Usenet is a million conversations on the Internet about thousands of topics. It predates the Web by a considerable period but it remains a bit of a Cinderella to many Internet users. One young person I know who is otherwise net-savvy knew it as Google Groups but had no idea that NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol) is the “real” way of accessing it, preferably with a “real” News Reader like Forte’Agent rather than the cack-handed implementation that Internet Explorer offers.
It seems that I have access to 62,742 different NewsGroups. I used to be subscribed to dozens, now it is down to 19 and with so many filters that I screen out vast quantities of babble, or should I say Babel?
I now find that the interesting conversations thrive in the blogosphere, as well as the HTML based forums (fora?) that are the online equivalent of mailing lists.
I suspect that next time I clean-install my PC, I’ll probably leave off Agent. I’ll miss it, but I’ll get over it…
We went to see Robots at the Leeds/Bradford Odeon this afternoon. It wasn’t very busy but we did get a free gift, a promotional slinky.
It is a good film, superbly rendered & detailed with a victorian engineering feel to it. Amnyone who has played the “Myst£ series of computer adventure games will feel a familiarity with the transportation technology.
The plot is fairly predictable but it works on two levels, it is jam-packed with jokey film references & the characters are well developed. There were a lot of familiar voices used for the talent, we watched some of the credits to confirm who they were.
David (7) did get a little restless half way through but that could have been related to running out of pick ‘n mix as well.
One coffee stain though, rather a lot of lamps out in the screen, including five of the twelve decorative wall & screen washers. The wiggly that waves “Odeon” around the walls wasn’t on either & I don’t recall the projected clock working in the foyer either.
Good show, spoiled slightly by attention to detail.
I’ve just sat through RND2005. Fortunately, I did what I normally do, set it recording last night & watched it today using fast forward to get past the tedious preachy bits. Now we have Sky Plus it means we can skip at 30x speed!
What was good? The Peter Kay song (first time), the Little Britain sketches, the Ricky Gervais trip to New York, Peter Kay taking about glue sniffers sailing (or whatever it was), Vicar of Dibley, odd bits here & there. The rest was so-so, some of it absolute pants…
I thought Alan Partridge tried but died, Fame Academy was dire, Ab Fab so contrived & Graham Norton just tedious. I was so bored with it that I even skipped Eric Clapton along with quite a lot of other bits.
Maybe it should be every three years….
I was at a high level presentation the other day by a successful eBusiness middleware entrepreneur. In the middle of his futurology he said of the Internet…
“We all hate spamming, we all hate blogging, we all hate pfishing.”
Perhaps he meant to say viruses instead of blogging, or maybe he was just related to the Viz Character distantly related to John Prescott…
Like newspapers up and down the country, the Morley Observer (& Advertiser) has a letters page. Week after week, people write in to the editor letting off steam or occasionally providing praise. A few years ago, I used to turn the page quickly because they appeared to be full of bickering & squabbling about & between local politicians that I neither knew nor cared about.
Now that I am a politician myself (small p!)& know some of the individuals concerned I find it a bit more interesting but I have always asked myself what the motivation of the writer was when they penned the piece. What is the hidden agenda? What is their political or religious undercurrent? Are they a member of a political party? If I know the person then does the letter reflect their style or have they been handed it by someone else & asked to sign it?
A couple of years back, someone told me that political parties orchestrate a lot of the letters in local papers in order to raise awareness on issues, but mainly to score points. They even suggested that it came out of the Local MP’s office on occasions. This time last year, I met an ex MP at a Conference who had an interest in Yorkshire as his Son lived in Leeds and he was a prospective MEP for the area. He knew our former MP (John Gunnell) fairly well and surprised me somewhat by telling me that he was a very shy person. I sounded him out on the possibility that the MP’s office wrote some of the local paper letters and he rubbished it immediately, on the basis that the Party Central Office wouldn’t trust a mere MP to get it right and would of course do it on his behalf then fax or email them to him! Of course he was a Tory and we can’t necessarily assume all parties practice the same “news management” but judging from the exploits of Ali Campbell it seems a reasonable supposition.
We can tell that the election campaign has started in Morley. First was the announcement of the prospective PPC from the BNP. Then came a flurry of letters slagging off the Morley Borough Independents (the gang of six who have progressively unseated the six safe Labour Leeds Councillors). Now the glowing praise for our hard working MP has started with a letter last week so effusive and toadying that had I written it myself I wouldn’t be able to look anyone in the eye again.
Now the MBIs have done some digging into some of the recent letters published. It turns out that many of the names & addresses are made up, the people not being on the electoral roll & the people living there never having heard of them. They have cried foul in their latest trade-mark lime green brag sheet, going so far as to accuse Labour of the scam. Surprisingly, however, the local paper hasn’t picked up on it yet.
Maybe there should be some sort of sign-off categorisation at the end of letters to the editor in a similar manner to ethnic origin forms so that we can read the correspondence in context and judge it accordingly. After all, anything other than hard science is basically opinion…
Ian Grey, Political Affiliation: None; Political inclination: Classical Liberalism; Religious view: Agnostic.
