wongaBlog
31May/072

The Independent goes bugnutty over wi-fi

I didn't think I could be surprised by mainstream coverage of pseudoscience, then along came the Independent with "My war on electrosmog: Julia Stephenson sets out to clear the airwaves". The subtitle is:

How one woman fought back after being diagnosed by her naturopath with overexposure to Wi-Fi and mobile phone frequencies

and the whole thing similarly reads like an Onion article. To say it gets worse is an understatement. Here's a sample:

“Any imbalance in our electromagnetic field creates a disturbance in cell structure and function, which can lead to illness in sensitive individuals,” says London-based complementary health practitioner Dr Nicole de Canha.

Even cordless hands-free home telephones - such a boon to multitaskers, enabling one to patiently listen to friends and family for hours while cleaning cupboards, re-potting house plants and reorganising the CD collection - are now off-limits. Their electrical force-field is nearly as powerful as that of a mobile phone. Since I’m now chained to a phone on a lead, my cupboards are filthy and my friends are neglected. But at least I’m less radioactive.

Radioactive?! (also, why the filth and neglect?)

We also have magical 'holograph field' pendants, 'electro-dictatorships', homeopathic drops that may 'reduce the amount of radiation in the body' and liberal quoting of people who appear to have no training in electrical engineering or medicine, all wrapped up in a brightly coloured cape of paranoid scaremongering.

Anybody playing a pseudoscientific drinking game would die. Do you think it could be a spoof? It's almost too ridiculous. As ever, Bad Science has the best coverage.

31May/070

Rush rush rush

Manic day. A job I estimated would take five minutes stretched into five hours. Simply put: a company can't connect to a couple of popular IPs, and I'm damned if I can find a reason why. Incredibly frustrating. I'll head back there tomorrow, but am hoping some ideas pop into my head overnight. Then this evening I nipped over to Nottingham to pick up my forgotten camera, which I'll be needing it for the upcoming dance weekend. It was nice to see Abi too, of course :-)

On the way back I listened to the latest in Escape Pod's audio of the Short Story Hugo nominees. Impossible Dreams and today's The House Beyond Your Sky were both excellent. I don't envy the judges one bit.

Ugh, it's nearly 0200. Bad.

29May/070

I can row a boat, canoe?

Anything considered

29May/072

I have no salt

I have had no salt for a couple of months. I don't know how anybody has salt. Nobody remembers, in the middle of Tesco, that they need salt. Other than people who've made lists, obviously. But that's cheating. Far more fun to get home and realise that yet again you slipped into the fluorescent netherworld befuddle bubble, and although you've got bacon, which you never eat, and chicken sauce, which you've got nine of already, the concept of salt was lost to you for those forty minutes. This was me last week:

  • 1100: Right. Today shall be different. I'll be in and out. Quickly. No worries.
  • 1105: Did that announcer just say 'good morning customers?'. Shall I shout 'ho-de-ho'? Better not. Why is that person giving me a funny look?
  • 1110: There are many people in front of the bananas. I'll loop around the salads and come back.
  • 1111: Strawberries! No. Mustn't.
  • 1112: Are those...the same people? The same people? HOW LONG CAN IT TAKE TO CHOOSE BANANAS?!

You know how irritating it is when the person ahead of you decides to pay by cheque / forgets their pin / can't find their wallet? A while back I started counting how long these procedures actually took. I reckon it rarely adds more than twenty seconds. I had the same thing with Hettie the arrival-time-predicting sat-nav: traffic-jams that seemed to take hours to clear only added three minutes to the journey. I've decided I can't be bothered getting annoyed at 'wasting' anything less than fifteen minutes, and it's impressive how much calmer my day becomes.

29May/070

Return of the monkey

The cut-down theme didn't affect downtime much, so I've reverted to the original. It was looking tired so I tweaked it a little. I'm still not happy, but it's better than before. The search box is now linked to Google, rather than an internal search. Google can search the entire page contents, comments and all, rather than the previous system which was limited to posts. It's less fun for me as I can't view stats on local searches, but that's no big deal.

The lack of difference makes me suspect the problems are more to do with my hosts than my site. I've been using mon.itor.us to monitor system uptime. It works well for server failures, but can't detect database problems. If my website responds with a 'cannot connect to database' error, mon.itor.us still registers this as a positive response. It's not possible to monitor a mysql server directly with their software, but I found a blog with a clever idea: monitor the phpmyadmin login page - that'll go down with the database. I think the database is going down frequently, and hopefully this will confirm my suspicions.

I've been a little disappointed in my hosts - Textdrive. I can appreciate that their job is to keep computers up and running rather than to help maintain individual sites, but none of my recent queries have even been answered, even an (you'd think) easy one regarding my general server load and whether I'm reaching the limits of shared hosting. Shame.

26May/071

Labrador vs. Dalek

The Plan: a sneak attack:

Die Dalek Die!

But it is not to be. Oh noes!

OH NOES!

25May/070

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes

I hope everybody has their towel with them today.

25May/070

Oh Gmail, I hoped this day would never come

Gmail has officially jumped the shark. They're putting spam in the toolbar now!

Gmail spam

This joke brought to you by my 13 year old self. The modern me is elsewhere.

24May/070

Three-and-a-bit Interesting Thursday Things

Via BA, a scale image of all known planetary bodies with a diameter of over 200 miles. It's fascinating. I knew there were moons larger than Mercury, but Ganymede's not all that much smaller than Mars. I'd be annoyed if I were that big and still called a moon.

In 1986, in a remote area of Cameroon, 1800 people in a circle of 12-mile radius abruptly fell over and died. Scientists investigated, and after a year's research realised measures were needed to prevent it happening again. Neatorama has the full story.

And, why eBooks are better than, er, Books, when it comes to bathtime. Read the various bookshop blogs and you'd think eBooks were the worst idea since marmite, but I'm happy to discover there are blogs who think otherwise. Andrew Marr, too. Booksquare - it of the wonderful header illustration - thinks the iPhone might be a major step forward...

24May/070

Up and running

My computer is now back in working order, hooray! The whole process took about a day, which isn't bad going. Unfortunately the Network Connection Just Dropping problem still occurs, but I've discovered that dis-and-re-enabling the interface solves it without requiring a restart, which is a start. There's no sign of USB-related crashes, which is very pleasant. I miss my dual-core processor, though. This morning I've had Picasa, iTunes and Firefox all go mental with 100% CPU usage, to the point that after 20 minutes I gave up waiting for Task Manager to appear. With my old processor this could - and occasionally did - happen all day without me even noticing. Ah well, it's worth it for the extra stability.