Somebody I know recently discovered an entry on his bank statement simply described as ‘hardcore’. Mr X didn’t recognise this and queried his bank, Lloyds. They investigated, and eventually found the cause. Mr X is using his overdraft, and at a certain point used more than a certain amount of money. Although still well within his overdraft limit, Lloyds charged him for ‘hardcore’ overdraft usage. Regardless of whether Mr X should have known about the charge, I’d like to know which genius decided it was a good idea to put the word ‘hardcore’ onto people’s bank statements. Could cause some awkward moments if a Significant Other queried it!

Last week I was working on a network connected to two adsl lines - one standard internet connection and one secure connection to another company - and needed to configure the computers so that specific external requests would be made through specific lines. The IP addresses were too broad to simply add entries to the routing table, so it had to be via URL. The obvious way is via a proxy server, but I have no experience with that kind of setup and the company in question probably wouldn’t be amenable to the inevitable downtimes while I tried to figure it all out. In the end I used a proxy configuration file, which consists of a small javascript function, for example:

function FindProxyForURL(url, host) {
     if (shExpMatch(url,”*.bbc.co.uk/*”))     {return “PROXY cabbages.com:8080″;}
     return “DIRECT”;
}

The browser checks the config file for every URL, and uses a proxy of cabbages.com for every bbc.co.uk URL while using the default settings for all others. I could use this to link to a proxy server on the secure line. This worked well, except that Internet Explorer’s proxy config file path setting doesn’t support UNC formats like \\computer1\files\proxy, so I couldn’t simply host a ‘proxy.pac’ file on one computer and have all the others link to it. I didn’t want to set up and configure an IIS server just for this, and equally didn’t want individual files on each computer as any changes would be difficult to implement. Eventually I discovered that IE does support UNC in the form of:

file://\\computer1\files\proxy

Which looks silly, but works Unfortunately Java, which gets its proxy info from the browser, doesn’t understand such a string, so I had to manually set a proxy in the Java config and hope that Java would only be needed on certain websites (could backfire, this).

I may need to set up a proper proxy server if it becomes any more complex, but for simple tasks a proxy configuration file seems to work well.

It does seem that many, many people are afraid of clowns. Or at least they say so. Maybe it’s one of those things that people use to fill a gap. Whatever the reason, mention clowns in any social situation and it’s almost a guarantee somebody will say ‘they scare me’.

Quite like clowns, myself. Never been afraid of them, either. I would venture, in fact, that clowns are cool.

I always wanted to make a short film in which a policeman pulls over a driver who turns out to be a clown in full costume. The policeman sees the oversize shoes and demands the clown drive around a test track to prove he can handle a car. The clown does this with aplomb, gets out, and the car completely falls apart, leaving the policeman sitting in a chair holding an unsupported steering wheel. Seemed funny in my head, anyway.

Norm posted my entry to his short short story competition! Chuffed.

Just spotted this:

Round numbers are always pleasing

After a fuss in the papers a few months ago, the 62-year-old woman gave birth to her child today. I had reservations when I first heard about it, but was completely turned around after hearing Penn Jillette’s take on it.

Penn suggests that there are far worse things in life than having older parents, and it’s hard not to agree. There’s every indication that the couple in question desperately want a child, and would love it very much. That counts for far more than any age issue, I think. People can whinge about how old the parents will be when the kid graduates, or whatever, but who actually cares? The kid’s going to say ‘my parents are old, I wish they’d hadn’t had me’? There’s no real reason that a couple in their sixties can’t physically look after a child. There are apparently measures in place should anything happen to the parents, too.

I see no moral issue. Sure, the child will probably lose his/his parents earlier in life than most people, but so what? Does that make his/her life not worth living¹? It depends on whether you think that putting a child into such a situation constitutes active harm, and I don’t. Any kid could lose their parents at an early age, and it being more likely isn’t enough to make a case for denial of ‘permission’.

The early death issue seems to be the problem that people bring up. What if two terminally ill 30-year-olds wanted to bring a child into the world before they died? They would last less than five years, say, at which point the child would be handed over to another, equally loving, family. Would anybody begrudge them this? What’s the difference?

The prevailing opinion that this shouldn’t be allowed seems heartless. It’s really a win-win situation.

1. On the surface this seems to have some parallels with abortion, but I don’t think it does once you think about it - the child is wanted, after all [↩]

Just back from Thank You for Smoking. Clever, really clever. It was fun to play spot the logical fallacy, although at times that made me pull a muscle in my head.

I very much like the Skeptico blog as it does a great job of annihilating pseudoscience. A couple of recent posts that I thought were excellent:

• In June 2000, an astrologer said ‘avoid terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001′. No trickery - she really said that before the event. Can you guess how she did it?.
• A wide-ranging study that aimed to compare cases of autism with exposure to MMR recently published its results. 28,000 children were watched, and in results directly applicable to the number of autism cases and the amount of exposure in the US, no link was found. Nothing. Of course, this doesn’t please crazy people, who say that doesn’t prove there is no link. I’m going to write to them about the dragon in my garage. Full details.

Via the Labour Humanists comes a great piece by Sam Harris on the question of morality outside of religion. I don’t hear that so much in the UK, but in the US there seem to be large numbers of people who think that orders from ghosts are all that stand between any individual and complete moral bankruptcy. Sam shows why this is crap in many ways; here’s one:

It is important to point out that we decide what is good in the Good Book. We read the Golden Rule and judge it to be a brilliant distillation of many of our ethical impulses; we read that a woman found not to be a virgin on her wedding night should be stoned to death, and we (if we are civilized) decide that this is the most vile lunacy imaginable. Our own ethical intuitions are, therefore, primary. So the choice before us is simple: we can either have a twenty-first-century conversation about ethics—availing ourselves of all the arguments and scientific insights that have accumulated in the last two thousand years of human discourse—or we can confine ourselves to a first-century conversation as it is preserved in the Bible.

I’d add that blind adherence to doctrine is actually a far less desirable form of morality than something you’ve thought through yourself. That’s not to say that many, if not most, religious people don’t analyse the morality of scripture - it’s only really the complete nuts who are happy to turn their brains off - but when you start from the basis of ‘god exists and says this’ you have to ignore or rationalise away large amounts of barbarism, because who wants to think their deity is any less than perfect? When your premise is invalid, chaos follows. A perfectly acceptable morality can be achieved through reason and compassion, and it doesn’t require jumping through mental hoops to avoid the clearly repulsive.

Sorry for the lack of posts this week. It’s somewhat turbulent around here atm and my head’s been elsewhere. It’s also been too bloody hot.

Via Jo I discover that ‘Andrew’ will be defined in the dictionary as:

Andrew –[noun]: A lewd street performer

I always wanted to be a street entertainer, but never had the force of personality to pull it off. I like this idea, though. Thing is, if it applies to all Andrews it’ll be me, Skuds and B4L working together on some kind of lewd performance…

Hmmm.

Current score in the one of the men’s double’s quarter finals at Wimbledon:

KNOWLES Bah v ASPELIN Swe
NESTOR Can      T PERRY Aus
5-7 6-3 6-7 (5-7) 6-3 21-21

Yikes.

Update: K&N just won 23-21, having come back from a match point.

That was a hell of a drive home. In the fifteen minutes I went from blazing sunshine to torrential downpour back to sunshine. Haven’t seen rain that heavy for a long time. Normally I’m happy of any excuse to use manic-speed-wipers, but it came very close to blocking my view entirely. In town the drains had exploded and at least one road was close to impassable, after only ten minutes of rain.

Still, some people have seen more water today. What a segue that was. David Walliams swam the English Channel for Sport Relief, taking only ten hours. You can ‘congratulate’ him by texting DAVID to 82125, which donates 70p (of a £1 total cost¹) to Sport Relief.

1. miserable phone network bastards [↩]

About an hour ago, I put a ready meal into the oven. Five minutes ago, I wondered how long it had left, and found I’d forgotten to set the timer. On removing the meal from the oven, I discovered I’d also forgotten to remove the film lid, so it hadn’t cooked terribly well. I removed the lid, then promptly dropped the whole thing while placing it back into the oven. It landed upside down on the open oven door. I sometimes delude myself with fantasies of intelligence; right now I’m wondering how I make it through the day.

I walked to the dancing venue a couple of minutes after the football ended, and people were emerging from the pubs. I’ve never been one for pubs: they’re too loud, smoky and crowded for me. One, however, was still broadcasting BBC1 at full volume, and as I walked past the Doctor Who theme suddenly soared through the air. It was so very cool, and I think the only time in my life I’ve been very tempted to enter such a place

This evening I went to a ball organised by the Midlands Amateur Dance Something, which took place at Stratford’s Civic Hall. I normally drive 15 miles for dancing lessons, so it’s pleasing when there’s an event within walking distance of home I went to the February evening, and it’s mainly a social dance. They play the standard modern ballroom and latin, plus a few sequence dances. There’s also a competition for amateurs.

My normal dance partner Lynsey wasn’t there, but happily I found myself feeling very comfortable, and relaxed immediately. Yay! I danced mainly with a lovely girl named Julie, and we entered the competition, which this time was a cha-cha. There were around fourteen other couples, and we entered just for fun. The man in each couple wears a number, the judges mark the couples and the top six are sent through to the second round. So Julie and I did our standard routine, with me trying very hard to break my bad habit of looking at the floor, and sat down, expecting nothing.

Then came a demonstration, which this time was an all-girl group of young disco dancers. They leapt and spun and contorted, and were very impressive. Given some of the expressions I think a few of the older men (Julie and I were probably 30 years below the average age, if not more) were unimpressed, and a guy next to us spent the whole show reading his magazine. The phrase ‘miserable old gits’ sprang to mind.

The compere then read out the numbers of the dancers through to the second round, and the final one was ours! I couldn’t believe it, but had only a couple of seconds to take it in before being ushered onto the dance floor. We went through the routine once more, somewhat surprised, and I fully expected to some sixth. A couple of minutes later and the results were announced in reverse order. We came fourth! I was amazed, but chuffed. We received a slightly odd plaque thing and had our photos taken with the other winners. I must see if I can get hold of a copy.

Ten minutes later I won a teddy in the raffle; he was quickly named Cha-Cha the Bear and took pride of place in the centre of our table.

Even excluding the competition it was a great evening. Julie and I picked up the Rumba One and Sennasometingcan’tremember cha-cha sequence dances by following the others. There was also a saunter together in very fast Scottish style, which was something new. I only sat out for the slow foxtrot, which I still can’t seem to do for more than one iteration, and am now rather tired! Overall, I had an excellent time, and am still chuffed about the competition