Things got slightly silly today. We had a joke who's the most middle class person competition on Hype, which was good fun until suddenly it turned very passionate and serious. I especially argued various dubious points. Why are people so ready to debate the class issue? As a group the people on Hypothetical are all pretty similar. All firmly middle-class, all supporting themselves, none too rich, none too poor. Yet, even we had much to protect. Why?

Then this evening Newsnight started a discussion between Tom, Louise and I about reading amongst kids that got really overblown. I argued that reading is not a cure-all solution for intelligence. Louise and Tom were slightly disbelieving. I stand by my point. Whilst books are an important part of learning, they are not an education panacea. Many children, including myself between about 12 and 18, read very few books indeed and "come out fine". They get their knowledge from other sources. Newsnight confirmed this. The sample of boys they'd found to illustrate low reading rates were all doing fine at school. Too often reading is considered a bellwhether of learnedness and often I've felt stupid because I haven't read as many books as my peers.

In the discussion, confusion and anger set in because I didn't admit that books are obviously a fantastic source of information. Now I've "seen the light" I happily buy and read many books. I still only read around once a week though. I personally think that kids should read, but I also believe they probably shouldn't hang out on street corners. The fact of the matter is that they do and most of them turn out fine. If my kids didn't read I would encourage them to, but I wouldn't punish them if they didn't.

We resumed Dinner and a Movie night at Superflat. Whereby we invite Charlie over and cook food and, um, watch a film. Last night we were going to watch Amores Perros but it didn't happen in the end. Instead Charlies gave me pointers on managing my portfolio (now almost completely sold) and we watched a bit of James Bond.

Dinner was good though. We started with some soda bread that Louise bought at the farmer's market yesterday, it had the most ludicrously crunchy crust. For second course Louise had fish cakes also from the market. I cooked a Soy beef stir fry with egg noodles for Tom, Charlie and I. I actually managed to marinade the beef overnight which was nice, it was very tendy and very salty by the time we ate it. The stir fry ended up a bit of a mish mash again. I think that basically our hob is not hot enough to fry things quickly enough. Oh well. For desert Louise made meringues. They were lovely. They were fantastically sweet. We had them with whipped cream and raspberries. I killed the cream a bit by over-whipping it, but it was OK.

Ah yes, Jungle Chaos at the ICA. After meetings, food and buying Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi on DVD, Louise and I went to the second live night of the Cybersonica festival, featuring DJ Rupture, The Bug and Kid 606.

We missed Rupture sadly, though some guys I was chatting to said he was good. The Bug was quite ragga actually. A little unexpected, but quite nice. 606 was mash up. He played the expected crazy set with quite a long gabba interlude and some serious jungle mash up midway through. It was a little bit spoilt by his playing a crap downbeat number for the last track and then just running off stage when his set ended. All in all, OK, it was nice to get out definitely.

This morning we were woken up by the arrival of the new Harry Potter for Louise and Hacking the Xbox for me. Woo, books! I finished Blondie24 last night, so the timing couldn't be better. Sadly, Rich blew the ending of Harry Potter on Hype, breaking our usual spoiler decorum. Louise is very pissed off about it in addition she didn't sleep after the post arrived and is currently catching up.

Hacking the Xbox was self-published by it's author Andrew "Bunnie" Huang because his signed publisher, Wiley, got cold feet, worried by Microsoft's might and the provisions of the DMCA. It contains a long chapter written by Lee Tien on the implications of the controversial DMCA. It has a lot of information about the science of reverse engineering and learning the tools and skills you'll need to apply that information in a hardware context, specifically the Xbox here ("Thinking Inside The Box"). It also has a series of interviews with master hackers. It looks great and I'm really looking forward to reading it. It's not all Xbox centric, but at some point I hope to ply one out of the hands of one of my box-owning friends. I'm prepared to wait until it's outdated though.

I thought I hated them enough. I'm now getting about 4 or 5 spam messages a day. Not too bad, I know, but it pisses me off enough. However, today I got a bunch of mailer daemon bounce messages from AOL because some bastard had used my address as the from and reply-to addresses on their Viagra spam.

Aaarrgghh! Everybody hates you! You are the worst, even worse than video games cheats! Please simply take you entire supply of Viagra yourself and explode your penis!

Yesterday Microsoft announced that there would be no more versions of Internet Explorer on the Mac. They actually said that people should use Safari instead. In the discussion of this point on various sites (Tantek, Zeldman) I learned that MS had previously mentioned that there wouldn't be anymore standalone releases of IE/PC either, that it would all be part of the OS only from now on. Microsoft is effectively leaving the browser market.

But hang on, Microsoft owns the browser market, with over 90% share. So they're leaving it for dead (ish). There will be no advancement in functionality on the desktops of 90% of the world's web users until 2005, it seems, when Longhorn is released. By which point the W3C will probably have shed their earthy bounds and evolved into a race of super-beings and we'll all be living on Mars.

What are we standards-loving hippy web devs to do between now and then? I hate IE 6. I have done for a while now. It's 18 months old and due for replacement and now I'm being told that I've got to put up with the same useless browser engine for the next two years! It's sad that nobody will upgrade. I guess people will migrate from IE/Mac to Safari pretty solidly, but that's little consolation against the static edifice that is IE/PC usage. I can't even get Louise to upgrade, let alone Joe Punter! If 90% of web users suddenly decided to upgrade from IE to Firebird, I would literally cry. Mainly because it's so unfeasibly unlikely.

The worst thing is the idea that nothing will happen between now and 2005. Nothing at all, in two years, in the internet business. It's an Ice Age.

Yours, Frustrated of Fulham.

← previous page, next page →

Choose another page: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113 or return to the most recent entries.

Last updated at 11:32, Wednesday June 18th, 2008. All times are shown in 24-hour clock format and are BST.

Rate my journal on bloghop.com: