At the height of the BBC’s “Jimmy Savile crisis”, when police were estimating that the old, dead child rapist and his associates had assaulted at least 40 boys, a female media twitterer tweeted that she had no sympathy for the BBC’s predicament at all, after the way they had blocked her promotion, because she was […]
Read MoreThe Net
Fighting The Good Fight
Spam—email spam, link spam, splogs, social media spam—is evil. I waste too much of my time dealing with it. It was inevitable that this Wired article about a new search engine would intrigue me: [T]here’s a new search engine in town that’s got a fresh approach to weed out the ever-proliferating junk and spam sites […]
Read More“Does anyone know the way, there’s got to be a way To Block Buster!”
This Slate piece about Blockbuster, the movie rental chain, is fascinating; well, it’s fascinating to someone like me who thinks formats and markets and channels and digital data and movies are interesting in themselves. Stir them all together and… In 2005, Greg Meyer wrote a letter to the management of Blockbuster. He wanted to warn […]
Read MoreNational Stereotypes
I have just searched Google News for “Afghanistan”. The top three stories are, in order: 500 more British soldiers will go to Afghanistan—[report] Italians bribed the Taleban all over Afghanistan—[report] France will not send any more troops to Afghanistan—[report]
Read MoreCapable Of Universal Computation
The new “un-search engine” Wolfram Alpha beat Google in at least one of my tests: Here are some of its answers to other, harder, questions.
Read MoreThe Squeaky Wheelchair
Paul Evans worked for a company that built Websites for political organizations long before the current crop of johnny-come-latelys started twittering about “digital engagement” and “campaigning 2.0”. This post of his about the kinds of people who use the Net to harass politicians and the kind of people politicians should listen to—two groups that, in […]
Read More“In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.”
Congratulations to the Web surfer brought here by a search for: “interracial dates that like Radiohead” You have hit the jackpot.
Read MoreHow Can You Tell?
MySpace sex offender charged with running “fake” church. It’s lucky they caught him before “real” churches became associated with fraud and the sexual abuse of children.
Read MoreI Warned Them, But Did They Listen To Me?…
Perhaps you remember my posting about my little sister’s small claims case against Sky. I wasn’t surprised to receive an email from her on Friday informing me that, after months of time-wasting and attempts at legal intimidation by them—don’t get lawyerly with woman who teaches law—she has finally and comprehensively whupped their sorry asses. My […]
Read MoreSpecial End-Of-The-World Science Edition
Years ago, PooterGeek featured the “Exxxtreme Mini-Bears”, tiny, hardy, beautiful living creatures called tardigrades. Turns out they are even hardier than thought. Some of them can survive being sent into space. The “TARDigrades in Space project is, of course, going by the acronym “TARDIS”. How long before the BBC sues? This is also a lovely […]
Read MoreDisturbing Search Of The Moment
I’m kind of afraid to ask why people have been arriving at PooterGeek over the past couple of days as a result of googling for “John Kettley” and “hedgehog”. I realise my publishing this post will now make things worse. Perhaps I should add the phrase “Richard Gere” as well.
Read MoreGood Advice
These are both old (by blogging standards) and from the unlikeliest of sources, but I think they’re excellent: Marketer Seth Godin on how to send email and 79-year-old Catholic priest Pat Connor on how to choose a spouse.
Read MoreOutage
Because of an ongoing1 split between two networks: that of my ISP and the one belonging to my server hosts, I can only send messages out of and receive them into my main email account by extremely convoluted means today. Apologies to anyone trying to reach me. I wanted to use “current” rather than the […]
Read MoreGetting The Point Across Online
Here are some sensible tips on how to send an email message.
Read MorePublished Writer
Even the Nazis didn’t put artists out of work. — Andrew Keen, author of The Cult Of The Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy, talking about the Internet, one minute into this interview The advantage of the Internet, as Keen reveals in the title of his book, is that, […]
Read MoreCollaborators And Fighters
Internet old-timers are not necessarily more polite than newcomers. They do, however, tend to know the rules, sometimes as a result of having been slapped down more than once by even-older-timers. Beginners in online communication often don’t even realise there are any rules at all. Hardcore open source geeks, for example, that is people who […]
Read MoreShouty Men
To date, most of the political blogs that employees of the old media have paid attention to have been noisy, gossipy, and abusive ones. This makes sense: the people in the media who read them also tend to be noisy, gossipy, and abusive. Such sites don’t threaten the old order and the blogs’ proprietors are […]
Read MoreMoney
This is the first time anything related to Pink Floyd has actually blown my mind: Cambridge-educated economist-turned-music-manager (Pink Floyd, The Clash, Ian Dury And The Blockheads, Billy Bragg) Peter Jenner … [has] put a figure on how much each music fan who buys music would have to pay in order for access to every song […]
Read MoreMillions Of Souls Cry Out
I’m taking a few days off from blogging because I’m busy so I will leave you, as always on such occasions, with one of PooterGeek’s famously hilarious repackaged jokes. But first, this is perhaps a good time to link to one man’s account of his attempt to go without the Net for a week: Day […]
Read MoreLeggo!
Via things magazine, I discovered an article in the Archinect about how when the people of the virtual community Second Life are given freedom to build whatever they want they recreate suburbia.The author of the piece broadcasts his own prejudices. I hate shopping as well, but I winced at this: [L]ike most utopias, [Second Life] […]
Read MoreToday Britain. Tomorrow The World!
Despite my slack posting there, in the few months since I started it The Wedding Photography Blog has gone to number two hit on Yahoo UK for the search terms “wedding photography“. This is amazing even to me. If you linked to it then thank you. I must extend special gratitude to the anti-Euston Manifesto obsessive […]
Read MoreRegistering Complaints
I hadn’t noticed this until I read Tom Hamilton’s post at Let’s Be Sensible, but the Devil’s Kitchen calls the Mr Eugenides essay that I blogged about “one of the finest posts ever written“. Does Eton College do refunds? Also, having read the latest post at Never Trust A Hippy, I must revise my slur […]
Read MorePenis Size: A Scientific Study
Further to this, this. METHOD: To study the effect of penis width vs. length on female sexual satisfaction, 50 sexually active female undergraduate students were asked which felt better, i. e., was penis width or length more important for their sexual satisfaction. RESULTS: None reported they did not know, or that width and length were […]
Read MoreProprietary
I’ve met and had a couple of interesting conversations with the Director of the Oxford Internet Institute so I’m sure he’s sharp enough to appreciate the irony of his compiling a list of Internet research centres, along with links to them, and then posting this collection to his blog as a Word document. Perhaps the […]
Read MoreApologies And Hugs
Yesterday PooterGeek was down (and I couldn’t read my email) for quite a while beause someone “compromised” the server it’s hosted on. Sorry about that. It wasn’t my fault. I’ve been very busy lately so there’s not been much to read here anyway. This is sweet—if you don’t mind the grungey soundtrack. I am also […]
Read MoreHow To Win Votes And Influence People
Dear Candidate If you want to be selected as the MP for the notoriously geeky and principled Cambridge constituency, spamming Labour Party members with your CV attached as a Word document sent from your work email account is not a good way to start. all the best PG
Read MoreHello, Loser
Right now, an annoying racist brat is trying to leave abusive comments on PooterGeek—my favourite so far: “niggers stink of shit”. Well, this nigger’s shit hot with UNIX. If you’re reading this, mate, I already know what school you attend and the name of your head of year. She is going to ring me back […]
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