundraising efforts for CRY (speaking of, we're off on a 3 hour walk this Sunday as part of our 'training')



Anyways, just been reading through the template that you get with blogger and realising that it's not that straight-forward to do.. you'd think that google who can do some really funky cool stuff on their main sites would make some funky tools or at least have well formatted html code that's easy to follow... But no, it's not, it's annoying, I'm not happy jan.. (sorry that's a reference for all the Aussies)



That's it, going now... sleep calls

B

Work Your Proper Hours Day - Friday 24th February 2006

Alcohol

shiet start to the day today, but it reminded me of a quote (don't ask):

Alcohol is not the answer.

Alcohol is the question.

Yes is the answer!

Photo's from Aus

As I'm still sorting out what piccies I want actually say something about (and look reasonable enough to put on the blog), I haven't been able to actually finish writing about what else we got up to in Aus..



But if you're one of the impatient people who really want to see those photo's (ie: Dan), they are now up one oneroundpebble, so jump on there and have a look!



That's all I've got for now, just got back late from Heathrow (wishing Margo bon-voyage on her exciting world adventures!), and I'm starving so off to eat.



See ya!

Back in ol' Blighty

Just wanted to let everyone know that we're now back (safe and sound) in ol' Blighty! :-)

We had an absolute ball travelling around Aus catching up with everyone and showing Cath some of the unusual and interesting aspects of the country I grew up in!

tourists..	tennis action
furry flying friend	bonzai kangaroo!!
The wine tour begins	The wine kicks in..

more pictures to follow (as I slowly get them uploaded)...

Also want to say a HUGE thankyou to all of you who donated to our trek for CRY!, from the 'donations table' we raised £163 (or $387.25 Aus) :-D

B

Aussie weather

Hi from Aus to all those left back in foggy London, it's been a few days now and we've got to enjoy the beautiful Aussie sunshine and my favourite part of Melbourne summer.. the cool change! :-) Was very amusing watching Cath experience for the first time when the wind starts blowing in and the temperature drops 10 degrees in as many minutes. She's heard me talk about it but never really fully grasped it. :-)

Oh should also say a bit about what we've done thus far, it's been mostly in Melbourne, we've been to the Australian Open (that's tennis for us unclued people), Squires Loft (fantastic steak!) and out to Healesville Sanctuary (where Cath finally got to see a Rock Wallaby and some Flying Foxes)... Will have to post up some photos quite soon, but that requires effort which is sorely lacking at the moment!

So hope everyone had a fantastic Australia Day, hope the beer was cold and the meat was cooked over a bbq!

B

Big thanks!

Well it's been a few days since we've set up the website for the fundraising and have already received some sponsorships!! :-D So big thanks to those of you who are donating or planning to donate money to this worthy cause!

In other news we're about to be off to visit everyone at home, looking forward to showing Cath the wild untamed places of Aus! :-D

See you soon!
B

Training Day

What were you doing?
On Sunday Cath and I (and a few others) went for a nice 'walk' around Epsom Downs (a fairly famous race course, but also a great spot for going for a ramble), and 3 hours later I realised several things:

• I'm not as unfit as I thought :-D
  
• But I'm no-way near as fit as I need to be :-(
  
• Especially for a 10 day hike in the Andes mountains near Machu Picchu

What's this about Machu Picchu?
Well as some of you are aware I'm getting married later this year, and instead of going for the traditional honeymoon at a nice beach resort we've signed ourselves up for trekking through Peru for Cardiac Risk in the Young.

Come again?
Yep that's right we're aiming to raise over £4000 for CRY by putting ourselves through the gruelling endeavour of hiking through the Andes mountains in a Ten Day trek to Machu Picchu.

So how much actually goes to CRY?
Almost every cent/penny/lira/yen that you donate will end up in CRY's hands (and if you're donating from in the UK, 28% extra!), as we are paying the entire cost of flights, tour, food, accommodation ourselves. The only exception to that is Skyline (who are professional fundraising company) have a small administration charge that we will not be covering.

So how can I help?
Well the first obvious choice is go to our fundraising page and sponsor us! But there are other ways that you can help out as well.

• Email us get a sponsorship form to help us get some more sponsors.
  
• Spread the word, email around your work and friends about this fundraising effort and help us beat that £4000 goal! Point them to this post or straight to our fundraising page.

Thanks for reading and thanks in advance for helping out!
B

Apples and Oranges

Just a random fairly incoherent rant from the B man..

Was reading an IT security article today that was talking about Microsofts response time to Privately or Publicly exposed flaws in it's software... And this sentence struck me as being flawed in itself:

Microsoft took 3 months on average to fix issues privately disclosed to the company in 2003, a response time that shot up to 4.5 months in 2004 and 2005, according to the analysis. Yet, the company response to a publicly disclosed flaws has quickened, from 71 days in 2003 to 46 days in 2005.

The bit I particularly like is that last time I checked 71 days is around about 3 months (if it includes February it's over 3 months)... But mostly it got me annoyed that it's a fairly common technique amongst journalists that in order to sensationalize a topic they'll not compare 'Apples to Apples', instead there'll be something like an average over the previous year vs the worst days figures (with the tone implying that that single day is an 'average' day).

Anyways was something I'd noticed and thought I'd have a brief rant about, going to stop now and do some other stuff... Have fun!

B