Fun And Games With Google Suggest

Ah, the fun that’s to be had with Google Suggest:

Google is...Microsoft is...Wikipedia is...Ebay is...Gay people are...Eat my...Blogs are...George Bush is...Christians are...

Some interesting facts we’ve learned:

  • “Gay people are gay” results in more hits than “Microsoft is bad”.
  • The only things people seem to say about Wikipedia is that it’s slow and that it’s down.
  • The only people who don’t distrust or hate eBay aren’t sure whether or not it’s safe.
  • Christians are one of the few things in the world that people don’t seem to think are gay. However, they still hate them more than pretty much anything else, even “gay people”, who are at least “cool.”
  • Blogs are only slightly more gay than they are stupid.
  • George Bush is a gay, evil, stupid moronic idiot. And, presumably, a Christian.

Have a play with Google Suggest yourself.

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Fire Has Moved!

Fire is now at the far South beach, through Trefhacan (or however it’s spelt). See you there soon!

Fire At Will!

Okay, the aforementioned fire is on! It’ll be windy, but it shouldn’t be wet, so we’re gathering anybody who’s game (and any dry wood we can find) for a small fire and barbeque on North Beach. Wood-scavenging begins at 7pm at The Place, ignition at 8pm. Bring your own food if you want it burned.

Fire!

Hmm.

I’m promised folks (like Statto, who’s visiting) a fire on the beach this week, but the weather’s conspiring against me. Watch this space for updates.

Reb Is Still Alive

Curious. I haven’t really heard from her since July 2004 but it turns out that she’s still alive and on the internet – I just received the following e-mail from my girlfriend of 1999-2001ish, Reb:

From: Rebecca ******** [*********@hotmail.com]
To: ***@sc*tmania.org
Date: Mar 24, 2006 3:10 PM
Subject: Hey you!

long time no hear, hows life?
Wanna talk?

xxxxx

Well, that’s interesting.

I wonder what made her e-mail me out of the blue after over a year of silence.

I wonder what made her choose to use the e-mail address she chose to mail me on. Either it’s a guess, or she read it from one of the few (I can count them on one hand) places it’s publicised, because it looks as if it wasn’t picked from a Hotmail address book. Hmm: looks like somebody using Internet Explorer from a British IP address looked at my recent Friends Reunited profile, which has that e-mail address, only an hour or so ago. That’s a maybe.

I wonder what she’s expecting by way of a response.

I wonder if I’ll respond.

Ah well. For now, time to get on with some work. It’s been an afternoon of deliberately breaking the company network in order to test it’s recoverability – a bit of disaster planning – which, while fun, isn’t terribly productive.


Oh, and on a completely unrelated note, here’s a picture I found on the web:Psycho Ex

A Winemaking Idea

For centuries – and particularly in Wales – people have made silver birch wine from the sap of the silver birch tree. We have loads of them around here, and this is apparently the perfect time of year to collect their sap. If enough people feel like helping me harvest sap and making wine, we’ll go for it. I’ll need a handful of volunteers who are willing to go out for a few hours on some weekend – hey; we’ll take a picnic and make an event of it – and tap into birch trees.

This isn’t an entirely hairbrained idea – a few people even make birch wine commercially.

The recipe I’ve seen, which I’ve copied below, is from an article on making things from birch trees in general, and the page also includes tips on tapping into trees without killing them and on how to avoid poisoning yourself with nasty varieties of bracket fungus. It goes as follows:

Birch Sap Wine

  • 8 pints sap
  • 1/2 lb chopped raisins
  • 2lb sugar
  • juice of 2 lemons
  • general purpose yeast

Collect the sap from a number of trees so as not to overtap an individual tree, which could kill it. The sap should be collected in early March whilst it is still rising. Select larger trees, bore a hole about 1″-2″ deep, around 4ft off the ground, place a tube or something similar in the hole and allow the sap to run down. Then put a suitable container underneath and allow to fill. The hole will heal naturally, but it wouldn’t hurt to wedge a piece of birch bark over the hole to aid it. Boil the sap as soon as collected, add the sugar and simmer for 10 minutes. Place the raisins in a suitable bucket, pour in the boiling liquid and add the yeast and lemon juice when it has cooled to blood temperature. Cover the bucket and leave to ferment for three days before straining off into a demi-john and sealing with an air lock. Let stand until fermentation finishes, then rack off into a clean jar and let the sediment settle. Bottle the wine and store in a cool place for at least a month.

So, who’s with me?

Spring Is Here: The Gulls Say So

Well, Spring’s finally coming around: the tell tale sign for me is that the black-headed gulls are back. One flew over my head as I crossed the bridge on the way to work this morning; for your reference, they’re the ones that look like this:

Black-headed gull

Their reappearance is a good sign that the weather’s taking a turn for the better, because they bother to fly all the way from the Mediterranean just to hang out on cliffs in the UK and steal chips from British tourists. Kids these days, eh?

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Dark Side Active Listening

Disclaimer: we don’t endorse any of this.

Following my post about active listening a few weeks back, JTA and I have been discussing the potential of what we’re calling Dark Side Active Listening – that is; the use (misuse?) of the skills taught by practitioners of active listening for the purpose of upsetting, infuriating, disorienting, or simply gaining the upper hand over other people. Here’s some of the things we talked about:

Mishearing And Misunderstanding

Do not underestimate the power of strategically failing to hear what somebody is saying to you. The favourite trick of schoolchildren (“Do you hear something? No, there’s nobody here.” while some poor tormented kid shouts “I’m here, you poo-heads!”) can be reinvented – with a marginally more refined edge – into something truly bitter and twisted. In particular, this is useful when dealing with somebody who has quite blatantly rehearsed quite carefully what they plan to say to you. For example:

Boss: We need to talk about your punctuality. Come to my office, now.
Darksider: (waits a few seconds, looking right back at the boss; then, finally:) I’m sorry, what?
Boss: (momentarily thrown by this change in the script) I said… umm… come to my office. Er… yeah.

The result is much the same – the darksider is in trouble for being consistently late – but the feelings of the boss are significantly different. By having their script, so carefully rehearsed in their mind, thrown off course so expertly, they’re no longer as confident in their own authority.

The key to successful strategic mishearing is in the pause – by waiting for a few seconds… long enough that if you were actually “listening” you’d have been using the time to let what they said sink in – before responding. This time gives the speaker the opportunity for their brain to turn the page in their subconscious script and get ready for their next line (unless, of course, they’re a lightsider and they understand that if you’re thinking about what you’re going to say next then you’re not truly listening… but if they’ve taken the time to rehearse in their mind what they’re going to say, they’re probably not lightsiding anyway).

Misunderstanding is also a valuable tool, and with far more applications. At it’s simplest level, misunderstanding can be used to deliberately raise temperature and infuriate the other person, like this:

Them: I need you to get the May forecasts to me by the end of this month!
Darksider: Won’t it be a bit late to use a forecast by then?
Them: What?
Darksider: By the end of May, the May forecasts will be out of date.
Them: No: this month.
Darksider: I already gave you this month’s forecasts. Last month.
Them: No… I need you to get May’s forecasts to me by the end of this month.
Darksider: Let me get this straight: you don’t want this month’s forecast at all, now?
Them: (explodes)

In everyday life, our conversations are full of assumptions: particularly assumptions about one another’s understanding of the topics we cover. By deliberately failing to make use of the knowledge we have and requiring that everything be explained in full (and, ideally, in triplicate), we can annoy other people quite a lot. For information on the benefits of winding other people up, see the section on temperature, below.

Perhaps a more sneaky use of misunderstanding comes from making a deliberate assumption about the inferred meaning of what somebody said, and then acting upon it without clarification. This is easy to do: just start taking everything metaphorical (e.g. “give me a bell”) literally (e.g. delivering a bell to the speaker), and everything literal (e.g. “don’t leave through the fire escape any more”) metaphorically (“he can’t have meant that – what would we do if there was a fire – let’s just keep using it” or imprecisely (“oh; you meant this fire escape?”), or just forget (“oh yeah; you did say something about that, didn’t you?”).

Asking Questions

If they’re trying to raise the temperature, a darksider will ask questions to clarify information and encourage the speaker to carry on talking, just like a lightsider. The difference is in the kinds of questions that they ask. These include:

Run-On Questions

Ask questions that are impossible to answer simply, especially when time is short. For example, instead of asking “Will you have that finished by tomorrow?”, ask “Will you have that finished? Or won’t you? By tomorrow?” Suddenly, a question which could be answered with a simple affirmative or negative must be debated, as the victim’s brain struggles to work out how many questions they were actually asked, and how their answer will be interpreted (particularly thanks to the negation, “…or won’t you…”: more on negatives later). Plus, asking multiple questions at the same time means that you’ve given yourself lots of opportunities to deliberately misunderstand whatever answer they give (by assuming that their answer was to one of your other questions, leading to further temperature rises.

Negativity

Use of negativity can quickly be used to put across anything from simple lack of concern to abject disapproval. “Aren’t you going to finish your dinner?” carries the implication that the speaker would be displeased with a negative answer, as opposed to “Are you going…” (although tone of voice can make a big difference to the implied subtle meaning, in either case).

Here’s a tip for if you really want to start an argument: when combining deliberate misunderstanding tricks with negatively-worded questions, don’t immediately pounce on the opportunity (e.g. “Yes? You mean, yes, you aren’t going to finish your dinner?” or “No? You’re not going to finish your dinner?”) but instead wait until further in the conversation before using their misinterpreted answer as an argument against them. By this time, they’re likely to be confused by your comprehension of their meaning but less able than you (having kept your plans in the front of your mind) to backtrack and correct themselves. Better yet, people will usually take responsibility for the misunderstanding, thinking that it was their fault in the first place.

Stupid Questions

Playing stupid, forgetful, or over-curious is a great way to annoy somebody. Here’s an example:

Them: I need you to get the May forecasts to me by the end of this month!
Darksider: Where will I find them?
Them: You have to make them up, first!
Darksider: Make them up?
Them: Yes, using the spreadsheet tool I showed you the other week! Don’t you remember?
Darksider: (shakes head)
Them: Look, just click “Generate New Forecast,” then… (continues demonstration)
Darksider: (later) Oh; that tool. Yeah; I know how to use that tool.
Them: (sighs) So when can you get me the forecasts?
Darksider: (later) What forecasts?
Them: (explodes)

Perhaps the cruellest trick in this category is to pretend that you don’t know anything and require clarification on every single point, only later to explain that you were pretty sure you had it pegged to begin with, but you needed to be sure. Then tell them that they needn’t have gone into so much detail.

Body Language

Just like in regular active listening, dark side active listening requires careful attention to body language. In particular, you must remain, or appear to remain, absolutely calm and relaxed at all times. Retaining a calm, composed exterior while deliberately winding somebody up can easily work to infuriate them even more, and this is a fundamental point in winning arguments using temperature, as discussed below.

Good body language can make a huge difference to a dark side effort. Paying absolute attention to a long-winded explanation but, right at the last minute – being “distracted” by something in the outside environment, can be a wonderful way to help justify your need for the reiteration of the topic.

You can send brilliant mixed messages by gently nodding while you say “No” and shaking your head when you say “Yes”. An inattentive listener will listen to what you say but will feel uneasy by their subconscious association of your body language with the opposite response to the one they’re hearing, like something is “out of place”. To really disorient somebody, try occasionally flicking your eyes up to look over their shoulder or at a point squarely in the middle of their chest, throughout the conversation, then look at them quizically if they turn to investigate, as if you’d never made the gesture in the first place. To help justify repetition, appear to be concentrating when discussing unimportant matters, as if making a mental note of every word, but then appear bored and uninterested when the important stuff comes up.

Another sneaky trick to throw people off-topic is to repeat the last few words of every sentence they say. Some people have a habit of this anyway, and they’ve probably dealt with it before, but the twist is this: later, start paraphrasing from time to time, so you’re no longer echoing them, but saying the same meaning as their last few words in a different way. Then, work your way up to saying different things at the end of each of their sentences, completely unrelated things: your shopping list, football scores, what you did on each day of the week last week – anything. By easing into it, it may be some time before they interrupt you and stop you, at which point play ignorant and go back to just parroting them again. Nothing disrupts the flow of conversation like unpredictability.

Try experimenting with eye contact: how about breaking eye contact whenever they make it, or trying to outstare them while they’re talking. Think about personal space: I’d recommend standing just far enough away from them that another person could pass in-between you, so that if anybody does walk your way, you can step back and gesture for them to walk through the middle of your conversation: you come across as polite, and, if you’ve been playing the other tricks in this article right, they berate themselves for being incensed by this.

Temperature

The fundamental aim of the majority of these tricks is to raise “temperature”, the meaning of which is discussed in the previous article. Why? Because this is an easy way to gain a moral victory in an otherwise unwinnable (or not-worth-bothering-with) argument. Piss the other person off enough while keeping your cool and you take the moral high ground, and they come off thinking that they’re somehow the “bad guy” for not being able to deal with you like an adult. And in the end, isn’t that what arguing is all about.

Closing Words

Hope you enjoyed reading that; it’s been sitting on the back-burner for ages and I’d never got around to finishing it. Obviously I don’t endorse doing any of these things, and I’d certainly say that you should never do any of them to anybody you want to be friends with, ever. I just wanted to share with you the idea that the application (and mis-application) of active listening techniques could be “used for evil as well as for good”… like everything else, for that matter.

Aberystwyth Webcams Widget

There’s a reason that people shouldn’t show me new programming languages and development platforms: I try them out. Even when I’ve got other things I should be doing. Ah well.

Aberystwyth Webcam Widget

And so I’d like to present: the Aberystwyth Webcams Widget [update: link dead], which collates the images of the three Ceredigion Country Council webcams into a little widget that sits on your desktop. It works in both Windows and MacOS X (on MacOS, it integrates quite nicely with any other desktop widgets you’re using), but you do need to install the Yahoo! Widget Engine version 2.0 or above.

Aberystwyth Webcams Widget (165KB)  [update: link dead]

Never written a Yahoo! Widget before, so I’m interested in any feedback you care to leave.

Another Weekend In Norfolk

Right – Claire and I will be out of town this weekend: this, combined with Pagan Wanderer Lu‘s upcoming gig in the Cooper’s Arms, Aberystwyth (which I’m sorry to be missing!) on Saturday, means there’ll be no Troma Night this week. Sorry, guys, but hey – you should be at the Cooper’s Arms anyway.

We’ll be back on Sunday night… then I’m helping out with the Student Skills Competition on Monday and Wednesday next week. Argh! Busy! If you’re one of the two people I’m supposed to be writing a web site for at the moment – my apologies, as it’ll have to be next week before I can get back to you.

Right; going to go and re-assemble Claire’s car ready for the journey, double-check the route so it’s fresh in my mind, and then we’ll kick off.

Claire, “Friends Only” Weblogs, And Employment

As Jon said, people like Alec and Suz have made their weblogs friends-only for the purpose of attempting to hide what goes in in their lives from employers, prospective employers, or the world in general. On the purpose of hiding such things from employers, I think that Claire’s most recent blog post (which talks about openness to employers) fully sums up exactly what I wanted to say. Well done, Claire.

Personally, I’m glad that searching for my name reveals this web site – I’d far rather that my current employer, my current and prospective clients, and my potential future employers see this site when they search for my name than any other, because this site is actually about me: raw and uncensored. Only an idiot (who I wouldn’t want to work for) would assume that just because they can’t find a weblog for somebody means that they must be “clean” and “innocent” – in the end, nobody is. But by being in control of my online presence, I can show off my talent: I can demonstrate my ability to run web sites, my writing style, and my unashamed approach to dealing with all elements of my life (with the obvious exception of things that I’m not allowed to write to the world about: NDAs and the like).

So: please – feel free to read my weblog, which contains accounts of my life going back as far as 1999, whoever you are, and if you find it affecting how you feel about me as a stranger (with reference to other strangers)… don’t forget – at least with me you’re getting the plain truth.

Edit: Incidently, Suz has tried to make some comments about this post, but hasn’t been able to (not sure why), so she’s made them on Claire’s post instead, and so I’ve responded there. The discussion continues…