The Information Superhighwayman

I am not writing very much at the moment but as an additional aid to my procrastination I have decided to write a few weblog entries. In the public interest I should mention that they will mostly be nothing but self-indulgent, procrastination-fuelled intellectual-masturbation and I will warn you when I have passed this brief phase and return to my normal sardonic ranting. If it helps, I will flag them all with the tag “Masturbation” so you can safely ignore them.

Apropos nothing; today I smell of Cherry and Almond and as I was putting this gloop of a shampoo on my hair earlier I started to wonder what had happened to The Body Shop’s dewberry range. Back in the early 90′s, White Musk and Dewberry were the Body Shop’s two original smells and the country stank of them. I am fairly certain that this was the thing that introduced our obsession with smelling like berries but the original source seems to have vanished from our memory altogether.  Bring back dewberry! Just not quite as much as before.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/sep/12/genderissues is quite a sweet article on Body Shop dewberries.

Don’t read this! It’s a note to me not to you.

I just wanted somewhere to remind me about things I was going to write in the future. So here it is.

• Yet another Global Warming grumble.
• Judges and their concept of computer evidence.
• Whether I should start a security weblog.
• Michael on Containers.
• An update on TV after my last posting on it.
• The curious incident of the Mouse that died horribly
• The top 10 ways I have nearly killed or maimed myself.
• How to win the Widget game.
• The top 10 reasons to leave this dump of a country.

That’s about it for now, but I will probably edit it. If you did ignore me and actually read this, then you do realise I will probably never write any of this don’t you?

No don’t worry, I haven’t gone completely mad. The title was meant to be somewhat sarcastic.

Somebody commented that I didn’t update my weblog very much so I thought I would respond. I don’t update my weblog very much because I don’t really have anything of much interest to babble about that seems to fit into a weblog. I don’t want to go all Stephen Fry and write undoubtedly interesting articles (he calls them blessays I think) which are simply too long to read and I don’t want to write 10 posts a day describing every bowel and bladder movement I have like a lot of other bloggers seem to. After all, I use IRC for that.

Mostly I write something when I feel I have something to say that may interest my regular audience of 3 or 4 readers or the few random people that the search-engines pull in after a few weeks. I don’t write it immediately – I wait a few days and if I haven’t forgotten about it then there is a possibility that it may actually be worth a few minutes writing it down and maybe worth a minute for somebody to read. This isn’t to say that every post will be interesting but hey, I try.

To try and add some value and interest to this post, I think I will add some things that wouldn’t really have warranted a post of their own…

Firstly – I was wrong, and the controller of Radio 2 was right. When he announced that Chris Evans would be taking over the afternoon drive-time slot I was one of those grouchy folks who said that they’d never listen to it again. The controller chap told us to give him a chance and we may be surprised but nooo, I didn’t believe him. In the end, I forgot it was Evans presenting the show and accidentally listened to it and, amazingly, I carried on doing so. I am never going to become a Chris Evans fan but I have to say I don’t hate him and he really does do a very good show.

Oh yea, and since I am babbling – I am reading all these things about Microsoft and Vista’s “Kill Switch” for unlicenced copies with amusement. Every one of my copies of Vista is licenced and legal and this is a novelty to me. It’s almost become a slightly perverse hobby watching people complain at Microsoft getting more and more evil while I sit in my little cloud of smug, legal self-satisfaction at it not being my problem at all. It’s rather nice not having to keep up to date on all the little cracks and workarounds to stop Microsoft breaking my computer any more than they already have.

Right! That’s it… Shoo now, get back to whatever you were doing, don’t let me get in your way.

Please feel free to ignore this post. It is nothing but a test to see if Giolla’s machine is happy with me once more having a Weblog. Of course, if it isn’t you will never see this post anyway.

As some of you may know, I have been having a bit of a problem with Mark Wahlberg lately. He has managed to get into my house and he is scuttling around and hiding out in the bathroom. Normally, I wouldn’t really mind but I am not sure why he is here, and it’s a little disconcerting seeing him scuttle off, just on the edge of vision every time you get close to finding him. I can feel those little beady Wahlberg eyes staring at me as I sit on the loo reading, and even as I sit here, typing this entry.

I have made up a sign, so that he knows that I am onto him, but it doesn’t seem to have worked. He’s still here.

There is nothing on the Internets about ridding your house of Mark Wahlberg so I am having to somewhat play this by ear. I am not sure what his natural predators are but I know that Bill Hicks is one. Unfortunately he is dead but then I realised I could just disguise somebody else as Bill Hicks and that may well scare him off. Whilst I am at it, I may as well bring in some more troops, so I got together Mark Harmon, Chuck Norris and MacGyver to command an army. Of course, I have to find them an army, but I have something in mind… I shall make them an army of Jungle Animals and Monkeys!

I present to you… My General Staff.

And, their army:

Tonight they will seek out Mark Whalberg and remove him from my house. I am afraid I cannot post any more details, I have been sworn to secrecy. This is, after all… War!

So…

I have just had a message from the High Council of Master Bloggers and Online Mass Debating and I have been stripped of my title pending requalification. I was still in my probationary period and missing a day without prior notification broke the terms of this.

The High Council are not without heart, however, and have sent me a short exam. If I complete this and pass, I will recover my title and all that it entails.

I shall repeat the questions here, whilst I ponder on which one to do:

1) You must find a fully qualified Master Blogger to act as a mentor and have them send you an approved personality test. These comprise a series of questions such as “What is your favourite colour?”, “How well do you think you know me?” or “If I asked you, would you suck my toes even though I had athlete’s foot?” Firstly, these questions will require short and honest answers from you and secondly you must send your completed test to all of your friends and colleagues and get them to fill in the test and return it. The results of this personality survey must be posted in your Blog for all to see and comment on.

2) You must express an opinion on online security and freedom of speech as it effects you, the Master Blogger. You will be expected to talk at length about your right to complete privacy as you share your life with the world and how encryption on your IMs will protect you from the authorities. You will be expected to show the technical know how in how to do this, and explain the methods to other people. Finally, you should write a short political endpiece on how 1984 is upon us and how the governments of the world are more and more interested on spying on their own people and how your rights to free speech are being eroded more and more every day. The essay should end on a positive note about how you, as a Master Blogger are armed with the Internet Toolset to “Stick it to the Man” and a pledge to do so.

3) For this question you are required to search the journals of a number of other Master Bloggers and to pick out a number of pertinent online tests which you will then answer and place in your journal. Although this question may sound like an easy option, you will be judged mostly on the relevance of the tests to the style of your Blog. For example: If your Blog is an Emo Gothic affair concerned mostly with how terrible your life is then there is very little place for a test that shows that if you were a fruit you would be a Banana. On the other hand, a Blog concerned mostly with the latest in Slash Fiction may very well benefit from the addition of a “What Lord of the Rings Character are you?” test. To obtain full credits in this question you should also comment on the journals where you found the tests, discussing your score there as well as in your own Blog.

I have three weeks in which to complete one of these questions so I shall give it some thought. For obvious reasons I am rather drawn towards number 2.

I apologise for not making an entry on Sunday. I realise that this is simply not cricket but I was washing my hair. I am a cad, I am a bounder, I should be stripped of my Master Blogger credentials. What more can I say?

It seems that I have taken back my pole position on the Slippery Slope of Culinary Decline. At this rate I’ll be back to spending weeks at a time living on instant mashed potato and pizza from bins. On the plus side, I won’t have to work out how to format my food weblog.

I was hungry and I haven’t slept properly for ages, ok? I did cook the toast and butter it myself if that helps. It wasn’t my fault that there was an open tin on the side with some dregs of pink salmon in it and it really didn’t taste bad with mayonnaise and paprika.

Come to think of it, everything was just fine until I saw 2 cats staring up at me wondering why I was eating their supper. Bastards.

It is 7.30am and I have just realised that I didn’t post that I was going to bed a few hours ago at just after 4am. Now I am a Master Blogger I realise that it is vital that I record such events with accuracy so I am feeling pretty crappy about all of this. As it happened, I just went to bed and read Sue Townsend’s “Ghost Children” but admitting that makes me realise that now I will have to write a review of it; quote endlessley from it and all that sort of thing.

All I can say is that it is jolly hard work being a blogger, I am amazed that us Master Bloggers have time for anything else at all!

It is now 7.37 and I am going to have scrambled eggs for breakfast.

I am learning about “blogging” so that I can become a blog expert; after all, that’s why I started this isn’t it? Well ok, it’s not but that’s beside the point.

See, I had a problem, when I went to bed last night, was I meant to report this in my blog so that my 2 avid readers would know I had gone? Was I meant to report my getting up in the morning too? I could have used my mobile phone to report that I had finished reading my book in bed, and was about to go to sleep although that would have annoyed the cat since I would have had to move to find the phone.

It seems that a lot of people now have voice blogs. These sound fun, exciting and useful if I am going to be duty bound to report every time I visit the toilet, I can just phone from the loo and leave the entry then and there instead of reporting it later. Always being one to adopt new technology face on I looked up these voice logs and found this fascinating article. It seems that voice blogging is bad because you have to listen to everything and that is boring – Text bloggers are more interesting and don’t ramble as much so that is ok. I get a little bit confused in this article that they seem to be using the phrase “Voice Blogging” to mean talking. They report going round to some old person’s house who then “voice blogged” at them for ages, over tea and they didn’t like that; apparently they would have preferred him to write it all down so that they could read it in their own time and skip all the boring bits that they weren’t interested in. See! Aren’t blogs amazing, they save all that pointless listening. I am amazed I didn’t take them up so much earlier.

Never fear though people. I am learning! And don’t worry, I won’t be taking up voice blogging, I wouldn’t want to waste your time. I shall write about my ablutions in long hand, like all the rest of the cool bloggers do.