Bye for now

I only write on this blog when my life is too miserable to do anything else.

No doubt I will be back. But for now I'm done.

Social media is not news

I wish the BBC and newspapers here would stop reporting what people have said on social media. That is not news.

You wouldn't say in a report "X was overheard saying Y in a pub about Z" so why dignify the digital equivalent with a higher status than it deserves. 

What The Fuck 2016?

Sorry for the strong language, but it kinda seems appropriate. What is wrong with 2016? It seems like it's not enough for one of my heroes to be dying every 5 minutes... no, the democratic world seems to have gone insane.

It's not that I think people are making the wrong choices. It's that they are being presented with terrible options and then picking one in completely irrational ways.

Is this the best we can do? Come on. This is everyone's problem. Blaming other people for voting the other way wont help. And blaming people for being unhappy with the results wont help either.

We need better options. We need more options. A binary choice might seem easy, but we need people to have to think more than that. And we need leaders who can work together not fight over who is telling the bigger lies.

World, get a fucking grip, please!

Spy apps

I installed the Instagram app on my phone, just to try it out. But it wouldn't work unless I allowed it to access the microphone as well as the camera.

Why does a photo app need to have access to the mic?

Alarm bells rang.

I uninstalled the app.

Fuck you, Instagram!

Fakers

They used to say "on the internet, no-one knows you are a dog". Which kind of meant anyone could be anything, even themselves, if they really wanted to without being shot down immediately.

Things were kind of fun then.

There were a few trolls, but you could mostly ignore them. There were a few correctivists, but you could mostly ignore them.

Social media doesn't seem very sociable to me. People aren't themselves, or even a more interesting version of themselves. Everyone is scared of saying the wrong thing and being humiliated by the next shaming fad.

The other day I was notified that I had a new follower on Twitter. People don't often follow me so I took a look. It was a woman that I had met the previous week, so I assumed she was interested in my film club and had actually looked me up... which she said she would, but people often say that and then don't.

So I sent her a message with details of that week's film.

And got a puzzled response (what?)

It turns out that it wasn't her. It was a student in the Ukraine. Odd, I thought. She seemed quite chatty and I wasn't busy so we exchanged a few messages.

All seemed fairly normal until she mentioned that she was a big gamer and wanted to meet me inside one of her games. He next message had a link in to download the game.

Which sounded a bit suspicious.

I didn't click the link. I googled the game instead. It didn't sound like the sort of thing she would be into... given the little information she had told me about herself.

Then, of course, I realised that this wasn't a free game. She was just trying to get me to buy the game. It was marketing.

When I mentioned this to a friend (a little smug that I hadn't fallen for it) he said that she probably wasn't even a real person. It was probably a "chat bot" that just tricks you into thinking you are talking to a person.

Smugness evaporated. I was fooled by a bot.

For a few minutes I thought I had found a friendly voice out there in the big world. That's what the internet is good at, right? But it was a trick. To try and get some money out of me. Which made me really sad.

The next time someone follows me on Twitter, I probably wont even take a look. I've already stopped looking at Facebook because I don't understand why it shows me the posts that it does... and there seem to be a lot of ads on it now.

Which is probably a good thing. Talk to your friends in person... and their dogs.

Punctured

This has been a strange couple of weeks for me. It was my birthday on the 29th which should be a happy thing, but never seems that great since I lost my wife.

Thanks to the people who have helped me over the last few years I am coping with it better each year. Maybe by the time I am 50 I will be able to enjoy the day properly.

It didn't help that the day before I had a puncture on my bike. The second in as many weeks. And both caused by hitting holes in the road, rather than sharp objects or wear and tear. Which is annoying because that is just down to rubbish road maintenance by Surrey County Council.

Not surprising since even after a fatal accident on Bridge Street in Guildford, last February, which lead to a petition of 11,000 people calling for immediate change to protect pedestrians nothing has happened.

Only last week I was a passenger in a car being driven over Bridge Street at 20 mph and we had an impatient 4x4 driver angrily tailgating us. That road is so dangerous the way many people chase along it.

Anyway. To add insult to injury I had a spare tube with me but after replacing it by the side of the road, I found that my pump was broken so I couldn't inflate it. Had to walk home :(

But a few days after my birthday Guildford was totally gridlocked (again) so I got a reminder of why cycling is sometimes the best way to travel.

Olympics 2016

The Olympics are over for another 4 years.

Didn't we (GB) do well. Apparently, yes, according to the medal table. Well, one of the medal tables... I'm not sure that any of them really mean much. But we certainly won a lot of medals.

I say "we", as if I had anything to do with it. I don't even play the Lottery. I did cheer from the side of the road in the 2012 road race, which might have inspired Mark Cavendish and Bradley Wiggins a bit. No. Probably didn't help much.

This was a weird games for me.

I watched some of it on TV. But because of the time difference I didn't stay up late to watch any of the "main" events. So lots of it was second-hand viewing.

The BBC did a decent job, apart from the mad channel switching. I mean, Olympics all night on BBC1 apart from Eastenders... please switch over to BBC2 for half an hour because we have to game the ratings.

Amazingly they did delay the 10pm news for Jason Kenny in the keirin. Which then over-ran massively with those 2 restarts. Go Kenny!!! And Laura!!!

Watched a bit of the Tae-kwon-do ... mixed feelings about that ... should probably call it Tae-do now that punches almost never score?

Even watched some horse things?!? And swimming.

What the hell is BMX about? Top riders got run off the course on lap 1... and out. Madness.

Hazel Irvine presenting. Slightly less annoying than when she ruins the snooker.

Lots of excitement about Usain Bolt (only saw the replays).

Distance runner Brendan Foster declaring distance runner Mo Farah the best British sportsman of all time. Yeah, not at all biased.

But overall a very fragmented experience. Didn't feel like one event at all this time.

Wonder what Tokyo will be like? Would love to go!!!