Mat Bowles

Make your own sign, 6 degrees meme

Via

Meme 6 handshakes… You know how everyone in the ‘developed’ world is six people away from everyone else (supposedly, and it’s probably not far off). Well, I figured the other day that I’m not that far off everyone on my friends list. So, new meme; copy your friends (not mutual friends) list, and reorganise into number of people apart you are. Delete non-existent people or dummy accounts.

Have met: _mindrape_, aeranth, aliannurai, angelil, benjamindodson, bimbeeni, blacktone, blue5hadow, byteback, dainul, darkestinsanity, deuschristus, djrex, draich_goch, draxar, dudeulike, extinctfables, faeriecween, freddiefraggles, gary_joyce, granjero, guido_was_taken, hunniethepig, iamseph, indiana_george, innerbrat, johnwordsworth, karis_uk, kittenfangs, lmnicole, lokean, long2blong, maddock_ist_rad, mapp, markslut, matgb, matryx, misseve, nadriel, ollyb, oueze, paulatpingu, petevg, rakiek, raksaksa, ravensloft, ruein, rx_ritalin, scorpionchild, seth_ra, sexygoldfish_uk, shadow_exe, silentgreeneyes, simoncopp, stonefox84, susannah_banana, taradragon, telerfretmage, timsinister, tiredstars, tispity, tregwilym, two_brains, vampire_gothica, vampwillow, zechnophobe

1 person away from: allezbleu, comedyjim, adamshadow, doccy, jonnynexus, lithium_doll, lostinarden, htwo, mdmnmdllr, paulrattew, pinkshifter, poifaerie, sinju, smattie, thalinoviel, tyrell, waka_laka

2 people: yojimbouk

3 or 4 people: annacdotes, chrislightfoot, doctorvee, jackthomas, rho, vodex.

No direct connection (known) therefore 6 people: active_apathy, atlanta06, cargoweasel, daweaver, demiurgent, flemco, grrm, herdivineshadow, kling_klang_bed, kobold, naudiz, nihilistic_kid, palliddreamer, ps238principal, takhisis, theweaselking, tiger_grrl_23

NB, This effectively works if through no other way than elective politics. Everyone knows someone who has met their loacl MP/Congressman/whoever; a “please vote for me” pop into your newsagent counts. I’ve met several MPs, they’ve met Tony Blair, he’s met most world leaders, they’ve met your MP, who’s met someone you know, etc. In other cases, it’s a bit weird, or “small world” links; I was in the same room today as who knows and as examples. Now, the question is, can those links be reduced by direct contact? And do we care?

January 30th, 2006 Posted by MatGB | Uncategorized | 2 comments

Spam experiment.

OK, awhileback I switched off my postmaster accounts on the domains, and got everything to forward to one inbox. I check the spam folder every hour or so anyway, and just delete whatever is in there, haven’t had a false positive for ages now.

Today, I decided not to bother deleting stuff, I just marked all as read to see when new stuff came in.

So, tally from when I logged off approx 24 hours ago and now? 253 spam emails.

The moral to this story? Meh, I’ve never tried hiding my email addresses, but I suspect putting it up unscreened on a domain name owned by a friend hosted on Geocities when I redesigned it for him was probably a bad plan. Also, owning two domains, one of which is being spoofed for outgoing by at least one spammer is really annoying. I think I may switch postmaster back on. Oh, having the admin account being also my main contact account was stupid as well. Learnt the lesson on that one. I’ll probably switch the fuzzyduck email address from MatB to MatGB at some point, and at this point I’ll let TaKtix lapse, not using it at all, and it’s not a cheap hosting package like fuzzyduck…

But, dude? 253 spam emails in 24 hours? FFS. Only 2 got into the inbox though, they’re right, spam is going to die soon, the filtering is too good. If people stopped buying the crap they advertise we’d all be better off as well. If I want viagra, or cialis, or even \/146R4, I’ll go see a doctor. I can’t afford stocks or shares, there is no way I’m taking out a US based home loan, and if I want to look for Euro porn I’ll just look for it, it’s not like search engines can’t find porn easily. Yet, somewhere out there, blithering idiots respond to these mails and make the spammers money. Stop it. Please.

January 28th, 2006 Posted by MatGB | Uncategorized | 5 comments

CSS help?

OK, I’ve got to the point that I can read .css, but writing it? Completely beyond me.

So, what I want, is to sort http://not-little-england.blogspot.com/ so that the search box is on the right of the logo, the logo left justified and no longer centered. It’s such an easy job, but I can’t get it to work properly. What very basic principle am I missing?

Oh yeah; what’s the html tag to force a display of unformatted text and/or code? Playing around with the blogger template is teaching me a fair amount, but I just don’t ‘get’ code in the way the code monkeys I know do…

January 27th, 2006 Posted by MatGB | Uncategorized | 5 comments

Whalesong and books

Whale looks for mate, sees Prescott

Bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you intend to read, strikeout the ones you don’t want to read. (via

The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams
The Great Gatsby - F.Scott Fitzgerald
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (denotes have started reading)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - J.K. Rowling (don’t think I’ve got a choice)
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story - George Orwell
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
1984 - George Orwell
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - J.K. Rowling (I’ve seen the film, does that count?)
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut
Angels and Demons - Dan Brown
Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
Neuromancer - William Gibson
Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
American Gods - Neil Gaiman
Ender’s Game (The Ender Saga) - Orson Scott Card (IB; the book is good, borrow it, the man’s an arse, but…)
Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Good Omens - Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman
Atonement - Ian McEwan
The Shadow Of The Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Dune - Frank Herbert

I think I may need to install textpad again, blogger has gone back to span + weight formatting for html, which annoys me…

January 26th, 2006 Posted by MatGB | Uncategorized | 3 comments

Banks. Why do we bother?

Important message (please pass it on) Royal Bank of Scotland is shit.

For some reason, I can’t avoid them today, having taken an extra hour at lunch trying to sort the finances out (red final demand sir? Sorry, no, we can’t extend your overdraft, you went over your limit last month sir. Yes, I can see that you have to pay it, yes I can see that you only went over by a few pounds for a few days, and yes it does appear that was due to us charging you some interest on the same day you withdrew £20. Computer stills says no sir; try this number, they’ll run the same request again on the exact same computer system, then wonder why I told you to ring them…), every blog I click on seems to have a finances story (well, two, here’s the other one). Ah well.

Got home, opened the post, it appears the council may owe me £250 in overpaid council tax (they got capped y’see). That is, if what I can see from the bill is correct, the numbers make no sense at all, it may be I’m just in credit because I paid the whole year in September and they’re confused.

January 26th, 2006 Posted by MatGB | Uncategorized | 2 comments

Livejournal customer relations

Hey everyone, guess what? Yup, you’ve got to log in (again) and are probably going to encounter some more problems for a bit longer. It appears that putting , and on your main friends page is currently an esential plan.

Great. You see, the thing is, from what I can tell, they could’ve predicted some of these problems, they could have warned us, they could have… You get the picture.

So, here’s how to deal with this sort of thing and not piss off your paying customers.

1. Identify problem and realise it’s fucking urgent.
2. Crash solve it.
3. Announce you’ve solved the immediate threat
   1. Admit it’s an incomplete solution
   2. admit there may be knock on effects
   3. give all users access to a specific, dedicated support reporting page for this problem only
   4. keep people informed
   5. be 100% open and honest; this is the internet, we’ll find out what the problem was anyway, it’ll leak
   6. don’t say things like “a flaw in a popular browser” but instead say “X flaw in Y browser”
4. make sure that if you’re doing something that will affect all users, warn them if possible and ensure they know after the fact if not
5. Apologise, and let those that may lose out medium to long term know that, when the problem is over, you’ll make it up to them, and to be patient
6. keep people informed (did I mention that one?)

Here’s what Livejournal have instead done:

1. Identify problem and realise is fucking urgent.
2. Crash solve it and think it’s all over
3. Announce you’ve solved the problem
   1. Give the impression it’s all done with
   2. Not warn people there may be knock on effects
   3. Not adequately explain the issue
   4. Tell people after the fact with incomplete data
   5. Tell people you’ll post info on but
      1. not do so for 5 days
      2. not provide people a link and instead call it “our development journal”
   6. Fail to tell people they may not currently be logged in in an accessible way (twice)
4. Thank us for “understanding” (something not fully explained) and hope we “have fun”
5. Give a priviledge that many thought was good enough to pay for to all users, and
   1. replace said priviledge with something most can’t effectively use (more phone posts. w00t)
   2. do this as a follow up to another significant tipping factor being lessened (# icons, I paid to go from 3 to 15, I could live with 6)
   3. act all surprised like when people are wondering if a paid account is now worth it
6. Fail to keep everyone informed

Yup, I’m pissed. Keeping your paying customers happy is something that businesses need to do. I love LJ, I like the flexibility, the utility, the community. But the management and PR people suck. I effectively work in marketing/PR (it’s a significant part of my job), and I know pissing people off by not keeping them informed is a bad idea. When the people you piss off most are the paying customers that your business model relies on heavily? Clusterfuck.

Short version: log in (again). Oh yeah, one good thing, Manage your login sessions (if they get it working…)

January 25th, 2006 Posted by MatGB | Uncategorized | 15 comments

DeadPool (redux)

I had a comment today on an old entry I’d completely forgotten about. What entry Mat? I hear you ask. Well, my entry on The Dead Pool 2006, from no less than the creator of the idea in the first place. I’d, um, completely forgotten about it, I’d meant to plug it all the way through December. So, options…


It would be a shame for to win by default with no actual prizes. IF’n you want to enter it anyway, go ahead, entries are only valid if enough people vote to continue the competition (poll closes Sunday 29th 25.59), if they do, entries must be made before January 31st 23.59; people that die before closing date don’t count, Mark can redo his entry if he wishes. Go on…

January 24th, 2006 Posted by MatGB | Uncategorized | 5 comments

The past few days according to LJ (approximately)

So, confused by all the stuff happening with LJ over the last few days? Well, has put up a great summary, which was funny enough to be metaquoted, but I got to it via a comment in , and it’s being linked to everywhere. So, for the benefit of those who don’t read , I thought I’d link it.

But, of perhaps more use, why secure passwords are essential for everyone and why they can’t just log you out if you get it wrong a few times. My password was the same as that for one of my domains. That was, well, stupid. Especially since I’d been using it for various sites for years.

I’m pretty much over the cold now, but the finances are still screwed, so I’ll be doing cheap things that don’t require travelling for a bit longer I suspect.

January 22nd, 2006 Posted by MatGB | Uncategorized | no comments

Warning; change your password, check you’re logged in?

In their infinite wisdom, LiveJournal have expired everyones cookie without warning us. There were already some logout problems due to the new subdomain as well. I didn’t realise until page 2 of my friends page, clicked reply; reloading got me 3 friends locked posts from people.

They’re doing it all for our own good, but, well, they’re announcing things so badly it’s pissing people off. Why doesn’t that really surprise me?

Change your password

Seriously, according to this blog/news post:

several Bantown members spoke at length in an online instant-message chat with Security Fix. During the chat, members of the group claimed to have used the Javascript holes to hijack more than 900,000 LiveJournal accounts…”However, we have only used approximately five hundred of these cookies so far, so it is impossible to tell whether this sample is statistically valid. Still, a massive number have been compromised.”

In other words, they know 900,000 passwords, but have used 500 of them, so they may have yours without you knowing it.

January 21st, 2006 Posted by MatGB | Uncategorized | no comments

Bravest hamster in the world?

A rodent-eating snake and a hamster have developed an unusual bond …Their relationship began … when zookeepers presented the hamster to the snake as a meal Via

Isn’t it cute? The snake, of course, the hamster is just a rodent. On the other hand, does know his favoured username means meal?

Feeling a lot better now, but still not 100% right; should be in Exeter Sunday, not sure yet…

January 21st, 2006 Posted by MatGB | Uncategorized | 11 comments