@aleecestar That's my title! If you thinking I'm giving it up you've got another thing coming :P
by nicktaylor3 10 hours ago, in reply to aleecestar
Tuesday, 22 December 2009
I Repulse Snow
I love snow, but it hates me. It avoids me like the plague, fleeing to opposite ends of the country at the slightest hint of my presence.
I don't remember it ever snowing much in East Yorkshire when I was a kid, but since I moved to Lancaster it seems to get it by the bucketload. Last week it snowed in Goole and most other places except Lancaster. More or less the moment I drove across the Pennines, it stopped snowing here and, predictably, started belting it down over the North West. Meanwhile, I'm stuck with the treacherous icy dregs of last week's snow bonanza.
Next year I'm going to market myself as a service: "Blizzards forecast? Flying South for Christmas? I'll loiter around your chosen airport for up to 24 hours in advance, to guarantee clear skies! Dial 0800-NO-SNOWB. The B is for Bargain!"
Posted at 10:43 UTC | 2 Comments | Link This | Email This
Sunday, 20 December 2009
Rise of the Nutters
Oh God, they won. The league of Internet idiots can do anything they want now. Lord help us all.
Posted at 18:57 UTC | 0 Comments | Link This | Email This
Thursday, 17 December 2009
Rage Against the Charts
In case you missed it, there's a campaign to have Rage Against the Machine reach Christmas #1, just to annoy Simon Cowell. In a shock move, Tom Morello, beneficiary of a huge royalties payout, fully supports the chart race. He plans to donate 'some' of his windfall to charity.
Seemingly, few people have noticed that Rage Against the Machine and the X-Factor winners are both signed to Epic Records, a subsidiary of Sony -- the corporate personification of The Man if ever there was one. So apparently, we're going to stick it to The Man by buying lots of his records and giving him both the #1 and #2 spot at Christmas. He's going to be bloody furious when he finds out.
At the moment, the campaign supporters are celebrating being ahead of X-Factor in the iTunes downloads charts, so it also seems that none of these people realise how many kids will flock to buy the X-Factor on physical CD on Saturday. It's probably the only single you can still reliably make money on in a physical format. Oblivious to this, they'll no doubt bemoan a suspicious last minute surge in sales, as if Simon Cowell has been running round all the record shops cackling and buying every copy.
Supporters are quick to point out that they have raised much money for charity by encouraging participants to donate an equal amount to Shelter, which counters the portion of the X-Factor earnings that go to charity. Of course, they could donate twice as much and not bother buying the download, but they don't seem to mention that.
It's all a bit of fun, but I'm a bit sick of hearing about it from people who genuinely think they're going to upset someone by giving them all this money. That said, I don't mind at all hearing Rage occasionally on Radio 1...
Posted at 10:28 UTC | 0 Comments | Link This | Email This
Wednesday, 16 December 2009
Web Two-point-Snow
I love Web 2.0. As soon as snow reports started coming in on Twitter, some guy launched a mashup which charted snow on Google Maps, based on tweets that contained a #uksnow tag, your postcode and a score out of 10 (0 for no snow, 10 for a blizzard). It's brilliant that this sort of thing can spring up , displaying results that are probably more accurate than the official reports. (On a side note, I hate the new BBC Weather site).
Unfortunately, all the technology in the world can't make it snow in Lancaster...
(Half an hour after I spotted this, the server had died.)
Posted at 12:31 UTC | 0 Comments | Link This | Email This
Thursday, 29 October 2009
Networked Bereavement
It was only a matter of time before Facebook needed to tackle death. I posted a while back about death and the Internet and the way that people will use social networking profiles as memorials for the deceased, and without wanting to seem morbid, it's something that fascinates me. Technology in general and social networking specifically is providing new ways of approaching something that very few people are comfortable talking about and I'm pretty interested in seeing how that pans out.
The Facebook development is the ability to report somebody as deceased and have their profile turned into a sort of memorial. The reason for this was a new feature (which I'm not fond of) that suggests people you haven't spoken to in a while and might want to catch up with. Clearly if a profile goes inactive, you might get a nasty shock in six months' time.
I just find myself wondering how long it's going to take for someone to Photoshop a newspaper article and declare one of their friends dead...
Posted at 22:28 UTC | 0 Comments | Link This | Email This