There’s nothing like a little snark to brighten your day. First up is UK Resistance with more of their fury-filled posts about the PS3. As a fellow bitter Dreamcast fanboy I can totally empathize with their hatred of Sony (although perhaps not with their obsessional desire to buy every piece of tat that bears the Sega logo).

Meanwhile, Wordpress Wank is distinctly unimpressed with the recent release of the Wordpress Widgets plugin. It’s nice to see some snark aimed at Wordpress; not that I have anything against them you understand, but a healthy dose of scepticism is always, erm, healthy.

Finally, some vintage snark from the archives of Amiga Power, where legendary games journalist Stuart Campbell heaps shame and humiliation onto International Rugby Challenge, a game which I’ve never played but am perfectly happy to assume is every bit as bad as Campbell says.

Cynics might argue that this shows a distinct lack of scepticism on my part but hey, if you recognise your own faults then they don’t count, right?

Trusted Reviews compare four iPod speaker docks and find the iPod Hi-Fi wanting:

For sheer power and bass though the Apple’s deliver, but it can also sound muffled and the soundstage restricted. However, if you want something that’s portable and can still kick it, then the Apple’s are your best bet.

What’s disturbs us though is the name. The Apple speakers are not Hi-Fi, and if Steve Jobs has swapped his main set-up for these then he needs to go find a new Hi-Fi specialist retailer as he was clearly sold a doosy the first time.

The one that comes out on top is the Acoustic Authority iRhythms, based on price vs performance. They clearly didn’t factor looks into the equation though, because (to my eyes at least) it’s ugly as sin.

Still, at least it doesn’t look like a breadbin.

So anyway, I was away from work today on a short training course; it’s a 2-hour train journey away and the only one that would get me there on time was the 6.55am. Fine, I can handle that; early-ish night, up at 5.45, breakfast, shower, then nip down to the station for 6.45 giving me plenty of time to pick up a Guardian. No problem, right?

Maybe it’s because I’m something of a night-owl, but I just couldn’t get to sleep; I’d nod off for maybe half an hour at a time then wake up feeling just as tired, only 30 minutes closer to my alarm call. Not good. Things reached a head around 2.15am; I realised that I was cutting it rather fine (I can get away with 5 hours sleep if needs be but 4 hours or less is pushing it), and vowed that if I was still awake at 3am then I’d drink as much black coffee as I could handle and stay up all night staring at Bloglines, periodically clicking “refresh” until either my eyes burnt out or the alarm went off.

Thankfully, it didn’t come to that; I must have nodded off shortly after because the next thing I knew, my radio alarm was blaring and I leapt into action. Well, I say “leapt”; it was more like a lethargic crawl out of bed to the other side of the room to shut it off, then a crawl back into bed to get a little more shut-eye before the 6am backup alarm kicked in.

The upshot of all this is that I feel utterly wretched; I’ve barely shaken off my cold so I’m feeling rough anyway, and a paltry 3-and-a-bit hours’ sleep hasn’t helped. My head feels like it’s full of cotton wool and that just isn’t right.

Is there a moral to this tale? Yes there is: don’t consume a can of Red Bull an hour before you’re supposed to go to bed.

I’m joking, of course. It was a wrap of speed.

Four words to summarise the Ricky Gervais-penned episode of The Simpsons:

“Fitfully amusing at best”

Gervais’s writing contributions were no doubt rounded and polished in the writers’ room so the blame can’t really be laid at his feet as a writer, and the central idea (assuming it was his) is a reasonably good one: Homer and Marge take part in a Wife Swap-esque reality show. Faddish, sure, but not a plot that sticks out like a sore thumb amongst the current crop of episodes (The Simpsons go to Europe! Again! And meet Sideshow Bob! Hilarity ensues!).

Where the show fell down for me was Gervais’s voice acting; while it’s nice to have a guest star playing a character (rather than a “Hey, it’s Ricky Gervais!”-style appearance), Gervais’s acting style just didn’t work for me in the context of the show. The result was an uncomfortable collision between the exaggerated cartooniness of the regulars and the “um, er” style of realism that Gervais prefers.

Also, the live-action sequence at the start would’ve been more amusing if it hadn’t been viralled to death over the last few weeks. Still, at least they flipped the shot of “Marge” driving so that she’s on the “correct” side of the car.

Thanks to yesterday’s Guardian I’ve discovered Mastermix, which hosts a whole bunch of mid-80s house/electro/hip-hop/etc. mixes in MP3 format, taped off the radio and uploaded along with a photo of each tape, with their torn labels and ballpoint graffiti logos evoking memories of the sort of mixtapes I used to put together.

I was only 8 in 1986 and lived in a fairly small town with no pirate stations whatsoever (apart from the mythical pirate station “Rock Radio” which apparently blasted out hard rock at all hours and which lots of people at school claimed to have heard but, if you tried to pin them down on any details, they’d become vague to the point of evasion) so all I ever heard of that kind of thing was the stuff that made it into the charts (and, by extension, into the record boxes of school disco DJs around that time): “Pump up the Volume”, “Beat Dis”, “19” etc. However, I’ve enjoyed delving into the music every so often in order to discover exactly where some of the music I like originated, although it’s worth pointing out that I enjoy the music in its own right, and not just as a history lesson.

I know you gonna dig this!

From The Register:

Web browser bugs are routinely blamed for creating huge networks of compromised PCs and undermining the safety of ecommerce transactions. Now one woman says a “security bug” in Mozilla led to the break up of her engagement.

The anonymous woman shared a Windows PC with her former fiancé. Both had separate user logins on the same machine and both preferred Mozilla to Internet Explorer. All was apparently well until the woman opened up a list of sites whose password was never saved and unearthed evidence that her man was a frequent visitor of dating websites. The woman took this as evidence of infidelity and split up with the apparent love cheat. She then had the presence of mind to report the privacy flaw to the Mozilla Foundation.

Things start to become clear when you read the bug report: it looks like the old story of boy-meets-girl, boy-gets-engaged-to-girl, boy-introduces-friend-to-girl, girl-begins-to-spend-more-time-with-friend, friend-fabricates-evidence-to-make-it-look-like-boy-is-cheating-on-girl, girl-dumps-boy. As we all know, the story continues with friend-makes-move-on-broken-hearted-girl, girl-sleeps-with-friend.

I’ll let you make your own jokes about plugins and extensions.

The answer is, of course, “time to get ill”. That’s right, a mere month after I was off work with a cold I find myself at home again, sniffling and wheezing like — well, like someone with a bad cold (My ability to think up appropriate metaphors is obviously as bunged up as my nose). This time around, I abandoned any pretence of being a Problogger and just concentrated on the strenuous business of not working.

My God, it’s tiring stuff.

It’s strange how you can feel so run-down after spending a day doing nothing, but that’s precisely how I feel. It obviously isn’t helped by the fact that I’m so congested I can only breathe through my mouth, but even so, surely playing old C64 games and mindlessly browsing the internet can’t be that taxing, can it?

Evidently so.

Just for the record, if you would like to recreate my Tuesday 22 March (perhaps in a Bloomsday stylee), you can do the following:

• Wake up at 9.30am feeling dog-rough.
• Phone in sick, then spend the next 15 minutes or so fretting about whether your boss thought you were putting on a rough-sounding voice when you called.
• Have a bowl of Quaker OatSo Simple for breakfast (apple & blackberry flavour for authenticity) with a Lemsip chaser.
• Spend the morning downloading old Commodore 64 games from the websites of Hokuto Force and Remember, a couple of release groups who have made it their aim to crack and train games that weren’t cracked and trained properly when the C64 (and its games) were still on sale. I used VICE to play them so make sure you do too, otherwise we’re wasting out time with this whole venture, aren’t we?
• Have cheese on toast for lunch. Make sure you add a splash of HP Sauce. Mmmm!
• Spend too much time browsing World of Spectrum, looking up games you used to have and comparing them to the C64 and Amstrad CPC versions.
• While you’re doing this, double your unproductivity by listening to the latest Podshock. What are you looking at me like that for? I’m a geek, I have internet access, of course I’m going to be interested in downloading an MP3 of people talking about Doctor Who.
• Invite into your life something at least remotely resembling human contact by watching Alan Sugar (sorry, Sir Alan Sugar) fire another management-speaking tit on The Apprentice.
• Finally, round off one of the most unproductive days on record by getting yourself a mug of hot chocolate and a cherry bakewell and writing a rambling blog post about how you wasted another day of your life.

Please note that it’s very important to have a Lemsip every four hours, and while you’re drinking it why not spend a few minutes reflecting on how guilty you feel for not going into work?

So, that’s what you ought to be doing every 22 March from now on. Make sure you buy your porridge oats well in advance — there could be a run on them…

Why don’t more games have intros like this?

A couple of things I read at the weekend got me thinking about tipping; or rather, bad tipping.

You see, I know a couple who are the nicest people in the world; they’re fun to be around, are always happy to invite people round for the night, and are pretty much all-round good eggs.

But they never tip.

I feel bad for noticing this because it’s become a constant source of annoyance. They’re always penny-pinching when we go out for a meal; they won’t have a starter, or they’ll use coupons, or they’ll share a drink (not a bottle of wine, mark you, but an actual glass of Pepsi or whatever) — but that’s fine, because not everyone has money to burn (and nor do I as it happens, which is probably why they’re financially secure while I’m roasting in debt Hell). What gets a little annoying is when relatively simple transactions become horrendous mathematics nightmares, where the bill has to be calculated to the penny instead of rounding up to the nearest penny. But again, maybe they’re just looking out for their own finances; that’s fair enough, I can understand that.

What becomes almost intolerable is their refusal to tip.

(Before I go any further, I should point out that tipping here in Britain is almost entirely optional; not tipping will merely earn you a pointed tut or stern glare from your waiter when you leave, rather than a savage beating round the back of the restaurant by burly men with heavy boots and pool cues, as I imagine happens in the US if you tip anything less than 25%)

One time, a few of us went out for a meal and when the bill came we did the usual addition, subtraction and long division to arrive at each person’s total and then passed the money to the bill payer. Once the waitress had returned and deposited the change on the table I broached the subject of the tip; a pound or so each, which worked out at around 15% — a reasonable sum, or so I thought. But then I noticed that, while everyone was scrabbling around in their pockets for change, they were just chatting to each other. At first I wondered whether they’d heard me, but as they continued to talk I realised they were pointedly not looking around at what was going on: they weren’t tipping on purpose!

Well, that was it; every time we went out after that I noticed that they didn’t tip. Every time. I started to get more and more annoyed by this, but what can you do? Being British, I don’t do confrontation very well and if I straght-up asked them to tip we’d end up in a situation where somehow I’m to blame for the resulting argument and recriminatory silence.

The last straw came when some of us went to a quiz night where the entrance fee was optional, but the money went to charity. Not only did they not pay (leaving the poor girl with the charity bucket feeling distinctly uncomfortable as she hovered by them) but they had the cheek to quibble over who got the prizes we won.

Let me repeat that:

They didn’t pay, and then they quibbled over the prizes.

So, I’m determined to do something about it but I don’t quite know what. The next time we go out, should I drop a subtle hint about how good the service was; should I confront them and demand answers; or should I just grin, bear it, and drop an extra few quid on the table to compensate?

So, it seems Labour are moving to outlaw the practice of secretly loaning sums of money to political parties in order to obtain a peerage.

Are they mad?

What better way to boost Lotto ticket sales than to allow newly-minted millionaires the chance to cash in on their wealth and buy themselves a Lordship? Apparently, an average loan of just over £1 million will get you a title nomination; well within the reach of most Lotto winners (apart from those who play the Lost numbers every week, who’ll be splitting their winnings with 4,815,162,342 other people, oddly enough). This has the dual effect of increasing the Lottery’s popularity and democratizing the peerage system, which will no doubt win Labour plenty of brownie points with the voters.

Get me into one of those Government think tanks, I’ll win the election for them no bother.