Passive Aggressive August 28, 2008
Posted by Drew in : Funny, Miscellany , add a commentWe’ve all been there. Someone keeps parking in “your spot”. You go to the fridge and there’s only an empty milk bottle. Every day for the last week you’ve arrived at work to find your office door unlocked when you know you locked it the evening before. Some of us are rude and obnoxious and will “explain” to the perpertators of such attrocities the error of their ways but not everyone has that luxury.
Which is where the passive aggressive note comes in. Anyone who has lived in a shared house has probably experienced these. Fortunately (more…)
When cakes go bad August 24, 2008
Posted by Drew in : Funny , add a commentCakes are an ideal foodstuff for celebrations of just about any kind. We’ve all seen those impressive pieces of art specially commissioned for whatever event it may be, birthday, wedding, funeral. You get the idea.
Some times however things don’t go quite to plan.
Happy Weeding Day
Memes R Us August 15, 2008
Posted by Drew in : Cool, Miscellany, Technology , add a commentAh, internet memes. Where would we be without them. They come along, make us all laugh for a few days and then disappear.
Who can forget Dramatic Chipmunk, Diet Coke+Mentos, Numa Numa, Star Wars Kid or All Your Base Are Belong To Us. Not to forget 2 girls, 1 cup.
AppleTV Take Two August 9, 2008
Posted by Drew in : Technology , add a commentSo I wrote way back when about my purchase of the Apple TV and how for me it was exactly what I needed. In my original assessment I didn’t think that the original lowly 40Gb hard drive was going to be a problem but as with all things storage related the amount that is available soon fills and there is never enough. Once I started using the Apple TV in anger, especially with video content, the small drive was not suitable for a synchronising set up and whether this was a serious issue was going to be down to the wireless streaming capabilities. Well after using it for several months I can tell you that it is a problem. Here’s the deal; I have 802.11n in my house and it works fine upstairs and downstairs for all sorts of things, the obvious email/web browsing, XBox Live from upstairs works fine. But streaming high quality video? Not a chance. Not that this is necessarily an Apple TV issue. My video library is currently sat attached to a poor old Mac Mini which only runs 802.11g so that could be the bottleneck but whatever the reason I found that streaming was hit and miss. To add insult to injury, the more people in the house the worse the experience which means all my boasting about this technological marvel was quite rightly thrown right back in my face.
Who Needs Subtitles? August 4, 2008
Posted by Drew in : Funny , add a commentThe perils of reporting in a warzone!
Mapping Local Crime August 3, 2008
Posted by Drew in : Cool, Miscellany , add a commentRecently there was a news story that the UK government was considering the introduction of monthly crime maps showing the nature of crimes in a local area in an attempt to close the gap between the actual recorded crime figures and the general perceptions of the level of crime. It was mentioned that there were already examples of this in other areas of the world.
Totally unrelated to this I came across this site that does exactly what has been proposed for dozens of cities in the US. It categorises crimes and allows all or a selection of these categories to be mapped over a 3, 7, 14 or 30 day period. It makes interesting reading. Different cities provide differing amounts of information but the level of detail is still quite interesting. As an example of a real case I chose Palo Alto, CA. From this example it is clear that the placement of the crimes is down to a fairly precise level on the map.
One thing that I did find interesting was that in some of the smaller cities there appears at first glance to be a fairly large amount of crime and it is only when you start to read through the categories and details that you realise that the large number of crime icons on the map may be due to an aggressive targeting of a particular offence, for example youngsters with alcohol. This shows that as with all information designed for the “public” there needs to be a clear explanation as to what the data shows. It isn’t too big a leap to imagine a situation where an area gets a bad reputation simply because there are a large number of icons on the crime map whereas a closer inspection shows that in fact the opposite is true and there is relatively little actual serious crime due to a “zero tolerance” approach by local police.
The Crime Reports site relies on local police departments volunteering the information and obviously any UK service needs to be a nation wide operation if it is to be meaningful but I think it could be a useful addition to the debate on crime.