So, you want to make a film about robots. That’s great, robots are cool. You want to make a film about killer robots. Also fine, this has the makings of a great action flick. You want to make it kinda nonsensical. Not a problem, plenty of films are nonsensical but entirely enjoyable. You want the underlying themes to be anti-technology, anti-logic and anti-intellect, as well as having various thinly-veiled religious notions. Not so keen myself, but hey, plenty of people will still enjoy it. But given all of these things, why oh why would you decide to base it upon the complete antithesis of these ideas, and incorporate Asimov’s three laws of robotics? Why? Asimov wrote hundreds of stories in which he pushed, pulled and manipulated those rules as far as they could go, and in none of them did he ditch them when he felt like it. I find those stories completely fascinating and consider them some of the best sci-fi I’ve read. Why use them in a film, then just fudge about with them for the plot? Why? It would have been perfectly fine if you hadn’t done that. Really it would.

You owe it to yourself to listen to this. It’s all taken from genuine speeches, according to boingboing. I’m in awe of these kind of remixes.

Just back from Hitchhiker’s Guide…I enjoyed it in part, but I don’t do reviews so won’t say any more. I don’t remember Trillian being quite so arresting in the books, mind - I think they were going for the young geek audience there Hell, she turned up to a fancy dress party dressed as Darwin, clutching a toy beagle. I think I’m in love.

Ahem. It’s late; ignore me. I threw everything I had at the corrupted CF card today, but haven’t had any luck. I think I’m going to have to give up Ah well, these things happen. At least it was just someplace I can go again (such a hardship) and nothing important like a wedding / birthday / badger-symposium.

Bonnie Tyler’s telling me that I should be going “faster than the speed of night”. How would one go about that, exactly? Would this help? Probably not, I’m guessing. Bonnie seems to be enjoying herself, though.

Can you tell I’m tired? Thought so. I’d best dash. Night!

The flickr Creative Commons section has finally re-launched, and it’s very cool. I would write it up, but I’m just dashing out to see Hitchhiker’s Guide (crosses fingers.) Have a fun evening!

I really don’t know what to say:

Once upon a time, a blonde became so sick of hearing blonde jokes that she had her hair cut and dyed brown.

A few days later, as she was out driving around the countryside, she stopped her car to let a flock of sheep pass.

Admiring the cute wooly creatures, she said to the shepherd, “If I can guess how many sheep you have, can I take one?”

The shepherd, always the gentleman, said, “Sure!”

The blonde thought for a moment and, for no discernible reason, said, “352.”

This being the correct number, the shepherd was, understandably, totally amazed, and exclaimed, “You’re right! O.K., I’ll keep to my end of the deal. Take your pick of
my flock.”

The blonde carefully considered the entire flock and finally picked the one that was by far cuter and more playful than any of the others.

When she was done, the shepherd turned to her and said, “O.K., now I have a proposition for you. If I can guess your true hair color, can I have my dog back?”
—
Good day.

First of all, sorry for inconvenience. I have decided to put one of the best jokes to each of my advertising messages. I promise you to choose one of the best jokes each day, hope it would decrease your irritation of my messages.

And, of course, I need to offer you some goods. I always take only the best offers for my audience, usually I test it by myself. 100% quality, low prices, fast delivery. I hope, this joke about the blonde was new and funny for you. Today i want to offer you absolutely new Penis Enlargement Patch.

[link removed]

Click on this link to keep up my beginning of making spam not so boring thing.

Have a nice day.

Well, s/he tried Of course, there’s only so polite you can be while spamming people. Of course, I suspect a tiny hidden agenda given that it defeated my filter rather easily.

An ice cream van in our road! Many years has it been since the last such occurrence - usually they cruelly tease me with their faraway jingles. Naturally I couldn’t pass up the opportunity, so I’m currently devouring a 99 flake. Yum.

No big surprises here
[oh, forget stupid tables - the following are out of 100]

Labour: 61
Lib Dems: 25
Green: 11
Conservative: -25
UKIP: -43

The Labour Party is broadly pro-Europe and takes a strong line in favour of all anti-terrorism measures, and of course supported the war in Iraq. Labour is against explicit increases in income tax to fund public services and against the abolition of university tuition fees, but has pledged to reintroduce maintenance grants for students.

Take the test at Who Should You Vote For.

I was going to post a link to Nod’s terribly amusing picture from his conference, but I see it’s set as ‘all rights reserved’, so I can’t give you a preview. There’re these wonderful things called Creative Commons Licenses now, you know…

Speaking of photos, it’s looking like my first batch of Paris photos are gone for good. A dedicated card-reader arrived this morning so that I could use the various image recovery programs, but they’ve all drawn a blank. I was hoping that just a few bytes would be corrupted and bringing down the entire card, but it seems like the whole thing is dead. Damnation - there were some shots in there I was really looking forward to seeing.

I’ve been using del.icio.us for a few weeks now, and it’s Just Great. It’s an online favourites manager, and is easily the best I’ve ever used in that department. Once you’ve signed up for a free account you simply add a button to your web browser, and you click it whenever you want to save the page you’re reading. You can then add ‘tags’ to the link, to help you find it again later. Tags are basically keywords, so if you added wongaBlog you’d probably tag it as ‘blog’, ‘weird’, ‘monkeys’ and similar. All links I think people would find interesting are tagged with ‘wongablog’, and you can see these are displayed in a box on the blogroll. My entire links list can be found here. The front page of del.icio.us shows all the links that people have added, which is fascinating to browse. All tags (both general and specific to you) are available as RSS feeds, too.

Tagging, incidentally, is turning out to be way more intuitive than you’d think. flickr, Technorati and del.icio.us make heavy use of tags over more traditional folder structures, and I’m starting to agree with a blog post I read recently in which the author said he wished his hard drive could be organised in a similar way.

There’s also populicio.us, which displays the most popular links from the last 24 hours. This is a great way to find interesting sites in advance of the major websites catching on - I’d read the World Greatest Hacker post way before it started getting worldwide attention.

One of my favourite blogs is Lifehacker, and catching up on posts today resulted in many new del.icio.us links. For example, I’ve just set up the suggestions in this article on iTunes management, and it’s working great! I also found a tutorial on cheaply making a tivo-like machine, as well as learning that if you eat something 8-10 times you’ll start to like it (there’s apparently no genetic reason for us not to eat anything, it’s entirely learnt).

Most importantly, though, there’s this list of why geeks make good boyfriends, which you should forward to everyone you know.

Just off to bed, but I’ve just seen the BBC news ticker report that police have made an arrest over the Abigail Witchalls stabbing. I really hope it’s the guy.

At the meal last night:

She: Who are you here with, Andrew?
Me: Just Mum and Dad.
She: No girlfriend?
Me: Nope, afraid not.
She: Why not? You had one, didn’t you?
Me: Well, she left me.
She: Ah well. You should be playing the field at your age. Until you’re 24 or so, anyway. Go and have some fun.
Me: Ummm, I’ll try.
She: You’re not gay, are you?
Me: Nope.
She: Phew. Just wanted to check I hadn’t put my foot in it.

It was an interesting experience. The meal was with a company I’ve done some work for via Mum & Dad, and I figured it’d just be people I knew. There turned out to be a fair few more, and when we walked in it was much posher than I’d expected. Although there were a few ‘youngsters’ there, I was the youngest by a conservative 15 years, and most were much older. As you may know I’m not very good with people I don’t know terribly well - I get all insecure and decide that everybody would be better off not meeting me. It was the kind of meal where there’s a pre-arranged seating plan, too, and I was away from Mum and Dad so couldn’t just keep my head down. We also shared our initial meeting room with another group, which contained various attractive young women. Bear in mind that this is the person who, when somebody pretty sat down next to him at Paris airport on Monday, stood up and left in anticipation of the unlikely event that she tried to talk to him and he made a fool of himself. So this didn’t help very much - it was just nerves all round from the start.

You know something strange? I’ve mentioned to three different people recently that I’m studying maths and physics, and this has provoked them to tell me at length how awful they were at those subjects. But it’s more than just a brief ‘I could never get my head around it’. They’ve really spent time laying into themselves and their mathematical abilities. I can almost understand the societal impulse to be modest, but it’s quite stunningly awkward, as well as unnecessary, I think. For starters, I don’t actually believe it. They may have lacked interest, but I doubt they were actually as atrocious as they claim. It’s also quite tricky for me as I generally sit there, smile and nod without wanting to seem like I’m agreeing too vociferously. I think it’s perfectly possible in conversation to be proud of achievements without appearing egotistical. It’s a bizarre thing.

I also had a few conversations with people about future prospects, which was equally interesting from an anthropological standpoint. Most people’s advice centred around the financial aspects of jobs. I was told of relatives who are making loads of money and have company cars etc. I was told of professions that reap large financial rewards. I didn’t really pick up on this until somebody said that I should do whatever I enjoy, as long as I can make ends meet. That’s entirely my attitide, and I wonder whether most people don’t really think that too. Obviously money is extremely important - hell, I’m more materialistic than most - but I really couldn’t do something I wasn’t enjoying. In fact I haven’t - twice. I wonder whether people think that I should concentrate on money until I can afford to do what I want, or whether they don’t want to open themselves up to criticism by saying something that may be construed as bad advice in some circles, or whether they genuinely think that money is the most important thing. It’s fascinating.

They were all very pleasant people (although extremely Conservative ) and I’m sure they wouldn’t mind my comments above. I remained pretty nervous and didn’t do a great job at socialising, but also didn’t do or say anything tremendously stupid. Hopefully.

I’ve just uploaded 50 or so shots from Paris. I’ve yet to rescue the shots from my dead memory card, so there’ll be more soonish (I hope.)

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