An Important Question

I remember someone once sharing this particular gem with me, and since it popped into my head today I thought I would share it with you.

Apparently, a cat always lands on its feet. Similarly, a piece of buttered toast always lands butter side down. So what happens if we strap a piece of buttered toast face-up on a cat's back and throw them both up in the air?

Technofear Part 3

Every now and then I get a message pop up on my laptop telling me that my computer is at risk from some virus, malware, spyware or tiny child hacking genius in North Korea, despite the fact that I have McAfee running. I purchased it when I got the machine, I updated it after a year, and my subscription is still active. So why is my computer at risk? When I try to find out, by following whatever technological jargon appears with the message, I am told in bold red letters that some aspect of the protection – a firewall, some kind of pre-scanning etc – is currently turned off. Why is it turned off?! I didn’t turn it off! Admittedly I never knew it was on, but I never turned it off! I don’t even know how to turn it off! I assume McAfee identified that it was necessary and included it to begin with, but now, by some mystifying stroke of fate, it is suddenly off. This is obviously bad news as McAfee is upset and encouraging me to pay more to subscribe again to the protection that I don’t understand why it thinks I need and that I thought I already had. I also don’t know how to turn it back on. In the end I have to resign myself to the fact that my computer has decided to switch something off and hope that it will realise the error of its ways and restore it before it succumbs to the undoubted risk that now hangs over it. It hasn’t fallen victim yet to my knowledge, but I have a sense that cyberdoom is just the click of a button away. McAfee appears to have protected me from everything except its own ads, junk and spam messages.

The Blues

As a kid I used to love football. I loved playing it, I loved watching it, and I loved talking about it with mates, collecting stickers and pretending I was Gary Linekar or Gazza (yes, I'm a child of Italia 90!). Over the years I grew more frustrated by the fact that I could now predict when a player would fall over, and that officials were still taken in by it. I was tired of spending 90 minutes waiting for a moment of class and watching scrappy battles that I could see in the local park instead. I was bemused by the fact that football media coverage was more concerned with who was dating who, which player was on trial for assault, whether anyone at FIFA was not accepting bribes, and who had just bought the most expensive car. Players at international level didn't seem to care. Top professionals earned staggering amounts every week but wanted more. I could hear myself saying all of this and thought, if someone told me all of that, I'd tell them to stop watching. So I did.

I quit. I stopped watching games, listening for results, supporting teams and getting annoyed. I saved myself the time and effort of following 'the beautiful game'. And I don't feel like I've missed much generally. But today, more so than any other in my recent life, has been a day of football. In part thanks to the news of Mr Moyes being dismissed in the increasingly impatient world of management, and in part because I have two new colleagues who are footy fans. Having held a football discussion for the first time in a long time, I thought perhaps I had it all wrong. Maybe I was missing out. So when I got home this evening to find Chelsea playing a Champions League Semi-final on TV I thought maybe I should give it another go.

I have just wasted another ten minutes of my life (and more by writing about it!). Within thirty seconds a player had fallen over at the merest prospect of a tackle by two opponents. I could see it, but the referee couldn't and gave a free kick. A reply in slow motion caused utter hilarity as the man in question hit the turf like he'd been shot. Shortly after a deliberate handball should have seen the player sent off for a second yellow card, but the referee didn't give it. Worse still, the entire opposition seemed determined to ensure the guilty man was shown the card by surrounding the referee and lambasting him for not brandishing the yellow. This stopped the game for several minutes whilst they all jostled for position, resulting in two more yellow cards. Even the commentators could not decide between them whether it was deliberate or not, and got into an argument. Somebody limped off after tripping on some grass. People taking corners and free kicks could not direct them anywhere near the goal despite being paid millions and being given a ball that was not moving. Defenders trying to clear swiped at thin air rather than connecting with a sphere the size of a dinner plate.

This was the semi-final of the champions league. A competition worth millions of pounds to the clubs involved. A tournament involving the best players from European football. A head to head watched by millions of people around the world. And all they could serve up was this utter dross. If this is the best that the sport has to offer then I'll gladly leave it behind again. In fact, I want my ten minutes back!

Scilly Seabirds

Working in conservation can be a tad depressing. There's a lot of stories of species in trouble, rapid population declines and extinctions, global warming concerns etc etc. So it's a genuine pleasure when I hear a story that reminds me that we are not just delaying the inevitable, treading water until the funding runs out. Sometimes the work we do makes a huge difference. And every now and then it does so as a result of people - communities, conservationists, landowners, funders - all working in partnership to achieve a common goal.

I have had the privilege to work on the Isles of Scilly for several years now, and in the last 12 months or more have been able to tell that story to a select audience. Last night it featured on BBC Countryfile, and I strongly recommend that you all click here to see the coverage for yourselves! Also check out the website for more info. Enjoy!

Shopping

I am not a manly man. I don’t consider myself very blokey, but contrary to popular opinion, I do have a few mannish traits. To quote Bob from Blackadder, ‘I fart in bed, I understand cricket. Everything!’ One of my mannish traits is my inability to go clothes shopping. I subscribe to the boom and bust principle: I wear things to death then go out and spend £300 on a whole new wardrobe. I simply can’t ‘browse’.

So it was no surprise to discover earlier today that almost everything I was wearing needed some work. My shoes have holes in (I did try to get new ones but the shop didn’t have my size!), my trousers are too short, and my jumper has gaps that my elbows protrude through (but has lasted 15 years – cracking value for money!). Even my boxers are slightly too small and a tad uncomfortable. I believe this is due to me having bought the wrong size, and is entirely unrelated to any possible weight gain.

In fact, that’s a second mannish trait I have: a complete lack of understanding for clothes sizes, and no recollection of my own when I need it. Why do some things require numbers (apparently known as ‘measurements’) when others survive with just small, medium or large? And why is it that most stores only stock clothes at XXL? Is it because they assume all men are beefcakes, or is it evidence to the contrary as all the other sizes have already been purchased?

Technofear Part 2

Have you ever noticed how people counting down get slower as they approach the end, sometimes actually inserting fractions of seconds in a patronising attempt to ensure that whatever small task that is being carried out in a time-limited fashion (getting a small child to put on their pyjamas, bomb disposal - that sort of thing) should be completed just in the nick of time and everyone goes home happy? Well now I've noticed that computers do this too. Only they do it in a manner intended to annoy and frustrate, and nobody goes home happy.

When something is loading on your machine (installing new software, opening a large file, saving a document, moving between web pages - that sort of thing), there is usually a little bar or series of dots or flying envelopes that indicates how fast progress is being made and how much is left to go. In my logical world, the bar represents 100% of the process and, therefore, the closer to the end of the bar the lime green flashing line gets, the closer to completing the task I am. But I suspect I have missed a trick here. That is what the computer wants me to think! By moving from left to write, in a logical forward motion, and flashing and gaining my trust and attention, it fools me into thinking that things are going well, and that I should sit it out, rather than putting my laundry away or doing the washing up. But as the line nears it's final position on the right hand side of the bar, it slows down and sometimes stops altogether, just short of the finish line. It takes no time at all to complete the first 95% of whatever process is going on, but then procrastinates massively for the remaining 5%. Had I known it would do that, I could have eaten a piece of cake or put my slippers on. Is it just another clever strategy incorporated by computer manufacturers to suggest that the machine is faster and more capable than it really is?

Perhaps, in it's defence, my laptop simply underestimates the challenges ahead and rushes on in there all gung ho, before realising the true complexities of the situation. And there it sits, embarrassed and ashamed, claiming that everything is under control and it'll be finished in a tick. Perhaps it 'mega-bit' off more than it could chew, and at 95% it 'hit the wall', relying on support and motivation from it's internal processor to drag it's weary RAM over the final painful steps. 

Whatever the reason, do not be fooled by a flashing line, dancing dots or anything that says '45 seconds remaining'. You'll be sat there 20 minutes later.

Technofear

Having failed to master the world of financial transaction lately, I turned my attention to the world of mobile telecommunications. My phone died while I was in New Zealand, and despite being kept alive well past the DNR point, it needed replacing.

I took a stroll to my local O2 store, where a series of attendants took turns attending me. Because my contract was not yet up, the phone was still on warranty. It appeared as though the battery was the issue, as it was warped out of shape and span on its axis. Beware the spinning battery! So, naively, I offered to purchase a replacement battery. This is not possible due to some law of electronics that insists that each component must be as totally unique as possible, thus preventing replacement in the event of failure - a system that makes it cheaper to replace the whole unit than get it fixed. What a disposable society we live in. I digress. 

Of course the phone was not an O2 phone, but a Samsung. O2 are just the service provider, though I was beginning to wonder exactly what service it was they were providing. So the handset would need to be dispatched to the manufacturers to be diagnosed with any certainty, a process that would take a week or so for them to tell me what we already knew. They would then replace the battery, because of course they have stocks but O2 don't, and the phone would be returned.

By chance, my contract was due to end ten days later, when I would be due an upgrade. It would take longer than ten days for it to be sent and returned, so a better solution was to upgrade early, a process that would cost me all of £12. This appeared to be a satisfactory alternative, so I was attended to once more and found the particular phone and deal that suited my needs. But in order to keep the benefits of my existing contract that I had been given by calling customer services when negotiating the original contract, I would have to call customer services again. Since I had no working phone with which to do that, I had to do it instore anyway. After some brief negotiations, they offered to give me the same benefits, but only if I waited until my upgrade was due, ten days later. Sad though it is to admit, the possibility of surviving for ten days without a mobile in the modern world did not seem plausible, but the thought of paying the £12 to get a worse deal was also unappealing. I was even offered a courtesy phone for £25. 

Finally, yet another attendant suggested purchasing a pay as you go handset to cover the intermediate ten days, and using the existing contract SIM card. This simple solution arrived just at the point that all hope was lost, and for the bargain price of £30 I was able to purchase a handset I didn't want along with £10 credit that I didn't need. Problem solved! Except that the new phone had none of my contacts on it, as these were cleverly stashed on the old, broken handset. Without any power, it would not be possible to retrieve them. Since I had already discovered the difficulties with sourcing replacement batteries, I was not full of hope. In fact, it's fair to say that, by this stage, I had lost any faith in the telecoms industry. An industry worth billions of pounds, designed to befuddle even moderately intelligent folks into smashing their assorted handsets into a billion tiny pieces, none of which will be replaceable.

However, the good folks at O2 pointed me in the direction of a local phone accessories store, where the proprietor may have something to help an idiot like me. Something like a battery. Needless to say, he didn't, but what he did have was even better: a slightly smaller battery and an impish look of glee in his eye. Using nothing but a folded wedge of paper, he managed to stuff the wrong battery into place, and hold it there while he powered up and rendered every possible warranty invalid. It then took an age for the contacts to convert across from the phone to the SIM card, during which time his fingers went blue from holding the battery in place so tightly. When complete, he transferred them to the new phone and, lo and behold, I was connected to the world again. My faith is humanity was restored, and I went on my merry way.

In celebration of this monumental feat of stupidity, I tried to send a text, but quickly found that I was unable to access any form of punctuation, making all of my messages seem really dry and uninspiring. I am clearly a moron when it comes to technology. And yet to my parents I am a genius! How is it that people with relative sense and intelligence can be so hopelessly lost by the advancement of technology as to waste half a day trying to replace one electronic item, and then waste just as much of their own time writing about it for other people to waste time reading about it?! It makes me despair that one technological failure leads to so much time, effort and money wasted to resolve it. Someone should come up with a solution to fix that. I think it's called an address book.

I think this neatly explains my predicament

A Serious Debate

It has come to my attention that there was a serious political debate on TV this evening. And the question I want answered is 'Why does Nigel Farage pronounce his surname 'Fa-raj' (like mirage), and not 'Farridge' (like garage). Is Farage simply an abbreviation for a Ferrari garage? Or perhaps it's a distant mirage?

Clegg is a little bit insecty. Like a beetle. Is there a Clegg beetle out there? Or am I thinking of the colloquial name for horsefly?