monkeymike blog

No surprise. I mean the e-reader thing from Amazon. Too small. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too expensive. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too restrictive (China has one that allows txt and PDF to be read). Just not attractive. If I enjoy a book I like to hold it in my hand. I like to go back to the bookcase and pick up a book I've enjoyed in the past and flick through. The cover, paper quality and heft spark my poor memory to life. Damnit I'm human and I want to stay human. The experience of reading a well written and made book is wonderful... However for the right price...£2 per book (and I get to move them around) and £50 for an A4 or bigger reader and you may have a sale. I do like technical manuals and I don't tend to get too attached to them (except my copy of Numerical Recipes which is fantastic) So there is market for you. For the right price I'll think about it.

...at least until you tear the tag off. M&S does a fine line in work trousers. Unfortunately they have an 'intelligent' paper label (you know, one you tear off when you decide that it does match your white shirt and brown tie) which is my first encounter (that I know of) with RFID. For those who don't know RFID stands for Radio Frequency ID it's one of the Big Satan's of the privacy obsessed. A pair of scissors and a Dinolite later and we get these: And this one of satan's face revealed: The chip itself seems to be plugged into a thin metal layer embedded in the paper. So there you have it. The future is now.

...I have decided to add my own existence as a cause of everything reported in nature/science web sites by the BBC.

Let me explain. Like a bubble of methane from a melting methane hydrate emerging from the ocean floor to the surface waters a thought impinged on the surface of my conscious mind. That thought was:"Heavens! Don't the BBC blame a lot of things on climate change!"

Now a lot of things are connected. For instance a lot of things can be blamed on Earth having a moon, including climate change (tides did it). The important thing is whether the cause was necessary or whether it would have happened anyway. BBC please just give it a rest.

JUST BECAUSE SOMETHING HAPPENS AFTER SOMETHING ELSE DOES NOT MEAN THE FIRST THING CAUSED THE SECOND!

Here's a solution to the second homes scandals that are rocking every political party. Have all the MPs stay in a specially built, high security dormitory. Something like Wandsworth prison. Luckily it looks like most of them have met the minimum qualification of committing a crime such as fraud. Now the MPs may argue against the single dormitory for reasons of security. They might argue that having them all in one place would enable evil terrorist nations (like Iceland) to decapitate the country by blowing up this hypothetical building leaving us poor saps rudderless and easy to invade. It's true that any innocent and well meaning politicians might end up being corrupted in the dorm, much like convicts learn new criminal tricks off the old hands. However we must balance that against the possibility of a terrorist nation (like Iceland) blowing up the building and thus raising the average moral standing by a statistically significant amount.

* Warning. This word may not mean what you think it does.

A lovely example of this sort of thing from Millets on 16/05/09.

and here in the bottom is the real 'deal' So what does everything mean? It means some things and in this case about 3% of items in the shop. I'd give everything** to stop millets going into liquidation. **In this context this word means "nothing" or no thing, nadda, zip, zero, nought,0 etc.

Have some cards printed out that say "MI5 - Returning commandeered items form YG67F" on them. Add the Secret Police's secret HQ address on the front and a space for someone's: name, address and details of the item. Place one in your hand and run up to someone talking on their mobile in the street. Grab the mobile, push the card at them and shout out "MI5 I need your phone it's a matter of national security." Give them the card..."send this off to get your phone back" and then run off in a "24" or "Spooks" kind of way. Ideally at this point you get a mate to squeal past doing a handbrake turn and shout something like "over here agent orange" Any sensible person would collapse back in shock and consider themselves honoured to be helping protect the UK from overseas terrorists and not worry about their iphone, let's face it Apple don't sell to the brightest subset of the population. Job done. Now go to a pub and find someone who wants to buy an iphone on the cheap, and is willing to deal with MI5.

If you look long enough in The Telegraph, The Telegraph will be borne in you; just as the awakened see with the eyes of the buddha.

A thought has just occured to me. What if all politicians were in fact corrupt. c.f. Massive second home corruption by just about every MP in the houses of parliament. Looking at the massive proposed (or extant) government databases, the cameras on every street and the surveillance society in general... I'm sure I don't have to spell it out. Corrupt leaders, surveillance society, police state, tyrannical overlords using the tools of the state to suppress the oversight of the government etc. etc. etc. I mean look at how honest and upright Jaqi Smith (the home secretary) has been with expenses. Such a fundamental lack of a sense of right and wrong. They are in it for themselves and they WILL USE EVERYTHING IN THEIR POWER TO MAINTAIN THEIR POSITION. If we allow them the powers that is. It would be funnier if it wasn't starting to look so plausible.

thanks iTunes. You were supposed to be diligently downloading the In Our Time podcast (each episode only available 1 week after transmission) so that I could enjoy them on your derivative (take someone else's idea and try and improve on it) portable media player. But no. I finally come to transfer the IOT backlog today (having been through several hours of the Gresham College Podcast and fancied something shorter) only to find that you hadn't bothered to do the simple thing that you were supposed to do. So thanks Apple. Your software doesn't 'just work'. It's poor and shoddy workmanship. The "you haven't listened to this for a while = you don't want it" feature was ACTUALLY PROGRAMMED IN AND SET AS A DEFAULT SETTING. If you guys are running out of idea, why not pay another visit to Xerox. Once you've been around and looked at the research , you can run off and pretend to have been creative again. Does anyone let you into their research labs any more?

meh ...after greater consideration. creepy. Creepy and unpleasant. Like having a paedophile living in the street.