Doodles

 

 

Posted via email from Olliebean's Posterous

Nostalgia

It used to be you could turn on the telly on a Saturday night and see proper professional singers singing songs they'd been singing for more than a week. Surely, that was better, wasn't it?

I really should stop watching reality television

The thing that drives me mad about the X Factor isn't when they put someone through who I think has a horrible sounding vocal tone. Because that is, at least to some extent, a matter of personal preference, and I can live with the fact that certain types of voice that I think sound horrible are the sort of thing the public seem to go wild over.

When they're out of tune, though; not just a little bit here and there, such as might be explained away as part of their singing style, but consistently and obviously out of tune - like one of them was tonight, by what sounded like almost a quarter tone - well, that's *objectively* horrible - isn't it?

Well apparently it isn't, as not one of the judges mentioned it. Surely it couldn't be that on a programme the supposed purpose of which is to find good singers, not one out of the four judges is actually capable of hearing when someone is consistently off by almost a quarter tone - that's nearly halfway to a completely different note - the whole way through the song? Or worse, do they actually not care that someone is so egregiously out of tune? Could it possibly, inexplicably, not bother them?

Anyway, she went through to the next round or the bootcamp or whatever they're calling it these days, which means she gets to sing some more in future episodes. Perhaps someone will mention it then. Or maybe she'll end up winning and release a single all Autotuned to hell, like the professional singers do if they can't sing in tune. I suppose if you look at it like that, it really doesn't matter a damn.

Twitter vs RSS? No contest.

I'm fed up with reading that RSS is dead, killed, apparently, by Twitter. What nonsense! Twitter and RSS are two different tools for two completely different purposes.

Twitter gives me a stream of updates from people I choose to follow, telling me in real time what their thoughts are in 140 characters or fewer. Whereas an RSS reader (Google Reader, for example) aggregates and categorises longer articles for me, from a variety of sites that I choose to subscribe to, for me to read at my leisure when I have time.

It's true that the originators of those articles could post links to them on their Twitter feeds, and I could find out about the articles that way. But I do not want them all mixed in together, arriving in real time whether I have time to read them or not, and then disappearing off the bottom of the page if I don't get around to Reading them in short order. That's just madness, surely?

So let's have no more of this frankly barmy talk about Twitter replacing RSS. Just use each tool for what it's designed for and have done with it. Or next thing you'll be wanting a toaster that can fry eggs and do macramé.

On blogging

Someone just pointed out to me that I don't update my blog very often. I gave what would probably be my standard answer if people asked me about it more often [*], which is that I don't have much interesting stuff to write about. To which the answer was "Your house is falling down for a start."

Well yes, it is, but I think I've already written about that. And anyway, I'd sooner not just be writing about things going wrong in every entry, which is partly why I hold back on posting about some stuff. I'm sure people don't want to read endless posts about bits of my front wall falling off every time there's a windy day, or part of one of my windows falling out, or my bathroom light switch breaking and subsequently turning out to be full of water, or the terrible agonised sound my central heating makes when I turn the radiators off, or my browser freezing up (as it has just done while I was in the middle of writing this note), or the ball valve on my cold water tank being incorrectly fitted and causing it to constantly dribble water from the overflow, or the handle on my toilet cistern breaking off so that I can only flush it by reaching into the cistern to pull up the now detached other end of the handle.

See, you're bored already, aren't you?

And then a lot of it would probably consist of moans about people, which is OK in private, I mean everyone has a moan about everyone else probably from time to time, and I'm sure no-one would be too surprised to find out they'd been moaned about (I know I wouldn't be) - well apart from certain people who think the sun shines out of their arses [**] but that's all I'm going to say about them for precisely the following reason - but you don't really want to go putting that stuff up in public where the person you're moaning about or someone close to them might read it.

I used to keep a diary, when I was at school, and for a while I wrote religiously in it every day, but looking back over it in more recent years there's very little in there that would be of any possible interest to anyone but me. Mostly I seemed to be obsessed with which girls I fancied, and whether they might conceivably fancy me back. In retrospect, I don't think any of them did, but at the time I maintained the fantasy that they might by consistently chickening out of doing anything about it (a strategy that I have continued to employ to this day). Anyway, that's another thing you don't want to be blabbing about in a public blog.

So instead, here's a blog post about why I don't post to my blog more often. Next up, the YouTube video about why I don't do more YouTube videos...

[*] The fact that people don't ask me about it more often, I take as evidence that nobody is particularly bothered. Which is fair enough, given that I don't have much interesting stuff to write about.

[**] I don't mean you, of course.

Am I desirable?

I just got an email from the Spark application. This is what it says:

"In total, you were viewed 44 times and one person expressed interest in you.
You are more desirable than 56% of 17,119,497 people."

By my calculations, that means that roughly 9.5 million of those 17 million people have had nobody express any interest in them at all.

With statistics like that, it's a wonder anyone ever manages to partner up. I think people should be less picky. Especially when it comes to me, obviously. I'm statistically due for a bit of luck in that department. The graph proves it.


You can't argue with a parabola.

And the one person who expressed interest in me, turns out to be someone who told me last year she didn't feel that way about me. See, this sort of thing is why I'm so rubbish at the whole dating game.

Why we need fuses...

I came home today after 4 days away, during which I had turned off my central heating. So I returned to a very cold house. In the interests of getting a decent amount of heat into the room in the shortest possible time, I did something a bit silly. Not only did I turn on the heating to maximum, but also plugged in two electric heaters, also turned to maximum. Into the same distribution board. Which had only a standard 13 amp plug on it.

Just before the fuse in the plug blew, the pins got hot enough to slightly melt the plastic bits around the base of them - well, not so much melt as soften, and slightly distort, them, to the extent that I had to lever the plug out of the wall socket with a screwdriver (after turning the socket off, obviously).

Thanks to the fuse, nothing dramatic heralded this eventuality. I just suddenly noticed that neither of the heaters were running any longer. Had there been no fuse in the plug, I could have been alerted to the overload by a small electrical fire - or worse still, been out of the room and subsequently returned to discover a larger fire.

So today, I am thankful for fuses. And to prevent a recurrence of today's silliness, I have resolved in future to plug electric fires only directly into a wall socket, so that no one socket will have to deal with more than one such heavy load.

This has been a public information note... well, no, not quite. If it were, something horrible would have happened to me as a salutary tale to others. As it is, all that happened was that I had to change a plug, and was very slightly colder for a while than I might otherwise have been. So take care, children, or the same mildly inconvenient fate might be yours...