But I have just spent at least a couple of hours reading the full judgement of the McCartney / Mills divorce case. It has moved me enough to write on a blog/writing thing/mess that I haven’t updated for over a year.

The thing that surprises me so much is just how underhanded and frankly horrible Heather Mills is. There are plenty of reports on the proceedings, portraying her as the villian, but it’s a sensational story and you shouldn’t really believe any of them. After all, stories are designed to get readers, so they’re going to play it up.

But, the thing is, when you read the judges thingy which I linked to above it’s quite surprising. She’s far far worse than the way she’s described in the media. She is not just a villain, she’s a pantomime villian. From exaggerating every claim in every possible way to actively attempting to steal half a million pounds, it’s the sort of thing you’d expect to see in some overly dramatic law show. In fact, reading through the judgement, you not only get a feel for the deep dislike the judge has for her, but this image of the proceedings as an episode of “The Practice”, with her, the villian, finally being revealed at the end, just before the closing credits, maybe even with a shout of “And I would have gotten away with it too if it wasn’t for you meddling kids!”. But that would just be far too dramatic and ridiculous.

I’m amazed that someone can be this self centred, so sure that they deserve anything they want and should give nothing in return. But I’m also glad to see that at least sometimes people like this get caught out. It’s more amazing still that people will both forgive and believe her. Sir McCartney has protected himself well by remaining quiet, but how many people will believe this to be an admission of guilt?

I don’t think someone who is that needy of the spotlight, so convinced of their worth and how much more important they are than everyone else can ever be changed. I doubt they would even consider that they should change and maybe not actively screw people so thoroughly in their quest to get what they deserve.

She is so transparent because we are so far away. Her eagerness to scorn and insult someone who genuinely cared the moment she could wring no more from him is easy to spot from a nice comfortable distance. It’s so easy to dismiss her taking credit for things that had nothing to do with her because we are not involved. But in our lives, we rarely get to be that detached. These people get under our guards, and reap as much as they can before we even realise. They exaggerate and lie and change the story as much as they can to make themselves appear righteous and we believe them. Then they move on to the next victim and do it again. Over and over again.

I guess what I’m saying is that it’s so easy to say that McCartney was utterly stupid to be tricked by her, but if you can honestly say that you haven’t been tricked in a similar way and you think you’re above it, then my sympathies are with you, because at some point, you will be tricked too. It may even be already happening. Just try to only let it happen once, and don’t be so harsh to judge those who are tricked.

One of the biggest problems to academia, progress, whatever you wish to call it at the moment is not a lack of information about things, but rather too much of it and no decent way of finding what you need. This is a relatively recently recognised problem and is fast being tackled, or at least valiantly attempting to be tackled. Google make their entire living doing just this, but like everything in life sadly, computers are not going to magically fix everything.  It is becoming very clear to even mainstream media that Google is not winning this fight.
The problem is simply that too many people want to have their say and not enough of them actually know what they’re on about.  This is the main failing behind Wikipedia, (and the fact that people are willing to trust information from this source is frankly frightening), but it extends to the web in general.  When you have no way of controlling what gets submitted and who by, there are just too many loudmouthed people who are too sure of their often insane opinions that the crud rises to the top whilst valuable and useful information sinks into the murky depths of the ever growing pile of crap that the internet has become.

So how do we solve this problem? Well, we can’t.  It is impossible for everyone to have their five minutes and for all views to be covered equally and sensibly.  People are selfish creatures and always push their agendas, the loudest mouths always win and the world steps backwards.  People purely want their words to be seen and heard, regardless of their correctness or even their possible interest to others. Blogs (which, lets face it, exist solely to boost egos and are of little benefit to anyone who isn’t the author), wikipedia, comments on news articles and forums seem only to consist of people all re-iterating their points with little or no regard to others in the hope that if their blab is repeated enough, it will drown out all other blab.  Forums in particular, even those that have a good community, slowly fill with more and more people who just have to have their say, or who can’t be bothered looking for a simple answer and ask repeated questions or start the same discussions over and over again.
To be honest, the only way forward is to filter and weight opinions based on the people that say them, but this in turn is also unsolvable.  Who has the more important opinion, someone with academic credentials, or someone with deep experience in the field.  It is possible the academic is merely a learned fool and equally possible that the experience gained by a field worker is repetitve and limits innovation.   In other words, there is no way of creating a metric of any accuracy whatsoever to rate the value of someones opinion.  And until this problem is translated or reduced to a problem that is solvable or even a hacky solution that almost works, the world will consist of far too much useless information.

Anyway, Ensign Teelas incredibly ability is that he lives in Japan. Don’t worry if you didn’t catch that because he will tell you about it again and again and again on possibly the most unpleasant forum on the entire internet. He also cannot write a sentence without it consisting of 5000 words and doesn’t have any sense of humour at all, which means that every update he does on UK:Resistance drags the high quality of writing down. I thought I might help him out and maybe convince him to carve his eyes out with some sort of Japanese thing with a sharp edge by doing a full critique of his newest amazingly shit article on called Goddammit, Japan . Which is partially reprinted here with no permission whatsoever. So here it goes.

Given how inescapable Final Fantasy is, its publicity machine has always been relatively low-key. You can’t see merchandise of Cloud and Zidane and The One That Looks Like Jamie Oliver on the shelves like you can with games such as Pokemon and Dragon Quest. Then, one day, you wake up and Ebay looks like this.

This is the first paragraph. UK:R is meant to be quick to read and funny and to the point. Perhaps phrases like “publicity machine” “relatively low-key” and the massively long winded way of saying everything that stains your shitty articles should be avoided FOR THE SAKE OF JAPAN. The first semi-joke comes in at around 23 words of pure pointless blather. And it’s not even that funny. Who the fuck wakes up to ebay? do you have some sort of computer alarm that wakes you up by bringing up the searchpage, turning the contrast up and playing a sample of the word “JAPAN” over and over again? It doesn’t need to be introduced like that you could in fact replace that whole shitstirring sentence with two words: “Until now.”

I think it’s safe to say at this point that you’ve lost 80% of your audience because it’s just a poorly written introduction, it isn’t that funny and there is something that I can’t quite identify that makes it strongly elitist. Anyway, here’s what happened after you fucked up the entire article within one paragraph:

It’s Final Fantasy in a bottle, courtesy of Square and Suntory! This is exactly the kind of stuff we would have spent WHOLE TENNERS on when we were teenagers, despite not having enough money to even heat the flat. Now we can’t escape the certain knowledge that Hironobu Sakaguchi has wanked into EVERY SINGLE BOTTLE.

Admittedly this isn’t too bad, it’s not quite so verbose, but it could have had a proper joke, the first thing that springs to mind is how many teenagers have their own flat? The last sentence is doing a typical Ensign Teela and expecting you to follow his peculiar train of thought. Did this mysterious Japanese Person (who I presume had something to do with Final Fantasy but I honestly can’t be fucked finding out) wank into the bottle because the fans demand it, or because all his work is wank or what? Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I’m sure it’s clear enough to someone who really has played Final Fantasy for months on end, but to the rest of us (ie, those who aren’t 15 year old girls), why should we have to work for entertainment? Particularly when it’s not very good entertainment. Spell it out and make some more of what could have been a fairly funny joke.

It really is Final Fantasy in a bottle, too! Here’s how your brain reacts when you drink it.

1) Initial repulsion and horror.

2) The palate begins to

..blah blah blah, wank wank wank, boring pointless self important text..

only this one has a packet of Jawbreakers dissolved in it. And spunk.

Right idea, but once again, the former writer for NTSC-UK one of the most pretentious sites in the entire universe shows his true style and spoils any smile that might have risen to your face over a drink being terrible just like the game by talking about fuck knows what and not stopping until you’ve lost anyone who still was reading up to this point. Nice spunk reference at the end though, shame about that.

The ingredients are listed as parsley, sage, thyme, royal jelly and something in Japanese that we can’t understand because we don’t know the kanjis for “Company Chairman” and “Tadpoles.” Horrible as it is, it’s nowhere near as bad as the “Collectors Edition” set which comes in these poncey perfume bottles.

What could have again been a good joke is totally spoiled by delivery. “The ingredients are listed as”, sounds boring and dull, much like the rest of the articles. But the worst attrocity comes just after, instead of going the “we have no idea because it’s in foreign” path, like the actual owner of the site, you needlessly show off that you can speak Japanese and unintentionally speak down to your audience. Finally you included these two pictures in your homage to yourself, namely these:

It’s absolutely GAGGING for a dildo reference, then you could link that to the wank jokes you’ve made before and even refer to some of the more bizarre Japanese sexual practises that everyone knows about.

The thing that annoys me most about this article is that it has no reason to be about Japan. This sort of merchandising has been happening here in the boring old Western civilisation for decades. Unecessary references to Japan are what you life for, I understand that, but try and at least keep them to your annoying attention seeking posts on the forum.

There are so many problems with your spamming updates, the lack of spellchecking, the poor wording, the failed attempts at humour and just the self importance of everything you write destroy anything you set out to achieve. UK:Resistance is one of the funniest sites out there at there and you’re very priviliged to even be allowed to write for it, so take the time and get it right. But secretly, I’m hoping that the next Employee update will have you being blown up in classic Star Trek fashion because time has shown that you have no ability to accept criticism or even listen to anyone who disagrees with you, so I doubt this will ever improve.

Why are you still reading? There’s a link to go and investigate!!

It’s a bit crooked, but you get the idea. When I next get the mood I’ll try and use those bastard paths in photoshop to make it a bit cleaner, damn my shaky hands.

Now that’s done, lets get on with what’s been happening. Rather a lot has been happening, so it may take a while. Perhaps you should skip to one of the older updates, although they’re probably not that much better. There are some good links on the side there though, failing that, you could check your mail, or even turn the computer off (if you’re not on one of those communal/libary/lab computers that have all sorts of signs saying not to turn them off that is), and do…err…whatever it is people do when they aren’t using computers. I’m not really that sure. I wonder if it involves yoyos?

Right, news. Well, recently I had to visit my university to sort out how I’m accepting honours and all and I met a PhD student. Now, as people who know me (certainly the only ones likely to be reading at this point) may know, I’m reasonably comfortable with my abilities in computing. I have only really recently returned to programming and such in a modern sense and so I’ve been having to learn rather a lot of stuff, but all in all, I’ve yet to come across something that is really worryingly difficult.

Of course, when you meet a PhD student who’s actually done professional projects and hasn’t taken time off to do a double degree in subjects that they never really liked in the first place and now hate with abundance, you feel a bit uncomfortable. Inadequate even. But I knew more about DVD ripping and video compression. And the Commodore 64. So there, no insecurities here. Really. None.

And this is one of those shitful events that for some bizarre reason has a magnificently positive effect, because, ever since then, I’ve been programming almost daily on my character editor/mapper/other stuff for the C64 in Java. You remember that don’t you readers? It was the one that sort of got a bit stuck for a while and had promise but never really got anywhere. Well it works now, it’s almost complete and the moment it can be either an applet or application and can load and save, I will call it release..err…0.00something (just in case someone mistakenly thinks that this is all I can do). Anyway, here it is in it’s minimal but functional stages. More on this later.

I’ve also been reading through the backlog of entries on Eloqui’s always pretty site and I really would like to make this place look a little better, a logo of some sort is on the way, and I’ve taken the big step of changing the tagline to something else, I might even fix up the categories.

In what way have you copied an ending sentence from The Triforce today imagined readers?

See? But even this picture seems to lack the impact that being within 500 metres of this glutonious glob of fat has. The fact is I strongly belief that her ass is so incredibly massive that has a considerable gravitational effect on a light object such as a tennis ball, because there must be some reason why she actually wins matches.

In every match I’ve seen her play, she makes countless errors, hits the ball strongly and confidently way outside the line and generally acts extremely aggressively. Her acclaimed power is indeed there, but the ability to choose where it goes is not - she just hits hard, nothing more. For every shot you see of her hitting a ball close to the line she will have made at least five that missed by miles, yet everyone defends this lardarse. She is praised unconditionally by commentators, regularly stating that they don’t understand why she is making so many mistakes and that she doesn’t usually play like this. Just for reference, if you’re a tennis commentator, the word ‘usually’ means something that occurs regularly, and this is something that happens regularly.

Really the only thing that she and her slightly less rear-dominant sister have proved is exactly how terrible the state of womens tennis is.

Right, for a while now, officially about 5 weeks I have been a fulling functioning and contributing member of society. I have pulled my weight and earnt my right to bitch about students and so on. I have been officially employed, doing perhaps the most useless job in the history of paid occupation. I re-order stuff on the shelves of a supermarket to make it look neat.

Now, I know the first thing I’d do upon reading that would be to go to my supermarket and mess everything up as soon as possible. I’m having a hard time not doing it right now, although I’m helped by the fact that nothing is open at this time of night. So I’m not surprised that you’ve already noted down in your cunning but sadly tiny mind that you should do this at some point. The sad fact is that even if you flukely manage to guess the correct supermarket and the right section, (since there’s about 11 people doing this job) it won’t matter. It takes only a few seconds to clear things up and even less time for the next imbecile to unwittingly mess everything up.

My job is so utterly pointless that it takes me five hours to return all the things that have been left everywhere to their rightful spot and neaten up all the shelves so items are in the right place and neatly arranged, and about five minutes for the new batch of shoppers to destroy it all the next day. I’m still not entirely sure why this job is even around, but that’s not the most startling thing.

The most startling thing is that most of the managers (and even a few of the workers) seem happy with where they are. I’m sure as a kid when they were asked what they wanted to do with their life they didn’t respond, “I’d like to manage a small section of a supermarket for the rest of my life”. How can they live with such a low expectations? I imagine their life goes a bit like this: Wake up, cry for a bit, go to work, go to a pub, get very very drunk, cry for a bit more, go to sleep and fantasise about not being so fucking boring. I don’t understand how someone can live this way.

Still, I have learnt a few ways to annoy people who work in stores, so here they are for you to abuse at leisure:

• If there is a huge stand of watches, take one and set an alarm for any time you feel people would enjoy it, and then replace it deep within the pile.
• Be sure to place as many items in a precarious position as possible so they fall down on the next person unfortunate enough to stand there, (particularly enjoyable around rowdy children in a china department).
• When taking things off the shelf and returning them, if a worker asks you to just leave them because they’ll put them back, be sure to tell them that you know best and stick said item in the most obscure place possible.
• If you are old, find a drone who is obviously busy and/or stressed and don’t let them go. Ask them every single price and expiry date of every single chocolate on display. Multiple times. They will love you for it.
• Crowd around the most central aisle possible with a large group of friends, making sure that no-one, shopper or staff, can get past you. Pretend not to understand requests when people ask you to move or look at them like they’re some sort of wierdo. What right do they have to ask you to interrupt your conversation so they can get past?

There really isn’t any good way to end this, so stop reading now.

First off, what do I want in a logo? Well I’m glad you took the time to ask that and didn’t force me to pretend that you did. I’m looking for the following features:

• A non-standard font and very obviously so, something that clearly has each letter designed carefully,
• Should be more symbol like at a glance, but easily readable when examined.
• A sharpish, edge like look, each letter should be pointy (both in 2D and the possible 3D render)
• Should be very curvy with points wherever possible

Armed with these ideas, I did what any professional design person does. I made a few sketches. Unfortunately, I’m not a professional designer and my hands are rather shaky, so my sketches were pretty horrible, but the ideas did start flowing. So my devoted readers, if you ever feel like making a logo, try sketching, even if you can’t draw a straight line, at least it will get the ideas going.

This was my first attempt. It’s horrible, I didn’t even bother with the rest of the letters, the style is okay, but the curves are all wrong and it just looks boring. But it’s a start, and all things start somewhere, except a circle. Or a square. Or any joined curve. Or plane.

A slight improvement on the T, but went quickly downhill as it went. Rather like this entry. This was the point when I just decided to concentrate on the “The”, it being 1/3 of the logo (or technically 3/13).

“Perhaps the curves look shit?”, I said to myself in a comic sort of voice. “Maybe I should try something different”, says the genius inventor. So I tried to keep everything pointy but remove the curves. Tim Burton would like it, but I don’t. Oh well, maybe next time.

So, back to the curvy bits, and overlapping letters and it’s starting to take shape now. I rather like the start of this, but things need to be fixed here and there. The overlapping is going to stuff up any chance of a straight silhouette, and the T is a bit wrong here and there. Still it’s a start. The thing is, a good (or crap writer, depending on the opinion), always leaves the audience hanging for more.

First off, I’ve been working on bits of things involving PHP and it’s new Object system. First impressions were extremely negative, since there are still some consistency issues, and the weak typing thing takes a bit of getting used to. However, now that I’ve done a bit in it, I can see that it could get quite useful. It’s a bit worrying that an interpreted language is taking a step that will clearly devastate any efficiency, but it seems that this is less and less of an issue nowadays. It’s also very sad to see that the ingenuity required to program things on a lower level is no longer required, there’s practically nothing that can’t be solved by either the basics of the language, a large amount of memory or processing time or a pre-written function. I can see why this might be a good thing, but it takes all the fun out of it.

In news of the same interest, (ie. none), I’ve been very busy not getting anywhere with Java documentation. It’s amazing just how difficult it is to get a serious description of the various things available at the GUI, or indeed anything that isn’t the newest thing. In particular, I’m trying to use only the AWT (Abstract Window Toolkit), which is not very nice, but has the significant advantage of not being entirely shit, unlike Swing. Despite all these serious setbacks though, my Commodore 64 editor/mapper/thingo bits and pieces are coming along nicely and I’ve provided the newest update on another server, because WordPress makes uploading applets far more difficult than I can be bothered figuring out. If only someone somewhere would write a system for webdesign which wasn’t plagued all these problems. Oh well.

Anyway, go here, be impressed, leave comments, but not about watches, gay marriage and stocks please. Thanks internet!