Recently, I felt the need to speak out in support of Sony Ericsson. It’s a big decision – Elina’s recent choice to purchase on of their devices mean she is now barred from ever returning to her home nation. However, given so many of our blog posts are moaning about technology has let us down, I thought I would offer a word of encouragement.
This is my Sony Ericsson k800i. It’s battered, every corner is chipped off, the infrared censor has come off the side completely and now there is a little creator where it used to be, the quick keys have been totally scrubbed of paint and you have to ram the joystick as hard as you can every now and then to get it working again.
But it still works, and this phone is now five years old.
I’m not sure I have anything other piece of technology that is equally as old and equally as used. It’s still my alarm every morning despite the fact I have since upgraded my phone three times and am now sporting my very, very much loved iPhone 4.
Phones, computers, laptops and many other gadgets have come and gone and it’s not like I buy cheap. My MacBook Pro is now starting to feel it’s age despite its £1,200 price tag and not yet having reached its second birthday.
As such, it really is a credit to Sony Ericsson that they can build a phone that can put up with the punishment I give it and still be in usable order after such a long period.
Of course, Twitter isn’t always informed opinion.
Last Saturday the EDL held a protest in Dewsbury. Although, the first I knew about it, was when a bunch of their supporters came running past my window in the centre of Leeds. Luckily, as I explained last week, Twitter soon had be clued up what was going on.
I spent a bit of time watching the Twitter updates, with both sides tweeting live, and had to giggle a bit when a guy named Ged Robinson kept asking them what was the point in doing protest events when a much better way to engage would be to talk to the moderate Muslims.
This may be a good point, but there is a certain level if irony with someone spending a large amount of their time engaging in the futile activity of trying to put a rational argument to people who will never accept such points, telling them their efforts are futile.
The police were soon hot on the trail however and within a few minutes, there were half a dozen police vans parked outside my house.
After the HSoWY meeting last Thursday, we headed towards The George for a few drinks. Unfortunately (or should I saw fortunately) The George was closed. So we headed on to Millenium Square, to hit the Cuthbert Brodrick.
While I will admit that it was a little nosier than I was expecting, we soon found a nice quite place to sit down outside. And the advantage of going to Cuthbert was the drinks were both cheap and varied.
Not to mention that when I ordered my ham, egg and chips, it cost £2.10. £2.10! You probably couldn’t make it that cheap just based on buying the raw ingredients, let alone the labour costs which could come to 20 times that once I had gone to the shops, cooked it and cleaned up.
There really is no justification for disliking ‘Spoons.
At last Thursday’s Humanist Society of West Yorkshire meeting, Brian Layfield and Mark Edon presented a talk on Creationism.
Brian is a long time member of HSoWY but also father of Steven Layfield, a well known creationist who is now head of Science at Emmanuel College. Mark is secretary of the British Centre for Science Education (BCSE for short) and has previously spoken at both Skeptics and A-Soc.
On Wednesday, I received a letter from the company that runs my car park.
It stated that some permit holders where parking there on a Sunday even though their permit did not entitle them to and if this continued, they would get their parking enforcement company to start issuing tickets.
Now, I have no idea if they sent this to everyone or not, but I do know that I am pretty much the only person who parks there on a Sunday. So I can’t help but feeling a little bit victimised by this.
Apparently, even though I have been parking there for two years now without any problems even after explaining to them when I first signed up I would be there all the time, the standard permit I have only covers Monday to Saturday and if you want to park there on a Sunday, you have to pay extra.
This is despite the fact that all council car parks are free on a Sunday and nobody parks there anyway so it isn’t like they need the space.
You could of course argue that this is just a company trying to pull as much cash as it can from every available orifice but pragmatically, it’s just them being wankers. They make virtually no money out of having this separate pay extra policy because no permit holders park their on a Sunday anyway, so the only person they are getting extra money out of is me. Their price gouging brings them little reward, but plenty of angry blogging.
Last Sunday saw the June meeting of the Humanist Community of Leeds. This month’s meeting saw a very elaborate array of discussions with topics ranging from The moral landscape and global politics to exactly how you should cook extra thick steak. Big thanks to Gijsbert for his excellent news round up as usual.
At around 4pm this afternoon, dozens of people, some wearing St George’s Crosses came running past my window, followed by a few dozen police officers and half a dozen police vans. There are still seven police vans a police car parked outside my house.
What was going on?
Well, my first guess was that there was some kind of EDL protest happening.
Unfortunately, traditional news outlets can’t keep up. There is nothing on the BBC Leeds website, nor the Yorkshire Post website. There never is.
The one place you could find out what was going on however, was Twitter. A quick search for the words “EDL” showed my a long series of posts about the group having a demo in Dewsbury today, next to the train station, they had then moved to Leeds and were now running around the city centre.
I could even confirm most of these details on West Yorkshire Police‘s official Twitter account.
That’s the great thing about Twitter. You’re right – nobody does give a fuck when Lily Allen puts the kettle on and tweets about it, but when it comes to breaking news, Twitter really is bringing something special to the game.
Eli Pariser recently gave an interesting talk at TED about the way the internet is becoming more and more personalised – filtering so we see more of the stuff we want to see, and less of the stuff we don’t. He argues this can be a bad thing as it means we don’t see the other side of the argument.
One of the most interesting statistics given in the talk is that Google use 57 different factors to personalise your results, including many used even when you’re not logged in. That really must make your job a whole lot more complex if you work in SEO ;).
I recently took a quick glance at my stats to see, well I would say how many people read my blog, but what you really get is how many spam bots have hit your blog. In any case, it was interesting to see some of the search terms that people have used to reach my blog:
- dogging
- red light area in london
- hamster birthday
- chicken brain
- osama bin laden death photo
- sue my chin buff my pylon
- dont buff my pylon
- cottaging blog
- daily star they ve stolen all our jobs
- bejeweled illuminati
- talk to dead ancestors
- water way to have a good time
Dogging I can understand, though I imagine people will be quite disappointed in the content they find when they get here. Chicken brain comes from the time we went to Nando’s for my birthday and found a chicken brain in our food.
The buff my pylon stuff is a reference to Brass Eye while the last term is a reference to Alan Partridge, though the blog post itself is nothing to do with that.
The Daily Star reference refers to a headline they ran in 2008 claiming immigrants had taken every single unskilled job in the past few years.
Beyond that, I’m a little lost though. I don’t have any pictures of Osama Bin Laden’s dead body, I’ve never tried cottaging and I’m fairly sure that Bejeweled is not a product of the Illuminati designed to control our minds. And even if I did, I certainly haven’t expressed that opinion on my blog!
EDIT: Actually, while I didn’t say that, I did suggest PopCap might be the new Illuminati.
