Archive for the 'Asides' Category

Teenager orders cabinet instead of cab

April 14th, 2008

This story made me laugh. A girl from London was looking to book a cab (taxi) to Bristol Airport. She called up directory enquiries and asked for Joe Baxi (cockney rhyming slang for taxi). When told there was nobody by that name, she said ‘It ain’t a person, it’s a cab, innit.’ and got connected to a supplier of cabinets.

From Metro: “‘Look love, how hard is it?’ she fumed. ‘All I want is your cheapest cab, innit. I need it for 10am. How much is it?’ The sales adviser told her £180. The tantrum-throwing teenager quickly left her address details before ringing off. The next morning, rather than being picked up by a cab, the young woman had the cabinet dropped off.”

BBC News

March 31st, 2008

The new BBC News website just looks absolutely fantastic. This comes just weeks after the redesign of the BBC homepage. The editors wrote a bit about the new design on their blog. But its a shame that the BBC don’t update the design of old articles on their site although I suppose that it’s nice they’ve kept the old pages as they were originally intended. Congratulations to the BBC News web team.

On the topic of BBC News, check out Bill Bailey’s BBC News Rave.

‘SG-1: Ark of Truth’ Tonight

March 24th, 2008

A reminder for Stargate fans in the UK: SG-1 Ark of Truth premieres tonight at 8pm on Sky One. If you miss it, it’ll be repeated on Wednesday evening. If you don’t have Sky, wait till April 14th to get it on DVD. I’d be really interested to see what everybody thinks.

Interest Rates

March 18th, 2008

The US Federal Reserve reduced base interest rates from 3% to 2.25%. Inflation last year in the USA was 4.1%. If you placed money in a savings account at 2.25%, you would actually lose 1.85% of it’s value in 1 year. Not really “savings”. According to The Economist, if you use GDP per head (a more accurate indicator of standard of living), the USA has actually been in recession since Q4 2007 with quality of life falling by 0.4%/year. Just something to think about.

Terminal 5 Heathrow

March 13th, 2008

Terminal 5 at Heathrow  is being inaugurated by the Queen tomorrow. Check out the “electroluminescent wall” which shows the time at Heathrow 5. Stylish eh. A really nice spin on the normal “clocks from different cities”. It opens to the public in 2 weeks time.

Software Bugs

March 10th, 2008

A really interesting article in The Economist’s Technology Quarterly this week about how computer programmers use a range of tools to try and cut down on the number of bugs. “An industry rule of thumb is that a bug which costs $1 to fix on the programmer’s desktop costs $100 to fix once it is incorporated into a build, and thousands of dollars if it is identified only after the software has been deployed in the field.”

Effortless Good

March 5th, 2008

Effortless Good is a fantastic idea and great extension. Simply, Amazon runs an affiliate system which gives webmasters a fee for every purchase they refer. Effortless Good is a Firefox extension adds a referral code to when you visit Amazon so that the referral fee is collected and then split between four causes: the Rainforest Alliance, Save the Children, Grameen Foundation and the Participatory Culture Foundation. A fantastic idea and some great causes too (although I’m not too sure about the last one)

MySpace Platform launching next week

March 5th, 2008

The MySpace Platform is launching Thursday March 13th. Myspace applications are launching using OpenSocial 0.6.

I don’t even use Myspace any more but it was really interesting to log on the other day and to see some of the new features MySpace has added such as tagged photos, notification pages on the front page and of course, now applications. Facebook certainly revolutionised the social web.

Skip Facebook Forced Invites

March 3rd, 2008

A bookmarklet allowing you to skip forced invites on Facebook. Fantastic, saves you time and saves you from having to spam your friends. But I’ve found that applications which force you to invite people generally aren’t worth the time anyway. Best thing is to uninstall it immediately but sometimes they dump these on you after you spend 30 minutes answering a quiz.

Cyber Warfare

March 3rd, 2008

Just a few musings:

  • if a country launches a cyber-attack on another country is it considered a declaration of war? A cyber-attack could arguably have more damage than conventional weapons: it could take electricity and security systems offline which could endanger lives.
  • Is a country attacked by electronic means allowed to respond using conventional bombs?
  • Given the amount of danger a cyber-attack could cause, should it be added to the list of prohibited weapons which currently include biological, chemical and nuclear weapons?

Next »