I’ve discovered the origins of Seppy.
Our neighbours-but-one are the legitimate owners of Seppy (who I should now start addressing by her correct name of Levi). They adopted her from a family round the corner, who have a small child and decided that the cat was surplus to requirements, I guess.
So I was right. She IS somebody else’s pussycat. But she still sits on our fence.
So it seems that over in the corner of the car park there is an event occurring. To my unprofessional eye, I’d guess that some sort of water pipe under the expansive flower bed has burst, as a steady trickle is coming over the kerb and forming an immense puddle on the tarmac.
And it also seems that no-one knows quite who this should be reported to, as it’s been there a while now. A green algae is forming on the surface of this puddle, and no-one dares park in that corner anymore.
I’m sure that eventually it will rise up and murder us all.
Meh.
An occasional series.
If none of the options below adequately describes your stance, please feel free to add a comment in the usual way.
When the analog TV signal is turned off (in 2008?), I will…
Gordon re-fuelled the fascinating discussion about the nature of A-list bloggers a little while ago. This is a subject that really seems to get people’s goats; even mild-mannered Vaughan had something to say, that’s how bad it is. Just like God, the existence of the A-list is proven and disproven over and over again with logic and rhetoric, and continues to make all the difference in the world, or none whatsoever, depending on whether you’re expecting to get famous one day or not.
Put simply, the A-list is an entirely subjective experience. One blogger’s A-list can be another’s clique of self-important luvvies. Some people A-list their friends, people they like, people they correspond with. Others A-list the blogs that they see everyone else linking to, with faith in the 1000 Flies Can’t Be Wrong approach to blogrolling.
Technorati alone is tracking over 14 million weblogs, so just because everyone you read has heard of little.red.boat, doesn’t actually make it a huge phenomenon. There are so many circles of blogs that read and link each other, that it’s just one big venn diagram of linky love, and you would have to be fairly obsessed with your own and other people’s referrals, to get your name heard outside your own reading list.
The existence of an A-list is of particular importance to newish bloggers, those who check their stats more than once a day and fret about the fact that they haven’t hit an average of 200 yet. These are also the types who are most likely to identify A-listers from Technorati, and leave bland, identical comments about what a great blog they’ve got, in the hope that someone will click on their URL. Yes HumanityCritic I’m talking to you.
A completely different A-list is also created by those people for whom blogging is a business model, such as Kottke and Plasticbag. These blogs are very meta, which I understand means something about referring to themselves a lot. In a good way, I’m sure.
Just as Uborka has two authors with totally different writing styles, so it also has two approaches to the serious subject of lists. This is one of the reasons that we don’t have a blogroll page, although we also agree on the fact that Kinja does fine, and no-one needs their ego stroking so much that we should advertise them on our obscure little page.
My A-list tends to be the people I know, either through having read them for a long time, or by being friends with them. This friends business is beautifully meta, because of course most of my friends are people I’ve met through blogging, therefore I’ve also probably been reading them for a long time. I was going to link my friend-bloggers in this paragraph, but for one thing I was worried I’d miss someone, and for another thing, it seemed a tad pretentious.
Pete basically divides bloggers into wankers and non-wankers.
This will not be a pointful post in any way. I have had no revelations or little cheering moments to tell you about. I did offer to help an old lady, who looked like she was going to collapse, on Monday morning, but she turned me down.
This week has been quite a lot busier than last week, which is good because although I enjoyed the peace of the empty office, and uninterrupted iPodding last week, I didn’t have enough work to do, and these days I feel guilty if I spend all day reading weblogs. There have been other people in the office this week, so I have had to be a little bit sociable [to the point where I suggested the collaborative ordering of pizza this lunchtime].
My usual working week includes a lot of email. In the morning there is a batch from the NJ and LA offices, which has been waiting overnight; and lots of enquiries from factories and suppliers in the Far East. The China offices close around lunchtime, but India stays open a little longer, and my clients in Europe are around for most of the day.
Every morning I do a search to see if there are any audit reports for my clients. These will have been QCd by our backoffice in India – not a replacement for any jobs in the UK or the US, but newly created roles that take some of the burden off us poor account managers. Their existence essentially means that I don’t have to check the report is correct, I just have to check that it’s all there, and that the english isn’t too wonky. If anything exciting has happened, such as the discovery of child labour, or a factory trying to bribe the auditor, I will already have been told about that on the day of the audit.
This week’s main project has been preparing for the SA8000 course I’m going on next week; this was twofold: reading a very long guidance document [174 pages, very small typeface], and unmaking and remaking my hotel arrangements, because my boss insists I take a laptop with me and check email/review reports in the evenings, therefore I have to stay somewhere with wireless internet. Well there’s not much else to do in The Hague, is there?
I’ve also been trying to keep one of my clients calm. She’s a very nervous type, and the inevitable bad reports that keep coming to her from the dark pits of Asia are frightening her into wishing she had never asked for the audits in the first place. Unfortunately some factories give more time and attention to the business of hoodwinking auditors than they would ever give to the paltry matter of paying the minimum wage or not requiring their staff to work more than 60 hours a week. In an interesting case of projection, the client blames the auditing company for the poor standards; but I’m afraid that if a factory doesn’t understand why it needs fire exits, then we really can’t offer anything positive except the suggestion that there is lots of potential for improvement.
Yesterday I had to escape early, because I could no longer stand my worried boss piling me up with spare leads for my borrowed laptop. She’s not usually so neurotic. I’m only going to Holland; I can pop back home in my lunch break if I’ve forgotten anything.
Last night I had my first stab at recording using the CyberHome DVR 1600 DVD Recorder. The first hurdle was getting the right kind of disc – my first glance at the manual let me to believe that both DVD-R and DVD+R formats could be used for recording, but upon purchasing a pack of DVD-Rs and double checking the manual, I realised that I would have to return the DVD-Rs for some DVD+Rs.
The discs are cheaper than I was expecting, actually. A spindle of 25 cost £12.50, which is not much more than a spindle of CD-Rs. This price doesn’t include any permanent storage, of course, though if you’re like me, you have shedloads of old CD jewel cases lying around the house. Additionally, these are not rewriteable discs, which means that you CAN record multiple programmes on them, but you can’t record over a previous programme. If this confuses you, then think of it as a notebook and pen, whereas a DVD+RW is a blackboard and chalk.
The actual recording process was fairly simple. You are presented with the choice of recording at five different quality levels. You can only get 2 hours on a disc at DVD-quality mode, though there is an even higher quality level available which offers half of this. For recording a broadcasted TV signal, either of these would probably be overkill. The lowest quality level (super long-play) claims to be equivalent to a VHS recording, and gives you 6 hours per disc. At this quality level, the media is cheaper than equivalent VHS tapes.
One missing feature which I found highly disappointing on this model was that there seems to be no way to put channel markers in at arbitrary points. I was hoping that I’d be able to dump a channel marker at the end of each advert break, but so be it.
Additionally, you can rename each title, but it seems that you are limited to very few characters. Hence, last night’s film will be remembered as BRINGING OUT TH.
The unit also defies convention by requiring recordings to be programmed with start time and duration, rather than the usual start time and end time. Whoever made this decision should be fired.
CDs didn’t render cassette tapes obsolete all on their own, as they didn’t have the recordability. However, when coupled with a home computer used as a media centre, cassettes don’t really offer any advantage anymore. Likewise, DVD recorders won’t render VHS recorders obsolete, but a DVD recorder with an integrated hard drive would. That is, as long as the manufacturers don’t DRM it up to the eyeballs. If there are too many restrictions on what you can do with it, then people will hold onto their VHS recorders simply because they aren’t being obstructed at every turn.
In conclusion, I feel that DVD recording has a lot to offer, though naturally if you are using the cheapest unit on the market, then there will be snags. The way that you want to use it also affects whether it is cheaper or more expensive than using VHS.
2 x Old Speckled Hen (bottle)
2 x Tanglefoot ale (can)
3 x Grolsch (bottle)
3 x Kronenbourg 1664 (can)
I’m spoiled for choice. Literally. I can’t decide what to drink. What would you choose?
Mmmmmm. Okay, Karen can have this computer back now.