Give me my internet - part 2

-In which Vodafone snatch fail from the jaws of win-

I was sad and dejected after being rejected by Orange, but after a few days hiding in door riven with angst, I was right as rain and back to Harrow.

Vodafone, they sell mobile broadband dongles, and that's just the sort of thing which will get me online quickly and easily, so I sauntered along to the shop and was served by a pleasant lady.

It was a painless process, the I'd check and the credit check all aided by them turning the screen so I could see what was going on, with the lady explaining every stage. They even checked the signal coverage in my area.

The nice people at Vodafone were on the verge of signing me up until they checked their stock and found there were no dongles. None in the Harrow shop, none in the warehouse.

Just two in their Watford shop and a few in Kings Cross. That was annoying, it didn't look like I was going to get to RedTube that night.
I bade them fairwell, the lady gave me a BIN number so I wouldn't need to be credit-checked if I descended on Watford or Kings Cross, and I strode out into the internetless night once more.

In summary: out of one attempt, Vodafone fail so their success rate is 0%.

Give me my internet - part 1

-In which Orange fails-

Ever since I moved out of my cosy West Hampstead pad to my derelict squat in Wembley, I've had internet connection problems.

Sure I have my mighty BlackBerry, but its not so good for compiling information, editing html blogposts and watching the more specialist videos on RedTube. Occasionally I've used my attractive young ladyfriend's wifi, but this is a source of stress in our relationship, so I won't be doing that again.

Of course internet cafe's are great, but Borders has closed and the nearest on according to google maps is always closed when I get there. There's a nice one in West Hampstead, at Brioch and the other day I spent some quality time at the Camera Cafe in Bloomsbury, but these are long train rides away.

So I've been endevouring to get my own interney connection.

As I have my 'Berry with them, I tried Orange first. Regular reader of my blog will know my attractive young ladyfriend had problems getting an iPhone from there the other day. But I am not she so I thought I'd try my luck at the same Harrow branch.

You know that thing about how early adopters pay through the nose for new technology and if you wait around you can get things at a fraction of the price, the £89.99 Gameboy now just a few pence on ebay, Xboxes for £279.99 when launched and now £30 on ebay. Well, I just want to get online as quickly as possible, money isn't really an issue, cos once I'm online my opportunities to make more money increase dramatically. I just want to get online as quickly as possible, and as stresslessly as possible to. Can't stand faff, me.

I was served by a gentleman, not the lady who served and knocked back my ladyfriend.

But to no avail, I too was knocked back.

Despite already having a contract with Orange I was unable to prove myself worthy of one of their mobile broadband dongles. The ID that I regularly carry around was inadequate.

In summary, out of three attempts with Orange, only one success has been achieved (that being my BlackBerry). So their success rate with me and my ladyfriend is a rather poor 33%

Falsifyability and Climate Change Mistakes

At the end of January, the BBC reported

Mr Miliband told the BBC it would be "profoundly irresponsible" to use one "mistake" as an excuse not to act.
He added it did not "undermine decades of climate research" and the "majority of scientists say that".

Of course, I only read about it in the scorn here.

I gotta say though, Ed is right, but the bar should be set higher. Maybe a better level would be to use ten mistakes as an excuse not to act on climate change or maybe more. The thing is, he didn't pin down how many mistakes would be the threshold to stop action. Without some kind of level, you're just acting on faith, and that way leads to religious fanaticism, lets try not to.

So. Let's go for ten mistakes:

• The IPCC AR4 reports mentions the factoid behind Glaciergate thing twice, so it counts as two mistakes
• Amazongate is a third mistake, but leading on from it we discover that non-peer reviewed papers from the WWF were used sixteen times in the IPCC report and by their own rules they were supposed to only use peer reviewed sources

That's eighteen mistakes in just two controversies, well beyond my proposed threshold of ten mistakes that we could use as an excuse not to act on climate change.

Before I go on, I need to defend -gates. Some quarters of the blogosphere that I read are beginning to tire of any kind of scandal or controversy having the -gate suffix. I did briefly agree, its a snowclone, but then had second thoughts. In the internet age, events and news stories need one word names, it helps with google searching, its a tag. Its an evolution of language, and a subtle and functional one too.

Digression over.

Maybe ten climate change inaction excuses was a bit low, and a twenty should be the level.

• The Hockey Stick graph from the front page of AR4 has been disproved, so that's mistake nineteen
• NASA changing its entire temp dataset counts as one mistake ( or maybe a thousand if you include each datum changed
• The Stern report who's tables and data is being changed and modified years after it was originally published that's has got to count as a mistake too
• The recent discovery that in IPCC AR4 the percentage of the Netherlands below sea level and GDP generated therein was incorrect.
• The Chinese Urban Heat Island controversy
• Africagate
• Droughtgate
• The losses from disasters increasing due to climate change or not
• The Antarctic Boot Cleaning Manual controversy
• The mysterious 1.3 billion agriculture employees factoid
  

That's 28 mistakes. How many mistakes in the science behind climate change do we need?

I give up

This is it. This is the end of my blog. It finishes right here.

Like all the others before me who ended their blogs mid-stride like Anna Raccoon, Idleberry and Charlotte Gore. Not cos I'm out of ideas or cos of abusive comments, just that its too much hassle, too much aggro trying to get online and pull together the quality, groundbreaking blogposts that you my readers deserve and that I know I have inside of me, aching to get out.

Blogposts I have spectacularly failed to write and post over the last few days include:-
1) Blog traffic stat porn with graphs and lists
2) Update on my New Years resolutions with a list of enemies to be crushed mercilessly
3) Write-up and photies of today's trip to Bristol
4) Exhaustive list of errors, bugs and mistakes with Climate Change and IPCC AR4 in response to Ed Miliband's "one mistake" speech, including analysis based on EUReferendum's Tiger Woods rating
5) List of which Kenickie songs I'd play in my "Chris Gilmour Plays The Songs of Kenickie" project
6) My recollection the 1994 Bolton School Bonfire Night, including maps and diagrams.
7) Actually playing London Indiepop EyeSpy
8) Rundown of comments left on my blog about the Academies International scam
9) Lamenting the items on my Amazon Wishlist which are no longer available.
10) Graphing all IQ tests what I've taken over the past few years

That's what you guys are missing. I'm sorry, I know its not your fault, its just the way things have turned out.

I love you and think of you all the time.

Know thyself

Its 4:50am, I've almost an hour til the end of my shift and in the few brief moments between deliveries I find myself looking for an IQ test on google.

Its been eighteen months since I last tried my luck and I think I"m getting duller with old age, so I clicked through to http://www.intelligencetest.com and got myself 136.

There's only twenty or so questions, briefly covering logic, spatial, visual, pattern, numbers and grammar. I think I slipped up on two of them, an anagram I couldn't be bothered with and a number sequence my heid couldn't runs the sums for.

That 136 brings my long term average up to 129, or ignoring the old drunken student score of 78, it brings my average down to 138. Age is dulling ma heid.

Blog Stat Pron - January

Good evening and welcome to my irregular start of the month look at the previous month's blog traffic stats review. According to google analytics, for January, this blog got:-

1,309 Absolute Unique Visitors
2,405 Pageviews

Compared to December's

1,004 Absolute Unique Visitors
1,853 Pageviews

Well, I think thats spectacular, a 30% increase. If I wasn't frantically tightening my belt and trying to spend as little money as possible, I'd be spraying champaign everywhere in celebration, instead you'll have to make do with spittle. The secret is to come up with goods time and time again.

Statcounter reckons I had 2,282 Unique Visitors, and an average of 95 pageloads per day, up around 50% from the sort of figures I was getting last year. On the back of that phenomenal success, for February I'm aiming to beat 100 ppd.

Here are the metrics of of my RSS feeds on various feed readers:

26 subscribers - GoogleReader (up 4 from last month)
4 subscribers - Bloglines (same as last month)
8 followers - Blogger (up 2 from last month)

These are my top referrers for January (not including google wanderers)

1. Facebook - 124 visitors
2. Twitter - 90 visitors
3. UK Bubble - 36 visitors
4. Mark Wadsworth - 26 visitors
5. Baby Honey - 25 visitors
6. EUReferendum - 19 visitors
7. Quick as Rainbows - 6 visitors
8. Newport City - 5 visitors
9. Nick X Spencer - 5 visitors
10. Luciana Berger - 3 visitors

Lets take a brief moment to consider which were the most viewed posts during January.

1. London Indiepop EyeSpy - 243 views
2. What Have I gotten myself into - the TFTA scam - 194 views
3. Origami flapping bird animation - 58 views
4. Pensioners burning books - 49 views
5. Bookcase dreams - 47 views
6. Back to Academies International - 45 views
7. Facebook IQ test gubbins - 39 views
8. Names of the dead in Gaza - 37 views
9. North Vs Pachauri - 33 views
10. Facebook Scramble graphs - 31 views

That's it belatedly for January's stat pron, until next time, take care space cadets.

Top Posts this month #1

Top ten most viewed posts on my blog that I wrote this month

1. London Indiepop Eyespy
2. This Pensioners Burning Books thing
3. Back to Academies International
4. North versus Pachauri
5. Excess Winter Deaths then and now
6. The dramatic return of Glasgow Indie Eyespy
7. Body Scanner Porn the legend continues
8. Pay Cuts Pay Rises
9. Brent Council FOI Fail
10. New Years Resolutions

Frankly I'm surprised I came up with that many posts with over ten hits each, but that London Indiepop one got over 200, by Jove.

Html markup in email blogging

I'm posting this blog post via email from my Blackberry, and I'm wondering what happens if I include html markup.

Like sure, I can attach photies to the email and they're embedded at the start of the post.

But what about bold text? Do I just sling html markup and it works?
<b>is this bold?</b>

What about italics?
<i>Is this in italic?</i>

Or blockquote? Now that would be cool? Can I just put that in by hand?
<blockquote>is this in a blockquote?</blockquote>

Let's post and see...

Scotland's temperature dataset

BBC has a story about how this winter has been the coldest winter in Scotland.
By combining temperatures of January and December it [the Met Office] showed they were the coldest since 1914 - the year data started being logged."

I could have sworn the global warming folk say that temperature records go back to 1880.
So what's it to be? We can only check global warming in Scotland for the last 96 years? Not much of a dataset that.

Media reporting of drugs death

Mark Reckons covered a lecture Professor David Nutt gave the other day and reports this snippet about the reporting of drug deaths in the media:-

1 in 265 deaths from paracetamol were reported by the media
1 in 48 deaths from diazepam
1 in 8 from cocaine
1 in 5 from heroin
for ecstasy the figure was 1 in 1

I'm wondering what the frequency of paracetamol deaths actually is, and where that information came from.