Thingomy.co.uk

I’ve always been fairly into conspiracy theories, and this stuff takes the biscuit, this should be mandatory viewing for life.

I don’t know it’s all well researched facts, I know some of it’s true, and it has only one tiny fact I know to be wrong (so tiny I’ve forgotten what it was), and I put that down to over simplification.

Yes, It’s a little long, but after the first 10 mins, it’s all good stuff.

See here:

register

The question remains — If you identify something as a UFO, it ceases to be unidentified — right?

Therefore it isn’t a UFO — right?

Therefore UFOs cannot exist

(edit: i put the wrong link in the first time)

For consultation:

I am going to be adding stuff to my blog in the near future. You may not like the quantity of stuff there, but there will be a way to non-destructivly opt out of most of the new bits.

It’s a little difficult to tell how this stuff will come out before I actually impliment it — such is the nature of this technology, you can’t really test changes without making them, or arsing about with it for way too long.

However if all goes to plan I intend on including a whole bunch of web links to interesting stuff I’ve found, this will lead to information overload in the case of some of the readers here.

I have considered the virtues of reducing content to keep viewers interested in everything, but I believe that is bad practice, and reduces creativity. Instead I beieve in alowing users to filter out the noise that is of no interest to them.

If you want a hastle free way of doing this, email me, or comment on this post, and I’ll specifically tell you what you need to do in your case.

At the change over there is a posibility there will be a swamp of anything up to 10ish posts that will come through at once, I will try to avoid this, but if it happens I appologise in advance.

Ideas? sugestions? requests?

If you want some more technical details, or you are on LJ, please read on…

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The stuff that I plan on adding is an import of my del.icio.us links, and my google reader shared items, these consist of mainly interesting news items/ humourous websites that I’ve found online, a more apt description of the content would be “random crap”. My username on both services is thingomy if you want to go for a preemptive poke around, but the character of the feeds will change once I am awear that somone other than me is actually reading them.

Provided (already) is:

Overal RSS feed — all posts;

RSS feed per catagory — these are an arse to find, email me;

RSS feed of comments on each post seperatly;

Email updates of selected catagories on a per user basis — cusomisable here: http://www.thingomy.co.uk/blog/wp-admin/users.php?page=subscribe2/subscribe2.php ;

An option to be emailed of any new comments on a post you have commented on — I think this one works…;

A feed of everything to LJ, (including all of the new stuff when it comes) — this is likelly to be the most problematic issue, as it cannot be tuned per user at my end. If I judge the LJ thing right, It could do with an injection of as much interesting stuff as it can get, so I intend on feeding through everything. I can however see merit in the attitude that it’s a blogging environment, and should not be filled up with other stuff. If I get a significant number of comments, I will look into alternatives. Such solutions as users using filters based on tags may be feesable after further investigation. Opinions?

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… mainly due to the fact I wasn’t around in 1920.

What a bloody mess, you couldn’t pay somone to come up with a situation as messed up as the naming conventions of the Brittish isles:

http://qntm.org/?uk

On other matters, I went to a gig tonight as official photographer, heard some good music, took a good number of good photos, a large number of bad ones, and am now completly, totally and utterly out of disk space — this is what happens when you take 12GB of pics in 4 hours.

In a conversation tonight with Steven Harrower, he proclaimed the following:

Americans only measure one thing in metric: 9 milimeters.

It has come to my attention that the feared US air securty TSA folks operate a lower standard of ID check that the lowley Northlink ferries traveling to a small island in the middle of the north sea — by boat.

Northlink now require photo ID, this is a little twitchy, as there is really very little you can do to a boat… i supose you could hijack it, steam it down to london (where you would arrive after about 3 days, having asked nicelly at some port half way to borrow some fuel) then ramraid a giant ferris wheel, but really?

On the other hand in america you can hapilly fly without any photo ID at all, as can be seen in this artical:

http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2008/03/13/how-to-fly-without-id-and-skip-lines/

I got tapped on the sholder in a mall today by what I imediatly assumed was a guranga monk or worse, I cringed as I prepared myself for what was about to come out of her mouth, and was surprised when it came out with a shetland accent.

Low and behold I knew the person…

This planet really isn’t large enough.

This may be a bit of a rant, but please forgive me.

These things annoy me, I may be generalizing a little much here, but it’s true.

mysp*ce is the worst of them all (and no it doesn’t deserve a capital letter despite being at the start of a paragraph) having a degree in computing, focusing mainly on how to design software, I know that they have broken pretty much every cardinal rule there is in software engineering. generally software engineers arn’t stupid, and nothing becomes a role of that nature unless it’s really important, and there are consequences to breaking it. It’s one of only 2 websites that actually raises my blood pressure during use. I’m not going to start on the details because i have managed to purge most of them from my mind.

Be*o and Faceb*ok are not as bad but are pretty poor. The trouble with the situation is that they are based around profit, and so do the following:

They force people to look at a carefully calculated amount of adverts that balances viewing volumes with people that get fed up and leave permanently;

Maintain total incompatibility with every other system available so that you have to spend dedicated time on their site. They only interoperability that any of the sites support is email notifications, this is a universal constant, and the emails are along the following lines: “funnylookingmonkeywithawig1982thesecond has sent you a new message, click here so that you can view 5 adverts while you wait to view it”

They carefully balance cost and benefit of development/repairs. When a company (especially in software) does this, they generally ignore bugs that frustrate 10% in favour of feature requests that 15% of people want. now I generally find that I only use the very basic functionality of systems like this, I rarely want animated smilies, cellphone posting (yes cellphone posting, it only ever works in America) or the ability to draw pictures of my genitalia at people.

What’s the difference between a blog post and a bulletin? I’ll tell you what: sod all, they are fundamentally identical, text posted to friends to pass a message. The only reason for separation is so that people spend more time on the site looking at adverts.

I have found one site that does vaguely work, LJ, it’s very much more cut down, although it does have some very advanced functionality, it supports a great deal of interoperability, and actually supports all 3 of the above examples of undesirables, (if you are willing to draw your genitals in paint) only they are were implemented without leaving too many bugs, and didn’t break anything them selves, If it stays out of my way it can do anything it wants, I don’t care. It’s just a little more technical and is designed as a blogging site, which to frank is all I want from a social networking site.

With only moderate expertise, LJ can be wired up to an email account such that you rarely if ever have to look at the site, and even then, it’s one page that you can save a bookmark to.

Now after reading the above one would ask (and rightly so) why I would have any interest in going near any of the above… the answer is that if you don’t play the game and sign up to them like a mug, you lose touch with people, and find it problematic to keep certain types of friends.

It’s funny that every group of people I find seem to use one of the 3, there seems to be no pattern, but if 5 people sit down in the pub, they invariably start speaking about one of the 3 and never mention the others.

The conclusion is that if I specifically (and remember that I have difficulties integrating into sacial groups as it is) want to try to make new friends I have to sign up for all 3, and spend endless amounts of time arsing around with it trying to get it to work, sifting through shitty memes and the such or I instantly get socially shunned. I don’t blame the individuals, but society for letting corps do this.

The one final gripe I have, and this is a far wider issue, passwords, If I could use the same password for all of them it would be ok, but oh no, at least one of them has odd requirements for their passwords, so because I can’t remember one site from another, I technically can’t remember my password for any of them

The only site that makes my blood boil more than mysp*ce may get mentioned later, but i’m starting to get stressed, and it’s really good for that.

First non travel realted post in ages…

I have come to the conclusion after much deliberation that every action has an equal but opposite reaction.

I hear many people say that this isn’t exactly the most original statment I’ve ever made, but I’m not talking about physics, I’m talking about social interaction.

The idea is that anything that makes a person (call him Adam) feel better than somone else (say Bob), will conversely make Bob feel worse than Adam.

This can be observed in union politics (if you don’t know exactly what I’m speaking about don’t bother) where a group of people feel good about themselves because they are part of the group, the oursiders on the other hand feel like exactly that, outsiders. This has been refered to as cleek culture. This of course happens virtually everywhere, but the most prominent example I’ve seen is in the union, where it is effectivly tearing appart the whole building.

This can also be seen when people educate others, by teaching a new skill or fact to someone, Bob once again feels inferior to Adam, because Adam looks more knowlagable than Bob, if handled incorrectly (or milked by Adam) this can develope into Bob being dependent on Adam for a stream of information, or bob being socially in debt to Adam for this social favour.

I believe that people can often be blind to the fact that they are are inadvertantly milking situations Either because of overwhelming arrogence, insecurities, straigt up force of habit, or social ignorance, and one of the above will affect most people.

I believe that all of these things can be handled correctly, so as not to hurt people, but may be very dificult in some cases, this may be where direct paralels with physics concepts fall down.

Taking pleasure from somone else’s apparent inferiority should imediatly ring alarms however.

I am not going to disown myself from this effect, I first noticed the concept when taking pleasure from superiority. It could also be said that this post is actually an attept to be superior than the people reading it, it certainly is not conciusly so, but subconciusly, nobody knows.