Aquarionics

Yeah

Today is the first of January Two thousand and three. For the second year running, my retrospective has been eaten by a crashing computer, which I find ironic. My year though, boils down to this:

Mediarific, 21, Mailbombed, Carrie, Spike, Crash, Burn, Code, Pol, Pink, Move House, Redesign, Write, Live, ADSL, ASCII redesign, Con, Wedding, Employment, PingBack, MLP, Employment, Phones, ESF, Techinicality, CTS,Lemon Jelly, AqGate, Complications, Hiatus, Code, Writing, Bath, Christmas.

Today is Aquarionics' third birthday. On the first of January 2000, at five past midnight, I had just finished uploading the first front page of the new domain, designed to suceed my old website hosted at my ISP. It's been online since then, and been a journal since the end of that month. This is my fourth year of blogging. Very, Very scary. Happy new year, people. And I still can't belive people read this crap...

And, in the grand traditions of yuletide programmes, a retrospective consisiting almost entirely of the bits the editors thought were the best in the last year:

January

(Aquarion) i've just accidentally ordered Buffy Season III.
(lonecat) *laugh*
[...]
(ccooke) explain accidentally?
(Aquarion) Er, I accidentally used my associates account to create a link on my local web page that would order it and give me a comission.
(Aquarion) I then accidentally clicked this link, clicked buy, clicked order, and clicked another three buttons confirming the order
(Aquarion) I'm quite accident prone when I put my mind to it.
(ccooke) Right. That's what I thought

Febuary

Because while you were taking the test, you answered four different types of questions — questions that measured confidence, apprehension, willingness to take risks, and your focus on experience versus appearance — the primary traits that determine your personality. Based on your responses, we determined your personality type, Rock Star.

March

I have several friends who are gay, and some of the favourite tales they tell are of members of the opposite sex who are convinced that the only reason gay people exist is because they haven't met the right [girl|man] yet. Normally the person who decides this sees themselves fulfilling this role. More amusing, however, is when it's a friend, or relative, or parent. Because then they go into a microcarpentry frenzy of matchmaking. They appear to lose the idea that it's like Marmite, or Tuna. I don't *like* Marmite. I would still continue to dislike Marmite if you make it with carrots and call it Vegimite. I don't like Marmite dressed in a golden lid, and I wouldn't like it if it secondary sexual characteristics you could see from space. And, these friends of mine tell me, trying to get God's Gifts to realise they (the friends) don't find them (the Gifts) attractive is only slightly more difficult than, for example, hammering a marshmallow nail into a brick.

May

This post is licenced for dissemination to other news servers by means of the NNTP protocol as defined in RFCs 977 and 2980 provided it is quoted in whole or with minimal modifications as required by the specifications above, the content of this post may - in whole or in part - be reproduced under "fair use" for replys to this article, appling recursivly to enable this article to be quoted in future articles in this thread including, but not limited to, quotations used in the future refering to this topic and the thoughts expressed within it. Permission is also granted to store this article for public retrieval on the condition it remains attributed and unmodifed except as explained above, unless this post contains the header "X-NO-Archive" (case insensitive). The copyright of all original portions of this document remains with the poster as identified above, portions of the entire article may be copyrighted to another party, all trademarks that may be referenced are also acknowleged. Furthermore, all contact data contained in this post (including email addresses) is licenced for use only for correspondance, the 'harvesting' of this address for marketing purposes is strictly prohibbited. Each indervidual charector as an ascii stored bit may be reside in memory belonging to the owner of hardware, in which case the legal responsibility of this article, including deletion if found inflamitory can I stop doing this now or is anyone still reading this far, I mean it started off well, but I can't really go on typing this stuff, can I? eventually it turns into something like the default text for MS Publisher files, lorum ipso decoum est ipso lurmo groucho foo bar baz and indeed frek blah blah every alternate tuesday blur, blah blah blair blair thatcher gosh politics in a thread that could spell danger, it would probably be best if I stopped doing this now before I spend the next several lines going zootle wordle, so I conclude with the facts that portions of this document are invalid where void, and most of it should not be taken as legal in any way unless you really really want to get into all sorts of trouble, but the important thing is that the end of this must have LOTS AND LOTS OF CAPITAL LETTERS ABOUT THE "CONSUMER" HAVING ACCEPTED THIS LICENCE THE MOMENT THEY KNEW THE SOFTWARE EXISTED AND NOBODY HAVING ANY RIGHTS TO EVEN READ THIS LIENCE, CONTENTS VOID WHERE PROHIBITED, MAY CONTAIN TRACES OF NUTS.

June

It was a day. Not a cold, miserable day. Nor a humid, drenched shirts day. No, this was an English bank holiday, sunny but with light breezes, and that means comfort.

July

(July had a new design, the start of the rewrite, and few nice things. There are two articles I would want to quote here, but since they are both too long, I'll just point to them instead. They are:

• D'ya feel the painitude?
• Con Sessions

August

This inherently multi user idea will then gain a toehold in major corporations, Exchange, Outlook and all major e-mail clients will support it (as a place to store contacts), and the next version of KDE PIM will be built around it, The daemon will be written into all major operating systems (including some geek who will make a server that runs on a ZX Spectrum), and soon every person in the world will be connected to NomicNet, the world's online appointments diary. One day, a security flaw will be found in MSNomic (Not the most popular version of the daemon, but the one with the biggest install base after it was bundled with Windows XTC) which will give a cracker write permissions on all Nomic databases and trusted mirrors, the resulting breakdown in the entire worlds appointments will leave the door open for when my army of hyperintellegent robotic trolls come out from under the bridges they have been hiding and trip-trap, trip-trap over the entire world and turn it into my own personal empire. The Aquarionic Empire will last for a hundred thousand years, until a civilisation called The Culture wipe out our entire race over what Iain M. Banks said about them in his books.

September

"Only support what you like", will be the response, which totally misses the point. The point is that we are surrounded by cargo-cult programmers, who will mindlessly implement all new things they can do just so they can say they've supported it, and it's going to mean that their RSS feeds become huge. Not that, I should point out, that cargo cult code is inherently bad, I've no doubt that the "Ooh, shiny new spec, lets play" accounted for part - if not most - of the events of the last week, but it's vital to remember that it's incredibly hard to take features /out/ of a released system.

October

Obviously it's an ironic metaphor for the transubstantiated existence of the post-blog phenomenon and - indeed - the meta-blog in it's self, a cunning statement on the semantic web and it's innate pointlessness in a society of mere opinion and painfully little content with the post-metablog schematics linking into a new literary style of personal 'push button' publishing, sending the traditional model of editorial spiraling into the plasma explosion of a new dawn.

November

Me: So I can't even *buy* a new phone until I renew my contract?
Drone: Exactly.
Me: *shoots drone in head*
Drone: Ow. Please don't do that, Sir
Me: Sorry. *withdraws bullet* When can I get an upgrade, then?
Drone: *talks to HQ*
HQ: Flooble-wordle.
Drone: Your contract runs out in... January 2004.
Me: *blinks*
Drone: Um. There may be a mistake in the system somewhere.
Me: You're telling me? Can you reset it, it was only a 12 month contract
Drone: Not without a copy of the contract.
Me: Don't you have one?
Drone: You have to supply it.
Me: I don't have it.
Drone: The branch that gave you the phone will.
Me: But that's 300 miles away. Do you have the phone number of the Sunderland branch?
Drone: No, but it's in Yellow Pages.
Me: *resists killing drone* *fails* *new drone appears*
Me: Right. I've had enough of this. How do I get out of this contract?
Drone: You can pay your line rental until the end of the contract.
Me: Until January 2004?
Drone: Correct.
Me: Sod that for a simulated wargame.
*dial tone*

ANN-2002-12-15: America Launches Operation Dessert Storm.

Last night, President George W Bush announced his intention to bombard the middle east with the only non-nuclear capable weaponry his country has left.

"To basicize", he announce this morning, "We have securityfied the use of a brand new example of technologicaficationizationology in the form of the world famous Nimbus 6000 Custard Thrower. We are plannifying a new stratification to throw several million gallons of custard, soaked sponge fingers and fruit at the Arabificationally occupied areas. Discussion has not yet decidefied whether sherry will also be added."

Critics of the scheme say it's a trifle extreme

December

So how do we stop the people with a distorted sense of reality from being inspired by this blatant filth, whilst letting those with a functioning reality switch get filthy? I suppose there is some kind of mileage in some sort of system whereby the creators of media entertainment put some kind of recommendation on the box for who should be able to buy or rent this item. If we really wanted to go into pipe-dream mode we could imagine some kind of governing body that assigns these rating things, and were people who sold them could make sure that the more explicit material wasn't rented to anyone who couldn't see it!

Happy new year, and may all your resolutions be kept, and your christmas wishes come true.