Archive for July, 2006

I’ve been reading Mashable which is a blog about web 2.0 start-ups. It’s quite interesting to see what is going on with new websites but it shows you how much of an unoriginal place the internet can be. Almost all of the websites and recent start-ups on there are either MySpace or YouTube clones. Some of them don’t even try to pretend they are not. I think if these start-ups are really going to suceed they need to be far more innovative.

I was reading over on Release 1.0 about a company called Goodmail which wants to charge for people sending emails. Basically you pay a few pence for each email and they gaurentee that it will be delivered to the recipent.

Esther Dyson puts some good points forward about why it would be an advantagous thing but I think there are still strong reasons again. For a start, the idea that people just want email to be free because it used to be free is somewhat bankrupt in that nobody would want to see a more costs involved even if it was paid for originally and also that email isn’t free. We already pay for it in our ISP fees, or domain and server fees. So adding a sending fee is making us pay twice. Even in the case of webmail such as Hotmail and gMail it costs us in having to endure annoying advertising.

Further more, such examples such as the fact we pay for snail mail I don’t feel support the case. It’s not a good thing we have to pay for stamps. It’s not like we had an open choice to pay or not and choose the paying route, it’s just how our economy/society works. I hardly ever use the mail. Why? Because emails faster and cheaper. Yes, we have massive spam problems. But so does the mail, so does the phone with cold calling.

Best. Gig. Ever.

I miss posting on forums, I’m in one of those moods to start a new forum. I have drifted apart from my usual online homes and could use something else to sink my teeth into, especially given that I could free up a vBulletin licence (or two, maybe). But that would mean picking a topic. A programming forum would be good but there is no niche so attracting users would be tricky. Doing a TV show or celeb site would also be good although most of the TV shoes I love have been cancelled. So many decisions, I just want to start a new forum dammit! That way I can buy a new domain.

I got a letter from Norwich Union Direct today saying the following…

Did you know that people in your road are enjoying great Home Insurance from Norwich Union Direct?

It then listed my street. My mum jokingly suggested I should ring them up and ask them who the people were. I decided to take her up on the idea. After all, what’s the point in telling me people in my street have it if they can’t tell me who they are so I can validate that they are telling the truth?

Having the luxary of a microphone and a phone that does speaker phone I took advantage of my right to record the call so you can all have a listen. It takes about 10 seconds to get into it (before you hear anything) as I couldn’t be bothered going back and editing it ;).

Norwich Union Direct call

From the 23rd of July, FilmFour will be free apparently. I’m not sure if it includes FilmFour+1 and FilmFour Weekly as well though I would imagine it does as nobody is going to pay for them when the main channel is free. Importantly, it’s going to be on Freeview so I will be able to get it at uni :).

I had a read of Digital Spy‘s story on it and apparently FilmFour Weekly is going to close. FilmFour should hopefully have some good movies on though, they are launching it with Lost In Translation.

Got down to Labour Ready for 6:45 this morning. Sat around for 2 hours before we were all told there wasn’t going to be anymore work available today. Had to bus it back home at peak time. So not the greatest start to the day.

I did get quite a bit of coding done today, indeed I started writing a new product from scratch and have done probably more than half of it which is a lot of code given I have also been working on other things. But overall it’s not been the greatest day. I’m hoping double South Park followed by double Sugar Rush will pull me out of it. Providing I can get control of the cable box.

And what do I have to look forward to? Getting up at 6 again tomorrow to go down again. And maybe the day after too.

On the flip side, it’s now only 3 days until I go see Billy Talent. My one salvation. Well actually my second after DC though it’s not having such a moral boosting effect as of the past few days.

That or it’s just drowned out by the soul destroying events currently happening. I mean, the stuff I have done today for my script involved piles of AJAX and JavaScript. This is the kind of stuff world leaders like vBulletin are doing. What the hell am I doing in the same place as the rest of the losers at the agency? Have a possible client wanting some development work though so hopefully I will get some joy there.

I was flicking over the Ruby category of Amazon.co.uk’s computer programing languages books and came accross this listing…

Should I tell them? :p.

I actually had the thought to check out the library and see what they had to offer as I really don’t want to be spending money on a book. The answer is they can’t offer anything! EB don’t have one single book on Ruby programming apparently. I wonder if I can request some.

I think Eniac has emptied for the summer, haven’t seen anyone in here the last few times I have been in. Not that I expected to, who is going to come into uni labs over the summer? Well, some people might hit DEC-10, I know Matt did, but that’s DEC-10, everyone except me hates Eniac :p.

I had another early start and finish this morning, I was home before 7:30. I got registered with Labour Ready but he said it wasn’t worth hanging around as he wouldn’t be able to find anything for me today. I did allow me to get some development done though. Although it’s depressing thinking about how work could cut into my development. I don’t want to get home from work and think “I’m just too tired to do anything,” I refuse to be even if it means overdosing on caffine. I don’t actually like coffee so I may just eat the beans raw.

On the up side, it’s now only 4 days until I see Billy Talent! I’ve been playing their new album almost non-stop including all night when I sleep to try and get all the lyrics learnt in time.

Have a read through this BBC News article. I’ll quote…

A Populus poll for The Times newspaper and ITV news suggests 13% of UK Muslims believe the 7/7 bombers should be regarded as martyrs, with the other 87% disagreeing.

I saw worrying not suprising because I’ve seen the figures for an international survey which asked basically the same question. While I hadn’t seen the British figures I could guess from the figures I did see that we would be about that level. But anyway.

13% of Muslims in the UK support what happened on 7/7. That’s in the UK. I’ve seen the worldwide figures and I think it goes without saying that they are a lot higher elsewhere, obviously in the middle east.

Given there are about a billion Muslims, and it averages out to be about 25%, that means 250,000,000, or 4 times the population of the UK are in support of such actions taken on 7/7.

Furthermore, we have 1.5 million Muslims in the UK. That means over 202,000 Muslims in the UK alone support the actions of 7/7. This is not a small minority. This isn’t a bunch of extremists we can dismiss. This is 200,000 people in the UK alone. This should scare the crap out of all of us.