Does anyone have any idea (a) why MsnMessenger randomises my display picture and (b) how I can stop it?

I got fed up with having odd images as my display picture and decided to put an actual photograph.

The photo was chosen because it was reasonably flattering, but in an odd way – anyone who knew me would know it was me but noone who didn’t know me would recognise me from it. So anyone who accidentally came across it wouldn’t really recognise me if they saw me on the bus.

However, there are about half a dozen pictures in the folder it’s in. Some have been used as my display picture. They would however only be recognisably me if I could be mistaken for a castle, Dolph Lundgren in the Starman film he made years ago, a hindu goddess, a baby wearing goggles or a toilet (and so on.)

Every time I log on, it’s pure chance which will come up, however. Sometimes the picture will change a few times in the course of an evening. Other times it will stay as it is for a few weeks. Rebooting the PC or reloading Messenger seem to bring on a higher than average rate of change but the change isn’t inevitable even if both of these things happen. Nor, as I explained before, is the changing process absent if I stay logged into Messenger for weeks.

That was a gratuitously long-winded way of saying. I have no idea why Messenger does this. It doesnt seem to happen to anybody else I know.

Before you ask, I don’t have Dynamic display selected.

As an aside, I think the new add-in features of the latest Messenger are mainly pesh of the highest order. Some even put loud intrusive adverts for things like McDonalds on and change your Messenger wallpaper. The Knock thing is quite useful. Everything else is nothing but aversion therapy in terms of making me switch off Messenger.

Well, this is potentially a short rant – simply because this months copy of .net is pretty uninspiring. Normally each issue is a combination of random, idiotic, reporting which inflames people enough to rant about it and a massive serving of inspriation – which encourages people to jump on their PCs and try something new.

Sadly, July 2006 does not follow the normal pattern.

Often the web builder section (especially “tricks of the trade” has good, helpful, advice on how to do cool tricks which then inspire people to try them out on their own sites (even worked on Why Dont You which is why there is a Google Maps mashup at http://www.compuskills.co.uk/demo/). Sadly this month expands on the recent trends for each article to be heavily aimed at a particular peice of software (Joomla for example) so it fails to provide the same inspiration.

Overall, this was a lame issue which provided a total of about two hours reading time before it was consigned to the shelf, possibly until the end of time.

Well, as the month draws to a close a new copy of .net magazine appears. Always good for some ranting 🙂 and this month carries on the traditions. I haven’t had the magazine for long so this is an “early stage” rant and that should be borne in mind. Remember, despite my misgivings about some of the crap they vomit out publish I am still a subscriber so it cant be all that bad!

Things do get off to a bad start this month though. Page 11 (first page of content) is where the hits begin. Now I am aware that as journalists the “reporters” for .net should be excused somewhat when it comes to understanding the mechanisms of surveys but even so…

Under the headline “No site, no sales” they have a three column article about how recent “research” shows 85% of people polled would have doubts about buying from a company that didn’t have a website. It goes on to produce dire proclamations backed up with “hard figures” (for example: “67% of small businesses believe it would take ten times longer to create a site than the average” – what does that even mean???) and finishes with the amazing proclamation that “a shop should sell stuff, a club should have membership info and a hotel should have online booking.” Fantastic.

Now the problem with this: The survey was comissioned by 1&1 and surveyed 1848 people. The number of people is acceptable but very low to make a comparison nationally. The big warning sign is the fact the survey was comissioned by a web host which sells online site creators and small business tools. Without going into this too much, from what I can gather the survey was carried out online which increases the disparity.

It seems a reasonable assumption that people confident enough about the web to take part in these sort of online surveys (lightspeed is a good example) would also have a higher threshold for requiring a shop to have an online presence. If I carried out this survey in the local villages where I live, I very much doubt if 10% of people would expect a shop to have a website before they would buy. You dont go online to check out your local newsagent before you buy the paper for example.

The article appears to imply that for small businesses to succeed they need a website. This, while good for business, is not really true. Most small businesses are aimed at selling goods to the local community, and in this situation the website is pointless. No one goes on line to check if the shop 200m away has a website before they buy. I agree that any business wishing to trade on a larger scale should have a website, but even then it is hard to think that 85% of their customers require one.

Ask yourself, when was the last time you saw an offline advert for a company and checked to see if they had a website before you bought. I have never done it. I have checked websites of online companies (eBuyer for a recent example), but they are online so of course they have a website.

To add scorn to their shoddy standards, in the sidebar of the article they “Name and shame” three sites which have “dismal” websites. Apparently SiteMorse looked at the websites for the FTSE100 companies and graded them. As always, Tesco.com gets slated – “zero for functionality” – yet even in the article it says they get hundreds of thousands of online customers. Oddly, the disparity of this escapes the .net journalists.

Instead of slating the site – visions of over paid designers sitting around in berets tutting about the site spring to mind – surely this implies the industry needs to overhaul its “testing” procedures (if there are any… I suspect it is just on a whim). Saying “bad design costs customers” seems true and is logically sound – however then saying the top online sellers have bad design lessens the point drastically. Tescos has an excellent website which hoards of people use for online shopping. I have used it and like it. I find it very functional and easy to use. What are the testers criteria if this real world example of a success is graded a failure?

Can anyone tell me?

Just a quick rant here. Today I was in Boots (the Chemist) and I was looking through the impressive array of non-chemist goods they sell. Out of idle curiousity I wandered to the travel / holiday area and, sadly, found my self comparing brands of insect repellent based on either claims or percentage DEET in the ingredients.

Then I noticed on the adjacent shelf a line of items for keeping you cool in hot weather. Basically they were loads of aerosol cans with instructions about how to use them – simply put spray on skin from about 20cm and allow to dry. Selling for a bargain £1.85 for 125ml, with big signs hyping them up, I was intrigued. Initially I wondered what modern technology was contained in these cans which would rapidly cool people’s skins – without CFC. Then I read the ingredients. A single item.

Aqua.

The pure madness. Spray cans of water going for nearly 10 times the rate they were selling 1l bottles! There were hundreds of these things – and based on the gaps in the layout, lots had actually been sold. Wow. The sheer marketting cheek to sell people cans of water at a massive mark up stuns me.

A sad sign that so many people seem to have bought them.

Now I am aware that some people wont believe me about this, so I searched the Boots website. I cant find the exact product which annoyed me so much (it was boots “own brand”), but this is a similar version which I didnt see in the shop so cant comment on.

Just a brief rant, old-codger-style.

1 – Usability gurus never have usable – or bearable – web pages.

2 – Web pages are generally getting uglier and they all look the same.

3 – All those technologies that were supposed to transform the web – like vrml and flash – never became better than the rubbbish they started out as. Well nigh nobody uses them. The few sites that do are almost always horribly annoying.

4 – Why can’t we have holosuite web pages? Seems simple enough.

Lots of tv programmes this week claiming that Star Trek inspired all sorts of fantastic tech advances. Even if this silly claim were true- guess what – we wanted the beam-me-up device and the holosuite. Nobody would have asked for the mobile phone ffs.

This is a really good site. I picked the URL up from other blogs on this page. http://archaeoastronomy.co.uk/

However, as well as confessing to being utterly baffled by the technical stuff on the Bosnian pyramid, I have to take issue a bit with the article on the Brazilian megaliths. This is just because it talks about there needing to be something aligned to the midsummer sun, if it is to be accepted as an astronomical thing, because of the crop cycles etc.

It seems to me that anyone who has been anywhere near the tropics knows that people living there don’t care about annual sun cycles. It’s always more or less twelve hours day and 12 hours night near the equator. There are no annual crop cycles of the sort we are familiar with in temperate zones. In the Amazon, it seems unlikely they’d even have to think about when the rainy season is – it’s a rainforest, isn’t it? 🙂

So – why would there need to be a midwinter/midsummer marker for it to be an observatory?

I don’t know if the irony seemed to have passed a lot of people by. I thought that Ben Goodacre was saying that some of the supposedly scientific research behind new medicines is so spurious that it might as well be homeopathic rubbish that they are selling. At least that is not going to make you sick from the side effects.

I can’t see how anything he said could be taken as saying homeopathic remedies are good.

Stonehenge,
originally uploaded by Tulna.

Well, as you can see I am still going through flickr.com – a search with the term “english heritage” is very worthwhile.

This shot of stonehenge (I dont know if the colours have been edited at all) is pretty cool. It creates an interesting green sheen over the stones and the lack of people is pretty impressive.

Stonehenge is a good bench mark as it seems to be the most photographed place in England. (From my unscientific view point! :))

jokulsarlon glacial lagoon,
originally uploaded by krmuir.

Sorry to keep the photo thread going… but this lagoon shot looks amazing. Some excellent work done on some fantastic landscape there.

(I will try to limit my use of superlatives soon…)

Well, readers of Saturday’s newspaper (or the website www.badscience.net) may be forgiven for thinking that Ben Goldacre, scourge of the charlatan, has gone soft. (Read the article online)

Taken brutally out of context, and subjected to skim reading, this article look almost like an approval of homeopathic remedies to treat all manner of ailments. The print version is a worse offender (missing the phrase “Bring on the placebos” – at least in my newspaper), but generally speaking about 60% of the people I have shown the article to so far think it was basically saying that “modern medicine has had its chance, now we need to try the homeopathic stuff.”

Shocking.

I hope I am not alone in being dismayed by this. To me, the article read like a sly dig at homeopathy – basically pointing out the fact it does nothing and has no real evidence to support it working – but on re-reading, and after speaking to others it may have been a bit too sly.

From speaking to people who have already bought into the snake oil sales pitch of homeopathy, this article was too close to support for them to see the reality. The only thing I can hope is that 99.9% of badscience’s audience are not that way inclined. (Although from the feedback on mobile phone towers I am not so sure…)

Sorry about the time lag between posts recently but pretty much everyone here at Why Dont You has had some time off of late or been away on work related courses.

You will all be pleased to know that the world has not improved one iota during our down time – so expect more rants to follow soon. 🙂

Is it 1984? Is it Germany 1936 again? I keep asking this and the answers get more depressing every time.

The front page of the Guardian today (19 May 2006) has an article on a plan to give council staff access to police intelligence to monitor criminals. The council staff include a huge swathe of people, inclluding park keepers, housing officers and community support officers. (Park keepers? Are there any left?)

Apart from people that you expect to have problems with this, such as the organisation Liberty, even the Police Federation are understandably disturbed, according to the Guardian article. Their spokesman pointed out that the data protection issues are huge. The police are trained to observe high standards in keeping their information secure. Leaks are traceable and should be dealt with seriously. Not only will the myriad council employees not have the training to evaluate information, they will not have the same constraints on their divulgence of it.

When this gets put into operation together with the implementation of the Identity Card fiasco, no one will have anything resembling privacy. It will also be impossible to obtain redress against people spreading malicious tales about you because it will be well nigh impossible to know who is responsible.

If a police officer misbehaves – as of course they sometimes do – you can hold them accountable. If a bin collector or school dinner worker misuses information about you, what possible redress can you have? It won’t even be in their job description that they can’t misuse personal information. Is there reason to think that police training and accountability are a complete waste of time and that networks of neighbourhood spies would be much more efficient?

Diidn’t this sort of thing used to be the responsibility of the STASI or the KGB in what were supposed to be the bad old days before freedom came to Eastern Europe?

To anyone, who served in World War II on the Allied side – my deepest and most sincere apologies. We seem to have thrown away the lives of the people who died then just so that we could set up our own proto-fascist state sixty years later, and under a “Labour” government no less.

Again, from reading interesting links on the “Past Thinking” blog site – I came across some links to the megalithic portal. All I can say is “wow.”

The map is amazing, and accurate. I have spent the last 10 minutes marvelling at the photos and sheer volume of information they have available. It has a forum and lots of user-contributed information, which is both good and bad. While I havent had time (yet) to fully explore the site, first impressions are very, very good. All I can say is check it out now!

http://www.megalithic.co.uk/

Thanks to a link on the “past thinking” blog I found out about some very interesting software produced to create 3D models. So far it looks VERY cool – I have not had time to check it out properly but I will do so soon.

One of the most interesting things about this is, is the ability it has to link into Google Earth maps – potentially great fun.

You can find out more about this at http://www.sketchup.com/.

Tynemouth Priory and Castle,
originally uploaded by me.

I promise this is the last photo of the day 🙂

This is a picture of the grave yard to the read of the priory at “Tynemouth Castle.” (An English Heritage site at the mouth of the river Tyne, oddly enough :-))

Most, if not all the graves with readable details on date to the 17th or 18th centuries – some from the early 19th but not many. Despite this, apparently King (later Saint) Oswin of Deira and King Osred II of Northumbria are supposed to be buried here. All I can say is I never found their gravestones.

Apparently the priory / monastry did well until the disolution under Henry VIII. During his reign, the Monks here surrendered the site to the king, and he apparently decided it was more suitable for a costal defence fort – and the castle was built.

It is a strange site – it has lots of early medieval parts (the priory for example), is ringed with a sixteenth century artillery fortress, has WW1 and WW2 gun emplacements and, best of all, a 1960’s tower building (looks like an Air Traffic Control tower) which now appears to be home of the CCTV monitoring site. All very amusing.