Posts by Nick Oakley

fumes and spiders..

I remember that news article about some kid spraying too much Lynx in a small bathroom and being overcome by the propellant fumes.

Also, slightly apropos - I have two large spiders in my bedroom: one is the small bodied-long legged type and the other is just large and thick legged so you can actually hear it running around the floor at night.

Last night I dreamt they both engaged in an arachnoid-duel across the bedroom floor - bizarrely conjoined one underneath the other in a crazy 16-legged beast cavorting wildly around the carpet. It was like a manic little tumbleweed pattering about and, I kid you not, they were emitting little screams as they attacked each other.

I'm pretty sure it was just a dream, but it sure as hell woke me up !

That is the worst statement they could have put out...

"We've learned that we're responsible"??? That is neither a blatant lie, nor an acceptance of full responsibility - it's the kind of statement you'd expect from a teenager who hasn't yet developed the maturity to hold his hands up and say, 'sorry'.

It's implicitly trying to get us to believe that not one person at RL knew about this, whilst at the same time trying to admit responsibility in a dilution of such proportions that it somehow places less blame on the person in charge by saying, "actually yes, it was I and these other 2,000 employees that did this".

It's as sickening as the image. Weasly and worryingly deceptive.

Who elected NASA anyway?

I'm sorry, but if NASA can't live up to mankind's hopes of reaching the stars, then someone else should. I don't recall them having a monopoly on my dreams of space exploration and I certainly don't think we should all take their word for it that 80 billion dollars isn't enough to send a tin bucket and a couple of adventurers up to Mars!

Maybe it'll be poetic justice that the Chinese are the first to lay claim to the Red Planet.

I can't even open the link to sign up ....

I'm even worse - the link to sign up opens a new tab under Firefox 2 but I'm lucky if I get half the page opening up and I've just given up after several attempts over 2 days.

Probably cuz the rest of the world is 20 yrs behind Japan

I travelled to Japan in 1994, buying the first issue of a magazine at the airport. This magazine had an article all about the European roadmap for widescreen, digital and hdtv and I remember being amazed at how long we'd have to wait to see any of this drool-inducing technology.

Imagine my surprise then, that I found myself living in a country that already had HDTV stations broadcasting content in a country whose citizens are proud of their traditions, old and new. Early adoption of new homegrown technology is as much a part of the Japanese psyche as going to work for the same company for your whole career.

Unfortunately, 15 years later, things have changed for Japan, but tiny little countries like ours that keep our public ignorant in their arrogant beliefs of global supremacy, still continue to import old technology and feed it to the masses as 'innovative'.

Simple Solution

Okay, so we all know when there is an ice-cream van nearby don't we? Those of us with kids with superior hearing to our own have a very efficient early warning system of the impending appearance of a certain frozen confectionary vehicle. So, why don't Google come up with a simple marketing campaign highlighting the jingle that their vans would play as it continues its jolly journey through the soon to be immortalised streets of the EU?

Hole Flow

Yup, the holes are the conceptual spaces left behind as each electron jumps to the next space that its neighbour has just vacated in a weird kind of marble-solitaire way. Early discoverers of electricity had to guess which way the current flowed and they guessed wrong, so that conventional current is always described in diagrams as flowing from positive to negative in the same direction that the holes appear to move. Electrons actually flow from negative ( cathode ) to positive ( anode ) in the opposite direction.

China Bashing

It's just another media outlet jumping onto the current bandwagon ( built in the US? ) that hails to the promised land of a new democratised China if we all give 'em enough love and a little encouragement.

Obvious

It's like those suitcases full of cash that explode with purple dye when you try to open them: Open this baby and all your data is shredded immediately. Try to remove the harddisc - shredded. Drop it too harshly - shredded. Incorrect password 3 times - .... you get the idea.

Let's think professionally here.

Ideally, I would just type, 'The Register' into a text box and wouldn't have to care about anything so arcane as a URL. That's my first requirement. I suppose I can stretch to clicking on a small Union Jack the first time I visit the website to get to the UK version, but thereafter I expect it to be remembered. Requirement number 2.

If these requirements are unattainable, then, unless there can be seen to be some measurable progress gained towards these requirements by changing the existing URL, then I suggest it's just left as is.

The New Dark Age

I hope that her future is not destroyed by this unfortunate witch hunt, which harks back to the days of Ducking Stools and mob justice.

I am ashamed to see how sophisticated technology is freely handed over to people with little or no training, only to have them carry the blame when that technology fails.

Just because every 10 year old boy knows what a steering wheel and pedals are for in a car, does that qualify him to drive on our roads? Of course not. So why do we give even more power to the average untrained professional as though it might magically find a way to improve things?

Revolution will come : either it will be in the shape of an interface that is intuitive for use by a human being, or it will be in the form of licences that entitle the holder to operate a computer after sufficient training.

Housewife in Curlers

Obviously it's Andy Capp's wife in a bout of reconciliation attempting to make amends by lifting up his beer belly....

My Goodness - if ever we needed proof of the damage that the internet has done to our collective psyche then this is it. By the way, I'm referring to what a lot of us can see in the logo, rather than what the original artist ( presumably ) intended.