Shittylink (the problem with Amazon Prime)

Hello Mr Amazon,

I recently took out your Amazon ‘Prime’ expedited shipping service because I thought it would make my life easier. Considering the number of orders I make with Amazon in a year it should work out a little cheaper, and the convenience of getting next day delivery on _all_ of my Amazon orders sounded great. It really did. GREAT.

This week however the magic of Amazon Prime has been wholly dispelled thanks to your use of Citylink, a courier so consistently awful that I’m amazed they’re still in business.

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Synchronicity

Yesterday I met Olly Jackson.

Today I looked at his blog.

The header image of chimneys and craw-stepped gables looked familiar. Very familiar. A quick look at Google Street View confirmed my suspicions. It’s the roof of my old flat!

Spooky ooky.

The Road

Before I hammer out my reaction to The Road in a bewildering morass of capital letters and ill-considered analogies, I ought to point out that I haven’t read the Cormac McCarthy book on which it’s based. I’m always a little wary of film adaptations as so many of them, perhaps uninitentionally, rely on the original material as a crutch. Watchmen is a good example of this. As a fan of the original I viewed Zack Snyder’s version of it as a lovingly crafted ‘frame by frame’ remake, and I don’t suppose they had to do much storyboarding when using a graphic novel as reference material. There did however have to be a compromise, and even at Watchmen’s impressively long running time a lot was left out, fine if you’re familiar with the material and can ‘fill in the gaps’, but I couldn’t help thinking that people experiencing Watchmen for the first time would be utterly bafled, staggering out of the cinema with glazed eyes and jets of piping hot steam coming out of their ears.

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The Shit They Pull (or ‘how not to be anonymous on the internet’)

I’m quite happy to put my name to what I write, even if it is a little edgy or contentious. I might spout a load of old shite sometimes (or indeed most of the time), but it’s a load of old shite that I’ll stand by. You might wonder why I’d want my personal blog or Twitter account with all my awful bawlings to be indexed by Google and available to potential (or current) employers, but I think it’s a sign that I’m honest and open, albeit a bit mental.

As documented on this very blog only yesterday, I received a threatening and abusive email from a member of an Edinburgh-based email list I run, by someone using the pseudonym flatulentbadger@gmail.com. Now I don’t know this person, and certainly don’t think I deserved to be called a cunt or punched for moving the date of a meeting, so I replied with what can only be described as remarkable restraint (transcript). I couldn’t however help but be intrigued as to who this mystery arsechimp was.

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Inbox hilarity #1 – ‘The Flatulent Badger’

This morning I found this little gem in my inbox from a certain flatulentbadger@gmail.com. He’s a member of a mailing list I run and had been slapped on moderation a while back for being sweary at people. Some of the list people meet once a month, usually on the third Tuesday, but sometimes we change the date if it means that more people will attend. I do not know and have never met flatulentbadger, nor has he ever – to my knowledge – been to one of our monthly meetings.

Not a member huh? but you still send me list messages? Either remove me completely, reinstate full posting rights or the next time I see you gangling down the road I will have no problem crossing the road to lamp you.  

Just for your own edification Rhodti, the reason you have such problems with people (I know I am not the only one) is your inability to organise shite, its like a cat hearding competition run by an autistic. Is it the 2nd, 3rd or 4rth tuesday of the month, or is that thursday? In three fucking fucking years its still, how is everyone for this week? dont mind if I just drop this into your calendar?. Other people have lives you feckless cunt, set a time, find a place (3rd tuesday for me) and stick to it.

I particularly liked the bit about him having no problem crossing the road, clearly a well-aimed dig at my tendency to get confused around pedestrian crossings.

When You’re Strange

Ray Manzarek is fucking awesome:

We’re just a bunch of hens in the henhouse. All we want to do is lay our eggs and have some fun. We want to smoke a joint, get laid, listen to some rock ‘n roll, see some good movies. That’s all we want to do. You know what they want? Power. They want the power. This is what I objected to with Timothy Leary’s statement: “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Oh no, no, no, no, turn on, tune in, take over. You’ve got to take over. Don’t drop out because if you drop out, they win.

This is from a great interview with Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger on their new Doors documentary ‘When You’re Strange’.

“The Internet? Bah!”

Clifford Stoll on why the internet won’t catch on, from 1995:

After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Read more… (via @robcmorgan)

Won’t somebody think of the children?

I was recently talking to my middle son and asking what he’d like to be when he grows up. Of course I was delighted when he said that he’d like to be a games designer, but at the same time I realised that this is far more of a closed door to the kids of today than it was back when I was young. I wrote my first computer program in BASIC when I was six years old, and spent countless rainy days as a child hacking about with programs of my own creation, typed in from a magazine or reverse engineered from magazine coverdiscs. I suppose we were spoiled back then, especially in environments like the BBC Micro, Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum where the programming languages and file systems were so tightly integrated.

No amount of ‘HELLO WORLD’ programs in any language will ever possess the beauty of something like this in BASIC:

10 PRINT "BUM TRUMPETS"
20 GOTO 10

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Why Santander can fuck off

And so with very little fanfare (the sum total of one letter about a month ago) my Alliance and Leicester account has been swallowed whole by the lumbering Iberian giant that is Santander. Which is fine. I have no beef with Santander. No beef at all. None beef. I looked forward to banking with our new paella-chomping overlords, and was confident that their call centres would be staffed entirely by cheerful Spanish people trying to speak English in that really cute way they do. Like Manuel from Fawlty Towers.

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Shenanigans

From Macrumors:

From Gizmodo:

So, is Mark a Macrumors or Gizmodo reader? Hmm? The public must be told.