See Saw

We bought Saw on DVD a few days ago and at the time knew nothing about it. The cover said it had Cary Elwes and Danny Glover in it, which Kate and I took to mean it couldn't be bad.

We watched it Saturday and were both impressed with how damn good it is. This movie rocks. If you like Se7en and movies of that nature then you'll love Saw. I'm saying no more about it because there's an incredibly good plot twist that I just didn't see coming and I don't want to give anything away.

My big question is... why was it not nominated for a bunch of Oscars? The screenplay alone is so original it should have at least got a nod. Just more proof of what a charade the O$cars have become.

Lies and Disinformation

Petco

We were in our local Petco a couple of months ago to pick up a few bits and while I was there I saw that they had some young pythons in a glass tank. I stopped to take a closer look at the snakes and I noticed a small red speck above one of the snakes' eyes. As I looked, the red speck moved. Then I noticed lots more red specks all over the snakes. They were infested with mites.

We mentioned this to a manager and she seemed concerned but since then we've been in the same Petco several times and nothing much seems to have changed - the place is still not as clean as it could be and I've noticed that rats, mice, guinea pigs and other small animals scratch themselves more than is normal, and they still have too many to a cage. At the time I just assumed that our local Petco was an isolated example.

This morning I was googling for pet supplies and I came across this site which in turn links to this one. It makes for pretty horrific reading but to sum it all up, it's plainly obvious that Petco neglects the animals they sell because it's cheaper to let animals die of disease, hunger and thirst than to pay for treatment to keep them healthy. It stinks. Kate and I will never be going into another Petco and if you're in the US and have pets, we urge you to read the linked pages before you consider buying from Petco.

Check out Kate's words on this subject here.

Microsoft

The April edition of Scientific American has an interesting article about spam and what's being done about it. There's some good stuff about spam filtering but then it goes on to describe Sender ID. And that's where it goes a bit pear-shaped, because (1) it mentions only Sender ID and does not even acknowledge the existence of CSV and DomainKeys as alternatives, and (2) it says that Sender ID is "a new industry standard" - which is a total crock because Sender ID is not a standard and never will be as long as it needs a license agreement from Microsoft.

And who are the authors of this masterwork? Why, none other than three guys who work for (you guessed it) Microsoft.

In other words the whole article is nothing more than a disinformation piece to try to trick readers into thinking that Sender ID, a Microsoft product, is not just an Internet standard (not true!) but is also the only antispam technology (also not true!). Hey, if they fool enough people that Sender ID becomes a standard (even an unofficial one) that's another great big pile'o'cash from the developers of all the mail servers that will be forced into paying fees to implement the licensed technology.

I don't know who Scientific American had review this piece, but whoever it was either has little or no knowledge of the current state of anti-spam, or works for Microsoft.

Some soccer quotes...

I'd forgotten I had these...

The new West Stand casts a giant shadow over the entire pitch, even on a sunny day.

CHRIS JONES, Evening Standard

What will you do when you leave football, Jack - will you stay in football?

STUART HALL, Radio 5 Live

Unfortunately, we keep kicking ourselves in the foot.

RAY WILKINS, BBC1

I've got a gut feeling in my stomach...

ALAN SUGAR, BBC1

I would not say he [David Ginola] is the best left winger in the Premiership, but there are none better.

RON AKTINSON, Carling FA Premiership WWW Page

Johnson has revelled in the 'hole' behind Dwight Yorke...

Carling FA Premiership WWW Page

An inch or two either side of the post and that would have been a goal.

DAVE BASSETT, Sky Sports

Both sides have scored a couple of goals, and both sides have conceded a couple of goals.

PETER WITHE, Radio 5 Live

You don't score 64 goals in 86 games at the highest level without being able to score goals.

ALAN GREEN, Radio 5 Live

What's it like being in Bethlehem, the place where Christmas began? I suppose it's like seeing Ian Wright at Arsenal....

SIMON FANSHAWE, Talk Radio

And we all know that in football if you stand still you go backwards...

PETER REID, Tyne Tees Sport Special

I was saying the other day, how often the most vulnerable area for goalies is between their legs...

ANDY GRAY, Sky Sport

The lad got over-excited when he saw the whites of the goalpost's eyes.

STEVE COPPELL, Radio 5 Live

They [Rosenborg] have won 66 games, and they've scored in all of them.

BRIAN MOORE, ITV

If you can't stand the heat in the dressing-room, get out of the kitchen.

TERRY VENABLES, Capital Gold

The lads really ran their socks into the ground.

ALEX FERGUSON

He [Brian Laudrup] wasn't just facing one defender - he was facing one at the front and one at the back as well.

TREVOR STEVEN, STV

It's now 1-1, an exact reversal of the score on Saturday.

Radio 5 Live

...but Arsenal are quick to credit Bergkamp with laying on 75% of their nine goals.

TONY GUBBA, BBC Match of the Day

...an excellent player, but he [Ian Wright] does have a black side.

GARY LINEKER, BBC

We say 'educated left foot'... of course, there are many players with
educated right foots.

RON JONES, Radio 5 Live

That's twice now he [Terry Phelan] has got between himself and the goal.

BRIAN MARWOOD, Radio 5 Live

Mark Hughes at his very best: he loves to feel people right behind him...

KEVIN KEEGAN

Football today, it's like a game of chess. It's all about money.

NEWCASTLE UNITED FAN, Radio 5 Live

Gary always weighed up his options, especially when he had no choice.

KEVIN KEEGAN, Radio 5 Live

We threw our dice into the ring and turned up trumps.

BRUCE RIOCH, ITV

And I suppose they [Spurs] are nearer to being out of the FA Cup now than any other time since the first half of this season, when they weren't ever in it anyway.

JOHN MOTSON, BBC

... and he crosses the line with the ball almost mesmerically tied to his foot with a ball of string...

IAN DARKE, Radio 5

Fun for the weekend

A man goes into the Doctor's surgery with a pork chop in one ear, a potato in the other and a carrot up his nose.

"Doctor", he says, "What's wrong with me?" and the Doctor says, "You're not eating properly."

Destruction of the ANWR a step closer...

The senate has voted by a narrow margin to leave open the possibility of drilling for oil in Alaska - just another example of the current administration selling the country by the pound.

Sierra Club press release

Carl Pope, Executive Director of the Sierra Club, said:

Even the oil companies know that America’s energy future does not lie in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

CSS and the Eeek! Factor

As I mentioned a few posts back, Kate and I bought a book about CSS. Since then I've read about half of the book, which pretty much covers all of CSS (the rest of the book goes into DOM and JavaScript). With the new knowledge under my belt I've been through my blog template and now for the most part I understand how it works, and I was able to fix a couple of the problems.

I've also been redesigning my web page using the new stuff and the result so far is a vast improvement over the old design. As I was making changes, using the book as a reference, I was able to test what I was doing in Firefox and the new pages are rendering just as the book says they should.

A little while ago I thought I'd upload the pages to the web server on my Linux system and make sure they still came up ok, which they do. So far so good. So I asked Kate to try hitting the same pages on her machine using IE6, which she did...

Eeek! What a damn mess. All the text rendered as great big 24-point bold characters, and that in turn blew away the layout because with such big text it couldn't fit the main content and the sidebar side-by-side so it pushed the sidebar down below the main content. The result was the web-page equivalent of a six-vehicle freeway pile-up.

I went back through the CSS to see what might be wrong, and I was able to fix most of the problems by forcing the text sizes to what they should have been. It's pretty obvious that IE6 doesn't implement CSS quite right.

There are still a couple of problems to fix and I'll do that if I can, but one thing I've always detested about web design is having to kludge a page to fix problems caused by browser incompatibilities.

If anyone knows of a web page with workarounds to get IE6 to render right, I'd appreciate hearing about it. In the meantime I'll see if I can fix the last few problems but if I can't do that in a reasonable time I'll probably end up having to add a footnote to all my pages saying something like, "best viewed with something that isn't Internet Explorer".

A word from our sponsors

Random thoughts about communications:

The telephone was invented in 1876 and it's usually Alexander Graham Bell who gets credited with the invention. I'm sure he thought that the ability for people to communicate over long distances must have been like magic. Last year, four calls out of every five that we had at home (especially in the evening) were telemarketers trying to sell us junk we didn't want. Thank goodness for Do Not Call registers.

Fax: great idea. I'm sure the inventor thought so too. Half the fax messages we get in my office are advertisements from people we've never heard of.

Email: I started using email in the late eighties. At that time the Internet was in its infancy and it was pretty much unheard of for private individuals to have connections at home. As such, email was exclusively used for real mail. The Internet boom and the invention of the Web changed all that. These days many people get more spam than genuine email.

You see where I'm going. Every form of communication ever invented soon gets used as yet another channel for marketing and advertising, often to the point where the commercial traffic hinders the flow of real information. Some TV channels seem to use at least half the air time for advertising - five minutes of the show we're trying to watch (paying to watch, since we have cable) then five minutes of ads; rinse and repeat. Radio is the same - I sometimes have to scan through five or six music stations before I can find one that's actually playing music. Magazines often have more pages of ads than actual copy.

As soon as a new communication technology is developed, it seems to be just a matter of days before somebody figures out how to flood it with advertising. Microsoft's Windows Messenger (not MSN/.NET Messenger - that's similar but not quite the same thing) was developed to allow network administrators to broadcast important messages to the network users; it is also used to pop up adverts. The ICQ client downloads advertising graphics. A few days ago, when I was casting around to find an RSS reader, one of those I tried included a frame that was filled with advert graphics (need I say that I uninstalled it immediately).

The marketing people that jump on any new communication channel seem to think it's their right to do so. When the national do-not-call legislation came in, people like the Direct Marketing Association were sobbing about how "they wuz robbed" and how many telemarketers would be out of a job (my response: Tough!).

They say that advertising keeps the economy moving. They say that without advertising we'd be stuck with state-controlled TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, you name it.

Maybe that's true. But they way I see it, when every communication channel we have gets flooded with adverts to the point that the real messages are lost in the noise, something needs to be fixed.

We've got bigger fish to fry

I wouldn't normally weigh in on the subject of the Ten Commandments being displayed on government buildings and in any case it seems that it's all over, with the supreme court saying it's ok "because they pay tribute to America's religious and legal history". That's fine by me, but I should point out that it would have been fine by me either way. The reason I'm saying something now is that with all the heated words from both sides I haven't seen anyone mentioning the point of view I lean toward: that the whole thing was a waste of time and taxpayers' money.

The main argument against allowing the displays is all about the separation of church and state - something that I agree with heartily. The danger, apparently, is that displaying the commandments is tantamount to an endorsement by the legal system. To me it's plainly obvious that there is no danger.

Consider: normal, well-adjusted people know that it's wrong to steal or commit murder. We don't need a book or a stone tablet to tell us that. It's also wrong to commit rape or molest children - but I don't see a commandment forbidding either. As for "no other god before me", that's just plain silly in a country that is not exclusively christian.

What about coveting? For one thing the way it's worded provides more than a hint that the writers considered wives as no more than the property of their husbands. In any case I covet all the time - for example, I often see a Chrysler Crossfire and a new Thunderbird in the office parking lot, and I can't go near them without my brain's Coveting Lobe firing up. I think the people who wrote "thou shalt not covet" down thousands of years ago must have thought it was a brilliant way to control the believers - make a sin of something that is totally intangible, unprovable and universally practised, then you can tell everyone they're all miserable sinners and must be saved.

The point is that unless the courts decide to make coveting a crime, with death by stoning as the penalty, I don't think we need to worry too much about what gets displayed on government buildings. As such, arguing about whether or not to allow the displays on the outside of government property is about as important as arguing what kind of wallpaper is right for the inside.

If we want to talk about separation of church and state, consider this statement:

I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.

This is the oath of office that US senators have to swear. Note that the part I've italicized is not optional (the oath the president takes is different and doesn't officially include the "So help me God" part, although it's customary to add that in practice).

Now perhaps this is just as pointless as the "commandments on buildings" argument, but it seems to me that the nature of the oath makes it impossible for someone to be a senator unless they believe in the christian god, and in principle that it is equally impossible for someone to be president unless that person is a christian.

So much for separation of church and state, then.

A Message to Bush-Bashers...

...and in fact, president-bashers of all administrations - red, blue, whatever: Keep on bashing.

Here's why you should

In 1939 Germany under Hitler annexed Poland. Shortly afterward, France was invaded. Hitler wanted to control all of Europe and things could have gone that way. Had that happened Europe would have been under the control of a militaristic dictatorship - citizens would have lost the right to choose who led them, the right to free speech and more.

If you've ever wondered why Britain and the US went to war against Germany, here's the answer: it was to preserve our rights to vote, to speak out against the actions of our leaders without recriminations, and much, much more. Many thousands of men and women died protecting those rights so that we would still have them today.

For US citizens the right of free speech is embodied in the text of the First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

You have the right to voice your thoughts; you have the right to be heard. Nobody - nobody - has the right to stop you speaking out against the government when they do something that you don't like, think is a bad idea, wrong, or just plain stupid. You should speak out against your government, loud and often, when things are wrong in your view. That's how democracy works. Keep your mouth shut when things are going down the toilet and you may as well join the ones pulling the chain.

This is why I get annoyed when I hear someone saying that it's "unpatriotic" to criticize the president. My answer to these people: YOU are the ones being unpatriotic. YOU are the ones being unconstitutional. If you only want freedom of speech when you like what's being said, there are are still plenty of dictatorships to choose from. Don't forget to revoke your US citizenship when you get there.

The current climate seems to be quite anti-Bush. There is a lot of commentary criticizing the current administration, and from where I sit the main pro-Bush response to this seems to be calls for the dissenters to shut up, rather than any reasoned argument about why they're wrong. As far as I'm concerned this speaks volumes.

My own opinion is that Bush is an undereducated religious-right redneck in a suit, ready to sell the country's every natural resource and welch on every agreement that hampers big business, just so that his big-business friends can make a fast buck, in office because of a bogus ballot based on a bogus war based in turn on lies. That's what really pisses me off; Clinton was impeached, not because he had an affair with an intern, but because he lied to the American people about it. Bush lied to the American people about weapons of mass destruction in the middle east - lies to justify a fake war that cost the lives of over a thousand soldiers and thousands of civilians. When are we going to see him impeached?

Sir Bill?

According to Reuters, Bill Gates is going to be knighted by Queen Elizabeth II "for his outstanding contribution to enterprise". Aargh. So he'll be Bill Gates, KBE. At least we won't have to call him Sir William (that honour is reserved for Brits).

On the other hand I suppose it could turn out for the better. I'm thinking of how the ceremony could go if it were Elizabeth I, as depicted in Blackadder II, doing the honours...

Elizabeth I: Arise, Sir oops...(slips on the steps)

Bill Gates: Aaach! (cut short as razor-sharp sword snicks his head off)

Nursie: Ointment - that's what you need when your head's been cut off.