IMS_Blog

This is a lesson for far too many companies out there, an object lesson in how to respond.

A guy called Darren Barefoot made a parody of the online environment Second Life, called Get A First Life. It’s particularly amusing to those of us who wonder how you can possibly have time or inclination to live an entire second life when one is hard enough. Anyway, he invited comments and cease and desists. The brilliant part is Second Life sent him one, or not. Starting off as legalise it’s a comment saying, hey, we know parody when we see it. Good work.

They even give the guy a licence to be selling his t-shirts. Now that’s how to do it folks :-)

That. Was. Awful…

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We used to believe in hard evidence and fair trials in this country - now we dispense rapid-fire justice as quickly as the government can develop a catchy four-letter acronym for it. Jago Russell, Liberty

Never mind the actual story (which is entirely ridiculous) attached to the quote. This applies far too much to the entire direction of this country’s justice system.

This post has been reproduced on my new site.

Back when I was younger than I am now (I have a birthday this weekend, it has a zero at the end, age is a touchy subject), I attended school. Big shock. More to the point, I attended Brighton Avenue School. That’s not particularly strange either; it was the local school after all, which I could see (before they pulled the old buildings down) from my house. What was a little strange, and never explained by any of the people I’d casually thought to ask over the years, was why it was Brighton Avenue. If you take a look at the school’s location, you’ll find a distinct lack of Brighton Avenue (I should point out that I went to school I went to the lovely original buildings which stood where the playing fields now are. The modern buildings were opened just after I left and were built on what had been waste ground but before that held more housing. I’ve always had it on very good authority that what stood there wasn’t a Brighton Avenue though—incidently, the street which was there, Ravensworth Terrace, actually still exists, transported brick by brick to Beamish Museum).

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This is a (quite belated) review of the final two Torchwood episodes (12 and 13) “Captain Jack Harkness” and “End of Days”. Spoilers, just in case there are those who haven’t seen them, are hidden below.

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The internet, world wide webby thingy is a wonderful (if occasionally unreliable) source of information. It’s so good in fact that it comes as a surprise when seemingly simple things aren’t online–but the sort of things which you might not look up everyday, yet are seemingly simple enough to have been put online, or quite often missing. They’re not exciting stuff, or big definitions (the sort of stuff found in Wikipedia (though that has its vast share of obscure) but rather things that people may occasionally need to reference. Lists, long pieces of generally irrelevant but occasionally very pertinent information. They don’t seem hard to put up is the thing. Oft times the information must already be in a database somewhere. Quite often it’s held by a government department, which you might think would increase the chances of it being made easily available to the public. Sometimes you can find everything but the all important details. I’ve recently come across a couple of examples of this.

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There are reports floating around that a new, LED, cats eye nearly caused an epileptic fit in a driver. Were it not for the fact that The Highways Agency seems to be taking it seriously then it would sound like an urban legend. That’s not the main point though. The question must be asked why they were messing with cat’s eyes in the first place. If Saint Christopher is the patent saint of travellers in general then there may be an argument Percy Shaw should be that of the motorist. His invention has saved countless lives and done so through its sheer, brilliant simplicity. Cat’s eyes require no power source, clean themselves, guide in the dark—even their familiar feeling and sound when driven over instinctively tells the driver they’ve changed lanes whether they meant to or not (and at times they are almost a comfort on the long, dark road). Why fuck with them, for the sake of “ohhh, isn’t it modern”??

Hmm, perhaps it’s just symptomatic of the Highways Agency. While looking for any report of this on their site (which I didn’t find) I did stumble across this story describing a trial in which electronic signs are being used to convey journey time information. While that may be useful one can’t help but wonder how long it takes drivers to start ignoring the important messages they display on the assumption it’s giving info about a journey to somewhere they’re not going. Just use them for important things, then you know it’s important…

This is a somewhat belated (thanks to my taking almost a week to watch it) review of episode 11 of Torchwood (Combat). As usual I’ll leave the spoilers until after the jump, just in case you haven’t seen it.

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