gamboling.co.uk

There were two major train related grievences that I managed to miss off of my previous rant on the matter. Both of them relate to MP3 players.

The first is obviously the tinny racket that seems to travel an incredible distance. I’m actually writing this while standing on a train platform. Nobody else is on my platform (maybe I smell, or am on the wrong platform)* and I can actually hear this guy’s player from the other platform. That’s crazy. It’s as bad as second hand smoking.

The second is a subset of these loud MP3 listeners and it’s people who are listening to their music so loud that they can’t hear that their phone is ringing. Now that’s annoying.

A solution suddenly occured to me the other day. It was inspired by something Derrin Brown said. He was talking about how people don’t like others to come and sit next to them on the train. Most people look up and scowl if they want to discourage others from sitting next to them. Derrin suggested that the best way to discourage somebody was to look at them with a nice big welcoming smile and then gently stroke the seat they’re aiming at. They’ll soon get the idea.

This idea works on a similar basis. You start gently rocking in time to the music the other person is listening too, and then when the chorus kicks in start mouthing along to the words. They’ll soon realise you can hear all and turn it down. You can even add a fake grumpy look at the end to signify that you’re upset that they’ve turned their music down. I’m sure it’d work.

*Note I was actually fine. There must be less demand for my direction at this time in the morning.

There is a train station in south London called Smitham and the odd thing is that Smitham doesn’t exist. Smitham is effectively North Coulsdon. The entire hamlet of Smitham seems to have been destroyed in the process of building the A23 and the train station. Imagine that planning meeting if you will:

Planner A: Hey there’s this small hamlet called Smitham that doesn’t have any access to transport.

Planner B: Yeah but it’s tiny they’ll just go to Coulsdon if they need to get anywhere.

Planner A: No, we must provide them with a busy transport link. That’s the only way they’ll ever progress.

Planner B: But there’s no space, nothing will fit.

Planner A: Well to develop a transport link sometimes you do have to knock down a few houses.

Planner B: But all of them? Surely that’s going a bit far.

Planner A: Do you hate progress.

Planner B: No.

Planner A: Well shut up and pass me the protractor.

So they destroyed the whole thing to build it, but then they left the station name the same. That’s what doesn’t quite make sense. It’s an odd solution. And now even that is under attack – from me.

I want to change the name of the station, purely for my own selfish reasons. Basically to make me laugh. I want the name of the station to become Andweep. Why? Well I’ll tell you why. The reason is that the station before it on the train line is called Reedham. And I want the announcer to have to say Reedham, Andweep. I know it doesn’t make sense, but I want it. And it turns out that it makes about as much sense as the current name anyway. So join me in the campaign to rename Smitham. Leave your votes in the comments.

My father has a theory about colds which may or may not be backed with any science but seems to be accurate in the field.

First you have to accept that the sniffles does not a cold make. Some people say that being a bit congested is a first sign of a cold but you can get the sniffles completely independently of a cold. First you have to allow this which I think is pretty reasonable.

So while holding that sniffles and a cold are unrelated we can now say that no two people in one family get a cold at the same time. People get sympathy sniffles but not concurrent colds. Each person in a family or an office will, in a rather British way, wait for the preceding person to finish up before falling ill themselves.

This is because, according to my father, there are a finite number of colds in the world. Each person is giving their cold to each other (as conventional wisdom holds) but in this model unlike conventional wisdom the cold departs the giver when it moves on to a new victim.

If you think back to past occasions when colds have been rife you will probably find this is true for you. One person caring for the other and then you swap.

Oh I’m sure you can think of some random occasion when this hasn’t been the case. But this is still possible if randomly you caught two different colds from two different people.

This does lead you to a rather interesting conclusion though. If the only way to get rid of a cold is to pass it on maybe lying in bed is asking for trouble. You only see your family members and then when they’re sick they only see you. Maybe going back into work works for you, maybe random strangers on the bus. Where ever you decide to do it you’ll need to expose yourself to others to get rid of the damn thing. So don’t stay tucked up in bed for too long.

Now “Alex”, you might be thinking, “if their are a finite number of colds where do they all go in the summer?” The answer is obvious. They migrate. They’re all in Australia at the moment as winter approaches “down under”.

Some things are difficult to search for on the internet. The best trick to use for finding things on the internet is to think in your mind of an exclusive sentence that is only relevant for the thing your searching for. This is harder than it seems but with a bit of practice you will find that you drastically improve the results of the thing that you’re searching for.

But some things are hard to look for. There are generally two reasons for this. One is that although your question is about something specific the specific thing shares a name with something common. Say for example you have a question about the html tag “table” well typing in table alone is no good, you have to type in html because other wise you get lots of information about the kind of tables that you sit at. But what if the modifier word is also a common word?

The second type of problem case is when you are researching something that nobody has ever researched before. If it’s something obscure then you are in luck. There are very very few truly original ideas that somebody hasn’t written about before on the internet. But if it’s about a common thing then it’s hard to write a question that lets you find the one article.

I was faced with this problem the other day. I had this strange feeling based on some information that I wasn’t sure about that it was a bad idea to take cans of soft drink (like Coke, Dr Peppers etc) in and out of the fridge once they had become cold. I couldn’t for the life of me think why this would be a problem, but I had this information in my mind. I came to the conclusion after some time that this was a rumour I had debunked a few years ago without checking any facts. The person who asked me probably left the conversation reassured after having asked Alex that it wasn’t a problem, and now years later it had come back to haunt me.

Luckily Yahoo Answers now has, erm, the answer because real people will answer your question for free on the internet. It’s all very useful. And I might even ask this question on there, although now my brain has clicked back in I’m pretty sure that it can’t be a problem. I have a nagging thought that condensation could be part of a counter answer. But I can’t rationally think how this would work.

Anyway, now that Yahoo Answers exists let me let you in on a little secret hack that you could have used in the old days if you needed the answer and couldn’t find it on a search engine. It would take a moment or two but in a bind it might be worth it. All you need to do is create an urban legend about your question. So in this example you would create an e-mail like this:

Dear friend,

Unless you forward this e-mail to your 5 best friends they might die and it will be all your fault.

Do you or your friends take soft drinks out of the fridge and then put them back afterwards. Do you do this when you’re trying to make room for pot roast leftovers or BBQ? Do you know it might kill you. Bacteria from the drinks arrive when they get cold, and then grow when you let the drinks get warm, and then when you put them back in the fridge the cold temperature causes the bacteria to thrive and mutate thus killing you.

Thanks,

A concerned Buddy,

And then you sit back and wait for Barbara Mikkelson (of snopes.com) to tell you the truth. It’s simple, effective, and probably a bit immoral. Hopefully Yahoo Answers will stop people from having to resort to such tactics from here on in.

Astute observers of this blog may have noticed a slight delay over the long weekend with the publication of the second half of my gig review. I do apologise of course. The problem was reality creeping in to the mix. I think that that gap might have been the longest since I started my second attempt at regular posting. I’ve back filled to atone of course.

When gamboling first started it was self published with a tool I’d created myself. It was annoying and difficult to publish anything and so there were often huge gaps where nothing got published. The old site is still available over there on the left under “Older Archive”.

Then after one long almost six month break I signed up for Blogger and tentatively started going again. Initially I did this on a seperate site but then I moved the blog back to it’s rightful home. Finally at the begining of the year I moved up to seven days a week. By gradulally stepping up the pace it’s just about been possible to keep up.

So what about the delay? Well weirdly the most difficult thing for me and writing are three day weekends. They almost always mean that something is happening on the weekend for a start (like I’m away or like this weekend when we had houseguests) and in May this year we’ve had three. I know everyone else has had two but I had to go away and climb a mountain remember. And all of that throws the whole delicate balance off track. Add to that the fact that the formula one season’s been in full swing and so I’m posting pretty regularly over on SofaF1 and you’ll see that I’ve been pretty stretched.

Do I mind? Well it annoys me whenever it happens. So it’s fortunate that it doesn’t happen too often. But on the other hand if I wasn’t out in the world experiencing things then I wouldn’t have anything new to write about. At least despite the 555 posts I’ve written in the last 3 and 3/4 years I haven’t run out of inspiration. I’d be much more upset about that.

So from the 1st July there will be a smoking ban in public spaces in England which is going to be very good. I’m not a zealot when it comes to smoking but it can be quite annoying. Some of the best new restaurants around are pubs and you do have this weird mix situation where you’re trying to eat and other people are trying to smoke.

I would love to hope that this move will be the final catalyst for people to give up smoking but I’m not sure about that.

Most people start smoking at school and there you have to go and hide behind the bikesheds with your mates. These groupings become the cool gangs and to get in you have to smoke. Right from that young age smoking is cool. And what are we creating now? Well we are creating a situation where people will have to go outside and huddle together with other members of their smokers gang. Where they are all cool.

All of us non smokers will be sitting smugly inside thinking how wonderfully healthy we are. But somewhere, maybe deep inside, we’ll want to be part of that gang again. They’re all in it together all smokers of Britain have all suddenly become a single gang where they get to automatically start conversations with strangers and shrug off their British reserve.

Ah the coversations with strangers thing. That’s important. The most common pick up line has to be, “have you got a light”. And that has now been denied. Women often accuse men of being stupid but listen to this men are already preparing for the smoking ban. A survey has found that young british men aren’t wearing watches any more. The reason? So they can ask women the time. They can’t ask for a light anymore because being a smoker might be bad so now men can use their watchless status to attract women. This trick has only become available due to the mobile phone’s invention. Because if there are no attractive women around and you need to know the time you can just look at that.

[Only a short post today as I'm up a mountain and it's about to start hailing again]

On Flickr there has been a big hoo ha about a comment that got deleted. A photographer whose photos had been up on Flickr had had her pictures stolen by a graphics firm which had turned them into photos for sale in frames on tea towels etc. She was very upset and posted the details of the company. The company started receiving death threats and so on. It all got a bit out of hand and Flickr decided to pull the post.

The interesting thing to me is not the rights and wrong of removing the post – which seems to interest everyone else. But the interesting point here is one of copyright protection.

This story was brought to my attention on digg.com and basically everyone on there was sympathising with the photographer who had had their photos stolen. But the usual fare on digg is quite different usually there are vast acres of articles about how to circumvent copyright, about how copyright is evil and about how DRM must die.

What struck me was how do these things square together? People know injustice when they see it. They can see that it's wrong for an organisation to steel from this girl. But they don't see the same injustice when they steel from a record company. Is it because each time they are fighting for the little man? Or is it just cognitive disonance?

When people steal music you might well be stealing from the little people. Sure the studio execs are rich. Sure Bono and Robbie Williams don't need any more of our money. But what about the people who will be laid off? You are stealing from them aren't you? And who gave you the right to decide?

Anyway I just thought it showed the true feelings of the digg users more clearly than they might even know themselves. And also it suggests a better tack for educating people about why copyright theft is wrong. Perhaps the authorities should do that rather than simply going around accusing people of being thieves? Educate people until they feel guilty enough that the majority won't do it.

So Tony Blair has finally announced he’s standing down as Prime Minister. There will be a lot of people who will be pleased by this news and a few who will be mourning. The main fault that Blair made was a failure to manage expectations. He wanted, no he needed the landslide back in 1997. And while part of that was the utter collapse of the Tories, part of it was the vision of him sweeping in and changing things. Weirdly, for an often quite conservative country, the charge that people seem to be levelling at him is that he didn’t change enough. Well that and Iraq, Iraq will hang round his neck for many a year.

In Blair’s farewell speech he said that he had been privileged to run the greatest nation in the world. My first thought when he said that was, “what? America?” It’s not that I don’t think that Briton is great, it’s simply that normally Americans say things like that and the British don’t. If Blair had meant that it would make a lot of sense too. I wish he had said something like this, but I know he couldn’t – and might not even believe it: “Remember back when Bill Clinton was in charge of America? Well back then I used to have time to do all kinds of stuff for Britain domestically. But since America in their infinite wisdom elected Num-Nutts over there I’ve spent half my time hiding the ‘Red Button’ from George in meetings. I’d love to say I had time for the NHS, but just imagine how bad the world would have been if I hadn’t stopped Bush as much as I did. You can thank me for it later.” That would have been probably the only thing that could have saved his reputation nationally.

But as I say the main problem is expectation. In fact a lot of the problems come from the D:Ream song “Things can only get better”. That should have been seen as a sign, ie., “We’re not really going to do much, but we can’t do as badly as our predecessor” but apparently people didn’t hear the song in that way. As it says on the Peter Cunah (the song’s composer’s) wikipedia page: ‘Famously, however, “Things Can Only Get Better” was to enjoy a further life, this time as a political anthem, which would lead New Labour’s 1997 election landslide.’ Yes it was D:Ream wot won it!

Anyway here’s this from Don’t Watch That, Watch This: