The Boiled Egg of Infinity

So here’s a funny thing – just at the end of last year, I wrote about how I managed to completely mess up a Wordpress installation and lose my blog’s database, posts, comments, the whole shebang. I quickly rebuilt what I could but the damage was done. In that post (you can, if you’re interested, see it here) I whimsically used an image of an angry Malcolm Tucker for two reasons: to illustrate my mood (not good) and because it actually mirrored the expression I had on my face when everything went so terribly, badly wrong.

Since that fateful day all the comments I have received here at the Boiled Egg Of Infinity have all been spam and all but one have been directed at that single post. Now, assuming that spammers haven’t all been charmed en masse by my writing skills, what could explain the attraction? Seriously, all the spam for my blog has been going to that one, single post. I have come to the conclusion that the spammers have all been attracted by the image of Malcolm Tucker who, as we all know but I’m going to say it anyway because it’s my blog and my rules, is played to perfection by Peter Capaldi. Or, to give him his full title, Peter Capaldi, Lord of Spam.

Now, to follow that bombshell in a logical and sensible manner, there are a number of possibilities to explain this link, all of which have worrying implications for us all:

1. That Peter Capaldi has achieved this level of devotion because he is responsible for sending all of those emails that plague us so much (“Please help, I am the unwanted stepchild of the King of All Oil and Gold and want to smuggle money out of the country using a total stranger’s bank account.”).
2. That Peter Capaldi’s spammer legions owe him fealty because he spends all of his money from the BBC on phishing scams, thus making him their “go-to” guy on the internet. Did his wages from the excellent 3rd series of “The Thick Of It” get wasted on paying expenses for having won the Internet Lottery?
3. That Peter Capaldi has in fact managed to upload his consciousness to the internet and has become a transcendent data-based lifeform, existing only as a pattern of energy moving from network to network, and the imprint of his thought patterns on the ever-flowing stream of digital information has inadvertantly brought about this Capaldi-Spammers connection.

Now I’m just one guy, no expert and have never once met Peter Capaldi (who seems like a lovely man / physical-avatar-of-a-next-evolutionary-level-distributed-artificial-intelligence) but accepting the terms of my argument one of those possibilities has to be true. That’s just logic, that is*.

* Please note this is not logic. Terms and conditions apply.

Okay, just had a frightening moment watching the 10 ‘o clock news on BBC 1. There’s Huw Edwards, introducing a piece on whether the Conservatives understand the British public* and if they can win the coming General Election**. He says something along the lines of “To win, the Conservatives will need to win in seats that the Labour Party have held since…” *noticeable pause, look at monitor* “…1997.”

Proud moment there, Huw old boy, proud moment. Yes, 1997. Not like you had a chance to rehearse that or anything.

* They don’t.

** Worryingly, they could. Get your fucking finger out, Brown.

Right at the back of my local Tesco, up the moving walkway that does that scary locking thing with the wheels on the trolleys, sits a large bank of televisions that just happen to annoy the hell out of me whenever I happen to go there. Before I go on I know that the most obvious solution to this particular conundrum is just to ignore them and not go to that particular section of the store, but they’re right next to the section that sells DVDs and video games. I am, for those of you who either might not know or have forgotten, a huge couch potato and geek that is easily annoyed at stupidly minor things. So it’s a perfect storm, really, and not one of my making.

What is it that annoys me so much? Well, it’s the whole setup that Tesco have trying to sell the HD experience. They have all these TVs with a split-screen, showing what a movie or show looks like in HD and what Tesco want you to think it looks like on a normal TV. It looks something like this *:

Above: see, you need to buy HD! Look at that old shite your TV puts out! Buy HD now! DON’T THINK ABOUT IT! DO IT NOW! **

Except of course that it doesn’t look like that at all, does it? *** I’ve got a normal TV, and it doesn’t look like someone smeared Vaseline all over the screen after punching me in both eyes and stealing my specs. HD TV might well be the best thing ever, but every time I see those televisions in Tesco I always get annoyed at the underhanded way they seem to be selling the experience. They even did it once with Iron Man, and when that white line passed over him Robert Downey Jr. became Robert Indistinct Blob Jr. I’ve got no problem with them selling something, but they should at least try to do it honestly. And yes, I know that sounds daft but I thought I might as well start 2010 as I mean to go on.

* That is, by the way, an image from one of the films that they actually use in Tesco. I had to go and do research to find out what film this was, and get a screenshot. I put in the effort for this, I really do. I don’t even like Keira Knightley all that much.

** Sponsored by Tesco. Every little helps.

*** Of course the possibility always exists that I just happen to have a very specific type of stroke that affects the vision in one eye whenever I happen to step into Tesco. Mind you, I would need to recover from this episode every time I leave the shop but I suppose it’s not impossible. ****

**** Yeah, I suppose it is. Sorry.

Right, here are some things I learned today:

1. When you’re upgrading a Wordpress installation and it tells you time and time again to make a backup of your database, it really really means it.
2. If you’re nervous because you never upgraded a Wordpress installation before and you think you have backed up the database, do make sure that you actually have backed it up before you do anything that involves deleting and replacing stuff.
3. No, seriously, make sure. Make really sure. Go and check again.

I mention all of this because if, for example, it turns out that you didn’t backup the database after all, have lost everything and need to start from scratch, then you’re left sitting at a laptop feeling like a complete tit with an overwhelming urge to shout obscenties at the reflection staring out at you from the screen.

All of which leaves you with an expression like this:

Above: What do you mean, you deleted the database?

So from me, and my safe pair of hands, I bid you goodnight.

If there is one thing that is guaranteed to put me off going to see a film*, it’s hype. I understand that talking up your latest movie is just a part of the business and I accept that, but when the talk and the praise and the hype all goes OTT it actually starts to put me off the film entirely. I don’t know why I have such a reaction, but there it is. When I think about it, I still haven’t seen Moulin Rouge because so many people I know said “You MUST go and see Moulin Rouge!” when it came out**.

That’s where I am with Avatar, the latest James Cameron film. Between people I know talking about it, mentions on Twitter and various reviews I have seen the words “revolutionary”, “awesome”, “spectacular”, “fantastic” and “gamechanger” tossed around like so many tossed salad leaves at a tosser’s convention. I’ve even seen one celebrity be a bit of a prick about it on Twitter when someone dared to even question the greatness of the film in the smallest degree. As the hype continues to build up I can’t help but think if this film were a person, he or she would be glowing white and floating six inches off the ground as lepers and cripples begged to be touched and cured.

Please don’t get me wrong: I’m actually quite keen to go and see the film, because I’m a geeky fan of all things science fiction and it looks like a passable enough way to pass an hour or so. But – and I say this with all due respect and in as mild a way as I possibly can – IT’S JUST A FUCKING FILM. Now, you want to talk about revolutionary ideas and “gamechangers” that’s fine. Democracy? Gamechanger. Polio vaccine? Gamechanger. Telephone? Gamechanger. Those scientists who mapped out the entire genetic code of cancer? Gamechanger. CGI-stuffed story with blue aliens, spaceships and action sequences that will be out on DVD and Blu-Ray within the year? THAT WOULD BE A FILM.

* And if you want to put me off reading a book, make a film of it and then print a copy of the book that uses the movie poster (or a scene from the movie) as the cover image. What, we won’t buy a book unless it has someone famous on the cover? What is this, the Heat magazine approach to literature? I saw a copy of “A Christmas Carol” in Tesco last week and in addition to the movie poster being the cover, there was text all along the top that said “Now a major motion picture”. You know, because being a classic bit of literature wasn’t enough.

Above: If only Dickens had thought of blue aliens first.

** Is this cutting off my nose to spite my face? Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. I just don’t like the glassy-eyed zeal that gets into people’s eyes when they are absolutely convinced that you would love something and that you should go and see it right away. I like apples and salt and vinegar crisps, but I don’t go all shiny-eyed cult leader on people and try to convert them to Granny Smith’s Golden Wonder Church of Walkers. Plus, Nicole Kidman pisses me off. An entire video singing with Robbie Williams and she doesn’t slap him silly once. Wasted opportunity.

When I read this Shortpacked! strip today I couldn’t help but have a look at the site that it mentioned, Stand for Christmas. I thought the cartoonist was just making it up, or if the site existed he was perhaps exaggerating for the sake of the joke. I was wrong, and obviously underestimated the capacity some people have to generate outrage where no outrage has any reason to exist. What I love most of all is the fact that some of the people using the site are so angry that the spirit of Christmas* has not made it into their shopping experience that they get angry and feel the need to ditch any semblance of basic manners or decency in their rush to get on their computer and bitch relentlessly about a shop not playing the proper music or an underpaid checkout person not throwing in a “Hallelujah!” with every receipt.

Some of my favourite comments on the site are: “Too liberal! I’ll order online.” (that one was talking about Borders) and “I visited Babies R Us today. No mention was made of Christmas when checking out.” (that would be Toys R Us, but in all fairness their giraffe overlord might not celebrate Christmas). If you have five minutes and want to see what happens when a group of people who could give Daily Mail readers a run for their money get all stirred up and angry, go have a look. It all goes to prove a point that I would like to make by means of a diagram**:

* I’m reliably informed this is stuff like love, kindness, compassion, understanding and what could be termed an overall sense of good fellowship. If my wife is reading this, it also involves BUYING YOUR HUSBAND MANY MANY COOL PRESENTS. And making him a sandwich when he’s sitting reading.

** The sad thing is, I am actually quite proud of the diagram even though it was just a matter of five minutes in Fireworks. That’s effort, that is, effort that you don’t often see in this day and age.

At the end of the year the internet, papers and TV schedules are always jam-packed with retrospective stuff. Who died this year, what happened this year, I loved 2009, all that sort of stuff. Some of it is good and some of it is bad, but it fills column inches/airtime and I suppose it allows Paul Ross to earn enough to eat for the next 12 months. With that in mind, I decided to get in on the action early and write about the things I had planned to do this year and didn’t. I may or may not offer excuses as I go along.

1) Learn to play piano

For my 30th my friends all clubbed together and bought me a USB keyboard I could use with my Mac. I’ve always fancied learning how to play the piano and so bought myself a book and DVD to start me on my way. The DVD featured a stern Australian woman who promised to have me playing the piano in no time (and believe me, she was stern, I was not about to argue with her). Of course, life being life things got in the way, things got busy, the keyboard was put to one side and hasn’t been picked up since. Trapped on the shiny DVD disk, I think the stern Australian woman is probably screaming like an angry Genie by now.

2) Lose weight

This was all part of a big plan for 2009. I want (and need) to lose weight. Couple that with my being a big SF fan and generally geeky person, you can understand why I planned that if I lost enough weight, I would dress up as the 10th Doctor for Halloween. Motivation for saddoes is a difficult thing to understand, but believe me this was the plan I set. Because, you see, when you’re my size and you wear a battered old pinstripe suit then the overall look is less this…

And more this…

So given that I achieved just about 0% weight loss, you can see where that plan went. If I had pushed ahead regardless, I remain convinced that the overall effect would have been less “Last of the Time Lords” and more “Ullo John, got a new TARDIS?”

3) Start running

This is related to point 2. I had grand plans to get up early every morning and start the day with a run. Well, I say a run – at first it would be a moderately fast lumber, then I hoped to graduate up to a run as time went by. Plan derailed because a) I am lazy and b) Scotland is COLD in the mornings.

4) Read “The Republic”

I bought “The Republic” a while back and it’s a book I keep picking up now and again to have a go at it. I like to read – in fact, it’s one of my favourite things to do and probably contributed towards my failure in point 2 – but this one is a tough read…and to think I used to laugh at one of the guys at work, who has tried and failed several times to make it through Joyce’s “Ulysses”. I’ll keep at it, but at the start of this year it was on my list of books to have read by the end of the year.

5) Get better at DIY

I included this in my plans at the start of the year because I am terrible at anything remotely practical *. My wife is the go-to person in our house for DIY, changing plugs and all that sort of thing. At the time of writing I am still likely to electrocute/stab/impale/burn myself when doing anything that involves tools. I did manage (with my wife’s help) to put up curtain rails when we first moved in, but that wasn’t without some tension on my part beforehand and a hot cup of tea afterwards.

6) Write more

2009 was going to be the year for me to write more, to be creative and enjoy having a blog. Granted, very few people would read it (I’m pretty sure the wife only does so occasionally because of that hypnosis tape I play when she sleeps her love for me) but that wasn’t the point, the point was to get in touch with my creativity more and see what I could produce when I put my mind to it. I’m afraid to count the number of posts I actually made this year, but I think it’s pretty small.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not all bad by any means – there is plenty I have managed to do this year and I am lucky in that I have time to have another crack at the ones in the list above. There is just something about this time of year that makes me think about what I had planned to do and didn’t make the time for. Someone should make a television show about that…hold on, I have to go, Paul Ross just turned up at my door and is worrying the neighbours.

* Oddly enough, I am very good with flat-packed furniture. Seriously, you want a bookcase from IKEA building, I am your man.

So my mum wants to buy one of my brothers a laptop for his Christmas. Being the geeky one in the family, I’m the person that parents, aunts, cousins etc come to with computer enquiries* ranging from “This isn’t working!” to “What’s my WiFi password?” to “This thing is running slowly…fix it!” with all sorts of things in between. In this case, it was “Can you find me a good laptop at a reasonable price?”. I didn’t mind helping out, so I started to look around for a decent deal. The requirements were simple – a general laptop for basic use, nothing too fancy that needs to play games or anything like that, as the boy in question has a games console for that kind of thing. Fair enough, says I, getting to work.

As it turns out, it was the wife who found a laptop that fitted the bill nicely. It was in John Lewis, looked good, decent spec, and came to a price that suited my mum. Cracking, I thought. Done and dusted. Except that when Saturday rolled around and I went up to mum’s to show her the thing, it was out of stock on John Lewis’ website. Undeterred, we had a quick look at Amazon.co.uk. Out of stock there too. Now starting to feel a bit foolish, I checked Play.com and with no small amount of relief, saw something very much like the following:

In stock. Two words that don’t often raise a smile, but let me tell you, they did on Saturday. Without any further hesitation we put in the order and boom, that’s Christmas sorted for one boy. Except that it wasn’t. I mean, come on, you’re not stupid. You’re sitting here reading something called “Screw you, Play.com” so it doesn’t take the biggest feat of logical deduction to come to the conclusion that something is about to go wrong.

Monday rolls around, and I notice that the cost of the laptop hasn’t come off my bank balance. I phone Play.com’s customer service, and this is where several things happen:

1. I almost make myself late for an important meeting.
2. I get a headache. Seriously, I really did. One of those “pounding behind one eye” kind, the sort that makes you really nauseous.
3. I come to realise that I am not getting this laptop.
4. I find out how many times someone on the other end of the phone can repeat the same line to different questions.
5. I consider going onto Google Maps to see how long it would take me to get to Play.com headquarters and swing for someone.

It turns out that between my clicking “Buy” on Saturday and the order going through, they ran out of stock. Or had run out of stock already, they weren’t too clear on that. Turns out that Play.com’s massive website, on which the entire company is based, isn’t updated on weekends but rather is updated on Mondays. The laptops were dished out on a first come, first served basis and despite my having ordered it in good faith with the whole “In stock” thing, what I could actually do was either piss off and buy a different laptop, or piss off and wait for them to restock. Which takes 28 days, according to their rep. So a perhaps more accurate Play.com would probably look like this:

That’s right. 28 days. Because it’s not like there’s something that happens in December that is less than 28 days away from the 30th of frigging November, is there?

I’ll give the customer support rep her due credit to some extent. She did say that if she had the laptop, she would send it out to me. She does lose points for consistently refusing to let me speak to anyone else at Play.com, for talking over me several times, for not answering any questions I put to her, for saying that if our situations were reversed she wouldn’t mind waiting 28 days for them to restock that laptop and for saying something at one point only to immediately deny ever having said such a thing in the very next sentence, but I will give her a little credit for being sympathetic. A very little credit.

So the upshot of it all is, I have to cancel the order and then find another laptop that fits the bill. Which I did, but what annoys me – beyond the crappy website that apparently operates on a two-day delay compared to the warehouse – is the fact that at no point did anyone at Play.com think it would be a good idea to contact me and say “See that laptop you ordered? Sorry old chum, it’s out of stock and you might want to think about ordering up another one.” No, they were content just to leave it as it was. The order page on their site didn’t even tell me the damn thing was out of stock, it just kept saying “order taken”.

December is a busy month and most of us have money coming out of our accounts left, right and centre as we buy presents. It’s not impossible that someone could have ordered that laptop and never got around to chasing it up until it was too late, especially as “order taken” doesn’t give the impression that it actually means “we have done piss all, and won’t until after Christmas, so I hope you’re not holding your breath for this laptop”. Not only would this have made me look a complete tit come December 25th, it would also have delivered a fairly solid kick in the knackers to a young boy’s Christmas. I’m no retail magnate but it seems fairly basic courtesy to tell someone that the thing they have ordered is out of stock. Basic courtesy, however, is not something that a company like Play.com has to indulge in at this time of year – they know that they have the consumers by the short and curlies because people need presents at this time of year, and with shops going under quicker than swimmers with lead boots on, online retailers are fast becoming the best place to go.

Anyway. Crappy experience, solution found, spleen vented and if I was ever on that Play.com rep’s Christmas card list I’m probably off it now. I’ll just wind this up by saying screw you, Play.com! Your time will come and when it does, I’m afraid that any sympathy I may have will be out of stock.

* Every family has one of these people in it. Every single one. They’re the one that usually has their job description shortened to “works with computers” by older members of the family. Oh, and if you’re sitting there thinking, “Well, my family doesn’t!” then guess what? IT’S YOU!

Fresh from a nice bit of twisting the knife about a young man’s death, the Daily Mail has seen fit to write an article about how the X-Factor is…now, you might want to sit down for this one, take a deep breath and prepare to be shocked…staged. Faked. Not actually a talent competition, but a polished, edited, made-up-in-advance product. I know, I know. When you’ve stopped crying and your ears have stopped ringing from the sound of your world collapsing around you, here’s the article itself. Be strong.

Above: What the Daily Mail thinks TV viewers look like.

Was there ever, in the entire history of human civilization, an article that needed to be written less than this one? Are we really so stunted, so stupid, so unable to see the plain facts in front of our noses that we need some journo from a sixth-rate rag to tell us that the X-Factor is fake? So you’re telling me that Leonard Nimoy has normal ears? What about that spherical robot on Terrahawks, did he steal Windsor Davies’ voicebox or not? Is Salma Hayek a vampire? It’s a world gone mad. Who knows what is real and what isn’t? Here’s a hint – generally, what you see on TV isn’t. It’s edited. It’s perfected. Usually, it’s scripted in advance so they have some idea of what they’re going to be broadcasting (I don’t think “Surprise TV” is going to be the next big thing – will it be an episode of Casualty, or someone reading Heat magazine for an hour?).

Honest to god, it annoys me that people can be so dumb. This is why we have adverts that have to stress that parts of what we are seeing IN AN ADVERT might be made up to make the product look good. Anyone who’s not a blithering halfwit knows that when you open a jar of face cream a cloud of particles don’t come flying out like hyperactive nanobots to be smoothly absorbed into your cheeks. You just get a slight smell of face cream that reminds you of your gran. In the adverts, though, we need to be told that bits have been dramatized, enhanced in post-production etc. Oh, really. Thanks.

While it annoys me that some people can be so dumb as to fall for this tripe, what really gets to me is the manufactured outrage when they do, and the pandering that’s done to avoid it happening again. Do I think the X-Factor is a genuine talent competition? No. I think it’s a very heavily edited show that’s about as realistic as an episode of Mork and Mindy. It’s entertaining, don’t get me wrong, but if you think it’s about talent then you’re…well, wrong is about the most diplomatic thing I can think to say. I also don’t think that women phone one another up and say “Hut?” once they’ve dropped the kids off at school, that Cheryl Cole’s hair is really worth it or that fitting a ninth blade to the Gilette Slashatron 2000 will give me a better shave than the razor I have now. Why is that? Because when you take into account all the autonomic functions my body needs to stay alive, I have at least one brain cell left over for thinking duties.

After an enjoyable lunchtime sandwich, ten minutes of reading “The Pickwick Papers” and a cool bottle of diet coke (which was doubly welcome as, like a moron, I had worn my jacket only to find it was hot outside) there I was, wandering back to work when I passed a woman talking to a child with her that had (I assume) just asked for something to drink:

“Awright, take a drink then, but if you go aw looneyball on me, ah swear ah’ll batter ye.”

Parenthood, thy name is…well, I’m not sure. Anonymous woman in Glasgow? Chavtastic mother? What was she giving the poor child to drink, anyway? Heroinade?

I want to point out that this scene played out after I saw a man take a big drink from a plastic bottle, vomit and then take another drink. All in all, it’s not so much been a lunchtime as an adventure with a sandwich thrown in.