Nlogaxical – What am I doing here?

Rant time.

Disabled man in wheelchair wants to catch a train home.  Somehow, for some reason, the station staff refuse to put a ramp down to let him board.  Man films this, puts it on YouTube, then goes to media with the story.

Look at the DigitalSpy Forum thread where the chap relates his sorry tale.

Somehow, a small subset of the good people of DigitalSpy [are continuing to] fill a single forum thread with every single example of conjecture, pedantry, exaggeration, bollockery and counter-bollockery known to Internet Forum Man and Woman.  Arguments about the whys and wherefores of the situation dissipate and spin off into their own little eddies and vortices of angst and drama, and in the end the whole sorry affair looks like an Eton Mess of frustration and complication blended through a random number generator and thrown against a pebbledashed wall.   Read the thread from soup to nuts and the actual situation is barely decipherable.

After we’ve passed a point where the arguments traverse ‘Your last post was incorrectly spelled and your user profile smells of wee’, Godwin’s Law is the inevitable consequence.  Make your bets when the entire discussion becomes so heavy with bullshit it collapses in on itself.

There’s very little point to this post other than to test WordPress iPhone geotagging. Which isn’t to say I’m going to apologise and say ‘Fooled you!’, ’cause I’m just not.

Anyway, the rain’s clearing after another frustrating day at the professional wheel. At times I feel like changing career tack and selling ice cream. This would undoubtedly bring a lot more joy to a lot more people. And make them very fat indeed.

Testing the new WordPress 2 client for iPhone. So far so good, it’s not died on me yet! Photo integration seems ok as well. If this works I may celebrate somehow. Maybe another coffee?

I was one of the lucky 400 to have tickets for last night’s Goldacre – Drayson debate at the Royal Institution.  90 minutes of back and forth discussion about the state of British science journalism and how it’s both viewed by and acted upon by ‘end users’ of mass media, ie the rest of us.  While there was plenty of online conjecture via Twitter and blogs during the event (judging by the number of open laptops and lit phone displays around me), I think some of it had lost the point.  There should be no ‘winner and loser’ in the debate.   If the standard of science journalism drops to the point where none of us know which way is up or down, which items cause cancer or which are rumoured to enable eternal life – then we will all lose.

The debate dovetailed into a longer question, one which has bugged me for a long time – that being the state of all journalism today.   What defines ‘journalism’ anymore?  And if it can still be defined, against what standards can it judged? Yesterday there was an interesting moment where most of BBC News’ online headlines were effectively reports OF reports.  (confused?  try BBC ‘News’ )    For a while, the front page looked more like DigitalSpy than the front page of a world-leading news gathering organisation.   Rumour, conjecture, gossip.    So who can you believe anymore?

Web 2.0 is all borked.   Twitter..down.  Facebook…down.   I can’t get on one of the two to moan about the other one.   Who pulled the plug?  Eh?  Come on..admit it.

Bye bye Sun Microsystems.   Today its shareholders voted in favour of the company being acquired by Oracle.   It’s a sad day for Sun – one of the true Silicon Valley upstarts. Yet it is an evolutionary step in which has become a really close partnership between the two companies.   And it’s hopefully going to be an exciting time for those of us who are proud to work for a company that started out as a personal project of a Stanford graduate back in 1982 and sold Unix workstations.

My first job in IT was back in 1991, and the Sun 3/60 workstation was my first proper “PC”, even before I discovered (suffered?) Windows.  So I have a particular loyalty, even if it is a slightly geeky one.

20 MHz, no internal drives, 4MB, and -that- optical mouse which would only work with the reflective mat.   Happy times.

As for the future – who knows?  Well, probably someone does, but I’m totally in the dark.  That’s what happens when the sun sets.

UK mass media amuses me.  When confronted by the shocking revelation that some teenagers like stuff and dislike other stuff, it is seen as nothing less than an epiphany, a window inside a teenage skull to the sloshing, hormone-filled mind of a fifteen year old male.

Adrian MoleMatthew Robson, (aged 15 years and 7 months no less) reckons that Twitter isn’t popular with his peers, that PS3s are low down in the a typical teen’s list of preferred consoles, that newspapers aren’t popular unless they’re free, and that music is also a big factor in their lives.   I’m not entirely sure why the mass media picked up on this as some sort of Jerry Maguire moment of truth and clarity representing the ‘common teen’.  Some kids like PS3s and newspapers, some don’t, most like free stuff over stuff you pay for.  More to the point. only the tiniest fraction are interns at Morgan Stanley.   Hardly representative of a typical teenager  (..is there actually anyone who is representative?)

It’s not as if it’s been a slow news week in the land of all things digital.   So exactly why is this a story?

(yes, I’m tweeting this – do I fit the profile as a 35 year old teenager?)

Finally moved over to the new web host. Far quicker than the previous place and just as cheap – and PHP5 seems to work correctly here. Everything updates correctly and runs like it’s lightly greased with a block of Stork SB.

Managed to salvage the design, comments and all the old plugins too. Success!

The TV Cream Blog has been hiding from me for bloody ages but someone has finally nudged me in the right direction. Particularly enjoying “The Sounds of TV Cream” – an entry devoted to those non musical sounds that conjure up days of our collective youth.

The slow, soft ripping noise of a mis-positioned Panini sticker being peeled from the wafer-thin pages of the Mexico ‘86 album.

An ice-cream van playing ‘Greensleeves’ too fast a couple of streets over

The creak of Polystyrene wings being pushed through a Polystyrene fuselage as a replica world war 2 fighter glider is prepped for it’s maiden flight.

Mmmmmm fab.

Edit: The crunchy avalanche of a box of assorted Lego pieces being turned onto the carpet for a rainy Sunday. GOD yes!!

Images of life along the Mexican / US border fence.     All photos are by María Teresa Fernández and are exhibited at USC Annenberg, Los Angeles.

Amazing how the Feds took no chances and extended the fence out into the sea.    I wonder what spiked implements lay beneath the waves?