Cherry Hinton Blues

Occasionally Updated. Rarely Rated.

Monday, July 26, 2004

Enter the googleDork

Big respect to "professional hacker" called "Johnny" who's put a great page up showing how Google alone can find examples of "inept or foolish" people on the web. Files containing "juicy info". Files containing usernames! Files containing passwords!!! It's all here. Amazing. Or perhaps not so amazing, I guess. »

Friday, July 23, 2004

Health Club update

I got shown all the machines at the Health Club today. They're very scary.

»

Tuesday, July 20, 2004

Ooooh I've joined a health club

Fat Bloke Need a good laugh? Ask the receptionist at our new href="http://www.nextgenerationclubs.co.uk/cambridge/index.asp">local health
club to alert you when I finally give the gym a try, then pull up a
chair and giggle uncontrollably for the whole five minutes I manage to keep
up the exercise. »

Thursday, July 15, 2004

Fahrenheit 9/11: scary

Went to see Fahrenheit 9/11 last
night, and well worth the effort. Film critics don't like it because they
think its lack of objectivity damages the documentary genre, and because the
publicity it's generating overshadows more worthy films, but this stuff
needs to get to the widest possible audience, and who cares how it's done?
One of the most frightening things for me was the suggestion - not really
followed through in the film - that the invasion of Iraq was because the
Saudis wanted it. The Saudis' investment in the USA is so huge that if they
pulled the plug, it could cause economic disaster. So when your biggest
shareholder says jump, you jump. Scary.

»

Wednesday, July 07, 2004

Comic Sans is not a font

I love all the campaigns to ban Comic Sans on the web, particularly, of course, bancomicsans.com, of which the highlight is the statistics page. This demonstrates how all communications will be in Comic Sans by 2030 and shows what it would mean. Actually, I've changed my mind, it'd be rather fun. »

Tuesday, July 06, 2004

And then there were... not enough, actually

As the new Chelsea manager decides he wants to trim his squad down to a core
couple of dozen players, I look at the Ipswich squad and realise we have
about twenty players in total, of which half a dozen are youngsters who have
virtually no first-team experience. We'll be struggling to fill the bench
some weeks if we're unlucky with injuries and suspensions. And this is a
team which finished 5th in the Premiership (and was one miss away from a
Champions League place) in 2002...

»

Thursday, July 01, 2004

Throwing out the CDs? Maybe

I read an article today about how quickly hard-disk-based music had changed
the author's outlook on his music collection, and I realised I was in
complete agreement. Six months ago I'd have been of the school which said
"downloadable music has its place, but unless it has a massive cost
advantage or something, I'll always want proper CDs". After all, it was a
wrench to go from nice big vinyl album sleeves to pokey little CDs; I'm
hardly going to give them up completely, am I?

Well, I'm beginning to wonder. The author of the article said that since he
got his iPod and started using his computer as a music source, his CDs had
begun to gather dust. And I have to say, so have mine. Do we really
appreciate all that cover artwork so much that we're prepared to forfeit a
living room wall to house it? Do we really want a physical CD so much that
we'll wait for our next trip to town (or wait a couple of days for
delivery), rather than having the album right now via a download?

Don't tell Mrs R, but I think if she now suggested that I pack up the 500
CDs on our living room wall, and dismantle the display shelves, I'd probably
do so. Even our living room music source is now a combined DVD/CD player,
and since I put my entire 500-CD collection on six DVDs as pretty reasonable
quality MP3s, I tend to use those when I want to play an album anyway.

Oh, it's all a bit confusing. I'll read this and laugh one day though.

»