WillWybrow.com

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IN THE NAME OF THE GUN

I remember first getting “MSN” as it was colloquially known (and still is, a bit) at the tender age of… I’d say twelve. My memory isn’t perfect, but it was twelve or thirteen.

Since then, it’s held its own as instant messenger of choice for me and the people I speak to most. But think about it… are you in any significant way similar to how you were at that age? Different hobbies, different friends, different institution of education, different level of education, different uses for instant messaging… Can one program really hold up for so long and through so much change in its users’ mindsets?

Well, apparently it can, since I’m still a user of it. Almost every day, too. Friends are still there, and I haven’t stopped adding new ones. But, I decided to ignore the fact that everyone still uses it and take a look at the actual program itself. Here are a few of the observations I have made:

So, from the top down, then…

First, this bar is mostly filled with crap: stuff like “Go to Windows Live Today” and “change the colour of your window” and the rightmost one - displaying the File, Contacts, Actions… menu that’s already at the top of the screen… This is all just unnecessary. I’ll grant the ‘e-mail’ button; people will want to check their mail if they use Windows Live for their e-mail.

Next, no thanks, Microsoft, I don’t want to enrol in your crappy Customer Experience bullshit programme. I don’t know how to get rid of this bar. Maybe it goes away if I click the link? Well, I’m not going to click the link.

Moving on, this is the worst bit. Pop-out Flash advertising. Not only are they unsightly, they are annoying when you mouseover them and they take up half your screen with flashing bright colours. And, of course, integrating the Flash plugin uses up a load of extra memory for no reason. Some of them even have sound…

Finally, there is a reason I don’t use Live Search to query the internet: it’s shit. Everyone who wants to find something uses Google. They own searching, it’s time to give up trying to take it away from them.

So, what I did was start cutting out all the bits of useless crap using a graphics program. I also removed some of the empty space that I put in myself (just to balance out the contact list to advert ratio), and look what happened:

I accidentally invented Google Talk.

A lot of people don’t have more than one computer. They rely on one machine to keep them connected with the wider world. When things happen, things like CJ’s laptop breaking through age, it makes me think of the following really good plan.

Courtesy computers! If I had a spare, reasonably powerful laptop handy, I would lend it out to people on a short term basis so they could use it for things like e-mail and Facebook and web browsing in the gap between breaking their computer and it being repaired or replaced. I’d lend it out to friends (and for free), and people would know me as the handy computer guy who helped them out when they needed it.

If it were suitably convenient, I could also carry it around with me when I go away. Chloë, an AHS trustee and their Publicity Officer, borrowed my laptop to check her e-mail when we were at the conference in Leeds the weekend before last. It occurred to me that maybe loads of people would want to do that, and so I could pass the communal laptop around for people to borrow.

I’d install Windows on it, and Office, and some web browsers and Messenger and some media players. All the essentials. I’d then image the hard drive to a DVD or removable HDD. Every time it came back to me I could wipe the hard drive and re-image it so that it was clean for the next person to use.

I have seen the Facebook advertising sign-up process. I know that you can choose to target people according to their listed personal information.

So, I am listed as ‘in a relationship,’ and my ‘religious views’ were set to ‘atheist’ (and I have changed them to Secular Humanist recently). SO EXPLAIN THIS ONE TO ME, FACEBOOK:

Also, I thought that if you weren’t paying very much attention and you read it as though it had a comma in the middle of the title, it could be very provocative to sensitive people like my pal, CJ (whose first name is ‘Christian’). They should be more careful.

It’s been a bit of a weird result, to be honest.

I woke up at 3am instead of last time’s 2am for the blackcurrant-induced toilet-trip. The only difference this time was that I didn’t immediately get back to sleep again afterwards. In fact, it was more like 5am when I finally did get back to sleep, and those missed two hours were a bitch.

But it’s ok. Despite being a bit more tired this morning when waking up, I got up ok because the doorbell went. The doorbell, you may well know, is located just on the other side of my bedroom door. Plus, I thought it might have been one or more of the prizes I’ve won in competitions this month. But it turned out to be a package for Stuart, probably from the NSS and probably containing a number of their new badges. Shh, don’t tell anyone they’ve got new badges out (I’m torn between the ‘atheist’ recolour in Warwick Atheists colours and the ‘evolved’ creationist-flip-off). Anyway, point is, I got up ok.

I decided that aiming to be in at 10am today is just too harsh. I don’t have to be in until eleven, so I thought it would be ok to just be ready to be in by ten (ready to leave by nine) and then spend the extra time writing this and playing on the internet.

In summary: a bit pissed off about lying sleeplessly for two hours in the middle of the night, but glad I didn’t fail when it came to getting up time.

Overall status: successful.

Just now having ordered my Dan Dennett lecture ticket over the phone, I have to say that the BHA has rekindled my love of ordering things over the phone.

This is partly a complaint about the NSS’s ordering website that does not allow you to specify an alternative delivery address when you make a purchase from their online shop. It’ll take much longer for my package to get from my card’s registered address and my present residence. It’s upsetting because I ordered some really cool things, and I want them now.

Anyway, the BHA lady was really friendly and helpful, and the experience was really personal and flexible, not like rigid online forms and faceless checkout systems.

If you’d asked me this morning, I’d have said online systems were much better as there’s less chance of human error. But now I think we still have a way to go with them.

Today is the first weekday of my new masochistic idea for helping me get out of bed in the mornings - discomfort.

Unfortunately, over the weekend I never got the chance to go out and buy extra bedding for the experiment. The idea was to use one duvet to cushion the floor and another as a cover. So I used some spare bedsheets and a towel and a bunch of old clothes from my suitcase to create a mountain of insulation over me. My house is cold enough as it is without it being a) Winter and b) the floor, so it was important I didn’t catch hypothermia (severe exaggeration but the point remains valid).

I got into bed at about 2307; pretty early by recent standards (considering for the last few nights it’s been in the region of 5am) and got to sleep without much of a problem. Woke up for the loo at 2am (I made a special case to check the time) because of the stupid blackcurrant squash we have in the house at the moment. Blackcurrant is a fucking diuretic and I’m pretty sure it’s giving me lockjaw. But that’s another story. I also resisted the urge to injest caffeine products in the hours leading up to my bedtime.

So, how did it go? It went pretty well. My alarms went off at 8am (for a 10am start). I didn’t hear them very well… On nights when I leave my computer on all night (tonight I was ‘purchasing‘ the film Hook), this thing happens where my ears kind of close up. I guess it’s to block out the sound of the fans whirring away. They go fine again in the morning but it makes my alarm quiet sometimes.

After two presses of the ’snooze’ button (so, on the third alarm), I got up. That’s much better than six presses of the ’snooze’ button and then going back to sleep, as has happened more than once in the past. I had time for all the things I needed to do in the morning. I even had time for breakfast, a too-often-missed delight of the morning. I had so much free time, I even sent a reply to my dad’s e-mail.

I’m not very tired either. The caffeine I denied myself last night was a pretty nice treat this morning, and it, coupled with an early morning meal, should keep me energetic and happy all day.

I have no plans for tonight, which means I will be at home in the evening. Getting up at a normal time should mean I fall tired at a normal time, which in turn should mean I get to bed at a sensible hour again. I will try and make it to the supermarket so I don’t have to sleep under a pile of musty clothes that I haven’t removed from my suitcase since packing them before term one last year.

Early Morning Experiment’s status so far: successful.

Man, we have a stupid crest. It doesn’t look professional at all. It looks like it was thrown together by a GCSE student studying… I’m gonna say ICT. And the project is to make a web page for a fictional university. It looks like it was just put together as a by-product of some other, bigger project, and serves only to fill a space whilst not expecting to be judged.

Well, it looks dumb. Why is there two of the atom logo? The bottom left one is far too big for its section on the crest. They could have made the badge a bit bigger or changed the space ratio a bit. But why is it there twice? Damn it. The only advantage to it is that it looks a bit like that atheist symbol… This one:

Next, there are too many colours on this. It can’t be a really effective logo when it’s so busy. I know it’s not meant to be a proper logo, but god damn it, why does that mean it has to look so shitty? It will go on my degree certificate possibly? I don’t even want a degree if the certificate has to be stained with this bullshit. Ah man, why even bother with university?

Coming soon, I’m starting a section of the site that deals primarily with Humanism.

Humanist Will

Look forward to it; it’s going to have some gems.

It’s actually really terrible how often I use words like ‘gay’ and ‘homo’ and ‘fag’ in everyday speech. Let me straighten it out, though, it’s just immaturely using the words as generic negative nouns and adjectives. That’s using the words, not their meaning.

Gay people are actually awesome. Not by virtue of being gay, (positive discrimination is still discrimination) but because they put up with so much shit from conservatives and religious nuts (cf. Proposition 8 - what a cunt). I really want the Warwick Atheists and Warwick Pride to do some event together sometime, to show them that we’re supporters!

Describing things as ‘gay’ when they’re going wrong, or people as ‘fags’ when they annoy me isn’t being homophobic (well, it is by accident I suppose) if I don’t intend to be homophobic. It’s just playground habits that I haven’t kicked yet.

But I’m going to go for it! Everyone help me out by interrupting me when I’m accidentally homophobic and reminding me that this post exists.