Friday, 10 August 2007
From Royston with love
I love British tabloid journalism:
The 'honeytrap' girls who find out if your man will cheat.
I don't really think I need to comment on that.
The 'honeytrap' girls who find out if your man will cheat.
I don't really think I need to comment on that.
Isn't "wrapped in the flag" a BAD thing?
Oh Telstra, how many reasons are there to hate thee?
Outsourced customer support, arrogant business practices, the general bad reputation of BigPond Internet, the outsourced customer officer who rang me to ask why we were no longer using Telstra, no longer being a public company, expecting us to pay line rental and maintenance charges on hardware built using tax dollars, Sol Trujilo's immense personal paypacket...
The latest is: Nationalistic, jingoistic advertising.
I have just seen an ad in the Courier Mail, from Telstra, attempting to prove that they are superior to Optus (It's never a good sign when a company gets personal with their opposition, is it?). At the top of the page were two pictures: The Singapore flag (Singtel Optus) and the Australian flag (Telstra).
Fuck you, Telstra. Frankly, I'm more likely to trust a Singaporean company.
Outsourced customer support, arrogant business practices, the general bad reputation of BigPond Internet, the outsourced customer officer who rang me to ask why we were no longer using Telstra, no longer being a public company, expecting us to pay line rental and maintenance charges on hardware built using tax dollars, Sol Trujilo's immense personal paypacket...
The latest is: Nationalistic, jingoistic advertising.
I have just seen an ad in the Courier Mail, from Telstra, attempting to prove that they are superior to Optus (It's never a good sign when a company gets personal with their opposition, is it?). At the top of the page were two pictures: The Singapore flag (Singtel Optus) and the Australian flag (Telstra).
Fuck you, Telstra. Frankly, I'm more likely to trust a Singaporean company.
"Her touch was electric"
The lengths to which people will go to get their jollies (pun intended, and if you don't notice the pun you're a lot more innocent than I give you credit for) is sometimes extraordinary, and with several billion people on the planet the range of fetishes and paraphilias is awesome.
Mind you, not everyone's aware of this: Mind Hacks was surprised to find that people like electrocuting themselves during sex (of course, most people prefer not to go quite that far).
Um, yes, they do (Not entirely SFW).
Mind you, not everyone's aware of this: Mind Hacks was surprised to find that people like electrocuting themselves during sex (of course, most people prefer not to go quite that far).
Um, yes, they do (Not entirely SFW).
Cute, cuddly, curly-haired cock-up.
Poor Valentino Rossi. It's not easy being one of the most talented men ever to ride a motorcycle. Seven world championships, the first man ever to win a title in all three GP classes, third all-time most successful race winner, but it's all starting to fall apart.
Last season he lost the title to Nicky Hayden because Yamaha couldn't give him a chassis that worked properly, and then when he had it within his grasp he lost his grip at the last moment, sliding across the tarmac on his arse, watching the most miraculous comeback in history ride off into the distance as a Yank stole the thunder. This season that little boy Casey, second year in the big league, the one who kept falling over last season, is out in front because Ducati built a faster bike, and stayed out in front because, against all the odds, he can win a fair fight. Even crew chief Jeremy Burgess, crew chief to Doohan before Rossi, has come out and said that Casey has all but tied it up.
And now he's wanted for tax evasion.
Not the first major-league sportsman, won't be the last. But, according to the press, it should never have happened not because he should be able to afford competent accountants but because he's cute.
A personal plea: Please, for the love of whatever god you hold holy, realise that there is a difference between looking good and being good, between skill and personality, between skill at riding a motorbike and skill at accountancy!
In what parallel universe is this statement anything but risible: "“There is a special sorrow ... in discovering that even a boy who is young, lucky, a genius in his field, the freshest and most unusual among personalities to have come out in recent years, is mixed up in the same old intolerable muck that makes this country unliveable,” a la Repubblica columnist said in a front-page editorial."
Luck, genius and minty freshness have nothing to do with the quality of your accountants, and never has and never will. I remember years ago that the English were baffled by the fact that Shane Warne, a master of the most subtle of the arts of cricket, was such as an objectionable trailor-trash yob. Hey, guess what? A delicate grip bears no relationship whatsoever to a delicate personality or, for that matter, a grip upon reality.
Ben Collins is a junkie, Jason Akermanis is a wanker, Shane Warne is a dickhead and Valentino Rossi has at the very least been given bad advice by the people trusted to look after his affairs while he spends 7 days a week concentrating on exploiting the laws of physics.
Deal with it.
Last season he lost the title to Nicky Hayden because Yamaha couldn't give him a chassis that worked properly, and then when he had it within his grasp he lost his grip at the last moment, sliding across the tarmac on his arse, watching the most miraculous comeback in history ride off into the distance as a Yank stole the thunder. This season that little boy Casey, second year in the big league, the one who kept falling over last season, is out in front because Ducati built a faster bike, and stayed out in front because, against all the odds, he can win a fair fight. Even crew chief Jeremy Burgess, crew chief to Doohan before Rossi, has come out and said that Casey has all but tied it up.
And now he's wanted for tax evasion.
Not the first major-league sportsman, won't be the last. But, according to the press, it should never have happened not because he should be able to afford competent accountants but because he's cute.
A personal plea: Please, for the love of whatever god you hold holy, realise that there is a difference between looking good and being good, between skill and personality, between skill at riding a motorbike and skill at accountancy!
In what parallel universe is this statement anything but risible: "“There is a special sorrow ... in discovering that even a boy who is young, lucky, a genius in his field, the freshest and most unusual among personalities to have come out in recent years, is mixed up in the same old intolerable muck that makes this country unliveable,” a la Repubblica columnist said in a front-page editorial."
Luck, genius and minty freshness have nothing to do with the quality of your accountants, and never has and never will. I remember years ago that the English were baffled by the fact that Shane Warne, a master of the most subtle of the arts of cricket, was such as an objectionable trailor-trash yob. Hey, guess what? A delicate grip bears no relationship whatsoever to a delicate personality or, for that matter, a grip upon reality.
Ben Collins is a junkie, Jason Akermanis is a wanker, Shane Warne is a dickhead and Valentino Rossi has at the very least been given bad advice by the people trusted to look after his affairs while he spends 7 days a week concentrating on exploiting the laws of physics.
Deal with it.
Thursday, 9 August 2007
Hey! Google isn't perfect after all!
To be fair, this is probably Firefox's fault. But it might not be.
I have one Firefox window open, and as many tabs as I need. I'm diametrically opposed to JWZ on this. And I have all links, except from the address bar or the del.icio.us sidebar (and I can't work out how to make that one cooperate) or that are within the same website, open in new tabs. All of them. Bookmarks from menu or sidebar or toolbar: New tab. Websites external to the one I'm on: New tab. Links opened from external programs: New tab.
But Google doesn't cooperate. It hasn't always been like this, and I'm not sure who changed what, but links from a Google search open in that tab. Unless I middle-click, which means open here. But then a link might be going to open in a new tab instead, which means they will now open in the same tab, which is what I didn't want. Or look! A Google preference to open all links in a new page! No, sorry, doesn't work: They all open in the same new tab.
This is getting quietly but persistently fucking infuriating. And it happens on both my XP box at work and my Linux box at home, and not all behaviours do that. So I'm blaming Google until informed otherwise.
I have one Firefox window open, and as many tabs as I need. I'm diametrically opposed to JWZ on this. And I have all links, except from the address bar or the del.icio.us sidebar (and I can't work out how to make that one cooperate) or that are within the same website, open in new tabs. All of them. Bookmarks from menu or sidebar or toolbar: New tab. Websites external to the one I'm on: New tab. Links opened from external programs: New tab.
But Google doesn't cooperate. It hasn't always been like this, and I'm not sure who changed what, but links from a Google search open in that tab. Unless I middle-click, which means open here. But then a link might be going to open in a new tab instead, which means they will now open in the same tab, which is what I didn't want. Or look! A Google preference to open all links in a new page! No, sorry, doesn't work: They all open in the same new tab.
This is getting quietly but persistently fucking infuriating. And it happens on both my XP box at work and my Linux box at home, and not all behaviours do that. So I'm blaming Google until informed otherwise.
There is a fine line between genius and...
Crackpot.
Seriously, this post exists purely for the almost entirely pointless reason of arguing quite emphatically that at no time should you ever say "There is a fine line between genius and madness" or "All genius is tinged with a little madness" or anything of the sort.
There is a vast and depressingly tragic gulf between genius and madness. Madness is not nice, not cool, not helpful and should not be bandied about like that. Madness leads to drug abuse, unemployment, violent paranoia, homelessness and alienation. Madness leads to jail time. It is possible to be an absent-minded professor, but it is not possible to be a mad genius. It just doesn't work like that.
Thank you.
Seriously, this post exists purely for the almost entirely pointless reason of arguing quite emphatically that at no time should you ever say "There is a fine line between genius and madness" or "All genius is tinged with a little madness" or anything of the sort.
There is a vast and depressingly tragic gulf between genius and madness. Madness is not nice, not cool, not helpful and should not be bandied about like that. Madness leads to drug abuse, unemployment, violent paranoia, homelessness and alienation. Madness leads to jail time. It is possible to be an absent-minded professor, but it is not possible to be a mad genius. It just doesn't work like that.
Thank you.
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