Freelancin’
August 4th, 2008 at 17:29

For the next couple of weeks I’m going to be doing some freelancing at Tech Digest, writing about gadgets and tech and stuff like that. If you’re craving some fresh new James O’Malley material, here’s some links to things that I’ve written so far:

• New iPod rumours
• Panasonic make a big telly
• “Google Street View is okay”, says man
• China censor stuff
• Bike gears or something
• Radiohead are popular
• NASA covering up aliens
• A PC… in a car?!
• Some black boxes that are apparently home theatres
• Yet another new Eee PC

So check out TD, they’re really cool, and that’s just not because they might give me some money soon. They’re genuinely excellent - they’re letting me write like I normally do, but on their popular website!

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Matisse’s Snail
August 3rd, 2008 at 17:52

I received a rather belated birthday present from my friends JD and Fundar (they’re nicknames, obviously), the other day. It was pretty impressive, as it was the punchline to a running gag started some eighteen months ago when we went to the Tate Modern.

They passed me a cardboard tube, and with some trepidation, I slowly opened it and unravelled what was inside. It was… it was… a print of The Snail by Henri Matisse.

This filled me with so many emotions. I was delighted that they’d bought me a present, but on the other hand, The Snail is shit. Look at it:

This isn’t art. It isn’t even a snail.

What really winds me up about it is the back-story - perhaps it’s excusable and almost is art if it has an interesting back-story, or is covered in all sorts of meaning and depth. But from the Tate’s own website, here’s an explanation of it:

At first sight it appears to be an abstract arrangement of vibrant coloured, geometric blocks on a white background. The blocks of colour are arranged in a loose spiral suggesting the shape of a snail’s shell. Instead of being painted directly onto canvas, the blocks of colour are made from pieces of paper that have been painted in a water based paint called gouache. The brightly painted paper has been torn and cut into uneven shapes and stuck onto a white paper background. The whole composition has then been stuck onto canvas.

In other words, Matisse has matched the artistic abilities of a child with learning difficulties.

Although at first sight The Snail looks entirely abstract, Matisse’s art was always based on observation of the world around him.

It’s a good job we had photography in the first half of the 20th century, as it means that nobody had to commission a painting to illustrate great historical events for prosperity. If Matisse was told to come up with a picture of the 1943 Tehran conference, historians might all think that Franklin D Roosevelt had a red square for a face, and Stalin had a crescent moon where his body should be.

Maybe I just can’t appreciate great art, as after all, my favourite work of art is Paul Delaroche’s The Execution of Lady Jane Gray.

Why do I like it? What could be better than waking up every morning to see a ginger woman being beheaded?

Thanks for the present, guys.

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Nerdy blog update!
April 21st, 2008 at 16:05

Warning, if you think an IP address is a postcode in Ipswich, then this might bore you to tears.

I’ve got an incredibly important essay to hand in on Friday - and an even more important dissertation to hand in the week afterwards. So what have I been doing so far today? Quite possibly the most efficient procrastinating ever. Rather than concentrate on things that actually matter, I’ve been busy improving the Twitter feed on the left hand sidebar of the blog.

Now, aside from merely having the text of my latest Tweets, I’ve enhanced it - if I broadcast a live video to Qik, using my mobile phone, that will alert my Twitter - and now rather than just link to it, it’ll display the video in a flash video box so you can watch it on this very same page (there was no end of hassle involving having to parse a second Qik-specific RSS feed and regex out the variables and all sorts). I’ve done something similar with photos, that I can also send in to Twitpic with my mobile phone - if I send in a photo, it’ll now be shown in thumbnail form on the sidebar, with its caption if it has one. I’ve also added a text “glossary” that reads my tweets and if it spots any keywords (like “Adam Hart Davis“), it automatically magically changes it into a relevant link.

I’m pretty damn pleased with it all though - I thought that when I signed up to do an arts degree, I was resigning myself to a lifetime of technological ignorance, not even being able to grasp the simplest of gadgets, but happily, as it turns out, I’m still shit-hot at coding. Well, sort of.

What’s the point in all of this? Well, if you’re asking that question that you don’t understand what web 2.0 is all about - its about doing cool things because you can, not because they serve any practical benefit to the rest of humanity. Really - prior to the invention of Facebook, did you ever have a desire to play Scrabble online?

I’m going to London on Wednesday, so if you stay tuned to my blog, you’ll be able to follow my thrilling adventure in real time! Quite why you’d want to is, er, another question.

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Dawkster Who
April 6th, 2008 at 18:38

Assuming I’m not the victim of an obscure (and late) April Fools joke, apparently Richard Dawkins is going to guest star in Doctor Who. All Russell T Davies needs to get now is Adam Hart Davis and the Misery of Others to cameo and all four of my favourite things will be united at last.

Apparently Davies, who is pictured in the article dressed as a middle-aged Neo at the weekend, is a big fan. Which makes me wonder just how Dawkins will be incorporated into the show.

Hopefully it’ll be in his guise as a gangster rapper.

I think it’d be pretty good if Dawkins would become the new companion - its not as if the Doctor has too many after all. He could provide a level-headed rationalist counter to the Doctor and the villains they encounter.

He’d be great fun - he could sneer at any credulous villains who speak of what they believe, and demolish their arguments academically.

I guess the only downside it would prevent the Doctor from so wrecklessly ignoring the laws of physics and using his sonic-screwdriver to get out of every situation, because Dawkins would tell him that there’s no way it could work, and there’s no evidence to suggest it could.

I can’t wait.

Rejected Post Titles:

• The Ood Delusion
• The Blind Clockwork-Monster-People Maker
• Unweaving the Face-of-Boe
• The Extended Carrionite

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Twitter on T-Mobile UK
April 4th, 2008 at 15:53

I knew this graphic would come in useful. I’ve discovered yet more problems with T-Mobile. So as you might have noticed by my swish, new, popular sidebar on the left, I’ve got quite into Twittering. The thing that makes it excellent is that you can update your Twitter via text-message, by texting what looks like a UK Number - it starts +44 and isn’t a premium rate short-code or anything like that.

But paranoid that I am, I thought I’d just ring up T-Mobile customer services and double check that I’m not being charged a billion pounds a text. I read out the Twitter number to the man on the phone, who informed me that “+44″ is the code for “A country called U.K”. It turns out that I’m being charged 17p a time for a text… outside of my contract.

Apparently the number is in Guernsey, which despite looking just like a normal number, makes it totally different.

So I’m posting this more as a public service announcement, and in the hope that if I slag off T-Mobile on the internet they might try and win me back by giving me free stuff.

T-Mobile users, for fucks sake, don’t text Twitter!

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Christmas Treason
December 10th, 2007 at 17:40

Inexplicably, my family have put the Christmas decorations up really early this year. They thought they’d got it all done, with much of the living room caked in tinsel, and the tree put into place. Me though, being the most predictable person alive, decided to add a finishing touch to the tree:

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Holy Statistics, Batman! When regular blogging topics collide!
December 8th, 2007 at 16:59

I noticed something peculiar earlier - Facebook network pages have lots of statistics about the people in the network - percentage male and female, a breakdown of political leanings, that sort of the thing, but there is one obvious statistical breakdown they’ve missed though, which strikes me as odd considering they collect the data in a regimented, easily counted way: religion.

I find it slightly perplexing that at a glance I can discover that 8% of my university colleagues define themselves as liberal, and 3% of them are married, but not find out which strand of bullshit most of them believe. I’m actually tempted to play the “political correctness gone mad” card.

So given that I love facebook, pie charts and slagging off religion, I took it upon myself to generate the statistics myself. As I am a man of science, I don’t want to create the impression that this pie-chart is at all accurate, fair, or representative. There’s the usual caveats of this is only made up of the 1126 people who are less feckless than the 5359 other people at my university who have neglected to enter a religion in the religion box on their profile.

This basically means that the people (women) who have it listed that they’re “spiritual” because they occasionally buy scented candles don’t count. Likewise entries like “none” and misspellings haven’t been counted because I’m not willing to count this manually. The benefit of this though is that the people who do count have clearly at least thought about their religious position enough to fill it in with something coherent, so they can probably explain their beliefs (but probably not justify them in the case of the theists… zing).

As you’d expect, the big religions - Christianity, Islam and Hinduism have the largest market share of the theists, with 38%, 14%, and 18% respectively. Excellently though, it appears that there are lots of Atheists and Agnostics (and Pastafarians) - about 29% of people are going to be predisposed towards acting rationally in all situations. This probably isn’t surprising unless like me, you spend your free time on YouTube getting annoyed at creationist videos, though.

What I find slightly surprising is that considering there’s five Jews, which is a sort of proper religion, there’s 5 “Wiccan” people. Or to give them their proper name “attention seekers who used to be goths when they were teenagers”. Similarly, there’s four “pagan” people, which is slightly bewildering, as they can’t even use the theist, cough, “reasoning”, cough, that loads of people believe what they believe, “so it must be true”.

So there you have it - a breakdown of the religions at my university, as derived from some unreliable statistics.

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Picking on people who share names with bastards
November 19th, 2007 at 16:56

I’ve invented a new game. Its called “How many people on Facebook share a name with someone I don’t like?”. I’ve been trying to think of a snappier title, but the best I can come up with has to be read in a Scottish accent: “Guess who many?“.

It turns out that there’s loads of unfortunate people in the world. Here’s a top-13 list of some unlucky people cursed with sharing a name with some truly dreadful people:

1. Nick Griffin - 274
2. David Cameron - 252
3. James Blunt - 171
4. David Mellor - 47
5. Jeffrey Archer - 37
6. Maxine Carr - 12
7. Richard Blackwood - 12
8. Richard Littlejohn - 8
9. Ian Huntley - 5
10. Vernon Kay - 3
11. Lowri Turner - 2
12. Madeleine McCann - 1
13. Adolf Hitler - 0

There are 171 James Blunts in the world. I especially feel sorry for the ugly ones, who have the joke set up for them by their namesake. At least no one named their kids Adolf Hitler, I guess.

I feel sorry for the Madeleine McCann on there - every day she must glance at the Daily Express front page on the way to work, only to learn that she’s either alive, dead, or whether or not her parents killed her, depending on the editorial slant the paper are taking that day. And every time her location is questioned, it must sound like some sort of sick joke, rather than a genuine enquiry. I hope she’s not planning any trips to Portugal otherwise we could be in for a year of the press saying “Maddy has been found” and then speculation on how she’s managed to age by 20 years.

And the poor other Richard Littlejohns - if they Google for their own name, as people (er, I) sometimes do, they might inadvertently think that I hate them.

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Weekend in Review #1
November 19th, 2007 at 00:04

I’ve had an idea for a new regular feature. I say “regularl - I can’t guarantee that at this stage. This could fall flat quicker than the Trumpet Blog. The idea is that I’ll review things I’ve been doing, like a critic would, and you can read it and value my opinion when judging whether or not to participate in an activity similar in nature to what I’ve been doing.

Robin Hood

About a year ago, I wrote a rather unkind review of the BBC’s attempt at doing Robin Hood, and then a few weeks ago admitted to giving it another chance. Inexplicably, the series has continued to grow on me, and its got to a point where I’m recognising and even appreciating the series-long sub-plot. It’s surprisingly watchable. I think this is because this series they seem to have ditched any attempt at historical accuracy, and have basically turned it into a middle-ages version of the Flintstones. In one episode, the Sheriff of Nottingham sets up a Vegas-style casino - and I’m pretty sure they didn’t have those in the olden days.

In a nutshell: “A weapon-carrying criminal who constantly evades the law is the perfect mascot for Nottingham”. 8/10

Top Gear

I watched Top Gear earlier. And it was a bit shit. They’ve gone back to talking about cars, rather than going on road-trips and having totally unscripted and unplanned banter. One thing that bothered me more this week than it has before was Jeremy Clarkson was more noticeably twatty than usual. I mean, obviously he’s always been a twat, but his tired old attacks on environmentalists have got boring when not done in a clever way, and he seems to get more xenophobic as time goes on. By the time he retires and the genes that make old people racist kick in, he’ll presumably be the most racist person in the country. Richard Hammond and James May are nearly as bad, but they still retain their position as the “slightly likeable ones” because Clarkson keeps being even more of a twat.

In a nutshell: “Objectively speaking, cars are still boring”. 4/10

Training Pokémon

I’ve spent a sizeable proportion of this weekend playing Pokémon again. I really want to beat the Elite 4, and thus complete the game, as I’m so horrendously close it’d be silly not to. To this end, I’ve been levelling up a Snover in Victory Road using an Experience Share. Its nicely relaxing, as you can train whilst watching telly (see above), and is slightly more productive than playing Solitaire.

In a nutshell: “That’s right, I play Pokémon”. 8/10

Finally writing something on the blog

You might have noticed, but blogging has been a bit slow as of late. I’ve had a massive bout of writer’s block. Sure, I’ve done the odd thing, but I’ve literally been devoid of inspiration, which has been irritating. I think I’d have written more with both arms broken and a recent bereavement than with writer’s block.

Thankfully though, I appear to be slowly overcoming this. Look! This is the third thing I’ve written today!

In a nutshell: “More obscure CD reviews and blogs about gigs you didn’t go to coming soon!” 9/10

Super Mario Galaxy

On Friday, the new Wii Mario game came out, and so far, it has been bloody marvellous. The hopeless Princess has been kidnapped again (it is Mario), so you’ve got to faff about in an implausible universe collecting stars that will somehow get her back.

The most amazing thing about the game though is the level design. It is spectacular. I thought some of the Zelda dungeons were pretty complex, but Mario takes this to a whole new, er, level. Most of the levels take place over several tiny “planets”, which are entirely spherical and you can walk entirely around - once you solve the planet’s “puzzle”, you’ll be able to get to the next one, and so on. It is amazing though - you’ll traverse one area, only to end up with the gravity flipping and you’ll find yourself having to cross the same area but in an entirely new way. Spectacular.

In a nutshell: “Lets-a-go… and buy it”. 9/10

Focus 800w Halogen Heater

Bloody hell, its been freezing lately. Its why I got a new heater for my room. Its pretty excellent. I mean, I’m not heating expert, and don’t spend my time on heater message boards or anything, but it seems to do the job. It puts out so much heat that it makes the air go wobbly directly in front of it, and will grill your legs. Take that, shit weather!

In a nutshell: “Bit warm in here, eh?”. 10/10

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Fairground Idea
August 11th, 2007 at 23:14

I’ve had an incredible idea for a new travelling funfair. The business plan is impeccable, because business is at the very heart of my idea.

Basically, each attraction would be priced individually, and the prices would vary according to market conditions. If not many people are using it the price will go down, and if its popular the price will go up: supply and demand, basically.

What would I call my fair? The Laissez-Fair, of course.

For example, rather than the queue for the dodgems being massive and no one wanting a go on the rigged coconut shy, the dodgems would be priced highly and the coconut shy would be dirt cheap… but would still turn a profit because the coconuts would be glued down.

There would be no queues because the visitors would be manipulated by changing prices, ensuring an equal spread of people throughout the fair.

Thinking this through, I could theme the entire fair around macro-economics. Those bungie capsule things could have the two towers at painted up like graph axis and it could be a homage to elasticity of demand? The ferris wheel? The economic cycle. Roller coaster? From the side it’d look like a graph of boom and bust. I’m still trying to think of a way to link the log-flume to trickle down economics.

There could be a terrifying new ride like those machines that hoist you up and then let you fall to the ground at speed. It could be called “Black Wednesday”.

I can’t see how this can possibly fail, as it would be self regulating. Crowds would be consistent throughout the week rather than it being packed on Friday and Saturday nights, as people would deliberately time their visits for when it is cheaper, so they’d never be any off-peak periods when its too expensive to keep the place open. Competitors wouldn’t have a chance, because if they tried to muscle in on the economics-themed-fairground market, they’d be pushed out using my rapid reaction market forces, as my prices would fall when demand is diluted by rivals. And in terms of social benefits, it will school people in basic economics - which is a valuable public service.

Look out for me on Dragons Den.

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