Before I started working for the Bodleian, I’d never worked somewhere where there was a significant risk of a film crew coming between me and my office. But since then, it seems to
happen with a startling regularity.
This morning, I was almost late for work as I fought my way past a film crew shooting The
Quiet Ones, some variety of supernatural thriller B-movie.
This guy. That bridge. Listen.
So, when you end up watching it: wait until you get to the scene where this guy walks under the
Hertford Bridge, and listen carefully for the sound of somebody walking across gravel just off camera.
That’s me, putting my bike away having finally squeezed my way past all of the cameras and equipment on the way to my office.
Eurovision Night 2012. In a moment of surreal awesomeness, Matt R holds a mirror up to the webcam in order to show Gareth the collection of whisky that’s just outside of his field of
vision.
Sometimes it’s really like we’re living in the future. Exciting new technologies keep appearing, and people just keep… using them as if they’d always been there. If
tomorrow we perfected the jetpack, the flying car, and the silver jumpsuit, I’ll bet that nobody would think twice about it.
Recently, I’ve had two occasions to use Google+ Hangouts, and I’ve been incredibly impressed.
The first was at Eurovision Night 2012, which was quite a while ago now. Adam did a particularly spectacular job of putting together some wonderful pre-Eurovision entertainments, which were synched-up between our
two houses. Meanwhile, he and I (and Rory and Gareth and occasionally other people) linked up our webcams and spare screens via a Google+ hangout, and… it worked.
It just worked. Now I know that the technology behind this isn’t new: back in 2004, I upgraded the Troma Night set-up in Aberystwyth
to add a second webcam to the Troma Night live feed. But that was one-way, and we didn’t do sound (for lack of bandwidth and concerns about accidental piracy of the
soundtracks to the movies we were watching, of all things, rather than for any particularly good reason). But it really did “just work”, and we were able to wave at each other and chat
to each other and – mostly – just “share in the moment” of enjoying the Eurovision Song Contest together, just like we would have in person when we lived in the same town.
At the weekend, I was originally supposed to be in Lancashire, hanging out with my family, but owing to a series of unfortunate disasters (by the way; I’m walking with a stick right now
– but that’s not interesting enough to be worth blogging about), I was stuck in Oxford. Despite torrential rain where I was, Preston was quite sunny, and my family decided to have a
barbeque.
I join a Google+ hangout at my (late) father’s house, where the rest of my family are having a barbeque.
I was invited… via Google+. They didn’t have Internet access, so they used a mobile dongle plugged into a laptop. I connected in from my desktop computer and then – later – from my
mobile phone. So yes, this was at times a genuine mobile-to-mobile multi-party video conference, and it was simple enough that my mother was able to set it up by herself.
Like puzzles? Like webcomics? Then here are two things you ought to see:
Crimson Herring
The first is the short-lived webcomic Crimson Herring. Personally, I’m hoping that it’ll come back to life, because it
really had lots of potential. In each episode, a “crime drama” plays out, and you – the reader – are left with just enough clues to solve the case. Sometimes you have to really pay
attention to the pictures, other times to the words, and it’s really got a good idea going for it.
A frame from Crimson Herring – Duel at Dawn.
Even if it turns out to be completely dead, now, you can go back and read the archives: start here! And if you like it, leave a comment and let the author know; see if we can get it brought back again.
The idea behind the comic is really quite clever; but once you’ve worked out the key, putting the panels into the right order isn’t difficult at all. Give it a go!
Opera 12 has been released, and brought with it a handful of new features. But there’s also been a feature removed – a little-known feature that allowed power users to have the
web address appear in the title bar of the browser. I guess that the development team decided that, because the title bar is rarely seen nowadays (the space in which a title once
occupied has for a long while now been used as a tab strip, in the style that Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox eventually copied), this feature wasn’t needed.
But for users of the KeePass Password Safe, this has the knock-on effect of crippling
the ability for this security tool to automatically type passwords and other form data into web pages, forcing users to take the long-winded route of manually copy-pasting them each
time.
KeePass for Opera Plugin
To fix this problem, I’ve released the KeePass for Opera browser extension. It’s
ludicrously simple: it injects a bit of Javascript (originally by Jean François) into every page you visit, which then appends the URL of the page to the title bar. This allows
KeePass to detect what site you’re on, so the usual Global Auto-Type command (typically Left Ctrl + Alt + A) will work as normal.
[button link=”https://addons.opera.com/en-gb/extensions/details/keepass-auto-type/” align=”right” size=”medium” caption=”KeePass for Opera”]Install[/button]
Now that the list of new top-level domain applications for 2013 has been revealed, geeks around the world can
start planning for the domain hacks of the future. Please.do.not.disturb.me was fun, and all, but the if many or all of these new
registries are willing to sell their domains to anybody, there’s a lot of potential for new and unusual domain names.
http://please.do.not.disturb.me/ – a website based on a simple domain name hack
I suspect we’ll soon be typing in addresses like:
jack.and/jill – the .and TLD is clearly supposed to be for the Andalusian community in Spain, but I doubt that’s going to stop people from coming up with imaginative uses for
domain names where you can just “put your own suffix” after the .and/, like we used to do before .isgay.com before it got taken over by domain squatters. (note
that .gay will soon be a TLD, so there’s probably going to be a whole raft of these new sites soon…)
crow.bar – or as we’ll say at the time, “.bar – it’s not just for bars any more!”
I quite like the idea of sugar.beats, but I think a far more popular use will be “put your own suffix” sites, again,
like rock.beats/scissors.
ro.bot- .bot is one of the many TLDs that Amazon is going for, and it seems likely to me that they’re going to try to resell domains underneath it. I’m just not sure
whether sex.bot or ro.bot will be first to be snatched up.
not.just.broke.but.broker – perhaps you have to be in my head to find this amusing.
fizz.buzz. This web site would have the best hit counter ever on it (why?).
s.care, s.cars, s.expert, s.tab, and dozens of other domain names that are only a letter away from
meaning something completely different – and that letter is often “s”.
mon.day, sun.day, dooms.day, birth.day – etc. etc. I’d buy birth.day if the
price was right, and then run a basic site spanning happy.birth.day, first.birth.day, and the like, with automatically-generated content on
each. It’d be fun.
yo.dog – a complete abuse of the .dog TLD, no matter what its purpose is supposed to be. Better still, I’d put a page at
http://yo.dog.yo.dog/yo.dog, containing the message “I heard you like domain names in your domain names, so I put a domain name in a domain name.” (why?)
electric.fan – the website that Koreans will set as one another’s home page, as a cruel prank against the superstitious.
jelly.fish would be an awesome domain name! Who wouldn’t want to have the email address throw.stones@jelly.fish?
mtee.ggee- the future domain name of Hungry Horse pubs? (get it? “empty gee-gee”?)
a.boy.named.goo, after the Goo Goo Dolls album. But then, I don’t object to domain names with possibly-excessive numbers of dots in them, as the Summer Party On Earth website probably gives away. Hell: I could possibly be using
a.home.called.earth as the domain name for our house, in 2013.
fag.got – I’ll bet that homosexual sex blogger Dan
Savage, who’s been trying to reclaim the word “faggot”, would love to have the email address hey@fag.got!
bl.ink – I’ve got an idea for a webcam-based site, like ChatRoulette, but with facial recognition software
that watches your eye movements. You get paired up with a random stranger and the pair of you have a staring contest, right over the Internet. If you win, you get a point. It’ll be
awesome.
commun.ist, rac.ist, anarch.ist, etc. – I’m sure that Istanbul, for whom the .ist TLD is intended, won’t mind if
we borrow their new domain name for a few amusing addresses. Like the email address shoot@the.rac.ist, for example.
bob.lob.law/law/blog – with apologies to those who don’t follow Arrested Development.
bi.ngo – sure,.bingo is likely to exist anyway, but this way’s more fun.
fuck.off – I have no idea what anybody else expected the.off TLD to be used for, if not this.
child.ren – I quite like this, because it makes not only a full word, but the first part is a word, too.
im.off.ski – faux Russian is never going to go out of style.
tube.tube.tube – if I can, I’m totally setting this site up in 2013. All that there’ll be is the picture, below, which makes me smile every time I see it.
Tube tube tube. Soon to appear at http://tube.tube.tube/, if I get my way.
Honestly, though: it feels like all of these new top-level domain name opportunities take a lot of the fun out of domain hacks. The more TLDs we have, the easier it is to put together
words and phrases with the opportunities given.
Scrabble wouldn’t be so enjoyable if each player had a rack of, say, 30 tiles, rather than just 7. The restriction (and working around them) is what makes
domain-name-based jokes so funny, in my mind. What are we supposed to do in a world where anybody with a spare $185,000 USD can have anything he wants?
When I realise that the era of funny domain hacks is coming to an end, it makes me a little sad. But then I look at that picture of a polar bear and everything’s okay again.
Tuuuuuuube!
The mobile app presents you with a special six-digit code that is used to withdraw the cash.
RBS Group this week
rolled out a service to all of
its customers, allowing them to withdraw cash from an ATM without using their bank card. The service is based upon the same technologies that’s used to provide emergency access to
cash by people who’ve had their cards stolen, but integrates directly into the mobile banking apps of the group’s constituent banks. I decided to give it a go.
The first step is to use the mobile app to request a withdrawal. There’s an icon for this, but it’s a bit of a mystery that it’s there unless you already know what you’re looking for.
You can’t make a request from online banking without using the mobile app, which seems to be an oversight (in case you can’t think of a reason that you’d want to do this, read on:
there’s one at the end). I opted to withdraw £50.
Next, it’s off to find a cash machine. I struck out, without my wallet, to try to find the nearest Royal Bank of Scotland, NatWest, or Tesco cashpoint. The mobile app features a GPS
tool to help you find these, although it didn’t seem to think that my local Tesco cashpoint existed, walking me on to a branch of NatWest.
The readout of the cash machine demonstrates that the roots of the “Get Cash” system lie in the older “Emergency Cash” feature: the two are functionally the same thing.
As instructed by the app, I pressed the Enter key on the keypad of the cash machine. This bypasses the usual “Insert card” prompt and asks, “Do you wish to carry out a
Get Cash or Emergency Cash transaction?” I pressed Yes.
The number displayed upon the screen is entered into the cash machine.
The ATM asked for the PIN I’d been given by the mobile app: a 6-digit code. Each code is only valid for a window of 3 hours and can only be used once.
The cash machine asks for the PIN a second time, and then asks for the sum of money to be withdrawn.
I’m not sure why, but the ATM asks that the PIN is confirmed by being entered a second time. This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me – if it was mistyped, it’d surely fail anyway (unless
I happened to guess another valid code, within its window), and I’d simply be able to try again. And if I were an attacker, trying to guess numbers, then there’s no difficulty in typing
the same number twice.
It’s possible that this is an attempt at human-tarpitting,
but that wouldn’t be the best way to do it. If the aim is to stop a hacker from attempting many codes in quick succession, simply imposing a delay would be far more effective (this is
commonplace with cash machines anyway: ever notice that you can’t put a card in right after the last transaction has finished?). Strange.
Finally, the ATM asks what value of cash was agreed to be withdrawn. I haven’t tried putting in an incorrect value, but I assume that it would refuse to dispense any cash if the wrong
number was entered – this is presumably a final check that you really are who you claim to be.
It feels strange taking money and a receipt from a cashpoint without first having to retrieve my card. I spent a few minutes after the experience with a feeling that I’d forgotten
something.
It worked. I got my money. The mobile app quickly updated to reflect the change to my balance and invalidated the code: the system was a success.
The banks claim that this will be useful for times that you’ve not got your card with you. Personally, I don’t think I ever take my phone outdoors without also taking my wallet with me,
so the chance of that it pretty slim. If my card were stolen, I’d be phoning the bank to cancel the card anyway, so it wouldn’t save me a call, either, if I needed emergency cash. But
there are a couple of situations in which I’d consider using this neat little feature:
If I was suspicious of a possible card-skimming device on a cash machine, but I needed to withdraw money and there wasn’t an un-tampered ATM in the vicinity. It’d be nice to know
that you can avoid having your card scanned by some kid with a skimmer just by using your phone to do the authentication rather than a valuable piece of plastic.
To send money to somebody else. Using this tool is cheaper than a money order and faster than a bank transfer: it’s an instantaneous way to get small sums of cash
directly into the hands of a distant friend. “Sure, I’ll lend you £50: just go to a cash machine and type in this code.” I’m not sure whether or not this is a legitimate
use of the service, but I can almost guarantee that it’ll be the most-popular. It’ll probably be reassuring to parents of teenagers, for example, who know that they can help their
offspring get a taxi home when they’ve got themselves stranded somewhere.
What do you think? If you’re with RBS, NatWest or Tesco, have you tried this new mobile banking feature? Do you think there’s mileage in it as an idea, or is it a solution in need of a
problem?
This blog post is about password security. If you don’t run a website and you just want to know what you should do to protect yourself, jump to the
end.
I’d like to tell you a story about a place called Internetland. Internetland is a little bit like the town or country that you live in, but there’s one really important difference: in
Internetland, everybody is afflicted with an unusual disorder called prosopagnosia, or “face-blindness”. This means that, no matter how hard they try, the inhabitants of Internetland
can’t recognise each other by looking at one another: it’s almost as if everybody was wearing masks, all the time.
Denied the ability to recognise one another on sight, the people of Internetland have to say out loud who they are when they want to be identified. As I’m sure you can imagine, it’d be
very easy for people to pretend to be one another, if they wanted. There are a few different ways that the inhabitants get around that problem, but the most-common way is that people
agree on and remember passwords to show that they really are who they claim to be.
Alice’s Antiques
Alice runs an antiques store in Internetland. She likes to be able to give each customer a personalised service, so she invites her visitors to identify themselves, if they like, when
they come up to the checkout. Having them on file means that she can contact them about special offers that might interest them, and she can keep a record of their address so that the
customer doesn’t have to tell her every time that they want a piece of furniture delivered to their house.
Some of Alice’s Antiques’ antiques.
One day, Bob came by. He found a nice desk and went to the checkout to pay for it.
“Hi,” said Alice, “Have you shopped here before?” Remember that even if he’d visited just yesterday, she wouldn’t remember him, so crippling is her face-blindness.
“No,” replied Bob, “First time.”
“Okay then,” Alice went on, “Would you like to check out ‘as a guest’, or would you like to set up an account so that I’ll remember you next time?”
Bob opted to set up an account: it’d only take a few minutes, Alice promised, and would allow him to check out faster in future. Alice gave Bob a form to fill in:
Bob filled in the form with his name, a password, and his address. He ticked the box to agree that Alice could send him a copy of her catalogue.
Alice took the form and put it into her filing cabinet.
The following week, Bob came by Alice’s Antiques again. When he got to the checkout, Alice again asked him if he’d shopped there before.
“Yes, I’ve been here before,” said Bob, “It’s me: Bob!”
Alice turned to her filing cabinet and pulled out Bob’s file. This might sound like a lot of work, but the people of Internetland are very fast at sorting through filing cabinets, and
can usually find what they’re looking for in less than a second. Alice found Bob’s file and, looking at it, challenged Bob to prove his identity:
“If you’re really Bob – tell me your password!”
“It’s swordfish1,” came the reply.
Alice checked the form and, sure, that was the password that Bob chose when he registered, so now she knew that it really was him. When he asked for a set of
chairs he’d found to be delivered, Alice was able to simply ask, “You want that delivered to 1 Fisherman’s Wharf, right?”, and Bob just nodded. Simple!
Evil Eve
That night, a burglar called Eve broke into Alice’s shop by picking the lock on the door (Alice never left money in the till, so she didn’t think it was worthwhile buying a very good
lock). Creeping through the shadows, Eve opened up the filing cabinet and copied out all of the information on all of the files. Then, she slipped back out, locking the door behind her.
Alice’s shop has CCTV – virtually all shops in Internetland do – but because it wasn’t obvious that there had been a break-in, Alice didn’t bother to check the recording.
Alice has CCTV, but she only checks the recording if it’s obvious that something has happened.
Now Eve has lots of names and passwords, so it’s easy for her to pretend to be other Internetlanders. You see: most people living in Internetland use the same password at most or all of
the places they visit. So Eve can go to any of the other shops that Bob buys from, or the clubs he’s part of, or even to his bank… and they’ll believe that she’s really him.
One of Eve’s favourite tricks is to impersonate her victim and send letters to their friends. Eve might pretend to be Bob, for example, and send a letter to his friend Charlie. The
letter might say that Bob’s short on cash, and ask if Charlie can lend him some: and if Charlie follows the instructions (after all, Charlie trusts Bob!), he’ll end up having his money
stolen by Eve! That dirty little rotter.
So it’s not just Bob who suffers for Alice’s break-in, but Charlie, too.
Bob Thinks He’s Clever
Bob thinks he’s cleverer than most people, though. Rather than use the same password everywhere he goes, he has three different passwords. The first one is his “really secure” one: it’s
a good password, and he’s proud of it. He only uses it when he talks to his bank, the tax man, and his credit card company – the stuff he thinks is really important. Then
he’s got a second password that he uses when he goes shopping, and for the clubs he joins. A third password, which he’s been using for years, he reserves for places that demand that he
chooses a password, but where he doesn’t expect to go back to: sometimes he joins in with Internetland debates and uses this password to identify himself.
Bob’s password list. Don’t tell anybody I showed you it: Bob’ll kill me.
Bob’s approach was cleverer than most of the inhabitants of Internetland, but it wasn’t as clever as he thought. Eve had gotten his medium-security password, and this was enough to
persuade the Post Office to let her read Bob’s mail. Once she was able to do this, she went on to tell Bob’s credit card company that Bob had forgotten his password, so they sent him a
new one… which she was able to read. She was then able to use this new password to tell the credit card company that Bob had moved house, and that he’d lost his card. The credit card
company promptly sent out a new card… to Eve’s address. Now Eve was able to steal all of Bob’s money. “Muhahaha!” chortled Eve, evilly.
But even if Bob hadn’t made the mistake of using his “medium-security” password at the Post Office, Eve could have tried a different approach: Eve would have pretended to be Alice, and
asked Bob for his password. Bob would of course have responded, saying “It’s ‘swordfish1’.”
Then Eve would have done something sneaky: she’d have lied and said that was wrong. Bob would be confused, but he’d probably just think to himself, “Oh, I must have given Alice a
different password.”
“It must be ‘haddock’, then,” Bob would say.
“Nope; wrong again,” Eve would say, all the while pretending to be Alice.
“Surely it’s not ‘h@mm3rHead!’, is it?” Bob would try, one last time. And now Eve would have all of Bob’s passwords, and Bob would just be left confused.
Good Versus Eve
What went wrong in Internetland this week? Well, a few things did:
Alice didn’t look after her filing cabinet
For starters, Alice should have realised that the value of the information in her filing cabinet was worth at least as much as money would be, to the right kind of burglar. It was easy
for her to be complacent, because it wasn’t her identity that was most at risk, but that of her customers. Alice should have planned her security in line with that realisation:
there’s no 100% certain way of stopping Eve from breaking in, but Alice should have done more to make it harder for Eve (a proper lock, and perhaps a separate, second lock on the filing
cabinet), and should have made it so that Eve’s break-in was likely to be noticed (perhaps skimming through the security tapes every morning, or installing motion sensors).
But the bigger mistake that Alice made was that she kept Bob’s password in a format that Eve could read. Alice knew perfectly well that Bob would probably be using the same password in
other places, and so to protect him she ought to have kept his password encrypted in a way that would make it virtually impossible for Eve to read it. This, in combination with an
effort to insist that her customers used good, strong passwords, could have completely foiled Eve’s efforts, even if she had managed to get past the locks and CCTV un-noticed.
Here in the real world: Some of Alice’s mistakes are not too dissimilar to the recently-publicised mistakes made by LinkedIn, eHarmony, and LastFM. While
these three giants did encrypt the passwords of their users, they did so inadequately (using mechanisms not designed for passwords, by using outdated
and insecure mechanisms, and by failing to protect stolen passwords from bulk-decryption). By the way: if you have an account with any
of these providers, you ought to change your password, and also change your password anywhere else that uses the same password… and if this includes your email, change it everywhere
else, too.
Bob should have used different passwords everywhere he went
Good passwords should be long (8 characters should be an absolute minimum, now, and Bob really ought to start leaning towards 12), complex (not based on a word in any dictionary, and
made of a mixture of numbers, letters, and other characters), and not related to you (dates of birth, names of children, and the like are way out). Bob had probably heard
all of that a hundred times.
But good passwords should also be unique. You shouldn’t ever use the same password in two different places. This was Bob’s mistake, and it’s the mistake of almost everybody
else in Internetland, too. What Bob probably didn’t know was that there are tools that could have helped him to have a different password for everybody he talked to, yet still
been easier than remembering the three passwords he already remembered.
Here in the real world: There are some really useful tools to help you, too. Here are some of them:
LastPass helps you generate secure passwords, then stores encrypted versions of them on the Internet so that you can get at them
from anywhere. After a short learning curve, it’s ludicrously easy to use. It’s free for most users, or there are advanced options for paid subscribers.
KeePass does a similar thing, but it’s open source. However, it doesn’t store your encrypted passwords online (which you might
consider to be an advantage), so you have to carry a pen drive around or use a plugin to add this functionality.
SuperGenPass provides a super-lightweight approach to web browser password generation/storing. It’s easy to understand and
makes it simple to generate different passwords for every site you use, without having to remember all of those different passwords!
One approach for folks who like to “roll their own” is simply to put a spreadsheet or a text file into a TrueCrypt (or
similar) encrypted volume, which you can carry around on your pendrive. Just decrypt and read, wherever you are.
Another “manual” approach is simply to use a “master password” everywhere, prefixed or suffixed with a (say) 4-5 character modifier, that you vary from site to site. Keep your
modifiers on a Post-It note in your wallet, and back it up by taking a picture of it with your mobile phone. So maybe your Skype suffix is “8Am2%”, so when you log into Skype you type
in your master password, plus that suffix. Easy enough that you can do it even without a computer, and secure enough for most people.
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I’d just like to say a few words of praise for Andy‘s new album, The Signal and the Noise. It’s not
the first time I’ve said nice things about him, but it’s the first time since he’s been recording
under his full name, rather than as “Pagan Wanderer Lu”.
I can say this for sure, though: The Signal and the Noise has finally dethroned my previous favourite Lu album, Build Library Here (or else!). It’s catchy, it’s
quirky, and it’s full of songs that will make you wish that you were cleverer: so far, so good. I think that one of the things that particularly appealed to me in this album were that
the lyrical themes touched on so many topics that interest me: religion and superstition, artificial intelligence, the difficulties of overcoming materialism, cold war style espionage,
and cryptography/analysis… all wrapped up in fun and relatable human stories, and with better-than average running-themes, links, and connections.
One of the joys of Andy’s (better) music comes from the fact that rather than interpretation, it lends itself far better to being issued with a reading list. To which end, here’s a
stack of Wikipedia articles that might help you appreciate this spectacular album a little better, for the benefit of those of you who weren’t lucky enough to have read all of this
stuff already:
Oh; backing vocals, you’re too kind! But this is just another chapter in the story of my life.
The Omniscient Narrator
The final track’s a little weaker than the rest (the actual final track, not the “hidden track” bit), and I’m left with a feeling that this was so-close but not quite a concept album
(which would have been even more spectacular an achievement), but these are minor niggles in the shadow of an otherwise monumental album.
Go get a copy.
By the way; I’ve got a spare – who wants it? Spare copy’s gone to Claire as an early birthday present. Somehow she failed to preorder a copy of her own.
It feels like most of the time I’ve spent in a car this year, so far, has been for travel related to somebody’s recent death. And so it was that yesterday, Ruth, JTA and I zipped up and down the motorway to attend the funeral of
Ruth’s grandmother.
It went really well, but what I wanted to share with you today was two photos that I took at service stations along the the way.
A sign I discovered at a motorway service station.
This one confuses me a lot. If I buy alcohol from this service area, I can’t drink it either inside… or outside… the premises. Are they unlicensed, perhaps, and so the only way they’re
allowed to sell us alcohol is if we promise not to drink it? Or is it perhaps the case that they expect us only to consume it when we’re in a parallel dimension?
Costa have decided to cut down on graffiti by writing all over their own walls.
It’s hard to see in the second photo without clicking (to see it in large-o-vision), but the sign on the opposite wall in this Costa Coffee implies the possibility of being an
“Americano Addict”. And there was something about that particular marketing tack that made me cringe.
Imagine that this was not a café but a bar, and substitute the names of coffees with the names of alcoholic beverages. Would it be cool to advertise your products to the “wine addicts”
or the “beer addicts” of the world? No: because alcoholism isn’t hip and funny… but caffeine addiction is? Let’s not forget that caffiene is among
the most-addictive drugs in the world. Sure, caffeine addiction won’t wreck your liver like alcohol will or give you cancer like smoking tobacco (the most-popular way to consume
nicotine) will, but that doesn’t detract from the fact that there are many people for whom a dependency upon caffeine is a very real part of their everyday life.
Is it really okay to make light of this by using such a strong word as “addict” in Costa’s marketing? Even if we’re sticking with alliteration to fit in with the rest of their
marketing, wouldn’t “admirer” or “aficionado” be better? And at least that way, Costa wouldn’t leave me with a bitter taste in my mouth.
For the last few years, though, the population of Aberystwyth has been dwindling, and Adam’s parties have turned from an immense hard-to-squeeze-everybody-in ordeal to a far more
civilised affair. While simultaneously, groups of ex-Aberystwyth people (like those of us down in Oxford, and those who are up in the North) have been having their own splinter
satellite parties.
And you know what? I miss doing Eurovision Night with you guys. So this year, we’re going to try to bring Eurovision Night back to its roots… with technology!
Google+ Hangouts. One of the technologies that will bring us closer this Eurovision Night.
Here’s where the parties are at, this year:
Adam’s house, in Aberystwyth – mission control
New Earth, in Oxford (hosted by Ruth, JTA, and I) – technical operations
…and… anybody else having one this year? One of you up in the North, perhaps?
If you’re one of the usual crew, or one of our newer friends, come on over and join the party! Or if you’re going to be watching from further North (Liz? Simon? Gareth? Penny? Matt? Matt? Kit? Fi?), let me know so that I can bring you in on my proposals for “sharing the experience”, drawing together our votes, and whatnot.
And regardless of whether you’ll be joining one of these parties in person, or not, I hope you’ll be joining The Party at Adam’s and The Party on New
Earth digitally. If you’re among the 17 people who are actually on Google+, come and join us in our Hangout! Dust
off that old webcam and point it at you or your little party, make sure you’re in Adam or I’s “circles”, and then log in on Eurovision Night and join us via the power of the Internet!
You’ll have to provide your own crisps and beer, and (unless you’re at Adam’s) you’ll need to bake your own cupcakes with adorable European-flag icing, too, but at least you can be part
of the moment with the rest of us.
This weekend was the worst net weekend of cinemagoing experiences that I’ve ever had. I went to the cinema twice, and both times I left dissatisfied. An earlier blog post
talked about the second of the two trips: this is about the first.
You know what – 2012 has been a pretty shit year, so far. We’ve had death (my father’s), more death
(my partner’s grandmother’s), illness (my sister’s horrific face infection), and injury (a friend of mine lost her leg to a train, a few
weeks ago, under very tragic circumstances). We’ve had breakups (a wonderful couple I know suddenly separated) and busy-ness (a cavalcade of day-job work, Three Rings work, course work, and endless
bureaucracy as executor of my dad’s will).
But it gets worse:
Of all the things that have gone horribly, tragically wrong so far this year… going to the cinema to watch this film was the worst.
On Friday night, I went out with my family to watch Piranha 3DD.
This is one of those bad films that falls into the gap of mediocrity between films that are bad but watchable and films that are so bad that they wrap right around to
being enjoyable again (you know, the “so bad they’re good” kind of movies). To summarise:
[one_half]
The Good
Lots of nudity, all presented in 3D. If there’ll ever be anything that convinces me that 3D films are a good idea, porn will probably be it. Boobs boobs boobs.
3D films remain a pointless gimmick, still spending most of their time playing up the fact that they’re 3D (lots of long objects, like broom handles, pointing towards the camera,
etc.), and still kinda blurry and headache-inducing. Plus: beams of light (e.g. from a torch) in 3D space don’t look like that. The compositor should be fired.
The cameos mostly serve to show off exactly how unpolished the acting is of the less well-known actors.
Plenty of less-enjoyable pop culture references: if you’re not going to do the “false leg is actually a gun” thing even remotely as well at Planet Terror, don’t even try – it’s like trying to show a good movie in the middle of your crappy movie, but not even managing to do
that.
Unlikeable, unmemorable characters who spend most of their time engaging in unremarkable teen drama bullshit. Same old sex joke repeated as many times as they think they can get
away with. And then a couple of times more.
Lackluster special effects: mangled bodies that don’t look much like bodies, vicious fish don’t look remotely like fish (and, for some reason, growl at people), and
CGI that would look dated on a straight-to-video release.
This weekend was the worst net weekend of cinemagoing experiences that I’ve ever had. I went to the cinema twice, and both times I left dissatisfied. This blog post is about the second
of the two trips.
Man, this movie looks good. Wish I was watching it and not, say, a black screen.
The less-awful of the two trips happened on Saturday. Ruth, JTA and I turned up for the 20:10 showing of Avengers
Assemble at Oxford Vue. We were quite surprised, entering the cinema right on time, to find that they
weren’t already showing adverts and trailers – the screen was completely dark – but we found our way to our seats and sat down anyway.
A little over 20 minutes later, nothing had
happened, so I went out to where the ticket collectors were doing their thing, down the corridor, and asked if they were planning on showing a film in screen six at some point this
evening. “There’s a technical problem with the projector,” I was informed, “We’re trying to fix it now.”
“When were you planning on telling the audience who are all just sat there in the dark?” I asked. There were mumbles of concern, but they were half-hearted: these people were paid
primarily to tear tickets, not to deal with irate customers. The stub collector apologised, and I returned to the cinema to feed back to the others. Sensing the dissatisfaction of the
other audience members, I briefly considered making an announcement to them all: “Ladies and gentlemen: I regret to inform you that Vue Cinemas doesn’t care about you enough as human
beings to tell you themselves, but there’s a technical fault and they’re working on repairing it.” Instead, I grumbled to myself in a British fashion and took my seat.
“I could have downloaded a pirated copy by now,” I joked, “But then I wouldn’t be getting the real cinema experience.”
“For example, it’d start when you pressed the play button,” replied JTA.
(for those of you who know the story of his employment there, you might be unsurprised to hear that this was the very Vue cinema at which Paul worked, very briefly)
"Is the film on yet?" / "Nope; still just a black screen."
A little while later – still with no announcement from staff, we got sick of the whole thing and went and demanded a refund. The manager – when we finally got to see him (apparently
he’s also the guy who was fixing the projector: I guess the cinema must be run on a skeleton staff) – was suitably apologetic, offering us free passes for our next visit as well as
giving us a full refund. Another staff member apologised for the delay in sorting out the refund, explaining that “it always gets busy, especially on Orange Wednesdays.” I’m not sure why he told us this, given that it was now Saturday. Perhaps there were still patrons from the
previous Wednesday, also still waiting to see their film, too.
As we explained to the manager, it wasn’t the wait that bothered us so much as the lack of information about the reason (or an estimate of the duration) of the delay. All it would have
taken would have been a staff member to turn up at five or ten minutes, apologise, and explain, and we’d have understood: things break sometimes. All we wanted was a little respect.
I see that Facebook is experimenting with allowing you to pay a nominal fee to make sure that your posts end up “highlighted” over those of your
friends’ other friends. That’s a whole new level of crazy… or is it?
A screenshot of Facebook's new "Highlight" feature. For about a quid, you can push your wall posts to the top of everybody's list.
I’m not on Facebook, but I think that this is a really interesting piece of news. The biggest
thing that makes Facebook unusable (and which also affects Twitter) is that people will post every little banal thing that comes to their mind. I don’t care what
you’re eating for your lunch. I don’t want to read the lyrics of some song that must have been written for you. I really can’t stand your
chain messages (for a while there, after I hadn’t received any by email for a few years, I hoped that they’d died out… but it turns out that they just moved to Facebook instead). If
you’re among my friends, I know that you have some pretty smart and interesting things to say… but unless I’m willing to spend hours sifting through the detritus it’s buried in, I’ll
never find it.
Social Media Citation. The littering fine tickets of the digital generation.
But this might work. If the price sweet spot can be found, and it’s marketed right, then this kind of feature might make services like Facebook more tolerable. When you’re writing about
a cute picture of the cat you’ve seen, that’s fine. And when you write something I might care about, you can tick the “this is actually relevant” box. You’ll have to pay a few pence,
but at least you know I’ll see it. And if I want to churn through reams of “X likes Chocolate” (who doesn’t?) and “Y is… in a queue
for the bus” then I can turn off the “only relevant things” mode and waste some time.
The problem is that the sweet spot will vary from person to person, and there’s no way to work around that. Big Bucks Bob can probably afford to pay a couple of pounds every time he
wants to push some meme photo to the top of your feed, but Poor Penniless Penny can’t even justify ten pence to make sure that all of her friends hear about her birthday party.
Google+ tries to use heuristics to show you "top" content you might be interested in. It feels less insidious than charging you, as Facebook will, but it still doesn't quite work.
It’s a pity that it won’t work, because a part of me is drawn to the idea that economic theory can help to improve the signal-to-noise ratio in our information-saturated lives. Turning
my attention to email: of all the cost-based anti-spam systems, I was always quite impressed with Hashcash (which Microsoft seem to be reinventing with their Penny Black project). The idea is that your computer does some hard-to-do (but easy-to-verify) computational work for each
and every email that it sends. But in its own way, Hashcash has a similar problem to Facebook’s new system: the ability to pay of a sender is not directly proportional to
their relevance to the recipient. If my mother wants to send me an email from her aging smartphone, should she have to wait for several minutes while it processes and
generates an “e-stamp”, just because – if it were made any faster – spammers with zombie networks of computers could do so too easily?
Yes, I just equated your social network status, about what you ate for your lunch, with spam. If you don’t like it, don’t share this blog post with your friends.
On this day in 2005 (actually tomorrow, but I needed to publish early) I received an unusual parcel at work, which turned out to contain a pan, wooden spoon, tin
of spaghetti hoops, loaf of bread… and an entire electric hob.
A parcel from Paul, containing everything required to make a “proper” plateful of spaghetti hoops on toast.
This turned out, as I describe in my blog post of the day, to have been the result of a conversation that the pair of us had had on IRC the previous day, in which he called me a “Philistine” for heating my lunchtime spaghetti hoops in the office microwave. This was
a necessity rather than a convenience, given that we didn’t have any other mechanism for heating food (other than a toaster, and that’s a really messy way to heat up
tinned food…).
It was clearly a time when we were all blogging quite regularly: apologies for the wall of links (a handful of which, I’m afraid, might be restricted). Be glad that I spared you all the
posts about the 2005 General
Election, which at the time occupied a lot of the Abnib blogosphere. We were young, and
idealistic, and many of us were students, and most of us hadn’t yet been made so cynical by the politicians who have come since.
Another shot of the parcel. This wasn’t posted, mind: he lugged this over to my office by hand, and dropped it off at the reception desk.
And, relevantly, it was a time when Paul was able to express his randomness in some particularly quirky ways. Like delivering me a food parcel at work. He’s always been the king of
random events, like organising ad-hoc hilltop trips that turned out to be
for the purpose of actually releasing 99 red (helium) balloons. I tried to immortalise his capacity for thinking that’s not just outside the box, but outside the known
Universe, when I wrote his character into Troma Night Adventure, but I’m not sure I quite went
far enough.
Looking Forward
It seems so long ago now: those Aberystwyth days, less than a year out of University myself. When I look back, I still find myself wondering how we managed to find so much time to waste
on categorising all of the pages on the RockMonkey
wiki. I suppose that nowadays we’ve traded the spontaneity to say “Hey: card games in the pub in 20 minutes: see you there!” on a blog and expect it to actually work,
for a more-structured and planned existence. More-recently, we’ve spent about a fortnight so far discussing what day of the week we want out new monthly board games night to
fall on.
There’s still just enough of the crazy random happenstances in my life, though. As I discovered recently, when I once again received an unusual and unexpected parcel in the post. This time, it wasn’t
from Paul, but from Adam, who’d decided to respond in a very literal fashion to my tongue-in-cheek
suggestion that he owed me tea, and a keyboard.
The second of the two unexpected parcels I received from Adam.
I got the chance to live with Paul for a couple of years, until he moved out last month. I’m not sure whether or not this will ultimately reduce the amount of quirkiness that I get in my
diet, but I’m okay either way. Paul’s not far away – barely on the other side of town – so I’m probably still within a fatal distance of the meteor we always assumed would eventually
kill him.
We’ve turned what was his bedroom into an office. Another case of “a little bit less random, a little bit more structure and planning”, perhaps, in a very metaphorical way? Maybe this
is what it feels like to be a grown-up. Took me long enough.
This blog post is part of the On This Day series, in which Dan periodically looks back on
years gone by.
![Cash machine: "Do you wish to carry out a Get Cash or Emergency Cash transaction? [No] [Yes]"](/_q23u/2012/06/IMG_5833-300x200.jpg "Cash machine: \"Do you wish to carry out a Get Cash or Emergency Cash transaction? [No] [Yes]\"")
