Pure freaking gold…

Zero Punctuation Reviews – Uncharted

And you get to meet the author. How snazz!

And I’d embed the code if it actually worked in WordPress. Damn.

And now the contrast: an ABC News report on the same incident in the US.

w00t for the power of the citizenry.

But that’s not the reason I’m posting this entry.

I’m posting the entry because of the apparently slack standards of news services. This — and many other reports I’ve seen lately — appears to have been either:

(a) written by several different people and not copy-edited

(b) cobbled-together from several reports around the world and not copy-edited

(c) not copy-edited

Notice the common-denominator in the above points.

Seeing the same piece of information repeated several times in the same report smacks to me of apparent laziness.

And in the award for Shameless repetition, we have:

“…Qian Xun was nicknamed Pumpkin, after the Pumpkin Patch-brand clothing she was wearing when she was found in Melbourne…”

“…She was nicknamed Pumpkin, after the Pumpkin Patch-brand clothing she was wearing when she was found in Melbourne…”

The award for the most gratuitous use of the same fundamental points goes to:

“…Murder suspect Nai Yin Xue was found by police with his pants around his ankles and his hands tied with his own belt after being captured by a group of angry Chinese Americans…”

“…”They had basically taken his pants and tied his legs up and taken his belt off and tied his hands up, so he was very much in custody by the time our officers got to the scene,” he said…”

“…”Local authorities got wind of the incident and arrived on the scene only to find the suspected murderer hogtied and detained by a number of men.”…”

The award for emotive geography goes to:

“…The abandonment of Xue’s daughter caused outrage in Australia and New Zealand, and led to the establishment of the Little Pumpkin Trust in both countries…”

“..Qian’s half sister helped establish the Little Pumpkin Trust in Australia and New Zealand…”

The award for television over-exposure is for:

“…Authorities in America had recently said they were closing in on the fugitive, and his image had appeared on America’s Most Wanted…”

“…The website for the America’s Most Wanted television program says Xue was caught after Chinese-American locals recognised him…”

“…”The arrest was based on the news reports and the internet and America’s Most Wanted,” Hession said…”

The Where’s Wally award goes to:

“…Xue had now been transferred to the Dekalb County Jail where he will be held until US Marshalls take him into custody…”

“…Xue is now in custody while it is determined what legal jurisdiction he faces….”

The Stating-the-bleedingly-obvious award goes to:

“…Murder suspect Nai Yin Xue was found by police..”

“…He is accused of Liu’s murder…”

“..Xue, who is suspected of killing his wife, has been charged with being a fugitive and for being wanted in New Zealand…”

I’m sure there’s more, but the point is well and truly made: it’s an abominable news report and the “with Staff Reporters, stuff.co.nz and Agencies” is little more than a disclaimer rather than giving proper credit to the sources of the report.

This is really sloppy journalism, but I’m up for alternative interpretations (other than a 5-minute deadline, which is just tommyrot on an online newspaper).

Thanks to D and iMeri for this one!

Finally worked-out one of the reasons I’ve been so fundamentally and astonishingly unable to concentrate at work.

And it’s a classic CLASSIC case of forgetting something.

Last year when I was working for Hellstra, I found that the environment I was in was not at all conducive to working. For one there were lots of people talking like they were deaf. For two there were not one, but THREE radios on people’s desks playing radio fairly audibly. And none of these radios were on the same station.

My solution at the time was simple: White Noise. No, not some bizarre def-metal rock band (from the gagralaca mind-zones, who are not only believed to be the loudest rock band, but the loudest noise of any kind in existence; sorry, channeling Hitch-Hikers Guide there).

So, white noise; it helped me focus, it helped me drown out the background crap, and aided my concentration astonishingly.

Why I forgot it is part II of this problem; the ADD I was diagnosed with late last year. I dispute the name (It’s not Attention Defecit, it’s Attention overload; we pick-up everything), but the diagnosis explained a whole lot of stuff, and I got some good tools and information to deal with the issues of an over-sensitive mind.

Which I promptly forgot. Just like with sugar (I eat some, I eat some more, then get all depressed and wonder why).

So, now I’m back on the White Noise bandwagon, and suddenly all the external influences, noises, music playing at A’s computer, people’s phones on speaker-phone because they can’t be arsed holding the handset up to their ears while on-hold, tennis balls bouncing, people walking past, people chatting nearby, conversations across the office, the nice guy who’s in the call-center actross from my desk talking to his callers… well, all of that is pretty much drowned-out.

Why not then listen to music, you might ask.

Well, because I listen to music.

Read that again, you might get it.

If you don’t, I’ll explain. Music: I enjoy it. Basically it’s another distraction. The tracks click over and I am distracted by the lyrics, the beat, the good guitar licks (why are they called licks btw; there’s no tongue involved is there?), the point of the music… and it dislodges the creative part of my brain and I get all sorts of story ideas.

Do I get any work done listening to music?

Not really.

White noise on the other hand isn’t a beat, isn’t rhythmic or anything else. It’s just constant sound. It’s not squeaky or changing, it’s not water pouring down a river, it’s not waves on a beach; both of these create an image to my mind you see, which leads to the aforementioned creative outpourings.

Not that creative outpourings are a bad thing mind you; especially when halfway through a second book and one third into the third in a series which one hopes will make me almost embarassingly rich and leave me with no option than to demand they wheel Parkie out of cryogenic freeze because he’s the only interviewer who I’ll speak with. It’s just that when I’m at work, I’m being paid to do shit, and that shit isn’t being done at present.

Not anymore however; now I’ve found a 20 second MP3 of white noise on Freesound. A quick download later and I had it in iTunes playing on an endless loop.

And thus I can concentrate again.

The only other way I’ve found to concentrate is to stay late at work when there’s no-one else around. Don’t want to do that anymore; it eats into my Being At Home time.

Another use for an iPod Touch.

Sounds a bit like the apple remote to me, but as the article says, the touch can also act as a keyboard (if you are prepared to get used to the thumb-tapping interface).

With companies like Meraki slowly rolling-out blanket wi-fi access (and Meraki is part-owned by google, so they’re doing this potentially to add value to the Android phone) it won’t be long before the Touch can actually be used viably as a VoIP phone.

Give it a couple more years though… we’re a good 3-years behind the tech here in OZ.

Never criticise Bike riders, or do something as stupid as these guys did.

Brilliant!

Well, it ain’t an iPhone…

Looks like a pale version of a Crackberry or even — goddess forbid — a Palm Treo.

Funny how Sony Ericsson is bagging the devic, especially since they’ve just linked their destiny to Microsoft.

So, it’ll really be a battle of the phones. iPhone is apparently going gangbusters wherever it’s sold (and some places it isn’t), the Crackberry is potentially making a rod for its own back, Palm is just about dead, so what else is there?

Well, the OpenMoko Neo1973 still hasn’t been released, but it still looks very good, and sports a nifty touch-screen a’la iPhone, and there really isn’t any real competitor as far as I can see to the iPhone other than the aforementioned Android…

So the game’s afoot really…

Okay, bored now.

I found a link for a Fake Steve Jobs round-up of the Macworld conference, and thought it might be worth a look. Cool, I thought; I quite like the blog — even though some of the readers are obviously sexist pigs (take a look at some of the Photocrank pictures if you doubt my appraisal) — and thought this might be an amusing diversion to what I was doing: translating incomprehensible tech-speak into something that people other than the author could read without a fairly high inhalation of peyote and camel-dung.

First I got a crappy and incomprehensible IBM advert, but hey, you expect that sorta thing on some online news reports; I lived with it.

Then there was a lady news reporter — no, not FSJ — saying how there’d be a report on Macworld. Cool, I thought.

Then there was a second ad.

And that was the point I killed the page. Arse-factor Zero; you lost me within the first 30 seconds. And that’s what happens these days guys. Don’t inundate people with crapervising, we’re Not Interested Anymore! And it wasn’t like I could just click the progress indicator because each of these babies was a self-contained presentation.

Morons.

Froot-loops.

Choice quotes:

“…If we can just save one person’s soul…”

“…I don’t know if you’ve seen Kirk Cameron’s ‘Left Behind’…”

“…Noah’s Ark is real, and the Millenium Falcon is fake…”

“…When they die, and they’re judged, then they’ll go to hell… according to my beliefs they’re going to go to hell…”

So today I looked at the blogs I usually look at.

Fake Steve Jobs hadn’t added anything since yesterday.

Vista Sucks isn’t adding much regularly (maybe once a week; come on! I’m a bloggict, I need my fix once a day at the very least!)

Rory Neopoleon had some new content and some additional links.

This one looked interesting — Laura Foy — except, What The Hell is “Microsoft Silverlight“? Surely they’re not creating a “competitor” to flash? Or even to Youtube. Please don’t tell me they’re doing this because I hate the pain caused by broken ribs, and that’s exactly what will happen when I LMAO and fall onto the floor.

Well, you can see from the link, that I’ve found some information. Talk about missing the bloody boat.

Oh my aching sides.

I LOL’d… well, giggled.

Open google search and enter the following:

Bikram Acapulco

Funny how Google searches work innit?!

Thanks to L, who took this pic close to work…

Two parting thoughts for the night:

1. It is slightly off-putting when riding past a cemetery to hear 2 year old pop music playing without a car anywhere in the vicinity. Even more-so at 10.30 at night. It’s a good idea for a video-game perhaps? Zombie attacks always preceeded by old crappy pop muzak? Anyone? Really… it’s a great idea! Honest!!

2. I took a risk on the way home and travelled further along a bike-track than I had before. The risk was that the bike track intersected with another one I’d discovered a couple of weeks ago. The nice thing about this was that I was right, and thus had a main-road and traffic-free trip home.

Goodnight and good luck. Especially with PCs.

Okay, thanks to this article, the treo might just be syncing properly…

I deleted all the windows sync settings from the treo, and have paired the computer and the treo once again.

If this works, I might just call it a night. It’s only been 4 hours. All right, 3 and a half at this point (I arrived here at about 6.30pm).

Well, it kind-of works. There’s still more contacts on the Palm than on the PC.

The addressbook seems to have synced properly though, so that’s nice.

Screw it. It’s after 10pm. I’m going home.

Okay. Success: it installed.

Now for the hard bit: getting the thing to (a) recognise there’s a treo connected, and (b) getting it to perform a full sync without crapping-out halfway through with some incomprehensible error message that not even the programmers in Redmond understand.

Restart time: here we go again…

I just had a heart-stopping moment there: straight after the PC manufacturer rubbish (Press F8 to do unspeakable acts to the BIOS), there was a black screen and a blinking cursor.

Phew, Windows hasn’t suddenly turned into a turgid pile of horse droppings infested with the worms of a thousand parasites. Well, no more than usual.

(By the way, before anyone complains how much I’m bagging windows tonight, consider, I’m well into my fourth hour on this sodding thing. I’m entitled to feel a little annoyed).

Okay, sync-time!Well, we’re back to what we had before the uninstall/reinstall loop.

Activesync refuses to accept there’s a Treo connected, while Windows syas there is.

Found New hardware it keeps saying, like a small dog with a sudden unabiding love for your leg.

Okay, I’ve waited a bit, and restarted the treo. Activesync seems to think it can deal with it now. And we’re Synchronising……with another sodding status bar that does NOTHING!

Let’s see what happens next…

And so it goes: Now to MS ActiveSync.

I’ve just uninstalled this, after 15 minutes trying to get it to understand that there was indeed a Treo connected via USB, and am now installing again.

Norton is up to its old tricks, holding everything up, like a bored gatekeeper at the gates of a rock-concert.

And now we’re back to the boredom of watching the installation status crawl from one end of the dialog to the other.

It’s like a rainy day in wales: full of restless natives stuck inside and unable to bag London.

Wake me when it’s done will you? *snort*, wassat?

Oh, now it wants me to install. What? I thought I just did that?! So what the hell’s it been doing for the last 5 minutes? Warming me up?

Come on, I need to be up early tomorrow.

I’ve had better days at school being morbidly depressed!

Hey, we’ve got yet another status bar. Honestly, what’s the bloody point of a status bar if you keep renewing it every 5 minutes?! What’s the point if you don’t actually display anything going on?

Come on you decrepit piece of monkey effluent! Install for crying out loud! It’s only 6 hours to daylight. Some time soon would be nice!

Well, a post was just lost because Firefox suspiciously couldn’t connect to wordpress.

In my vanity I wondered if MS Fankiddies were performing a DoS attack on my blog.

No, it was just a glitch. Even the MS PC I’ve been working on could connect.

Now I’m in Safari.

Oh well.

There has been progress; while the scan button on the officejet won’t work, and the officejet purpose-built software doesn’t work either, the MS Office scanner utility detects there’s a scanner connected (on the officejet multifunction) and will scan from the plate.

Good.

A minor mishap with multiple installations of the same printer, and a quick delete of the offending party later, and the printer worked fine.

Even when connected to the PC via a USB hub.

Similarly, suddenly the HP laserjet 5L will now print.

It looks very like the ultimate issue was MS all along: Service Pack Two in fact (though why HP didn’t issue an update to their drivers and software is beyond me; but I’ll let it go for now).

Now I have a new quest: get the palm treo to sync with addressbook.Wish me luck.

Fucking hell, it’s still going.

I’ve just gone into the house, chatted briefly with G, the owner of the PC, hunted for a teabag while the kettle boiled, found the teabag and poured boiling water over it (in a cup no-less; no fooling this gal), and stomped back out here. We’re now installing HP Officejet 9100 series.

Nicely enough, the installer window is counting-down — like a harbinger of doom — the free disk space; presumably the PC will turn into an MED (Microsoft Explosive Device, as differentiated from a small bullet-shaped lump of cotton-wool) when the counter reaches Zero.

A great use of my precious time; think, I could be cycling home now after another ab-building Bikram Yoga session, with slightly sweaty hair but feeling energised and content — relaxed even — and even more-so because the day was over and I didn’t have to look at another sodding PC again that day.

Luxury!

Whoops.

Anyway, We’re on 22% on the installer, which leaves a honking 78% to go. It’s not helped by Norton scanning every stinking byte of the installation programmes either. Tea’s too hot to drink, so what can I do? I know, Youtube!

Okay, we’re back, in the continuing story of the HP printer and computer that could but refused because the software was shite.

When last we spoke (#131), I’d successfully uninstalled XP Sp2 and effectively rendered a large proportion of software on the computer useless.

Now I’m installing the HP printer software. It’s a 9110 officejet btw, a hulk of a beast sitting like… well, it’s the size of a bloody kennel to be honest… on the desk next to me.

And now we wait. The progress bar is… well, we’re validating, so it could take a while.

However, I am cautiously cautious, which is what one gets after four separate attempts to get the stupid thing working.

I think I’m going to get some more tea.