Rob’s Blog

Has it really been that long?!?!?

Well, in the intervening period a small amount of trivial and rather uninteresting stuff has happened:

I passed my driving test back in May, and I have since decided that every other motorist is an idiot and shouldn’t be on the road. Supposedly it normally takes years to learn that skill, but I’ve picked it up surprisingly quickly.

I’ve finished all my A Level exams, with the usual multitude of cockups bringing themselves to the pinnacle of the public exams process on a regular basis. Unfortunately I never got my request in to demand the invigilators remove their shoes. If anyone reads this who will still have exams in the future, remember to demand the invigilators remove their shoes at every opportunity; it’s your right, so use it!

All of the websites I was in charge of have now been handed off to other people, which is a load off my mind, but now leaves me with little to do. I have combatted this in three ways: finding a table-top pool/snooker table on FreeCycle; using my Nintendo Wii much more often; setting up more websites.

On the subject of more websites, I have launched one (http://www.simplelinux.org/) and am planning another (a home, and possibly finally a use, for all of my useless information).

I quite like the phrase “euphuistic blithering”, after reading it in the paper today. Pondering it as a new slogan to replace the current one…

Amazon just sent me one of their oh-so-useless-and-far-too-frequent emails, gleefully advertising 40% off a book that I am not interested in, never will be interested in, and bears no resemblance to my past ordering history.

Around one third of the way into the email, where the footer and smallprint start, was this paragraph:

We hope you enjoyed receiving this message. However, if you’d rather not receive future e-mails of this sort from Amazon.co.uk, please opt-out here.

I shudder to think of anyone who actually enjoys receiving these emails: “Oh good, another of those delightfully useful recommendations from Amazon! I’ll certainly enjoy reading this.” Yeah, I just don’t see it.

However, perhaps I am not being literal enough (a rarity for me). It is possible that the message was meant for the mail server, expecting it to take some form of delight in the process of receiving the message and delivering it to me, something like the doors in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? This theory of course requires the belief that Amazon think servers are sentient beings that can take pleasure in directing electronic messages. Who knows? Perhaps Amazon’s servers run around all day having deep meaningful conversations and pondering the intricacies of modern life while directing emails and generating crap recommendations.

For the benefit of any Amazon employee who may pick this up:

1. I was indifferent towards the process of receiving the message.
2. I did not enjoy reading the message one iota.
3. The server did not, to my knowledge, complain about receiving the message, but I doubt it expressed feelings of glee, either.
4. Improve your recommendations as they are currently useless.

Well, as T-Mobile has decided that they own the colour magenta, and we have all known that the Royal Mail staked claim to the colour red a while ago. Cadbury’s own the colour purple, Heinz own the turquoise colour used on their cans, BP own green and Orange own, well… orange (more specifically, Pantone 151).

It’s not just colours, though. Toblerone have rights over triangular shaped boxes, and the cigar firm JR Freeman and Son have decided they own the first six bars of Air on a G String. A Tarzan-style yell has also been trademarked as the following:

The mark is a yell consisting of a series of approximately ten sounds, alternating between the chest and falsetto registers of the voice, as follows -
1) a semi-long sound in the chest register,
2) a short sound up an interval of one octave plus a fifth from the preceding sound,
3) a short sound down a Major 3rd from the preceding sound,
4) a short sound up a Major 3rd from the preceding sound,
5) a long sound down one octave plus a Major 3rd from the preceding sound,
6) a short sound up one octave from the preceding sound,
7) a short sound up a Major 3rd from the preceding sound,
a short sound down a Major 3rd from the preceding sound,
9) a short sound up a Major 3rd from the preceding sound,
10) a long sound down an octave plus a fifth from the preceding sound.

So, to claim prior art, I present to you: the colour wheel!

As far as I know I edited out the colours I am aware of being registered to other people, but that may not have worked. Anyway, I can now claim prior art for any new trademark applications going through for colours.

Did you know that in only 4413.662 years time we will run out of National Insurance numbers, assuming that every number is reassigned as soon as the original owner pops their clogs? That works out, roughly, at 13th November 6421. There are a few assumptions to be made here. For example:

• Population growth remains the same as it is at the moment (0.5% per year)
• There isn’t an apocalypse
• There isn’t a massive influx of space aliens requiring NINOs
• The ONS have adjusted their figures to average out over leap years
• There is no air resistance
• The population can be treated as a particle

This just reveals a shocking lack of foresight and logic on the part of the Government.

At this point in time though, the UK would have a population density of 15,240 people per square kilometre. This would only place us third on the world population density rankings, behind Monaco and the Macau Special Administrative Region in China. Furthermore, this would leave each of us with 65.64 square metres of space, assuming we destroyed all services and public buildings, that every square inch of land can be built upon and is inhabitable, and that we did not all start inhabiting balloons or airships in the sky. That space is equal to 2.73 double decker buses, or 0.65 times the surface area of a blue whale. If you chose to cover your precious land in A4 paper, it would take 1052 sheets, just over two reams.

However, having worked all this out, I really don’t need to worry. I’ve got it pencilled in my diary to be dead by the year 6421, making the assumption that we stick with the same calendar we have at the moment, and that the Earth does not pick up speed thereby reducing the length of a year or indeed a day.