Jay's Journal

How to ruin journalism: why 'traditional' media should not embrace Web 2.0

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 11:24:10 GMT

If there's one thing that bothers me about the now pervasive trend of allowing people to comment on almost anything on a website, it's that it is somehow seen as the Holy Grail of reader participation, which must be adopted by all for fear of being left behind on the trail of media evolution. In particular, no industry seems to have embraced it so blindly as the 'traditional' media of news reporting.

In the UK at least, BBC News were probably the first large media organisation to adopt wide-scale commenting on their articles, as the seemingly logical extension of their "Have Your Say" section; or, as I refer to it, the "Have Your Ignorant Rant" section.

For me, it ruined BBC News forever.

It's by no means the only thing to dislike about BBC News, but it is a major factor. The biggest problem with reader participation is that an awful lot of the readers are simply stupid. The result of this is that for almost any news article that is even mildly controversial, the comments will quickly descend into a cesspit of obnoxious, bile-filled, ramblings by people who probably could not compose an informed opinion on anything, let alone something in the national news spotlight. Some of the finest examples of this can be found on the cringe-worthy "spEak You’re bRanes" website, with the adorably apt URL of ifyoulikeitsomuchwhydontyougolivethere.com. It's editor, Matt Southall, is clearly a man with a near-infinite tolerance for idiocy that I could never manage. If I were trying to compile the same information that he does, I would probably kill myself in despair of the cretins we are forced to share society with.

Ironically, the "spEak You’re bRanes" site is exactly the sort of media that does lend itself to reader comments, because it is intended as a forum for discussion. Herein lies the problem; a news site should not be a forum for discussion, it should be a forum for reporting. By all means have a section devoted to discussion, but please confine it there, as BBC News once did with "Have Your Say". Making every article on the site a platform for stupidity is a colossal mistake.

When I visit a news website, I come for professional journalism. I can get ill-informed bullshit on half the websites on the internet; the one thing that distinguishes news websites from everybody else is that they are written by paid professionals. One might suggest that professional journalism is itself in short supply these days on the BBC News website, and I'd tend to agree; it's hard to trust any news source that doesn't credit the author of the vast majority of its articles and some of them have clearly not even been proofread before being published. The same cannot be said of The Times, yet I find my distaste for the site growing with each passing day. Much of The Times is well written, thoughtful, and professionally presented, as befits a major news organisation. The increasingly ubiquitous comments box at the bottom of each article is simply an insult to journalism. One way of looking at it is that it elevates the words of ill-informed amateurs to the level of the professional writer; another way is that it drags the professional writer down to the gutter levels of a drunken pub argument.

Neither of these comparisons is a good thing. The Times is allowing itself to be ruined by its own blind desire to connect with a reader community that adds little value to the site. Perhaps this will be the saving grace of the printed newspaper; that it leaves the hands of editors as a pure form of reporting, untarnished by the additions of moronic illiterates. Sadly, I fear it will not be enough. My only consolation is that The Guardian appears to be resisting the urge to follow suit on their own website. Only time will tell how long they can hold out.

Further reading: What about are rights? - Matt Southall reads the internet's most cretinous topical comments so you don't have to (The Guardian, Saturday 16 August 2008)

Whispers

Fri, 13 Mar 2009 09:57:51 GMT

There is a phenomenon amongst IT workers.
Its existence a mystery,
Never normally discussed with outsiders.

This thing is a gift that some of us possess.
It sets those of us who are trained in our profession
apart from those who were are naturally drawn to it.

It is called The Ear.

The Ear cannot be learned or acquired.
No-one can tell you if you have The Ear or how you can recognise it in yourself.
One day you will simply know.

One day you will sense a fault while passing a Machine.
Through the ether it will beckon for attention
for you to resolve some unseen fault.

I have long known I have The Ear.
For years now my colleagues have witnessed my speciality in action
that has earned me the name of "The Hard-Drive Whisperer".

Earlier this week it took on a new form.
I was in the car park when the Machine spoke to me.
It called out, a dark red charger in the wilderness.
At first its calls were faint, like a half-heard conversation on the wind.
I listened.
I trained my senses, eyes closed to deaden any distraction,
and suddenly I heard the call loud and clear,
and it spoke to me an urgent warning:

"My drivers-side brakelight is out."

The Curious Case of BBC News Photoshopping

Sat, 14 Feb 2009 11:57:41 GMT

During the coverage of the snowfall in the UK earlier this month I noticed something curious: both BBC and The Times were running the same pictures on their website, but BBC's looked... different.

First off, a photo of Westminster Palace from The Times:

and now the same photo from the BBC website:

The blue tones have the photo have been all but completely washed out, presumably to create a more 'pristine' snowy scene, and mysteriously the picture is a bit blurry. There's also no credit attached (a common feature of BBC News reporting).

Next up, a night-time snowball fight from The Times:

and the same from the BBC:

Now what the hell is going on? The photo is blurry again, no credit given, and it's been tilted at a jaunty angle for some reason. Just what are the BBC playing at?

Then it occurred to me - are they trying to pass these off as amateur shots?

BBC have been quite aggressive in the last year or so in encouraging user participation, spearheaded by their ~~Have Your Ignorant Rant~~ Have Your Say section, and you can see in the screenshot above the link to their gallery of "Your pictures". So why were they manipulating the work of Press Associate photographers to make them look less professional and publishing them uncredited? For that matter, why is it that so many of the articles on BBC News have no credit at all? What are they trying to hide?

Seriously now

Sat, 07 Feb 2009 11:26:02 GMT

How much market share does Firefox have to take before companies realise this is no longer acceptable?

Firefox's market share stood at 21.3% at the end of last year. That's a fifth of the market that you are shutting out if you don't support Firefox. Also, let's be serious here; if you don't support Firefox, you also probably don't support any of the smaller browsers either, just Internet Explorer with its 2/3 slice of market share, so you're really shutting out almost a third of your potential customers.

That just does not make business sense to me.

In other news, Napster's competing service works just fine with Firefox.

The largest piece of paper in Britain

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 13:49:48 GMT

Look at it! It's huge! Also, where do I get a roll of sticky tape that big, and in which alternate version of London is today Tuesday?

So, yes, il neige as they say in France. I had a fun time this morning after the school was initially going to be opened, only for the decision (followed by my driving route) to be reversed after I was 2 miles down the icy road on my way. Took some grainy photos of the snow in Reading. Note to self: stop using manual mode on the camera so much, you clearly don't know how to use it properly.

Putting the Christ back in Christmas

Sun, 28 Dec 2008 03:37:39 GMT

This sort of outdoor decorations are popular in America these days. While driving through MD earlier today, we saw a very... special... one of these.

It was a crucified Jesus. 6 feet tall, on the side of a house.

A 6-foot tall crucified Jesus that lights up at night.

What. The. Fuck.

This is why Amazon's recommendation system sucks

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 22:28:19 GMT

The next recommendation, based on the same reasoning, was for a Mamma Mia! gift set

The Word of the Day

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 08:23:27 GMT

YES.

Another reason I love Virtual PC - the BT Home Hub 2.0

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 20:25:06 GMT

There are many of them; Microsoft's Virtual PC software has a plethora of uses in software testing, and for working around those irritating bits of software that I need to use very occasionally that don't play well with Vista x64.

However, one of my favourite features is the 'Undo Disk' functionality. I can boot the virtual machine up, and any changes I make are only temporary. When I shut the virtual machine down, I can either choose to keep those changes, or wipe the slate clean as if the virtual PC had never been booted up.

This evening, I found this most useful in installing a neighbour's broadband connection. A lot of ISPs (especially in the UK) are adamant that you must install the software from their CD in order to setup your ADSL. Normally this is bullshit, and you can simply log on to the modem directly and fill everything in.

Not so with the BT Home Hub.

I've talked about these irritating pieces of kit before, but sadly our new neighbour ordered it before I knew she was getting ADSL so I didn't have time to intercept with a better recommendation. I spotted the courier delivering the wretched thing this morning as I was ~~sitting on the pavement trying not to die~~ doing a manly warm-down after my morning run, and volunteered to set it up for her as I knew there was no way in hell she'd manage it on her own.

In fairness, this is a new breed of Home Hub, and it's actually not as bad as the first. It did at least work properly, a significant improvement on the last one I dealt with. However, I couldn't find a way to activate the BT Total Broadband connection without the BT CD, because instead of the username and password being entered on the router itself, it seems you have to activate the line by authenticating against a proprietary system that can't be got to directly, only via the BT software. Thus, I had to install the CD. Naturally I knew that it wouldn't stop at activating the line and would install a plethora of pointless BT-branded crapware, so instead of subjecting either my own or my neighbours computer to this onslaught, I ran it on a virtual machine I have set up for testing new software at work.

As predicted, it installed some crap diagnostic suite, a bunch of ad-sponsored software, and the Yahoo Toolbar, all without asking. Once it had finished, I checked that the internet connection was active on another computer, then closed the virtual PC, hitting the 'Delete Changes' button. If only removing all that junk was as easy on a real machine...

So, in summary, Virtual PC is useful for activating home ADSL connections without having to then spend the next 20 minutes cleaning your machine of all the unnecessary crap your ISP wants to force on you.

Wasters

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 09:41:56 GMT

The person in front of me at the petrol station today put £107.15 of petrol into a Range Rover that was literally twice the size of my car. They had no passengers, and this 4x4 behemoth had clearly never been off-road, nor ever would.

I really do despair sometimes.

Bug in Adobe Reader/Acrobat 9.0 causes crash when the user's Application Data is on a network share.

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:09:03 GMT

Warning for any system administrators thinking of deploying the newly released Adobe Reader 9.0, or it's big brother Adobe Acrobat 9.0: if your users have Group Policy applied that uses Group Policy Folder Redirection to move their Application Data directory to a network share (with or without Roaming Profiles), it will cause Adobe Reader/Acrobat to crash almost immediately after launching. I have had this confirmed by Adobe UK Support as a known issue, and there is currently no ETA for a fix.

The issue has been reported by a handful of users on the Adobe Forums and some of my users ran into it after I began a test roll-out of Acrobat on our site yesterday.

These are the exact error messages we're seeing:

Microsoft Visual C++ Debug Library 

Runtime Error! 

Program: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 9.0\Acrobat\Acrobat.exe 

The application has requested the Runtime to terminate it in an unusual way.
Please contact the application's support team for more information.

and when attempting to view PDF files in Internet Explorer:

Microsoft Visual C++ Debug Library 

Debug Error! 

Program: C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe 

abnormal program termination 

(Press Retry to debug the application)

We often see odd problems with software running on our network due to the various configuration options we use that set our workstations apart from the average home computer (and a lot of computers in other schools, for that matter), and often trip up programs that haven't been tested on domain workstations. I ran a trace using ProcMon to see if I could work out what was going on:

98959 11:29:15.6155113 Acrobat.exe 972 CreateFile \Device\Mup\ NAME INVALID Desired Access: Read Data/List Directory, Synchronize, Disposition: Open, Options: Directory, Synchronous IO Non-Alert, Attributes: n/a, ShareMode: Read, Write, Delete, AllocationSize: n/a 
99021 11:29:15.6181294 Acrobat.exe 972 CreateFile \\mydomain\users\ SUCCESS Desired Access: Read Data/List Directory, Synchronize, Disposition: Open, Options: Directory, Synchronous IO Non-Alert, Attributes: n/a, ShareMode: Read, Write, Delete, AllocationSize: n/a, OpenResult: Opened
99100 11:29:15.6219431 Acrobat.exe 972 QueryStandardInformationFile \\mydomain\users\ SUCCESS AllocationSize: 0, EndOfFile: 0, NumberOfLinks: 1, DeletePending: False, Directory: True
99111 11:29:15.6222464 Acrobat.exe 972 CloseFile \\mydomain\users\ SUCCESS
99182 11:29:15.6254897 Acrobat.exe 972 CreateFile \\mydomain\users\ NAME COLLISION Desired Access: Read Data/List Directory, Synchronize, Disposition: Create, Options: Directory, Synchronous IO Non-Alert, Open Reparse Point, Attributes: N, ShareMode: Read, Write, AllocationSize: 0
99187 11:29:15.6257927 Acrobat.exe 972 RegOpenKey HKU\S-1-5-21-1708537768-2052111302-682003330-4640\Software\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat\9.0 SUCCESS Desired Access: Read
99189 11:29:15.6258324 Acrobat.exe 972 RegQueryValue HKU\S-1-5-21-1708537768-2052111302-682003330-4640\Software\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat\9.0\Crashlog NAME NOT FOUND Length: 144
99191 11:29:15.6258536 Acrobat.exe 972 RegCloseKey HKU\S-1-5-21-1708537768-2052111302-682003330-4640\Software\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat\9.0 SUCCESS
99192 11:29:15.6259012 Acrobat.exe 972 QueryNameInformationFile C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Acrobat 9.0\Acrobat\Acrobat.exe SUCCESS Name: \Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Acrobat 9.0\Acrobat\Acrobat.exe
99193 11:29:15.6260191 Acrobat.exe 972 RegOpenKey HKLM\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Windows\Windows Error Reporting\Escalation NAME NOT FOUND Desired Access: Read

The suspicious line here is in red: Acrobat issued a CreateFile on the root of the DFS share hosting the redirected AppData, with CreationDisposition set to CREATE_ALWAYS; in other words, trying to overwrite the share... unsurprisingly this resulted in a NAME COLLISION since it already exists, and a call to Windows Error Reporting immediately followed.

As I had tested the software on my own laptop I first assumed that perhaps only non-Administrators were affected, but quickly put paid to that theory after checking in with a non-admin who was also testing the software who only had the problem on certain machines. After checking in with further users, I found that only our desktop workstations were affected, not laptops, regardless of which user logged in. Since the same user was affected on a desktop but not a laptop, I surmised the difference was likely to do with something specific the fact that our desktop computers are configured to redirect most users' Application Data directory to a network share, in order to keep consistent program settings regardless of where they log on. The laptops are not configured in this way, so that users can more easily access their accounts while off-site and not connected to the network.

Taking a page from Mark Russinovich's book (or blog, to be more precise), I setup one of my Windows Vista testbench workstations to generate a crash dump for Acrobat in order to analyse, and from reading through the stack trace it appeared the problem stems from the PDFLTerm() function in AdobePDFL.dll (remember this is a stack, so the cause of the issue is usually below all the exceptions):

ntdll!KiFastSystemCallRet
ntdll!ZwWaitForMultipleObjects+0xc
kernel32!WaitForMultipleObjectsEx+0x11d
kernel32!WaitForMultipleObjects+0x18
kernel32!WerpReportFaultInternal+0x16d
kernel32!WerpReportFault+0x70
kernel32!UnhandledExceptionFilter+0x1b5
msvcr80!abort+0xeb msvcr80!terminate+0x4d
Acrobat+0x422e
ntdll!__RtlUserThreadStart+0x6f
ntdll!_EH4_CallFilterFunc+0x12
ntdll!_except_handler4+0x8e
ntdll!ExecuteHandler2+0x26
ntdll!ExecuteHandler+0x24
ntdll!KiUserExceptionDispatcher+0xf
kernel32!RaiseException+0x58
msvcr80!_CxxThrowException+0x46
Acrobat_69630000!DllCanUnloadNow+0x68e27
Acrobat_69630000!PDFLTerm+0x645ce
Acrobat_69630000!DllCanUnloadNow+0x663df msvcr80!_NLG_Return

Armed with all of this, I quickly located the forum post I mentioned earlier where other users had found the same issue with Adobe Reader 9.0 under the same circumstances. As users of the free download of Reader, they were out on their own as Adobe have no obligation to give them one-to-one support. However, as someone who had just spent several thousand pounds buying Adobe software, including Acrobat, they would have to talk to me, so I called their UK support line.

As soon as I read out the error message to the agent I talked to (the very helpful Andrew Mitchell, for reference), he told me that he'd heard the exact same problem yesterday and that Adobe were aware of a problem producing this error. I mentioned my diagnostics and told him I suspected the AdobePDFL.dll, which he confirmed was the case. He put me on hold for a couple of minutes to talk to a senior technician, and when he returned, confirmed more of what I'd already found out.

Unfortunately, Adobe were only made aware of the issue very recently, and there is currently no ETA for a fix. I later got a follow-up email from Andrew which stated the following:

"Unfortunately because of the new-ness of the software we are unable to provide you with a direct solution to this issue as all solutions are experimental at this time."

Translation: we're still testing the patch for this. I was told I will be contacted again when a fix is available, but for the meantime, I would strongly advise you do not deploy Adobe Reader 9.0 or Adobe Acrobat 9.0 if your users' have their Application Data directory stored on a network share.

The actors in this commercial are real SEAT employees

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 21:00:44 GMT

Specifically, they are employed as actors.

I am tasteless, illegal, or questionable

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 10:04:42 GMT

I meant to post this a while ago, and it's been sitting on my hard drive ever since. While I was doing some work at another school in the area whose internet connection is provided by Bucks County Council, I tried to access this blog to find some instructions I'd written up. This is what greeted me:

How dare they employ me with such a reputation?

Actual quote from spam email

Sat, 28 Jun 2008 20:49:17 GMT

"You better ensure you have your long range artillery serviced when you enter the sex combat zone"

What. The. Fuck?

Now that's just lazy

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 19:47:52 GMT

Apparently someone at Grisoft forgot to check their TODO list before the product shipped.

I'm not a student, I'm a husband - R-MWC Reunion '08

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 13:39:55 GMT

Last weekend, Elizabeth and I were in the US for her 5-year college reunion. The R-MWC reunion events are shared between classes celebrating every 5th anniversary of their graduation, and Elizabeth's year (class of '03) put in a good showing, with a large proportion of the alumna who attended being Reading Program alums, so I knew a lot of them. Photos from the event are up on Flickr: click below for the full set.

Those of you playing along at home will know that R-MWC has been the centre of controversy the last few years, after they suddenly decided to switch from a woman's college to co-ed (and change their name to Randolph College), cut staff and courses, and sell off prize pieces from the college museum's permanent art collection to shore up long-running (and long-denied) financial problems. Lawsuits from alumnae groups resulted, but were lost in the circuit courts and last week were ultimately quashed at appeal.

All of this meant that there was a heightened sensitivity amongst the alums to any male involvement in reunion. There were a small number of snide remarks and people jumping to conclusions over the contribution made by male students at some of the events, and several times I was asked by older alums if I was a student. Very few of the older alums had brought their partners with them, but I think it was mainly my closeness in age to the actual students which led people to assume I was one of them. The first time I was asked "Are you a student?", I simply quipped, "No, I'm a husband" without even thinking about it, and that became my standard response from then on. Later I realised that, in future, some form of branding might be in order:

I'm thinking of making it into a t-shirt.

Beneath the celebratory mood, there is a somewhat more gloomy outlook over the changes at the college. Overall the mood of alums seemed to be more accepting the older the alums were. The class of '03 were still decidedly frosty, in particular when they pointedly refused to stand to applaud college President John Kline's speech when every other class did. I can empathise with that; the memories of their woman's college days are still very fresh, and to be honest Kline did labour over his defence of the college's decisions in the last 2 years for far too long. I think it may have been a misguided attempt at openness in informing the older alums of what changes had gone on, but I don't think it was the time or place for a detailed no-apologies stance, which is how it came across. It was also clear that Kline has lost patience with the still-dissenting students on campus, which frankly I can understand given that a minority of them even resorted to physical harassment of male students at one point.

Nonetheless, deep divisions remain in both the student body and faculty; seven faculty members retired this year, far more than usual in one year, and only two of them showed up to the Dean's farewell speech for them. Several more have also had their jobs cut as part of the restructuring program. I have a somewhat unique position in that I contract for the college in a roundabout way as the IT Support for the Reading Program here in England, so I get snippets of the staff viewpoints as well as the students. I'm told that the division amongst the faculty has broken long-standing professional relationships on campus, with some former colleagues even refusing to attend the same functions because they don't even wish to see each other. Some faculty are also privately admitting that the enrolment numbers for next year, which have become a yardstick on which the success of the changes are being measured, are looking considerably lower than the college is publicly saying, though nothing will be certain until later in the year. I'm told that there is an additional demographic problem that will be facing all US colleges in the coming years, in that there is a significant dip approaching in the number of college-age students which will put pressure on all institutions' recruiting. If Randolph College starts to become less popular right as that dip comes over the horizon, the long-term outlook for the college is not especially rosy.

Bloody spammers

Fri, 16 May 2008 17:36:16 GMT

Not content with irritating me by sending me spam, today I've had over a hundred bounce messages from other people because some donkey-molesting spammer is spoofing my email address to send spam to other people. Fantastic.

The BT Home Hub is a pile of shite

Sun, 04 May 2008 19:10:53 GMT

This isn't a new revelation; I'd already been tipped off by various friends in the industry about how piss-poor this device is. However, today was my first personal experience with the thing, and it did little to ingratiate itself to me. It's also unnaturally large given how light (and how obviously empty) the box is.

My cousin and her husband were unfortunate enough to have one foisted upon them by BT, and had not been able to get the wireless working since it arrived - which was hardly surprising since the integrated wireless was not only not broadcasting its SSID, but appeared to be disabled entirely, despite several admin pages on the box claiming the contrary. After a few cursory searches of various forums, I quickly learned that this is not an entirely unusual problem.

If you are unfortunate enough to have to deal with this retrograde piece of rubbish, may I recommend the following resources:

It did eventually acquiesce and start broadcasting - incredibly, the device does even support WPA2 in the latest firmware, though since BT routinely send firmware upgrades to it remotely, I won't be surprised if it stops working again at some point. Not a system I'll be recommending any time soon.

Hello Climate Change

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 10:34:17 GMT

Go sensationalist headlines! Or maybe not. Still, heavy snow in April is not the most common thing we see in the UK.

Some pictures for your viewing pleasure can be found by clicking on the picture below:

The School 'Holidays'

Sat, 23 Feb 2008 21:39:10 GMT

You've probably picked up before now that I work in a school. It should come as no surprise, then, that many of my friends are teachers. I'm well aware that a few of them will read this, so to them I say, this isn't anything personal.

That said, I am now going to rant about my #1 pet peeve about teachers.

It's fair to say that teachers' holidays are somewhat infamous. The general public views them as having an enormous amount of holiday time, in particular the 5-6 weeks during the summer, but also the week or two at Easter, Christmas, and the week in the middle of each term. On top of that, they have their mystical short hours because 'they go home at 3.45'. Most people who don't work in education do not factor in the late hours many teachers put in at home after school on a regular basis, or that many do lesson preparation during the aforementioned holidays. Teachers themselves are the first to rant whenever there's a discussion about 'how easy teachers have it with all that holiday', which is why what I am about to describe pisses me off even more.

Whenever school restarts after a break (and I guarantee this will happen on Monday, the first day back after half term) someone will ask me, "Did you have a nice break?"

No, I did not have a nice break. I did not have a break at all. I know you were just making conversation, but as IT support we are, along with the caretakers, cleaners, the Business Manager, and the Bursar, on full time contracts. We are here through Easter, Christmas, half-terms, and the entire Summer Holiday. Also, do you remember what it was like the last two terms when the heating was broken? Well, during the breaks, the entire school's heating gets turned off entirely, so in the winter breaks, any work we have to do outside our offices is done in fucking coats and hats.

What's more, last Monday morning, a teacher did actually come in to do some preparation, as they sometimes do. The first thing she asked me? "Are you actually doing any work, or just Facebooking everyone?" I was hungry and on my way to lunch so I gave one of my usual dry responses on the subject and carried on, but what I felt like saying was, "Actually I'm fucking run ragged, but it's obvious what your plans for the afternoon are."

It's this attitude that annoys me. Not only are we here, but the 'holidays' are when we are at our very busiest, because it's during these short windows of time that we work our way through the usually gargantuan list of improvements to the IT provision that can't be done during term because they are too disruptive to lessons, and because during term we spend most of our time running around fire-fighting because there are 1200 students and about 150 staff who at times seem hell-bent on breaking as much as possible. This stuff takes time, almost always more than we really have, so there's an awful lot to do before the site is once again filled with people who take us for granted a lot more often than I'm comfortable with, need everything fixing right now, and are convinced that 'it was fine before you did x so it must be your fault it's broken', a handful of typical attitudes which are little more than minor irritations when faced with the view that we sit around all day during the break sipping coffee and wasting time on Facebook.

I love my teacher friends, I really do. But it is only a matter of time before I kill one of them for making the same assumption about my 'holidays' that the rest of the country makes about theirs.

Telling

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 14:37:10 GMT

I went into a card shop today. Just as it was yesterday, every single 'Wife' card for Valentine's was sold out (apart from some ugly ones).

The 'Husband' rack had dozens of cards left in every design.

Sabotage

Sun, 27 Jan 2008 22:12:47 GMT

I had an epiphany this evening while fixing yet another screwed up QuickTime/iTunes install.

FACT: Apple consistently spread FUD about how Windows is so much less stable and reliable than OS X.
FACT: A large proportion of the PC problems I deal with are to do with Apple software being installed on it and breaking horribly.

The way I see it, there are only two logical reasons for this:

REASON A: Apple are deliberately writing broken software for the PC in order to support their flawed argument that Windows is unreliable.
REASON B: Apple are in fact completely fucking incapable of writing software that works.

Right now I'm leaning heavily towards the former, but I hereby invite all Apple supporters to pick either one of these reasons and explain why that reason should convince me to 'make the switch'.

UPDATE 00.21: More than 2 hours later and I'm still trying to figure out how to get this bloody iTunes install to work again. Anyone thinking of taking up my above invitation best be warned: I am not in the best of mindsets for hearing how fabulous Apple is right now.

Promotion

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 18:58:42 GMT

In all the excitement, I almost forgot to mention the thing I've been having to keep quiet about for over a month.

Last week I put in an application for a new position at work, and following an interview earlier this week, I have been appointed IT Support Manager at Challoner's, effective 1^st February (i.e., next week).

To cut a long story short, I approached my boss a couple of weeks before Christmas to express my interest in doing further internal training and taking on more responsibility, although there was no real position to fulfil that as the IT roles that existed at Challoner's were 'IT Technician' (the job I already had) and 'Network Manager' (the position which my boss isn't planning to vacate any time soon). It turns out that senior management had seen this day coming and had already discussed what to do about it, so in quite short order the wheels started to turn to create a new position that could I slot into. Huzzah! etc.

Upgrade to Windows XP!

Fri, 25 Jan 2008 18:50:54 GMT

I was taking a look at prices for a new PC today (I'm thinking abut starting saving to replace my ageing desktop) and I noticed this blunder on the Dell website:

So... I've chosen Vista Business, and you think I should 'upgrade' to the previous version?

I'm sure all the Vista-haters will cynically cry, "Hah, XP is an upgrade, n00b, because Vista is teh suck", to which I reply, "Eat my ass, you cynical, whingeing, amateurs." I've been running Vista since July, and I wouldn't go back to XP. Fact.

Christmas Photos

Thu, 27 Dec 2007 14:12:22 GMT

I've thrown up some photos from Christmas Day; captions to follow later.