Politicians around the world are sharpening their knives towards game developers, blaming video games for increased youth crime etc

Has anyone stopped to consider, perhaps, that we humans are spreading – our population is getting bigger, ergo there’s more teens available to commit more crimes, do the statistics take population into account? I personally don’t think so, so the conclusions that the anti-videogames nutters are coming to are a little flawed

Friday: Was supposed to have my reindeer pilgrimage; where I dress up in a reindeer suit and go to the pub, then get horribly drunk for the amusement of other patrons and the public (usually people buy me drinks – making the reindeer suit a good investment). Alas, the weather had other ideas and it got rained out. Instead I had some quiet drinks at Benny’s

Saturday: Regulars party at Murphy’s Law. Open tab for a few hours, then a few more drinks afterwards, I got all ways of drunk.

Sunday: Had a few quiet ones, travelled to my parent’s place and continued drinking with my brothers. Managed to make a ham and tomato sandwich without cutting myself.

Monday: A quiet Christmas day, had a couple of beers but nothing major.

Tuesday: Boxing Day races. Started drinking approx 11am, finished drinking approx 6am the following morning. Had some great times with some random girls in Palmy, and I have to say – the Square has been redeveloped and is kind of cool now…

As it turns out, a couple of mates of a mate who were also at the races are my second cousins – small world!

UPDATE: Some more pictures::

This is Big Pete from Murphy’s Law in Petone, my watering hole

Some folk who were in our section, we ended up partying with the two on the right as you’ll see

Me showing the effects of a day’s drinking in the sun, this is on the bus back to the pub after the races were fiinshed

Drunken dancing

I was so drunk I immediately forgot her name, but we were having great fun talking snooty to everyone, eg:
Barman: “can I help you?”
me: “yes, we require two alcholic beverages”
her: “pardon me, but what is your name?”
bemused Barman: “uhhh Ben”
her: “very good, Benjamin”
me: “indubitably”

Yep, spent a while drinking with her and her cousin

and did shots with them, my mate Johnny and another of their friends

who I wound up piggybacking down the road

Matthew Lynn postulates that we should just ingore spammers, along with some good suggestions.

I personally don’t think that training users is the right path in the long run – joe average isn’t interested in learning about computers – they see it as a toolbox full of tools that helps them to do what they want to do; it has a browser that helps them to browse the interweb for pr0n, it has a music application so they can listen to their tunes, a word processor so they can write letters of resignation and so on

One of the tools in this toolbox of theirs is an email client, and it is based on a deeply entrenched, 30 year old system. If any of you have picked up an old rusty adjustable spanner, you’ll know that a couple of squirts of CRC or WD40 will only go so far.

And that’s how it’s been for Email – over the years we’ve kept squirting CRC into it, with add-ons like Mailmarshal and baysian filters and antivirus hooks and so on.

It’s time to replace the spanner.

The latest fad seems to be “2.0″, we’ve got web 2.0, ferrit 2.0, stuff 2.0, I expect pretty soon we’ll have “*ethnic minority of your choice* hookers 2.0″, so why not email 2.0? Why can’t we focus on things that matter?

Email 2.0 would have to be backwards compatible with Email 1.0, would need to be extensible but as a base would be designed to be both anti-spam and anti-malware, completely transparent of the user. The other big feature it should have is attachment escrowing – all attachments are escrowed and reviewed – compared against an international blacklist database and antivirus scanned.

This would immediately drop the instances of viral infections, and allow users to transfer files between one another over a shapable protocol – allowing files to trickle around – something that the current email system is struggling with. And ultimately it will have a simple and transparent user interface, just like email 1.0.

How to secure things further than that – I’m not sure, blacklisting/whitelisting email addresses or bringing money into the picture tends to complicate things. And that’s probably why we’re where we are – nobody has sat down and nutted out an effective business model where some corporate swine can weasel millions out of administrating email.

Telecom NZ has signed an agreement with Yahoo!

This sucks because it effectively destroys my grand aspirations to get a Google Mini box installed at work to improve the flow of information around the company. Oh well.

I was checking out SymphonyOS screenshots and I’m really intruiged by the Desktop UI, so I dug a little more and found out that it’s called Mezzo.

Now I’m interested, and it appears that there is a KDE SuperKaramba theme based on Mezzo, it’s called Kuartet

As soon as my new Athlon64 X2 CPU arrives, I’ll be testing it as well as 3D-Desktop on DesktopBSD. We’ll see if it lives up to its design ideas…

I was recently sent a link to the new Copyright bill that seeks to impliment some DMCA style nonsense, initially I was intruiged, then I was infuriated.

Fortunately, Russell Brown has come through in good form and already covered the major bits and pieces:

http://publicaddress.net/default,3778.sm

It’s time to pen an informed letter to your representatives folks

Read the bill here
Read what the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has to say about the DMCA, especially the unintended consequences, IP and Fair Use and DRM

Remember folks, a coherent and educated letter will be taken more seriously than “OMG DONT DEW THIS BECAUSE DMCAS IS BADS!”

Finally, I don’t give much credence to Online Petitions, but you can sign one here. If it’s printed out and delivered, it might make a difference

I’ve been struck down again with the flu, useless flu-jab in all its uselessness.

The problem with the flu jab is that they tend to give the one with the most recent strains to the young and the elderly, not working age folk like myself – we instead tend to get an older revision of the jab that’s missing the latest strains.

Lo and behold, Murphy’s Law – I get the latest strains.

Unfortunately this time around it’s come part and parcel with a middle ear infection, and I’ve blown out my right ear drum – neatly perforated to the point where I actually went to a doctor to have it checked. Drugs + a month or so and it’ll self heal, but I’m half deaf until then which means my balance is impaired and it’d be a danger for me to be riding on the roads.

This sucks, sitting at home and blowing toads out of my nose isn’t my idea of fun, and being denied the ability to cycle commute for a couple of weeks is a small blow

It’s the simple things in life that brighten up your day. Someone’s going to hell: