Top Books
July 2nd, 2007 at 17:49

Warning: If you thought James O’Malley wasn’t an elitist twat, and want to retain this delusion, you might want to skip this one. May I recommend watching this video (again?) instead?

I’ve been having a look around Facebook again. One of the best features is that it splits users into different university networks, so you can see other people at your university and so on. What makes this interesting is that it makes it possible to generate statistics about the most popular TV shows/activities/etc at each university based on what people have put into their profiles. What makes this interesting is that I’ve figured out that it is possible to compare these statistics with those from other universities.

So I’ve decided to compare the Top 10 books from my university, a former polytechnic, with those from the university where I’m going to apply to do an MA next year, a “proper university” in London (whether I’ll get in there is a question for another blog entry). See if you can guess which list goes with which university.

List #1

1. 1984
2. Lord Of The Rings
3. Pride And Prejudice
4. Memoirs Of A Geisha
5. Wuthering Heights
6. Lolita
7. Harry Potter
8. To Kill A Mockingbird
9. The Picture Of Dorian Gray
10. Rebecca

There’s loads of “classics” listed there. Pride and Prejudice, Wuthering Heights and so on- the sort of thing I wouldn’t read but would like to create the impression that I would tolerate, as it’s a high culture thing. It has 1984 at number one. People at this university must be excellent.

List #2

1. Harry Potter
2. Da Vinci Code
3. Angels And Demons
4. The Bible
5. Lord Of The Rings
6. 1984
7. Pride And Prejudice
8. Dan Brown Books
9. Cosmopolitan

A children’s book, three trashy Dan Brown novels, the most evil book ever written, and a magazine.

Have you guessed yet? The first list in the uni in London, and the second is my university. The disparity in… high culture… really is that clear.

What makes this more depressing is that I have not made a mistake on the second list above – there really is only nine entries in my university’s top ten books.

I’m not trying to slag off my university here, as it’s alright really. I just think its an interesting comparison – almost as if there is still a class divide between universities and polytechnics. If I were a better elite hacker, I’d write something that compares every university. But alas, I’m not.

In summary: Statistics are fun!

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Spam of the day
June 12th, 2007 at 23:42

Having my e-mail address plastered all across the internet I probably get more than my fair share of spam. Usually its just images of text promoting Cialis, slanted at such an angle that software spam-deleting things won’t pick it up. There’s also a lot of Russian women who seem to really want to contact me.

When checking my e-mail today though, I noticed this particularly bizarre e-mail:

“Hello my friend!

I am ready to kill myself and eat my dog, if medicine prices here ([url removed]) are bad.

Look, the site and call me 1-800 if its wrong..

My dog and I are still alive ”

W…W…What? It reads almost like a short story. A man decides to kill himself and his dog in protest at the price of medicine, but luckily finds a website hosted in Hong Kong, promising “CHE@P MEDS”, so decides that suicide isn’t the answer. A pretty crappy short story, admittedly.

Here is the same story again, but as a Haiku:

I am ready to

Kill myself and eat my dog

If Prices are bad

Mental.

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Good Mourning
April 18th, 2007 at 13:53

Yesterday I found out that they’re planning to have a “one day blog silence” because of the Virginia Tech massacre.

Although obviously well intentioned, I find it a little perplexing that not updating your blog apparently means that you are showing “respect and love to those who lost their loved ones”. I’m not sure how not updating does this – it’s just going to make Google Reader look slightly emptier and the world will collectively shrug their shoulders.

I think the fatal flaw is that whereas in real life if there’s a respectful silence and you’re in a public place you see everyone around you standing still and looking a bit unhappy, whereas in the “blogosphere” (for the unfortunate lack of a better term), if someone doesn’t update you just assume the writer is lazy.

In fact, I’d argue that actually updating about the relevant subject matter is a better way of showing “respect and love”. I’m writing about the Virginia Tech killings at the moment, so you’re probably thinking about it right now. If I hadn’t posted this blog entry, you’d probably be thinking about whatever drivel I would have written in its place, and if I hadn’t updated at all, you’d have clicked away to something else about another topic.

On the OneDayBlogSilence website, it contains this text, which strikes me as a late addition:

“But it´s not only about them. Many bloggers have responded and asked about all the other victims of our world. All the people who die every day. What about them? This day can be a symbol of support to all the victims of our world!”

Oh, right, so the campaign of “respect and love” is now for the families of dead people in general. People dying all the time in horrible injustices means that we shouldn’t update our blogs for the day? How, er, logical?

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Facebook
April 16th, 2007 at 02:02

I’ve got an embarrassing confession to make. For the past few months I’ve been using the social networking website Facebook. Why is this embarrassing? It’s basically a slightly classier version of MySpace- so it’s like a murderer admitting he stabbed the victim in the front instead of the back: marginally more honourable but equally horrific.

My justification for using it is that its useful for keeping in touch with old friends, as well as what is generally going on at university – usefully it splits the membership into individual university “networks”, meaning that normal morons can’t see what I’m up to, and it hopefully provides a sort of cretin-filter that prevents the great-unwashed who are too stupid to go to university from accessing it.

I don’t like using it, because I mean, why on earth would anyone want access to a list of my favourite bands or TV programmes? What possible use does anyone have for this information? When is there ever going to be a medical emergency when I’m lying unconscious and the paramedic says “Does anyone know what James’ favourite book is? Find out! Hurry! This is a life or death situation! Reading passages from Richard Littlejohn’s Essex Girl Jokebook is just sending him into a deeper coma… we need a more accurate book type match!“

It concerns me that I’m getting really into it too- I’ve uploaded a couple of photo albums, presumably to subconsciously boast about what an excellent social life I have. I’m finding myself checking back multiple times per day to get the latest news on what my friends are doing: “Oh my god! Heggs is eating a grapefruit!“

One of the worst things about Facebook is that allows me to see who my university peers are and mercilessly judge them based entirely what they’ve written on the internet, without having to go through the effort of awkwardly making conversation with them. Facebook has over 3000 people from my university registered on it, and at risk of making a gross over-generalisation and sounding sickeningly self-righteous, without exception they all appear to be morons. I don’t know if this is an accurate reflection of them, of course. I imagine I come across as a right self-important twat if judged exclusively on how I described myself. Or, er, this rather angry blog entry.

It’s just that the vast majority of users on there seem so far removed from who I am. If you look at the “activities” or “interests” on anyone’s profile, and the list invariably consists exclusively of “drinking” and “clubbing”. Maybe “sleeping”. Are these people’s vacuous lives so devoid of anything more noteworthy? You see on the lists of recent activity every few days yet more photos of pissed students in nightclubs are posted as if the photos are radically different from the last time they all got drunk.

It doesn’t help that despite being students, and by extension the assumed learned people of society, students seem to insist on typing exclusively in lower case, using text slang and so on. I know its clichéd to moan about this, but it really irritates me- when reading it I imagine it being said in the voice of an idiot child. I imagine if we all used Cyrillic keyboards with a backward-R key then the writings of students would be near indistinguishable from that of a five year old because of all the backwards letters and illegibility.

I’m always vaguely amused as well as intensely depressed when in the “favourite quotes” section of someone’s profile, rather than being something witty, clever, or amusing or whatever, it’s something like “ur a twat!!!!” attributed to another pointless moron.

Have I missed something? Have I completely got the wrong end of the stick with regard to university? Where are the people who don’t define the quality of an evening by the number of shots they had? Where are the people who will appreciate the learning experience rather than see it as something to do whilst the clubs are closed? Seriously, it’d be useful to know.

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GodTube
March 10th, 2007 at 00:03

If you’re savvy enough to be reading a blog, chances are you’ve seen the Internet’s number one newcomer this week: GodTube. It’s basically a Christian version of YouTube, featuring sickening videos like this one. Or this one. Basically I could link you to practically any video on the website and have it outrage you like it outraged me. So I’ve decided to have some fun instead.

Does anyone remember Peter Florida? Turns out that he’s a nutty Christian and has been posting video blogs to GodTube.

In this first video, “Peter” discusses the Bible. Click the link to see it on GodTube, I’ve posted the video below on Revver too, just in case they remove it.

Incredibly, it wasn’t deleted after being posted, and has now been online for around 48 hours. It must have been too realistic. So “Peter” made another video to see if that would get deleted. It discusses a controversial topic for the church: homosexuality.

These two actually got some comments from real people commending Peter’s religious beliefs, although they’ve mysteriously been deleted since. I thought it was getting a bit ridiculous – as of right now, they both still haven’t been deleted despite obviously being the work of some smart-arsed atheist blogging twat.

I…, er, Peter thought he should up the ante and really show his devotion to God by complaining about scientists:

This has now been on GodTube for a couple of hours and is being viewed by real members of the Christian Taliban. Can the limits of GodTube be pushed any further? Just how absurd can one go in the name of God before being rumbled? Tune in next week.

UPDATED 10/03 00:51. I’ve been found out and they’ve banned me. The funny thing is that because my ISP uses a proxy, presumably everyone in the county is now banned from GodTube too. Whoops.

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Achievements
February 25th, 2007 at 23:35

I’ve just discovered this clever piece of Javascript where you can put in your age, and it’ll tell you what other people from history have achieved by the time that they were your age. Its quite depressing seeing how much some people have achieved compared to me. Here are some of the things that people who are nineteen years old have done:

“At age 19: Writer, painter and filmmaker Jean Cocteau published his first volume of poetry.”

Actually, that’s not too bad. Some of my writing has been published, so Jean Cocteau can go fuck himself. (Yeah, I’m not quite as eloquent as a poet.)

“French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud (‘A Season in Hell’) abandoned his writing. He had proposed that poets become visionaries by pursuing a complete derangement of the senses. Later he became a gunrunner in Africa.” – I don’t know what most of the second sentence means, but I’d love to be a gunrunner. Not full time, like, as smuggling weapons to perpetuate civil war must get a bit tedious, but a couple of weeks work experience maybe, that’d suit me.

“Henry David Thoreau delivered a Harvard commencement address. Expanding on Emerson’s 1836 essay on ‘Nature’, he proposed that man should work one day a week and leave six free for the ’sublime revelations of nature.’” Clearly Henry David Thoreau was just a lazy student. By “sublime revelations of nature” he means going on a themed bar crawl resulting in traffic cone theft.

“Dan Topliffe survived a 50+ foot fall from an oak tree in Clayvillle, NY while working for a tree trimming company. His boss said it was a miracle. He went from the tree to the ground and had only a sore spot on his back and a scratch on his elbow.” – I’d hardly call this an achievement… and it’s not the sort of thing you’d list as you’d say in a job interview. “Where do you see yourself in five years?” “Well, I’d like to have fallen out of tall oak tree”. I don’t wake up in the morning thinking “I hope I fall out of an oak tree today and sustain only minor injuries”.

However, these people are all old-timey celebrities, back from the day when nobody really did anything as they were too busy being paupers or dying from the plague, so it is tenuous to compare what they have done to what I have – but there are some modern day celebrities who have achieved more than me by my age too. Look at Billie Piper for instance, Wikipedia informs me that she had a number one single aged 16. 16! How many number ones have I had? A depressing zero. And now she’s in Doctor Who- and I don’t think I’m going to be Doctor Who’s sidekick any time in the next five years.

At least I’m not old, as that’d be depressing. Not because of this website, just in general, as y’know, I’d be complaining about my back and young people stepping on my lawn, that sort of thing. “By age 39, Neil Armstrong had walked on the moon and looked down on the earth from space… what’ve you done lately? Wallpapered the kitchen? You loser” (I assume by the time that I’m 39 Javascript will have artificial intelligence and a flippant attitude.)

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More window cleaner madness
February 23rd, 2007 at 01:53

I’ve spent this evening watching clips of Michael Moore documentaries on YouTube – like the one where he gets people who have lost their vocal chords due to smoking to sing Christmas carols at tobacco companies, so I’m going to tackle some BIG ISSUES in this blog update. That’s right, I’m going to talk about window cleaners again. This is a clever traffic-boosting ruse as my hits seem to go up when I talk about them. Shame I don’t have any adverts on here, really.

Since my last post, I’ve managed to haX0r my way into their message board to see what they’re saying about me (Peter Florida might have signed up to their forum and got approved by the administrator).

My original blog entry appears to have stimulated some debate about whether or not it is best to knock on the door of the house who’s windows you’re cleaning before you do it. They seem to be split down the middle over it- like the Tories used to be over Europe, back in the days when they had policies. (I’ve just managed to elbow in some political satire into a post about window cleaners. Excellent.)

Knocking on the door, whilst polite, apparently gives the punter a chance to reject the advances of a window cleaner, whereas if you clean the windows then harass the public for money, they can’t not pay you, as the job is already done.

Here are some quotes to prove that I haven’t made up this debate in my head:

“I don’t see what the problem is, I would NOT appreciate a WC cleaning my windows without knocking/calling first. It’s something that I always do, because you are looking directly into peoples bedrooms/rest of the house.”

“No way would I consider knocking on all my customers first – it wastes time, gives them a chance to say not today.” (‘JM123′)

I daren’t imagine what sort of flame wars get going when they get on to the topic of WFP versus, er, not-WFP. (This is a window cleaner in-joke).

I’m not sure whether this is a sort of concious and knowing reference, but ‘EasyClean’ says: “With the kind remarks some of you made let’s hope he doesn’t turn out to be a tax inspector,LOL.” Funny you should say that, EasyClean.

‘Jeff1′ sums me up quite accurately: “I seen his video were he was pretending to be a www boxing champion, with that new wii, He looks like the typical arrogant lazy student he is.” Yeah, Jeff, I might might be a lazy student, but that’s what makes me so excellent.

‘Asboss’ had the nerve to infer that I’m lazy too! “This guy needs to get a life, waffling on about his dreams, he is a special agent wanna-be. He can’t get in the secret service cos he has no one to tie his shoe laces. Get a life fella, in bed when you should be out earning a living !!.”

‘Andy@w.c.s’ took time out to watch some of the videos I’ve posted on here: “YOU can see him if you go down to the karting vid on 6th feb 07. total waste weird oooooooooo”

Window Cleaners, or WC’s, as they’ve hilariously abbreviated themselves to are brilliant.

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Celebrity
July 27th, 2005 at 15:02

Something amazing has happend. Twice.

I’ve been recognised!

As you probably know, I’m the webmaster of the world’s biggest Pokémon website, PKMN.NET (PUK). It’s quite popular, and it’s now reached the stage where two people from completely unrelated websites have recognised me- these websites do not link to my website, nor do I link to them. People just know me because they happen to go to the two.

Noit from B3ta/Talk was the first to “recognise” me a few months ago- claiming he visits PUK every other day, and just yesterday, Xavious on UKNova recognised me, just by my username!

He had this to say:
” yea, your blog ive read a few times, its pretty funny.”

Oh, and, this…

“ps, loving the terrorist shirt with george bush on it“.

Even strangers think my fashion sense is second to none!

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The Crazy Frog
July 8th, 2005 at 22:49

No exciting news to report, gang, so instead have a little flash film I made.

Introducing, the crazy frog.

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The New Pope
April 20th, 2005 at 22:18

Why is it that days after I suggest the old Pope was a nazi, it turns out that the new Pope was in the Hitler youth and German army?!

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