I have always made a point in any interviews I give about Freecycle to never talk about landfill. The carefully crafted and commercially sponsored messages we get from Freecycle-Central in the USA are always about the evils of landfill and how the ultimate purpose of Freecycle is to keep things out of landfill sites; but I don’t agree with this. Not at all.

Freecycle for me isn’t about landfill or recycling it is about reuse and it is about helping people in the local community by making sure items are reused. To me, reuse schemes like Freecycle are actually about avoiding the evils of recycling, and in this sense I will do everything damned well possible to keep yet another thing out of one of those green, purple, blue, orange or polka-dot mauve bins. If you ever ask me my opinion (and oddly, people do); I will tell you that unless the item is made of aluminium or copper then just bin it. Send it to landfill, wave it on its way and thank any gods you may have that you saved the environment just a little bit more harm.

Recycling on a domestic level is pointless. Not only is it pointless, it is harmful and for some ridiculous reason, we are being forced to pay taxes to help this nonsense perpetuate. So why does it exist and why are Governments across Europe and North America starting to require more legislation to force us to recycle? The answer is sadly quite simple, there is a hell of a lot of money in Recycling and the people who are making all this money have damned good lobbyists.

Back when the world was somewhat more sensible we had three Rs. Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. Why have we forgotten all the rest and got so hung up on the last one? Well lessee…

Reduce:

Reduction is the simple answer to most things but asking a modern Western family to reduce the amount of stuff it consumes is somewhat akin to teaching pigs to sing. It won’t get you anywhere and it will only annoy them. In this modern age we tend to be rather into convenience and convenience isn’t very compatible with reduction. There is a tendency to shift the blame from us to the companies who sell us stuff and in order to shift this collective guilt people will start to blame the Supermarkets and the manufacturers for their obsession with packaging. Surely, it is the packaging that is to blame and not us! We’d be just as happy with our stuff wrapped in old newspaper or in a recycled cardboard box.

Nice idea but that’s just not true. Packaging isn’t cheap. Companies don’t go out of their way to spend too much money on the stuff when they could avoid it. Packaging is there for a reason, it stops items breaking and in the case of food, it stops food going off. Studies consistently show that the gains from packaging far outweigh the losses and over the last few years advances in designs have led to a lot less of it being used.

There’s a whole other argument about “Junk food” and processed food over home cooking. Fast food chains benefit from bulk packaging and the fact that they are only running a room full of cookers to generate a whole lot of cooked food does have its plusses. As for processed foods, well contrary to what we are endlessly told there is very little waste at all from the processed food industry. The food we as humans get lasts longer and stores better and the byproducts go towards animal foods. I don’t want to make this an argument about animal welfare, that’s a completely different issue (and I really do hate to defend the modern chicken processing industry in any way at all, really I do) but it is worth noting that in reduction terms, modern commercial processing of 1,000 chickens recycles just under a metric tonne of byproducts and only uses just under 8kg of packaging.

Does a modern family need to use all the stuff it has? Do those low income people on their council estates really need two cars? Well in most places in Britain that aren’t in one of the few cities the answer to the car issue is probably yes. Cars are not cheap, buying the thing, fuelling it, taxing, MOT-ing and insuring it cost a small fortune these days. There seems to be some middle-class Daily Mail reading view that the evil working classes have multiple cars through choice – Maybe if the money we spent on recycling schemes went onto public transport instead… But I am getting ahead of myself here.

Reuse:

Reuse is obvious a biggie for me – Personally, I don’t like waste. If I can find a use for an old plastic bottle then I will use it and carry on re-using it. I have some juice jars here that I have been using for milk now for over 2 years – They are wonderful, far better than anything I could buy at a supermarket and they were free. I love car-boot sales and yard sales, I love thrift stores. I am not at all ashamed of driving down the street screaming “Oooh! Other people’s crap!” as I stop at yet another yard sale.

I picked up on Freecycle very early on for this reason; it was a near perfect scheme in that one person’s junk is another person’s gold and more to the point, the whole thing is local so there are no major logistics in transportation involved. It also made sense. I have found myself with perfectly usable things that I didn’t want any more that I know somebody else would probably love but I didn’t have a means to tell them. Freecycle answered this beautifully. It keeps useful items from being pointlessly destroyed, it saves people money because they don’t have to buy something new and it helps people who can’t afford new things enormously.

Nobody forces anybody to use Freecycle; there is no government legislation in fact there is no government or commercial backing at all in the UK. It is, in fact, very hard to get anyone in government interested at all since they are obsessed with Recycling schemes.

Of course, not everybody is on Freecycle; very few people have ever heard of Freecycle but it doesn’t stop people reusing things. Some families still recycle clothes and pass larger items around but this doesn’t seem to happen as much these days which are where local schemes can be wonderfully useful when they exist. In the past it could well be argued that certainly in Britain, Charity Shops filled this niche. People would donate stuff they no longer wanted to one of the local shops and they would sell them cheaply to the local community and make a small profit at the same time. Unfortunately it seems to be the case with what a few exceptions (thank you Salvation Army, for example for letting me have at least ONE exception), charity shops have changed. These days the used goods they sell are generally more expensive than new items you get a Primark, TK-Maxx or Poundland and their book prices are becoming astronomical. Clothing that is deigned “unfit for sale” is sent off to be pulped and that tends to be anything without a designer-label that won’t sell for their increasingly large prices. Something has gone horribly wrong in the world of the Charity Shop so I guess now, we need to praise the fact that Freecycle and Car Boot Sales exist to feed local reuse needs.

Recycling:

And now… The biggie. Third on the list for a reason and that is because it is the least important by far and yet it is the one that is given extraordinary amounts of attention and obsession and huge amounts of state funding wherever you look.

Why? Simple. Recycling is easy!

When our Daily Mail readers pack the kids to school with the bottles of pop, their packaged snacks and the like, they are safe in the knowledge that this is ok because all the packaging will be recycled. It’s far easier to buy a bottle of pop than it is to mix some squash in a reusable bottle. Who has time for that? By the same notion, it is far easier to throw those items away into a recycling bin than to maybe think that they could be used again, or given to somebody else who may use them. After all, they’ll be recycled and made into a new ones just like the TV ads say! It’s not like it’s really going to waste is it. By recycling things, people are safely protected from having to think about reduction and reuse. They are doing their bit still.

Sadly, it is true that recycling is both easy and guilt free. It is positively encouraged and indeed, legislated for now. Houses have an increasing number of different bins that they sort their rubbish into and off it all goes, saved from landfill and everybody is happy.

Not only that – We can buy more and more recycled stuff too! Notepads made of recycled paper, recycled Christmas Cards, hell there is even recycled toilet paper. This stuff is all made out of pulped clothing and recycled paper so there was no waste, no damage to the rainforests and we can feel great.

It’s a shame it’s not true.

There is very little good in recycling on a domestic level. I don’t want to go into enormous amounts of facts and figures, search the Internet for something like the Eight Great Myths of Recycling (or just look at http://www.perc.org/articles/article179.php ) if you want them. The point is, we are not running out of sand and we are certainly not running out of paper. When sand shortages start to become an issue then yes, maybe we should worry about recycling bottles but until then, why bother? As for paper that’s a whole big hornet’s nest.

Recycling paper has a big negative effect on the environment. Think about that for a moment, it’s important. It is bad on so many levels – Let’s take a simplistic look.

• The amount of fuel being used to pick up used paper on a local level is enormous. Those trucks give out pollution you know. That’s CO2.

• Once the paper is at a depots, it needs to be sorted. This involves machines, which again give out pollution and use electricity. Oh yea… More CO2.

• The paper is dirty, and needs cleaning. Sure you may not mind your recycled papers being a bit brown but the old dyes still need to be washed out and most large users still want white paper so there is going to be an industrial sized bleaching operation going on here. Waste… More waste, and more and more CO2 being pumped into the environment.

You know what helps CO2? Trees. And you know what paper is made out of? Trees. Not slow growing, unreplenishable rainforest trees, the cost of getting those trees would be enormous and those are far more often used in furniture (which can be reused remember, paper generally can’t!). The trees used for making paper come from large areas of concentrated fast growing sustainable forest. Forest that helps enormously with the whole global warming deal that people are so concerned about. The process of turning these trees into paper is large-scale but localised, and whilst it does obvious use some resources to harvest and process, it is a small tiny fraction of the ones used in the recycling process. The more we recycle paper, the more CO2 we are putting into the environment that isn’t being replenished and the more trees are not being planted in sustainable forests. You know what that means? Recycling paper is polluting the earth with its by-products, killing us slowly with its CO2 emissions and it is actually reducing the amount of forest we have on the planet.

So what about glass? Again the resources used in localised transport of glass from houses, sorting it, crushing is and reusing it far far outweigh the resources in making new glass from sand. Sand isn’t something we are running out of in a hurry; really, it’s not.

Plastics are a contentious issue in this. There is no argument that making new plastic uses oil and there is a positive effect to recycling some plastics; the problem again is in the selection and sorting process which tends to still use more resources overall than not recycling. I remember a scheme a few years ago that was looking into basically melting down every sort of plastic and re-processing it to re-produce oil. This would almost certainly be a good thing but we haven’t got there yet and the folks who understand the economics of this claim that burying all the plastics we have in landfill for now, and mining it later would be far more efficient than the picky and mostly wasteful recycling we do now.

In doing a little bit of research for this post I did read quite a few opinions on everything and a lot of the anti-recycling articles I have seen state things like: “Recycling things like paper, aluminium cans, etc. are among the most harmful ways to pollute the environment and use fossil fuels.” – This is a shame because the person who wrote this is talking nonsense. Actually, aluminium cans are one of the few things that are very much viable to recycle, along with copper and other large metal items in general. It is easy to take the negative effect of paper and bottles and stretch this to everything and if you do bother to read “Eight Great Myths”, for example, you should pick up the fact that the big evil is the small scale house to house recycling and not much larger selective schemes which can sometimes, be positive. Scrap metals, tyres and fast-food company cooking oils are all good examples of positive recycling.

Landfill is often cited as the main great evils of our green age. Freecycle almost has this whole thing about keeping things out of landfill as a mantra. Companies make a LOT of money out of recycling and there are a hell of a lot of commercial pressures to keep up these myths. There isn’t a lot of money in landfill so it tends to lose the PR battle. But is landfill really so evil?

Actually no. Not at all – And this is one of the reason I refuse to go on about keeping things out of landfill. Modern landfills have moved on in technology; if you don’t believe me look some up! They tend to be huge centralised places that are landscaped over when they are finished; they don’t cause pollution, they are well managed and the more modern ones are re-using the methane produced by organic waste to generate electricity. Landfill sites are certainly not the great open fly infested visions of hell that recycling evangelists would have us believe – Quite the opposite in fact. A lot of them are also being designed now with the prospects of future recycling being taken into consideration. One day we may come up with a much more efficient use of plastics and when we do, we know exactly where they are in the landfill sites and we can easily get at them in bulk. When you stop and think about it, that’s actually pretty cool.

Ultimately there are people on both sides of this debate and it’s one I try not to get too involved with. I am forced (legally!) to recycle things and it grates at me every time I have to put used paper into a recycling bin. I hate it, but it’s happening anyway. I can’t stop people doing this, I can only hope that at some point governments will stop listening to the companies who make billions from recycling schemes that are both pointless and damaging and will come up with some other schemes. Meanwhile, I will carry on pushing for local reuse schemes like Freecycle and its offshoots and supporting yard sales and car boot sales. I will also carry on supporting the Salvation Army shops who have so far refused to forget their purpose as cheap local-community charity shops and companies like Frenchys in Atlantic Canada who keep millions of tonnes of clothing from otherwise being pulped to make recycled bloody paper!

So should you.

Now the Internet Gnomes are mostly teenagers who have very little concept of what Doctor Who used to be so I can forgive them for expecting low standards. They’ll acknowledge that there was a show before the 2005 pantomime remake but they probably haven’t actually watched any episoses. I mean hell it’s been going nearly 50 years now, that’s a lot to watch and fuck man! Some of them are in Black and White; didn’t people know how to encode AVIs properly in those days? Having said that, even the most die-hard fans of the new drivel will have trouble justifying a reason to look forward to the Christmas episode except maybe in the vague hope that the Doctor will finally die. We have hope yet! Remember Lynda Day? That’s all I have to say!

It’s not even that I don’t like Matt Smith as The Doctor; I do. I would go as far as saying that he’s pretty similar to Tom Baker in many ways and I’d class that as a compliment. With some good writing, he’d be great. For one single moment in Big Bang I had hope. He said something like “Do you really think the life of one girl is more important than the future of everything?” – Hell no! That’s the Doctor we know and love! Welcome back Hartnell and Troughton. Halleluiah! Finally us humans are back to being nothing much better than shaved apes. Unfortunately, it seems he was only joking; a brief moment of teasing taunting fantasy for those of us who remember a proper Doctor. Obviously the life of one human girl is more important than the whole of … Well whatever the fuck was going on.

It’s a terrible ending to a terrible show. Russell T. “If you can’t write it Camp, it’s not worth writing” Davies started it by dragging in his old mate David Tennant. Now Tennant isn’t a bad actor as such but he’s no Doctor Who. The whole thing is akin to getting Daniel “Harry Potter” Radcliffe to play James Bond. Talking of Harry Potter, what’s with all the new gadgets? Time travelling wristbands, notepads that show magical identity badges, every flavour jelly-beans, telephones that cross time and space and a Sonic Screwdriver that doubles as a magic wand when it is waved and the spell “deus ex machina” is muttered. One of the major plot-devices about Doctor Who was that a lot was unexplained but the pantomime version seems obsessive about explaining everything. There was an amusing part in the Matt Smith series when one of the ever-present C-List British TV celebrities they roll in said “Oh you are that Doctor”. Yep, he is indeed just that Doctor.

Back in the olden days of Doctor Who the format was pretty solid. Each story was 4 or 5 parts, with a cliff-hanger between the middle episodes and with the exception of John Pertwee’s exile years, they were very rarely set on Earth. It’s tempting to use this entry to have a dig at Americans and say that the new one hour neatly wrapped shows are made for export to the US where attention spans are shorter but this doesn’t really fly. American television is getting a lot more sophisticated than this these days and it seems to be the British who are falling well behind by adopting this somewhat tedious format. As for the writing – Well yea, all I can say is that even the old Tannith Lee episodes were better than any since Tennant became The Doctor. There were a few good Eccleston episodes but then we had false hopes once, for a short time.

Another thing I am curious about is why, when there is the whole of time and space to zip around in; does The Doctor insist on coming back to Earth. More specifically, Britain – In fact more specifically again, London or Wales in the early 21^st Century. It’s not like the BBC is short of money for this series; each episode must cost more to make than than one of the older whole seasons. The whole thing seems kind of akin to Star Trek or Blakes 7 spending their entire time travelling back in time to 20^th Century Earth.  And what’s with his obsession with Human assistants? I don’t want weedy and somewhat useless British girls, I want half naked primitive girls, in skimpy leather loincloths who carry big knives and gut the baddies when nobody is watching. I’d say I want metal dogs with guns in their nose too; but I don’t. I can live without that. The show has two spinoffs; Torchwood and The Sarah Jane Adventures – Let them deal with Earth in the 20^th Century since that’s where they are set. It’s boring… Ok! I want Robots of Death, I want Yetis in space, I want Daleks on Sarko, I want The Doctor shagging green aliens. On second thoughts no; I have seen Casanova, I am not sure I want to see any more Russell T Davis sex-scenes.

I WANT SPACEMEN – IN SPACE AND IN THE FUTURE – DAMMIT!

(Oh, and I want Lynda Day back please.)

Firstly I must say that if I am being completely truthful I was only actually fired once, and this is about that time. The other two times I left it was a mutually agreed situation – In the first one, I told my managers that I flat out refused to lie for them any more and in a company who’s whole culture is based on lying to customers that is a bad thing – In the second case, I left because accounting every half  hour I worked to a customer cost-centre (when it often made no sense at all) was just ludicrous. In both cases, as soon as I left my contract was immediately picked up by another part of BT  with promises various changes so I actually ended up with an unbroken lump of employment for them.

So let us go back to a time just before the last Millennium. I had just returned from a few months secondment building a new Internet Service Provider for BT’s new mobile company (Genie, now O2) and I had in my hand a glowing letter from the Chairman of Cellnet saying how wonderful me and my team were for delivering the impossible in such a short timescale. We did good on that job, even though I didn’t want to do it. Back at the office I was finally at the point of being part of the sign-off process for any solutions that BT sold to customers. In theory, before any solution was sold I got to security evaluate it first and could refuse to sign it off and send it back for design corrections if it failed. I was also working with internal security and in theory should have been happy, but I wasn’t. In the past I had been able to do what I wanted, to be proactive and to look for problems that needed solving; now I wasn’t allowed to breath without it being charged to a customer. Any autonomy I once had was gone and I was fixing things on my own time and not being paid for them which was getting somewhat ridiculous. I told my managers I was not renewing my contract when it came up and I thought that was that.

A week before I was due to leave I got a call from BT Operations begging me to come and work for them. They piled on the sweeteners; a nice big pay rise, all my billing to a single cost centre, just two months and no more and I could move back to my favourite office. I agreed to this, I decided not to go ahead with another job I had decided to move to and I made sure the paperwork was all sorted out.

The following Monday, I turned up at my new job and had a tea. The office was basically a football-pitch sized machine room that took up a whole floor of a building with just me and 2 operators in it. There were a few offices in there from the days that this was the major PSS centre for the UK but they had basically been abandoned Marie-Celeste like in the 80′s. I had worked here before when I worked on Genie and had made a little cubby-hole in a long since abandoned conference room, the two ops had also moved in there.

At mid-day the ops both got a call and vanished. I never saw them again. Nobody had told me what they wanted me to do so I just sat around drinking tea and watched machines humming. At 3pm I got a call from my new boss saying he was coming around at 4pm for a meeting. At about this point I attempted to login to the Ops system and it wouldn’t let me so I got a little suspicious and phoned some people. Nobody was saying much but somebody said they had heard that word from the board said they were about to fire me, but nobody knew why. I couldn’t find out any more so I sat and waited. My boss arrived at 4, and curtly told me I had been fired and he had to escort me out of the building. I asked why, he said he didn’t know, he’d just been told to do it. He asked for my security card which I didn’t have on me that day and that was that – I was at the front gate and very confused.

The next day I expected to hear more. I didn’t – At least, I didn’t hear anything from my bosses but I did hear a lot from other parts of BT. I received mails asking me to review secure networks, I had calls from customers asking me how to mend things, I had calls from various people within BT wanting advice. I made excuses when I had to and just waited to hear something official.

A week went by. I heard nothing. No letter, not even an email. Nothing to tell me formally I had been sacked and nothing to tell me why. I contacted S-Com, my agency who were cagey (rightly so since they owed me a month’s salary in notice period). I am assuming they knew nothing and were keeping quiet hoping I wouldn’t notice that I was out of a job. I decided to contact a few people in BT, had a few shady meetings in pubs but the upshot was that nobody knew a thing. Nobody had been told I had been sacked, most people were astonished and assumed I was still working there – I still had my fixed network connection into BT and I could still access all of their systems except for one I had been deleted from and my mail addresses still worked.

I decided to arrange a meeting with BT Internal Security, I was curious to know if they knew anything so I popped to Milton Keynes for dinner and we had a chat. They’d not heard a thing and even when they dug around they could find nothing. As far as they were concerned I was still working for BT. I asked them if I could see how much access I still had without them arresting me and they said sure as long as I wasn’t silly or naughty.

Over the next month I tested various networks. I could access all of the customers I ever worked on which included governments, law enforcement, most of the major banks, various ISPs and a whole load of internal things. I tested my card and my ability to just walk into a building – Nobody ever challenged me, I had a nice cup of tea in the room that housed the central Bank Clearing System and the national salary payment systems (CHAPS) and yes, I could still login to them. I could also wander into Telehouse and the like at any time I wanted. I was still getting many calls from customers and internal BT people and in the end I just pointed them at somebody else and didn’t explain why.

At this point, I was thoroughly pissed off. BT owed me nearly £10,000 and my agency S-Com (who had sent me a crate of champagne just 2 months earlier) claimed they knew nothing about it. I sent them a copy of the purchase order and the reference numbers but they just refused to reply after that. Nobody seemed to have a clue why I was fired they just know I was. There were various rumours but none of them really seemed right. I’d just been fired from on-high.

So we have one exceptionally disgruntled ex-security manager, who was owed money, who was being constantly ignored and treated like shit by BT and who still had access to every customer, internal system and building of importance. I had to change my phone number after six months, people were still calling me about things. It took them two years to disconnect my lines into BT and to this day there may still be personal  machines of mine housed on the internal networks that I can access. As far as I know, my card was never disabled and as far as I know, nobody in BT and certainly no customers were ever told I had stopped working there. My email address eventually stopped working in about 2004 when they changed systems.

To my credit, I never did anything to them – But that’s not really the point, I could have caused untold amounts of hugely embarrassing damage. I am not sure if relying on the continuing ethics of somebody you treat like utter shit is really a good policy but apparently in this instance it worked for them.

It’s at times like this I remember the old mantra:

“WE ARE THE TELEPHONE COMPANY. WE DON’T GIVE A FUCK”.

So – The site has moved. You shouldn’t notice much in the way of change except for the colour and the theme (it seems they stopped developing the old theme I used about 6 years ago damn them) but one day you may want to update your RSS thingumies.

Oh – I added better navigation buttons and those “publish to other site” things as well. Both of those are things that someone or other has asked for in the past. Nobody asked for the little icons you get when you comment but I don’t care, they are cute.

Anyway, all that aside, I had been convinced that the Marmite you can buy in Canada, although it is made by the same company and in the same packaging is watered down. It’s the wrong colour for a start. Canadian Marmite looks like diarrhoea and doesn’t have the translucent inner glow of British Marmite. I thought I was going mad, why would there be a difference? Tonight, I came across some old packages of British Marmite I had nicked from a hotel in Norwich in 2003 so I finally had a comparison.

Firstly… Hotel packets of British Marmite:

(Yes, I know the sell-by date is 2005, we will ignore that. It’s not like Marmite changes over time).

Now Canadian Marmite:

(You can tell it’s Canadian, it has English and French labels, so no cheating here).

Now some anaemic toast:

(Yeach, do people really eat toast this colour?)

And now, the Marmite on a knife:

I may as well have stopped here really – It’s obvious that they are completely different. In the interests of Science, however…

The Marmite on toast:

I have no idea WHY Canadian Marmite is so completely different. It costs pretty much the same in Canada as it does in Britain. It doesn’t taste bad, it’s just a little weaker and you have to spread a lot more; plus there is that whole bodily fluid thing going on with it. People who may claim that the 2003 Marmite is blacker because it is old, well you will just have to trust me. I could have used the British Champagne Marmite which is just as black but that wouldn’t have been like-for-like.

There is no conclusion to this. I just figured that rather than waste a posting ranting about Google I may as well expose this curious Marmite Conspiracy.

So let’s pretend for a moment that Google isn’t a great encompassing blob of an alien life form and it is in fact different organisations some of which I can be nice about and let’s ponder Picasa.

I have been using Picasa from the start – I don’t know why, it’s not very popular to use Picasa, especially for somebody who doesn’t like Google. I should probably be using Flickr or Deviantart like all the cool kids do but I like Picasa desktop and I like the way it talks to Picasa Web Albums and I like the way Picasa Web Albums are nice and easy to use. But there is more.

Firstly, my Picasa crashed a few weeks ago. I was not happy, I use my Picasa a lot on my laptop for trying to keep tabs on what photos I have on here that I haven’t moved to the Desktop and the huge photo archive I have. Every time I loaded it, it crashed and told me to send a crash report – As long as I didn’t hit “OK” it would carry on working so that was good but I submitted a crash report anyway.  I wasn’t expecting anything, I submit Microsoft crash reports on a weekly basis and have never had any feedback at all but apparently the Picasa team actually read theirs. and a nice chap called Fernando Corrado asked me to test a new version which promptly crashed too. Eventually after 2 days of trying new versions and tweaking things the Picasa people discovered I had a screwed up installation of Quicktime that was causing some previews to die and created a fix. My Picasa now works properly again and it is nice to see such a quick response for what is really, free software.

Anyway, armed with a working Picasa and being generally impressed so far with the new face recognition, I decided to let Picasa run riot over my desktop.  I started it about 48 hours ago now and it claims to be 14% of the way through recognising faces (which is odd because 4 hours ago I restarted it and it claimed to be 21% of the way through).

It is sloooowly indexing 3 terabytes of disk on a 3.5ghz Pentium and has found just under 5,100 folders full of photos. It has found over 1,500 photos of me now ranging over 25 years, some of which have me wearing glasses, funny hats and in one, a Pippi Longstocking wig and a diamond fairy tiara (Hey I get bored in Wal*Mart sometimes). Every time I look at it, it has dug up more and more obscure photos of people with terrifying accuracy and it is still going strong. It also seems quite good at sharing the facial information (via my Gmail account I assume) between my laptop and the Desktop. I am deliberately avoiding asking what Google will do with the huge amount of data I am giving it but I am pretty sure now Google could track me pretty well with its hidden spy cameras since it even recognised me in my tinfoil helmet. Damn.

(Why wouldn’t Picasa let me link that from my Picasa album? Weird)

I can’t find much wrong with it – There are some pretty useless filters in it (why would I want to find all purple photos, or all orange photos?) and some seemingly useful filters missing. One really useful thing would be for it to be able to detect naked photos  (ok, let’s call it a porn filter). There are very few good tools for detecting porn by flesh percentage and *ah hem* “body features” on Windows – Hyperdyne’s Snitch and Media Detective are the only two I can think of and they cost more than I paid for my copy of Vista. It is a feature many people need and want so go on Google, add it please?I suspect all the tools are in there, although please… It will freak me out if you start being able to identify people without faces, that is going a little too far ok?

And now for the downside. Don’t worry Picasa, this isn’t about you, I have nothing but praise for you today and this weblog entry would have stopped here if I hadn’t needed to register a Gizmo5 account for Jess today.

I merrily browsed to http://gizmo5.com only to be redirected to http://www.google.com/gizmo5/ and told:

Gizmo5 Has Been Acquired by Google
New user signup has been suspended and will return when we re-launch.
To receive information about the re-launch please enter your email address.

This is not useful… I needed a Gizmo5 account today and now Google own it I assume that the useful “Forward to Skype” feature will end up broken since Skype are in the business of selling Skypein numbers and won’t want Google Voice numbers supplying this for free. I assume it will also create a mess because Google Voice is only available in the US and Gizmo was available everywhere. Plus of course, it’s a pain since I wanted an account today dammit! Grrrrr.

On the plus side, this means I didn’t have to write a Weblog entry that was full of praise for The Evil Empire.  Got to take some good out of everything I guess.

(I also wonder why WordPress wouldn’t allow me to have that last line in a paragraph by itself… This thing has a mind of its own I swear)

“It’s Important to be Regular…
Now posting once a week whether I have something to say or not.”

This got me thinking that I haven’t written anything in here for nearly a year and it may be a good idea for me to write something here occasionally, even if I do have nothing much to say.

I think one of the problems is that when I decide I want to write something I deliberately leave it a week or so to see if I still feel the urge to write about it then. If I remember then I will write about it but more likely, I’ll make a note somewhere that I should write about it in the future and then never bother. Blogging seems to be pretty impulse driven and if you force yourself not to write in a reactionary way then the impulse vanishes and the Interwebs ends up with a whole lot less shit.

On the other hand, as the Crabby Old Fart says; it is important to be regular whether it needs it or not – So I shall try.

Amen.

It’s quite simple really… North American toilets just aren’t made as a comfortable place to read. They are too low and it seems offputting and potentially perilous to be quite so physically close to all that water in the bowl.

In England people have traditionally retreated to the bog to sit and read and get away from the other people in the house. It’s sometimes the only privacy they ever get. People started to read on the toilet because we tended to use ripped up newspapers to wipe our frozen botties in outside loos. It gave us something to do whilst we were trying to shiver out a poo in the wind and rain and even though now our toilets tend to be inside and somebody invented Andrex¹ the reading habit has carried on and no English toilet² would be complete without a pile of toilet books. The upshot of this is that North Americans have never been exposed to books like “The Book of Heroic Failures” (volumes 1, 2 and 3), “The World’s top 20 Serial Killers”, “Not a Lot of People Know That” (by the esteemed Mr Caine) nor in fact, any Gyles Brandreth books at all.

You know… This is probably why Americans don’t have pub quizzes too. It’s all starting to make sense now.

¹: Does anyone else still object to the slogan “240 sheets per roll”? It’s not true, at best you can get about 30. If you are a vegetarian, your mileage may vary.

²: Note, toilet, not bathroom, the toilet has the throne position here not the bath – And come to think of it, most American bathrooms don’t even have a bath, especially the ones in cafes – What sort of a rip off is that? Grrr!

³: Did you spot that I moved from they to we mid-posting? I can’t be bothered to correct it since it amused me.

Ok Man, see you later.