Parents Lie

Travelling home from work last night was a particularly nightmarish experience…

Having left my customers office at 3.45pm, I was looking forward to getting back to the village at a reasonable time for once – after all, Sheffield is only about 65 miles away. However, after queing for what seemed like an eternity to pay for my car parking, it then took me around three quarters of an hour to leave the grounds of the car park. Progress on the main road was hampered somewhat by the diversion signs guiding people around a collapsed sewer, and the predilection of new mothers to assume that the baby buggy they are pushing through the traffic confers some form of magical invincibility to the trauma of a double decker bus ploughing through them, didn’t really help. Total journey time to the motorway (around 5 miles) clocked in around the hour and three quarter mark, making my eventual time of arrival in the village around 6.45pm.

I wasn’t happy.

Which brings me to the subject of todays post.
While travelling, I was subjected to a longer than usual dose of drivetime radio, on which the prevalent subject of discussion for the evening was the lies parents tell young children about the death of their much cherished pets.

I was quite lucky in this respect. My dog Trixie died at a ripe old age, at a time when I was old enough to understand that she had died. My Mum & Dad were honest about what was happening, so didn’t have to lie. But my heart went out to the guy who rang in, saying that his mother had told him that his Border Collie, Sam, had gone for a job as a Police Dog, and how thereafter he often wanted to call in to the police station to see how he was doing, only to be told that Sam would be on undercover duties and therefore not available. It was 10 years later when his mum admitted that Sam had in fact been ploughed half a mile down the road by a number 57 bus. The poor guys voice was trembling with emotion as he related the tale.

Then there was the bloke whose rabbit died. His parents just replaced it, telling their son that rabbits were like Dr Who, and magically regenerated when they got to a certain age, thus explaining why his albino rabbit was now black and tan with lop ears. And the girl who had a white budgie one day, and a blue one the next. Her parents, rather than admitting that they had accidentally hoovered up the poor bird, told her that it now had its winter coat on!

All lies – told in good faith to protect the young from the absolute truth of death. But how do you feel when you find out the truth?

So, has this ever happened to you? Did your parents lie to you? Or, more importantly, are you a parent who has told similar lies to your offspring, and feel it’s time to get it all off your chest. Go on, you’ll sleep easier at night…

Click ‘Comments’ and tell us your tale of woe.

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Old Hot Mothers

I was quite taken aback the other day when ‘Definitely Not Plastic Paddy’ pulled me up in the Fountain, complaining about his Google Search results…

‘Funk!’, he exclaimed in his rich oirish brogue, ‘you should see the results you get if you toipe Old Heatonian into Google! The first sponsored link was for ‘Old Hot Mothers’!’

Google makes it’s money by displaying adverts (sponsored links) on its search pages which it thinks, judging by your search terms, may be of interest to you. However, I could think of no reason why anyone searching for Old Heatonian would come up with such a result. A little more investigation was called for.

‘Do you use Google Toolbar?’ I asked.

‘Oi do to be sure’ he replied.

Well that explains it then. Google uses the toolbar to monitor the websites that you visit, so that it can ‘finetune’ the sponsored links to narrow down the kind of site you would likely visit.

However, given DNPP well known sexual preference, I wonder just what it is he has been looking at to garner a result like that!

And if Google can so easily profile you in such a way, is it wise to be running the Google toolbar at all?

Web Censored

Anyone who has paid any attention to Technology news will have noticed the outcry over the ongoing censorship of the Internet that is prevalent in nations like China, and more recently India.

The big 3 players in the market, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! have each been accused of working closely with these nations in order to facilitate said censorship:

• Google have created a custom designed version of its search portal for China, which blocks results from sites deigned ‘unsuitable’ by the Chinese government.
• Microsoft has been active in banning Chinese language ‘bloggers‘ from its services.
• Yahoo! has been accused of indirectly causing the imprisonment of 3 Chinese dissidents by releasing details of their activities to the Chinese government.

All these things may seem far away and relatively unimportant to the casual user of the Internet. Why should we care what the Chinese can and can’t look at on the Internet? But we should care, because the fact that this has happened there, and the capacity for censorhip and the mechanisms with which to expedite it are in place, for anyone to use. Do we really want to belong to a nanny state where freedom for individual expression is curtailed, and the freedom of access to information is limited to what those in their ivory towers deem is suitable? It’s not a million miles away from burning books.

I can reveal that the rot has set in, even in this country, where we value and excercise our freedoms on a daily basis…

The past few days, I have been working away, meaning that I have been spending my evenings at the Premier Travel Inn chain of budget business hotels. The other evening, having fired my way through the three books I took with me (nights are long and boring in the bar sometimes), I decided to log onto the public Internet terminal in the hotel reception area, to catch up on some e-mail and maybe browse through some of my favourite websites, to see what was going on.

Having volunteered my debit card details to pay the extortionate amount required for 30 minutes of use (£3.00), I first looked at www.bbc.co.uk, to catch up on the news. Fine, no problem. Then GMail, to check my e-mail. Excellent, my DVD had been despatched, and spam duly marked as such for deletion.

Then I tried to browse www.boingboing.net. This is a bit of a geeky site, which collects links to interesting sites throughout the internet. On very rare occasions, those links may lead to slightly subversive sites, speaking out against censorship, or even rallying the masses against unfair uses of anti-pircay mechanisms. But mainly it’s just interesting things. Try it. You may like it. But you may not be able to try it at work. Or the Premier Travel Inn. BoingBoing is censored by default by a program called Surf Safe, which Premier Travel Inn uses to filter what can or can’t be viewed across it’s network. Bearing in mind that sometimes, they have in the past displayed a picture of the odd naked cartoon character, and this sort of thing may be a bit unsavoury for the casual visitor to a hotel chain who’s primary customers are business people over the age of 18, I could just (only just, mind), let that one go.

I then tried www.scaryduck.blogspot.com. This is a ‘comedy’ site which I log onto every day. The author won the Guardians best ‘Blog’ award a couple of years ago, and he updates daily. Most of what he writes however, is a bit near the knuckle, and is not to everyones taste (unless you are still amused by fart jokes). Blocked by Surf Safe. Not too surprised, bearing in mind the constant litanny of choice Anglo Saxon he uses.

So I tried to log on to a friends website. Now this friend is definitely not subversive. Her writing consists mainly of anecdotal stuff about her work and life. Nothing too heavy. Blocked by Surf Safe.

Alarm bells were now ringing, as I racked my brain trying to work out why:

• PIctures of naked cartoon characters? – none
• Swearing? – well, nothing more graphic than the odd buggar
• Subversive comments attacking the government? – nothing more subversive than moaning about the Council Tax bill

So I tried an experiment. I entered the address www.oldheatonian.blogspot.com

Blocked by Surf Safe. They didn’t even try to connect to the site – which doesn’t exist anyway.

So I had my answer. SurfSafe has blocked every site hosted by blogspot.com. Which is a relatively high proportion of the ‘blog’ sites, as they offer free hosting. A free voice for anyone who wishes to exercise their right to express themselves.

One last experiment – I temporarily posted an article to Old Heatonian which consisted of a list of the most disgusting expletives I could think of, then tried to surf to it.

Bingo! There were my expletives in all their unpalatable glory! So they are not even doing a real time filter on content.

I object to Premier Travel Inn taking an extortionate amount of money from me to pay for a substandard service which doesn’t allow me to do what I would reasonably expect to be able to do.

I object to them controlling what I can and can’t look at in a service which I have paid for, with no warnings about censored content before I paid for it.

I will be writing to them and asking for my money back…

Message from America

Sorry Lebanon. You have no oil or anything else we are interested in.

Panopticon UK (1)

I buy an iPod from PC World…

The sales assistant enquires how I would like to pay for my purchase.
‘Debit Card’ I reply, handing it over.
The sales assistant slots it into his machine, handing me the keypad in which to type my PIN number.

As I punch it in, it occurs to me that I’d heard of a supermarket chain which was beginning to experiment with a biometric debit card, where the customer would submit to a fingerprint scan rather than punch in a number, thus verifying his guardianship of the card, and ownership of the funds it represents.

Absently, I gaze around the store, noting the CCTV cameras observing everyones every move, the rent-a-cop security guards manning their consoles.

‘Could you give me your house number, postcode and telephone number please?’ says the assistant.

I do.

It occurs to me that I will now be inundated with junk mail and spam text messages, but it is too late – I have handed over my details. No matter.

But I never do hear from PC World…

I wonder why they wanted my address?