Eviljaymz: Musings on Everything by a bitter Irishman in London

I went to see Gamabomb & Soulfly last night at the University of London Union. I was a bit pissed off to find a pint was £3.50, given that its a fucking students union but anyway, the gig itself was pretty good. I was really only there to see Gamabomb, I havent really listened to much Soulfly. I was a big Sepultura (pre Max's departure) fan but never got into the stuff after the divergence.

Anyway, Gamabombs set was really good, some fucking twat behind me was moaning about them and when I turned round to look he was some trendy prick, so his opinion is about as worthwhile as a turd on the street. Aside from the old-skool thrash, Philly is a funny guy on stage, the intro's to the songs get the crowd laughing, songs like OCP about Robocop or Final Fight (the video game) got good laughs when being introduced and my personal favourite was the intro to 'Sentenced to Thrash', a song about being forced to listen to thrash constantly deep in the future as punishment. For some reason it makes me think of the excellent & underrated Fortress film starring Christopher Lambert.

Going to the bogs (which were conveniently placed down the sodding stairs and through a long corridor) reminded me why I hate going to gigs, some fat bastard was storming through the corridor pissed out of his mind and on seeing the queue forming decided he'd piss against the wall in the fucking corridor with everyone around him. Thankfully the line moved a bit quickly as he was unzipping and he ended up just pissing in a sink. Classy stuff.

When Soulfly finally came on the little venue was packed leaving tons of room around the back and easy access to the bar. I'm beyond wanting to be in the middle of all that and would rather chill at the back with a beer in my hand. In any case I was still only about 25m from the stage. Rather weirdly there were a bunch of chavy pricks in addidas tops walking around menacingly, I figure they were just there for the mosh pit, and not in a good 'metaller' way, just for violence. Dicks like that are ruining metal gigs. If your ever in a mosh pit people are actually friendly, if you fall you'll get picked up almost immediately and people will try and help you. Yeah, it is 'violent' but in a chaotic controlled way. Assholes that turn up at gigs just to hit people really fuck me off.

Anywayz, I noticed that Soulfly played more than a couple of 'old' Sepultura tunes, these getting the biggest shouts and 'wooooo' from the crowd which made me think 'is this Soulfly or some Sepultura tribute band thats trying to sneek in their own stuff'. Still, it was good to hear 'Refuse/Resist' and some tracks from 'Roots'. Overall the gig was pretty good, the sound was a bit pants though.

Paramount is quite good on a weekend if you have nothing else to do, they've been running Frasier Season 7 all day today. So after a fairly long night I thought I'd just crash and watch that. Unfortunately whatever fucking moron decided to schedule the channels own adverts seems to think people have the memory of an egg.

After watching 6 episodes in a row the channel was really grating on me. Whatever new 'theme' they're having for the coming week the insist on plugging during every fucking break. The amount of times I've had to listen to the new stand-up season their running on Monday drove me crazy. I don't know who thinks its a good idea to piss off their viewers but of all the channels I watch Paramount are the worst offenders. Dave is bad enough for replaying the same show over & over (ever sit down to watch 6 episodes of red drawf only for the last 3 to be the same as the first?) but Paramount are kings of forcing you to leave the channel at every break.

If the idea is to physically burn their schedule into your mind its got the opposite effect. As soon as the break hits I'm either muting the bastard TV and surfing the web or making excellent use of the 'backwards/forwards' jump button on the remote to switch to the news. The only explanation I have is that the channel is run by one guy in a room with a dvd player that sticks in the Frasier or M*A*S*H box set every weekend and schedules it to play one of 2 ad's every break. If I ever happen to meet this guy the first thing I'll do is scream 'what the fuck are you thinking?' at him...

So after a week I've landed a job at a creative design agency called U Dox. It's a very cool company and its smack in the heart of Soho. The thing I really loved about this place during the interview was that they use whatever is the best tool for the job. If Python makes sense, that's what's used. Ruby/Rails? That too. A lot of the work is ActionScript3 based so I'm excited to get to learn that. Having spent a few days playing around in Flash CS3 I have to say I'm impressed. It's a hell of a lot nicer than AS2. Having had a rather productive week I feel like sharing my experience of landing a web-dev/design job at a really cool agency.

The first thing I did was to put together a portfolio online at PixelReactive. As a web developer it's really important to have a resource like this. Even if you're a coder you should put up some sort of link to example code. It helps to differentiate your CV from all the others. You can just give a list of links if they ask you but it shows you are serious about yourself if you have a collective resource like this that you can say 'if you go to this link there is some sample work and my links'. It also makes your telephone calls easier to rhyme off the one URL.

Since I was keen to get into design as well I put up links to my illustration and sketch work. Anything I did which I felt showed off my skills in a good way I put on that site. Code samples are really important, it means the people interviewing you will have a good idea already how you code and your style. It also means they can see if you're full of shit :)

The other big thing I found was enthusiasm will get you far. This is a very hard thing to fake. It's been something of a dream of mine to go from a 16 year old learning about ActiveX (jesus!) to working at an agency. I have no formal graphics training, everything I do comes from books, free resources like OpenU & MIT, and Google searches. If you want to get into the web-dev field it's very forgiving for those who don't have the right bits of paper. The other thing you might consider is getting certified in your language of choice. I'm taking the Zend PHP5 exam soon, I didn't need it to land a job but I've paid for it already so might as well :)

Finally when you're interviewing at an agency or development shop it's important to be a good fit in the team. This is obviously really hard to 'learn' but if you have a good manner on the phone and in person and you aren't miserable or somewhat aggressive or shy then that will help you a ton. A few years ago I would crap my pants when the phone rang, I'd avoid contacting people as much as I could (which ended up with me in court vs the Inland Revenue after 4 years!) and I was generally very introverted. I still am somewhat shy but after working at Net Root for a bit I came out of my shell and got used to talking to people on phones & in person.

Having talked to a lot of recruitment agents this week the other thing I should say is that I was really impressed with how they work. I got a lot of really good advice from them and they were all really helpful (and nice!). I've read lots of horror stories about people having nightmare times with these guys but thankfully that didn't ring true for me. Partly because of the portfolio (it makes it easy for them to see you're worth their time) I would say. As a side shoot from my job hunting I've got to meet some really cool people that I'll be keeping in touch with.

So if you're looking to get into web development and want to work make sure you have something to show people. It will make your life a ton easier. And learn as much as you can outside your comfort zone. I didn't really need to use CVS or SVN for my projects but I started because thats a useful thing to know about when it comes to team work. Same goes for Python, all my (paid for) development was in PHP but I've been learning Python mainly because I love languages. Little things like this make you more marketable than some fresh-faced grad with a bit of focused experience.

It would appear that 'the big 6' ISP's in the UK are agreeing with proposed government policy to punish file sharers. They're going to identify repeat offenders by IP address and so on and so on ad nauseum. There's loads of detail about this not least on the BBC, Slashdot, ZDnet, The Register.

What I'm more interested (or I should say annoyed) about is the brigade of people that compare bittorrent to actual physical theft. If you read the Have Your Say (BBC) page on the topic its split between people saying it is not theft, its copyright infringement and the others that say 'would you walk into Tesco, take what you want and walk out?'.

Now no matter what your opinion of people downloading movies, tv shows, music, games, whatever for free is, what it is not is theft. We have laws, laws like 'dont murder' and so on and the law says its not theft. People don't seem to understand that. It makes for circular arguments on those sort of discussion forums and I can only read so many pages before I start to go crazy but a few weeks ago one of the BBC's own editors put out a blog post on the Technology section of the site comparing file sharing to theft. When people pointed out in the comments that this isn't legally/technically correct he still proceeded to say:

UPDATE: A few people have questioned my use of the word stealing. Arguing that it is copyright infringement and not stealing. There may be a point here but to my mind this is semantics. It's a bit like breaking into a car, driving it around and then abandoing it. I believe it's called Taking Without Consent in legal parlance. Stealing to everybody else.

No Defence for Stealing Music.

The 'in my mind this is semantics' bit is what annoyed me the most, so much so I actually bothered to complain to the BBC:

Dear BBC,

As much as I find the reporting across the BBC excellent this particular post angered me so much as to write in and express my grievance with which the manner of this particular blog post came across.

There are numerous comments below the article in question that refute the central message of Darren Waters piece but it is his shear ill-informedness that is so perplexing for someone supposedly clued into how technology and presumably law as it applies to the area works.

His comment that, despite the many arguments to the contrary, the notion that copyright infringement and stealing are merely 'a question of semantics' is ridiculous. It is these sort of statements that create mass-confusion with regards to this area. If anything, it is rather irresponsible for someone high-up within the BBC's technology team to have such a warped view of what is legal reality.

I expect to find this sort of rhetoric on a BPI funded blog, not a public service broadcaster.

Thank you for your time in reading this,

Regards,

James

I got a reply a few days later saying it had been noted and added to the pages of internal feedback that gets passed around.

There's this fallacy amongst the people that argue that it's theft that is perfectly demonstrated in Waters' explanation. He compares downloading music illegally to taking a car, driving around a bit and then leaving it as is. There is a problem with that argument though and that is that you're taking a physical possession. When you steal/borrow the car the rightful owner has been deprived of their resource. File sharing on the other hand involves no deprivation to the creator of the work in that sense. That's why its copyright infringement and not stealing. I haven't taken anything from the producer of the media, I'm playing their music unlicensed. Comparing it to taking a physical car is stupid.

What you could compare it to is walking up to your friends car with some sort of replicator device they had in Red Dwarf and make an exact copy with your own materials. In the case of music piracy the materials are the magnetic tracks of your hard drive that when you arrange in a certain order happen to be the same as some crappy bands new album in MP3 format. The only person I'm physically depriving is myself, of bandwidth and disk space...

Note I am not talking about the loss of revenue here, I'm talking about the actual MP3 file itself. This is the problem with people that compare file sharing to full on ram raiding a supermarket. In any case I wouldn't have a problem if file sharing was classed as theft in law, but its not, so don't compare it to nicking a car.

I've been doing some shopping at the Co-op a while now, it makes a change from going to the Sainsburys Local near where I live. It involves a bit of a walk to Kentish Town but its still pretty close and they tend to have some decent deals. I picked up a couple of pizza's last night whilst I was in search of a bottle of Olde English (which I didn't get) and its only when I got round to cooking one of them did I notice two things.

Firstly, they actually tell you how much meat your getting on the front of the box:

I've not seen that on other supermarket boxes. You see it in the small print on the back on the ingredients and the 'mega' in the title suddenly doesnt seem so generous. The other thing I noticed was the inclusion of a braille description on the back. This I noticed after taking the thing out of the box. It never occurred to me before but it must be a real pain in the ass buying food if your visually impaired, so this was a nice touch.

As a side note, their own-brand bitter is really good, quite dark and hoppy. The meat feast pizza is bloody hot by the way. Huzzah for the co-op!

Northern Ireland has always been somewhat polarised over religious differences and we've got our share of nutcases and extremists on both sides but its good to see the greater majority coming out in condemnation of this idiot. Iris Robinson (DUP) is an MP, and not just an MP, she's the first lady of Northern Ireland. That's right, this person who considers child abuse a lesser offense than being gay is about as high up the pecking order as she can get.

Quite rightly the PSNI are now investigating her claims that gays are worse than paedophiles and that with the right counselling they could be 'turned around'. It's also rather sad that in a country that has been so damaged by religious divides we have someone near the top of the political tree advocating that it is 'the government’s job to enforce God’s law'. Last time I checked Northern Ireland wasn't an off shoot of Iran or Saudi Arabia.

Thankfully there is still some sense left at Stormont, I finish with a quote from Martin Mc Guinness (SF), deputy first minister:

“In the society that we live in now with many newcomers to our shores, and in many democracies throughout the world, we have a situation where many people within society believe in different things and believe in different gods. So what god are we talking about?"

“Is it the Free Presbyterian god, is it the Church of Ireland god, is it the god that Catholics adhere to, is it the Mormon god, is it the Jehovah’s, the Islamic?”

Oh and she's totally opposed to pro-choice.

UPDATE

Apparently, now the shits hitting the fan big time, she's saying she's been misquoted. That's once to the committee and once to a national fucking newspaper.

So what she really meant was child abuse is really bad, like worse than being gay. Crikey! Thank god for that then...

The New York Times has a piece regarding women in the workforce, in particular science. Women have always been under-represented if you prescribe to the thought that given roughly 50% of the world is female then so too should that statistic be mirrored in everything.

When I studied at Imperial, one of the more male dominated universities in the UK I wasn't surprised to not see that many girls on the comp-sci & electrical engineering courses. I did see a lot of girls at the bio-chem, geology (it had more girls than guys if I remember), medicine and other subjects like civil engineering. Since Imperial is a strictly science university, the girls that go there are not art's students that have happened to come across the wrong campus. They're engineers, scientists & incredibly techy. While I can imagine that perhaps at the high levels of academia men might be dominant and in those cases women should have the right to equally apply and fulfil that position but to mandate that a certain exact percentage of intake should be female is a horrible idea.

A lot of girls I met at Imperial simply didn't like computer science or electronics. They were happy to fiddle with tons of lethal chemicals or go mapping in the middle of nowhere but bits & bytes didnt float their boat. Maybe its true that guys like one thing & girls the other. It's hardly a reason to make up quotas and try and force X amount of people to do topic Y just to make a pretty curve...

I should mention of course that this is USA-centric legislation and not thank god in the UK. Although I can imagine something similar making its way over.

Still Game is a Scottish comedy and I've always had a soft spot for regional comedy, coming Northern Ireland. The Scot's have a really good sense of humour, normally a little less refined than the English, biting and caustic, but brilliant nonetheless. Still Game was on straight after the pilot of Lab Rats (which was terrible) and I wasn't expecting very much from it.

The opening scene with the old women made me think 'god here we go again' with the terrible 'cheap feel' comedy but once the two main characters (the guys above) came into the scene it was up hill from there. It has some great moments, the dialogue between the characters is quite natural, it doesn't feel so contrived as Lab Rats.

The 'working class scots' setting really works, the chavs on the park and the subsequent encounter with the main characters was really funny. Having it straight after 'Lab Rats', I sort of felt like I was being shown actual comedy after some rubbish knock off. Also, this show had a laugh track and it didn't impact the show. Mainly because the joke lines weren't crap.

FIVE out of 5 deep friend mars bars...

When I saw the first trailer for this new comedy show on BBC2 I had that sinking feeling that it was going to be terrible. Having now seen the first episode I'm sorry to say that my initial feelings where right.

The show has good premise, its set in a university's science laboratory. That alone is reason enough for me to watch it, science is severely lacking as a proportion of major broadcasters output. Even if it is a comedy, anything that brings a bit more attention to the topic is a good thing. Kind of. But Lab Rats has the feel of many of these recent situational comedy's, such as Not Going Out. When you watch them you think 'who is the target demographic here?'.

Almost everything these days is targeted at someone. I can't for the life of me think that this is targeted at an educated science crowd. I don't really expect subtle comedy shows to make it to the main channels, that's why we have BBC3 & 4. Down The Line, a Radio 4 'talk show' had a particular episode based around string theory. The discussion was technically, rather accurate yet incredibly funny. This was scientific humour at its very best.

Lab Rats however is a bog standard situational comedy that just happens to be set in a laboratory. The science jokes that turn up aren't funny and have an obvious feel to them. The laugh track (something I've never really liked) adds even more to the irritating viewing on offer. I understand the need for laugh tracks, I even 'get' them every now and again but its these weak shows that make them so difficult to make it through a whole episode. Giant props of a lemon and terribly rendered CGI don't help much either. I can suspend belief to an extent but I'd rather proper comedic writing than a joke about a guy stuck in a hallway with a fake, computer generated giant snail approaching him slowly whilst his assistant uses a giant lemon to power a fan.

The official BBC site sums it up quite well actually. Here's the blurb line from the 'About' page of the show:

Although the show is set in a laboratory and everything, it's less about science and more about using its setting as an excuse for stupid jokes, endearingly chaotic characters and fast-paced, farcical plots.

In all, this was pretty bad. Doubt I'll watch the rest of the series. I can only hope that it gets a bit stronger, I did have a similar feeling early on with Channel 4's The IT Crowd but even the first episode had some strong elements to it.

Out of five Hawkings it gets one. One because its at least set in a laboratory with scientists and you never know, it might maybe pick up, and I do like Chris Addison...

I know that Metro is hardly the bastion of great British journalism but it's a guilty pleasure that anyone that comes into contact with London's transport system will attest to enjoying. Ever since I quit my job I've missed that part of the daily commute (not the commute itself) so to recreate it I check the metro.co.uk website every now and again. Today as their lead story on the site they have this rubbish:

Two things immediately strike me about this.

1. First its not the very first iphone owner. That expensive brick has been out for ages. One of my mates even sunk his money into one.
2. Secondly, this sort of stuff is meant to be down the page a little, not stuck in its own massive box on the front. Its a fucking phone! Actually, its just a revision of a fucking phone!

Anyway, metro's online readership agree, there was this succinct comment:

Congratulations you're a d**k.

Spend 3 days of your life to give your money away for a overpriced piece of junk that will need you to carry on pumping money into it to get some use out of the new functions that it has. What a fanboy.

I'd rather rip my cash up and eat it with corn flakes then wait in a queue for 3 days for anything.

- Sinnick, London, UK

As for me, I'm a huge fan of the Nokia 6230i. I use to have a 6230 and then gave that to my dad when I was given a fancy (work funded) smartphone. As much as I enjoyed the ability to SSH to my web server, the minute I handed it back and was 'phoneless' I'd already made up my mind. The thing I love about this phone is that... its a phone.

Huzzah! It's really good. Having started playing at just after 1am it's only that the battery in my DS has finally given up that I've put it down.

I've never been a big PC gamer, mainly because I use Linux and am always aeons behind the current 'standard' gaming rig. For me, most of my gaming is done on a console or else its emulated. So as crazy as it might seem, I've never really played Civilization before. Its rather unsurprising then that I've been waiting for this version to come out. And its very, very good :)

I watch a lot of car crash TV, in fact I actually enjoy it. Personal Services Required (PSR) is however in a league of its own in showing some of the more infuriating sides of well-to-do people. In tonight's episode one of the employers really got on my nerves. They were the 'head hunters' that got described as 'chavvy lottery winners' by one of the unfortunate potential employees.

Not only did they expect more than a 12 hour day, they wanted everything meticulously cleaned all the while pestering the poor housekeeper with banal demands every other minute. At one point the woman wanted the current guy to wear a chauffeurs hat and treated him as a personal shopper. It got even worse when the mother of one of them turned up and proceeded to vomit up the main course the guy had spent forever preparing. To add some sugar to the victims day they also had to contend with the spoilt brat kid throwing a tantrum whenever she didn't get her way.

In the end they offered one woman a job with them at £250 a week, below what they'd initially proposed in the job spec. When she worked it out, given the amount of hours she'd be working, she wisely turned it down remarking 'its not even minimum wage'. The other set of employers were as bad but at least were willing to offer a half decent wage. The only problem with them was they seemed to confuse 'housekeeper' with 'housekeeper, dog trainer & office cleaner'.

This show is difficult to watch even for me at times. Its mainly because these people actual exist in the world. I can only hope that this economic downturn that seems to be screwing everyone hits them like a ton of bricks.

As a textbook example of car crash TV I'd give it 4 out of 5 Sherrif John Brunells, a man that knows a good crash when he sees one. A '5' would be if that woman at the end accepted the offer. So they lose a 'sheriff for showing common sense winning through at the end.