cat: cannot open food in tins

Blogger.com: sayonara

2010-02-03T00:23:00.000Z

I sent this plea for help to a blogger friend tonight, but I thought it was worth broadcasting in any case:

Blogger.com has been a rudderless ship for some time now. No humans are noticeably running that service since Google bought it.

Tonight they sent me 2 identical emails explaining that their "publish via FTP" feature is just too much darn work for their engineers to maintain (I'm not shitting you) [note that the current FTP standard is unchanged from 1985 - but is evidently nonetheless too challenging for blogger.com's engineers to handle] and so I'll have to stop hosting my blog at my own site and start hosting it over on their servers.

Despite the fact that I rarely blog, I say "fuk dat". My data is mine and stays on my server, especially since their service sucks in so many ways and I don't trust them. For something like a year I've had a warning on my control panel that says my blog will be deleted in 20 days because it's a spam blog (but the remedies they suggest go nowhere, and there is no way to contact a human).

Do you know of another service I can use that also has a working importing tool? I briefly tried wordpress (again, about a year ago) but their advertised importing tool seemed broken...

Help!

So there we have it. How can I get my blog off this service and on to somewhere safe, that works?

India photos

2010-02-01T08:20:00.000Z

I've posted photos of my recent weeklong beach holiday in Goa, India.

Look What You've Done

2009-11-16T17:15:00.002Z

Proundly presenting my band She Hit Me First's new video, Look What You've Done (I'm the one in the middle doing most of the singing):

Suspension of disbelief

2009-11-10T21:03:00.001Z

Joe Klein of Time, normally a very clever and insightful guy -- with a strong grasp of international politics -- seems to have momentarily misplaced his skepticism and powers of critical thinking. He premises this Swampland post on

the appalling news that Iran seems to have brought espionage charges against three American hikers who wandered across the Kurdish border

It would be one thing if Joe were to back that assertion with some evidence, but as it stands it looks like Mr. Klein swallowed a whopper (intentionally or not) and is trying to feed it to us, too.

I mean sure *nudge nudge, wink wink* it's possible these 3 young Americans were just enjoying a lovely hiking holiday in Iraq of all places, and just happened to innocently mosey into Iran. But upon reflection, how likely does that seem?

Roughly as likely as, a few months prior, 2 American journalists just naively crossing a desolate frozen river into North Korea, again totally by accident. We know by their own admission that America deploys spies into these countries, so how do we suppose they get there, exactly? Of course these spies have a cover story, but that doesn't make it true.

Really, when was the last time you heard about a young American being arrested for accidentally wandering into, say, Canada? Mexico? Turkey? When Americans get caught sneaking across remote borders on foot, crossing from a war zone into a bleeding "Axis of Evil" country, they work for the CIA until proven otherwise, yeah?

But what if you're not a journalist?

2009-09-24T23:42:00.000+01:00

David Mery finally gets his apology. I wrote about it here 3 years ago.

It's frightening - and daunting - that it takes a journalist nearly 4 years of bureaucratic and legal rodeo to get an apology for an unlawful arrest, after being stopped and searched under the terrorism act, arrested for 'public nuisance' (for looking suspicious) having his DNA sampled, his home raided, and his belongings confiscated.

It took 4 years even though he's a journalist and the incident was widely publicised. It took 4 years even though the police clearly realised, from the very beginning, that he was totally innocent.

Streaming songs from our upcoming album release

2009-07-05T22:23:00.000+01:00

What everyone wants

2009-07-01T13:22:00.000+01:00

Start typing 'how to get' in your Google search bar. It turns out that most of us want babies, and to travel, to look good, to not be fat, and not have acne (and thus to get a girl like you). Oh yeah, and to get on MySpace at school. Humanity's primal desires. For the record, I was not searching for any of these things, although I'm starting to worry about love handles.

Save the boobies

2009-06-10T16:01:00.001+01:00

I keep seeing these hilarious banner ads for some kind of computer game. Help! Save the Queen! (or else this guy is going to stab her luscious mams)

It's not that they never learn, it's that they don't care

2009-05-18T02:23:00.001+01:00

Here we go again. According to the BBC:

A controversial database which holds the details of every child in England has now become available for childcare professionals to access.

Ahh, is this sort of like the one where they lost the banking details of every parent in the UK a year or two ago?

A report into the project by auditors Deloitte and Touche said it could never be totally secure. Last summer ministers delayed the database, admitting there were some "issues" identified in testing. It says 390,000 people will have access to the database, but will have gone through stringent security training.

Well I feel better hearing about that stringent training. As long as there are no security bugs in the database software or the computers they run on (presumably not running Windows) and none of those 390,000 people are crooked or stupid, the sensitive details of every child in the UK should be nice and secure.

Blogger.com: sayonara if you say so

2009-05-12T20:46:00.002+01:00

A few weeks ago, as I scanned my email Spam folder with my finger poised to click the 'delete all' link, I noticed an email from blogger.com*, the site that I use to manage this blog. It said that their robots had determined that my blog was a "spam blog". Further, it said that if I didn't click the supplied link and request an "unlock review", my blog would be deleted in 20 days and that until then, my readers would see a warning on my blog. Gosh, thought I, lucky I spotted that, or my blog would've been deleted!

I clicked the link. Broken. No messages in my dashboard control panel thing. I published some posts, but the promised warning did not appear. It seemed like a phantom email, or as if the robots had changed their minds about me in the meantime. I tried clicking around blogger's help pages, but there was nothing relevant, and there is no way to contact a human at blogger (when you eventually find a 'contact us' link, and start feeling hopeful, you are dismayed to discover that it has been disabled, and redirects back to the help pages). There are no people steering this ship**.

A couple of weeks later, in my control panel, a warning appeared:

This blog has been locked due to possible Blogger Terms of Service violations. You may not publish new posts until your blog is reviewed and unlocked***.

This blog will be deleted within 20 days unless you request a review [ followed by a link to request the unlock review ]

I clicked the link, and was taken to the following page where I was asked to enter a 'captcha':

Blogger's spam-prevention robots have detected that your blog has characteristics of a spam blog. (What is a spam blog?) Since you are an actual person reading this, your blog is probably not a spam blog. Automated spam detection is inherently fuzzy and we sincerely apologise for this false positive.

Your readers are seeing a warning page until one of our humans reviews it and verifies that it is not a spam blog. Please fill out the form below to get a review. We'll take a look at your blog and unlock it in less than two working days.

OK, fair enough, I thought: a computer made a mistake and a person will soon set it right in less than 2 working days. I think you can probably guess how the rest of the story goes from here: A couple of weeks went by, but the message persisted. After that, it was replaced by the original message (though no email this time) asking me to unlock my blog or lose it within 20 days, and promising that they would review it within 2 days. I went through the procedure again. This evening, a couple of weeks later, it happened again.

OK, the unsupervised robots running blogger.com want to delete my blog. Fine, effing let 'em, I'll use another service. I'm not going to let myself be bullied by a badly-written computer algorithm. Sayonara if you don't want me, though I have a sneaking suspicion that it's just an empty threat, and that their blog-deletion system is probably broken too. I guess I'll find out in 20 days.

[ * It's ironic that an email from blogger.com (who are owned by Google) accusing me of spam would end up in my Gmail spam folder ]

[ ** If a human who works for blogger.com ever actually sees this message, please leave a comment - with proof! - and I will post a photo of me eating my shorts ]

[ *** The fact that you're reading this post proves the statement is untrue ]

He's betting we forget

2009-05-11T10:24:00.001+01:00

Can you spot what's missing in the following quote from Dick Cheney, defending his torture regime?:

Now, if you'd look at it from the perspective of a senior government official, somebody like myself, who stood up and took the oath of office on January 20th of ‘01 and raised their right hand and said we're going to protect and defend the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic, this was exactly, exactly what was needed to do it.

Gosh, either Mr. Cheney forgets what he actually swore to defend (unlikely) or he's betting that you forget. He swore to protect and defend the US constitution -- not the US itself. And it was, ironically, the constitution Dick Cheney and George W Bush kicked to the curb along with the Geneva Conventions these last 8 years. Apparently the best he can do to defend himself now is to retroactively redefine his oath of office.

Quote of the day

2009-05-07T10:53:00.000+01:00

"Marriage is good. There is something special about unions of husband and wife. Unless we bring men and women together, children will not have mothers and fathers."

- Carrie Prejean, Miss California

Erotic interrogation

2009-04-25T00:20:00.001+01:00

It would be interesting to ask torture advocates if they also think it should be OK to rape terror suspects, as long as it is done under strict legal guidelines, no more than X number of times per day, gently, with plenty of lubricant, etc.

If you think about it, it's no worse morally than other forms of torture, should not leave any physical scars, and has an obvious advantage over waterboarding: the prisoner's mouth is left unobstructed should they choose to 'break' and start talking.

After all, it happens to regular prison inmates all the time. Heck, some guys even do it to each other for fun, right? Where's the harm in it if it saves lives? We can even give it a nice name; since "enhanced interrogation" is already taken, how about "erotic interrogation"?

Calm down dear, it's only an election

2009-04-11T16:27:00.009+01:00

After the election of Barack Obama in America, I confess to feeling a certain amount of schadenfreude, watching the fear and loathing of the hardcore right-wingers (or in Rumsfeldian parlance, the Bush/Cheney dead-enders) gnashing their teeth and forming proverbial "circular firing squads". [For my Republican readers, schadenfreude is a German word meaning "pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others"].

For a while it was interesting and entertaining, but latterly the debate seems to have been taken over by the certified, Kool-Aid-drinking moonbats. I find myself clicking on links to right-wing articles and blogs, or beginning to watch YouTube video clips of Fox News commentators, only to click the 'back' button moments later. What was once (gratifyingly!) bitter disappointment at their 'side' being out of power, has descended into pure unadulterated rancor and malice. It's not clever any more. I can feel the hatred coming through my laptop screen like radiation.

All of which is slightly difficult to understand, since president Obama has been in office fewer than three months, and hasn't really had much time to do anything truly controversial. Sure, there are legitimate debates to be had about the economics of bailouts and stimulus packages. Frankly, there is probably no single correct answer. Obama inherited a financial crisis, and he's doing his best to fix it, but any reasonable person should be able to debate these things without getting too emotional.

That's why I find all the "tea party" stuff so disturbing (except for the unintentionally funny stuff about "tea-bagging"). There's no theme there. "Burn the books"? What do they actually want, specifically? No one seems to know; It's just an increasingly angry mob making decreasingly veiled references to violent revolution. They're supposedly angry about the budget deficit? Why were these same people so silent while Republicans were spending like drunken sailors these past 8 years?

The hatred and vitriol coming from the rump of the Republican party has long ceased being logically coherent. They're throwing every epithet in the book at their president -- terrorist, wimp, socialist, communist, fascist dictator -- except for the one I suspect many of them wish they could say in public (perhaps prefaced with "uppity").

It seems as if a lot of right-wing true believers in America right now, for example the followers of Rush Limbaugh, would rather see their country fail than see a fellow the likes of Barack Obama succeed. Something has snapped inside of these people. The political wilderness will be a good place for them to spend the next few years having a 'time out'.

Stupid quote of the day [updated]

2009-03-30T01:10:00.006+01:00

From Canoe: Eleanor Maticka-Tyndale, Canada's "research chair in social justice and sexual health" (never mind asking what those two things reasonably have in common) wants the government to:

require warnings on packages about how often condoms break and leak, leaving people at greater risk of pregnancy and disease.

For what purpose? To deter condom usage for, say, disease prevention? Is Maticka-Tyndale against condom usage? Or does she propose some alternative besides "no sex for you?" Not in this article, she doesn't. That certainly seems like a responsible, reality-based message.

But wait, the kicker is here:

"We always assumed that whatever the failure rate is, it is due to human error -- that we don't store them properly, we get our fingernails caught in them, we don't make sure that there is enough air in the tip," she said.

Words fail. Let me spell it out: Canada's sexual health research chair, critical of condom failure rates, thinks that when you put on a condom, there should be plenty of air in the tip.

Update: In response to a private email (because the quote was so unbelievable, I had to ask her for clarification) Eleanor Maticka-Tyndale writes:

Dear Andy,

I just saw the article and there are several errors in quotations. I will contact them and request a retraction of the ones that clearly misinform, such as air in the tip of a condom. The quote should have read, 'no air in the tip ...'

This is one of many reasons why many researchers refuse interviews with the press! Thank you for alerting me.

Eleanor

So: I take it back -- about the quote, anyway. I still think failure warnings on condoms are counterproductive, even if the intention is to make manufacturers accountable for failure rates.

Germany photos

2009-03-29T23:57:00.003+01:00

I've posted photos from my solo visit to Berlin, Germany in March 2009. I was there for business but managed to schedule some time for sightseeing.

Spain photos

2009-03-29T17:55:00.002+01:00

I've posted photos from the long-weekend trip that Kim and I took to Majorca, in January 2009.

Poland photos

2009-03-29T00:48:00.004Z

I've posted photos from the long-weekend trip that Kim and I took to Krakow and Auschwitz, in November 2008.

Take these bits from me, I don't need them anymore

2009-03-13T20:54:00.003Z

Just in case I haven't signed the right forms, or told the right people: when I go, I want to be an organ donor (hey, I ride a donor-cycle!).

They can take any bits they want to put in other people. I'm not so keen on donating the whole mess for creepy scientific research, but if living people want the parts I don't need anymore, go to town muchachos.

There we go - I've put it out there on the interwebz, so it's official and forever.

France photos

2009-03-13T17:53:00.003Z

I've posted photos from the trip Kim and I took to Paris, Halloween weekend, 2008

Crimint those varmints

2009-03-06T22:19:00.006Z

I guess, living in Britain, there's always a part of you that understands these sorts of things happen routinely. However, to find out that it's real is still a bit shocking:

Police are targeting thousands of political campaigners in surveillance operations and storing their details on a database for at least seven years, an investigation by the Guardian can reveal.

Photographs, names and video footage of people attending protests are routinely obtained by surveillance units and stored on an "intelligence system". The Metropolitan police, which has pioneered surveillance at demonstrations and advises other forces on the tactic, stores details of protesters on Crimint, the general database used daily by all police staff to catalogue criminal intelligence.

One of the worst things is that when heavyhanded police tactics and surveillance are revealed, it's almost always the case that they've previously denied it or lied about it. Further:

Police surveillance teams are also targeting journalists who cover demonstrations, and are believed to have monitored members of the press during at least eight protests over the last year.

That seems like a sign of a healthy democracy.

Activists "seen on a regular basis" as well as those deemed on the "periphery" of demonstrations are included on the police databases, regardless of whether they have been convicted or arrested. Names, political associations and photographs of protesters from across the political spectrum – from campaigners against the third runway at Heathrow to anti-war activists – are catalogued.

Well, it's surely nothing to worry about. After all, the government is good. This is a free country. The government is only looking out for our safety. You've got to keep track of peoples' "political associations", right? Political activism is just one step away from terrorism, don't you know.

Flights to Guantanamo were kinda like this (except orange jumpsuit is not included)

2009-02-27T15:33:00.007Z

BBC: Ryanair mulls charge for toilets:

Michael O'Leary: 'People might have to spend a pound to spend a penny'

Irish budget airline Ryanair has said it is considering charging passengers for using the toilet while flying. Chief executive Michael O'Leary told the BBC that the Dublin-based carrier was looking at maybe installing a "coin slot on the toilet door".

Next up, coin slots on the seatbelts, and extra charges for keeping the cushion on your seat.

Following that, they'll drop the pretense and just do a midflight announcement "pay us £10 more or you're out the door without a parachute"

They've run out of "extras" to charge for, like (ahem) luggage and checking in, and are stooping to demanding money not to deliberately make the experience more craptastic than it already is. Pardon the pun.

It's pretty sad, though, that they'd stoop to extorting a handful of coins per flight from those few passengers who can't 'hold it' for the 2-hour duration of the trip. I think that by leading the industry in this respect, Ryanair will become the guinea pig for finding out just how badly you can treat your customers before they eventually abandon you.

Slipping, sliding, and skiving

2009-02-05T11:22:00.003Z

From Anne Applebaum in Slate:

LONDON — This column is arriving late this week. It is arriving late because, among other things, my flight out of London Heathrow Airport on Monday was canceled. Not delayed, canceled. So were almost all other flights out of London Heathrow. This stunning disruption to one of the world's busiest transportation hubs was not caused by a terrorist attack or a catastrophic computer failure. It was caused by 5 inches of wet, rapidly melting snow.

Kim and I were left stranded overnight in Majorca on Monday because of the snow (I know, I know: cry me a river, right?). Anne's column seems to assume a genuine inability to cope with snowy weather, but for me, after spending 6 years in the UK it's becoming all too familiar. The problem, I believe, is not that Britons can't handle 5 or 8 inches of snow; it's that they can't be bothered to.

It seems as if people here wake up, see snow, and think, "Whee! Snow day! Chaos! Surely I can't be expected to go to work". Unfortunately when public transit workers think that way (in the UK, they apparently do) it becomes a feedback loop.

At the first sign of trouble — high winds, heavy rain, piles of leaves, and most particularly snow — the people responsible for the UK's transportation infrastructure (even, comically, the Underground variety) simply throw up their hands and surrender*, causing the whole mess to grind to a halt. As a result, any form of extreme weather becomes a valid reason for much of the population to take the day off. The domino effect multiplies the paralysis. Pretty soon there aren't enough workers available to clear snow from runways, or otherwise operate an airport.

Granted, this time there was more snow than usual, but there's roughly the same level of mock panic at least once or twice every winter. The lightest dusting of snow tends to produce approximately the same result.

Many British people seem to accept (even secretly enjoy) this regularly-occurring pantomime of collective meltdown, but it's pretty aggravating when you're trying to get home from your holiday.

[ * Overhearing snippets of conversation amongst my fellow would-be travelers on Monday, it struck me that, as a consequence of the railways' failure to make any effort at coping with bad weather, Britons seem unaware of something that Canadians (for example) take for granted: trains can operate just fine in snow. ]

Plumbing the depths of despair

2009-01-17T17:37:00.005Z

Shimon Perez, Israel's president, states, "Israel's aim was to provide a strong blow to the people of Gaza so that they would lose their appetite for shooting at Israel."

The "people of Gaza"? Mr. Perez, did you mean to include those hundreds of dead children in your 'lesson'? I think the answer can only be yes, when you bombard neighbourhoods and schools. In other words: collective punishment, just like Lebanon in 2006. Last I checked, that is still a war crime.

I think Israel is a wonderful place, and I hope they do achieve peace with all their neighbours -- including a revived, independent, and sovereign Palestine. But I also think Israel's military and political leadership have demonstrated the worst kind of brutality in recent years.

I don't assume it's because they're bad people, though some of them may well be. I suspect it comes much more from genuine emotion, and well-considered strategy, but also from the fundamental laziness made possible by having such an overwhelming military advantage over your enemies.

Faced with terrorism and insurgency, and difficult choices and compromises, it probably seems very tempting, when diplomacy fails, to simply bomb the hell out of your adversaries. But we all know violence is a downward spiral. More succinctly: Israel have just created the next generation of Hamas militants in Gaza -- i.e. all the young survivors who just lost their homes, schools, siblings, parents, or friends. I imagine Israel will be hearing from many of those young victims in a few years' time.

This is probably a vain hope, but perhaps with an adult in the white house, Israel won't be given a blank cheque when it comes to violence. Perhaps Israel's leaders will be obliged to take a more progressive and humane path for the next few years. I'm sure it's no coincidence that they are winding down their Gaza operation on the eve of Barack Obama's inauguration. As one frequently sees spray-painted on utility boxes and walls in Tel Aviv: "know hope"

Small victories

2008-12-04T21:13:00.003Z

DNA database 'breach of rights':

Two British men should not have had their DNA and fingerprints retained by police, the European Court of Human Rights has ruled. The men's information was held by South Yorkshire Police, although neither was convicted of any offence. The judgement could have major implications on how DNA records are stored in the UK's national database. The judges said keeping the information "could not be regarded as necessary in a democratic society".

Home Secretary Jacqui Smith said she was "disappointed" by the European Court of Human Rights' decision.

Gosh, I'm so surprised that Jacqui Smith wants to forcibly keep the DNA records of innocent people in government databases. Like most UK Home Secretaries, she never met an aspect of our lives that she didn't want to record, mandate, tax, or prohibit.