Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Stange Sign in Piccadilly Circus

Outside a chinese medicine shop. It lists the causes of different diseases and purports to show the traditional chinese cure.

Fine.

But what the hell is the sign about cancer? Posted by Picasa

Tuesday, July 18, 2006

British business under American rules

The Sharpener » Blog Archive » British business under American rules

Quite interesting article. Basically the usual moan about Sabarnes Oxley - the cruel cruel burden of accountabiltiy on the poor, put upon chief executives.

However, they have a good point asking where the protest from the CBI & co is...

It porbably has put a greater burden on major UK companies than any single European directive ever has. It's even had a knock on effect on paperwork for people in the UK. I've had people delay stuff because they need to get a counter signature on something due to 'SOX compliance'.

If the EU tried to introduce anything that would lead to jail terms for company executives, you wouldn't be able to move for posters printed out from the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph.

Something to remember the next time they decide to complain about Euro legislation. At least we can do something about it, whereas SOX just ends up people shrugging and getting on with it.

For once, it's a reasonably coherent and strong regulation. Another couple of years and it'll have been emasculated to a piece of paper for CEOs to sign coupled to another, longer page of waivers.

Go America

Monday, July 17, 2006

Flickr: Photos from arabist

There's a guy who is posting onto Flickr frm Lebanon at the moment. Quite interesting. Seems to show that the areas that are being bombed aren't very military at all.
In fact not very nice at all.
Who built a city like this - shoddy apartment blocks all bunched together. Craziness.

An embarrassing mistake

Not an article about clothing worn by Courtney, but an article about a mistake someone made using Wikipedia.

Basically, someone's just released an 'Open film'. An Open film is intended to be similar to an open source programme - every possible element of the film has been publicly released so that people can mix it up (mash ups and the like). The film has been released under the creative commons licence.

The creative commons licence allows people to edit, retouch and mess about with a film as long as they release it under the same terms. It's a slowly growing movement on the internet to try and democratise content against a growing onslaught of IP lawyers.

Anyways, the person in charge of releasing the DVDs had managed to get the film script translated into a whole host of different languages. He thought it arrogant to give subtitle options only in English rather than native (German vs Deutsch).

He went through Wikipedia to try and update the subtitle menu with the correct words. Unfortunately, the day he did it for Catalan, someone had vandalised the page and replaced it with something else. So, instead of it saying Catalan, it said 'Polaco' which is the Catalan equivalent of Taffy for the Welsh.

How humourous. Not as bad as Microsoft who managed to translate one of their brazilian offerings so that it gave you a choice of being a male or a bitch. Nice.

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Nuclear Power

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | Sure, nuclear power is safer than in the past - but we still don't need it

Even George Monbiot is coming round to see that Nuclear is necessary. His only stumbling block is what to do with the waste after it has been generated.

Dumping it into an area which humans are unlikely to live in seems the best solution - deep sea trenches anyone? I think it was Lovelock who proposed that we just put it into the Amazon. Animals won't notice the effects of radiation and are unlikely to be unduly hindered by a slightly reduced overall lifespan when they tend to die of being eaten anyway.

Cost savings would be massive if we didn't have hippies continously trying to disrupt nuclear shipments and could transport them covertly but under tight security to avoid terrorists.

Sunday, July 09, 2006

Good Grafitti on a tree

Went for a quick wander around Hampstead Heath. Kind of looks like it's watching you. Posted by Picasa

Saturday, July 08, 2006

Economist Cover

Great little piece of photoshopping! Might try and get this on a t-shirt Posted by Picasa

Friday, July 07, 2006

i-level Summer Ball

Good clean fun had by all. In the picture, Courtney who's on my team and Gosia from the search team. Posted by Picasa

Thursday, July 06, 2006

My new phone rocks


But will I be able to publish this?