I hate when you know someone for a while and give them a certain standing in your mind, and then all of a sudden they say something which sends your high view of them free-falling. such as when you find out someone is a racist :-(

At 1110 UT this morning, the third largest solar flare on record erupted from the Sun, sending a coronal mass ejection directly towards Earth at 5 Million MPH (picture, animation), and starting a solar radiation storm. We may see bright auroral activity tonight. Passengers on high-altitude airplane flights may receive chest-x-ray-level dosages of radiation.

The Democratic and Republican parties have 158 and 165 Million voters in their databases, "DataMart" and "Voter Vault", respectively. They track how you vote, what issues you're concerned about, demographics about your home and family, and who you associate with. From it they mount door-to-door, telemarketing, spam, and junk mail campaigns offering customized versions of the political party to appeal to your passions, while avoiding issues that might offend you.

Ok im sitting right now in a net caffe in the loft of a shopping center and its actually FULL (about 50 machines) there are about 10 people waiting to use machines. WTF?
Im trying to kill time before i go and see 'Goodbye lennin' for the second time :)

My freind ben has just baught his first car and has been driving it around for the last few weeks.
Its very comfortable and he got it ostensibly beacuse he disliked public transport.His points ranged from it being too crowded to feeling unsafe using it sometimes.True, it is nice to be able to get places at (compared to the bus) lightning speed but what are you missing when your in a car?
Yesterday i was returning home from helping at our sixth form's open day on the bus i started talking to a man called james who had recently moved to birmingham from telford. He was complaining about birmingham city centre's lack of toilets, at one point so desperate he was about to take a wizz at the back of the bus but i managed to persuade him to get off and find a tree.A month or so back i had just left the cinema after watching bowling for columbine on the big screen - again. I started chatting to a guy who had just gotten off his shift working for central trains, a thouroughly interesting guy and after the bus arrived we chatted until i got off the bus near my house.
I don't chat with many people on the bus, usually people who first say something to me or who make a broadcast comment (My phrase for something said for everyone to hear but not neccesarily requiring a response - such as someone uttering "Typical" when a bus zooomes past and doesent stop.) but i still like occasional banter between the bus riding public.
Car users miss these kind of things, they speak with the people they know at work and go directly home and speak to the same people they know there, sure they meet other people but usually at set locations and people who are similar to them. On the bus it's all random today you may meet a teacher tomorow a drunk 22 year old comming home from clubbing,

but people you never meet are car people and they never meet you....

Someone was interested in this, so I decided to post it here instead of clogging up the article with too many OT posts. Enjoy, or something.

The point of copywriting is to make it as easy on the reader as possible, because they have to keep track of a lot of stuff.

The most important thing to know when you're writing is: You are writing something that will be spoken aloud! Things that work written will not work when you say them! PM should be in the afternoon or at night. Numbers should be rounded as far as practical, 4,827,243 becomes almost five (m) million. Et cetera. Speak it aloud as you write it. If it sounds good, use it. If it sounds awkward, even if it looks good on paper, rephrase it. Punctuation is important. Woman, without her man, is nothing. Woman, without her, man is nothing! So put your commas and periods in the right places to make sure the meaning you intend gets across.

Broadcast copy IS WRITTEN IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS, even though I personally find proper English capitalization easier to read. It is double-spaced on the page. In television, video notes (such as what camera is live, always a good thing to know) are indicated on the left half of the page, and audio on the right.

Hyphenation: When each letter of an abbreviation is pronounced, you put hyphens between each letter to indicate that. Example, R-I-A-A, K-D-E. This also includes sequences of numbers, such as phone numbers. 5-5-5-4-3-2-1. Abbreviations pronounced phoenetically are put down verbatim, GNOME, SCO.

Numbers: No more than three digits consecutively, and all single digit numbers spelled out. All ?illions have the first letter in parentheses before the word to make doubly sure. Five (b) billion 482 (m) million 326 thousand 384. Dollars is written out after the number, never ever use a dollar sign, the reader might forget there was a dollar sign on it by the time (s)he hits the end of the number. It happens!

Shorthand in general: Don't use it. 9:00 becomes nine o'clock. PM becomes in the afternoon or at night. Inc. becomes Incorporated, unless it's actually pronounced "Inc".

Tricky words: Avoid them, but if you've gotta put them in, write out a phoenetic pronounciation afterward. Kazaa (kuh-ZAH). I hate these, 'cause unless you go over the copy beforehand, it'll make you pause a little bit anyway. But it's better than a couple seconds of dead air while you stare blankly at the paper/prompter. =D

Well, there you go. What I paid a couple hundred dollars to learn. Man, I just realized I've been ripped off.

The first of the problems that eventually cascaded into the blackout began at 1 p.m on August 14th. "The inability of critical control data to be exchanged quickly across the grid could have hampered the operators' ability to prevent the cascading effect of the blackout," said Gary Seifert, of DOE's Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory. "It didn't affect the [control] systems internally, but it most certainly affected the timeliness of the data they were receiving from other networks. A former Bush administration adviser who has consulted with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on the power grid issue said the Blaster worm also hampered the ability of utilities in the New York region to restore power in a more timely manner because some of those companies were running Windows-based control systems with Port 135 open. The control systems ... are often based on Windows 2000 or XP operating systems and rely on commercial data links, including the Internet and wireless systems, for exchanging information.

Lately, I've been noticing a disturbing trend: When people write an acronym, they will write what it stands for right next to it, so they will say "IANAP (I am not a physicist)"

The net result of this is that the person ends up writing a piece of text that is LONGER than what they would have written if they had just written out "I am not a physicist," thus defeating the whole point of using an acronym in the first place.

Does anyone have any insight into this disturbing trend? I realize that this is not going to cause the eventual bloating death of the slashdot comment database (we can thank trolls who post 12-chapter-long narratives for that), it just strikes me as extremely stupid.

PISCBWAOMPAATWWIMNTT (Perhaps I shuld compensate by writing all of my posts as acronyms then writing what I meant next to them.)

I hate this, my mind has so many good/cool/brillient ideas . Things i want to make or draw or paint but i just cant. Im absolutely crap at anything like that, my drawings look poor , my paintings suck and everything i make is never how i want it- usually doesent even fit togeather properly. and it frustrates me beacue i have all the information up there but my hands dont translate that into anything like what i wanted.

Ok im sure this entry will be swiftly deleted when i get home tomorow but ive got to go in to pick up my exam results, i will get what i deserve :-S

Digging through some old stuff in my attick i found a scruffy peice of paper with my (even scruffyer) handwriting on it from the first time i used a computer and had written down instructions on how to run a program. It read

"get A> tipe basic
pres spas Bar tipe Menu then pres
enter"

braught a tear to my eye :-)

Ok, that was weird, i was looking through some backups and i found IRC logs of Tuesday september the eleventh 2001. Reading through them i thaught how odd it was that what i said could be recalled with 100% accuracy and what people were saying on the day.Its not important that it was *that* day but that i could see how i was two years ago, - time for more reading.....

Saw two films, first blue velvet
at the end i thaught "O...K - i didnt quite get it a little weird. Anyone care to help me out?

Then second bill Donnie Darko, i found it to be a great film, and by the end i gaped in awe at its brillience. It just all clicked into place in a split second , kind of like the last 5 minutes of pulp fiction where you hear in the background "Garscon.... Coffee"--- WOW

Hmm - i like the 20 mins early articles, im glad that you cannot post in this period though.I also think it would be good if no one could post for 2 minutes after the article goes live. So Subscribers cant just instantly flood the discussion as soon as it goes live.
But i must go and do work now, i keep putting it off....

I rent LCD projectors to the unsuspecting public.

Every time, I have to babysit the PC laptop owner while he hooks his POS laptop to the projector. Why? Because for some reason NO version of windows can handle the addition of second display. Some windows versions seem to think they need special drivers just to put an XGA signal out the port. Yes, I know, you can just 'Next' out of the dialog to proceed, but it scares the customers like crazy.

Then, once the OS is happy, you still don't get anything out of the laptop. Why? Even though the OS knows there's a display hooked to the external VGA port, the laptop has to be told to use it. What kind of stupid crap is that? Even better: Every brand of laptop has its own different key combination for 'activating' the VGA output. Of course, almost no laptop owners (including most /. readers) know what key combination their laptop needs. Some use Fn/F5, some Fn/F8, they all have different cryptic icons on the function keys. Stupid PC laptops.

Of course, it's always my fault, or the fault of my projector. It's even better when I hear about it 2 weeks later when the whole crowd was left with the impression that my equipment was to blame. Stupid PC laptops.

"What about Mac laptops?", you may ask. No Mac laptop user has ever had any problem with my projectors. They simply hook up to my projector, and it works. No problem. Yet people still claim that PCs are just as user-friendly as Macs. Wrong, they are.

Stupid PC laptops.