news – Page 4

Comcast Customer Service

Saw a news story today that made me smile: it seems that this guy had problems with his Comcast cable modem and, after a fair amount of hassle, finally managed to get them to send an engineer around to look at it. The engineer proceeded to fall asleep on the guy’s couch, which he caught on video and posted online.
Comcast, somewhat distressed by this bad publicity, sent a whole team of engineers around to fix our amatuer filmmaker’s internet connection, and report that the engineer in question is no longer working for them.

One can make all kinds of comments about the behaviour of the engineer on call, but the easily-overlooked point is that the engineer fell asleep after spending over an hour in a telephone queue to Comcast’s engineering department… something tells me that firing the engineer won’t fix Comcast’s customer service problems…

Guess I Was In The Wrong Place…

…when a man in Aberystwyth threw up to £20,000 into the air in a free-for-all on Alexandra Road.

Strange.

Microsoft And Sony Agree, “Buy A Nintendo!”

Well, it seems that both Microsoft and Sony want and expect you to buy a new Nintendo Wii. Both have independently said that their console (the XBox 360 and the PlayStation 3) will be people’s primary choice, but because of the cost of the other and the innovative games on the Wii, it’ll be people’s “second console”.

MGs Cafe Owners To Marry

News to anyone who cares. This poster is up in the window of the cafe.

Angry Saudi Protesters

In the style of her comic, The Aber Effect, and in the light of recent protests about the religious implications of a comic, Claire has made a marvellous one-framer, shown below:

Much thanks to Claire for allowing me to publish this online.

Futurama May Come Back To Life

In the news: Inside Move: ‘Futurama’ may get new lease on life. That’d be fabulous.

Genius Filmmaking

This is just a piece of genius filmmaking. 5 friends in Machynlleth made huge chipboard letters akin to the ones famously on the hills above Hollywood did so secretly, deploying the letters the night before Mach’s weekend-long film festival started.

Big chipboard letters on a hill near Mach

But better than that, they filmed themselves doing it and entered their short movie into the film festival they did it for. That’s just brilliant. A well-deserved award was given.

For more, see the original article from the BBC.

Interview With Hayoa Miyazaki

The Guardian ran an interview with Hayao Miyazaki, director of such films as Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and Tonari no Totoro. My favourite bit of the interview:

Miyazaki taps a cigarette from a silver case. The Disney deal suits him, he explains, because he has stuck to his guns. His refusal to grant merchandising rights means that there is no chance of any Nausicaa happy meals or Spirited Away video games. Furthermore, Disney wields no creative control. There is a rumour that when Harvey Weinstein was charged with handling the US release of Princess Mononoke, Miyazaki sent him a samurai sword in the post. Attached to the blade was a stark message: “No cuts.”

The director chortles. “Actually, my producer did that.”

Bush On ‘Intelligent Design’

Bush approves of ‘Intelligent Design’, we hear, a theory that’s gaining popularity amongst some Christian groups as a competitive scientific approach to the theory of natural selection. It specifies that while evolution has occured, it was guided by an intelligent force.

But the thing that it’s fans repeatedly fail to notice is that it isn’t a demonstrable scientific theory. To be considered as a scientific theory, it has to be impirically demonstrable, at least in theory, to be false. Evolutionary Theory can be proven false, because theories of evolution state that they could be proven false by the discovery of any single species who’s history can not be explained by it’s own terms. Intelligent Design’s “fail” demand is that it is proven to be incorrect for every species. Just like theories that both “God exists” and “God does not exist”, Intelligent Design can not be proven false, and therefore is untestable and unscientific!

I have no problem with the existance of a theory of intelligent design: in fact, I’m honestly surprised it’s taken so long to get a foothold, as it is a great theological explanation for the way species have been (so far) proven to be while maintaining creationistic ideas… but it is not, by definition a ‘scientific theory’.

It’s been a long day.

On the up-side, Egg have stopped writing to me to tell me I am over my credit limit and instead, today, wrote to me to tell me they were bored of telling me I was over my credit limit and so they have increased said limit. Go Egg!

Sewage Leak Update

I see that the council are still recommending that people don’t swim in the sea off Aberystwyth, with signs all along the promenade, after a pollution incident at the weekend, although they’ve allowed access to the beach again. I called the hotline number and determined that the sewage leak most likely occured at the pumping station near Rummers.

My suspicions were confirmed today when I took this photograph on my way to work:

A JCB digging near the sewage pump by the River Rheidol

Robotic Bins And Benches

Singing Benches Let Loose In City, writes the BBC. Just plain weird, say I.

Lib Dems In Ceredigion

Lib Dems win in Ceredigion over Plaid Cymru, by 219 votes, after a recount. Our little election party just took off…

Exploding Toads

Umm… yeah…

Ricin In Wood Green… Well; Not Really…

The Register have got a well-written analysis of the people involved in the recent “ricin terror” case, with a look at how this relates to Al-Quaeda, ID cards, and politics. It’s worth reading.

Google Wants Your DIY Porn Videos

Got home videos? Send them to Google! That’s the message that Google co-founder Larry Page is trying to put out.

In anticipation of launching a “video search” system, Google wants a stack of material on which they can test their “video spider” – a program which will hunt for keywords (spoken, or on-screen) in video material, so that it’s searchable in much the same way as web pages already are.

Fucking weird.