Sandeberg Rising

No net access for the foreseeable future, so blogging by phone sporadically. I’m at the client site, reading docs, guzzling coffee like a mofo and wanting to smoke. Also looking forward to the pub.

BBC NEWS England West Yorkshire Cooing at new-born babies banned: “Debbie Lawson, neo-natal manager at the hospital’s special care baby unit, said: ‘Cooing should be a thing of the past because these are little people with the same rights as you or me. “

And not a moment too soon. Not because the babies (at this time barely aware of their surroundings, never mind human rights) might object, but because it is generally a silly, twee practise.

Seriously though, why didn’t the specific hospital in question (I know it’s headline news in a national paper, but it’s only one hospital in West Yorkshire) just leave the reason at the increased risk of infection, as opposed to this ridiculous human rights angle?

BBC NEWS | UK | Drunk young women ‘taking risks’

Portman Group Press Release: “A shocking new survey conducted for responsible drinking campaigners, The Portman Group, shows that almost four in ten young women (36%) have been sexually assaulted after getting drunk.”

I had so many angles on this topic in my head about this topic, but after evaluating them all, I realised that there is no safe way for a man to talk about sexual abuse publicly. It’s just going to go wrong regardless, it’s such a touchy subject, and if you don’t know exactly who your audience is, and what their opinions are and how open-minded they are, you’re totally screwed.

So I shall just leave you with the link, the quote, the above back-peddle, the disclaimer that I do think sexual abuse is a terrible thing and the following question: Which definition of sexual abuse did the Portman Group use when commisioning this survey?

BBC NEWS | Magazine | Tingo, nakkele and other wonders: “The Japanese have bakku-shan – a girl who appears pretty from behind but not from the front. ”

I particularly liked that one.

Anyway, I haven’t blogged what I’ve been up to for a while, so I’ll get to that now.

Wednesday involved me going for a couple of beers with Stu. You’d think that considering I live in the town where he grew up and where his mum lives, I might manage to meet up with Stu more often than three or four times a year…

Thursday evening I met up with Alison for a meal in Farnham. Haven’t seen her in ages, probably since Conception 2005. A very pleasant evening.

The weekend mostly involved me distracting Penny from packing up her belongings and not being much use at all. I did manage to break Endless Games quite a lot, but it’s all backed up, so it shouldn’t be too hard to put back to where it was. I guarantee it will be back up before the Aberrant game!

I’ll be sending emails to to see who’s up for joining me for DragonMeet this year. Last year was a blast, and mainly involved Andy and I getting more and more drunk and playing less and less games.

The Observer | International | Armed and dangerous – Flipper the firing dolphin let loose by Katrina: “It may be the oddest tale to emerge from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Armed dolphins, trained by the US military to shoot terrorists and pinpoint spies underwater, may be missing in the Gulf of Mexico.

Experts who have studied the US navy’s cetacean training exercises claim the 36 mammals could be carrying ‘toxic dart’ guns. Divers and surfers risk attack, they claim, from a species considered to be among the planet’s smartest. The US navy admits it has been training dolphins for military purposes, but has refused to confirm that any are missing.”

Dutch Reporter to Use Heroin, Pot on TV – Yahoo! News: “A field reporter for a new Dutch television talk show plans to use heroin and other illegal drugs on the air during the weekly program on issues that concern young people, producers said Wednesday. “

Bizarre. But what can you expect from the country that brought us Big Brother?

However, there were some interesting statistics at the end of the article:

6 percent of Dutch have used marijuana recently, compared with 8 percent in the United States, 8 percent in Britain and 9 percent in France. For cocaine, it was 1.1 percent in Holland — and rising quickly — compared to 1.3 percent in the United States, 1.5. percent in Britain and 0.3 percent in France.

Well work is getting busier and busier. Tomorrow I won’t be in the office at all, off to a client site. I’m glad it’s getting busier, there’s nothing worse than inactivity.

Well, I finally managed to install SUSE Linux. It was a lot less scary than it could have been once I’d done some background reading. I’m sure it shouldn’t have been that scary in the first place though, and I shouldn’t have had to do any background reading to install it. While installing an operating system is hardly a day-to-day activity and certainly not having two co-exist on the same machine, we are often told these days that Linux is ready for the end user and it’s not as techy as it used to be. Rubbish. Sure, I could trust the suggestions of the installation program (they were pretty much correct), but then why did I need to make all the decisions? An normal computer user will not understand what it means when the boot sector is on hda1 and root is installed on sda1 which will be repartitioned and formatted with the ReiserFS file system. Eh? Like I said, it all worked smoothly, but I was confronted with a lot of technical questions, and I’m supposed to reasonably technical.

On use Linux was quite pleasant and intuitive. I decided to opt for GNOME rather than KDE as a desktop thingy, mainly because I’ve read it can auto-mount USB drives, which I use quite heavily. One frustration is that I’m going to have to download codecs to view most movies and listen to most of my music. For various copyright reasons they were not included with the OS which I find quite annoying. I want it all to work out of the box. It manages to come with an adequate office package (I would describe OpenOffice 2 as excellent, if it weren’t for that immense let-down, the database is ships with), half a dozen MP3 players, but if you want to listen to a WMA or watch an MPEG you have to go online.

I watched the directors cut of Alexander the other day and I really enjoyed it. I’ve not seen the theatrical release of Oliver Stone’s epic, but I’ve been informed the directors cut is much better. Alexander got panned in reviews when it came out in cinemas. Empire Magazine’s review was one of the more balanced. It gave it 4 stars and described it thus: “Unwieldy and flawed, but Stone remains a tornado in an era of airless formula and — to paraphrase our Ptolemy — its failings are greater than most films’ successes.”
Interestingly, they only gave the director’s cut 3 stars, saying it was cut down and more audience friendly than the more cumbersome theatrical version. I can’t comment on that, but I did enjoy the directors cut. The characterisation was good in my opinion. Some judged it hammy and overacted, but these are strong, epic even mythical characters. Sure, the plot jumped between the campaigns of Alexander to his youth all the time, but it was well timed to show where his decisions came from and what his influences were. Some say the battle scenes were too messy, bloody, violent and horrific. Yes they were. It was war in simple, bloody, vicious times. Fans of the battles of Troy will be appalled. I thought it was great, depicting clearly that there was no glory in his conquests, just blood.

And yet, Sin City is still my film of the year.

ipod radio
Originally uploaded by fatcontroller.

World of Warcraft ‘plague’ swamps servers | The Register

Now this I found interesting. It must have fascinating to watch this plague spread across the virtual world of WoW, but probably also a little creepy. Perhaps it’s a little too much horror for a game that mostly consists of ‘kill the mob, steal it’s treasure’. There are indeed many a cry of “Why am I infected, I did nothing to deserve it, it’s unfair!”. Players want someone to blame and they are blaming the creators (of the game). Of course death in WoW is not permanent, it’s not like the characters are being wiped out forever when they get the plague, but it’s still causing distress. And in game? It’s certainly causing paranoia, segregation into ghettos, mistrust of others. Brilliant idea…

BBC NEWS | Politics | Call to end sex education opt-out

This came out of the LibDem conference, and I’m all in favour of it. I didn’t even know that there was such a thing as an opt out, which just seems insane. I hope we never get to the state in the UK as they have in the US, where sex education is thought to encourage sex. The UK already has the second highest teenage pregnacy rate in the developed world (the US having the highest, they must obviously have too much sex education).