Aching Brain

I stopped smoking a year ago today.

Yay, go me.

[update]
6th July 2004

Okay, to be more accurate, the last cigarette i smoked was smoked a year ago today
[/update]

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I arrive on the edge of the solar system, the high pitched whine of the hyperdrive fading to a deep, distant hum, the central star is visible out of the left viewport while it’s lone orbiting planet is a distant disc of green.

Engaging the jump drive, the nearby stars turn into long streaks as I speed towards the planet and it’s orbiting space station.

Suddenly, the drive becomes mass locked and as I look at my nav computer, three yellow flashing blips representing pirate vessels appear and are approaching at speed. Pivoting the ship towards them, I unleash a fearsome barrage of laser fire. One Krait attack craft bursts into a fiery explosion, the tenrils of flame licking the hull of a second Krait, which decides the risk is too great and turns tail, running from the fight. The third ship, a Gecko - fast and highly maneuverable - bobs and weaves towards me with an agile, eerie grace.

It shoots past my starboard side and I brake and turn, hoping to catch it from behind. Unfortunately it is too fast and I turn and turn, eventually crashing into it (as these things seem to happen), depleting one of my four shields, but destroying the pirate vessel. I shrug. My on board computer contacts the Galactic Navy and my account is credited with the bounty offered for the pirate’s destruction.

I turn back towards the planet and once more engage the jump drive looking forward to the profit I will make on the contents of my cargo hold and making a quick mental calculation as to how many more runs will be required before I can fit that beam laser to the front gun mount.

Soon I approach the space station and expertly pilot my Cobra Mk III towards it. I approach at dead slow speed for the last hundred metres, when suddenly the businessman next to me turns the page of his overly large newspaper, nudging my arm and sending the stylus skidding over the screen of my PDA. My ship slams into the side of the space station destroying my cargo, my ship and sending another Commander Jameson to an early grave.

Shit.

I hit the pull down menu button and reload my game, hoping to be a little more fortunate this time.

My name is Alex, I have Elite on my Palm, and I no longer dislike travelling into work.

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Fucking Amazon. While browsing around I found this story about how if you search for “Panasonic NV-GS55B Digital Camcorder” on Amazon, it seems to think that you will also be interested in “Shaven Nudists by Dieter Nagel“. Then another article surfaced (scroll down to the bottom) about how if you search for “Sennheiser HD202“, you are recommended “A Hand in the Bush: the Fine Art of Vaginal Fisting by Deborah Addington“.

After a bit of messing around, I found that the word Sennheiser threw up all sorts of bizarre recommendations when combined with the ‘Search All Products’ option - Feminine Anarchy: Girls Pissing in Public by Amanda James and Paul Compton anyone?

Unfortunately I foolishly did all this while logged in. As Amazon builds customer profiles and recommendations on your recent browsing history, my “The Page You Made” is now full of such delights as “Sexy Sports: Maximal Crazy Girls by Ralf Vulis“, “Shaven Beauty Mystery by Torsten Seidel” and perhaps rather worryingly “The Ultimate Guide to Strap on Sex: The Complete Resource for Women and Men by Karen Lotney“.

Oh well, just going to have to browse lots of electronic goods pages to counter all this pr0n…

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Ah, summer balls. The dodgy marquee, the tribute band, the cheap tuxedos, the ladies in their beautiful gowns and oh so meticulously applied makeup.

All this leads to the inevitable question. It runs along the lines of..

Darling, I’m a girl and as such have no pockets and only carry this tiny little bag which is only big enough for 10 cigarettes and a lighter. Could you put this large wallet/camera/backup fag packet* in one of your many suit pockets.

Note the lack of question mark.

At the risk of sounding like a metrosexual (a word I learnt the other day refers to a straight man who preens, pouts and poses like only a gay man can), I like to think I cut a rather dashing figure in a suit and the last thing one needs is for the line of said suit to be ruined by a large object in a pocket.

The only other alternative is to wander around carrying said items and worry all night about losing one of them.

*sighs*

* = delete as applicable, or if the bag is very small, include all three.

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From the geniuses who brought you ‘What? You got to go there?’..

Sloth 1: But we’re sloths - we’ve got three inch claws. What are we going to do with contact lenses?
Sloth 2: You know what man, you think to much.

Inspired…

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So I was aimlessly surfing around and look what I found…

http://the.taoofmac.com/space/blog/2004-03-07

Yeah! Like he said!

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There’s lots of Mercedes cars parked outside the flat today - dunno why, but now I’ve got that stoopid BigBrovaz song stuck in my head and decided to compose my own little ditty, sing along at will…

Buy me ipods and laptops with nice apple logos,
Maybe an isight, an imic, and protools,
An aluminum G5 with dual processing,
Those are a few of my favourite things…

It works, as long as you can excuse the dire American pronounciation of aluminium…

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Why, oh why… Here we are in this world of mass consumption and production, and the simplest of items to make - the t-shirt - is seemingly impossible to construct. As any girl will know buying a t-shirt in Topshop, or New Look, or any other cheap high-street retailer, for £5 or so you are guaranteed it won’t last and will most likely shrink to an unusable size after four or five washes. That’s fine, you pay for what you get and it’s not this that I wish to take issue with today.

Anyone who knows me well knows that the t-shirt is the backbone of pretty much everything I wear. I wear them lots and own many, and varied items in this vein. However of late there has been a revolt occurring in my hallowed t-shirt drawer; most of my t-shirts are unwearable. Did I buy too many cheap t-shirts? No, I went out and spent a lot of money buying more the more expensive variety on a shopping expedition around Covent Garden…

So, what went wrong… Well after about two washes many of these t-shirt’s have shrunk, the kind of shrinking that’s not all-over smaller and just about get-awayable with, but the kind of shrinking that makes things short and wide. Now, although I am not overtly against the sight of my stomach, it is firstly a little cold to be flashing my navel, and secondly the lack of sit-ups or any sort of exercise has made that area of my body a little unsightly. Please tell me - what is with the shrinking?

I know absolutely nothing of the textile industry, but when any very simply made cotton t-shirt malfunctions on such a great level, you have to think something is awry… A plot is afoot, my friends, the t-shirt manufacturers are evil capitalists. They plot, they do, day by day, “make rubbish t-shirts, people will have to buy t-shirts more frequently, we make more money (ha ha ha, make your time…).”

What is to be done… I have a plan, t-shirt wearers unite. I am going to send back all my shrunken t-shirts (along with well-written polite letters) to the manufacturers and see what I get back… My next blog will consist of a cut out and send off letter for you readers to bombard the lousy clothing manufacturer of your choice. Even if I don’t get my money back I could always use a few new items of clothing…

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I’m meant to be writing an essay. When I say meant it means that I should be doing that now, but I’m not, I’m posting my first blog. I’ve decided that achingbrain.net is looking far too Alex-o-centric… Enough with his techno-twaddle…

In attempting to conceive this first blog I pondered the various aspects of life, the universe or everything that I could potentially discuss thhrough this medium of the internetweb. So what would I like to point out/rant about to the great and good readers of this site (all four of you - you know who you are…). What did I decide, I hear you ask…

Well I thought I would do a little introduction into my excessively warped mind. I foolishly study music, recently people have started to ask that time-honoured question - what are you going to do when you finished (this mostly comes from sensible older relatives). Well I decided to try and find out what you do with a music degree…

First stop - Prospects - this is the UK governement approved site for careers advice when you graduate. And what does it tell me…

First on the list become a musician (painfully obvious suggestion - but painfully impossible to acheive) - apparently the armed forces are the largest UK employer of musicians. You have got to be kidding, me, in the army, pah!

Second on the list - composer, please… Apparently though the average composer’s income through composition itself is only 20% the rest being made up from ‘other employment’ (read job in the service industry).

They then go on to suggest various things such as librarian/editing/publishing/journalist all of which are dovetailed with ‘further training required’ or ‘highly competative’

Strangely the last thing they list is teaching… This seems to sharply contrast with the informative University of York Careers Pages which would suggest that out of there 162 graduates from their music department 30 of them ended up teaching or training to be a teacher. A further 65 ended up doing further study. The reamining 67 ended up scattered around. How 11 went into scientific jobs (including 1 medical - what?) I have no idea, given that music training has got precisely nowt to do with science. It is quite scary to think that these wholly unqualified people are out there doing whatever scientists do (blow up labs, experiment on rats…). 13 ended up in ‘other employment’ (read service industry).

The future is certainly not looking bright. However I still have lots of work to do before I actually graduate (with this essay looking more and more patchy by the minute, my chances of actually making it to the finishing post are looking slimmer by the second)…

If anyone has any suggestions what I should do with my life, it would help me to give a definative answer to those pesky relatives… Currently I work in what you could call the service industry (I prefer to refer to my current place of work as ‘the house of hell and eternal damnation’) and I have no intention of staying there… Internetweb readers and blog enthusiasts - save my soul…

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Enough is enough. Every now and again I’ll read Bill Thompson’s column on the BBC’s website. Every now and again he’ll make a point that, although usually slightly inaccurate, generally has some base in common sense. But then it’ll take a random slant that would not take too much to get the right wing loonies stampeding through the streets waving their copies of the Daily Mail shouting ‘Something must be done about this’ which will inevitably lead to some poorly though out bit of legislation.

A recent example of this is the bill that is currently attempting to be pushed through the US Congress by Senator Lamar Smith of Texas. Basically it says that if you give false information when registering a domain name, you will be liable to up to seven years imprisonment and a maximum $150,000 fine. The reasoning behind this as I understand it is to deter spammers from using fake WHOIS data associated with the domains they send email from and as such make them easier to track down and bring to (hopefully swift, bloody and painful) justice. Now, while any attempt to stem the flow of spam is good in my book, this is hardly going to help the problem while spammers use open SMTP relays (i.e. ill configured email servers which allow anyone to use them to send email) and compromised machines to inform and educate the world about alternative treatments for male impotence - because it has nothing to do with the details registered with registrars about domain name contact information. Add into the mix the fact that most spam originates outside the US and as such out of US jurisdiction, it all starts to seem a little pointless.

But back to Bill Thompson. In his column today entitled ‘How to control what is online‘ he comments on the recent tragedy of Brighton teacher Jane Longhurst who was murdered by Graham Coutts. I shall not go over the gory details here, but suffice to say, the victim’s mother claims ‘Jane would still be here if it wasn’t for the internet.’

Thompson jumps on this choice soundbite to put forth his manifesto on how the Internet should be regulated (although I’m sure he really means the World Wide Web).

He starts off well, pointing out that effective regulation of internet traffic at the packet transport level is rather difficult, with the task of filtering data packets being ‘decidedly non-trivial’ (a term used by serious programmers, apparently. One wonders what term a Sunday programmer would use. A pain in the arse, perhaps) without serious dedicated infrastructure type backup, as with the Great Firewall of China.

He comes to two conclusions. One is to give up the ghost and admit that the Internet (once again, the World Wide Web) is effectively unregulateable, while leaving the task of content filtering at to the user level with ‘parents and school teachers and youth clubs [installing] filters and blocking programs on their computers’.

But then he starts to lose the plot somewhat in suggesting that ‘part of the problem is that the net’s standards are controlled by bodies like ICANN and the Web Consortium (by which I can only assume he means the W3C) whose primary interest is technical stability and corporate interest’.

Now for a quick reality check. ICANN (the Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers) is a non-profit, private-sector corporation which coordinates the assignment of various bits and pieces the Internet requires to function. These include domain names, IP addresses, protocol parameters and port numbers. The W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) is another not-for-profit organization that develops the language and framework standards that are the icing to ICANN’s cake. These include HTML, XHTML, XML, CSS, DOM and a host of other important acronyms. The work of both ICANN and the W3C is influenced, but not dictated, by various industry players (Microsoft, IBM, Sun Microsystems, etc).

He then goes on to suggest that he ‘would rather see the network in the hands of governments who can be lobbied, replaced and argued with, than leave it in the hands of the large corporations who develop the programs or standards bodies who are blind to people’s real interests.’

And this is a perfect example of why Bill Thompson is a fucking idiot. Yes, the standards that drive the Internet (not just the WWW) are controlled by these organizations (and what is wrong with technical stability exactly?). However they have nothing at all to do with what content is available online. That kind of control is exercised by individual Internet Service Providers who have ‘fair use’ policies which control the content served from and often, via, their facilities.

Instead, he would rather see the content of the WWW regulated by governments of each individual country, even if said governments have a habit of censorship, media manipulation and human and/or civil rights abuse - but this is okay apparently because ‘not everywhere is the United States or China’. There are reasons why organisations and/or resources that would be very open to abuse by the powers that be have certain levels of, or complete autonomy - non-tech examples of the Bank of England and the judiciary spring immediately to mind.

The (sort of) self regulation the WWW has at the moment may not be ideal, but it’s a lot better than the short sighted alternative he suggests.

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Hey, great! I’ve just put loads of photos up on the Pics page. Oh wait, no I haven’t. Why? Because some beady eyed low foreheaded dipshit with questionable parentage in possesion of an almost primate like ability to climb scaffolding took time off from wanking over Trisha to break into my flat and steal the camera and the better half’s laptop.

Not impressed.

On the bright side, at least they didn’t piss on the rug.

[Update] The rozzers have been round and they’re sending the fingerprinting squad (!). Crikey. I thought they only did stuff like that in the movies… [/Update]

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So I went to the station to get the 18 past from platform number 5 but on closer inspection it was in fact the 19 which was delayed until 24 although when it arrived it was too full to board so i got the 28 which was moved to 4 but as it arrived at 34 maybe I should have got the 32 from 4 but as fate would have it was delayed until 36 and may not have arrived at all.

Daniel is in Tokyo at the moment. Mmmh. Bullet Trains. Punctual to the second, or so I’m told. The only second you get with Connex is the chance that maybe the busses will get you to work on time.

On an unrelated note, my <a href=”http://www.achingbrain.net/blog/alex/new-toy/”>toy</a> was <a href=”http://www.apple.com/uk/powerbook/index12.html”>obseleted</a> today

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Just a thought, but if a techie gets the sack via an email system he set up, is it like a cowboy being shot with his own gun?

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So I was in the Market Place last night, chilling out to some tunes when I was witness to one of the cheekiest bits of bar work I’ve ever seen.

At about 9.30pm I was second in queue for the bar. The man infront of me had just ordered a large round consisting of many pints of lager. With several pints of the man’s round yet to be poured, another barman took strips of paper and folded them over all of the beer taps. When the first barman had finished serving the man infront of me he asked me what I wanted. ‘Two pints of lager’ I said. ‘Sorry, we’re out of lager. You can buy it in bottles.’ He said. ‘Bullshit’ I said. It was at this point that the man who was infront of me asked the barman to top up one of the pints as it had a rather large head. The barman obliged. ‘What about that?’ I said. ‘Sorry, we’re out of lager. You can buy it in bottles’ He said. I sighed and bought two bottles.

Now, aside from the fact that it’s a little strange that all the barrels of various brands of beer in the cellar would mysteriously run out at exactly the same time, it’s quite irritating that this is not the first time this has happened. Last time I was in the Market Place, exactly the same thing happened at around the same time in the evening. At the time I put it down to the manager being shit and/or not ordering enough beer, but now I’m not so sure.

It’s a shame ‘cos otherwise it’s a lovely chillout type bar on a weeknight with a great basement room and lovely food. Pity the bar manager seems to see fit to take the non cocktail or alcopop drinking punters for such a ride.

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While listening to Radio 1 this morning I heard to my dismay that David Beckham’s fitness tests as part of his move to Real Madrid are to be screened on Spanish national television.

After the ridiculousness of this sinks in, visit this page and feel much better.

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