Chris Worfolk's Blog

We recently headed to the bowling alley to celebrate Fonze’s birthday.

It was a rather confusing start because the alley used to be owned by AMF Bowling, but it is now owned by 1st Bowl. However, AMF have now bought Hollywood Bowl, so if you search for AMF Leeds you get what was the Hollywood Bowl out at Cardigan Fields rather than the one you are looking for. Never the less, we sorted it in the end.

They have a pretty cool offer called Big Work Party, which is where you can take your office (as long as your office is at least six people) and bowl for £2.25 a game! Being a Yorkshireman, I decided to take all the saving I could get and booked three games. I then bowled the worst games I’ve ever played, but a steak as ‘Spoons afterwards made it all better.

That’s right, I have a photo of Elettra – with a drink!

Need to locate a specific file somewhere on your system? Luckily, there is an appropriated named search tool which you can use to do that. It’s called locate and it’s very similar to file search in Windows file manager.

Not all Linux installs come with locate, so you may need to install it.

yum install locate

Also, the first time you run it, it will need to build the database, so that will take a little longer. But once it is up and running, it is pretty fast. Simply use the command followed by a file name, or even just part of a file name, to get a list of all the files on your system that match.

locate httpd.conf

As some of you know, I write some of my blog posts in advance and publish them a few days or weeks later, depending on how many I’ve written recently. So sometimes I will write something and it won’t actually be published on my blog until a few days later.

This Saturday is the Grand National, the most valuable race in the racing calendar and one of the most prestigious after the Gold Cup. It’s also synonymous with real outsiders taking the crown. Whether this is a justified reputation or not I’m not entirely sure, but in 2009 it was won by Mon Mone – a 100 to 1 shot (which makes for a far more exciting headline than last year’s winner, Ballabriggs, 14 to 1 price).

Anyway, this year I’m tipping Neptune Collonges. Lets see how my prediction does in the race on Saturday – which totally coincidentally is about when this blog post would be published…

Cyclists on the road have long been a contentious issue for drivers. Many drivers argue that they slow down traffic and don’t pay any road tax. Meanwhile, cyclists argue that not enough care is taken by drivers to maintain safe roads and that they are often the victims of accidents in which they come off much worse.

The issue seems to be that they are very much in limbo. They are road users in many aspects, but then they are also similar to pedestrians in many ways (so in some aspects, pedestrians are road users also).

Traffic lights are a very good example of this. I would say the majority of cyclists I see on the roads, that is to say at least over 50% of them, do not pay attention to traffic lights. They ride straight through them or sometimes mount the pavement in order to avoid them if you would go as far as to describing it as that.

My problem with this is that you can’t expect to be treated as a valid road user, if you’re going to jump red lights.

First of all, it isn’t safe. You can make the argument that it is safe because obviously a cyclist wouldn’t jump a red light when there was someone crossing but if you’re going to make this argument there is no reason why cars should still be restricted to stopping for red lights – after all, we promise to check if there are people on the crossing. Obviously, this would end badly. Why? Because it’s just not safe to let people jump red lights, whoever they are (including emergency vehicles, but there are greater risk of not stopping).

Secondly, it creates a separation between cars and bikes. If we’re going to maintain that cyclists are full road users who deserve just as much respect as drivers, then they need to be held to the same standards as cars and motorbikes – if you say “the law doesn’t apply to me because I don’t have an engine”, you’re unlikely to be granted the respect you are looking for either.

As a society, we need to make the roads safer for cyclists – and that is only going to happen when drivers change their attitude towards cyclists. But, when the majority of cyclists don’t follow the rules of the road, can we really blame drivers for not giving them that respect?

I don’t normally go to the cinema – it involved sitting still for two, maybe even three hours. But this summer I’ll be making an exception. Why, in one sentence? A Seth MacFarlane film, featuring Mila Kunis!

If the video isn’t embedding properly, you can also see it here.

If for some reason you’re not already 100% convinced then a) there is something wrong with you and b) here is a different trailer, this one voiced by Patrick Stewart. Enough said.

We make some pretty shocking television in Britain. For those who live elsewhere, they see what the US has sent them – shows like Friends, Scrubs and CSI, and think “yeah, that United States really make some kick ass television.” Then they look at the programmes we export and find such titles as X-Factor and Who Wants To Be a Millionaire.

Both those shows were created in the UK and both have been hugely successful in franchising to the rest of the world.

It’s therefore easy to look at the shows we have managed to export, while our true gems like The Office and Sherlock simply get re-made by the US, missing the genius of the people behind the original series which made it so great in the first place, not to mention the best television we put out, shows like Horizon and Human Planet being largely ignored, and become depressed about our success in selling our output to the rest of the world.

But there is one show which has successfully gone out into the big wide world and carved out an international relationship. Top Gear. And why not? It’s a fantastic TV show.

I don’t know anyone who doesn’t like Top Gear. Its reinvention in 2002 was a stroke of genius – time after time people say “I love Top Gear! I’m not interested in the cars, but the rest of it is brilliant.” That’s the genius, especially with the specials, it’s a really cool travel documentary about three friends that happen to be driving cars at the time.

Even those that do object to the show are usually only objecting to the fact that Jeremy Clarkson is one of the most offensive people on TV at the moment. Granted, he does say a lot of inappropriate things but then his TV personality is set up to be controversial – he is a man who is paid to have strong opinions.

As a result, the British version of the show is one of the most watched TV shows around the world. It has readily topped the list of most downloaded TV shows, indeed in 2007 it was the second most downloaded show of the entire year, beaten only be Heros and topping Lost, Prison Break, 24 and Family Guy, the most popular shows coming out of the US at the time.

Add to that the spin-off franchises which exist in Australia, the United States, Korea, China and Russia and you have one of the most popular TV shows currently produced in the UK.

Of course, for a rather differing opinion, you might want to check out Stewart Lee’s opinion.

Last night, I tried to access a website using the 3G internet on my phone.

I couldn’t. Why? Turns out O2 now censor their internet traffic. Instead of presenting me with a web page, I was re-directed to another website telling me that I had not verified I was over 18 and therefore would not be allowed access to said website.

I wasn’t even on an adult website. I was on a clothing website. But because the site contained certain keywords, I’m not sure which ones, it must have picked up on that and decided the website contained material of an adult nature and therefore decided to block it.

I don’t think they should be censoring anything (they can add a parental lock-out that you can opt into if they wish, but I don’t think you should have to opt out of censorship), but even if we accept it’s fair play to automatically censor my internet usage, they know damn well that I am over 18 because you have to give them your date of birth when you sign up for your contract.

Secondly, the site they redirect you to is one called bango.net. Not o2.co.uk. This would have been a little more reassuring, but a website I’ve never heard of? I had to text my friend to check if it was legitimate. Seriously, WTF? We’re always being told to beware of phishing scams, and they companies pull shit like this. No wonder banks are constantly being defrauded when companies imply that actually we should trust these random third party domain names!

Thirdly, it turns out that bango.net is a third party company that they just use for payment processing – so O2 are effectively forcing you to give your personal details to a third party who could be doing anything with your details. The only way round this is to turn up to an O2 store with photo ID, which I would have done if it wasn’t Easter Saturday and I was no where near an O2 store.

Fourthly, you have to give a credit card to authorise it online. But this doesn’t actually prove I am over 18 because some banks will issue cards to under 18s as second card holders. So they might as well just rely on the date of birth I give them.

Finally, because of the way that they set the technical implementation up, even after I had verified with my credit card (I had to use my backup credit card as they don’t accept Amex, or indeed anything other than Visa or Mastercard, so they’re not making it easy) I still couldn’t access the website I wanted because it kept redirecting to the age verification website, which then saw I was verified and redirected to an O2 portal page. I could probably fix this by clearing my cache, but I don’t want to clear my fucking cache, my cache is there for a reason. If they had put more thought into the technical implementation they could have done it in such a way that this wouldn’t have been necessary.

I’ve just started watching Diarmaid MacCulloch’s documentary series, “How God Made The English.” The premise of the series is that the one common identifier over the past thousand years in Britain has been religion. I’ve heard good and bad things about it, so I decided to give it a watch.

One of the points he discusses in the first episode is the idea that once we had abolished the slave trade in our own country, we then set about forcing this on the rest of the world. In MacCulloch’s words, we became God’s policemen.

An interesting parellel could be drawn between this and today when the United States, an anomaly in being the only major developed world to contain such high levels of piety, now takes on a similar role perhaps best illustrated in Parker & Stone’s Team America: World Police.

Is there then, a connection between religious devotion and a feeling that you can tell the rest of the world what to do?

Almost certainly. As luck would have it, we didn’t have to work out whether it was wrong or right to go into Iraq and kill a lot of civilians based on some fictional weapons of mass destruction. Why? Because both George Bush and Tony Blair both spoke to God, and he confirmed that that was exactly what he wanted.

That isn’t to say that political positions didn’t play a part in this too. In both cases, we and America not only had the will to enforce our view on the rest of the world, but the power to as well. As the saying goes, power corrupts.

But it is this power, combined with divine right – the knowledge that you are unquestionability doing the right thing because you have God on your side and God can never be wrong, that seems to lead to such totalitarian attitudes towards the rest of the world.

Not that I’m all together against interventionism.

There are quite a few different VNC clients available for Mac, and most of them are, in my experience, pretty disappointing. And totally unnecessary, because OS X actually comes with a build in VNC viewing client which works fine. For some reason though, Apple have kept it pretty well hidden.

Never fear though, because once you know the location, it’s easy to find and use.

/System/Library/CoreServices/Screen Sharing.app

It’s pretty simple, but then I’ve never found the need for all the extra crap a lot of the viewing clients come with – I just want to be able to control a remote computer!