Archive for March, 2009

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Jade Goody – Beauty or the Beast?

Saturday, March 28th, 2009

Over the last few weeks (or months even) it has been impossible for anyone in the UK to miss news of reality TV’s Jade Goody and her ongoing struggle against terminal cancer and recent very public demise.

I am not a regular newspaper reader and generally avoid tabloids, however occasional glances at the metro and catching tv news coverage have made me increasingly uncomfortable recently.

I am not going to claim to have been a huge fan of the reality TV contestant. I have never been especially interested in her and her ignorance has made me cringe a few times, however I have always felt that she received an excessive amount of negative media attention and in the case of the race row became the scapegoat for others because she was already such an easy target.

I am not blaming her for taking advantage of the attention, as she was clearly trying to make money to support her family. That doesn’t however make it feel any less ghoulish when the press give us extreme close-ups of her suffering on a daily basis.

As the whole public saga of her last few weeks unfolded in the media I noticed that suddenly the girl who had previously been labelled as Jade “Baddy” was suddenly being regarded as a saint and compared to everyone’s favourite corpse Princess Di.

Newspapers that had once branded her as ignorant, racist, fat, ugly and whatever else they felt like calling her are suddenly calling her a vibrant young woman and a brave hero. Purely at random I have glanced at the Daily Mail website to see if it will illustrate this. As you can see in the few examples I am pasting below, they have no qualms about completely changing their opinions of Jade and her actions, and can even use identical facts in both a positive and a negative way.

In most cases you can’t blame the individual reporters, you couldn’t even if you wanted to, as bylines are conspicuously absent on a lot of opinion pieces. Amusingly some journalists have clearly forgotten the opinions they previously committed to print, as evidenced in the two articles quoted and linked below…..

Quotes from Think TV can’t get any worse? – by Allision Pearson Daily Mail May 2007…

“Big Brother will be preceded by an apology. Not for the brain-rotting dross that is certain to follow, but for the previous series in which a group of moronic white girls bullied the Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty.”

“On Radio 1 yesterday, BB presenter Davina McCall said: “Leave Jade Goody alone. She’s been in the wilderness long enough. She was a silly girl, but we do love her really, don’t we?”

So Jade is a foul-mouthed, ignorant bully, but that doesn’t stop her being a shoo-in to replace the Queen Mother as national treasure.”

Quotes from Jade Goody and Princess Diana had so much in common – also by Allison Pearson – Daily Mail 2009

“Both women ended up as a kind of royalty, one ancient, the other that modern monarchy called fame. They had the power of changing a room when they joined it. They made people happy and excited, which may not be a degree course, but is a talent nonetheless”

“But they had a way of bypassing conventional intelligence and making an intuitive connection with a crowd which unnerved some commentators – especially men”

Phew.. good thing Allisons ovaries prevented her from being unnerved.

Finally, some interesting images taken from the Daily Mail search screen….

So is she ignorant and idiotic? Comparable to Hitler…

Or an almost saint-like Lady Di figure….

Was she an unforgivable racist and bully?

Or just misunderstood…….

Was she an un-attractive figure of fun…..?

Or a real heroine…

Let’s hope that she (and the story) will finally be allowed to rest in peace.

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Posted in General Musings | 1 Comment »

Maw Reviews: The Walking Dead, Zombie Comic

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009

I have been unwell and couch ridden for the last week or so, and asked my husband to continue a tradition started by my folks when I was a tonsillitis ridden youth and get me some comics to entertain me. He returned with the first issue of The Walking Dead Volume 1: Days Gone Bye: Days Gone Bye v. 1, an American comic which comes in graphic novel/trade format and follows the lives of a group of zombie apocalypse survivors.

I read issue 1 and was instantly hooked, have since enjoyed issue 2 and will be getting the rest as soon as I can reasonably spend more of my grown-up pay on comics.

The first issue follows a policeman who has woken from a coma to discover that the world has become overrun with zombies. He travels towards the city in order to find his wife, and being a comic he soon does, along with a camp of survivors, disposing of a few zombies along the way.

Despite the amazing luck of finding his wife and child the story is pretty bleak and doesn’t shy away from human misery and the odd zombie inflicted death. However, as much as I love zombies, the beauty of the story lies in the relationships of the survivors and how they cope with the extreme situations they repeatedly encounter. While there are obvious nods to great zombie stories it is more reminiscent of post apocalyptic tales like Day of the Triffids.

So far I would rate it as a great comic, very readable and some great zombie art.

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Posted in Geek, Words | 4 Comments »

Should I get a Netbook?

Monday, March 16th, 2009

.. or why I love my Acer Aspire One

For me the answer to this question was an obvious and very resounding yes, but for those of you who are unsure if a Netbook is right for you this rant should help you get to the bottom of it.

The first thing to consider is how you use computers and the internet. If you mostly spend your time working on detailed designs, relying on processor heavy software, or constantly playing games then the format may not suit you. If however you expect to use multiple machines and often spend hours browsing or working on text documents then it is definitely worth considering.

As much as I like my full sized laptop & desktop I have often found myself getting overly hot legs from my giant laptop or being hunched over a desk for way too long, so being able to use this tiny machine for casual internet use is great and makes it a lot more enjoyable. It doesn’t have the power of a full sized machine, but often we are not going to use half that power, so why lumber ourselves with a huge bulky object for simple web browsing?

The main thing to realise is that you are not going to use a Netbook all the time, so if you can only afford one machine get a full sized laptop or a decent desktop instead. I adore my Netbook for travelling, and can pop it in my bag every day without noticing the weight, but as soon as I need to do any serious coding or design work I switch straight over to a larger machine/display.

I run the Linux Linpus Lite on my Acer Aspire One, which can obviously restrict you in terms of software, however as the screen size is not appropriate for most work anyway I don’t really find this much of a problem. This model does also come with windows XP for a small increase in price, and might be worth considering depending on skill level/personal preference.

The main restriction of the Netbook is always going to be the screen size, and getting the right balance between screen size and portability is always going to be the most important thing when choosing which model to buy.

From personal experience I can confirm that you do quickly get used to the reduced screen area (although it does make you start to loathe some website layouts), and it doesn’t seem overly restrictive when browsing social networking sites, forums, email and news.

I have heard some criticism of the keyboards, however I have not noticed any problems, possibly due to my small hands but helped no doubt by the Acer Aspire keyboard, which has been getting great reviews and ratings.

I am not going to discuss the merits of currently available Netbooks. There are already plenty of sites out there with those reviews, I only have experience on the Acer Aspire One and great new models are coming out all the time. My only advice would be to go to a local outlet and try as many out as possible to get a feel for what suits you.

So if you are a writer, blogger, tweeter, facebook junkie or general internet addict I would check one out.

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Posted in Geek, General Musings, Internet | 1 Comment »

Things (or people) I like – Charlie Brooker & zombies

Saturday, March 14th, 2009

If you have yet to encounter Charlie Brooker, columnist, broadcaster and tv commentator, then you are missing out on some glorious venom from a very funny and intelligent human.

He is known for his guardian column and his BBC show screen wipe, both of which are generally concerned with tv and the media. In his reviews Brooker manages to somehow combine an obvious love of the medium with seething contempt for anything he considers obvious or unoriginal.

He often focuses his glare on shows that he clearly enjoys, yet he can still point out the flaws and weak points, or he might just ruin 24 for you by pointing out how much Tony looks like action man. Whether he is dissecting the latest drama, debating the merits of Britainnia High or just enlightening us on the realities of the industry he is always hilarious and never holds back.

Considering the above you might think he would shy away from risking his reputation by making his own fictional TV shows, but fans of Nathan Barley might suspect he had the talent to succeed in the difficult sounding task of making a reality TV show based zombie drama, Dead Set.

The show used the premise that during the production of Big Brother the zombie disaster we have all been trained to expect broke out, and due to their confinement the BB housemates are safe from and initially unaware of the chaos outside.

Not only does this work well by introducing zombies into a familiar format and location, but probably made the show cheaper to produce as they were no doubt able to re-use a lot of set and in the case of zombie-Davina and a number of the ex-housemates they even re-used the talent.

After the initial shock factor of OMG it’s a like a zombie movie but in Big Brother wears off it relaxes into a fairly standard, post zombie infection story, but of surprisingly high quality for TV. The use of fast zombies and some good shaky camera work (I think that is the technical term) enabled them to avoid making a cheap parody of a zombie film, and there are some genuinely scary, jumping on your couch moments.

The great script and decent performances by the cast don’t hurt, and while many of them do fall into traditional zombie film roles we get a few treats, as we are treated to some wonderfully disgusting dialogue and behaviour from the less admirable (but more awesome) survivors.

As a zombie film fan (and less proud big brother victim) I came to this fully expecting to hate it, but was totally won round and not just by the geeky Manchester morgue type references, just by a show made my someone who clearly understands the genre.

My only real criticism would be that the show ended a bit too soon for me, and I would have enjoyed a few more episodes. If you haven’t already go read and watch as much of Brooker’s stuff as you can, assuming you are not easily offended.

Screenwipe clip

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Posted in Geek, General Musings, Moving Pictures | 4 Comments »

Twitter and the Celebrity Appeal

Wednesday, March 11th, 2009

One of the unusual things about twitter is the volume of celebrities who are signed up and active.

Personally I think it can be a great thing, not because I want to be best friends with Stephen Fry (let’s face it, who doesn’t), but for the same reason I watch those people’s tv shows and movies or read their books. I think they are talented and/or entertaining and therefore find their posts and updates on their work interesting, just like I find tons of regular people interesting.

I think there is a natural human desire to connect with people you admire, and twitter allows regular folk to do so with a range of famous tweeters, however I can’t help cringing at some people’s efforts to get their chosen celebrities attention, which often veers into insulting or aggressive when they don’t get the response they wished for.

It’s clear from their posts that famous tweeters often get inundated with messages and requests. If you want to see how that looks to them just go to search.twitter.com and try searching for @stephenfry or any other famous tweeter to see just how many comments and requests they get in just a few hours.

Imagine dealing with all that, trying to figure out which charity link to retweet, which question to answer and so on. I am frankly amazed that some haven’t given up on the idea totally. Especially when instead of appreciating the efforts they do make people often send them abusive messages or call them stuck up.

As Dave Gormon’s recent blog post shows, this resentment from people who claim to be fans can take a nasty turn. Although less disturbing, the fact that Stephen Fry needs to write numerous blogs apologising for not being able to respond or retweet all the time is also a bit unfortunate.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t feel able to message anyone you want on twitter. That is the whole point of it, and anyone with a public account knows that. Just give famous tweeters the same respect you would give any other person on twitter or in real life and try to be polite and relevant. If you don’t get a response don’t assume they are being rude, as responding to thousands of tweets just isn’t possible.

If you really do admire a celebrity let them get on with enjoying twitter the same way the rest of us are able to. Share with them if you have something to say, but don’t waste everyone’s time with pointless star-struck requests. Fame doesn’t give celebrities the right to more respect than anyone else, just the same as everyone else with maybe some added understanding for the volume of incoming messages they may have to deal with.

I don’t expect everyone on twitter to want to be my friend, follow me or respond to my messages, and wouldn’t be offended if they didn’t, so why should someone in the public eye be any different?

th3maw

Posted in General Musings, Internet | 5 Comments »

So, why don’t you Tweet This?

Sunday, March 8th, 2009

This is basically a test blog to see if my new Tweet This wordpress plug-in is working.

While I am here I might as well tell you a bit about it. Tweet this adds a Twitter link to every post and page, so readers can share your blog posts on twitter at the click of a button, displaying a shortened URL

Should prove a handy tool for any wordpress and twitter user.

I found this, and some other great plug-ins here… http://tinyurl.com/cmr9mm via twitter

Now off to investigate some other wordpress plug-ins.

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Posted in Internet | 1 Comment »

Webssentials – Part 2 – Searching

Wednesday, March 4th, 2009

Searching – How to find what you want.

I don’t know how many times I have seen people post questions on forums, when the solution is impossible to miss if you just use google and would be found in a fraction of the time. Often I just copy and paste the question in full into google and get exactly what the person was asking for as the top result. So why do people find it so hard to find what they want?

My advice here would be to give your chosen search engine (does anyone not use google?) as much information as possible. So if you want to know why your dvd player is overheating type exactly that into google… and add any info that will help narrow it down.. so in this case you would type ‘Why is my [enter make here] [enter model here] overheating when [add anything that triggers the issue here]‘.

It may seem silly typing a question into a search engine, but you will often get matches on forum posts where people have asked the exact same question, and reading those threads will often give you the answer.

Of course you could just leave a bunch of those words out and get the same results, so if you don’t want to be overly polite to a search engine just type ‘[insert make here] [insert model here] DVD player overheating [trigger]‘, and you will get the same results.

Location is essential. If you want results in your town make sure to add that info into your search query.

Understanding how search engines work will help. when you search for a bunch of words on a search engine it will search for any of those words, ranking those with the most matches highest, so you can never give it too much information. On the other hand if you were to simply type ‘DVD player’ or even ‘DVD player overheating’ you would get millions of results that would be of no use, as it would return every site with a match on those words, as it has no way of knowing what info you require.

The tips below apply to google, as this is the most popular search engine, although many may work or have variants in other search engines.

Looking for a quote?

If you want to change the way your search is run there are simple ways to do that. For example if you are trying to find an exact quote the search engine might return any number of results that contain those words in the wrong order. Adding quote marks round your quote will tell the search engine that you want results containing those results in that order, meaning you should only get results with the identical quote.

This OR that.

Using OR will also help you narrow down your search results, as adding this between words with tell google to give you results that contain either of those terms with the same priority. So if you wanted to find the best films from 1982 and 1983 you would enter ‘best films from 1982 OR 1983′.

Don’t correct me!

The way google corrects your spelling and suggests alternatives can be great, but annoying when you actually want what you entererd. Using + directly before the word will tell google to search exactly as it is. Alternatively not doing this will allow you to use google as a spellchecker.

Wildcards.

If you want to search for something but are unsure of a word you can use * to indicate a wildcard. Google give the following example.. ‘Obama voted * on the * bill’. This will return results containing different votes on different bills, enabling you to track down the information you need or just compare similar stories.

Begone unwanted results..

You can exlude words by attaching a minus sign to the front of them. Googles example: [ jaguar -cars -football -os ].

Search within any website.

You may have noticed that using the search on some sites takes you through to google search with results from that site. To do this they have taken advantage of googles option to search within a site, and you can do this too by adding the name of the site you want to search in your query. So typing iraq nytimes.com would give you results from that specific site.

The sky’s the limit

There are a bunch of other handy tricks you can use on google to get you the results you want, including typing in equations to use google as a calculator, asking google to convert units, converting currency… and a whole bunch more that I am not going to bother retyping here.

All of these tricks are simple, and a list of them can be found on the google help pages

It’s worth taking the time to familiarise yourself with these features, as they will save you a lot of time and frustration and stop you from looking foolish when asking questions online.

Happy hunting

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Posted in Internet | 1 Comment »

Webssentials – Part 1 – Email

Wednesday, March 4th, 2009

Idiots guide to getting the best out of the web….

People are alway asking me things like ‘Where can I store my images online?’, ‘How do I set up a blog?’, ‘Will you let me kill you and eat your innards?’, ‘Why can’t I find stuff online?’, ‘Why is everyone on something called facebook?’ and ‘What the hell is a twitter’?

This blog series is intended as a basic guide to getting the best out of the internet, using online tools, services & software and understanding the basics of how the internet works.

I will add to this topic if and when the moods strikes me, so look out for updates.

Today we are going to go right back to basics and look at Email and Search Engines. This is in no way meant to be a definitive guide on either of these topics, just basic information for flustered internet users based on my experiences. Experienced users may want to give this one a miss, as they will hopefully have all this nailed.

Email

Rather than shackling yourself to some ISP, most people find it easier to sign up for a web based email account. There are numerous benefits including avoiding the hassle of alerting your contacts when you switch ISP/email and the ease of accessing your mails online.

The most popular web based emails are hotmail and gmail. Personally I use gmail, as there is a pile of storage space and it fits in well with my other google tools, but both will serve you well.

Next post.. how to search…

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Posted in Internet | No Comments »

How to cope with work and long-term illness

Sunday, March 1st, 2009

This question came up on a forum recently, so after writing out a huge response I figured I would rework it and share it here, in case anyone reading has tried to keep a career going despite long-term illness.

These are my top tips for being fair with your employers and giving them the opportunity to be fair to you.

  • Be honest. Give your employers all the information they might need on your condition and prognosis and then try to come up with a plan to deal with working around it together.
  • Know your limits. If you are struggling to cope with full time hours consider asking for a reduction in your contracted hours, as feeling rested and not stressed out is essential if you are unwell. Better to admit you should work less now than struggle on, miss days and possibly lose your job.
  • Show your commitment. I don’t suggest you should make yourself ill working every waking hour. Nor should you force yourself when you are not well enough, however if you are feeling at your best take advantage of it and stay a little late or do a few hours of work on the weekend, as this will show you are committed to the job and willing to make up missed hours.
  • Earn your keep. As unfortunate as it may be, if you are unable to commit enough to work to cover the cost of hiring you and hopefully generate some profit then there is no reason for your employer to keep you. If possible make sure you earn the company more than enough, or your employer will be forced to let you go.
  • Be flexible. It’s all very well expecting your employers to bend over backwards to accommodate you, but you have to make an effort to be flexible yourself. Be willing to consider changing your hours, your pay or your role, as this will allow your employer to keep you there without losing money or getting behind on work.
  • Give warning. Obviously it isn’t possible sometimes, but if you start feeling unwell or expect you will be off for an extended period of time make sure you let your employers know so they can arrange cover if needed. Don’t commit to being in the next day and then let them down, as you will appear flaky and leave them without a backup plan.
  • Don’t be shy. While it may be a little embarrassing to share the details of your illness with co-workers letting them know you have a problem (even if you don’t give details) will give them a better understanding of and sympathy for your situation. Nobody wants to cover for a slacker, but only the worst kind of person would resent you for being unwell.
  • Don’t fold to unreasonable demands. Considering your illness may disrupt things at work it is reasonable for you to try to make things easier and fairer for everyone. It is not however reasonable for your employer to berate you for something that is out of your control, add stress to the situation or refuse to agree some sort of plan.
  • Don’t stick around. If you try all the options above and they are still being unreasonable then I would start looking for another job, as the stress and guilt is the last thing anyone needs on top of illness. As impossible as it may seem there are employers out there who are reasonable and flexible.

I am fortunate to have found employers who are flexible and sympathetic to my needs, so I am posting this advice in the hope that it might help others achieve the same thing.

When you have a long-term condition you have to consider the impact it will have on your life and your work. I have previously had to leave jobs due to illness, partly due to delayed diagnosis, unreasonable employers and also my own ineptness and confusion over the best way to tackle the problem.

The normal thing with illness is to find out what is wrong with you, get fixed and then get back to full abilities, but in some cases this isn’t possible, and most of us have no clue what to do when that happens and end up dealing with financial and emotional stress, which obviously doesn’t help the illness.

I am lucky that my own issues are relatively minor, and I am still able to work the majority of the time, but regardless of the severity of your problem, if you expect it to be ongoing and you expect to need time off work this advice may be of help.

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Posted in Maw Stuff | 1 Comment »