So the iTunes Store seems to be getting into the whole Red Nose Day support, and already have a compilation of clips from the night available. However the real treats can be found if you take a look at the Best of Comic Relief Volume 1 which contains Blackadder: The Cavalier Years, Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death plus Comic Relief contributions from Ricky Gervais, Catherine Tate and the Vicar of Dibley, and the Best of Comic Relief Volume 2 which includes a special Men Behaving Badly, and an infamous Ali G interview with Posh and Becks.
Possibly Related WebsitesMar 152009
Oct 212008
I’m certainly not the biggest fan of Christian Voice, but their press release discussing the Richard Dawkins backed plan to put an advertisement for atheism (although from the wording of the advert I’d say it was more agnostic) has produced probably the most amusing quote, one which the BBC are highlighting on their news story:
Possibly Related WebsitesBendy-buses, like atheism, are a danger to the public at large.
Aug 112008
New kids on the block Cuil might poor scorn on their algorithms, but the way Google floats popular pages up the rankings can still tell you a lot. For example, say you were looking for Texas Attorney Mark Brewer, the fact that, at this point in time, there are six references to his dealings with Dave Walker and the SPCK above his own page gives a pretty strong message…
Possibly Related WebsitesJul 312008
Hat tip to David Keen for giving a name to the phenomenon of an attempt to silence or censor information backfires – much as Mark Brewer’s efforts to silence the SPCK story are currently – it is apparently known as the Streisand Effect.
Possibly Related WebsitesJul 232008
I’m sure Mark Brewer thought it was a good idea, threaten a little cartoonists blog to get some troublesome posts removed… However, I really don’t think he considered the reaction, as nobody likes a bully, especially not when they are bullying a genuinely nice bloke like Dave Walker. Thanks to the wonders of the Google cache, numerous blogs have now copied and pasted the offending material all across the net, and there is a burgeoning Facebook group in support of Dave. Certainly the effect of their actions has been a massive backfire, raising the profile of the story rather than diminishing it.
Jul 082008
From time to time, I wonder why some Churches struggle for numbers – then I read stories like this. Sure, noisy children in services can be annoying if you’re not expecting it, which is why we provide alternatives when we host family services. Equally, I know there is quite often a perception that a wedding couple is using the Church purely as a pretty backdrop for their service – they roll up for a couple of weeks to hear the banns, have the wedding, and then disappear never to be seen again, but as the established Church that’s part of life, and for those that go, there are some that find a place in the Church community through the welcome they receive from their local Church. However, taking all of those objections into account, I do think having the Bride and Groom’s own son ejected from his parents wedding is a bit excessive…
Possibly Related WebsitesJul 012008
Amongst other things, on Saturday both Chris and Howard were raving about the Roomba. Chris has had one for a long while, and Howard and Lindsay had just picked up one of the latest generation and were saying how good it was too. After a bit of talking about it, Beth and I thought it would be a useful purchase, and this morning I put the order through on the official iRobot UK site. Then I read this posting on Howard’s site – he has hit a problem with his Roomba and is trying to claim under the warranty – the problem, the UK warranty company Domotec are refusing to honour the warranty saying that his unit is not a UK model. Worse than that iRobot are agreeing that the models they sell from their UK site are not covered by the UK warranty!!!!!
Possibly Related WebsitesJun 212008
Amongst the sites I’ve been using on my iPod Touch quite frequently has been Yahoo! Go Flickr, a nice AJAX interface to Flickr that is distinctly superior to the normal Flickr mobile site, and nicely formatted for the portrait screen on the iPod. However when I tried to access it a couple of days ago, I got a site not found error, and that is all I have got ever since. It’s a bit of a shame if it has gone, but then with the launch of the App Store, maybe there will be a better way to access Flickr on it’s way.
Possibly Related WebsitesThe ReadWriteWeb blog has posted a couple of interesting articles looking at Generation Y (classified as current 13 to 31 year-olds) and their connections with and use of technology. The first, “Why Generation Y is Going to Change the Webâ€? looks at how the group uses the internet and what changes that might bring, whereas “Generation Y – Welcome to Their Worldâ€? looks at how they relate to the world outside cyberspace. Certainly an interesting read for anyone involved with working with Generation Y…
Possibly Related WebsitesJun 012008
We’ve just watched the Lost season four finale. I’ll write something a bit more later in the week, but from my point of view, it was a pretty good episode, certainly an improvement over the end of season three. Perhaps the only moment that didn’t surprise me which was intended to was the final big reveal of who was in the coffin we’d first seen in the season three finale – yes it has taken them an entire year to get that answer out – as I’d already guessed who it was going to be. Perhaps that’s one of the changes with season four, that at least some of the pieces are finally starting to fit together…
Possibly Related WebsitesJun 012008
I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it before, but if you’ve got a Flickr account, Photojojo is running a great little free service called Photo Time Capsule. The concept is pretty simple, you configure it for a predefined time period, from one month up to two years (mine is set to the default of one year) and then twice a month it sends you an e-mail containing pictures from your Flickr stream that period of time ago. As an example, this month it has sent me firstly pictures of Jo and Drew’s wedding, secondly a mixed bag including Sophie being cute and the 2007 PCC Away Day, and thirdly the Black and White Evening at church. Certainly if you’ve got a Flickr account it is a great way to rediscover old pictures.
Possibly Related WebsitesMay 282008
I’m thinking that electricity company engineers are a bit like dentists and doctors when they say “it won’t hurt” before doing something that really does. The reason I say that is that our local electricity company is currently doing quite a bit of work around Finchampstead, as a result they have several generators stationed at strategic points to keep the supply running. One of the places they asked to put it was on part of the church grounds as there were relatively few houses close by. When we were asked, we queried how noisy it would be, our concerns being the neighbours we did have, and were told it would only be “a quiet hum”. Going up to the church last night for the first time since they put it in, there was indeed a quiet hum, but unfortunately it was rather hard to hear over the noise of the diesel engine in the generator!
Possibly Related WebsitesMay 182008
I’ve had some unintentional and rather drastic spring cleaning on the blog this weekend. I decided that I really should upgrade the site to the latest version as it was still running version 2.1.3 of WordPress, and the main release has just hit 2.5.1. The upgrade of the main software went fine, it was K2, the fairly complex theme I was using that hit problems, not helped by their support wiki being down for maintenance all weekend. After some messing about with that, in the end I decided that perhaps it was a good opportunity to change the presentation, so I’ve now swapped over to a totally different look using the plaintxtblog theme, with a couple of tweaks to support my inline picture styles on the older posts. As usual, I think everything should be working, but if anyone finds anything that isn’t working properly, give me a shout.
Possibly Related WebsitesMay 172008
One of the aspects of putting in a planning application is that a public notice is placed giving details of the application to allow other interested parties to comment, including on the council web site. We seem to have found another side effect of that though – we’ve started getting a selection of unsolicited junk mail from building and household improvement companies, who I assume have picked up the address from the application. For example we got a letter from a kitchen specialist this morning, despite the planning application being for a garden shed!
Possibly Related WebsitesMay 132008
Reading through the newly published Sonning Parish Profile includes one thing I didn’t know – the church owns the local pub! I wonder if that means the Vicar and Churchwardens get free drinks?
May 052008
We don’t usually watch Family Guy, but having seen the reviews, and having spotted that the episode was being shown last night, we watched Blue Harvest last night on BBC3. Having not seen the rest of the series, we probably missed quite a few jokes, but there were plenty of Star Wars jokes to keep us laughing through the whole episode, with some very accurately recreated sequences from A New Hope that aren’t quite as they are in the original, and even a brief appearance of the fourth Doctor title sequence from Doctor Who. There are certainly some jokes at the expense of the plot of the original movie – the discussion about the Death Star being invincible aside from a small hole about the size of a womp rat being and example – and also picks up on eternal fan discussions such as parsec being a unit of distance rather than time, and Han shooting first.
Possibly Related WebsitesApr 282008
I’ve blogged from time to time about politics within the Church, but every so often, even at a local level, village politics and St James come into contact. In the past it’s been in relation to things like the villages memorial oaks being on church, rather than public land, and occasionally the Parish Council will use the church or our parish centre for services or events. The Parish Council also generously gives us an annual donation into church funds. However as part of our conservation appeal, alongside a number of other grant awarding bodies we applied to the Parish Council for a grant, and put in an application for what would be considered a significant amount – £15,000, backed up by Rev Richard personally attending the meeting to put his case for the benefits that the church building offered to the community and the village as a whole. In all honesty expected to be awarded a lot less than what we had asked for, therefore we were delighted to be awarded the full amount, but it caused a bit of a storm. The award was passed by majority of the councillors at the meeting, but one Parish Councillor who voted against the award was so upset that she has resigned her position in protest, stating that she believed the money would not be benefiting the whole community.
Possibly Related WebsitesApr 052008
So this morning we got confirmation that our application to “erect a garden shed for purposes ancillary to dwellingâ€? had been received. If at this point you are puzzled by why we need planning permission for a garden shed, according to the duty planning officer it’s because by virtue of the fact we back onto a road rather than other houses we fall foul of the planning rules designed to stop people putting buildings in their front gardens – the shed is closer to the road across the end of the garden than the house. As a result, before we can get to shed heaven like Ian we have to get planning permission. About the only place we’d be able to put up a shed without asking planning permission is in the narrow strip of land beside the house. Having said that, the duty planning officer did suggest it should be passed pretty easily. Famous last words? Hope not…
Possibly Related WebsitesApr 042008
Sometimes I despair of how clueless politicians can be when it comes to technology. This morning we had a great pronouncement that the government will protect children by requiring sex offenders to give them their e-mail address. Quite apart from the fact that many of the companies are based outside UK jurisdiction, how difficult is it to get another e-mail address? Anybody can get one or more addresses from Hotmail, Yahoo Mail or countless others – which again are beyond UK jurisdiction. All it is is another announcement that technically just cannot work, or make any difference at all. Clueless, absolutely clueless.
Possibly Related WebsitesMar 312008
If you think the problems at Terminal 5 are anything new, Jeff Atwood has a great article highlighting a rather similar scenario at Denver in 1994. The similarities are uncanny, even down to all the over-hyping that proves to be spectacularly misplaced once problems hit the system, in the case of T5 being staff who due to other technical issues couldn’t do their jobs. At that point the system has just backed up totally, such that there are now 15,000 bags piling up at the airport. As Jeff quotes in his article – “It wasn’t the technology per se, it was a misplaced faith in it.”
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