State of the nation

The pace of social change is so slow to as be imperceptible - like the way glass shrinks [PDF] - and so people deny that it actually happens. "Above the glass transition temperature, glass shrinks quickly as it’s cooled, like a liquid. Below the glass transition temperature, glass shrinks slowly as it’s cooled, like a solid.". There's a metaphor there.. how can we achieve our transition temperature?

Anyway, over a generation you can quite clearly see social change, if you look carefully: it's very encouraging, but you have to accept the pace is glacial.

What you can't do is turn the clock back: the world has changed in the last 25 years, and if you don't see that then you're going to get things wrong.

Anyway again, now I'm going downstairs to see who won the election. I was pleased in a way to see the Tory party come out as outright racists - Smethwick 1964 comes to mind - as it allows us to count those who still think "they" aren't as good as "us". Let's see.

Enjoy this if you read it because I will without doubt or regret delete it tomorrow.

One generation ago # 1 - banks

I've had a sequence running through my head recently about how "things ain't like what they used to be". I think the reason I have this blog - and the reason I post to it - is to get these things out of my head to make room for new things that I'm not bored of.

Anyway, #1 in this sequence is banks. Counting one generation as 25 years (I believe that is the standard) this was the deal:

You had a bank account, and a cheque book. Cheque cards hadn't been invented, there were no holes-in-the-wall to get money from, and not many people had a credit card (my dad did, he had to reclaim expenses: he used to have a Diners Club card among others: I've never seen another since.)

You had a branch, and at that branch you could withdraw money. You went in, gave them a cheque: they compare the signature with the file and if they like it (and you have enough money in your account which is held in a ledger) they give you the money.

If you're in a branch of your bank which isn't your own - there is no question of using another bank - then the branch phones your branch, authenticates you I-don't-know-how, and gives you the money. Or not. Or they make you speak to the branch. Of course, they charged for this - £10 at least, a lot more money then - and you had to actually wait for someone on the other end to pick up the phone, find your file, authenticate you I-don't-know-how, and authorise the withdrawal based on your account balance.

You could make "an arrangement" with another branch - and potentially a branch of another bank if there were any affiliated with yours. I had a bank account in 1979 with the Bank Of Scotland (my father's branch, which I think at the time was Waterloo Street, Glasgow) but "an arrangement" with Barclays in Epsom: I suppose they had a signature on file and would phone the bank for withdrawls of more than £10 or so (to confirm my account balance) but I wouldn't be charged for the call. I'd have to wait.

By the way - I no longer have an account with the Bank Of Scotland. We parted company, shall we say, mutually. Certainly unequivocally.

Not me guv

Did my annual virus scan the other day and was very surprised to see a positive for something called ByteVerify - nothing to worry about, move along.

Don't watch this space

I have had a strange compulsion recently that tomorrow will see Prime Minister Howard presented to Queen Camilla: thankfully the election will be over with anyway.

It's always instructive to remember at these times that people get the government they deserve: you know what to do, get out and vote. If you can't stand any of the candidates, write that on the ballot paper - otherwise how would they know? If you can't be arsed to vote - see above.

DRM considered harmful

Cory Doctorow talks to Microsoft about DRM:

"The same thing happened to a lot of people I know who used to rip their CDs to WMA. You guys sold them software that produced smaller, better-sounding rips than the MP3 rippers, but you also fixed it so that the songs you ripped were device-locked to their PCs. What that meant is that when they backed up their music to another hard-drive and reinstalled their OS (something that the spyware and malware wars has made more common than ever), they discovered that after they restored their music that they could no longer play it. The player saw the new OS as a different machine, and locked them out of their own music. There is no market demand for this 'feature.' None of your customers want you to make expensive modifications to your products that make backing up and restoring even harder. And there is no moment when your customers will be less forgiving than the moment that they are recovering from catastrophic technology failures."

.

He goes on to describe how the same thing happens with iTunes when you buy a new Mac every year. There's a pretty PDF version here

More h2g2

Book The First. The other four are there too, just use your favourite URL number-bumper.

The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing

The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing - call it possible future reference material..

Unmistakeable

A record I've got - scroll down for the promotional giveaway metal cock which, alas, I didn't get in Woolworths.

Get Perpendicular

Why? Because Hitachi say so.. and I say watch the video and then decide. Plug your headphones in for this one.

Maybe not yet

"My first 48 hours enduring Ubuntu 5.04". The "enduring" is a clue..

Lights! Camera! Action

Action Comic. Nothing to do with Superman.

Firefox 1.0.x zip build

Where, oh where will I find the one true zip..

Here.

Wallet clearout

These are my notes from the top 10 of the Top 100 cartoons:

• The Nightmare Before Xmas


• Iron Giant


• What's Opera, Doc?


• Spirited Away


• Family Guy


• Bill Oddie hates cats.

In case you didn't see it, Tom & Jerry were second, and The Simpsons were first. You might disagree about the order but they share this one crucial characteristic: the early series were so very much better than the later ones..

When I was a kid, I used to look out for Fred Quimby's name in the credits - that usually guaranteed "Classic" T&J, not that later rubbish (why did Tom have to talk, why oh why..)

Actually useful for once

Google now allows searches for up to 32 words instead of 10

Dean again

Dean Edwards on why IE7 can't support CSS2.

Edit: now it occurs to me they could just use Tasman.

Gone monthly

Now this isn't JALD anymore and there's Google search to look at the archives I've
gone for a monthly archive. It'll take a while for Google to index the archive pages, though.

If anyone's interested, this is what you have to put in your template to strip the navbar down to search only:

/* Lose bits of navbar I don't like */
/* Lose logo div */
#b-navbar, #b-logo
  {
    display:none !important;
  }
/* Lose it's contained img */  
#b-logo img 
{
display:none !important;
}
/* Other stuff */
#b-more, #b-getorpost, #b-next, #b-this, #b-blogthis
{
display:none !important;
}

It goes in the top of the template with the other CSS rules.

Giz an oogle

Gizoogle - Fo all you beotches who wanna find shiznit

Hmm

So I thought, well, I can never get into Blogger in the evenings so I will set up the email address posting thing and post by emailing to that.

Doesn't work. Had to post manually.

My heart feels like an alligator

Goodbye Hunter S Thompson

As the ultra-perspicacious Weaver asked right away - what would Doonesbury do about
Duke? Seems like many asked, and the answer is that Duke is no longer
Thompson. Well, noone is, now, but they
both were once. Tom
Wolfe's obit is OK.
Me, I don't know - but Carl Fussell of Mpls, MN wrote

Thompson hated you almost as much as he hated Duke. If you had any restraint you'd stop insulting him with the gross parody and ditch Duke. The man killed himself for God's sake. Show some class.

http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/blowback/index.html

Title from Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas: a book I can't recommended highly enough..

Good griefers!

More from Microsoft:

Known as griefers, snerts, cheese players, twinks, or just plain cyberbullies, chances are that a kid near you has been bothered by one of these ne'er-do-wells...

10 tips for dealing with game cyberbullies and griefers

Edit: More on snerts.