Where Worlds Collide

Slacktivist looks at the sort of organisations making use of Microsoft’s Powerpoint, from bat-crazy heretical fundamentalist churches to corporations run by the pointy-haired boss out of Dilbert.

In evangelical churches, Bill Gates’ computerized Colorforms has supplanted the flip chart and the overhead projector (as well as, disastrously, the hymnal).

The slide here is taken from a PowerPoint presentation from the site Last Days Mystery. It covers the very same territory Bruce’s presentation does, the “seven seals” of judgment from Revelation 6, except it uses spiffy bullet-point lists. You can find lots of similar PowerPoint presentations on other “Bible prophecy” Web sites.

This is the ideal technology for this task because, as Edward Miller notes, “PowerPoint … can give the illusion of coherence and content when there really isn’t very much coherence or content.” This is, for many PowerPoint enthusiasts, a feature, not a bug. The illusion of coherence and content is precisely why PP is the preferred technology in corporate America and among Bible prophecy “experts” (and why it was used almost exclusively in Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon).

At some point in the far, far future, historians will recognise the release of Power Point as the point where Western Civilisation went into terminal irreversible decline.

One way to tell the lawn needs mowing:

• From the upstairs window you can see next door’s ginger cat asleep in the middle of the lawn
• From downstairs, you can’t see him at all

Useful things, strimmers.

Wonderful rant by Charlie Brooker on the subject of fashion

Last week, hardcore idiots across the nation stood in rows at dawn, desperate to get their hands on a cotton bag with “I’m not a plastic bag” printed on it. Right now, a group of determined oafs is camping out in preparation for tomorrow’s launch of the new Kate Moss clothing range at Topshop. If Grazia magazine printed an article declaring it fashionable to smack yourself in the forehead with a limited-edition ball-pein hammer designed exclusively by Coleen McLoughlin, a mob would form outside your local B&Q before the ink had dried on the page.

It’s a mystery to me. If the whole point of fashion is to distinguish yourself from the herd, why queue up to be part of it? Am I missing something here? I suspect not. But then I don’t “get” fashion. I once went out with a girl who was obsessed with dressing up; a real clothes nerd. While we were together, she developed a serious jeans habit. Each week, a new pair. She’d bring them home and show them to me, bubbling with excitement. I honestly couldn’t tell the difference between one pair and the next, and I was staring pretty hard, in case there was a quiz at the end of the relationship. Doubtless a fellow jeans spod would’ve been thrilled by her purchases. To me, it was like trying to spot minute discrepancies between two marked playing cards.

I’m with Charlie Brooker here. Last Friday night we had a works do which ended up at some dreadfully trendy nightclub full of fashion victims, everyone just posing around, with a DJ playing ‘cool’ (i.e. crap) music. I felt totally out of place, as if I’d landed on an alien planet, and just stood around wishing I was somewhere else, like the gig the week before.

When I moved my blog from Moveable Type to Wordpress, it broke all the permalinks, which mean any old incoming links end up at my 404 page.

Unfortunately I’d chosen an archive/URL structure in MT that’s impossible to reproduce in Wordpress. I have generated a 1500 line text file that translates old URLs to new ones, which leads me to my techical question - will adding 1500 lines to my .htaccess file put a heavy load on the server and slow my site down?

Yes, this blog looks a bit different. After all the troubles I’ve had upgrading to Moveable Type 3.3, I’ve decided to give Wordpress a try. It installed straight out of the box at the first attempt, and slurped up the entire 1500+ post MT archive.

At the moment it’s still the default templates and style, apart from the header image, and looks just a little bit bland at the moment. I had a heavily customised template in MT which was accumulating cruft and getting harder to maintain.

Sooner or later I’ll get round to customising this one, once I get my head round the way Wordpress templates work.

Yes I do know that all the archive permalinks are currently broken. The new installation has a completely different archive structure. I believe it is possible to fix this, and this is currently on my to-do list.

Sorry, The Reasoning, but it’s true. Especially when your entire site is unusable unless I’ve installed a version of Flash that’s not even available on my combination of browser and operating system. Flash is evil; Dack.com explains why.

Comes from Captain Electra

Jade Goodie and her loathsome clan are just another product of our moronic popular media and Chav-culture.

The hypocrites in government are constantly hand-wringing over “yoof” behaviour and trying to instill a “Respect” agenda whilst our youngsters are being fed role-models like this shuddersome creature that resembles something from HP Lovecraft’s most fevered dreamings.

And I thought she was just pond life; you’re telling me she’s really a prawn from outer space?

Iä! Iä! Jade Goodie Fh’tagn!

It seems there are absolutely no limits to human stupidity. From today’s Guardian:

A man has suffered severe internal injuries after trying to launch a powerful firework from his bottom on bonfire night, it emerged today.

I suppose it’s one way to cure constipation.

Some completely stupid drivel from a tiresomely hipper-than-now New Statesman scribbler called Rachel Cooke.

Podcasting is for geeks — created by geeks, listened to by geeks. Think about it. Don’t you ever wonder why you no longer see anyone wearing a Marillion T-shirt? I’d bet good money that the reason for this is that the owners of said T-shirts are all too busy at home, messing around with their podcast software.

Doesn’t she know that Marillion T shirts are for wearing when going to model railway exhibitions?

I find something vaguely fascist about the Bruschetta-eating literati’s hatred of ‘geeks’. They seem to feel threatened by the very existance of people that don’t conform to their narrow definition of ‘cool’. How dare we listen to music which has some depth and complexity rather than the latest three-chord style-over-substance flavour of the month? How dare we read science fiction rather than pretending to like dull novels in which nothing happens but are deeply symbolic of man’s struggle against his socio-polical environment?

The Ministry of Information’s take on HippyDave’s post on mailing lists vs. web forums.

On the initial topic (e-mail groups vs. online fora), I definitely favour the latter, for one main reason: threads. For me, that’s the ‘killer app’ of fora, with which e-mail lists can’t compete. I drastically prefer to read the topics I choose, rather than an undifferentiated stream of all traffic.

I can see the point on signal-to-noise ratios, but I find that the extra time spent checking and navigating web forums is longer that the time skimming and deleting off-topic postings on most mailing lists. This may be because I’m still on dialup, and I find web forums with all those graphic avatars and other ‘cute’ cruft take forever to load. But few if any web forums have an easy way of telling you which posts you have and haven’t read, or even which threads have new posts.

Most mailing lists support threading if you use a decent mail program (i.e. anything other than Microsoft Outlook, which was intended for corporate email, not Internet discussion groups, and it shows), although that gets weakened by poor thread discipline, mostly from top-posting Outlook users who don’t realise that other mail programs exist.

One of these days someone will come up with a ‘killer app’ that combines the best elements of both. Although I think the usability of web fora would be dramatically improved by the simple addition of RSS feeds which can tell you when there are new posts on a particular subject - I can’t imagine the Blogosphere without RSS.