Apathy Sketchpad

Today was my first day back at uni, and marked the beginning of my third year (of four — mine’s a proper degree). It is also the first day I have been both sober and well for the last week, which is why there’s been no updates in a while. Last week, of course, was Fresher’s Week, and that means lots of clubbing, lots of drinking, and just a little bit of pulling cute freshers. And I’m told I had a very good time, though I remember very little of the week between leaving Revolution on Monday and waking up at noon on Sunday with a killer hangover and someone stood in my doorway, but that’s OK because it was only Adam come to see if I wanted any food. Unfortunately this period of drunkenness/hangover/freshers’s flu included an introductory meeting at university, and now I have very little idea what’s going on.

Luckily, this does not seem to put me at any notable disadvantage, because nobody else seems to have any idea what’s going on either. My housemates have spent the day looking through the module handbook trying to second guess which options they chose last year and therefore which lectures they should attend. Our lab convenor and head of year has been absent all day apparently without telling the undergraduate office, so the lab safety talk was conducted by the technician (who generally has a rather better idea of what’s going on than anyone else anyway). Meanwhile, our demonstrators are nowhere to be seen, and none of the computers work properly.

Even more luckily, there exist several organisations to help up. There are, of course, the official ones the University offers, but there is also a 24 hour beer delivery service just in case we run out. This is probably a fairly common one, but today someone came round and delivered some beer trophies. I opened to door and he gave me three roadsigns. Of course, there was a shining good reason why he did this, but personally, I think it will be a lot more fun if I don’t tell you what it is.

Unless you’ve been living in a glass box above the Thames for the last month, you can’t help but have noticed the new film out, namely Calendar Girls. About this time last year, the news, particularly the local news, was full to bursting with the terribly dull news that a group of women had taken their clothes off and posed for a calendar. It’s been done before, of course, and with better looking women, but this one seemed to get all the media attention. This was a very bad thing, although noone realised how bad at the time. We thought it was just annoying, but we assumed that a news story about a calendar would die down after a couple of weeks when nothing vaguely interesting happened. And true to form it did, but then Round Two began. Round Two was perhaps marginally more interesting than Round One had been, but only marginally. In Round Two, the focus shifted to a film that was being made about the calendar. This was more newsworthy, because while many video games, stories, books, and TV series had been translated to the silver screen, this was the first time a calendar had ever made the transition successfully. After a while of silence, Round Three began. Round Three was probably the least interesting phase of the whole pointless operation, and now the focus had shifted to the release and premier of the film.

This sort of news annoys me. It’s like the launch of the Euro: Everybody knew exactly what was going to happen, when it would happen, and where, and therefore the huge banner headline afforded to it by The Times seemed wholly pointless and seemed to imply that the changeover had caught everybody completely off-guard. I for one do not need a newspaper to tell me what entirely predictable and inevitable event has happened, I just need a calendar, and I certainly don’t need a newspaper to tell me about the calendar.

But I suppose all of this beats the alternative, since as I have mentioned the alternative is to live in a glass box above the Thames for a month. This, of course, is the other tedious and pointless story in the news lately, and I actually feel a little dirty contributing to its coverage like this, but anyway…

I am not going to try to answer the moral issues here, I am not going to debate whether or not he’s really going to do it, and I am certainly not going to try to offer any medical insight. I just want to say that it’s a stupid idea. I want to point out that Sky One, thanks to the alleged wonders of digital television have a camera on his box twenty four hours a day, and that this is even more stupid because thanks to his ridiculous obsession with pointless feats of endurance he is temporarily the only person in the country who is physically incapable of doing anything even slightly interesting. It’s like Big Brother without the contestants (or the house). I think I’ll turn off the interactive service, thankyou, and watch the adverts.

The adverts, though, are getting worse. I’m thinking specifically here of Tesco’s new billboard campaign. It started out just being bad. That I could cope with; most adverts are. Now it appears thay have abandoned any attempt to make any kind of sense on any level at all. The one’s I mean are the ones with a picture of a child dressed up, usually recognisably, as a celebrity, and a slogan which just barely connects to it. For example, there’s one with a kid dressed as Craig David, and the slogan reads “low prices on bread rolls, even when he’s a pop idol”. I suppose I should mention, in their defence, that the kid is using two bread rolls in his less than elaborate Craig David disguise, but that doesn’t change the basic facts, which are that being a pop idol has nothing to do with the price of bread, Craig David has nothing to do with Pop Idol (or bread), and nobody’s going to recognise him immediately because he has mercifully refrained from releasing and music for a long time and he was never that distinctive in the first place, especially without the beard.

When I first got Windows XP, the first difference I noticed what that it looked a whole lot nicer. This is not because I’m shallow, but rather because the idea of using it with my eyes closed until I thought “hey, this doesn’t crash as much. I wonder what it looks like” never occurred to me. One of the new graphic niceties is a blurry drop-shadow effect on the mouse pointer, which I have to say looks rather snazzy.

Just so you know, I am not against expending processing power on this sort of frivolous decoration. I think that computers these days are quite powerful enough that if they’re sat there word processing or displaying web-pages they may as well spare a little excess clock-time on ornamental lighting. It’s high time computers started to look a little more like they do in films, and Windows XP is a step in the right direction, in my opinion.

Anyway, the first thing I noticed about the pointer shadow effect was that I rather liked the look of it, and the second thing I noticed about it was that the computer apparently didn’t. The shadow vanished at random, and because it is such a small thing I often didn’t notice until it had been gone fore some time and therefore found it very difficult to work out what was killing it every time I put it back. Thankfully, though, God in His infinite wisdom blessed us with an internet (presumably He has some divine reason why He saw fit to wait until 1995 or so to do so), and said internet came to my rescue. The problem, apparently and somewhat randomly, was that Worms World Party is known to kill pointer shadows.

This struck me as strange, but stranger still was the discovery that if you minimised Worms and quit it from there, the shadow survived. This was odd, but I accepted it, and lived with it for a while. Then I noticed that Worms was not the only game which destroyed the shadow. I had two other games which also apparently hated that particular lighting effect, and the interesting thing is that I had written them both. I worked out that it was probably a bug in DirectX, and that made sense because Microsoft wrote that and blaming something on Microsoft is basically geek for “such is life”.

But the really bizarre thing about this little story is that today I noticed the shadow had quietly slipped back under the mouse pointer when nobody had been looking. i remember putting it back a few days ago, but I also remember playing my games last night, so DirectX presumably either didn’t see it or felt merciful. So today we learn that DirectX is sentient, and has preferences as to your display. It’ll probably be changing my wallpaper next.

There has been a marked increase as of late in the amount of false advertising you see. Now I don’t mean “false advertising” as in adverts that lie. I mean commercials that look and sound like advertisements, but in fact are demonstrating the worst things about the product or service in question. This is all very honest and laudable of them, of course, but nonetheless it seems like a mistake to me.

The first one we noticed was a Norton Finance advert asking “are you financially fit,” and showing a woman trying vainly to lift too many weights. Luckily for her, a helpful Norton Finance employee showed up and moved the pin so she only had to lift one easy, affordable weight. Almost immediately Adam pointed out that this would have absolutely no benefit as an exercise anymore, and almost immediately I pointed out that it was therefore a rather better analogy than anybody realised.

Not too long after that, Maoam’s latest orange-flavoured bar launched. Their advert featured a fruit fly feasting on the orange filling, while a second fruit fly shouted “you shouldn’t eat that. That’s not real orange, you idiot, it’s an artificial additive”. Again suprisingly honest and factual, but not the best advert in the world by traditional standards.

And there’s more of this around than you might expect. As well as the “now fits in your handbag” magasine mentioned last week, which fails to mention that this is because it is barely half its old size, there is Nivea’s new “55% natural caring oil, 100% silky soft skin,” which fails to mention what the other 45% of it is, Pantene’s claim of “healthy-looking hair”, which Lizzy assures me is as much as can be said about it without being nasty, and British Airways’ “Don’t risk disappointment with any other airline”.

A far better product promotion is the one Persil are running at the moment. I’m not saying they actually do have an ulterior motive here, but just think for a while about the benefits to a detergent company of offering free paint to primary schools…

Earlier this week, in a bored moment, I typed “a good website” into Google to see what it threw up. I was hoping to see a good website, but what I actually saw, and in retrospect what I should have expected, was a list of pages about how to make good websites. I read some anyway. Apparently, this is A Bad Website. According to their little lists, I should have a search facility. I actually tried to add one a few days ago, but ran into a problem when IE saved the wrong page. But never mind, I’ll do that later.

They also said I should never underline anything, which I don’t anyway, so that’s alright then. Then they told me to always underline links. This seems to flatly contradict the last instruction, so I will ignore it. Frankly anyone who can’t spot my bold, blue links probably can’t read anyway.

Oh well, not much point typing any more of this. Why don’t you go and read A Good Website?

Scientists, or at least astronomers, have a very big job ahead of them. They have to identify and name as many rocks as possible. This would seem like a futile and pointless exercise if the rocks were someplace where we could go and look at them, but these rocks are millions of miles away in space. The obvious question is “why?”, but the answer is not too hard to deduce: Periodically, one of these rocks will leave the belt and pass comparatively near the Earth. The scientists’ aim is to spot a near-miss before anybody else does, so they can be on the news. Hypothetically, if they spotted one which actually would hit us, we almost certainly couldn’t stop it, and I doubt very much if there would be much benefit to the scientist in the anarchy that would doubtless follow any announcement. Near-misses, though are a good move. First, you can shock the world by announcing the Armageddon ‘might’ happen on an ominously specific date in the future, and then a few months later you can tell everyone that after doing further calculations, all we will get is a pretty light-show in the sky.

This all might seem like a terribly pointless branch of science, but to be honest the occasional asteroid story can be very good in a slow news week like this week. I mean, almost nothing seems to have happened on the world front. We have had front page stories to tell us about a rather large power cut, that the ancient Romans might have worm socks with sandals (which would explain both how and why they invented underfloor heating before anyone else), and that one — one — British soldier was killed in Iraq. This kind of news irritates me. I realise it has a ‘personal’ edge that makes it accessible to the public, but unless I actually know the guy, I can’t see it as being bad news after the numbers lost in the rest of the war, and If I do, I don’t think I’d want to hear about it on the news. Similarly the long, repetitive news stories about child murders. I don’t mean to seem uncaring, but I can’t help thinking that there is usually more than one being investigated at any given time and the hopelessly arbitrary coverage of certain ones can’t be good for families of the other victims.

And then there’s the local news. Local news is usually less than enthralling, but this has been a slow week and we have had a story about a man getting stung by a wasp (granted it killed him, but then he was allergic to wasp stings), a man who died of even less spectacular circumstances (granted he was a pretty well liked guy, but I can’t see how that merits all of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire hearing about it) and a man who found a rather large spider in his luggage after returning from holiday. This last was captioned “Spider-Man” on the Look North report.

And all this, you must realise, is the reputable news printed on large sheets of rough paper and then in mirror writing onto your forearms. The news printed on A4 gloss is even worse. I’m told by a friend who had the misfortune of being bored enough to read such a publication that there is a lengthy story about Chris Evans and Billie Piper taking a holiday together, which might be shocking news to any of their readership who have forgotten that they are in fact married (which was probably reported in an earlier issue of the same magazine). This might, though, be a large section of the readership. One of these magazines recently shrank, and this was advertised as a good thing not because there was less of it but because it would now fit in your handbag if you happen to have a particularly large handbag.