Dadblog

Nice piece in The Economist on Google: “With luck, Google’s owners will remember to work out a viable strategy for Google beyond the point at which they cash out.”

From The Register: “An Australian man has been charged with defrauding a Saudi prince and others of AUS $5 million in an Internet lottery scam…..the accused, Nick Marinellis, 39, of Sydney told police: “I have 220 African brothers worldwide. I am the Australian headquarters for those scams.” Marinellis is charged with sending spam emails which conned people into believing that they had won millions of dollars in overseas lotteries, or inheritance, or through a business opportunity. But before they could collect the money, the victims were required to pay an advance fee to process the payment. The biggest victim was an unnamed Saudi prince, who coughed up more than $AUS 500,000.

I’ve always hated Diane Abbott. I hate her easy causes, I hate her casual racism, I hate the fact that she consorts with Aitken and Portillo and doesn’t seem to mind it. But now this - she sends her son to private school, and then masks it in supposedly “selfless” language: “It is inconsistent, to put it mildly, for someone who believes in a fairer and more egalitarian society to send their child to a fee-paying school.”

Yes is is, Diane. It’s absolutely bloody unforgivable. You slagged off Harriet Harman for sending her kid to a grammar school, for Christ’s sake. You don’t deserve to be in the Labour Party. You don’t deserve to be in parliament. Anything good you have ever stood for is invalidated by the awesome stupidity and hypocrisy of this move. And the fact that you also said your constituents would understand - “particularly black mothers who know the position I’m in” - is just more evidence of your casual racism. You are beneath contempt.

Let’s be clear: state schools are right, private schools are indefensible. If you can’t find a decent state school for your son with all the advantages you have, you’re just not trying hard enough. And if you think the kids at your local school are not good enough for your son, you should move. Because they won’t want you to stay.

God, I’m cross about this.

From NTK: “Post Mortem: the Alien Film Series“: Although I do like the Alien series, episodes 1, 4 and 2 being my favourite in that order, I can’t help noticing that they keep on repeating the same mistakes, over and over again. Now perhaps centuries in the future ISO 9000 certification is no longer required, and “the learning organisation” is a discredited concept, but that is no reason not to review actions and learn from mistakes. So here is a classic software engineering team postmortem of the various alien encountered.

I’ve been using Bitpass to pay for two online comics: Apocamon, and The Right Number.

Bitpass is a nice, elegant little system which, as one of the comic authors neatly says just “gets out of the way” when it’s done its business.

Apocamon is an insanely violent animesque thing which seems almost devoid of morals; it reminds me a little of Kill Bill as it’s so kinetically cool. The keywords for it are: revelation, manga, apocalypse, anime, 666. Enough said, really.

The Right Number is a nice clever little thing, poised and moderately funny. Where Apocamon is rancid, this is tasteful. So not really to my taste….

From Popbitch: “Robert Palmer was buried in a black Kiton 200 superfine suit with pale grey chalk stripe, white Charvet China silk shirt and coloured Sulka tie.” Now that’s class (the fact that I don’t know any of those names just makes it classier).

How extraordinary is modern science? This extraordinary:

1. Some guy has made a soundfile of what the Big Bang sounded like, and it sounds like the coolest piece of alternative music you have ever heard.

2. Last night I read to J from A SHort Guide to Almost Everything, the bit about Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, and when I finished, he said “cool!”. How cool is that?

From Wired: “LONDON — A massive bubble of gas that could cause havoc with power grids and satellite systems hit the Earth’s magnetic field Wednesday morning and is likely to have the biggest impact in Alaska and the Far East.

Scientists said the cloud of charged particles unleashed at high speeds by a hyperactive Sun and known as a coronal mass ejection, or CME, traveled at about 5 million mph.”

Brilliant way of indexing the 100 scariest movies of all time. And you can’t argue with much of it.

QuirksMode, a new site from a Dutch Web Developer, seems to have information on everything to do with compliance under the sun. How does he spare the time to make any money?