tomment

When I was at school I never really thought about the crazy Walkers ’sports equipment for schools’ offer, which effectively means you have to eat loads of crisps in order to get a free cricket bat or something for your school.

The idea of advertising sport with fast food is pretty scary, as in Sarah’s McApple, it seems very wrong.

The Guardian reports sports bodies urged to shun fast-food sponsors, but it seems the Food Commission pointed out back in March how ridiculous it was, their press release Cadbury wants children to eat two million kg of fat - to get fit details that in order to get a set of volleyball net posts you’d need to ear £2000 of chocolate, which would involve eating 1.25 million calories. Nice.

where did geourl go? it’s been down for days.

most disgusting thing ever?

at safeway, now under morrisons ownership, they are shrinkwrapping individual peppers.

then i could have a PlusDeck - a cassette deck for the PC.

it allows you to digitise your audio tapes, and record your digital files to audio tape. fab.

living in brighton i forget what it is like to see fly posters in every direction you look. the council cracked down on it a few years ago apparently, and hence there are just no flyposters in brighton.

the telegraph today reports that Sony and BMG record label (advertising) executives face jail threat for flyposting. as you’d expect, it is a slight shocker of a headline, and they’ve just been asked to cease flyposting or they could get a jail term. interesting though.

in Brighton, more so than any other UK city outside London (i think), there is ridiculous demand for housing. the population is transient, maybe it’s a place to spend a year or so, but the feeling here is that people move on, or will move on, or have already moved on (and been replaced by new people).

as a consequence, the lettings market is ridiculously buoyant, a lot of people rent houses here, probably because property is so damn expensive. and it seems, for whatever reason, that the majority of property is let via agencies, of which there are probably hundreds.

unlike estate agents, the market for letting agencies is totally unregulated. how many stories have i heard about people getting done over by their agents? too many. and as a consequence, there seems to be no rules by which they play.

take the example of the new flat i am moving in to. let from outlet sales & lettings, or so we thought when we looked around the property. great, we like it. let’s pay a holding deposit.

the deposit is paid immediately, and then we find out that actually maybe they want a tenant to move in before we’re willing to move. what do you mean maybe? well, the property isn’t actually let by outlet, but by another agency, they’re just helping to market it. great.

so another agency gets involved (i’m not mentioning them for fear of retribution, as they’ll be looking after my house for the next 12 months!), and yes - they want us to move earlier. but i’ve paid a deposit, the house remains on the market despite the fact that we were told by the agency who we thought we were dealing with that a holding deposit would take it off the market.

so on it goes. we eventually negotiate a move in date which is a bit more realistic, but still has huge overlap with my current place. oh well. then outlet decide to let us know that actually they advertised the price wrong too, and it’s another £25 a month. what can i do? absolutely nothing, if i want the house, i have to accept - because they say, despite the fact they made a mistake, the rent is payable to another agent and so they can’t reduce it to apologise.

once again, as customer i am left with very few rights, the agents have just negotiated on their terms, what they want, what exactly is the point in me paying rent on 2 properties when i am on holiday and therefore don’t need either? why did they accept my deposit before they had even decided whether to accept?

so i guess i’ll just sweep it under the carpet, like every other person who rents their home in brighton, and pretend that i’m not spending £300 on absolutely nothing (that’s £60 referencing fee, £50 for them to print a contract for me to sign (both + VAT) and £160 odd rent when i can’t even move in). grr

Bristolian’s will now be able to get their fix of Daily Mail spun articles as Metro newspaper comes to the West.

Apparently buses have holders for them to be distributed. I imagine a happy partnership between the Daily Mail and First Group.

TRAIN TICKET - Bristol to London

i just got unsuccessful phone spam on my landline.
i answered the phone.
‘we have an important message for you, please wait 2 seconds’.
i waited.
nothing happened.
the call was disconnected.

today i saw a contractor (i presume some sort of builder) adding to his lunchtime coffee from a miniature baileys.

outrageous.

gnuplot is my favourite thing of the day, the speed with which you can plot charts with 200000 data points is amazing, and they look hot.

thanks to edward for introducing me to it .

i had to go to somerfield to buy some torture tea because the shop which sells equal exchange tea had sold out.

while in somerfield, i came across possibly the most disturbing food ever:

so what’s so crazy about prawnys? they look like prawns, well vaguely. ‘prawn flavour snacks formed from white fish’, and coloured pink with dye too. freaky. i don’t get why you’d buy them.

today the register told me about yak farmers in nepal with wifi.

i find this particularly exciting, not just from a geek perspective (ie rigging hardcore wifi in the middle of the himalayas), but also from a social development perspective. such minimal physical infrastructure could potentially bring so much communication.

they might not have telephones, but they have wifi. nepal wireless has all the info.

i woke this morning at 5.30am after an excerpt from a dream that a small kitten was purring very near my face and it took me ages to get back to sleep as my heart seemed to be beating about 3000 bpm. fear the cat.

wordpress just went 1.2 so i thought i’d upgrade.

a few things broke but it seems ok now. exciting!

today I learnt about Mark Tilden’s RoboSapien (and saw one in the flesh).

quite an impressive machine, especially for £80 (you can buy it from the gadgetshop if you’re willing to go near the shop). ok, so it’s not exactly the most intelligent of the bunch, but it’s responses are very human like, and Tilden’s unique interest is in cheap / easy feedback systems, and as a consequence has focussed on the actual embodiment of the robot, rather than sophisticated software for reasoning and cognition. RoboSapien uses the natural feedback available from the physical world to help determine it’s movements; I guess considering nature more ‘on it’s side’ than is the view in a traditional AI approach. Traditionally, AI systems always seem to be an uphill struggle against the uncertainty of the world, whereas this approach to a system which interacts directly with the nature seems a lot more sensible. Certainly a far cry from many other attempts, such as the £100 million behemoth Honda humanoid robot, which looks distinctly un-human-like in it’s movements and I believe spends most of it’s time reasoning and planning.

To compare, the robosapien runs on just 12kb of assembler code, with 2 chips for processing, it relies mostly on physics and nature to control it’s movements. easy.

Without the help of eBay, my old iBook (talvi) has been sold. Hurrah.

Now all I need is a memory upgrade for pakkasta (that’s my iBook G4) and I will have something extra special.

thanks again tom.

a bus in Bristol caught fire

thanks to tom for this picture! wow.. a bristol bus falling over, or nearly.

looks like First need to train their drivers to drive too!

saw this ‘flatmate wanted’ sign posted on a bus stop today

i wondered whether it would work. if you were normal and saw that, would you move in?