October 2005 Archives

More Wikipedia esoterica:

[[Fictional chemical substance]]
[[List of English words containing a Q not followed by a U]]
[[Cabbaging]]

Previously on trioptimum.co.uk: The Losing Battle

For the first time in months, my inbox is empty! A big, looming, constantly worsening task has finally been dealt with, allowing me to finally reassert some control over my digital victim lifestyle.

I feel like celebrating. So light-headed am I that I'm making this wacky offer: send me an email and I'll reply to it!¹

P.S. Coming up fast on my list of things to do is to kick my websites back into shape. I did the whole switching thing a few months ago, as you may know, but all my website source files are still sitting on the old PC where I had a nice little workflow that worked well for me. Now I'm a newbie to OS X and largely ignorant of all the software that exists, so in order to do things like update the contents of that antiquated sidebar over there (pfft, City of Heroes? come on...), I need to figure out how to recreate the same effect with none of the same tools. Irritatingly, developers seem inclined to charge registration fees on OS X for software that would probably have a nice free alternative on Windows (would somebody please show me a good free Mac FTP client?), so that makes the discovery process more time-consuming.

¹ Offer open for a limited time only. Not valid outside the Internet.

Updated: As it turned out, it didn't take very long after all to find Cyberduck, an apparently perfectly serviceable GPL FTP/SFTP client for OS X. Sorry, unlicensed mode RBrowser, you're fired.

There are some fascinating obscure articles on Wikipedia, and I mean to start posting links to some of those I find and particularly like.

Here's one: [[List of unusual deaths]]

Just back from Manchester, where it rained for five days only to turn sunny on the day of departure, and where I briefly met some other blogging guy (apparently he dabbles in other media too).

I've had no success convincing anybody I know to watch the hilarious, insightful, geek-literate comedy/news/talk import The Daily Show (8:30pm and late, weeknights, More4), which I've been watching for months through the joys of the Internet, so I'm going to give up (your loss, people). But just before I do, here's a recent Guardian interview with frontman Jon Stewart.

What a bad day. The details are irrelevant and non-noteworthy; suffice to say that it seems as though my every action -- even the most innocuous -- has backfired disastrously, bringing misfortune crashing down on me and those around me. Today I am living in my own tiny bubble of doom, and it's highly contagious. Too late, you probably caught it just by reading this.

What do I do in this situation? I give up and go to bed early. Night!

You would be surprised at how much email is sent to me telling me to stop being so derisive, that harsh language and ridicule turn people off and repel the very ones we're trying to persuade. My reply is like the one above; by refusing to ridicule the ridiculous, by watering down every criticism into a mannered circumlocution, we have created an environment where idiots thrive unchallenged. We have a twit for a president because so many people made apologies for his ludicrous lack of qualifications -- we need more people unabashedly pointing out fools.

I've been motivated by this entry from Pharyngula.

The piece may be called 'Idiot America', and I don't know what it's like in the rest of the world, but there are depressing signs here in the UK that the same anti-intellectual, anti-expertise mentality may be starting to take hold. Our media is, in general, not much better at reporting controversial truths than the (dire) US news media and regularly discards verifiable fact in favour of some notion of 'balance', creating arguments where none should be. And though we can pride ourselves, to some extent, on the broadsheets and Channel 4 News and Horizon and Robert Winston and Richard Dawkins and Ben Goldacre and, hell, even the current Archbishop of Canterbury, I think the UK is actually fairly precariously balanced at the moment, and it would not take much to send Britain toppling off into the fantasy headspace inhabited by the US, where global warming is a myth espoused by fringe scientists, scientific conclusions are rewritten to fit political agendas, medical research is a good thing unless it's labelled 'playing god', and theology is taught in physics lessons with little indication of how the two are different.

I think I'm going to have to resurrect tsif.org. We need more people unabashedly pointing out fools.

A message to the agency behind the advertisement currently airing in the UK for Tiscali Broadband:

If you shamelessly and totally plagiarise a memorable sketch from Big Train, somebody's going to notice that you're creatively barren.

Update: Thanks to this site I found the name of the ad agency involved, so if you have strong feelings on the subject of lazy advertising slags, you might want to contact Tim Mortimer, the Managing Director of Mortimer Whittaker O'Sullivan Advertising -- his email address is tim@mwo.co.uk.