Aaaaaaaaaargh!

Look, I’m sorry, but I don’t fucking care about Tim fucking bastard Henman, whether he’s at the top of his game, whether he’s an arse covered in white flannel, or – in fact – any fucking thing else about bastard Wimbledon. Why the keff do people insist on obsessing about the dull little loser – wonderful, he’s a UK Tennis player, and he’s (supposedly) the best we’ve got, and he’s a darling of the media – but face it, he doesn’t bloody win. He gets to the quarter-finals, the semi-finals, whatever, and fucking loses. Every time.

All hail Henman, the “Eddie the Eagle” of tennis. Now just shut up about the prick, OK?

Aftermath

Pissed. Utterly pissed. Thorughly good night in the company of two gorgeous women. Pissed. Going for chinese. Back later. Maybe.

Feminism and Equality

Following on from Green Fairy’s post about the current state of feminism, I’ve been thinking about it a bit. Not necessarily in terms of right/wrong, or even with regard to feminism per se.

The thing that I’ve noticed now in just about every workplace is that feminism’s main result (OK, it’s other main result) has actually been to foster a distrust – even a dislike – of women in much the same way that America’s “Affirmative Action” has spawned a level of resentment against those whom it was meant to be helping. I’ve seen far too many situations where the phrase “Well, she got the job because she’s female” is used, along with the implication that a person would get the job, even in the face of better applications, because the company in question needed to show how “fair” and “unbiased” it was. For every job/contract in the last five years, I’ve filled in an “equal opportunities” form to detail my gender, birthplace, “ethnic origin”, mother tongue, and various other details. Why? Shouldn’t the criteria for getting the job be my skillset, not my genitalia or skin colour?

When feminism and work equality first came to the forefront, this kind of policy was essential, because there simply weren’t the women in the workplace. Now, the work environment – and life in general – are much more level playing fields, so is there still a need for this kind of policy to be in action? We’re now in a situation where (as I’ve commented/ranted before) the balance has in some cases gone the other way.

Personally, I believe in equality – not feminism, nor any other -ism, but equality. I believe that feminism, in addition to all the other “Affirmative Action”-type policies have had their day, and are now perhaps even proving to have a negative effect on their own goals. In an ideal world everyone would be taken on their merits – and gender, race, religion, etc. etc. wouldn’t matter a toss. Perhaps that’s now the target we should be aiming for.

Sociability

While Aquarionics is sorting out a London blogmeet, I started thinking about a similar thing for the North-West. From the comments below about the new Manchester sky-scraper, it looks like there’s a fair number of bloggers (Sorry, “personal publishers”, daaahling) in the area. Therefore – what’re the chances of some kind of Mancunian Meet?

Is it something that’s been done already and I’ve just missed it, or would it be a good idea anyway? Feedback gratefully received – comments, mails, whichever.

Ah, the joys of discrimination

If, like me, you end up setting up random accounts in Yahoo! and similar, then you’ll have noticed that there’s a “new” (i.e. it’s been introduced in that last year or so) test, involving a word embedded in an image, like the one below.

It turns out, according to this story in CNet news that these “anti-spambot” techniques are discriminating against the blind. (And yes, this does seem obvious in hindsight – but I hadn’t thought of it ’til now, I admit) The problem is that even voice readers can’t deal with the images satisfactorily – apparently the word has to be garbled enough that a computer can’t recognise it and use it. An interesting challenge between security and accessibility.

Better than dieting

Sometimes I just despair. I wasn’t really aware of this (although I suppose I should have been) but it turns out Kraft (and various other companies) are reducing portion sizes in the US in order to combat obesity. OK, I can see the logic – to a degree. Smaller portion size means people eat less. Well, until they just eat two portions instead.

What really got to me though is that Americans are now sueing the people who make the food/drinks that contribute to their obesity. As always, there’s got to be someone to blame, and it can’t be ourselves – blame a company instead. It doesn’t seem to occur to them that the main reason they’re obese is because they eat too much. Not rocket science, is it? But no – instead, let’s blame Macdonalds, Burger King, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, whoever – because of course we all thought fast-food was healthy, didn’t we?

Of course we did – well, there wasn’t a health warning on the side of the burger wrapper that said “caution – eating too many of these will make you into a fat git“. The drinks didn’t have a warning that said “contains more sugar than the average tin of golden syrup”. So of course we didn’t think they’d make us fat, unhealthy, obese. It’s a shock to our systems, a trauma – and we should sue because of it. No-one told us to eat less – we thought it was OK to eat til we nearly burst.

Of course, it’s also probably hard for Kraft to make itself out to be too healthy anyway, as their main brands are things like Dairylea, Philadelphia cream cheese, and Toblerone chocolate. Oh, and they’re also owned by tobacco manufacturer, Phillip Morris.

What’s in your wallet?

In Northampton, they’re doing a trial of a PIN number system supposed to help reduce credit-card fraud. Supposedly it’s been a success. The “Chip and Pin” method means that when you hand over your credit card to make a payment, you also have to type in a PIN number.

However, a piece today in the Register suggests that it’s not as secure as the card companies would like people to think. Big Shock. Unfortunately, so long as it’s possible to intercept the data being passed through to the credit-card company’s computers, there will be card fraud. Just because there’s more data (i.e. a PIN number) doesn’t make it any harder to intercept. And it’s also possible that the new “Chip and Pin” methods will also increase identity fraud – hence just moving the fraud to a different area.