From the Independent:

Last week, Toby Dawson, a Korean-American with Elvis-sized sideburns and daredevil skills to match, won the bronze medal in the men’s freestyle moguls. His heroics made headlines in the US. In distant Busan, South Korea, they created a sensation.

After watching the event, friends and relatives of Kim Jae-su called him to say that Dawson looked exactly like the son Kim had lost in 1981, when the two-year-old boy became separated from his mother in the town’s market. His father never set eyes on him again. Until, perhaps, now.

Pretty amazing, thus far.

[T]he toddler who became Toby Dawson was found near the same marketplace. The person who found him left him outside a police station. After his parents could not be found, he was placed in an orphanage, where he was adopted by Americans Mike and Deborah Dawson, ski instructors at the US winter sports mecca of Vail, Colorado.

Kim and his wife, meanwhile, had searched everywhere for their tiny son. “I didn’t think reporting it to the police would be of any help, so I went around looking for him myself,” Kim said.

Hmmm? What, now?

The couple never filed a missing persons report.

There must be more to this story, surely.

Bit-Tech says that forthcoming Ricky Gervais podcasts will be released on a subscription basis, with four episodes per month costing ~£4.50. The Ricky Gervais website appears to back this up, as it’s now displaying the Audible logo and offering a ‘free preview’.

I admit I happily pay £0.79 for three-minute iTunes tracks. I occasionally rent DVDs at £3.85 for one night. Dancing costs me £4 / week. I very much enjoy the Ricky Gervais podcast, but I can’t see myself paying £4.50 a month for four half-hour shows. It may be hypocritical of me…but I just can’t see it happening. It wouldn’t need to be much lower, I don’t think. I’d pay 79p a show without a problem. I’m not really making sense, am I. It just seems…too much.

Mediawatchwatch reports that Stephen Green, head of Christian Voice, responded to the recent news of Arts Council funding for Jerry Springer: The Opera, with:

As far as I am concerned, Jerry Springer: The Opera appeals to people who like treading in dog shit.

Well you…umm…you…you like to eat your own sick! A ha! Full stop end of the page no more paper in the whole world Mr Green!

I just can’t stop laughing. Apparently his actual first reaction was ‘what the fuck? what the fuck? what the fucking fucking fucking fuck?’

It would be nice to think that nobody will take this man seriously ever again.

Generally, when I get a phone call about a computer problem it’s something like “Word won’t load”, or “the network icons don’t work any more”, or “the printer won’t do landscape.” Nine times out of ten the problem is software-related, and doesn’t take more than twenty minutes to fix. Not, however, this weekend.

In the last five days I’ve had four computers Just Stop Working. The first went down after a power cut, refusing to boot from a cd, let alone the hard disk. I diagnosed a motherboard b0rked beyond all hope, and put in an order for some replacement hardware. On Sunday my sister’s laptop abruptly stopped booting with “load needed dlls for kernel”, which was a new one on me. With a bit of luck that’s some kind of massive software cockup, and a repair install will fix it up. This morning one of the office PCs didn’t even get so far as booting, simply beeping like a demented droid. To be fair, it’s nearly six years old and is due for death fairly soon, so I ordered a replacement motherboard / cpu / ram for that too. This evening I’ve been told that my uncle’s laptop - only six months old - is stuck in a nearly-get-into-windows-but-conk-out-and-restart-just-before-anything-happens-loop, even in Safe Mode. First thoughts are that it’s a dying hard drive, but I’ll need to take a look.

It’s really not all that common to have such major problems. I must have upset the electron fairy.

I love Gmail, but it irritates me that new features take months to arrive at Gmail UK. Auto-saving of drafts was the last major feature added, and that was in December. In the US they have integration with Google Talk, RSS Feeds, Auto-responders, ‘Accounts’ so you can send from different addresses…Lots of cool stuff. Still, I was happy enough, until last Friday when it abruptly stopped loading in Opera. Firefox and IE still worked, but Opera just stalled. This was annoying. I looked on the Opera forums and it seemed to be a UK-only issue. Then somebody replied with the following:

If your language is set to English (UK) (in the gmail prefs), you are using an old version of gmail. Try setting your language to English (US). That should fix it and give you a whole bunch of new features (grouping of contacts!).

Not only did that fix the Opera problem, but I now have all the cool stuff! Six month’s worth of new features added in about a second - nice

Bloggers4Labour had its first anniversary last Thursday, and a meetup was arranged at a Whitehall Wetherspoons. On first hearing about it I hadn’t intended to go - I’m not good in pubs generally, nor around people I don’t know, and also I’m only political in phases. Skuds put some of my fears to rest and convinced me it would be fun, so on Friday I headed down to London. I arrived half an hour early, so wandered down to the embankment and back. At around 1900 I headed inside, spotted the famous B4L sign and introduced myself to Andrew, the creator of B4L. Others soon arrived, and eventually there were¹:

Andrew - B4L
Andrew - Andrew Brown
Skuds (real name Andrew) - I found that essence rare
Damian - Pootergeek
Kerron - The voice of the delectable left
Neil - Brighton Regency Labour Supporter
Paul - Mars Hill
Paulie - Never trust a hippy
Tom - Let’s be sensible

It’s most odd meeting people whose blogs you read daily - everybody’s strangely familiar, but at the same time, not. I relaxed very quickly, and had an excellent time.

Neil’s blog is always provocative, and at one point he remarked on his ability to offend people without meaning to. At this very moment an Old Guy walked past and stopped, spotting Neil’s camouflage jacket:

Old Guy: What rank are you?
Neil: I’m not in the army
Old guy: What rank are you?
Neil: I’m not in the army
[Old Guy walks away, then turns and comes back]
Old Guy: That’s very confusing, you know. It certainly fucking confused me!
[Old Guy makes wanking gesture, and leaves]

We were very impressed at this ability to offend without doing anything at all!

Conversation ranged from religion to the smoking ban (we were all of one mind on this, so it didn’t last long) to classic television. Unfortunately the others were sadly deluded over the best Doctor Who - it’s Jon Pertwee, clearly. This conversation had natural continuations…I have been told that I must stick around for a second series.

I realised after a couple of hours that everybody around me was drinking beer, while I was on lemonade. Somebody else had bought me the drink, and I realised that I’d completely unconsciously been using the supplied straw. Not terribly manly, but I felt so comfortable that I wasn’t bothered
Unfortunately due to limited space we were forced to split onto two tables, so I didn’t get to talk to Damian, Paulie or Andrew B very much. I’d certainly like to hear from Damian about what it’s like to run a blog with more than a couple of dozen regular visitors. Next time, hopefully.

I was very surprised to find it was 2300, but I’d had a great time. It was the complete antithesis to dancing the previous night. Many thanks to Andrew for arranging it, and to Skuds for his help.

Update: Other people’s roundups - B4L, Andrew Brown, Skuds, Kerron, Neil, Paul, Paulie and Tom.

1. was…were…argh [↩]

Jerry Springer: The Opera is notorious in the UK. There were some complaints when it opened in the West End, but the main media coverage occured when it was broadcast by the BBC. Christian groups (’Christian Voice’, mainly) complained in their thousands, some about the swearing, but most regarding the religious content. Ofcom subsequently rejected the ruling¹. High street stores, including Sainsbury’s and Woolworths, bowed to pressure from Christian Voice and pulled the DVD from sale, drawing fire from Equity, amongst many others. A cancer charity refused to accept a £3,000 donation after Christian Voice contacted them. The subsequent UK tour was lobbied against and looked for a while like it would be cancelled, but was saved when regional theatres stepped in. The fuss was fascinating to me.

I always found the Jerry Springer show crass and unpleasant. I didn’t want to see people fighing, swearing and upsetting loved ones on television². The idea of a musical based around it was entirely unappealing. But all of the protests intrigued me. Was this actually a show entirely based around bad language and exploitation, and designed just to annoy Christians? From the publicity it seemed like the show was intended to shock, and that was its sole hook. As I became more interested in religion and its effect upon the world, I took more notice of news articles relating to the play. I then discovered that Stewart Lee³, its writer and director, is a humanist. Humanism is all about treating people well, and it seemed unlikely that a humanist would write something just to offend Christians⁴. What was actually going on, here? When I discovered that this Saturday’s performance would be the last in Birmingham, I snapped up tickets.

Quick warning: my review contains extremely bad language.

Continue reading ‘Jerry Springer: The Opera - Review’

1. I take issue with some of their defence - “Ofcom did not believe that the characters represented were, in the context of this piece, conveyed as faithful or accurate representations of religious figures, but were characterisations of the show’s participants” seems like a cop-out to me, but the freedom of speech issue was well-put [↩]
2. there was a West Wing moment where a bed-bound President Bartlet saw the show, commenting ‘do these people vote?’ [↩]
3. of the comedy duo Lee and Herring, incidentally [↩]
4. arguably naive, I admit [↩]

Having written most of a long Jerry Springer review this morning, I’ve just come to finish it off and found myself too tired to do so. The sentences just don’t seem to be working very well…I don’t want to publish something I’d long to fix on a read-through tomorrow morning, so shall wait until I’m awake.

I’ve just uploaded the few B4L photos to Flickr, too. They didn’t turn out so well as I’d hoped, but at least they aren’t completely black!

Incidentally, it turns out that coComment doesn’t work at all like my recent overview suggested. As this blog post of theirs points out, they do not crawl comments. New comments from the ‘Your Conversations’ page will only appear if they are posted by other coComment users. I apologise profusely for not realising this fact, although in my defence it wasn’t made very clear. In my view, this makes the entire service much less useful. It’s handy to have a list of places I recently posted comments, but having to visit each page manually…I feel a bit cheated, really. They say they’re working on incorporating non-coComment-user responses, but if the experiences of the FeedLounge team are anything to go by, the infrastructure needed for large-scale crawling is easy to underestimate.

Hope that made sense. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to collapse.

Lots to say today As soon as I’m home I’ll transfer the better pictures from the Bloggers4Labour meetup. This is the first chance I’ve had to check the blog for a while - didn’t realise the previous B4L shot was quite so dark. I already have an entire Jerry Springer post drafted in my head, too.

Protesters outside Jerry Springer! This is their literature. We think the t-shirt is appropriate, too
Edit - I should point out that Tamsin only happened to be wearing the shirt by coincidence (she didn’t know she was going until a few hours before!), which is why I took the picture - we didn’t go intending to annoy anybody.

I’m stuck in a lift! This has never happened to me before Most exciting.

Update: We tried the lift’s phone, but there was no dial tone. After hearing somebody walking nearby, we shouted for help, and they then called the building’s caretaker. Happily we’d stopped moving almost perfectly level with a floor, so they managed to open the doors so we could step out. It seems the entire building’s power had gone out, including the ‘emergency help’ phone - some great planning, there! Despite this delaying my already-tight run for the train, we made it with twenty seconds to spare

Andrew, Kerron, Neil and Paul. Am having a good time
(hmmm, bit dark! More pics coming soon)

I’m off to the Bloggers4Labour anniversary meetup in London this evening. I was happy to find that not only are there direct trains to London from Stratford, but it’s a chiltern train that goes through Banbury, so there’s a £15 return ticket! Given that I was once charged £80 to visit a client in London (they paid!), I’m happy with that.

Bit nervous about the meetup - half the reason I blog is because I have the social skills of a mole - but hopefully it’ll be good. They’re all terribly nice people, after all My political credentials aren’t quite so hot as most, but hopefully that won’t matter.

I’ll stay overnight in London, but am seeing Jerry Springer: The Opera in Birmingham tomorrow night, so have to get back in time for that. I’ve no idea what I’ll think of the play, but I’m too intrigued to let it slip by

FeedLounge was down for upgrades yesterday, and it was most odd. Great things could have been afoot, and I would have known nothing about them…I was trying to remember my most commonly checked feeds, then doing ‘I’m feeling lucky’ google searches for the pages, since I didn’t know their addresses.

The good thing is that FeedLounge has had major speed improvements, and really is very snappy now. That’s it - the last irritation sorted. I have a couple of issues with Opera, but they don’t claim full Opera support as yet (at least one is an Opera bug anyway), and they’re easy to sidestep. Difficult to begrudge them their $5/month, really

I’ve finally been forced to buy a new motherboard, and it arrived yesterday. It’s an Asus A8R-MVP, and features include:

• Use incredibly complex USB devices like webcams / iPods / card readers without taking down Windows!
• Plug in firewire drives without completely kakking up the boot process, requiring a keypress on every restart!
• No ridiculously broken¹ hardware firewall!

The above problems were inherent in my Abit nForce4 KN8 motherboard, and seem to be quite common in the nForce4 line. I’m staying well clear of that particular brand from now on. The new mobo is an entirely different chipset, and is reputed to Actually Work Properly.

Motherboard replacements are probably the most annoying operation to perform on a computer. The whole case has to be taken apart and reassembled, and then Windows must be completely reinstalled. It’ll certainly be worth it, but will take a fair while, so I’ll leave it until next week.

1. some have claimed that it is possible, with windows reinstalls and all sorts of software manipulation, to get this working properly - even if true, it’s still crazy [↩]