December 2007 Archives

So you might remember my Seasonal Nonsense post of not so long ago. Imagine my surprise (and imagine you will have to seeing as it is non-existent) to read that Christmas sales have picked up with people doing lots of Christmas shopping this past weekend. I enjoy the various theories as to why people have been doing there shopping so close to Christmas. It's because Christmas is on a Tuesday, meaning most people have a 3-day weekend beforehand in which to to their shopping. It's like a 3-day Christmas Eve. If you didn't manage to find that specific gift you wanted to get on Christmas Eve 1 (Saturday) you can always look for it on Christmas Eve 2, and even Christmas Eve 3.

Christmas should always be on a Tuesday in my opinion.

This is a new curry take-away that opened this week. I tried the chicken shakoota last night and am pleased to say it was fantastic. Delicately spiced, and cooked to perfection, and reasonably priced to boot. The Bengal paratha was very nice too: light and tasty. They did forget to give me my pilau rice (opening week jitters I guess) but I called up, explained and they sent a guy around with a portion and a couple of complimentary poppadoms. The rice was gorgeous. Light, moist, wonderful taste so well worth the wait. I hope they keep up the good work when word gets out and trade increases. For now, whilst they are relatively underused and overstaffed, I can say this is the best curry I've had in Cambridge so far. No doubt the Rice Boat would give them a run for their money on the quality stakes, but you get a decent meal for less than a tenner from Ahar and that's great value for money.

Virgin Media's DNS servers threw a wobbly earlier this week meaning I was locked out of the Internet. When they eventually settled back down and let me in again I decided to try OpenDNS as an alternative. It's good: fast, regular and provides convenient filtering based on the phishtank anti-phishing sites lists.

Worth looking at, even if you just make a note of their servers' IP Addresses, just in case your main provider falls over:

• 208.67.222.222
• 208.67.220.220

The No Mill Road Tesco campaign has brought out conflicting opinions in me. On one hand, sticking it to The Man is always fun, and healthy, and a sign that people are awake. On the other hand, the rainbow Nazi streak running through the no campaign is The Man in dungarees. Having played devil's advocate in my local, only to be stonewalled by a fen troll hence onwards (even when I met him in the soulless Sainsburys supermarket) I am naturally inclined towards bringing Tesco to Mill Road myself. Political differences over minor matters shouldn't become personal. Big things like racism, sure, but the little things shouldn't come between friends. Oh well.

Every year, without fail, we get a warning from retailers that Christmas sales are down on last year; that they will be discounting goods in the next few days to shift stock; and that the last minute rush might be greater than last year, making it possible you won't find the presents you want to buy.

I expect retailers to do this. It's classic sales spiel. Or lies in other words. "Sale Now On" means nothing: of course there's sale now on - it's a shop selling stuff, which is also known as a "sale" - but it's immediate and it lies by implying that there's something extra special to what prices they are accepting for their wares at this very moment when there isn't. The same with the identical doom and gloom predictions they issue each year about Christmas. It's just nonsense.

Journalists keep publishing this nonsense. Of course, most journalists will have walked in a town centre in the past month or two and experience the scrum of bodies all bustling around buying the latest gadgets and must haves for nearest and dearest. It's the human equivalent of the great migrations of African wildlife reaching a ford in a river, concentrating into a dense mass of bodies all pushing and shoving to get to the other side. Any fool knows that the high street is busy as hell.

But they keep on publishing because it's bad news, it's frightening, it's scary, it plays on a misguided sense of nationalism (if we don't buy loads of stuff now the economy will collapse - spend for Britain!) and editors love a good bad news story more than they like probing the contents of press releases made by shop keepers.

Keep on shopping. Shop more. Time is running out. The economy will collapse if you don't. There will be bargains to be had. There is a sale. now. on.

There's been a lot more media coverage of this issue lately, as well as feelers put out by Government for their piecemeal, inconsequential suggested measures designed to be seen to be doing something without actually doing something. But first, what is it that's wrong and what is it that we want instead?

Well, I suggest we all want to be able to get merrily drunk, have a night out, totter home and remember the night out with fondness. We also want to be able to cook with a bottle of wine, maybe have a few beers with the barbecue should summer ever arrive. Or maybe a single malt with our supper. Basically, we want a situation where grown ups can have a drink and enjoy it without being caught up in fights, sick, abuse, outbursts and injuries. What we don't want is po-faced health fanatics turning drinking into the same pariah state as smoking.

I suggest the answer lies mostly in existing legislation: it is an offence to sell alcohol to a person who is drunk, as is being drunk and disorderly, as is selling alcohol to under 18s, as is urinating in public. The question really has to be why aren't these powers being used? I noticed in Melbourne that the police there have a "booze bus" - a double decker bus converted inside into multiple police cells. Disorderly drunks can then spend a night in the cells sleeping it off without police vans carting them from one end of town to the other. Pubs and clubs that produce the trouble makers should be warned then fined if they continue serving drunks. Those gents who piss in shop doorways could also spend a night on the booze bus. The only hurdle is having enough police on duty to enforce the current laws. A few months of pressuring licensees and punters to be reasonable would have a great effect. More so than more, interminable, ineffectual "education".

This is River Farm Smokery, which is a wee bit outside of Cambridge on the way to Newmarket. I went there the other day with a hairy colleague in his fabulously retro car to get a gander of what was on offer. It was fantastic: the shop is in middle of the farm and stinks to high heavens with smoked ham, bacon, eels, kippers, cheese and assorted other bits and pieces. The ham was lovely (especially with the excellent crusty loaf) and formed the centre of a great lunch at work. I have some kippers from there to try this morning, but I am assuming they will to the same high standards as the rest of the goods.

Not cheap (but then why should food be cheap?) but not ridiculously priced, this is a nice drive in the country with the deep satisfaction of knowing your hunter-gatherer instincts will be rewarded with fine food to take home and enjoy in good, friendly fashion.

Thanks to Stray Toaster for the interlude from desk jockeying for a living to living for a living.

It occurs to me that such a thing would be very useful under the right circumstances. It would essentially be directory of known spam sources that anyone could refer to. Some notes:

• Follow the phishtank model of allowing anyone to partake in the confirmation process and trusting users based on performance compared to other trusted users
• Provide service for email and comment spam as well as phish URLs
• Needs a clean API to enable many applications to use it
• Needs resilience from attack
• Push option as well as the normal pull methods
  

Sharing opinions on whether an entity, e.g. an IP Address, is a source of spam could give people the choice of blocking them automatically and before they come into contact with that entity at all. For instance, if a blog commenter is considered by enough people to be a spammer you could block their IP Address automatically, before they even post on your blog.

I need to think this through and ask around for better ideas. If you have any, or want to help, let me know.