maynardcase.co.uk linkfest

This is a brief step-by-step guide to setting up Firefox and Sage so that you can subscribe to blogs such as this one, and easily check if they have been updated.
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It wasn’t a good start.

When your driver calls you and explains he can’t find a way of getting to your house, a certain sinking feeling tends to drag you down. Still, once I’d found his shiny black Mercedes at the wrong end of a one-way street round the corner, we were on our way to Heathrow. From getting out of the car to sitting down in the executive “but stressed businessmen need free beer” lounge took a mere fifteen minutes - quite impressive. The flight was relatively pleasant, the on-seat screen was quite neat, the selection of entertainment on said screen was resolutely uninspiring, the food was actually quite nice, and the stewardess was a miserable dried-up hag. Gotta love flying American Airlines. Found the car dispatcher chap, got the car into the City and arrived at The Carlyle. Room: fine, if not amazing - but the bathroom was a self-conscious person’s nightmare, being mirrored on all four walls from floor to ceiling. Very impressive, although I don’t like being able to see myself from multiple angles.

Got up early the next morning, got some breakfast at the hotel and headed to the office. Nine hours passed relatively quickly, my boss flew in by about 3pm NY time and we left about late for a dinner at a nearby Italian. I’m afraid I can’t remember the name, but there were two main features that stood out in my mind:

1. The enormous and hugely tacky “sculptures” of bits of human anatomy - noses, eyes, and so on. It’s a memorable experience when you spend your evening dining sitting directly below a giant breast.
2. The main course, shared between three of us: a 48-oz Porterhouse Steak, sliced up and served around a bed of rocket leaves with a rather tasty balsamic dressing. Absolutely gorgeous - crisp and slightly burned on the outside, tender and juicy on the inside - very much an Atkins diet meal.

This was followed by a brief trip to Hooters, purely for the comedy value.

The one thing that hits you about New York is purely how much it is like your mental image of New York. It’s very “New York-y”. The yellow cabs, the smoke coming up out of the grills in the road, the skyscrapers, the street stalls grilling up everything from hot-dogs to halal; it’s all very much as you would imagine it to be. And it’s an exciting place to be; the place does seem to buzz with a certain energy and frenetic desire to move forward, to get ahead.

Wednesday passed quickly enough, with just enough time for me to get annoyed by the toilets in the office. Firstly, the cubicles have big gaps around the doors; I don’t like having an audience (see above). Secondly, everything is automatic. Which is fine, but things tend to happen before you want them to, or last shorter than would be helpful, and generally conspire to piss you off. When you’re spending five minutes trying to figure out how to get the fecking toilet to flush, you know that life could be made easier. USian bathroom designers: worried about hygiene? Either a) Get a grip, or b) install a floor switch. Sheesh.

Wednesday evening started at the Red-Eye Grill where I had a rather nice crispy duck salad followed by a half-rack of ribs, which I obviously didn’t finish, only having a regular-sized stomach.

Afterwards I had my camera, so decided to walk down 7th Avenue towards the glare of the screens of Times Square. The screens there are bright and more than numerous - you can’t help but feel slightly overwhelmed. The boundaries of taste are stretched some way past their snapping point, but that’s part of the gaudy fun; it’s way over the top but makes you laugh rather than be annoyed by the ludicrousness of it all.

My boss was more than happy to get a shot of me with the Naked Cowgirl, and also now has the picture of her on her own as the backdrop of his phone.

I wandered downtown past Bryant Park, where a huge group of natives were watching the Yankees game. It made me regret that there isn’t a single London team for football games that the entire capital could get behind (or more likely, complain about). I eventually found my way to the Empire State Building for some late-night tourism; it was quiet and the rows of velvet-roped lines made me think of Shrek as I bypassed them. The view is pretty incredible, and the accent of the “NY cabbie” character who narrates the audio tour was similarly impressive.

Thursday was enlivened by a sneak trip out of the office to Tiffany’s (the gf had made it clear that she didn’t expect a present, so I thought it would be nice to get her one), and finishing up the remaining space on my camera’s memory card.

The final evening was spent at a place on the Upper East Side called Maya, which does magnificent Margaritas (we were working our way through quite a lot of the Especials), although the food didn’t do anything for me; my primitive Londoner’s idea of Mexican is fahitas and tacos, not a Tamal al Chipotle. Afterwards to a bar called “Becky’s” which had an impressively large selection of beers and live “music” in the vein of Phoebe from Friends. Acoustic versions of Pink Floyd tracks are sometimes good, but mostly something to be avoided. Got a cab home very quickly…

Returning home from NY sucks, for a variety of reasons.

1. JFK. What a miserable airport. Getting through security was bad enough, but to then discover I was at the gate, with no sign of nice “executive lounges” or other little comforts that I was hoping for. Stuck with the proles - outrageous!
2. Jet lag. Gah. Three hours sleep really isn’t enough; feeling like death seems like a reasonable punishment for defying the zones of time. Unfortunately I was extremely tired and miserable when meeting up with my gf later on that day, just before a five-hour drive up North. Perhaps not the best time for a long journey. We made up the next day.
3. Not being in New York - it’s a great place and hopefully one I’ll visit again.

Sunday only, I’m afraid, so no Lemon Jelly or Iron Maiden reviews here. We arrived after a two mile trek from the car park to see All-American Rejects on the main stage, trying desperately hard to warm up the crowd. After a while having someone screaming, “I love LEEEEDS”, at you lessens the impact. They did quite well, though, and there were some good melodic tracks there. After that there was a bit of a gap; we saw some unsigned folks, listened to some crazy metal/trumpets/saxophone band whose name I’ve forgotten, then a spot of Roots Manuva. You can tell there’s a big set of speakers behind that main stage; the bass was pretty impressive. I’ve never had my head actually vibrate before.

We made our way over to watch The Others (singer’s catchphrase: “bless your little cotton socks”), who were rocking pretty hard but I didn’t recognise any tunes. This was followed by Ed Byrne in the comedy tent, who is absolutely brilliant, even if his Carphone Warehouse radio ads are extraordinarily annoying.

Quickly back to the main stage to catch the end of the Charlatans, who were… well, rather uninspiring. They managed to leave the stage before anyone noticed, which is pretty impressive. We then had Razorlight who was pretty good - some good performances of some catchy tracks. Kings of Leon were on next, who I’m not so keen on but had more songs that I recognised than I had expected. Finally, the headliners: the mighty Foo Fighters.

This band was essentially why we’d forked out for tickets. They played a blinder, a great set with a few of the new tracks but mostly the old favourites re-worked for a great live show. Dave Grohl chatted amiably to the audience, was genuinely concerned that people didn’t get stomped in the mosh pit, and gave a lot of energy out to the crowd who responded in kind.

All in all, it was even worth waiting an hour in the car to get out of the car park at the end of the night…

I’ve created music compilations as mini-presents for friends, but deliberately left off the playlists for two reasons:

• to avoid prejudices of the listener immediately dismissing tracks
• because I couldn’t be bothered

I’ve finally got off my arse and got some of these playlists typed up, so I thought I may as well share them here.

[now updated with 2002 playlists]
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Everybody should be using Firefox, rather than other dodgy browsers.

Why? Well, there’s a couple of decent reasons:

• Better security - gets rid of popups and avoids spyware
• Faster - a lean browsing experience
• Standards Compliant - because these things really do matter

Apart from all of that is the good support for RSS: this is a mechanism for keeping up to date with web pages that update their content regularly. It’s easy for RSS software to determine if there’s any new exciting content for you to browse, and you can easily glance through what’s available to see if it interests you.

In the case of Firefox there is a built-in RSS tool - simply click on the icon in the bottom-right of the window and select the “Add RSS feed” option, and you’ll get a special bookmark folder that contains links to all the new articles.

Alternatively, you can get a Firefox extension called “Sage” which allows you to collect lots of RSS feeds and check all of them to see what’s got new stuff to look at.

As a final bonus you’ll find that this page itself has an RSS feed so you’ll never have to come here only to be disappointed - you can just check to see if there’s anything new!

Netscape was ten years old recently. It seems amazing that something so bizarrely world-changing is so recent; it seems like such a long time ago that I first set eyes on the pulsating “N” icon.

In the slashdot article above there was a link that caught my eye - from the web site of Jamie Zawinski, one of the original Netscape developers. It was from a diary he wrote while writing the UNIX version of Netscape and makes for very interesting reading. It reminds me greatly of Microserfs - one of my favourite books, as you can see from my reviews page… and you can read an extract courtesy of Wired.

On the trip back from York this weekend we went past a motorway sign every few miles. Occasionally they would have fairly boring messages:

• “Don’t drive tired”
• “Debris on road: slow down”

Apparently they have had things like “Merry Christmas” at the right time last year. Which got me to thinking: surely the guys who write these things get bored. Just think of the devastation and disaster you could create with a few well-placed messages:

• “What’s the top speed of your car?”
• “Brake suddenly”
• “Slow down: T-Rex ahead”
• “See the road: always use full beam”
• “The driver behind you is giving you funny looks”

Think of any more?

Courtesy of The Register, this is a marvellous collection of spam poetry - little bits of spam emails that seem to have a deeper meaning. My personal favourite is the lovely phrase “Translucent gibbon rucksack bonanza”.

All this is because when Bayesian filtering started becoming popular, spam mail generators starting writing code to generate nonsense that looked like English. This was done using a Markov chain nonsense generation system - you simply look through a piece of text, and analyse which words follow which other words. For example, in this article the word “this” is followed by the words “is”, “was” and “article”. Once you’ve done that, pick a word at random to start (eg. “This”), then pick one of the next options (eg “is”), and repeat until bored. A sample bit of text from this article could read:

“Done using a word at random to have a sample bit of spam mail generators starting writing code to have a sample bit of text from this is a marvellous….”

Not perfect sense, but it’s difficult to automatically distinguish from English. Despite this, the war against spam continues on new fronts, with Sender Policy Framework trying to ensure users only send mail as themselves (preventing spoofing of “From” addresses) - although this won’t prevent all spam, even when Microsoft adopts it. International agreements to do… well, something about the problem are being forged (although as this only includes the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia it’s unlikely to be terribly effective).

No doubt the fight will continue, although probably at some cost to both freedom of speech and the plain simple convenience of email.

I noticed today on the tube an advert that grabbed my attention. It was for a service that requires you to text a number. Most of these advertise such puny offerings as phone ringtones or directory enquiries.

This, however, gives you the answer to any question that you choose to ask - “within minutes!”.

I thought of several that they might be a bit more hard-pressed to answer (any suggestions, mail me!). But it also occurred to me that this would surely be the most interesting job in the world - one minute you’re looking up the wingspan of a dodo, next you have to find out when the next train from Hammersmith to Ealing Broadway is. Apart from anything else, just think of the winnings you could make from pub quizzes. I wonder if I can apply?

Bastards. I think that macho ads like this are really, really annoying. This is because of a few very simple facts:

• The stock market generally goes up (over a long period of time, where long > 5 years)
• At the moment the FTSE index has been going up steadily for about a year
• Funds that are managed by people generally don’t do any better than “tracker” funds which just invest in whatever is in an index (eg. the FTSE 100). So rather than having to make decisions about what shares to buy or sell, you just invest in all the companies in the index. Zero effort and so a lower charge. These tracker funds generally perform better than 75% of managed funds over a long period of time (ie. 5 years or more).

So these idiots can spout off about “beating the market” and many people will believe them. And the reason that they are advertising now: because the market’s going up and so any fool can give decent returns on the money (barring anything disasters). The fact that there’s only a 1 in four chance of them doing better than the trackers is obviously not very important to their marketing department.