Simon Rules!

Slogans saying “There’s probably no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” have started appearing on London buses in response to a particular religious message that pointed readers to a website telling them they were going to have to endure torment in hell for all eternity.

As expected, the campaign has already drawn complaint from a religious group.

Now, a few things piss me off about the complaint. If it’s fair to have religious slogans on buses, then it’s also fair to have these atheist/agnostic ones. You could even argue that it’s fairer to have the atheist messages, since they are based in science. Put simply, if I told you that there was an invisible flying spaghetti monster that created the earth, you would have absolutely no way to disprove it. After all, non-believers cannot even see him. The lack of a way to disprove him simply means he has been designed to be impossible to disprove, not that he exists.

I hope when the complaint is brought to the Advertising Standards Agency, it is laughed at.

Hooray for 8ft trees and LED lights! Happy Christmas!

The BBC and other news sources are reporting on an initiative to start promoting atheism to counter similar public religious messages. They want to put signs on London buses telling people to enjoy their lives and stop worrying about nonsense questions. A fundraiser was started, and the aim was to collect £5500. As of the time of writing, £125,711.32 has been collected so I hope to see lots of these signs.

What was one of the biggest reasons I got rid of my Verizon phone? Aside from the sucky service and terrible battery life, it was because of poor customer service. Not only didn’t they care when I called customer service with my issues, but they were unwilling (or unable) to solve a basic problem for me: my phone couldn’t display dates in UK (dd-mm-yyyy) or ISO (yyyy-mm-dd) formats, and it couldn’t display times in 24 hour. I think it would take a programmer less than 15 minutes to add those as options for future phones. It still wouldn’t work outside the country, though.

I’ve noticed this kind of thing a few times. Today I had to enter some security answers for online credit card access, and a hell of a lot of the pre-defined questions that I have to pick from are solely geared around the USA.

“What high school did so-and-so attend?” – they don’t call it high school in England, but I’ll let it slide as it’s a translation issue.

“When is so-and-so’s birthday (MM/DD)?” – I am not sure why they even need to know the format, since it accepts any string input.

“What is the last name of your 1st grade teacher?” – I can’t remember that far back. Even so, they are not called grades in a lot of other countries, including the UK. Translation issue again, but who remembers that far back? For me, that was 1985!

“What was your favourite college year?” – Questions like these are really problematic to me. Not only are college and university two separate things in England (we have two years of college before we go to university), but asking me what my favourite year was may result in a different answer depending on my mood.

“What’s the name of your elementary school?” – I am still not certain what elementary school is.

“In which city did so-and-so get married?” – City? Many times I am asked what city I am from in England. Addresses don’t work that way in Europe; we don’t all live in or near a city.

“Who did you go to prom with?” – We don’t have prom in England. Oops.

“What state did you first visit (other than the one you were born in)?” – That’s a big assumption! I guess I can still answer this one…

I don’t have a photo of this to hand, but CU Boulder attach computer mice in some of their labs to the right side of each keyboard, leaving about 10 inches of cord free. Thanks, CU! You have access ramps for the disabled and want to increase the diversity of your students, but you don’t think about the 10% of your population that is left handed. I don’t know why I felt so mad at the time – I just went to a different lab to do my work. Perhaps it was because I really cannot use a computer as quickly with my right hand (almost, but not quite), and it doesn’t feel at all comfortable.

This brings me onto my next theory – the 50% skill theory. I believe that when we are all born, we each have 100% of skill to allocate between our hands for various sports (some athletes get more than 100%). Left handers get so confused with what to do – do I mirror what the instructor is doing or repeat exactly? As a result, our skill gets split more like 50/50 instead of, say, 80/20 in a regular person. We have equal skill in our hands but neither is particularly good. I have always found that I am terrible in any activity that involves throwing, catching or aiming, so maybe that’s why.

Another thing. When I was in school, we had left handed scissors. You know the type – the blades cross the opposite way. If they have moulded handles, they are moulded to fit the left hand rather than the right. I just cannot use left handed scissors. I hold right-handed scissors in my left hand, but my eye is trained to look at the “cutting” side of the scissors. If I pick up a left-handed pair, I look at the wrong side and my line goes wonky. The funny thing is that I remember when I was about 7, my school bought few left-handed scissors, and they would make me use them, since there were not enough right-handed ones to go around. As a result, my work turned out utterly crap.

Why is it necessary to bring down an entire site for hours every weekend to perform scheduled maintenance? I think all bank online account access sites do it, but I rarely ever see online shopping sites doing it. So, what’s the deal? I think it’s another case of unless you are parting with money, they don’t care. It’s pretty simple to switch over to a back-up server while you do an upgrade. Ever notice how you can get through to someone on a sales line quicker than you can get through to support?

Also: Circuit City officially suck. They are closing a local store and liquidating all merchandise. I went tonight and they have a sign saying “everything in store is on sale”. I asked a sales assistant, and they said it includes all display merchandise. I wanted to buy a Canon 40D, but they had none left, and wouldn’t sell me the display copy.

Scott: it’s on.

For those of you who haven’t heard about it yet, the Mojave Experiment is a marketing ploy by Microsoft to encourage people to decide for themselves whether Vista is a POS good or bad. They show participants Vista, but tell them that it is a new Windows operating system called Mojave. They give their comments, and then they are told that it is actually Vista.

Without commenting on Vista at all, I would like to mention how surprised I am by the results. Microsoft say the people that participated were the following:

• 84% Windows XP users
• 22% Apple operating system users
• 14% Pre-Windows XP users
• 1% Linux users
• Some users use multiple platforms.

The thing I find shocking is that apparently none of their participants could tell that it was Windows Vista. I do not use Vista on a daily basis – in fact, I have only used it a few times, but I can recognise it from a mile away. Did they ask any computer professionals at all – people who use computers every day for their jobs? Even before I used Vista, I would have easily recognised it from all the publicity I saw online.

Here are some funny video responses (typed exactly as spoken):

“Like if it’s um up against other systems, um like a Mac system, or something, you know what I mean, like, if you were deciding between the two, I would say that this one has um probably the <pause> best new features that I’ve seen.”

“I’m not a’git thedl git the the book out and read 77 pages to figure out how to do it. I just want to be able to look at it, read it.”

“There’s something I have to tell you now – there actually is no Mojave.”
“Oh? OK.”
“What I’ve just shown you – or John’s just shown you – is actually Windows Vista.”
“Oh, really? See how much I knew – nothing.”

I don’t really have much faith in a marketing exercise that puts the respondents in the same room as multiple Microsoft employees where they may feel pressured (perhaps out of kindness) to give a positive review.

Tonight my Mac reported that it was out of hard drive space, just minutes after I checked and was told there was approx 4GB free. I am not sure what happened, but it dropped to zero and then went back up to 3GB free a few minutes later. I was scanning in some receipts and reading email via a webmail account and nothing else when the web browser froze (Safari) and I started getting odd errors from the scanning app.

I have been holding off on upgrading my 100GB 7200rpm drive (the largest in that speed that you could buy in early 2006) in case Apple announced new Macbooks with Blu-Ray drives, but I finally had to buy one.

I settled on a 320GB 7200rpm Western Digital drive… for the killer price of $94 (plus $6 shipping). Amazing price. I just hope the drive turns out to be a good one.

In other news, I am ill for the second time this year – yet another mystery cold type illness. I also went to Scott’s sister’s wedding this weekend and had great fun – I took some great photos and spoke to one of the photographers for a long time, who convinced me to spend many thousands on a pro lens (well, when I save up for it).

Following on from my “boredom” post, here’s something that has been keeping me busy for a while. I have a home server called Frankenputer, and it runs a package called Zoneminder along with the web server.

Connected to it I have two black & white outdoor cameras (el cheapo $30 things from Harbor Freight) and one indoor colour wired ethernet camera. The outdoor cameras are connected via very long cables to individual video capture cards in the server. The problem I am having right now is that the picture quality at daytime is fairly noisy:

At night though, it’s plainly crap:

Zoneminder is also fairly terrible at motion detection, requiring a very clean image to work with, and very precise fiddling with “blob counts” and other non-intuitive variables. If I connect either of the cameras to a proper TV, there is absolutely no interference, leading me to believe that the interference is being generated inside the server. However, if I connect a closer source of video to the server (such as a VCR), the picture is also perfect! I think what is happening is that the long run of camera cable (100 feet) is causing the composite video voltage levels to drop, and interference in the server is becoming more noticeable. Any hints would be appreciated though.

I am wondering whether to retire Frankenputer and get a new motherboard, CPU and memory, or to get ethernet cameras all around. Here’s a snap from the ethernet camera: