Personal

Why is it so hard to get people to pay for things over the internet and so easy to get them to pay for things on their phone?

Well the two aren’t really related I suppose. Most of the people who buy stuff over the internet are under 18 and don’t havea credit card so they don’t really have a way to pay for stuff over the internet. So I’ll rephrase:

Why do people pay for stuff on their phones when the same stuff is free on the internet?

I was looking in a magazine (a TV guide) and you could do a numerology love test for £1. Just text your name and your (possibly) beloved’s name and get a percentage back. There are hundreds, possibly more, of those on the internet completely free so why would you ever pay a quid for it?

The other thing that got me was the advert had most popular ringtones. Why would you want one of the most popular ringtones? I thought the whole point of a custom ringtone was so your phone didn’t sound like everyone elses (although a train completely full of crazy frogs would have a certain humour about it).

Maybe people between 16 and 18 are just more prone to idiocy…

Or maybe this is the evidence that mobile phones cause brain damage…

George Galloway is the member of parliament for Bethnal Green and Bow, the constituency I happen to live. Now I personally find him very annoying. He’s part of a new political party called “Respect” that is aimed at unhappy Labour supporters.

Despite this, his appearance in front of a committee of senators in America was hilarious:

Washington Post

I think the best part was the accusation that he’s met with Saddam Hussein several times. As he points out he has met Saddam the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld . Unlike Donald he wan’t there to sell him weapons though… Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld, Labour, George Galloway, election, Saddam Hussein, America, senate

Well it’s been a while since I made a person post so here goes. Julia is coming over on Thursday. In fact she’s bringing her sister Jaz too. In fact it would be more accurate to say Jaz is bringing Julia since Jaz is coming over to meet a guy (something they apparently have in common is a thing for British guys).

This will lead to a few interesting situations: Firstly they’ll be both be staying in my room on at least one night (two I think). This isn’t actually that interesting inherently (from my point of view it will make Julia’s stay less interesting) but it may look odd to anyone who notices us enter my room.

We’re meeting Piia, one of their friends who lives near London on Friday - the day I have my dance class which they’ve decided they’ll apparently watch. So I turn up to a dance class with an entourage. One that will no doubt be speaking Finnish. Finally there are people around the campus I probably won’t be able to hide them from. It’s not that I’m trying to hide them from these people as such, it’s just I try to avoid these people myself (not for any good reason I just don’t want to talk to them).

I’ve added the second chapter of my story, Reactions.

The story by the way is my attempt to write a time travel short story with no paradoxes (or should that be paradocies?) in it.

I’ve also added some info about Galaxia Reborn. I must remember, whenever I lose the urge to write Galaxia, just go look at Planetarion and think “I could so do better”.

I was over at XHTML Friends looking at the info for this site and noticed dance ads. At first I didn’t think anything of it, I see dance ads all over this page. But thenof course it occurred to me there is not a single mention of dancing on that page. It gets better when you realise there isn’t even a direct link from that site to this site.

I was ready to put it down to coincidence, but noticed ads relevent to the sites I was listing on their pages…

That is very clever :)

By the way,the site in question doesn’t even need to be displaying Google Adsense themselves (so it’s not even cached ads either; they’re being gnereated live for my site about another site).

Did you know some blogs contain ICBM data? That (as I’ve now discovered) is a euphemism for latitude/longitude. Well XHTML Friends now displays a map for sites that provide the data :)

Indexes or indices? If this was anything but an article on databases I’d use indices. Anyway, XHTML Friends was taking about 3 minutes to load a page. I added three indexes to two tables and now it takes a few seconds. I have never seen such a speed increase come from adding indexes to a database. So let this be a lesson to me…

Well if you have a URL you want crawled go to http://brownab1.miniserver.com/xfn/crawl.php.

If you want to have a look at the pages already there in a nice graphical network display, go to http://brownab1.miniserver.com/xfn/image.php.

This displays 26 random sites and the links between them. If you click on a site it “holds” it so subsequent requests always contain this site (this way you can slowly buildup an image of sites that actually link to each other).

My first exam is in ten days… Galois Theory. Worst one of the lot… but at least I only have seven to do instead of eight.

I’m struggling to find something to write. That’s not to say I don’t have things to write as such I’m just not sure I should share them.

Julia’s letter hasn’t arrived yet…

I’m sure I’ll actually say something interesting next time :P

We impulsively went to Cleethorpes today. By we I mean myself, Ryan and Darren. Not that exciting but still a laugh. We went on lovely illegal imported DDR machines…

On a more personal note (since this is marked personal) I’m awaiting a letter from Julia. Apparently there’s some stuff in it that would be hard to explain by phone. I’m sure it’s not as ominous as it sounds.

Also if you haven’t realised there is a link to the first chapter of a story I’m writing called Reactions on the menu to the right. Go on, have a look (unless you are one of the two people who actually read this regularly in which case you’ve already read it).