Threat of Violence

Recently I had occasion to visit London, and found myself at a busy London Underground tube station during the rush hour.

As I was approaching the exit barrier system and was stretching my hand out to place my ticket into it, when a man attempted to barge in front of me mere centimetres from the barrier. I instinctively put my left arm up to stop him physically interfering with my person, and proceeded through the barrier.

Immediately after passing through the barrier the person who had just attempted to barge in approached and stood in front of me, used foul language, and threatened me with actual physical assault if it were not for the presence of cameras in the tube station.

The incident was a bit shocking at the time and I reacted in supplication.

Thinking back, a small part of me wishes that a member of LU staff had been visible and close by at the time, as I felt tempted to call his bluff and scream “assault” or even “fire” (the later which may possibly land me in court hounded by beurocrats, rather than being taken as the desperate call for help that “assault” or god forbid “rape” no longer brings in today’s damaged society), but at the time I did not see any staff and suspected that any attempt to shout for help would result in him punching me and running.

I suspect that this sort of thing is no longer un-typical.

Get a job!

I’m sure society has never had a golden age of enlightened dicourse amoungst the masses (whatever our grandparents tell us), but If I take the time and effort to attend a job interview which has all the appearances of going well, and the interviewer says that he will be in touch with my agency later that same day, and then nothing…. And then doesn’t return my agents’ contact attempts the next day, doesn’t that say something about the interviewer?

What if… God was a nature documenter?

Bear with me here.

Nature documentarians are a hardy lot. They have to be able to trapes anywhere, anytime, in any climate, to watch in absolute secrecy the natural behavior, life and death of animals without interfering with them in any way.

The cardinal rule for the nature documentarian is “do not get involved”. Animals behave as animals do, and quite often that means they kill one another. And the watcher must not get involved, must be distant, and watch for the sake of understanding without interfering. If he interferes then he changes the natural evolution of the situation, and the knowledge gained becomes useless.

Here the observation does not change the outcome, and the animals do what the animals do, and quite often they kill one another…

Google of Solace

Do you know how long Google waits between scans of your site?

And why would it matter?

Well, imagine that you buy a shiny new URL and want your old websites traffic to go there instead (quite reasonably). The easiest way to do this is to put up some simple redirect pages (either HTTP redirect Meta tag or Javascript), and this works fine for the first, what, month? Then all of a sudden traffic drops like a stone to almost nothing and all your lovely graphics disappear from Google Image Search (the source of most of my traffic it seems).

Disaster!

Two weeks of farting around with Google SiteMaps and my graphics and hits still have not returned even though they are on the website, so time for something of a cudgel, in that the text of the old website and the links to the graphics are all going back in at the bottom of the redirect pages, in the hope that Google might get the idea that this contents still actually exists and re-index it.

Nothing dishonest at all, but I really, really need my graphics back on Google, since the new site’s graphics don’t seem to be indexed at all.

Another 2 weeks and it will be a month since the earthquake (and it took a month for Google to drop the graphics, so lets hope things return to normal then…

Freeview – mostly

Do the massive “media” companies do it on purpose, or are they just incompetent?

Having finally given a 60-70 channels I never watch the chop, why oh why am I still missing some of the supposedly “Free” free-view channels?

Come on guys, why are my +1 freeview channels missing? I phoned up and even complained about it, but the supposed call-back after investigation of course never comes.

Not the end of the world, but I understand that E4+1 and C4+1 etc are freeview channels, so why am I supposedly “not a subscriber” of them?

About par for the course I suppose, punishment for no longer paying obscene amounts of money for over-priced services without much choice in the content.

Indicating is not optional!

First of all a rant against what seems to be the majority of drivers on the road – why do you think that indicating is optional?

It’s not just a nuisance, it’s dangerous being on the road and switching lanes, pulling out or moving around a roundabout without indicating to other users what you are about to do.

Especially on roundabouts so few people indicate, but it is probably the most vital place to indicate on.

It’s dangerous not to god damn it!

I would just love to hire the signs on a particular roundabout in my area (you know the ones, advertising local law firms usually) and put something rude on them to grab drivers attention about this, but its never going to happen is it….