daily life: wise words.

I must be too intelligent for my own good, that's because my Mandibular Third Molars are coming in, or to be more precise they have been coming in for the last 3 years. It's reasonably common for some or all of your wisdom teeth to partially erupt, but it frickin' hurts and I've had to live with Vertical Impaction for 3 years.

What is the point of Wisdom Teeth? I certainly didn't sit around thinking 'I sure wish I had a few more molars because because the 28 teeth I already have just aren't cutting it for me'.

They are just another evolutionary dead end, bits of the body that humans haven't needed for thousands of years, probably required when monkey-men ate food that was difficult to chew. Or if you don't believe in Darwin, it's because God is a douche and wants me to suffer.

English Teeth, English Teeth!

Shining in the sun

A part of British heritage

Aye, each and every one.

English Teeth, Happy Teeth!

Always having fun

Clamping down on bits of fish

And sausages half done.

English Teeth! HEROES' Teeth!

Hear them click! and clack!

Let's sing a song of praise to them -

Three Cheers for the Brown, Grey and Black.

— Spike Milligan, "Teeth"

what were you thinking: Knights who say Ni

I've actually had to make  a new category for this one.

As a trained (and if I say so myself, rather expert) Computer Scientist I am very wary about security, and regularly laugh at the comical techniques Spammers use to clog my inbox with junk. If you actually do click on that link to 'Claim your $1million from the King of Zimbabwe' then you deserve to be scammed, it is Darwin at work
As they say;

ignorance is no excuse in the eyes of the law

So I get rather annoyed when my personal security is compromised by the incompetence of multi-million pound or dollar organisations who have entrusted my details to Infinite Monkey Theorem, only instead of producing Shakespeare they obviously produced the most useless security system imaginable.

Recently I had been noticing an increase in SPAM, which transpires was possibly (don't want to get sued now do I) due to a breach at Silverpop, a company providing email services to many large brands including Play.com. Why any company would entrust millions of customer details to a company with a name even a 5 year old would find childish is beyond me. But they did.

So now my details, along with millions of UK citizens, and many more across the world are on every spammers hit-list.

technology: the sincerest form of flattery

I wasn't actually planning to do this post. I haven't actually used Open Office in years since it corrupted a lot of my documents. But after an avid reader pointed out the Open Office developers blatant attempt to rip-off MS I just had to critique.

I was one of the few that liked the Office 2007 Ribbon, and with MS incorporating it in Windows 7 even those that didn't are stuck with it.
Realising that the Ribbon is actually pretty good, Sun/Oracle decided to shoehorn it into Open Office. If any of you have written Java (which Open Office is written in), you will know that, to put it politely, it sucks in the UI department, so it was never going to look pretty. But not even Lucifer himself could have created such an abomination, a sight so abhorrent that to look upon it is to peer into the darkest abyss of humanity.

It is actually so awful that I have had to overlay it on Office 2010, because to look upon it's entirety will drive the sanity from you. Just look what it did to my beloved dog, I hear she is now ruler of a middle-east nation.

So ignoring the fact that Open Office is not very good, using it will turn you into a drooling lunatic, destined to live the rest of your existence with the knowledge you have seen the worst man can produce, no longer able to see all the beauty in the world.

technology: playing with fire

I have mentioned the irrational hatred that exists for Microsoft in the past, and never is this more prevalent than with Internet Browsers. Yes, IE6 was pretty pants, but IE7 and IE8 weren't bad.
Many years ago I switched to Firefox, and at the time it was much better than Microsofts offerings. But I started to get annoyed by how damned slow Firefox was , it made IE8 seem snappy and caused the only BSODs I have had on Vista and Windows 7. I soon jumped over to Google's Chrome and I have been loving it ever since. I've also had a brief play with IE 9 and it's pretty good to, and I see no real reason why you wouldn't use IE9 to read my musing.

But recently I've been doing some web development and I've been forced to use Firefox, and I've hated every moment of it. It's just so clunky and regularly hangs, it's like using IE6, but atleast with IE6 I was on a 56k dial-up connection so the browser was the least of my problems.
Yet, there are thousands out there who feel they have earned their geek-cred with statements like

IE is junk, Firefox FTW! 

And we all know the EU's opinions on IE, yet they haven't yet explained how you are meant to download their beloved Firefox if Windows didn't ship with IE.

Any unbiased individual will have noticed that Firefox has turned into the buggy, crash prone and incredibly bloated software that the community rightly accused IE of being.
But where Microsoft have learned from the communities concerns, and from Google's barebones Chrome, Mozilla has become complacent while legions of loyal 'fans' spread misinformation as they attempt to make millions join the cult of Firefox. I doubt few of the Firefox users have even used the browsers they claim Firefox is superior to.

So if you are reading this with Firefox, I advise you to quickly download one of the alternatives in the 30 seconds you have before your browser hangs for the 134th time this hour.



Next time, Open Office and why is sucks and GIMP really pisses me off too.

entertainment: he did the mash

Vampires have been a common staple in films and television for a while now, yet very few have actually read Bram Stokers Dracula, which although not the first account of vampyre, is essentially the Alpha although certainly not the Omega.

But watching True Blood or those god awful Twilight films you wouldn't even know that they were based around vampyre. The most recent series of True Blood has introduced some stupid plot with Werewolves and Vampire Kings and all manner of :censored:

Can we just put an end to all this vampire nonsense?
Mark my word, next series of True Blood it will be revealed that vampires built the pyramids as landing pads for their space ships as they are actually aliens from the Vampirous Nebula. Actually, I think I could go for that Stargate slash True Blood crossover. If you are reading this HBO I accept Cheques or Credit Card.

Armstrong and Miller did a series of parodies about how vampires have evolved in media, the first of which I have posted below.

daily life: this is Moscow calling

I had a scary moment yesterday. It is 10pm and I am watching some TV on my HTPC. Then, shock horror, I lose my internet connection. I glance at the router and the internet light is Orange, the router instructs me that their is an issue with the line, but just to be sure I restart it before coming to the realisation that I must phone BT. And so begins the worst 24 minutes of my life.

Firstly I phone to check if any faults are reported for my area, but sadly there are not.
I have to go through to Tech Support who are based in India.
While on hold I am instructed to visit www.bt.com for online help, okay then, I'll go do that when you fix my internetz.

When I finally get through to a 'technical advisor' she immediately instructs me to reset my router to factory defaults, which I politely refuse to do. After 10 minutes of battling, repeating every word 5 times, agreeing to be referred to as Ireye because I can't get her to understand my name is Matthew, she agrees to perform a line test and promptly promises to phone me back in 10 minutes.
25 minutes later I get a call, and the 'advisor' agrees that there is a fault with my line - Good job you hadn't instructed me to reset my router to factory defaults then. And they promise that an engineer is looking into it.

At 11pm on the dot my internetz are back, albeit at a reduced sync speed of just 8mb.

Then this morning BT phone me from India to ask if my problems are resolved, after 5 minutes of NPA where I tell the advisor I DON'T need assistance setting up my Wi-Fi, that my Xbox 360 and PS3 are working fine and that my BT Vision Box has been unplugged for 12months because it is rubbish, whilst being referred to as Mr Iran (Don't ask), I finally get off the phone.


I do have to hand it to BT that they can be efficient in fixing a fault, and the processes for making sure everything is fine the next day are a nice touch. But for the love of God, please can I speak to somebody who can string a sentence together in English. Repeating yourself 10 times over is not going to impress your customers. When you are continually referred to by the wrong name you get a bit annoyed. It's bad enough that the 'advisor' quotes a script that can't possibly resolve your fault.

You have been reading theguywhomoanscallediraney

technology: welcome to the world of yesterday.

Technology sure does move fast, and as William Shatner will tell you we can only imagine the miracles that are to come.
Shatner's Toupee would have flown off his head if somebody had told him that in the year 2011 I would be typing this message, and in mere milliseconds somebody anywhere in the world would be able to read it. Not that anybody is actually reading this nonsense.

I sure would like to know what magic those 2 buttons on that phone will be used for. One can only imagine, but I bet if you press them somebody will commission a decent Star Trek TV Series that doesn't get cancelled after 4 years.