Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in gwire's LiveJournal:

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Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007
5:00 pm	Playlist envy As I was leaving for work this morning I managed to catch a couple of minutes of an interview with Mick Jagger on (I think) BBC News. The interviewer was reading out viewer submitted questions - such as 'Do you have an iPod and if so what do you have on it?'. "Do you have an iPod?" "I do, yes." "And what have you got on it?" "Eighty gigs of music." Exactly. The interviewer attempted to twist the question into a variation of "what sort of music do you listen to", but even that's a trick question. It's not the same question that it was twenty, or even ten years ago. That question becomes, in an age where the barriers to exploring different kinds of music have collapsed, "do you only listen to specific music and, if so, why?" In the shuffle-age are tastes are more accurately defined by those things we actively avoid. Current Music: Random play (Comment on this)
Tuesday, September 25th, 2007
1:00 pm	Locked out Good to see that Gnome's screensaver process now comes with some kind of messagepad for people to leave messages for you. I'm sure the Use Case for people leaving anonymous messages for you when away from your desk justifies what I'd imagine to be a bit of a security auditing nightmare. And yet somehow they haven't managed to implement the one big interface win that XScreenSaver still has - displaying the current time on the unlock dialog. When my cell phone is locked it still shows serveral bits of information: the current time, if I've missed a call, and if I have any unread messages. I'd get a little annoyed if I had to unlock my phone to check the time - ditto my PC. But maybe I lock my screen more than normal people. I lock my screen at the drop of a hat - a habit I learned from spending time in my college computer lab. If you were away from your terminal long enough for someone to type "xhost +;clear" into one of your terminal windows you were doomed. If you're unfamiliar with X server authentication that command basically gives control of your current desktop session to anyone at another terminal. The usual prank would be to display windows of hardcore porn on the user's screen at the least opportune moment. Hi-larious. Other uses were more... insidious. I'm sure Gnome's screensaver anonymous slander system will work great in lab situations. "Quit hogging the terminals, asshat." for example. At college the system provided screensaver would log you off after a certain amount of time being locked, but the people would still attempt to "reserve" the terminals with the crisp high-res displays (for playing Netrek, natch) by running a self-compiled, and renamed, copy of xlock. Fortunately I knew a magic key combination that could bypass xlock. (You keep rapidly hitting the key that cycles the display hacks until it segfaults, dropping you back into the user session. HaXxor.) xhost - (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 10th, 2007
6:21 pm	Test posting via IM Just testing this out. Smashing. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 7th, 2006
12:09 am	The Nightly News If you value information the most, then you don't care about convention. It's not "Who do you know?"; it's "How fast are you? How dense?" It's not, "Do you talk like my old friends?"; it's "Is this interesting?" How fast? How dense? Rudy Rucker's quote about cyberpunk fiction (easy to read, while at the same time containing lots of information) became a sort of motto for the Mondo2000 era. Infofreako that I am, it's become the criteria by which I judge all media. Web sites. Movies. Magazines. Comic books, straddling the ease of visual story-telling while retaining a textual element, have the greatest capacity to be very fast, and very dense. This came to mind when I picked up the first issue of Jonathan Hickman's 6-part comic book series The Nightly News. The style of the book, which combines heavily inked comic art with graphic design elements reminded me of the very early covers of CRISIS which combined Ezquerra's line-art with the strong Rian Hughes design. Crisis used to begin each issue with some element of the backstory for Pat Mills's "Third World War", such the development of the IMF. (Hughes also later had some involvement in the short lived WildStorm series The Intimates which offered the reader a trivia tsunami on every page - a sort of superhero version of Network 7 .) And Hickman isn't afraid of dedicating a couple of pages to the sort ofgraphs that Wired magazine calls "infoporn". Favourability ratings for theWorld Bank. The divvying up of America's media pie between six companies. (At this point I checked the cover again: Image Comics, and not DC's Vertigo imprint - ultimately a part of the Time Warner empire.) And it's the conglomeration of the media landscape that is the narrative's concern. Not some corrupt future media as with Brian Wood's DMZ, but the current main stream American media. And while we see DMZ (with which this will inevitably be compared) through the eyes uncompromised journalist, Hickman offers, not a hero, but an assassin. "The Hand". A sniper picking off hapless TV news reporters. Clearly not a protagonist we're supposed to root for. "The Hand" is a broken man whose (as yet unexplained) need for bloody revenge against the news media is fed by a mysterious religious cult. The cult's leader, known only as "The Voice", communicates his sermons on the nature of mass media though old-school audio cassettes delivered by courier (which brought to mind Videodrome's deceased media theorist Brian O'Blivion and the Cathode Ray Mission). It's too early to call storywise, but the delivery has certainly allowed it to pass the only test a first issue has - is it worth buying a second. Yes. More information at www.pronea.com. (Comment on this)
Sunday, May 7th, 2006
10:30 pm	Red Light. Green Light. Managed to see Mission: Impossible III this weekend. Which is good if you like that sort of thing (which I do), and would probably be even better if you hadn't seen the first one since it has the exact same "who's the traitor" twist. But hey, I've willingly subjected myself to four seasons of by-the-numbers MacGuffin chasing on Alias DVDs already. Anyway, I just wanted to know if anyone was distracted by the red dots that kept being flashed up on screen. Single frames, with a braile-like arrangment of red dots left of centre. At first I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me, but during the bridge sequence they seemed quite frequent. What are they? Hidden clues for Lost or something? I assume it's actually some kind of watermarking system - but, WTF - is it impossible to do that in a way that doesn't bug the hell out of me? (Comment on this)
Thursday, April 20th, 2006
1:56 pm	More Goodmail Thanks to the EFF debate, that "Goodmail" issue I've been trying to avoid is back in the news. An article in the Guardian begins "Advocates believe that 'paid-for' email schemes are essential to put a stop to ever increasing spam...". D'oh. That's not it at all. The spam war is over, baby. We lost. It's all about whitelists now. (You can object to a system that doesn't allow mail to be delivered - you can't object to a user that chooses not to read it.) I'm not a supporter of AOL/Goodmail in this case (I'd much rather an open standard was being supported (such as S/MIME), to provide the "trust" part of their scheme. The problem I have is that the rhetoric the EFF is using is so broad it appears to be attacking the the idea that there should be a mechanism to increase the visibility to users of not-specifically-whitelisted mail. And while I don't believe that any scheme that involves charging for the receipt of email will a: work, b: reduce the amount of spam (that exists, rather the amount actually seen) - I can see the need to be able to mark some mail as important and (in some way) reputable. The only analogy I can think of is the way SSL certificates are used for websites. Firstly, imagine SSL certificates hadn't been widely used. That they just existed as a proposal, an RFC or something. Keep your eyes on the watch. You're feeling drowsy... Imagine AOL announces that, as part of the fight against phishing and malware etc, a future update of their browser would support SSL, and block any HTTP POST requests that do not go to a site with a valid SSL certificate signed by a certificate authority "trusted" by AOL. Now, to counter the initial objections, AOL allows you to add sites to a browser "whitelist" - on a dialog window that urges caution. You can also use an alternative browser if you so wish, that implements SSL without restricting non-SSL use. But it's widely expected that businesses who don't want customers to go through through the whitelisting step will pay for an SSL certificate. And while they don't necessarily have to buy a certificate directly from AOL, AOL charges the certificate authorities a fee to be "trusted" (perhaps based on the number of certificates they issue?). This could represent millions in revenue. There's potential for possible abuse in this scenario (Perhaps they'll extend it to HTTP GET? Perhaps they'll restrict the whitelist feature? Perhaps they'll require a two-way certificate exchange forcing users to also buy certificates? Perhaps they'll shift the restrictions to the network-level, blocking out alternative browsers?) Under pressure, AOL ships the browser still with SSL capabilities but with non-SSL POST blocking switched off. Yet many businesses still choose to use the SSL functionality for their sites. Now while I might find the level of control and potential abuse objectionable I can still see some usefulness in the underlying technology. Yet from my perspective (extrapolating in my mind) the EFF position would seem to be that the very existence of certificate authorities gives an unfair disadvantage to those that choose not to pay the "certificate tax" making them seem untrustworthy. The conclusion to their "slippery slope" argument is that no sites should have signed certificates. SNAP. We're back in the real world. SSL certificates are widespread, but AOL doesn't get to decide who's a trustworthy issuer - Microsoft does. The EFF has a signed certificate on their own webserver. Nobody worries they're creating a two-tier Internet. Phishing sites still exist, but people tend to blame the fact that (generally) victims are submitting details via plain HTTP. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 29th, 2006
11:52 am	Off the grid If you leave the TV idling in BBC FOUR for long enough, Edward Heath will appear and ask that you limit your electricity consumption to three days a week. It's not some environmental voice-from-the-grave, it's a promo for a documentary covering 1973. (Commercial use of electricity in the UK was rationed in December 1973 following strikes by mineworkers). Shortly after one such promo on Saturday night, my television switched itself off. Well that explained the mysterious reboots that my PC experienced while I slept on Friday night. Slight voltage drops have been making the lights flicker every so often but not enough to affect anything else. These drops were enough to affect my TV. After a while the gaps were long enough to reboot the PC (which is plugged into a power "smoothing" adaptor, but not a UPS). Eventually everything with a clock was demanding attention. Chrono-tamagotchis blinking two sets of eyes, 00:00 (tama-clock-chis?). That's the real impact of electricity problems to the lazy decadent westerner - having to reset the bloody clocks on everything. I don't even need them - but you don't get the option - they're always there. My gas oven won't even switch on until you've told it the time. And usually it's the worst user-interface experience you'll ever experience. The only clocks I don't need to reconfigure following an extended power outage are my PC and DTT reciever (which I guess pulls a DST adjusted time signal from the TV signal. If it wasn't for those chrono-tamagotchis, the only things I'd need wired up permanently would be my fridge and ADSL router (which, btw, supports NTP). I took the precaution of switching everything off. Constant power-cycling can't be good for consumer electronics. ( A friend of mine, despite having grown-up with computers, was obliged to go on a basic computer literacy course when starting a new job in the mid-90s. The entire class sat in front of IBMs and the first thing the instructor told the class to do was to push buttons, any buttons - as a way of getting over the initial fear that they might inadvertantly cause the PC to, I don't know, catch fire. My friend started belligerently flipping the system power switch. "Shit! Stop doing that! You'll break it!" the instructor bellowed across a room of freshly minted computerphobes. ) By Sunday there was no power at all. The downside was that I'd forgotten to charge my cellphone, the upside was that I'd needed to defrost the freezer anyway, and all the clocks would have needed to be readjusted for BST anyway. That night I read by candlelight. An article in Wired about a hospital in India made mention of the unreliable power. Brian Wood's 'DMZ' depicts New Yorkers during a future civil war scrambling to get as much out of their temporary jury-rigged power connection as possible. The developing world road-testing the developed world's dystopian future. By Monday morning the juice was back, courtesy of a diesel generator. If there's one thing that makes you think about your energy use, is its physical repesentation as a barrel of liquid. I'm severly limiting my use of electrical appliances. (And now I'm wondering about the etiquette of electricity use with a limited communal supply. Will my neighbours think me rude to run a washing machine?) And that is why I haven't gotten around to replying to your email. (Comment on this)
Sunday, March 12th, 2006
12:40 am	Screen Wipe I just saw Charlie Brooker's show on BBC4 Screen Wipe - basically a TV version of his Guardian TV column Screen Burn. If you haven't seen it, imagine one of Victor Lewis Smith's TV shows, but one in which, rather than being a voiceover, Victor is facing the camera for about 80% of the time. (Yes. Exactly.). (Comment on this)
Saturday, March 11th, 2006
10:03 pm	A Taste of Spamageddon "How do you do filter out the spam from your email?" Unless it's being handled by some unseen third party, those whose mailboxes are exposed to the full force of the world's junk mailers often wonder what it is they're supposed to be doing about it. I think the last time I was asked this I unhelpfully replied "angrily, by hand" and generally that was true. The last time I was asked was, well, last year. Until quite recently my perspective on anti-spam software was, I suppose, informed by the Star Trek episode "A Taste of Armageddon" in which Kirk argues that the populace of a planet at war should be exposed to the full unsanitised horror of conflict. "Disease, suffering, hardship... that's what war is all about, Anon. That's what makes it a thing to be avoided. But you've made it neat and painless - so neat and painless, you've had no reason to stop it, and you've had it for five hundred years." My belief for many years was, that if efforts were focused on technical means of hiding spam from the recipient, distribution would be tolerated. Whether directly acknowledged or not, the victim's failure to deploy the appropriate technology would be seen as the cause of a (if not the) problem. ("I'm switching because mailservice-a has much better spam filters than mailservice-b.") After many years of (mostly) manually filtering mailboxes, I conceded. I finally allowed myself the decadence of SpamAssassin scoring. Firstly, I'm my own postmaster. This can makes things a little easier. At the exim configuration end, I have a custom "acl_check_data" which will deny mail on the basis of several custom checks, before being passed to spamassassin where a custom X header added consisting of numerical score. I also have a system filter that adds a "List-Id:" header to identified mailing list traffic that doesn't currently have one (not that many, these days). The mail is then delivered to my user level filter which then separates it into mailing-list traffic and everything else - done on the basis of a populated List-Id: header. The identified list traffic is mainly filtered into list-specific mail folder. No specific spam checking is done at this point - it's usually been filtered out at the list distribution end. Spam sporting unmatched List-Id: headers drop into a "ListCheck" folder. These are either new lists that haven't been added to the filter, lists that have changed their List-Id: format, or (very occasionally) spam. In my experience very little spam sports List-Id: headers. Not really surprising since it's like a flag that says "not to you personally, filter aggressively". For the non-list mail, I pass it through a whitelist filter that matches the contents of various header fields. Mail that passes the whitelist check goes into the "Inbox" folder. For the mail that failed the initial whitelist check, a check for the custom header inserted by the spamassassin is made. If the header exists, and the score is above a certain threshold the mail goes into the "Spam" folder, otherwise it goes into the "Check" folder. If the mail that ends up in the "Check" folder is non-spam it means the whitelist filter should be manually updated. Any spam is added to a bayesian filter, and complaints - if appropriate - are issued. The amount of mail in the "Spam" folder is usually too much to review using IMAP. I occasionally log into the mailserver directly and open it in mutt. Mutt has a feature where you can order the mailbox based on the "spam score" in the header ("o p"), so I tend to order the box by "least spammy", check the subject line of the first few pages worth, then clear the whole folder. The strength of this system is that, since I'm not relying completely on SpamAssassin, the negative effects from scores that might be interpreted as false positives or false negatives are reduced. (Comment on this)
Friday, March 10th, 2006
12:28 am	Vivat Milligna! I guess the SpamAssassin developers aren't big Goon Show fans - any reference to "Spike Milligna" triggers an apparently heavily weighted rule (FUZZY_MILLION). (And heaven forbid you use the word "magnanimity" if you're not commiting a 419 scam...) (Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 1st, 2006
1:30 am	Thinking inside the box Spoilers ahead: I watched last night's episode of CSI, Gum Drops. Nick, still clearly affected by the trauma of being buried alive in the previous season, becomes convinced that a probable murder victim is actually still alive and he races to rescue them. He follows the clues, and finally finds her body - throat cut, skin blue - at the edge of a lake. I assumed she was dead. However, the final scene shows Nick visiting the girl as she recovers in hospital? Ah, I see what they're doing. Unable to deal with his failure to save the little girl, we're seeing Nick's hallucination of an alternative 'good' ending. And he, as a television character, needs to hallucinate a trite TV drama resolution. Normally TV clumsily signposts these conceits, but here it's done with such subtlety. Incredible. But then I checked the episode guide online, and it turns out she was supposedly still alive when she was found. Frankly, I blame games like Metal Gear Solid for letting me think that that sort of thing would ever be allowed. (Comment on this)
Sunday, February 26th, 2006
7:38 pm	Goodmail? While I'm too slack to actually write up my thoughts about the Goodmail issue (in brief I'm in favour of the principle of independent reputation guarantors, and don't see them as the way the man is going to steal away free speech), I thought I'd add some emphasis on this EFF press release: Under AOL's recently announced "certified email" proposal, large emailers willing to pay an "email tax" can bypass spam filters and get guaranteed access to people's inboxes-with their messages having a preferential high-priority designation. Charities, small businesses, civic organizing groups, and even families with mailing lists will have no guarantee that their email will be delivered unless they are willing to pay the "email tax" to AOL. And how, under the status quo, would the beligered "little guy mailing list" get delivered if caught by AOL's spam filter? Why they'd need to apply for AOL to whitelist them (i.e. to bypass their spamfilter), and for the administrative legwork to be done on the AOL subscriber's dime. I suspect that the logical implication of the EFF's complaint, is that AOL shouldn't be using any spam filtering system that relies on whitelisting. And if the emails of small businesses get caught by what remains, then that shouldn't be used either. Like it or not, building large-scale reliable anti-spam systems is going to cost money. Is it completly just that that cost be solely bourn by the reciever? (1 Comment |Comment on this)
7:03 pm	Rollin' "Oh, is that the Mata-hari dryer monkey game you're playing." "Katamari. Katamari Damacy. Or rather We Heart Katamari, which, if it wasn't confusing enough, is the sequel that makes constant references to a game that was never actually released in the UK. Which I suppose puts it, in terms of bafflement, on a par with about 90% of Japanese media." "Oh, it's cute - like a kid's game." "Oh. I thought you said all videogames were for kids." "Well, you muttered something about it involving a little guy with large attractive balls, I thought it sounded... y'know - dodgy. Like that game with the hookers." "No this game, for once, is actually nothing like Grand Theft Auto. Basically you have to roll the ball around picking up all the things lying around. It's about tidying up." "Well, at least it's not about killing things." (At this point I envelop a large group of screaming schoolgirls into my giant flaming ball-of-death.) "You killed them?! You crushed those people?" "No, it's OK - they cover that. After the King of the Cosmos flings the Katamari out into space, he asks if the people are fine, and apparently they are." "OK on what basis?" "I don't know - on the basis that it's not real? That's it's just a slightly surreal fantasy?" "Surely you could say that about the dead hookers in that Grand Theft game." "Exactly, that's exactly my point. And it's not just hookers. I don't remember there being Japanese schoolkids in San Andreas, but if there were, there'd be nothing to stop you killing them as well..." "Not exactly a compelling defence though, is it?" (Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 7th, 2006
11:38 pm	Blind Item Which notorious Atkins cheerleader, and contributing editor to a popular hipster blog, has now switched away from the protein-heavy foods to a combination of regular exercise and a diet emphasising fruit and veg? (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, January 29th, 2006
9:39 pm	Sweating to the oldies Even if my inner pool of misogyny has run dry, all I need to watch an episode of My Super Sweet 16, and boom - I'm topped right up. Unlike Laguna Beach which just fills me with a general loathing of humanity. I don't deliberately set out to watch these shows, but if I'm spending 20, 30 minutes on a machine at the gym I've got the choice between MTV or 24-hour rolling news. Now my thinking is "I'll watch MTV. Their constant parade of hard-bodied hotties should provide ample work-out motivation." A Benny Benassi video, or something? Oh no. MTV UK consists of 60% ringtone commercials, and 20% "Pimp My Ride". So I end up watching Pimp My Bloody Ride - the show that, if I stood for anything, would be the antithesis of everything I stand for. Hey, you go, Xibit. Reward those car-owning videogenic teens, who've had "a tough year", by upgrading their car stereo, blinging their hubcaps, and whatnot. Fight the good fight. The gym ought to just run the trailer for Into the Blue on a loop. That ought to work for everyone. (Comment on this)
Thursday, January 26th, 2006
2:25 pm	Snake? Snaaaaake! Whenever Grand Theft Auto is mentioned in the media there's usually some mention of the player using a hooker, and then killing her to get the money back. This illustrates the utter immorality of the game. I'd played GTA games since the old-school top down original and it never occurred to me to do that until after I heard a cultural commentator suggest it. And yet nobody mentions that you can choose to spend 20 minutes in San Andreas swimming with dolphins - everyone wants to focus on the whore-slaying. I finally defeated The Boss in Metal Gear Solid 3 last night - with a total game time on the save file just shy of 24 hours. Which presumably includes a big chunk of cut-scenes and codec conversations. There's a section where you plant explosives with a timer of 20 minutes, the cut-scene kicks in - and by the time it's over there's only 5 minutes left to defeat the boss and escape. Anyway after you defeat The Boss, there's a significantly lengthy cut-scene at the end of which see implores you to kill her and complete the mission. And then it cuts back to interactive mode but one in which you have a single task - shoot her in the head, or don't. Given my ruthlessness up to that point, the fact that I hesitated before shooting is perhaps significant. Despite the drama of the scene, the outcome was my choice. I've just seen an article online, Metal Gear Pacifist, that argues that, despite the fact that it's a military action game, the Metal Gear games subtly attempt to influence the player not to kill anyone. And it's true - it's easier to break cover long enough to tranq a soldier in the leg than it is to line up head-shots. Of course, my gaming style is to then sneak up to the sleeping soldier and slash at him with a hunting knife. Corpses don't wake up - and I don't want to be disturbed when searching for plastic frogs (don't ask). And yes, The Sorrow level did take a chunk of time before I figured out what needed to be done. (Comment on this)
Thursday, January 19th, 2006
8:16 pm	Fire Below Some bastard is smoking on the tube. I'm on the Northern Line between London Bridge and Bank (i.e. under the Thames) and I can see a wisp of smoke in front of me. I stand to my feet to see if I can identify the miscreant. But as I stand, I realise there's a lot of smoke. I can't quite see where it's coming from, the vents? The doors at both ends of the carriage open and coughing passengers move into the carriage to escape the smoke only to find it's in here as well. Someone pulls the emergency alarm and the train pulls to a stop. The driver announces he's stopping until he can get confirmation of what's going on. The lights dim, then flicker. We're trapped in an enclosed space, smoke is coming in from some unknown source. We've seen tube trains filled with smoke before... phonecam pictures from six months ago. I pull out my phone and switch to hi-quality video and start recording. There may be drama worth capturing. I get about a minute of people either patiently sitting it out, or coughing and wheezing. Weirdly I'm not coughing at all. Maybe the years I spent as a smoker have destroyed my ability to detect the inhalation of harmful particles? Maybe because I was busy shooting video I didn't feel the psychological need to react physically. One guy tells a stranger how scared he is. I shut the camera lens without saving the video file. I've seen a lot of articles about "citizen journalism", but in a situation like this you just feel like a twat. People are having a moment of fear and you're recording it for posterity. I move from the seat to the floor of the carriage and breathe shallow. Time slows, but fortunately the smoke doesn't seem to be getting thicker. Several minutes later the train starts moving on to Bank. On a slightly surreal note - the first thing I see as we pull into the light of the station, is a priest. On the platform, reading the Standard. While most people's reaction is to leave the smoke-filled subterranean hell-hole and scramble to the surface, I head for the Central Line platform. (In that bloody-minded Londoner way.) By chance I see a friend on the platform an tell her about the fire. Then shortly afterwards there's a tannoy announcement calling for Inspector Sands. "How long have you lived in London and you don't know who Inspector Sands is? It's code to let station staff know of undisclosed security alerts - i.e. the fire." The announcement repeats twice more. "Three times. They'll evacuate." Seconds later the alarms go off and the station is evacuated. As we are hustled out through the open ticket barriers I tag out my Oyster Card.  Severe delays to the Northern Line for the rest of the day due to a London Fire Brigade investigation. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, January 15th, 2006
7:54 pm	Why can't I have the pretty things? I'm disgusted with myself and, by extension, the world. I switched to using Linux at home over ten years ago. At that time most of the programs I used lived inside the 80x25 terminal screens that I flipped between - there were few programs that world make me load up the graphical would have been for that new fangled "Netscape" thing. Graphics were usually viewed in their own SVGA-based program, no need for the overhead of X. Efficient, minimal, perfunctory. Workman-like. That is how Linux interfaces were and how they always would be. I upgraded my Gnome desktop this weekend. Apps that change state while minimised now alert you by pulsing in the window list by increasing and decreasing the opacity of their transparent backgrounds. Nice. Lovely. But sadly draws attention to Gnome's visual shortcomings. (In short - Gnome panels currently use pseudo-transparency rather than supporting the new Composite extension to X.) Wow. Being annoyed about relatively minor UI issues. Isn't that what emasculated Mac owners do, instead of worrying about freedom? I'll be spouting off about proper kerning next... Like I said - disgusted. (Comment on this)
Monday, January 9th, 2006
2:37 pm	Just big boned More than half of the 4000 men and women surveyed were overweight or obese. But 87% of obese people and 32% of overweight people failed to identify their correct weight category. [Cancer Research UK] It seems almost comical ("surely they've seen themselves in a mirror?"), and yet it's true. For much of 2004 (and probably ten years before that) I had no idea how much I weighed. I didn't own bathroom scales, I hadn't used one of those electronic scales they have in chemists. It doesn't help that I'm a member of the sacrifical generation who were exclusively taught the metric system. When someone talks in pounds and stone I have no idea in my head of what they represent. I'd always thought of myself as slightly overweight. Then, in late 2003, I bought an electric bathroom scale. I got it home, stood on it, stripped down to my underwear, stood on it again. Re-calibrated. Stood on it again. Damn thing appeared to be working, and presumably accurate. I put the result in kg and my height in cm into one of those online BMI calculators. The result: OBESE. Those articles and TV shows about the obesity epidemic - they weren't just talking about the people in the stock footage (gigantic Texans wandering around shopping mall food courts and the like), they were talking about me. The diet planning began that night... (Comment on this)
Friday, January 6th, 2006
1:28 am	So close $ uptime 22:28:59 up 342 days, 22:46, 2 users, load average: 0.49, 0.17, 0.08 $ Broadcast message from root (console) (Thu Jan 5 23:38:44 2006): The system is going down for system halt NOW! Noooo! Only 23 days away from a whole year of uptime. Curse you, failing RAID array! (Comment on this)