Damn-Dutch

I’ve been watching too much Time Team lately and it is entirely to blame for the following randomness…

Whenever some or other age rolls along that they are discussing they drag experts out of every possible hole they could find them. The further away in time the period, the more outlandish the explanations for some things get, mostly ending up with the word “Ritual”.

Now let’s stick that onto our own time. Let’s forget for a moment that we record every time we pass gas. Let’s assume (and in most cases hope) that this does not pass the test of time and that this digital detritus dies a sorry death on a digital midden. Well alright it gets overwritten and eventually discarded without leaving a trace.

Add 3000 years and assume we haven’t blown ourselves to little tiny bits and even if we have that some of our offspring remains to find our archaeological layers of optical storage devices, old car tyres and plastic shell casings. I wonder whether or not they can tell much difference between our current death cults. I can’t and I’m living among them… They will have to resort to the word “Ritual” an aweful lot, that’s for sure.

April Fools jokes are not funny on websites.
Stop fucking around with frontpages and thinking you’re funny, trust me you’re not.
Just makes people jump through hoops to still get to the same info which means your joke falls apart.

Parties on a national and a local level have almost nothing in common besides their logo and name. And yet the national party leaders go have a debate the night before a local election. That will never cease being weird to me.

When it gets colder people complain about wanting a white Christmas.
When it snows people complain that the snow is causing the natural ice to be bad which lowers chances of decent ice skating.
When the snow melts and freezes over again people complain about slippery roads.
When people complain about these things it gets other people complaining about people complaining.

In short: people complain and people love it.

The Utrecht police are stepping up their fight against crime by using the internet. From Monday information on all break-ins in the city will be published online.

I wonder what this will do… Will it make people more aware of lacking security in their neighbourhoods. Probably. But then the locals chat enough with one another so that grape vine will do its job just fine in “spreading the word”. As far as I know people want to protect their fortress of sollitude, their castle, their home.

Seems to me a smart burglar can take advantage of this site in a few ways. After a burglary people tend to get more security measures. But since the time of burglary is known, you will also have an indication of the minimum age those security measures have. You can scan for probability of weaknesses. Maybe not this year, but in a few years sure. Plan ahead, why not.

But even if that’s a little far fetched, you can get a similar probability from looking around where a fair amount of burglaries has happened and with which method (they add it to the burglary posting!). This seems a likely problem with a lot of houses there. The locks and such will probably stem from the same period on most. The time they were built or last massively fixed up. Again, this seems useful to me if you think like a burglar.

And of course the plain and simple fact of “Oh I don’t need to go there to break in, they’ve already been burgled and are now without much useful things to steal.”

Who knows, maybe it will work. But I think it would work a lot better with a little less information…

Don’t you just fucking love being called day in day out by call centers? You just get home from minding your own or someone else’s business, usually on a friday, and we’re off… *ring ring* Would you like to subscribe to…? *ring ring* Your current power company, insurance, mortgage, cable package, isp, newspaper and your current life are clearly inferior to the alternatives we have to offer. Would you like to switch now?

Don’t get me wrong, I am not hating the call center employees. It’s great that they have a job and for some things a call center can be useful. It’s not the employees I mind, and I regularly wish them good luck, a good day, pleasant evening, you name it I’ve wished them it and only good things. I mind the companies that use them for sales, outgoing, intrusive calls, overloading people with information to get them to agree to something they really haven’t bothered to consider properly… No.

Along came Caller ID. Somewhere between the 70s and the 90s it became available to the public. Good, that evens the ground between companies and consumers. So why aren’t we applying to phones what we learned to use in e-mail traffic? Proper filtering… Let the end user decide which numbers can, well, FOAD. We don’t need to *know* these numbers as such, as long as some phone company knows them, which is true since a connection is established. Combined with something as easy as an online interface to set up this filter.

One seems to be able to filter one’s mail (return to sender), e-mail (block), front door (just leave it closed you git)… but not one’s phone? Not properly anyway… It sucks. It seems something that can be solved. If so, then it should be solved.

Winter is lifting its heels again, not that this had anything to do with the lack of posts. I was in a mental state of hibernation… or lazy… or something. Anyway.

Why do people keep an ice scraper and lock defrosting spray in the car’s glove compartment?

Nick changed for the hell of it. This was a random thought on IRC back on July 29th or so.

[22:17] <*> it’s 1:16 already, where does the time go X(
[22:17] <Chris> not sure, but wherever it is, it’s huge!
[22:17] <Chris> sounds like time passes from one universe to the next
[22:18] <Chris> that’s why it never stops!
[22:18] <Chris> the vacuum needs to be filled!
[22:18] <*>:o
[22:18] <Chris> so then.. maybe we’re recycling time
[22:18] <Chris> that would account for a feeling of deja vu
[22:18] <Chris> ok now that will be stuck in my head for days to come
[22:18] <*> alright, no more scifi for you
[22:18] <Chris>

Does adding a wedge or slice of lemon to your drink make it significantly more healthy or should I say less unhealthy?
Or maybe the added acid will help rot your teeth some more combined with the carbondioxide and sugar and things.

That’ll be on my mind for days…