Origin of the Word 'Bleh'

I have an email search program which essentially lets me search all over 120,000 emails in a few seconds. Anyway, I remember using the word 'bleh' when nobody else did. So I did an email search to find the earliest use of the word. I found it in an email from April 14th 1998, but I didn't use the word, it was an American friend in Florida called Jonathan Harp (who was helping us write movie reviews) who mentioned it in a review.

So there are 3 possibilities... (1)Is Jonathan invented it, I used it, and people copied me. (2)Is Jonathan didn't invent it, I used it, and people copied me. (3)Jonathan invented or didn't invent it, and people copied HIM.

Either way, it's nice to think I popularized a word.

Be Careful What You Design

At high school, I typed in a BBC B program on the Acorn Archimedes (BBC B = old 8 bit PC, Archimedes = old 32 bit PC), and it let you draw lines and circles, and zoom in and out infinitely. Wireframe graphics.

Me and my friend made a little world in it, and if you zoomed in in a certain place, it said "If you can read this, F*** off". Then we got the maths teacher to look at it.

It was our bad luck that he chose the exact choices and I turned red when he read "If you can read this, F*** off". But he took it in good humour.

The lesson? Don't make assumptions about what choices people make on a computer.

Webserver on the Moon

If our civilization collapses, and we lose all our data, we'll need a way to get all that data that got blown up or erased.

What to do?

Simple! Send a rocket to the Moon with a phat laptop and a few Terabytes of space. Then, make it so you can send voice or data requests over a radio link from Earth, and then if a future civilization rediscovers the concept of radio, they can get all that data.

It'll be *safe* on the Moon. Google webservers on the moon are where it's at!

Belkin F5D7010 And laptop batteries

I found out that my F57D010 card (7xxx series) plugged into my laptop's PCMCIA socket, shuts off whenever I switch to running off battery.

The solution? Simple...

Get a 5xxx series F57D010 card and it works great. This is I assume, because it uses less power. The 7xxx uses more power than a laptop battery can provide.

An older version using less power? Criminal...

Web Gripes for 2010 and a Funny Story

Here's a post that isn't about anything, just my gripes about Web 2.0 (or whatever).

• Cascading style sheets (why would I want to cascade a style?) AND the whole concept of jazzing up pages to unnecessary levels, when there was nothing wrong with a page of HTML with a few different-sized fonts. It's like at school, we used to write by hand, but now in schools it's "unacceptable" not to use a word processor (from what I know). They taught us the basics of HTML at college in 1997, and we happily made bulleted lists, embedded pictures, big and small fonts, and italic/bold/underline, but now, I have a degree and even I can't figure out new HTML tags - and CSS files are certainly NOT HTML.
  
• If the Web really was downward-compatible, as evidenced by the version number of HTML (1.0, 2.0, 4.0, etc), then modern webpages wouldn't crash (or lock up) Netscape 4.7. But they do!
  
• Twitter and unnecessary centralisation (what was wrong with blogs?)
  
• YouTube and unnecessary centralisation (surely hosting and bandwidth should now be cheap enough for any website to host their own videos)
  
• The death of Geocities by Yahoo for no good reason - millions of pages now gone offline (result of centralisation)
  
• URL shorteners - unnecessary centralisation, and there's no doubt a URL shortener service will shut down after 2 years and wipe out billions of URLs
  
• Google not spidering my pages because they don't have enough "PageRank".
  
• Monopoly of embedding Flash for showing videos because web browser manufacturers are incompetent to do it themselves (and the antitrust nightmare of the buying out of Macromedia [maker of Flash] by Adobe).
  

And people have various catchphrases (eg, "simple is more") to explain the lack of a secure (I mean permanence and forward looking) design for the Web.

I used to be faintly optimistic about the Web, but new flaws (not bugs, but the above companies and fads) appear to have ballooned in the last 4 years or so, which threaten the integrity of the whole stupid system. (I'm not saying it has any integrity).

An old pun of mine about the Web's name: What's a web for? To catch unsuspecting flies! And it certainly is doing.

Finally, I'll finish on a funny story. I got a direct mail leaflet from Dell about the Inspiron 560. It has a 340GB hard drive, a E5400 Pentium CPU, and 2MB Memory. I knew Windows 7 was optimised, but I didn't realise how much...

I Just Invented a New Form of Media

Whatever you are doing at a particular time is written up (in < 40 characters) as your screen name in MSN. All your friends can see what you are doing NOW, but not before that. I call it Witter.

Watts Going On

My studio has about 13 pieces of gear (including amp and laptop), and I've got 2 4-way boards and 1 8-way board on the go. I wondered just how much a single 13 Amp socket can cope with?

Well, according to this, I can plug in about 30 100-watt devices.

Luckily the 13 pieces of gear only use about 500 by my calculations, so I doubt even I can buy enough studio junk/gear to reach the limit!