Thursday, March 27, 2008
Eureka!
A birthday present for the BH from BT. Wake up this morning and all the green lights are on on the little black box and we are online again. Maybe they have a batch of spare lines they dish out in emergencies, that is to say when the 48 limits given to valued customers are running out. Let's hope it hangs together for a bit longer this time.
Thinking more about the Chinese whispers, find it all a bit alarming that such things are floating about the ether. First, that someone should start such a rumour maliciously. Although, if it really is Chinese whispers, no one individual created the whole thing. But no-one along the way thought to check it. Second, that I did not think to check it until after the event, and then only as an afterthought. Third, the rumour was cunning, in that one has heard before of places like the University of Kentucky - at least schools in that part of the world - getting embroiled in nonsense about the creation or not in seven days. Or right to life. So entirely believable that people in that part of the world would go in for something stupid. As The Square used to say in his thrillers, if you are going to tell a lie, it works much better if the lie is built upon the truth. A free-standing lie does not have any foundations. This being, perhaps, the clue to successful rumour generation.
And I have passed this particular Kentucky lie on to some more people who may not get to the retraction posted here - so the stupidity not confined to the place of origin. While I went through the motions of saying I ought to check it, this was just going through the motions. It did not occur to me that the check might fail. If it is out there, in print, in some sense, it is true. In the same way that one continues to believe what one reads in the DT, despite the volume of misprints - never mind about bigger mistakes.
I was reading recently about the cyber-vandalism of Wikipedia. A propos of which it seems that there is a large industry out there of people working either for or against Wikipedia. Large numbers of people going around vandalising articles - quite often in a witty way - in the way that the better graffiti are quite arty - but vandalistic none the less - and large numbers of people going around clearing up the mess. Reams of material about governance of same. A sort of suburban tennis club committee or trade union branch committee gone completely mad. Nothing quite like the committees that amateur bureaucrats set up. Real labours of love.
I then thought that there must be people in my old department responsible for keeping the department's Wikipedia entry in good shape. There certainly is one. Maybe an entire team - since Wikeipedia may well be the sort of place that a journalist would go to get a bit of background to pad out his more or less news-free article on the dreadful Darling. I wonder if they have entries in MySpace, Facebook, Second Life and all those sorts of places? I seem to remember reading that the more media-whorish politicians do, so why not institutions of the same colour?
All rounded out by a bureaucratic dream the other night. I was filling in some elaborate form -the sort of thing I was rather fond of designing once one had packages like Word to do it in - but I was getting in a right lather about it. The form had a layered structure - shops within villages within county sort of thing - with the second level involving large stainless steel bolts - say about three or four inches long - and their correct insertion in the form depending on cutting the heads of the bolts into the right shapes. I was getting quite worried about how exactly I was going to do this. My hacksaw would not really be up for steel of this weight. The third level seemed to involve engraving the required information on the shanks of some more bolts, but this part is all rather vague. Bit of a mystery where all this came from, although it is true that I have designed a form in Word recently and that I did buy some cheap bolts from a hardware store in Tunbridge Wells which was closing down recently - although I think buying the bolts came after the dream, so maybe the latter really was prophetic.
New tax disc from DVLA turned up safe and sound yesterday. So that part of their computer system is up and running. Maybe the trick was not to have any people involved in the customer facing part of it.
Thinking more about the Chinese whispers, find it all a bit alarming that such things are floating about the ether. First, that someone should start such a rumour maliciously. Although, if it really is Chinese whispers, no one individual created the whole thing. But no-one along the way thought to check it. Second, that I did not think to check it until after the event, and then only as an afterthought. Third, the rumour was cunning, in that one has heard before of places like the University of Kentucky - at least schools in that part of the world - getting embroiled in nonsense about the creation or not in seven days. Or right to life. So entirely believable that people in that part of the world would go in for something stupid. As The Square used to say in his thrillers, if you are going to tell a lie, it works much better if the lie is built upon the truth. A free-standing lie does not have any foundations. This being, perhaps, the clue to successful rumour generation.
And I have passed this particular Kentucky lie on to some more people who may not get to the retraction posted here - so the stupidity not confined to the place of origin. While I went through the motions of saying I ought to check it, this was just going through the motions. It did not occur to me that the check might fail. If it is out there, in print, in some sense, it is true. In the same way that one continues to believe what one reads in the DT, despite the volume of misprints - never mind about bigger mistakes.
I was reading recently about the cyber-vandalism of Wikipedia. A propos of which it seems that there is a large industry out there of people working either for or against Wikipedia. Large numbers of people going around vandalising articles - quite often in a witty way - in the way that the better graffiti are quite arty - but vandalistic none the less - and large numbers of people going around clearing up the mess. Reams of material about governance of same. A sort of suburban tennis club committee or trade union branch committee gone completely mad. Nothing quite like the committees that amateur bureaucrats set up. Real labours of love.
I then thought that there must be people in my old department responsible for keeping the department's Wikipedia entry in good shape. There certainly is one. Maybe an entire team - since Wikeipedia may well be the sort of place that a journalist would go to get a bit of background to pad out his more or less news-free article on the dreadful Darling. I wonder if they have entries in MySpace, Facebook, Second Life and all those sorts of places? I seem to remember reading that the more media-whorish politicians do, so why not institutions of the same colour?
All rounded out by a bureaucratic dream the other night. I was filling in some elaborate form -the sort of thing I was rather fond of designing once one had packages like Word to do it in - but I was getting in a right lather about it. The form had a layered structure - shops within villages within county sort of thing - with the second level involving large stainless steel bolts - say about three or four inches long - and their correct insertion in the form depending on cutting the heads of the bolts into the right shapes. I was getting quite worried about how exactly I was going to do this. My hacksaw would not really be up for steel of this weight. The third level seemed to involve engraving the required information on the shanks of some more bolts, but this part is all rather vague. Bit of a mystery where all this came from, although it is true that I have designed a form in Word recently and that I did buy some cheap bolts from a hardware store in Tunbridge Wells which was closing down recently - although I think buying the bolts came after the dream, so maybe the latter really was prophetic.
New tax disc from DVLA turned up safe and sound yesterday. So that part of their computer system is up and running. Maybe the trick was not to have any people involved in the customer facing part of it.
# posted by Jim @ 12:26 AM 
