Monday 30 November 2009

The Best Crisps Of All Time

As judged by a panel of myself and @pipboy2009 on Twitter.

1. Steak McCoy's
2. Salt & Vinegar Squares
3. Pickled Onion Monster Munch
4. Walker's Cheese & Onion
5. Plain Hula Hoops
6. Salt & Vinegar French Fries
7. Pringles
8. Cool Original Doritos
9. Cheesy Wotsits
10. Quavers

Wednesday 18 November 2009

Theme Planet

Okay, how's this for an idea? It's the future, we've got space travel and we're discovering planets left, right and centre. In fact, any Tom, Dick or Harry can own their own planet. It doesn't take long to get there, or cost much to do it up.

Anyway that's the background. The idea is this: There's this one planet and it's all done up like Mad Max, Morrowind or Lord Of The Rings or something, and you pay a bit of money and you go there for a holiday. There's people living there (actors) from day to day, working the land, trading, bringing up families and all sorts.

When you arrive, you get given some clothes, some local currency and are allowed to go off into the world to do what you wish. You can be a warrior, an explorer, a thief, a wizard or even a robot (depending on the theme). Each planet has a storyline and all the actors are trained to fit in with it.

You go round, staying in taverns, eating and drinking the local cuisine, getting involved in battles, doing quests, freeing slaves, exploring the wastes, sailing from port to port. Whatever you want really. At the end of it, you get to keep all the money you've earnt or all the stuff you've nicked and, if you're lucky, it might just pay for the cost of the holiday itself.

The only spanner that could be thrown into the works is if we discover other planets that already have humanoid races on them. In which case, you might as well go there.

Monday 9 November 2009

End Party Politics

The human race is a race with a million specialities, but one of the things it does best is accept the status quo, when questioning it, and possibly changing it could be beneficial for the race itself and the individual.

One of the best places to see this unquestioning acceptance is in post-Thatcher Britain where all the trade unions are dead and only about 2 or 3 people turn out to vote. Maybe when things are going good, people don't like to try changing things. One thing you will notice though is the complete absence of any movement wanting to pull down the system of Party Politics.

What's the point in having 646 members of parliament if they can all be divided into three main political parties? You might as well have three people sat in there making the decisions of 60 million people. Not only should party politics be abandoned, it should be made illegal in the same way that big companies are fined for colluding and turning things in their favour. If every MP was his or her own person and was only answerable to his or her own opinions our parliament would be truly democratic and the general public would feel much more positive and less apathetic towards politics today.

Party politics may have been effective and necessary in the past but now we need a more humanistic and representative approach. However for the status quo to, in essence, commit suicide there would have to be some sort of a revolution, but considering how everyone is so apathetic, that will never happen. How do you get people who don't care about politics anymore to dismantle the system that is causing them not to care.

Every MP should only be answerable to himself and his or her constituency which they have earned and not been given by their party. There should be healthy competition between MPs and not between parties. If MPs spent less time trying to please their parties and their whips and more time trying to please us, maybe we would have more interest in them.

Sunday 8 November 2009

Google Wave

Now and then, something comes along, wastes a bit of my time then buggers off again. A kind person on Twitter decided I was worthy of an invite to Google Wave and in due course it arrived. The next day I set about trying to get to grips with it. I had watched Google's "Looooong Video" of a Developer Preview Presentation, but I can't remember much about it other than a lot of developers getting wet over what they were being shown and a Scandinavian bloke making bad jokes.

I logged in, which was fairly easy and straight-forward. Then it went downhill from there. The first thing I noticed was how shit it looked. I wasn't expecting the Mona Lisa in html form but I was expecting something more than one of Facebook's hand-me-downs. That didn't bother me too much as some of the best things in life don't actually look that great, including sex organs, genetic mutation and Tony Hancock.

After that disappointment I went on to the next one which was finding out that it doesn't do anything. It didn't immediately sing and dance and contrary to what I've heard, didn't have any bells and whistles on it. That didn't bother me too much because if anything, bells and whistles can be a bit annoying when you're trying to get things done. Anyway the point of this paragraph is that with my only friend, or 'contact' as Google Wave likes to call him, confirming my belief that 'the Wave' will be more at home in boardrooms and advertising agencies rather than on my laptop whilst I'm chatting bullshit, un-tagging myself in photos and scratching my balls, often simultaneously. Where was I? Oh yeah. With my only contact offline, I was quite limited as to what functions I could test. The first thing I tried to do was to install an app or a 'gadget' as the Wave's Newspeak calls it. I don't know much about apps or gadgets but I know enough to sense Inspector Gadget turning in his grave.

I knew somehow that you can do Twitter in the Wave so I tried to get something going with that. After about 45 minutes trying to get the Wave to do whatever it does to get Twitter coming through and failing in so many ways it's annoying me to think about writing about it so I'm not going to, I deleted all trace of it on my account. Needless to say I decided that the Twitter website actually handles Twitter quite well itself so I'll stick with doing it that way.

I thought there must be more to this stupid thing than having a little profile pic and an embedded Youtube video hanging around like a bad smell so I went about trying to find some new apps, nay gadgets, to try and spice up may page of rectangles and words; a mission in itself as tedious as it was frustrating. At last I discovered something-or-other that made Wikipedia come through on my Wave, in theory.

I copied the url for this gadget and pasted it into my contacts list, a process quite odd and until I found out about on some other website 10 minutes later, quite hidden. Then nothing happened. So I double-clicked around the screen and eventually something popped up suggesting two html codes that will make Wikipedia come through on my Wave. After lengthy attempts and variations on what I thought the instructions could mean I gave up. If I ever do need to bring Wikipedia through on my Wave, which I doubt I ever will, I'll push aside the disappointment with the satisfaction that I already wasted 15 minutes of my life on it and I stopped before it wasted any more of my quality wasting time.

After that, I decided that the only way forward on this son of a biscuit would be to get some contacts. I advertised on Twitter, and one brave soul stepped forward. Five minutes of deciphering yielded the knowledge required to add my contact which I did and we set about communicating. Like we do in chatrooms... and Facebook... and Twitter... and emails... and sometimes real life. You're probably asking 'why's that so great?' Well, in Google Wave, when you type, people can see the letters coming on the page as you type them. You're probably asking 'why's that so great?' Well, it isn't. In fact, it's a little bit embarrassing. We persevered with that for a two or three minutes then went back over to Twitter to finish up.

By this stage I still had a little bit of faith left for the over-hyped old bugger so I thought if I can succeed in getting some games to come through on my Wave everything would be alright; I'd have a bit of fun, let off some steam and take away a little bit of positivity. Did I fuck. The one game I managed to get going was a Sudoku app (I'm not even gonna call them gadgets anymore). Pretty straight-forward you'd think? No. You type a number into a box and it disappears. You try another number. It disappears too. You try all the numbers from 0-9. One stays in there; the correct one. The whole point of Sudoku is that you get half way through the thing then realise you fucked it up 8 moves ago by putting the wrong number in! All the other games looked shit so I decided that my Xbox 360 actually handles games pretty well so I’ll stick with that.

I picked the laptop up and threw it against the opposite wall then walked over to it, repeatedly smashed it up and down on the side of the table then brought it down on my head, adorning myself with a rather dandy cybernetic necklace. Then I snapped out of my fantasy, slowly shut down the my laptop's monitor and went outside for a smoke. I don't even smoke. Or own any cigarettes. My house doesn't even have an outside! That's how stressful it all was.

So if you've made it through to the end of this post, you deserve some advice. If you're still canvassing around for an invite you'd be better off trawling websites for a kind German that will agree to let you come to his house then kill you and eat you, for all the good it will do you. Would I have faired better if I read the instructions? Probably. Is that the sort of thing someone with a 21st Century attention span would've done? No.

Test Post

Testing. Testing. One Two Three. One. Two. Two. TWO! One. Two. One. Two.