Recently we have had some quite severe rain storms. I’m not a fan of rain but when you dress right and carry a large umbrella there is usually little harm in increased levels of water falling from the sky. At least you would have thought so.

Last week on my way to work one morning I was walking down a pavement made up of slabs when I took one step forward and was instantly sprayed with a large quantity of cold, muddy rainwater. What had happened was the paving slab in front of me was loose and set on uneven ground such that when it rained water collected underneath it, just waiting for someone (me) to step on it and release its nasty stored payload. No umbrella could have saved me. I ended up being stuck in wet clothes for pretty much the rest of the day.

What bugs me is how the council can get away with such shoddy paving practices. If maintaining a good pavement with slabs is too hard then surely they could just lay tarmac and have done with it? One thing is for sure the residents of Leeds don’t deserve to get soaked on a rainy day when they remembered to bring an umbrella.

On a similar note; poor curbside drainage. Leeds is a big city and thus has a fair few large buses. If the curbside isn’t water free at all times then the passing of one of these large vehicles will spray, no wait, SOAK, any poor unsuspecting pedestrian who happens to be walking by at the time. There is no need for this. Tarmac at the correct angles and an adequate number of unblocked storm drains permits only a mere film of rainwater to remain on the road, an amount even the largest and most badly driven Leeds bus cannot spray at pedestrians.

I for one am sick and tired of walking everywhere and looking after my health and the environment in the process only to have my efforts rewarded with a face full of water and a day in wet clothes. This is one of those things where a little would go a very long way. If you regularly walk places around town and have soaking experiences to share, feel free to post in comments.

Quite frankly I’m appalled. Thousands of pounds and months of inspirational thinking time leads to something not even a primary school child would be proud of. The logo for the 2012 Olympic games is a shambles. For those who haven’t yet seen this monstrosity here is a link to a copy on the BBC

My problem with this logo is quite simple; It says nothing about sport and absolutely nothing about London hosting the games. It doesn’t even look like the numbers 20 and 12 like the desingers say it should. Even if it did, it wouldn’t really do the games hosted anywhere in the world great justice.

London winning the games was a proud moment for us and we go and show that pride to the world by displaying a completely non-related logo to represent our contribution to the games. Typical. Just Typical.

All who have been keeping up with the news lately can’t have helped but notice that yet again we have stuff moving towards the doors of parliament that involve a trade-off between our civil liberties and the “fight against terrorism”. I’m commenting on this because I don’t see enough debate on this in the blogosphere and as such I want to get peoples views and voice a few of my own.

In order to determine what is legitimate in order to fight terrorism we first of all have to decide exactly what terrorism is. The dictionary defines terrorism as [the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, esp. for political purposes]. It should therefore seem reasonable that only actions which fit this definition should be deemed a terrorist action and therefore only measures which prevent such an action should be considered valid counter-terrorism measure.

There is a problem here however. We already have a number of acts passed through parliament that mention counter terrorism but what they appear to address is not in fact terrorism but other issues entirely, and yet according to these acts anyone caught doing these actions should be treated as a terrorist when their actions do not actually correlate with the dictionary definition of terrorism.

That is practically an aside though (although it is certainly something that should be addressed). The problem is the methods employed by the counter-terrorism measures - they almost always involve us giving up certain rights that we have enjoyed for a good number of years and indeed should continue to be enjoyed. Furthermore you have to consider what terrorists aim to achieve; they want to affect our lives, make us scared, make us change our ways. In the act of giving up our civil liberties are we not in fact affecting our own lives, scaring ourselves and changing our ways before a terrorist has even been born?

It seems to me that we are doing this all wrong. When I woke up to news of explosions in in summer 2005 my first thoughts were to my friends who work in the city. Later my thoughts were of defiance; these people are not going to make me scared to go to London, to ride the tube, to live my life. Assuming I am correct in this action and not a mere fool, giving up our rights in the name of preventing terrorism is akin to waking a week after those attacks and being too scared to take the tube to work.

I don’t believe we should allow our government to pass laws and acts that force us to let the terrorists win by giving up our rights. They want us to change our lives for them. We need to make sure we don’t and show them we’re not afraid by living our lives with the freedoms we have always done. Only then can we truly beat the machine of terrorism which at present, by its mere mention, threatens to undermine every facet of freedom in our everyday lives that we should be able to take for granted.

I never thought I’d be saying this considering I’ve previously praised the high quality of internet connectivity from this ISP, but I’ve completely had my fill with Bulldog customer services and billing. They are total crap.

This morning Matt received a letter from them asking for money stating we hadn’t payed for this month and threatened to cut us off (remember my last nightmare in this regard?). What is so annoying is two-fold. Firstly they were supposed to sort out the payment issues which prevented money going through last time we had issues with them (see link) but this letter clearly indicates they didn’t. Secondly after the last bout of problems (again, see link) they promised us a month of free service because of the trouble their crapped out billing system had caused us, but clearly we aren’t going to get our free month because if we were then the fact this months payment had failed wouldn’t be a problem.

Bulldog, you suck. I rely on my connectivity for personal and business reasons and although it pains me to say it, you are the only company that when the wire is connected can provide the level and quality of connection that I require. Its just a shame that your billing system believes it should pull the plug on my connection all the time because you screw it up.

Bottom line is that if you pull the plug on us again I’m going to get a leased line for my needs instead and bad-mouth you in every moment of free time that I have. Sure it won’t make a difference to you, sure you won’t care, but I’ll save my friends and colleagues from signing up to the grief associated with your crap billing and customer services and in so doing it’ll make me feel a whole lot better.

Normally I’m quite glad of bank holidays; work is less intense on my websites, there are no lectures so I can catch up on my reading and generally my friends and I are able to go out on one more night than we do in an average week. This time around though its not so great.

I’ve just finished my exams and so I have a huge amount of non-exam stuff to be getting on with. Most of it is code and business stuff but there is also calls to be made, letters to be sent, I need to go to the bank, arrange a few meetings and other things like that. Problem is no sooner have my exams finished thus providing me with the time to do these things, we are slap bang in the middle of a bank holiday which is made worse by the fact the University closes on the Tuesday as well meaning I’m not able to use these few days to do half of the things I need to do because they rely on the presence of another person who won’t be present due to the holiday.

I’m all for taking a break but because I start full time work on Wednesday I really need these 4 days to be as productive as possible and it would help oh so very much if everyone wasn’t out of the office. To be honest I don’t quite know how I’m going to fit everything in I need to do.

So facebook really is taking over the world. A day or so ago they announced the opening of their Network Marketplace which is, essentially, an ebay style sub-section of facebook that allows people to list, request and trade items between other people in their network. Although in its infancy and without any way of setting a time limit, placing a bid (other than messaging the seller) or making a payment, I can see facebook implementing these things soon.

While I can see potential in the market place idea I can already see a problem that would stop me using it, and in fact is one of the biggest gripes about facebook - put things in pounds! Facebook has networks all over the world and yet we all have to use dollars and get messages about American football games. This is annoying to say the least. Its remarkably easy to make a site have region specific modes of operation - I’ve done it with sites I’ve written on many occasions, so there is no reason facebook couldn’t either. In fact having the networks set up the way they do, with specific regions for advertising etc. I’d say it would be even easier to do.

That aside though the more fundamental thing that strikes me about facebook is that they are trying to put too many things into one site. People do like to get everything in the one place, but they tend to consider that one place as their computer. At the rate facebook are going they are going to have a little bit of every other mainstream website built in. Now I know this is probably their aim, but the problem with having a bit of everything is that you tend not to be able to do any single one of them all that well. Facebook makes a very good social networking site, but for me and I’m sure many others, thats all its ever going to be.

Coming back to the market place though, we all expected it, but probably not quite so soon after opening. Yup, one girl is already selling herself on the trading portal and is inviting facebook users to message their bids accross. She has already received a couple of amusing comments on her wall and there are sure to be many more. If you’re bored why not check them out, lol. I wonder if the listing will get deleted by facebook like similar ones in the past on eBay?

A rare event occurred last night - I stayed up watching TV until gone 1am. Why I hear you ask, well the world championship snooker final was on and it was such a cracking match I just couldn’t stop watching. At the end of the first day John Higgins looked certain to triumph over Mark Selby with a score of 12-4 but Mark pulled it back on the second day with some of the most superb play I have ever seen, taking th match late into the night - the latest final finish on record in fact.

I’d like to take this opportunity to congratulate John Higgins on his win, his world championship final victory for 9 years and to Mark Selby for a superb come-back, the likes of which I have never seen on the snooker table. Snooker is such an amazing game, especially when it gets close to the wire and I’m just sorry I wasn’t at the crucible to see it this year. Ah well, maybe next time.

I got chatting to Michael who was in my working group for the SE24 software engineering project and he was telling me about what studying IT was like in Nigeria and I suddenly realised why so many people want to come and study computing in the UK. Essentially its all theoretical. Students don’t get the chance to work on computers or if they do, not to any extent that we, as students here in Leeds SoC, would be used to. The way we learn programming - in a lab with fast, internet connected machines is a world apart.

We simply don’t realise how progressed we are here in the UK. We can pull up details on our accounts online, send e-mails, get print outs whenever we want etc. There are some places in the world where they still use typewriters in the workplace and big companies only have one dot-matrix printer for the whole building.

So why am I blogging this I hear you cry? Well I’m mentioning this to try and point out to my fellow students and indeed any other students who read this blog how lucky you are to have the access to the education you do, and once in education the quality of education that you have. Not to mention the cost. It can cost close to £30,000 for an international student to come and stufy in the UK. We get that privillage for just over 1/10th of that amount. The bottom line is we are extremely privillaged to have what we do and we should make the most of it; work hard, ask questions, make use of resources and respect the sanctity of what is provided for us - a superb education that many in the world can only dream of.

… been written in a magazine.

Not only is love blind but falling out of love is indeed its mirror opposite

Thanks to Rachel Garrod for writing into the New Scientists letters page with this wonderful little quote amongst others. Your quote now graces my quotes page with its presence.

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I was pondering today just exactly WHY the Leeds School of Computing newsgroups are public.

Every time support remove a post for having inappropriate content the reason that is almost always cited is that the groups are accessible from the outside without a SoC username and password. My question is that if this presents a problem, why is it so? I mean, the groups are SoC related and if they are not they are most certainly predominantly aimed at SoC students.

Why should our freedom to post be governed not only by the fair use policy (which I accept and respect) but also by the potential offense caused to outsiders who have nothing to do with the school just because internal groups are world readable with no authentication. Just seems daft to me that if a post doesn’t contravene the fair use policy it cannot exist because it might be read by an outsider. If a post or discussion abides by the school’s policies the answer is to block the outsiders, not us from posting. That is all.

</soapbox>

As an aside, if someone from the school wishes to give me a good reason that I am staring blindly at as to why news is public without authentication then feel free to post in comments.