Meriblog: Meri Williams’ Weblog

Elly and Dave have both already written good posts about the recent Manhunt infleunced teen killing. They are right — neither of the boys involved should even have had access to the game (they were 14 and 17 respectively). The parents citing Rockstar as the source of all their son’s troubles is classic blame-shifting.

But what I find almost amusing about this is the reactions of stores stocking the game. You’d think by now that people would think for a moment and try to solve the right problem in a case like this, but it would appear not. Partly I imagine this is because it would be PR hell if they did so — to see why let’s look at the actual problem.

The Problem
Extremely violent, 18-rated games are being played by minors. They have access both to the games and the facilities on which to play them.

The Knee Jerk Solution
Take it off the shelves!

The Real Solution
1. Make sure that certificates on games are enforced where the games are purchased (probably by making sure there are stiff penalties if not)
2. Instil some sort of sense of responsibility in parents to make them aware of what games their kids are playing/having them buy for them.

See why this is a PR nightmare? The stores can’t claim that they’re going to put in restrictions on who can buy games, because that would be admitting they weren’t policing this well enough to start with. Equally, they don’t have the spinal inflexibility to point out that parents a) shouldn’t buy the games for their kids if they’re underage and b) should have at least some vague clue of what their kids are up to!

Every now and again I look at the management consultancy industry in wonderment that businesses feel they need an entire industry to help them solve their own problems. Then I see a story like this and am suddenly converted to the same belief.

• Worldchanging has an interesting
  article about “cool”
  TF-SOFCs. If they can
  pull these off they’ll be fantastic — I love the idea of my laptop running for
  longer than currently on a battery the size of 4 sugarcubes.
• Eliza
  sex-bot passes Turing test — I’m not sure whether this is a sad reflection on
  humanity or not
• Jason has a fantastic comedy (or possibly
  predictive) post about the
  Cult of Ken Jennings, where he describes a world when the Jeopardy-winning dude’s
  winning streak carries on so long it becomes part of the game. I think we should
  all remember he predicted it first
• BugMeNot’s Registration Form is one
  of the funniest things I’ve read in a long time. My favourite questions are:

  Would you be willing to have an RFID chip inserted under your skin in
  exchange for a free, 12 month newspaper subscription?
  What if we told you that you couldn’t access news unless you agreed?

  Make sure you read right to the end, it’s worth it!

• Interesting
  look at the changing state of the diamond market via Kottke
• Great story about a Microsoft presenter assuming everyone uses IE and being
  
  completely wrong. As the article suggests, what if Mozilla
  really does win?
• Some interesting design
  guidelines. Worth a read
• 
  Zoom in IE, via ParanoidFish
• GooglePreview puts thumbnails
  of the site next to Google search results. Looks quite a cute Firefox extension;
  via ParanoidFish
• So, what happens when you have a load of tribal artefacts and you parade them around
  their country of origin?
  They take them back. Bloody fantastic! And they’ve hit the nail on the head, when they
  say
  

  “If you haven’t got a past then you haven’t got a future and it is our future at stake here.”

• We were surprised when we heard that Google in
  the UK had slowed down to MyDoom. Surely they’re not running Windows? Well, as this article
  explains, it was actually
  requests from infected Win machines that slowed Google down. We can all rest easy again

• Another marriage of the geeky gadget and real worlds : turning flowers into speakers
• Kayodeok discovers great extension that lets you automatically open links from other apps in new Firefox tab. I also found the new window default irritating (if expected) and agree this should be a default option in Firefox rather than an extension, if poss
• Comedy suggestion that all customer service operatives should contribute to a central fund so they can get stupid customers whacked — because of course the gene pool needs a little chlorine
• Modified version of the yeti + club hit penguin game : Pingu Extreme
• Another nail in the SCO coffin
• Another step in the right direction as another attempt to change state legislature to ban gay marriage dies in North Carolina

Jeremy Clarkson is fantastic entertainment. His opinionated, but entertainingly witty, postulations on just about anything are always something to enjoy and often make a program worth watching. I love Top Gear, but it wouldn’t be anywhere near as fun if he weren’t there enthusing about the new Jag, being surprised that a Skoda _anything_ could beat a new Mini, or pouring scorn liberally on the last little tin thing that has come on the market.

The other day, though, he was presenting a program all about how the jet engine had changed the world. It was quite an interesting look at things, but the show was made by some choice musings. My particular favourites were:

[Talking about security procedures in airports and planes] “Of course, once you leave America and get back into the free world, anything’s possible”

and

“700 million people have been carried on 7 million flights in the last 10 years and there have been no deaths. According to government statistics, you’re more likely to be killed by your trousers!”

Jeremy Clarkson is great. He’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but his bitching is entertaining … so much so, I reckon if Top Gear ever decided they didn’t need him anymore, he’d have the option of a cracking career as a drag queen. And people would definitely pay to see that

• Interesting article about “barefoot solar engineers” — illiterate but hardworking women building solar energy kit and earning a lot of respect in their communities for it, which is cool. I also agree that their work being sponsored by the Ministry of Non-Conventional Energy Sources is quality
• I also remembered why I love reading Neil Gaiman’s journal so much when I found him saying this, in reference to a news story about a pastor wanting to burn sinful books, being denied by the council and it being suggested he shred them instead:
  

  “I’m sure this is the kind of pastor who would assure you that in the bible, Jesus always made a point of burning his novels, tee-shirts and CDs on proper bonfires. None of that new-fangled shredding nonsense for him.”

• A computer in a motorbike petrol tank?. Of course. Now why didn’t I think of that?
• There goes anonymity. And political freedom. But hell, nevermind, hey? Incidentally, it’s the anniversary of the moon landing (or not, if that’s the way you prefer to think). Seems strangely ironic.
• Googlefight is my new favourite made-up-statistics tool. Amused that the Linux-Windows fight is quite that close though…
• Burgers don’t kill people. People kill people” — Alton Brown’s website almost makes me want to get satellite TV just to see his show
• Grouphug — the online confessional is really really weird. And addictive. Just like Neil Gaiman says:“It’s like driving down a road, passing car crash after car crash, and always having to slow down and watch.”

There’s a great article over on the NYT website, about a call centre operated McDonalds drive thru. You drive up to the window and give your order to the speaker — you are actually talking to someone in a call centre 900 miles away. At the same time a small digicam takes your photo and pairs it with your order, which is sent electronically _back_ to the store where you are making your order.

Apparently it’s all cheaper and more efficient — the photo ensures you get the right order and apparently cross-state call charges aren’t enough to overwrite the staff saving. The system itself is run by a McD’s franchisee who set it up for himself and others, but the main McDonald’s corporation is looking at whether it would be feasible to reapply across all their massive network of stores.

There are some comedy thoughts though — what if the call centre has a blackout or the phone lines go down or something? Can you imagine being the poor store manager that has to wander out to the forecourt and explain to all the waiting customers (this being America, in massive 4×4s) that they can’t use the drive thru because a call centre two states away is down.

Slightly more sinister is that if they didn’t destroy the photos immediately afterwards. Imagine the applications: a name & shame campaign or more of that data mining to find terrorists stuff? What would you do with the biggest database of McDonald’s customer photos linked to their favourite orders?

• Microsoft have swallowed a company, which results in them releasing some software based on Apache — resulting in this great screenshot from Anil UPDATE: As Simon rightly points out, it’s not based on Apache, just licenced under the Apache licence
• A step in the right direction
• An interesting perspective on the Olympics: “a two-week-long private party for thousands of hard-bodies”
• Top Ten Weapons of Mass Distraction
• Someone appears to have implemented a real version of The Game
• Fantastic Bush/Kerry Flash video
• The this page cannot be displayed properly message we _ought_ to see most of the time with IE

We’re sat in a coffee shop and I was thinking about putting something online. It’s not really suited for this weblog here, which is supposed to be more about tech, politics etc than my personal life (despite the recent holiday entry!). The only place that it would really fit would be an old personal site that I used to run — it had some stuff about myself and my friends, an archive of the fiction I’d written (some of which was published IRL) and all the other stuff that you found on old-style personal sites, short of cat photos.

So why aren’t I posting it there rather than talking about it here? Because I can no longer access that website with editing privileges. I signed up for it years ago and have long forgotten the password. Surely I can get them to email me my forgotten password? Well, of course I can. Unfortunately I no longer even remember which it was registered with and I strongly suspect it is one of the ones I have left as carrion for the spam vultures.

Before I wised up to the problems of spam (arguably some of my earliest email addresses were gained before it became a real problem) I used to give out my email address quite happily. So of course all my original accounts and a few others after I wised up (since the companies who shall remain nameless sell their customers’ email for profit) filled with spam to the extent that I abandoned them. Most free email account providers offer no way to delete an email address or terminate your account. Some do the honours for you if you fail to log in for a while, but there is no way of deciding yourself.

So now, I have an old defunct website, a number of old & defunct email accounts, none of which I can easily access and no way of proving to an online service that in the real world I am who I say I am and the owner of these various things. For most I didn’t have to prove a real world identity in the first place.

All the safeguards the companies put into place to allow me to retrieve access if I was dumb enough to forget passwords are broken, by spam driving me to abandon not only the original account but the backup too. With email addresses even more impermanent than home addresses and no extra incentive such as a voter’s roll to get me to connect my real world self with my online self, this is no surprise. But it is amusing to think of all the spambots unintentionally turning email accounts into either fortresses or carrion. They can swarm all they like over my old email addresses — I don’t go there anymore.

PS Just noticed that the previous person’s ticket password to get onto the pay-as-you-go internet here in the coffee shop was 76-BRAN-COPS. It made me chuckle

So, the holiday was good. We only managed to get out of the country for 3 days out of 10, but they were good days and the rest were, on the whole, rather relaxing. Which is, of course, the point of a short holiday such as this. I’ll write up what we did, places and things we’d recommend, etc

We flew from Gatwick airport, which is a nice little airport, as airports go. Getting there by train was definitely the best plan — Woking to Gatwick return for ?12 each can’t be scoffed at! The train link on the other side was great as well — Schiphol seems to just become a train station at one point — and much cheaper, as continental Europe tends to be. We quickly got to the centre of Amsterdam.

There we discovered that the cheapest and simplest option for getting around was going to be a 72 hour public transport pass, from GVB who run all the buses, trams, night transport and so on in the city. It was great value at about 13 Euros for 3 days and much simpler than trying to understand the arcane strip tickets system.

From there we went to our hotel, the NH Amsterdam Centre Hotel which was very close to the Leidseplein, a nice district with lots of restaurants and bars and so on. The hotel was nice, but we soon headed out again to find sustenance and, it turned out, some lovable green cartoon characters. We had dinner at quite a good Thai place right near the cinema and then went to watch Shrek 2, which was good enough to deserve a separate review later. Although the Dutch subtitles allowed me much inexplicable hilarity throughout!

On Wednesday morning we found a pancake place and had a gorgeous brunch. Perhaps it is just the similarity to South African home cooking, but I really loved loads of the food in Amsterdam — both new variations (like pancakes with the bacon embedded in them, with syrup) and old favourites (Gouda, Gouda and more Gouda!). We then went on an hour long canal boat cruise, which was surprisingly rich given that it was being delivered in four separate languages.

A couple of hours spent wandering around the red light district avoiding the coffee shops (dope cafes) and prostitutes had the amusing highlight of finding what is possibly Elly’s favourite goffick shop in the world ever. Apparently it was all much better than in Camden (not that I’d know really) and the salesgirl found it hilarious how El was jumping around ecstatically and grinning all the time. I’ll admit it was quite cute to watch
We then indulged in the horrendous sin of Vlaamse Frites — sweet real potato chips smothered in mayonnaise so thick it looks like paint. Niiiice….

On our last day we checked out of the hotel and went wandering around in the Vondelpark — a lovely large screen space with plenty of water, which is wholly unsurprising really since Amsterdam is below sea level! I found it unusual and lovely to have such a nice, relaxing place in the middle of such a cool & busy city. It was also good to get some exercise, what with all the pancakes, Vlaamse frites and good meat being consumed!

The afternoon we essentially spent wandering around the centre of town, stopping off in a flower market to buy some tulips for both sets of parents. In the midst of it all the weather suddenly changed (there was some sort of cyclonic weather front over Europe) and it absolutely bucketed down with rain and then hail, for a good hour and a half. Literally from sunshine to pissing rain in 60 seconds — now that’s real weather!! Anyone who knows me has heard me bitch about the pitiful weak rain in the UK (compared to the often drastic Cape weather anyway) probably thinks that I deserved to be rained and hailed on massively. Anyway, we ran for cover and ironically ended up in the only lesbian bar we even _saw_ on the whole trip! I think it was called Vivelavie and it was really quite nice.

Once it had stopped raining we wandered around a bit more and stumbled on another great find — a good tattoo shop! Everything looked clean and professional (something I often find is missing from UK tattoo places, which is why I am yet to get one there) and so we had a bit of a look, which of course ended in my getting (yet another!) tattoo just an hour before we had to head off to the airport. Curled between the panther and wolf I already have on my right arm, there are now two cute little lizards. I can thoroughly recommend BodyCult — everything was clean, they were very professional and took the time to understand what I was trying to achieve before giving advice. Sharp lines and great fine detail too!

Photos to follow when they’ve been developed & scanned in, since we went for hardcopy this time
All in all we thoroughly enjoyed Amsterdam, despite the concern that our non-consumption of drugs & alcohol might put us behind in the enjoyment stakes and would recommend it to anyone!

I’m off on holiday for 10 days. Largely this will involve playing PS2 and sleeping, but we are going to Amsterdam for 3 days next week as well. Since we’re staying in the London flat that doesn’t even have a phone line, let alone internet connection, updates will be sparse to non-existent.

Y’all have a good week now.