Archive for the ‘Rants’ Category

Does anyone else miss Microsoft?

Say what you want about their business practises, you never found this in Internet Explorer’s EULA:

You retain copyright and any other rights that you already hold in Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content, you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services. This licence is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.

Due to massive pressure Google have now removed this. But how anyone can make the claim that Google aren’t just as much a faceless evil corporation as anyone else these days is beyond me.

Having said all that, I didn’t watch a lot of the Olympics mainly because it just annoyed me. We seem to have been a bit too happy, smiley, everything is fine with China. Let’s review a few of the news stories that came out during the games.

The fireworks were pre-recorded.

Nobody turned up so they rounded up groups of students to make the stadiums look full.

To construct the new venues they bulldozed people’s houses with compensation.

People’s families suffered due to the people being involved in the games being taken away to camps so they couldn’t look after their familes.

The fancy trains that said “made in China” on them were actually made by a company in Canada - who were ordered to de-badge them and put “made in China” on them in an attempt to stop people associating said term with crap quality. When in fact of course it is, hence why they went to Canada for their trains.

They spent a third of their GDP on the games, rather than feed their people.

They decided the young girl who was singing was too ugly so they hid her behind a curtain and put a better looking girl out there miming.

They managed to perform the closing ceremony without using any amplification on the drums.

They had people carrying “nothing to see here” boards on standby as seen when the Hungarian weight lifter bent his arm back.

Their no doubt equal and fair selection process for the hundreds of people dancing in the stadium somehow presented any overweight or even slightly inperfect people from appearing.

Finally the co-ordinator for the ending ceremony of the olympic games said the western world couldn’t do amazing ceremonies like China did because…

• We respect human rights
• We have no dicipline and stop every 15 minutes for coffee breaks
• We only work 4 and a half days a week
• We aren’t willing to suffer enough
• However he does complement North Korea on their ability to stage such performances.

Did I miss anything?

There are a few things I want to talk about here. We need rather well I thought. Russia beat us to 3rd place in end but but 4th for Britain is really good, after all if there is one thing we are good at it is losing at sports.

Anyway, syncronised diving. It’s not a real sport is it? I mean seriously, you’r just jumping into a pool at the same time. It’s not big and it’s not clever. It’s very good to do at some kind of swimming club with 7 year old kids but an olympic sport? Of course not.

Also, London 2012, how are we supposed to follow this? Well anyway it’s irrelevant as we’re not even going to try. There is already talk of how we are going to hold a more “intimate” games, which basically just means less impressive.

And what was our closing ceremony about? It did have some rather nice features but it was spoilt for me by the fact that the big red bus we had, turned up on time. I don’t really feel that sums up British culture. Oh and the commentator accidentally called Leona Lewis a “superstar.” Finally, in case we hadn’t lost all self respect we ended it with “here’s David Beckham, he’s not going to say anything we’re just showing off.”

Finally, I just want to be clear that the man we sent to represent us in front of the rest of the world - was Boris Johnson. Kept him away from Britain for a while I guess. It’s good to see I’m not the only person who actually uses my jacket pockets.

Good stuff.

Facebook’s developer platform is a joke.

I mean, it wasn’t great initially but they made an effort. They launched a wiki and tried to provide good documentation. They often didn’t succeed but a little more time and experience and they would probably get the hang of writing good quality documentation.

But it’s just gone down hill. As you probably know they have re-designed Facebook and as part of their changes they have altered much of the API and mark-up language. The only problem is, they didn’t bother to updatr any of the documentation. So none of it works anymore.

Nothing is coherant either. There are dead links and nothing matches - the new integration guide will say one thing and the documentation for the function it is talking about is completely different.

Worst of all, the final hope of salvation, asking users who have actually managed to get it working, isn’t a simple search of the forums at the moment as it’s returning no results for any search term I care to put in. Fantastic stuff.

Short tags. My one victory of the night.

It’s been one of those days.

I got my new equipment delivered today in preparation for the podcast. The mic stands are, well, awful. They are way too big. Still I’m sure I can look beyond that if only Behringer had got back to me in terms of configuring my mixing deck so sound comes out. I haven’t got that far yet so I’m now sitting on lots and lots of very expensive equipment that I can’t get to work and we start recording the show in just over a week.

A-Soc. I had to redo the artwork for the membership cards because everyone prints different “standard size” business cards apparently. I don’t know if my artwork has sent because all my SMTP servers sent my email then told me it had rejected it. And I can’t order the hoodies because people aren’t answering their phones after they haven’t responded to my emails. I can’t test the A-Soc website locally because the MySQL server keeps rejecting my connections.

Finance. I’ve had £170 go missing out of my account which means I have had to cancel my card so now at some point I need to go home and get my new card and no doubt spend time on the phone activating it too as well as going through the fraud procedures.

Web. My web host isn’t returning my emails with regards to the fact they have lost my database. I still can’t commit all of my files to the SVN for House Metrics but the one victory I have had tonight is short tags. Having finally got everything running, anything without a full

Plus I finally have the second series of Doctor Who. Guess you have to take your victories where you find them.

…but everyone from Birmingham is bad news.

I got into my car to go to work and sat fiddling with my MP3 player, stationary at the side of the road when a taxi comes past and a crashes into me!

But what really tops it off is his excuse for why he drove into me.

I’m from Birmingham, I don’t know where I’m going

How about, not into other cards. That would be a sensible start, wouldn’t it?

Luckily my car was for the most part fine other than some scuffing on the bumper. Seriously though, how much of an idiot do you have to be to drive into a parked car?

Just when you’re down enough there is always something to give you that little extra kick.

Went round drive-thru this evening to find that meals have gone up £0.30 as well as having gone up £0.50 on breakfast!

As I left for uni this morning I was debating whether I could be bothered to go into town and pick up my phone (which was in for repair) or whether I should pick it up later. I decided to make the trek down to town as I need my phone to test my FYP on a phone browser on. I got down there to have them turn round and say “sorry, we had to send it off, it’s going to be 14 days.” So it should be due back right about the time I’ve just handed my FYP in. Fantastic.

Having got my new phone I requested my network unlock code for my old phone.

I phoned back in a few days when the said it would arrive. It hadn’t. So they requested it for me again. I rang back on the Monday. They still didn’t have it and requested it again. Wednesday I got an email with it. I entered it into my phone. And it bricked it.

Everything worked fine. I followed the instructions and then restarted my phone to find I got a “configuration error” message no matter what SIM I put in it.

I phoned up Vodaphone, several times, and they had no clue. They said back up your data on it and take it back into a Vodaphone shop and they will send it away for repair. So I downloaded and installed the crappy Sony Ecricsson software to backup my important data and guess what - it fails every time.

Any idea how you can recover data off a mobile phone anyone?

Meanwhile o2 is a whole different story. Norm dug me out an o2 SIM card which I inserted into my phone so I would have a pay as you go phone on o2’s network when my Vodaphone one wasn’t working. But the SIM refused to activate. So I tried to activate it online and was greeted with a message saying this was not an o2 number.

So I phoned up customer services who informed me that they had no record of this number in the database.

So I went down to the o2 store to get a new SIM card. Which I did as well as £10 top-up. I got home, inserted the SIM into my phone, phoned up and activated my top-up card and got the text messages to install the “settings” whatever that is. But despite having topped up, I apparently don’t have any credit. Fantastic.

I am most enjoying my new phone.

It looks quite good sat on my desk not doing anything.

I phoned up Vodaphone on Tuesday to get my unlock code for my k800i and they told me they would have it by Friday so I phoned back yesterday and they told me they didn’t have it. Not they didn’t have it yet, but rather they didn’t have it. And have now requested it for me again. Fantastic.