When “Charmin” first started hawking their bogroll in the UK they had an advertising campaign involving bears shitting in woods. I liked this frankness, and I liked the fact that there was no attempt to hide what you were supposed to do with their product. However, tonight they demonstrated how shite their current marketing scum are with a new ad:
Two sisters, arguing over bogroll. Their banter is clearly supposed to make us, the lumpen target audience, identify with them: “heh, me and my sister have arguments like that all the time! I think I’ll buy that bog roll”. They decide to perform a dubious set of experiments, involving blue liquid of course, to see who was right. Amazingly, the Charmin advocate won, purely on scientific grounds!
So, viral marketing gurus, listen up. Here is a way to make a lot of money. Remake the Chamin advert, but instead of the blue liquid, acually get them to wipe their arses and compare the results!
People will love the honesty 🙂 Charmin would surely pay for that sort of publicity.

The producers of Big Brother clearly miss “The Word”. While they haven’t had the bath in shite or eaten a bar of lard or bowl of toenail clippings, they have had to drink pureed fish guts, cod liver oil and salt water. I don’t care what you say…odious people puking makes great telly.

A perl script here (thoughtfully released under the GPL) lists loads of hex numbers that make words. Isn’t it a bit of overkill when you can just do:

grep -i '^[abcdeflo]*$' /usr/dict/words |tr '[lo]' '[10]'

Surely someone with some m4d obfuscation skillz can make it more 1337 ?

The last time Tony came down, he left me a book called “Where did it all go right ?”. It’s essentially the autobiography of a guy called Andrew Collins from birth to age 19. I would never have chosen to give this a try without Tony’s recommendation, looking as it does, like some diabolical 1970s nostalgiafest. In fact, it is a diabolical 1970s nostalgiafest but one of the most enjoyable, funny, and insightful books I’ve read for a while. I’ll lend it to you. At the end of it I felt like I knew him intimately – odd when you consider I’d never heard of him a couple of weeks ago.
Anyway – yesterday I heard him presenting “the day the music died” on Radio 2, and I got quite freaked by it. There was this presenter, whose voice I didn’t really feel I knew, but whose friends, family, school-friends, sexual partners, musical tastes, and favourite films were all familiar to me.
Unless he was lying of course.
It made me feel a bit like a stalker or, at the very least, a voyeur.
And you’re reading my blog. Perve 🙂

So I found a couple of interesting blogs yesterday that also give me that slightly unnerving feeling. Chocolate and Vodka is a blog by someone who, like me, doesn’t go out much, favouring prolific blogging, IRC and promoting the Welsh language (she’s not Welsh).
Oblomovka is Danny O’Brian’s blog, and spiffing it is too…if you like that sort of thing.

When we moved in here, I set up wireless and left it wide open to see if anyone would try and take advantage of it. To make it more interesting I stopped it doing SSID broadcasts so the only people who would find it would probably have to looking properly (ie using some sort of netstumbler software).
Last week, we noticed a few people sitting on the wooden bench at the top of our stairs, using laptops. Hmm. I checked the AP logs and sure enough, they were associated. So I set them a few tests. Changed the network name (easyhack@fatsquirrel.org). Took them two days, but they found it again. Next, MAC address ACL. Sadly they never managed to nobble that one. 14^^3RZ!
So, I opened it up again, tcpdumped all of their traffic over 24 hours for later grepping, and then WEPped it up. They’re still trying, bless them, but I don’t hold out much hope.

Someone very clever reverse-engineered the Google toolbar enough to work out how to generate the checksum needed to get a pagerank.
In a nutshell, drag
this link into your bookmarks or toolbar, and then whenever you want to know the pagerank of the page you’re viewing, just click the button.
The most surprising find for me was that of all of the various pointless sites I have up, the one with the most Google juice is…sandwich selector. Funny old world.
Yet another Friday night I don’t remember. Yet again a lacklustre plan to give up drinking for a while. Yet again woken at 2:30am by a couple of Italian students that erroneously believe that we operate a 24-hour “door opening service” for Surrey House. Michele was so infuriated (this is a frequent occurance),she went up to the front door, shouted at the poor bastards and then closed the door on them…
However, Michele has a plan. We will construct a tape of hold music, with occasional interjections such as:
“Welcome to the Door Opening Service. All of our door openers are busy at the moment but we will open the door as soon as someone is available.”
and
“Sorry for the delay, your door-opening request is important to us. Please continue to hold”
or
“Sorry, we are experiencing more door-opening requests than usual. Please continue to hold, or request the door is opened at a more reasonable time.”
Loop it, and play it down the phone the next time some pillock decides to rin random bell number at 2 in the morning.

The new Prodigy album is superb. Michael Jackson should be glad someone improved on Thriller (see “the way it is” for details of what the fuck I’m going on about). I’m going to go out and buy this 🙂

Thanks for the feedback on the brick problem. If you don’t want to know the answer, look-away now. 27! Simon was the only person to get it right. See, that psychology degree did come in handy didn’t it ? Maybe not…

Not been too bad at work over the last couple of days. Mainly because it has been quiet as a morgue, leaving us time to actually do some work. A rare thing. Sadly, my office-mate and colleague, Shirley, left work yesterday still not knowing if she will still have a job on monday. This is due to the incredible lameness of our Personnel department.
However, this week they demonstrated that they aren’t as shit as they first appear by offering her another 6 months….starting in September. This sounded like quite a good deal to me until Shirley pointed out that this was probably an attempt to create a “new term of employment”. Of course! They’re trying to do her out of redundancy. An explanation:
One of the only good things our “new Labour” government has done is improve part-time and temporary workers’ rights. Nowadays you can’t be discriminated against for being a contractor. In fact, if you have contracted for a while, you are entitled to redundancy if they terminate your contract! So here we find our Personnel department trying to pull a fast one. We still don’t know what the outcome of this situation is. However, what they don’t realise is Shirley is owed “fair treatment”, this includes adequate notice. If they decided she’s out of a job, she can take them to a tribunal 🙂
Other things…
This week’s “evil video game” is “Manhunt”. The news media, together with Dixons, have decided to promote this game by explaining how violent and nasty it is on every news programme. They even got some poor woman whose son was killed by some inner-city thugs to help them promote it by trying to ban it. The guy from the BBFC said that he wouldn’t have a problem with it being banned, but legally couldn’t do it. Aren’t we humans lucky that there are people such as he that are ordained by god to be able to watch disturbing violence and sex, without being turned into the psychopathic daemons that we, lesser morons, would become, should we ever be exposed to the same material.
The forthcoming Prodigy album “Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned” is really, really very good. But not as good as I had expected. The reviews I’ve seen for it put it down as the best British rock album of all time…but it just isn’t. It’s still better than “The Fat of the Land” (IMO), but I can’t help feeling Liam has jumped the shark to some degree. Sorry Liam, I still think you are one of the best musicians of the last century, but you never topped “The Dirtchamber Sessions”…I also agree with you about “Baby’s got a Temper”…I still believe that the more special guests someone has on their album/sitcom, the more they have to rely on famous names. This is probably unfair, if I was in that position I’d love to have personal heroes like Kool Keith and Princess Superstar on my records. Christ I can talk some shit when I want to.
Humph is lovely still.
Hmm, this Prodigy album is growing on me…I might have to eat my words…again. I might even buy it!

Workwise I should really be hating today. Scorpio (our main mail server) was down for most of the morning. It was our scheduled downtime and I decided to upgrade our mail server software (for the nerds benefit: it is cyrus). However, because we never normally get any downtime to perform such routine activities, we had to upgrade around 14 versions, including a major revision. Despite the need for multiple recompilations and a few scary problems during the initial upgrade, it was back up well before the end of our at-risk period. Consequently, scorpio decided to crash 20 minutes later, after cyrus had decided to corrupt a very significant database and the number of incoming connections caused it too much hassle.
Rebooting scorpio after a crash now takes over 2 bloody hours due to the massive size of our throbbing disk array (Phwoaaar and so forth).
It was fine by mid-day and everyone was really nice about it. Good job I didn’t actually have a heart attack this morning really.

As if the nervousness engendered by a major systems problem wasn’t enough, it turns out that I also managed to send about 15 minutes worth of unscanned mail into the college as a result of my desire to clear the mail backlog. In the grand scheme of things it’s not really significant (we frequently have periods where in-the-wild viruses pour in before the protection is available), but it still made me feel like an arse…

Here’s a very simple mathematical problem that seems to confuse even the most intelligent people…I don’t know why…but I do know it confused me when I first heard it:
“If a brick weighs nine pounds plus half a brick, how much does a brick and a half weigh ?”
Answers on an e-card please.
Loads of other stuff too, probly.

Another item of news I neglected to mention was that we have discovered one of our ancestors, William Wellard, was a jailer in Westgate Jail. He was mentioned in a book by E.P.Thompson. There was this bloke, the Jeffrey Archer of his day, who got nicked, much like his modern-day equivalent, but on release praised his jailer, William Wellard, and said that he would “commend him to all his friends.” Fame:)

Nice day. This evening we went over to my mum and dad’s place and bought them a kebab. Chris and I managed to get a swift pint in too, from “The Banker’s Draft”. Perfect.
Good night 🙂

Whoops – I forgot to mention the important stuff in the last blog. Tony Blair, in a fit of blatant fascistic self-righteousness decided to demonstrate what a complete toss-pot he is, by giving Peter “three-times-disgraced” Mandelson a great new job on the EU gravy-train! Hoorah for over privileged tosspots! They always win! Just look at at John Scarlett. Despite being heavily criticised by the Butler inquiry (because he was clearly bent) he now has a cushy job as head of MI6! Well done that man. Ignore the critics. The fact you are in a position of such power proves how right and incorruptable you must be.
Refreshingly, the Tories are still demonstrating how much more odious, corruptable and nasty they are than the new Labour bastards, ensuring they will never get elected.
I swore that Blair would be out within 6 months of the publication of the Hutton report. Looks like I’m going to be proved wrong…but maybe only by a couple of months. The Tories hate him, the party hates him…in fact everyone hates him. Rather than ingraciate himself with people in the UK, he continues to bang on about WMD and then go and give Pete Mandleson loads more pay…how more insulting can he be to the left in the UK ? Why hasn’t he been stabbed in the back by every self-respecting member of the cabinet…after all, he has stabbed them in the back on many occasions.

Thatcher still isn’t dead, but living in a senile hell. Maybe there is some justice in the world. Let them die old, insane and unhappy. Bye Tone – you won’t be missed.