Personal

I wrote quite some time ago about my liking for watching Most Haunted but that it was tainted with a slight feeling of it being staged or faked.

The new series has just started on UK Living TV and we have already Series Linked it on our generic digital hard disk recording system.  Again, some of the situations seem very forced and are not taken with any gravity at all:

“Oh!  Did you hear that moan…?  Anyway, lets move on into the next room…”

I want to believe in ghosts and spiritual things but have so far seen little that has convinced me that the program is nothing more than pure entertainment and fiction.

This got me thinking more of what proof I would need to believe more strongly and came up with these 2 ideas:

1.  The locked off location

The Most Haunted team would choose a location that had a history of “activity” and place “locked off cameras” in multiple locations.  They have done this before with no success, but have always done one camera in a room or one looking down a hallway.

What I propose is for them to place lots of cameras in lots of locations at once.  All locked so they cannot be moved and all recording continually fo 24 hours.  If you have a passageway - have one camera at one end and one at the other facing each other. Each room should have a camera pointed towards the door - on the inside and the outside.  The cameras could also be grouped in sets of 3.  One normal camera, one infra-red night vision camera and a camera that can sense heat.

Good quality microphones would also be used to capture any odd noises.

The location would then be locked off with no-one allowed in for the duration of the experiment.

This could prove without doubt that something occurred of its own accord as it would be captured on many cameras from different angles and technical perspectives and no-one was present to cause something to fall or a noise to happen accidentally.  If ghosts really are real, then they must also be around when other people are not?

2.  The blindfolded Psychic

The Most Haunted presenters are usually accompanied by a psychic investigator who helps discern the facts and unfold the story of the locaton from reading energies and communicating with spirits.

Again, some of this seems “too good to be true” and all seems a little false.  Mainly because the information they come back with is usually perfect and far too accurate for my liking.

I propose that a psychic be blindfolded, taken by car and driven by a person not connected with the show to a location chosen at random.  The place could either be chosen based on random numbers converted to a geographical location or just someone driving as far as they can taking random turns based on the throw of a dice.

Once at the location and while still blindfolded, the psychic would then have to “pick up” the nearest energies he could feel and allow his driver to take him towards that location.  He would then be asked to communicate with the spirits/energies to obtain as much information as possible and someone else would be there to record his findings.

Once the findings were recorded, the psychic would be taken away from the location.  Local historians could then be contacted to provide any backup evidence that would support the psychics findings.

This would prove that the psychic did have abilities and that they are not false.

Conclusion

These two tests would help me to believe that such things are real.  But the likelyhood of them happening is slim.  They may have happened already in some other guise!  I am not aware that they have though.

There is more in this world than we understand or can comprehend by the means of science.  But at the end of the day, the program makes interesting viewing.

Twitter is one of those services that I still don’t quite “get”.

• You post little updates in 147 characters or less and follow other peoples updates, or they follow you.
• You can even choose to follow the updates of people that don’t follow you too - so if Bill Gates used Twitter - you could get his updates!
• Twitter asks you “What are you doing?” and you answer the question.

I just came across this little video that does a good job of explaining what Twitter is and what the goal of the service is.

Its quite helpful in describing what it is supposed to be used for and has opened my eyes to it a little - but really, Twitter is much more than what is shown in the video. It can also be used as a tool to network with like minded people and gather information, comment and up to date news about almost any subject. I am starting to use this more at the moment than other stuff and its quite addictive. Especially as you can get to it from your mobile phone, your PC and other internet enabled mobile devices.

If you give it a go, then Follow Me On Twitter too!

So, unless you have been asleep all day or are reading this from another country; the main chat of the day has been “did you feel it last night?”.

I am of course referring to the Earthquake/tremor that happened at around 4 minutes to 1 this morning. The epicentre of the event was near Lincoln, which is about 105 miles from where I live - but not far enough that I didn’t feel the earth move and rumble for about 6-8 seconds.

I was just getting to the best part of reformatting my PC at this point (the bit where I realise that XP won’t validate its serial key as genuine again) when I mistook the ground shaking and windows rattling to be a ghost suddenly appearing behind me and tugging at my chair! By the time I had realised what was going on, my wife had jumped out of bed thinking it was a burglar trying to break in through the upstairs window and then rushed into see the kids to make sure they were ok.

We pulled ourselves to our senses, settled the one child that woke and my wife popped back into bed whilst I went back downstairs to see if I could find any information about the tremor on the Internet.

01:03 - My first port of call was the BBC News website. This was totally lacking any information - but bearing in mind it was only just after 1am and a few minutes after the event, I was not surprised that nothing was there.

01:05 - Reuters, Sky News and ITN news were then visited - but again, nothing to be seen.

01:06 - I logged onto my Twitter account and sent the following message:

I then jumped to the Twitter Public Timeline and picked up a message from Chris Alcock:

I did send him a reply, but he never replied to me though. I then saw a message referring to the tracking of tweets with the word “Earthquake” in on the TwitterSearch.com page and headed on over to see a glut of messages from various parts of the world reporting the quake and reflecting on the experiences of the people in the UK. Some poor chap was being sick at the time and missed it all - but he later informed me it was not a self inflicted sickness

01:15 BBC news page shows a “Reports coming in of earth tremor in west midlands area” ticker message but no real story to be seen. Still no word from the other news sites either!

01:16 I followed a link from the TwitterSearch.com list to TwitterVision and kept an eye on the BreakingNewsOn user based in the Netherlands who were providing the most information throughout the evolving news.

01:20 Twitter keeps serving up good links and information from people including the real information about the quake:

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/Quakes/us2008nyae.php

01:20 An old BBC news story about a UK quake from 2007 makes the top of the “most read” section to the ridicule of Twitter users:

01:25  The BBC post a Breaking News article with basic information about the quake and “more to follow” appears but it is all very vague and information lacking.

Conclusion

Twitter users beat the major news networks on the head last night!  I appreciate that any news story being reported by someone such as the BBC has to be checked, validated and double checked and validated before it even gets anywhere near being reported - but nearly half an hour before anything was put up is pretty poor.  The messages on Twitter were reporting the quake being in different places at different times and strengths, but until quality links were provided to actual data, this is par for the course.

Twitter might not be to everyones tastes, including mine at times, but it was very good at getting information quickly and easily from a large variety of people and services.  Twitter can be good fun if you know people on there but it can also be a lonely place too.

If you want to learn about Twitter, read the excellent guide by Caroline Middlebrook and then follow me!

It's ugrade week here in the Megatao camp.

Tuesday saw the release of the Xbox 360 "fall dashboard update" which brings DivX and Xvid playback to the console with a host of other new features .  Microsoft have even seen sense and allowed the content to be played from USB memory devices and data CDs and DVDs too.  If only the 360 wasn't so noisy , it might replace my aging Xbox1 and the perfect Xbox Media Centre app.

Wednesday was "upgrade to Leopard" day!

I have now updated my Macbook to run Leopard , the latest (and greatest) version of the OS X operating system.  The upgrade went smoothly without any issues (after I freed up some hard disk space) and I am now taming the beast that is Leopard.

My first impressions are positive.  It does seem a little slower to operate - so some more RAM might be on the cards once I have had a good poke around to make sure nothing is stopping it from running properly, but it kept all my settings, preferences and files too!

I had even disabled the OS X Dashboard to give my Macbook a performance boost and it left that disabled after the update too!  I have already changed the dock from 3d back to 2d though as it does seem to be a bit of a memory hog.

What will I upgrade next?

I have two more days left in upgrade week… 

“I see you have constructed your own lightsaber…”

These famous words uttered by Darth Vader to his son, Luke, after his surrender to him on the forest moon of Endor in Return of The Jedi echoed in my head last night as, for the second time, I removed the plastic shielding to repair my sons plastic version of the Jedi’s weapon of choice.

I had already found that my soldering iron was no longer working and therefore would not re-solder the broken wire that stretched from the negative battery terminal - and that the meagre heat from a few swan vesta matches and some excess superglue were no substitute for such a device - only making it much worse.

I had to Jedi-Force my way to the shed and extract an old plug from which I used the fuse terminal to join the end of the wire to the other end of the LED light part of the blade. I then had to jam it all together with some tin foil, shield the 2 terminals from touching each other with a piece of cardboard salvaged from a free pack of crayons given to us at a local resturant (to keep the kids busy - not to eat!) and screw it all back together.

No doubt by the time I return home from work today, the lightsaber will again not be working and will be destined for the bin - and many tears will be destined for my childs cheeks…

What do you expect for £4 though!

ps. As an aside to this story of DIY lightsaber repair - I had a thought. Why does’nt someone invent superglue that conducts electricity - therefore acting as some sort of cold-solder type substance. If I see you on Dragons Den with this idea - I am going to kick your ass - but not with a £4 plastic Jedi weapon.

So.  It’s been over a year since I left my old job under voluntary circumstances.  I have been contracting in the same position for the same company since then.

Last Friday, my colleagues were all given “30 day notice of threat” letters and were told that they faced redundancy.  A team of 14 - down by 4 people.  Not including myself and the other contractor who, it seems, are automatically ear-marked for the chop.

So, out of a team of 14 - it is actually 6 that are going.

As with my previous employer, it seems that these cuts are at the expense of the customer, the contract we have with the customer and the promises made when the company took us over 7 months ago.

As a contractor, you have to be ready - and expect - to turn up one day and be told that your job is going, has gone, never existed or has been given to the less technical department numpty who happens to be a permanent member of staff.  So I guess I will have to play it cool and accept my fate, get on the “find-me-a-job” websites and get my CV up to scratch.

Shame though.  I quite liked it here.

It seems that political, bureaucratic nonsense and no-brainer senior management decisions have started to follow me around.

On the plus side, it has meant that I have bit the bullet and have bought two new domains today and have started setting up two new blogs that have been rattling around my brain for a few weeks.  Time for action!  Get some extra cash rolling in.

Whilst brains are cool for doing things such as making coffee, working your vital organs and wandering during meetings - mine has not been anywhere near the land of blog for some time.

Maybe the time has passed for “this whole blogging thing”. Maybe updating my status with something random on Facebook has just become more “fun”! Who knows.

My good-brain is still telling me to blog more. Work on that new blog thats going to earn me all that extra spare cash I need - but crap-brain says “no”.

I got my free pack of 10 Moo Cards through the post yesterday after getting them as a free gift for eventually going Pro on Flickr. Seemed like a good idea at the time to go Pro. Not sure why though, as crap-brain also says “no photography for you, dull boy” each time I think about it.

I have picked up a Sony Ericsson K800i phone though with a 3.3mp camera which is cool and means I can snap reasonable quality stuff when I want to. I could blog about the argument I had with Phones4U when I took back a phone and got that one - but crap-brain doesn’t want to tell you about it at the moment.

Good-brain likes the new iPods and would love to play with an iPod Touch but crap-brain knows that they are just music players and pretty much do the same as my current iPod and mobile phone put together.

Ho-hum…

I had a rude awakening this morning from the nice lady from Royal Mail carrying a large bag of items similar to this one.The “potter books” are pretty much the only thing I have read in the last 7 years!And 5 of them I did as audiobook whilst travelling back from Birmingham on the train each day (so they don’t really count).  And the last one I read on my laptop as a downloaded OCR’ed document…

“All Computer and no real work make eyes go ouch ouch!”

It’s great to read that as a person who is covered in moles, that my “7 signs of aging” may be slower to take effect than that of a person who is mole free.

The flip side to this discovery is the common knowledge that people with a lot of moles have an increased risk of skin cancer.  This does not bother me too much though as I am not a sun lover, never have been and never will be!  Give me a rainy trudge up a hillside in the Lake District any day - you can keep your holiday to Barbados!

The only other down side to having moles is the increased risk that they will be

• Knocked off during play fights with children
• Scratched off during sex
• Cut by the hairdresser
• Grow hairs so thick and wiry that the US military want to use them for secret projects

I did once ask my GP about having my larger moles removed but he told me they may leave a scar if I did.  A homeopathic doctor once told my father,

Just cut it off with a pair of scissors and put your finger on it…

Advice not to be followed I think!