Richy's Random Ramblings – Page 208 – Random ramblings and ravings of Richy B

Personal: Congrats Sis!

November 27, 2002

News: 2DTV’s George Bush advert

November 27, 2002

[George Bush putting a video in a toaster] I laughed as soon as I came across this article on BBC News about the Broadcast Advertising Clearance Centre (BACC) ruling that new adverts for the ITV’s satire show 2DTV video were “offensive because they questioned President George W. Bush’s intelligence, and without having asked his permission”.

Do you really have to ask someone’s permission to insult their intelligence?

Yeah, yeah – I know that isn’t quite what they said, but Dubya does seem to be acquiring a reputation of not appearing too intelligent. And a satire/parody/caricature show is all about “enlarging” certain factors of a person’s personality/looks to make them larger than life. In the word’s of Slashdot – “It’s funny, Laugh”! Plus, if the BACC really think that people belive that is the “real” George Bush putting a video into a toaster – doesn’t that mean that they are insulting the intelligence of the viewing public themselves?

Anyway, 2DTV is back on TV and is being broadcast tonight for half-an-hour at 10.30pm…

Techy: Microsoft’s losing me….

November 27, 2002

3 Comments

It seems “big bad” Microsoft is going to be losing me as a customer shortly. Whilst I’ve never been a great fan of theirs (I was sort of “forced” onto Microsoft platforms after the near collapse of RISC OS), I have used their systems as a primary desktop system for a few years now – however I try and run my servers on Linux as I don’t feel that Microsoft’s server platforms are stable enough yet-plus it works out a lot more cost-effective to have servers running something like Debian Linux than a single copy of Windows 2000 Server).

So far, Microsoft’s put me off them on the Instant Messenger and Web browser fronts, and I’m just hoping for a bit of time so I can clear down one of the harddrives in my main work machine and install Linux: ditching MS altogether…

Blog: Ali’s no longer a Porn Clerk

November 26, 2002

1 Comment

[A video box] It seems that Ali Davis is no longer a part-time clerk at a video store (which happens to rent out pornographic videos).

I first came across her “True Porn Clerk Stories” via an article on Kuro5hin (you can hear her on the forth ‘act’ of The American Life). I’ve enjoyed reading Ali’s encounters with the her customers, how she deals with problems that I wouldn’t have guessed might occur (how many of you think that people really do “whack off” in a video shop or return ‘dirtied’ tapes), but after a change of management at the store she worked in Ali felt it was time to move on.

Good luck to her and I hope she finds a fulfilling job that she enjoys, but I will miss her insightful diary entries (and, yes, like her, I do have a small collection of singles and albums from Aqua – take that how you will 🙂 ).

(Oh, and why oh why do I pronounce “clerk” as “clurk” instead of the proper British way of “clarke”?)

Spam: An anatomy of a spam

November 26, 2002

4 Comments

[Spam headed computer] Damn! I’ve just been hit by another “hit-and-run” spammer. They sent around 900 spam emails to me in little under an hour (I was busy doing other things so I didn’t notice the start of the run). Drat! Only 76 got reported to SpamCop though.

What really got annoyed was the fact that they had sent 20 identical messages to the same email address each time. And they had an average size of 20.7Kb each. Richy nashes teeth

So, for your “amusement” and interest, I have “captured” one of the spams and “disassembled” it for you.