#236 a norwich blog

Update 16/04/08: I’ve binned the sociable plugin, so most of this post is irrelevant.

You may notice the presence of two new icons under each post that look something like this:

If you know what these are, click them. Do it! Otherwise, keep reading for your web2.0 / social media lesson for the day.

First icon: vote for the post on Digg.

Digg is a news site where articles are submitted and voted for by the public. The more votes an article gets, the higher up the listings it goes. The truth: as an end user Digg is crap, I’m just hoping to fluke some search engine rankings off this.

Second icon: bookmark the article in your del.icio.us account.

Del.icio.us is a great social bookmarking site, very useful even without the social aspect. Unlike Digg, I recommend using it. In short in allows you to bookmark websites and organise them by tags, groups etc. The best thing is being able to access bookmarks from anywhere, not just the browser you saved them in.

Also, any shared bookmarks can be viewed and searched by anyone. If you’re looking for something specific then searching del.icio.us can be more effective than Google, despite the flawed nature of tags.

On the social media subject, I take back everything bad I’ve said about Facebook. It’s actually quite impressive, just initially confusing. Myspace is still shit.

Any questions?

Another new design for the blog! Though if you saw old versions of unfunked you’ll know it’s an update of an old design.

Just to prove that I don’t always live the rockstar dream of fish fingers and champagne, tonight I prepared this humble dinner:

It’s turkey tikka. I even had to settle for rum as an accompaniment.

While there are other places on the internet you could read about films, they’re all wrong unless they agree with me. Today I shall be assassinating 28 Weeks Later, I’d say the following contains spoilers but that suggests it has anything worth spoiling.

Off we go. The story is weaker than Simon Quinlank’s lemon drink – frying pan, fire, repeat. It might have worked if it wasn’t the same frying pan every time, but evolving the plot would have been a great backup plan.

People in the film have absolutely no common sense. To my reckoning the virus outbreak, and therefore most of the film, could have been avoided at least four times:

1. They let the boy into their safe house when they know the infected are outside. It’s one of him, several of you, he has to die for the greater good.
2. The girl unblocks the safe house window-slats to look outside, giving away their presence nicely.
3. Annoying kids sneak out of the safe area of the city and find their infected Mother.
4. Despite having seen first hand what “the rage” does, Robert Carlisle’s character kisses the obviously infected wife.

I spent the whole film hoping that the main characters would be mutilated by zombies because it’s all they deserved for being so stupid. It ruins the drama when “will they live” becomes “I don’t care if they live“.

Finally, Bob Carlisle’s zombie vanishing tricks and firebomb immunity were ridiculous. One and a half films have shown “the rage” to turn people into mindless killing machines, then inexplicably it turns one man into a zombie Solid Snake.

In defense of 28 Weeks Later, nearly all modern horror films are rubbish. What do you think, was 28 Weeks Later crap, is the horror genre more stale than old bread, or has The Departed spoiled me so much that I can’t enjoy any lesser film? Answers in the comments.

Since they stopped trying to kill me, Wetherspoon have been making many changes to my lunchtime caffeine fix. First was the new coffee machine, which seems to make weaker americanos (aka black coffee) but much tastier lattes.

Next was the re-categorising of the existing sized mugs to “small” and introducing the larger hot chocolate mugs as “regular”. This also included a price increase from 69p to 79p on small, or 99p for a regular.

Yesterday, they redeemed themselves with this:

Behold, the Wetherspoon Magic Beans Coffee Reward Card – buy four small coffees, get the fifth free. Using mathematics, I can prove that this not only negates the 10p price increase, it works out 29p cheaper per five coffees! You can’t argue with numbers:

(79 x 4) < (69 x 5)

These particular numbers (with which you cannot argue) make my goal, which is to replace my soul with coffee and become immortal, more cost effective.

That’s actually Wally from Dilbert’s goal but Dilbert quotes seem to get search engine hits, albeit with 100% bounce rates. Spices up the website statistics a bit though.

Fish fingers served in wholemeal farmhouse bread with peri-peri ketchup accompanied by a side salad. To drink, Moët & Chandon Brut Impérial.

Screw the PS3, this is living.

Last.fm tags are unpredictable at best. “Electronic” played me grunge, “electronica” kicked up some indie, then “drum and bass” yielded detroit house. After trying a few more I’ve concluded that listening to any tag-based station is equivalent to putting all of last.fm’s playlist on random.

In my experience tags are messy beasts, user generated content has the inherent problem of users. To quote Peep Show’s Super Hans, “People like Coldplay and voted for the Nazis. You can’t trust people”.

At risk of alienating my faithful audience…

Posh fluff Emily’s eviction from Big Brother for “using a racially offensive word” gets tagged with “unnecessary”. Shame on gutless Channel 4 for bowing to political correctness, even though they showed the Diana car crash special. Anyway, I didn’t think anyone was even offended by “nigger” these days. Nas says it all the time on his “Nastradamus” CD, you’ll probably find that tagged under folk rock on last.fm.

Probably more important than Big Brother 8, last weekend I passed a Wing Tsun grading to earn my white belt.

This post is entirely self-congratulatory but it really is my most significant personal achievement in a long time, more-so than buying a house or writing a content management system. White belt may not sound too special, but for me it represents a combination of taking up something completely new, learning new things, and applying them.

Thanks for listening and well done to me. Yellow belt in three months time is the next step. Now what special things have you done lately / are planning to do?

I tuned in to channel 4 this morning whilst I ate my porridge, and while I didn’t intend to watch any of Big Brother, a certain event changed my mind.

Is Ziggy… gasp… Batemen?

The introduction of a man to the 11 phallus hungry women, shouldn’t have been able to hold my attention, but it did because the new man, Ziggy 26, is Patrick Batemen from American Psycho! His 80’s dress sense, materialistic nature and enormous resemblance to Christian Bale in the film version of Bret Eastern-Ellis’ novel go a long way to freaking me out.

If Ziggy does turn out to be an American Psycho wannabe and he finds a nail gun in the house - then you will most definitely find the torture, violence and killing online here.