Is it me or is it now the job of modern day hacks and hackettes to simply regurgitate press releases and rumours while not bothering to check the facts — let alone check their copy for grammar, typso1 and decency?
A case in point is this BBC item from my RSS feeds that I saw this morning:
I checked that it wasn’t just my twisted mind that saw something not very tasteful here by asking a couple of colleagues. I do concede that this was posted pretty early in the morning so it may just have slipped through unnoticed. Someone at the Beeb has since spotted this and the offending news item has now been amended to something a little more appropriate.
Earlier this month we had the mysterious self-destructing palm tree upsetting the guys at Google Sightseeing, the erroneous reports of an alien SETI signal and most reported of all is the story of the adopted twins that got married to each other. This last item appeared in just about every media outlet despite it being a complete fallacy.
1 Before you ask, yes. That was on purpose.
Of late, in-and-among the pop-culture dross that seems to somehow pass itself off as newsworthy, I’ve noticed a lot of items on the state of the stock markets.
I do understand the basic tenets of commerce. However, the exchange of currency for goods or services rendered is about as far as my understanding of the financial world goes. Take, for example, the €4.9 billion loss made by Societe Generale which has been attributed to just one of their traders, Jerome Kerviel. Where has all that money ended up? At the other end of the spectrum is the $11.6 billion made by Goldman Sachs in 2007 by gambling against everybody else. Michael Lewis sums it up and concludes Goldman Sachs assumed that everyone in the industry (including their own employees) were “a bunch of idiots”.
I am also curious as to why this speculation is given protection by the government. Of course, I’m talking about the £25 billion bailing out of Northern Rock. Alistair Darling is obviously defending his actions but I don’t see why other forms of gambling are not given the same protection. I understand that my pension is affected somehow. Just how different is this to when I lose money in the casino?
In an attempt to find out more about this befuddling area I came across an interview with a hedge fund manager. I think I’ll have to read it again a few times as the only thing that is currently sticking in my mind is an arcane Simpsons reference. For now I’m going to rely on Bird and Fortune to simplify things for me and make me chuckle at the same time.
It appears that the answer is very. Especially if you happen to be the Met Office who supplied the weather data that the BBC presented to me this morning.
A little on the chilly side I thought, but it looks like it will be a nice enough day so I’ll leave my umbrella at home. I took one step outside and looked up at the clouds. It was like I was about to enter Mordor. The clouds were clearly full of snow. Sure enough, after returning to pick up my umbrella, I walked to work through just about the full gamut of precipitation. A veritable blizzard was threatening to freeze my ears off by the time I arrived at the office. I passed a child on his way to school who was nearly in tears because he was that cold (he would have been in tears had his tear ducts not frozen).
The Met Office has spent a lot of money on technology and wants to spend more. They have their eye on a £200 million super computer that they hope will allow them to provide far more accurate forecasts. This shouldn’t prove to be too difficult as it appears they can just about tell me what the weather is doing at the present moment and I can look out of my window to find that out.
I have an alternative conspiracy theory brewing. Little known fact: The Met Office is actually part of the Ministry of Defense. I don’t think that the Met Office actually has all that much technology and their forecasters just wing it while the MoD pockets the cash for covert operations.
Facebook is to face questions from the Information Commissioners Office here in the UK. There is some concern about what information about you Facebook keeps on its servers even after you close your account. It seems that simply deactivating your Facebook account does not remove your wall posts or other such items you may have posted and you have to do this manually which can be a long process if you’ve been a user for any length of time.
I got to thinking about the kerfuffle that erupted when Scoble got himself banned after breaking the Facebook terms of service. You did read them when you signed up, right? All traces of Scoble were removed after his account was suspended. His wall posts and photos were gone and he also vanished from friend lists and groups.
So, if you want a quick way to totally remove yourself from the pages of Facebook (although maybe not their servers) then the answer is simple: break the rules.
I very nearly went to the gym this evening but I’m still counting this weekend as constituting part of my birthday so I decided to stay in with a glass of wine instead. I’m glad I did as I had completely forgotten about the new eight-week season of Ski Sunday that started on BBC 2.
The days of David Vine commentating are long gone but I feel that the Winter sports magazine has been overlooked and underfunded in the past several years. Pitifully short runs or ratings killing early broadcasts have almost been the death of the show so I was glad to see a new look with elements from Top Gear and some Michael Palin travel escapade thrown in for good measure and actually shown in a prime time slot. I was also much relieved to find out that Sam Fonteyn’s anthemic theme tune Pop Looks Bach has survived the refresh.
As for the racing, what better way to kick things off than with the Kitzbühel downhill? A horrific crash to American Scott Macartney left me hoping that this year wouldn’t be remembered for all the wrong reasons. Thankfully he’ll be okay despite some bruising to the brain. For some light relief, Bode Miller’s outrageous riding of the safety netting was the most thing jaw-dropping thing I’ve seen on the Hahnenkamm since Kristian Ghedina’s spread eagle at 135 km/h off the final jump a few years ago.
That is, if you believe what you read on conference banners.
It’s only a few hours to go until Steve Jobs kicks off the Macworld San Francisco (MWSF) conference with his keynote presentation and time feels like it is actually slowing down. CES has finished and, as usual, there was a really big television and not much else that grabbed my eye. True enough, wireless power appeared on the horizon once more but Splashpower have been promising us this for several years now. So what have Apple got up their sleeves for the not-so-distant future?
From www.gocomics.com
As usual, excitement, anticipation and wild speculation have been rife. As per normal, Gruber hits the nail on the head. Inductive reasoning based on technological developments, job vacancies and patent applications is the norm but some people go to extraordinary lengths to dig up information about what could about to be announced. Coming across a reference to a “MacBookAir” in the Google cache records of Adium usage logs? Honestly, where do these people find the time?
This is what Christmas was like when I was a child before it became an excuse to simply over-indulge in everything and fall asleep in front of the television. Swap a man bringing presents in a red Santa suit for a man wearing a black turtle-neck and jeans and you’re pretty much there.
I may actually forego sitting and watching the usual website and photo updates this year, hide in the gym for a couple of hours and watch the apple.com recorded version of the keynote instead.
“Final” in every sense of the word for the nominees and eventual winner of the Darwin Awards 2007 (ironically announced in the same week as 12 school districts in Florida effectively banned the teaching of evolution). For the uninitiated among you, the Darwin Awards are named after Charles Darwin and are given posthumously to those that kill themselves by performing some remarkably idiotic act and therefore advancing mankind by removing themselves from the human gene pool.
Another unwanted awards list is this breakdown of the worst science stories of 2007. This is how the media spreads fear and panic among the non-scientific populous who in turn fan the flames with chain emails. I can forgive Joe Sixtooth for not checking their facts before blindly forwarding these ‘warnings’ but professional journalists should really know better.
The last review of 2007 is far less idiotic and much more creative. Nicholas Felton is a graphic designer in New York city who produces a personal annual report on the facts and figures that constituted his past year. I’m not sure that I’d remember to record everything I do over the course of 365 days.
Just when Facebook stops displaying fliers for gay nights in Edinburgh to me (at least they got the city right), it now insists on serving me adverts in Norwegian for some strange reason1. Handbags and hair straighteners also make regular appearances. I’m fairly tuned out of banner ads in their normal positions but these inappropriate ones somehow make me read them regardless. I thought that the big selling point of Facebook for advertisers was supposed to be the profiling of their users?
Still, I’ll be happy enough as long as they stop short of implementing their dream business tools (and you thought the whole Beacon debacle was bad).
1 Ah yes, I forgot who is supplying the advertising for them. That’s right – Microsoft.
I dislike the notion of New Years resolutions. If something needs changing then I say change it there and then – there’s no reason to wait for another calendar year to come around. I don’t smoke so there are no cigarettes to kick. One of the few (and easier) ways I could be greener would be to cut back on the computer usage a little but that’s as likely as easing up on the other common bad habits such as drinking “too much” caffeine and alcohol. Regardless, here are a few things that I’ll be trying to address over the next 12 months.
- Get back in shape
Yes, I know that round is a shape too. I’m not quite at that stage yet but I did gain close to a stone (five kilos) over Christmas. What with breaking my foot toward the end of the Summer it was nearly December before I felt like training again and by that time I’d lost all impetus.
- Spend more time in the kitchen
Another thing that I’ve got out of the habit of is a good few hours cooking on a Sunday afternoon and making meals for the week ahead. Plus I find it quite therapeutic so it should help me relax.
- Learn jQuery
Opinion is divided (and in some cases partisanly so) between jQuery and Prototype. I’ve pretty much used the latter exclusively before now due to being more programmatically complete with concepts such as function currying but another web technology in my quiver is always a good thing.
- Start using GTD principles
I’ve been toying with David Allen’s Getting Things Done productivity system for a good few months but have yet to jump in with both feet. After playing with the alpha release of Things for a while now I think that I have finally found the software to help me.
- Stop buying shiny things
This may be the biggest ask of them all when there are only a few days to MacWorld San Francisco. Apple already announced their Penryn based Mac Pro a few days ago which clears the way for more exciting products next Tuesday. Maybe nothing that you can configure up to costing £18,000 – but at least at that price you can heat your home and cook your food on it.
It may have escaped your notice somehow but towards the end of last year we had some trouble with personal data going missing here in the UK. Why low-ranking people had access to all of this information and why it was transmitted unencrypted and using unregistered mail is a discussion for another time.
I was of the same opinion as Jeremy Clarkson in that there wasn’t much that an identity thief could do should they get hold of my bank account number and sort code other than altruistically deposit money into my account.
I must follow suit again and admit to being wrong too. However I doubt that I would publish my bank account details in a national newspaper.
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