Racism (Guest Post)

I don't have enough time apparently to write blog posts these days, so one by Nicola 'HarmoNicks' Hastings instead. I take zero credit for the content or opinions here - I didn't even edit this one

I don't really follow football, but a handful of my friends do, so by proxy I sort of have to tolerate all their talking about it in my presence. One thing that did sort of catch my eye recently was the fact that you can apparently get an eight match ban and a fine for calling a black person "negro", yet when you're charged with deliberately stamping on someone's face that only merits four matches.

Now maybe football boots are a lot softer and less covered in studs than I think they are, but personally I don't really see the consistency in that sort of system. 'Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words (and boots in my face) will never hurt me'?


My dad is English, but my mother is Japanese and I've taken the majority of my appearance from her, meaning I class pretty solidly as "Asian". On top of this, I also have the added bonus of having lived in the UK for basically all of my life, and therefore am totally out of touch with the modern Japanese way of speaking, and every time I go over there to visit relatives or whatever I find myself getting weird looks as people discover I have weird mannerisms and that I'm nowhere near as fluent or normal-sounding as they expected me to be.

Maybe I'm just not particularly bothered by it, or that there's some massive extra issue black people have with racist comments that Asian people don't have, because we didn't have the whole slavery deal, but I don't see why it's viewed by so many people as such a taboo and frightful issue.

I mean come on black people, you're stereotyped as people who are tall, athletic, and have large penises or curvaceous asses, depending on gender. We Asians are stereotyped as people who are small, can't handle alcohol, have small boobs/penises (or both) and eat weird food like dog or nattou (<3). And whilst most of those might be true, I feel that we have just as much right to complain about being tarred with the same brush as you guys. Personally I've always viewed there as being three types of racism: 1) Ignorant racism - people who say dumb shit because they're essentially culturally ignorant. The sort of people who will just assume that I'm Chinese just because I have slanty eyes, or that I can read Chinese, Korean, Thai, Hebrew, Arabic, or whatever other language they deem to be "Asian" on account of it not using the roman alphabet. Fundamentally these people aren't particularly dangerous - they're just stupid. They're just as bad as rich people who assume that anyone who is poor or didn't go to Oxbridge is a filthy moron whose opinion isn't worth the time of day. It's a combination of a loud mouth, insensitivity, and knowledge of the social cultures they're actually talking about.
2) Joking racism - people who say dumb shit because they're trying to be funny. This can be pretty irritating when you're the subject of the joke, especially if it's combined with a shitload of ignorance. Typically I either mind or don't mind depending on how well I know the person. If I don't know them, then it's over the line and isn't on, but at the same time whilst it really annoys me, I don't feel it's outright awful. It's just socially not cool. And if they do know me (i.e. Rosti and Daz ALL THE FUCKING TIME), then it's banter, and it only starts to irritate me when it becomes repetitive and/or tired. Either way though, the person doesn't hold the opinions they're claiming to (or it wouldn't be a joke) and really it's not that different to mocking a woman for being out the kitchen, or being shit at parking. It's near identical to joking that someone is going to steal your shit just because they're a Scouser, yet stuff like that is somehow far less antagonistic. It's repetitive at times, but it's rarely malicious.

3) Racist racism - people who genuinely hold negative feelings and prejudice towards people because of their race. The sort of people who vote for the BNP, believe the Daily Mail, or who hold the idea that they have some magical entitlement to have a job in the UK that other people don't have just because they weren't fortunate enough to be born there. By all means these people exist, and by all means they are vile and their intolerance shouldn't be tolerated. Alternatively this also applies to people using someone's race in a purely derogatory way to insult them.

The thing is, I feel that in the UK at least the vast majority of this sort of thing falls into the first two categories, i.e. it's typically not malicious racism, or not deliberately anyway. It can be stupid, and it can be pretty annoying or offensive, but at the same time it's not a lot worse than other things you can say if you want to be offensive.


I think part of the problem is that racism is viewed as being grossly impolite, and it's in the British nature to take an extremely dim view on anything which isn't polite. Which is fair enough, I just think that sometimes it can lead to pretty massive overreactions, or people tip-toeing around being politically correct when really they don't need to go to the effort. [That said, the Japanese are a notoriously polite race, yet also have a national trait of being horrendously xenophobic]

Ultimately a lot of it comes down to context and intent. If someone casually calls me a 'chink', then if I know them I know they're joking and don't care. If I don't know them I'd typically be somewhat surprised by their ignorance, but generally not particularly arsed. If someone I didn't know used the phrase while having a go at me, then there I get offended, and I feel I have the right to be because of the manner it's being used.

It's extremely comparable in my eyes to swearing. There's a massive difference in the phrases "oh fuck...", "that fucking hurt!" and "you fucking idiot!" in the way that the f-word is used, and in how much offence people are likely to associate with it.

Fundamentally I feel that racist terms should only bring the amount of offence that was intended in their usage. If someone is joking or being ignorant, then ignore them and move on, because there's really not much point in getting all irate about it. If they're intending to be offensive or are genuinely racist, then fair enough, that isn't on (though I don't see much difference if someone calls me "a fucking jap" to "a fucking bitch/slut" other than the fact they typically know they're crossing a socially forbidden line in the first instance).

The real way that racism is going to slowly disappear and stop being a problem is if people stop making it a problem. There are swearwords that are no longer particularly offensive when several years ago they were almost unheard of, purely because the stigma has worn off as their usage has become more common. If racism becomes a source of banter and humour then it ceases to be a source of hatred or insult. The fact that nobody is allowed to really say that sort of thing just makes it all the more shocking and stinging when people do.

It can often be quite difficult to distinguish the line between jokes and insults, and racists shouldn't be allowed to use the premise of humour to openly promote bigoted opinion, but fundamentally we should be frowing upon and eradicating the sentiments themselves, and not the language that people attach to them. Because if being called a "negro" is genuinely twice as bad as being kicked in the face, then we should be doing all we can to make it so that it's not.

Internet Streaming

There are quite a few web streams I follow lately, mostly StarCraft related, and I was always fairly curious to know how much money the guys behind these things actually make from streaming. I was particularly interested in the SC2 players because their revenue from streaming is typically their main income besides what they earn through tournaments.

Most of my questions were answered earlier this week when one of the guys from the popular streaming site TwitchTV made a post on SCreddit detailing how their advertising system works. There's a whole ton of crap in there, but the key piece of info I took was that the average rate per ad for the broadcaster is around $5 per ad per 1000 effective viewers (that post says this is their most popular rate).

From this I did a few calculations. A SC2 player streaming their ladder games will probably play three or four games every hour. If they display two ads at the end of each game then this works out to around six ads an hour on the stream.

Typically the more popular streams will have anything from 4000 to 8000 viewers, sometimes more. Taking a base rate of around 5000 viewers, and assuming that only 60% of those see ads, because 40% are living in weird regions or using adblock or something, that gives us 3000 effective viewers for six ads an hour. With the $5 rate this works out to a pretty impressive $90 an hour.

Say players stream for five hours a day, and that they do this five days a week (most of the popular ones do it more like seven days a week, but then there's days off for tournaments and the like), this works out to roughly $120,000 a year, just from streaming ladder games that they'd be doing anyway.

My first thought to this was along the lines of "holy shit that's loads" and my first reaction was that I'd screwed up the calculation somewhere. As far as I can tell the calculation is correct, but I figured maybe some of the assumptions were wrong. I discussed this with a few people, and Emtee provided me with a couple of links, both related to the popular streamer, Destiny.

The first one was a post by him from May last year discussing his income from streaming on TeamLiquid. It shows his earnings from March 2011 being $4000, and this with a whole week where the revenue reporting bugged and didn't give him anything.

This was back in March, when the scene was a fair bit smaller and there weren't quite as many stream viewers around (myself included, because I didn't own SC2 at this point0). Looking a bit more recently, I also found this screenshot from his stream:

The first part of that graph clearly shows him earning around $300 a day on average, which is a $90,000 annual income if he streams 300 days a year. Definitely not bad for just streaming himself practising and dicking around in ladder games for several hours a day. And not particularly far off from what I'd calculated - you can make absolutely tons of money from a decent TwitchTV channel.


As well as TwitchTV, the revenues from YouTube don't seem to be that bad either. I recently got the ability to monetise the videos on my YouTube account, and I did so for the lulz, and it turns out that I actually make non-zero amounts of money through the handful of videos I monetised.

In total my videos get around 1,500 views a month (I have no idea why - most of them are either really niche or shite or both) and that makes me around £1 every month. A tiny amount, sure, but for the amount of views I'm getting it's not particularly terrible. Especially given that I already had the videos before when I wasn't making small amounts of cash from them.

Recently I started watching the Shadow of Israphel minecraft series on the Yogscast's BlueXephos YouTube channel. Not only do these guys have absolutely shittons of videos, but a huge number of them have between one and two million views each, with some having over five million. If I'm getting £1 for every 1500 views, then if things scale these guys are getting £1000 for every video they make, possibly more. I reckon the 81 videos in the Shadow of Israphel series alone have clocked up over £100,000, which is an astonishing amount for something that's recorded entirely within the minecraft game.


The thing with most of these things is that they're not just making large amounts of money, but that they require almost nothing to make besides time and creativity. If you've got a computer enough to stream from and a bit of talent, you can make some considerable money from it if you end up being successful. The latter part being a somewhat important factor, because there are no doubt large numbers of people trying to make this sort of thing and not really getting anywhere in terms of views, but the money is definitely there to be had.

If anyone has a cat that they're cool to have do stupid shit on camera, then I have a monetised YouTube account. I'll totally split the money with you.

The Holiday Period

I was back home last week for the festive period. It was nice to see family and be home for a little bit, and it's also nice to be back in Cambridge now. I didn't so much enjoy the travelling though.

What I learnt on my way back up North was that the buses in Cambridge are absolutely shite. I've heard rumour and anecdotes from friends about how shit they are but I've never really used them much because I tend to walk/cycle everywhere. I've also never used them for something where it was crucial I arrived at a certain place at a certain time.

I took the bus to the train station because I live on the complete opposite side of the city, and was taking a pretty large 10kg holdall home with some clothes and a laptop and some other crap in it, and wasn't particularly keen trying to cycle with it. I arrived at the bus stop about five minutes early for a bus that should have gotten me to the station with around half an hour to spare. I figure this is reasonable, given the buses run every twenty minutes and the journey itself is only meant to take around 15-20 minutes as well. I thought I was playing it safe. Apparently not, because not only did I have to wait 23 minutes for the next bus to arrive, but it didn't even go the whole way along the route and I had to change in the city centre and wait for a different bus.

So this meant I was late at the station. I missed the train I was intending to get, and more importantly I missed the off-peak time for travelling through London, meaning I either couldn't go through London or I had to pay an extra £100 for the peak ticket. So yeah, the day sort of backed up my existing preconception that buses are completely balls.

Christmas was standard - I got the handful of fairly inexpensive things I'd asked for and a fair bit of dosh, ate lots of food, and most of my extended family had too much wine and there were a lot of dumb arguments around the table. I also won at Pictionary.

And that was Christmas. I got the train home with a now even heavier bag, and felt ill almost the whole way back. Plus the train from Wigan to London was absolutely rammed and I was really lucky to manage to find a seat.


New Year's was pretty good fun, with me and my housemates going out to the pub for a bit, before proceeding to go to a house party where only Nick was really that friendly with the people who lived there, and we didn't really know most of the people there. But it was fun anyway. And I kicked off the new year having to go for a pee in our back garden because the house only has one toilet, which was being hugged fairly hard by a housemate and I figured that moving him was probably not a wise idea.

Typically for the first blog post of the year I make some sort of attempt at posting New Year's Resolutions, but I can't really be bothered with that this year. They're a fairly pointless thing and nobody actually remembers their resolutions past maybe the second week in January. They are essentially a list of things people would like to do but have already sort of resigned themselves to the fact that they're probably not going to do them.

I had to look at the blog post for last year to find out what my resolutions were, and it turns out I actually managed to accomplish a fair number of them, although completely without the recollection that I'd resolved to do them a year ago.
(EDIT: Turns out when I read it properly I didn't make any last year either. Though I did do a decent job of managing to accomplish crap I intended to do in 2010. Only took me two years to get around to it.)

Whilst I can't be bothered with annual resolutions, I do have a few things that I really want to get done before I leave for training camp (10th Jan), namely getting job applications sorted, completing Batman: Arkham Asylum (which is an awesome game), and finishing all the series that I'm currently halfway through watching and haven't gotten around to wrapping up yet. Those being in rough descending order of importance, and also in rough descending order of how likely they actually are to happen.


As much as I've slowed down on the blogging front, I still managed to get 77 written last year, which still averages above one a week (though if I'd not clocked up a load inter-railing that probably wouldn't be the case). I also recently breezed through my 200th blog post without noticing, so I guess that's something of a milestone too.

Anyway, to people reading this I hope you all have a good 2012 and all the best et cetera.

Happy Christmas (Term Is Over)

It's been frickin ages since I've really had the time to write a blog post, mostly because of the amount of time I was having to spend doing my degree and coxing and stuff (also Fairbairns Dinner was a stupid amount of admin). Term finished last week, and it's been awesome to have a week of mostly lazing around and sorting out all the stuff I've been putting off until term was finished. Finally finished. After 11 weeks of Michaelmas term.

The first objective was getting a new phone, because I needed a new phone. And not "needed" in the sense of someone who finds themselves two generations behind on iPhones, where really they just mean "want" or "feel socially pressured into having". My current phone was a Sony Ericsson W910i, a phone released all the way back in 2007 when phone internet was still a waste of time and it could get away with its main selling point being that it works pretty well as an mp3 player.

I was actually OK with my phone being old, and I would have been perfectly happy with my old non-smartphone thing. The main issue wasn't so much the age as the fact it had sort of stopped working particularly well just as a phone in general. It would crash and turn itself off frequently, typically in the middle of sending texts, so that most messages would enter a quantum state from my point of view of the potential to be both sent and not sent until I received whatever reply I was expecting.

So I hunted around a bit for a new phone, and settled on an Orange San Francisco II, otherwise known as a ZTE Crescent, otherwise known as the successor to the ZTE Blade, a fairly low-budget Chinese smartphone largely popular with Android modding enthusiasts because of how cheap and easy to crack it is.

After a few days of playing around with it, I'm fairly happy with it as a phone. It looks reasonably nice and like most other smartphones (that is to say it's rectangular, thin, with one side entirely taken up by a screen and a couple of small buttons). It functions fairly well, and to be honest I'm not really sure what extra benefit I'd be getting with a new Samsung or HTC given I'd be paying £30 a month instead of £15 for the same contract.

So far I've only encountered two issues with it - the first is that the model is less than a month old, meaning that all the standard accessories like screen protectors and cases don't exist for it yet. It also means it doesn't have support for Android modding yet, meaning I can't get rid of all the Orange app crap from it.

The other was actually Orange's fault, which is that all outgoing calls and 3G data were barred. This actually proved a fair bit of faff to undo because I needed to ring up Orange's customer service to fix it.

The house doesn't have a landline, Peter is on Pay-as-you-Go still, so wasn't really keen on me using his phone to ring up, and my phone was barred from making calls, meaning I had to use Nick's phone.

This would be fine, were it not for the fact that Nick's phone has a glitch whereby the screen turns off during a call and there's no way to turn it back on again until the call ends, meaning that when it says "If blah blah, press 1" I have no way of actually pressing 1 because the keypad is on the non-functional screen. We initially solved this problem by using his hands-free kit to progress through the menus until we got to an actual human being, at which point I discovered that the microphone on his hands-free kit is broken and he'd forgotten to tell me.

So attempt three, getting through to an actual person and un-plugging the hands-free kit, and I got stuff sorted. The guy on the other end of the phone was actually really good - he was extremely polite, spoke clear English, knew what he was doing and was good at telling me what he was doing and what the problem was, and it took all of three or four minutes to get everything fixed and have a functioning phone again. If it wasn't for the horrific Christmas hold music then it'd probably be the best customer service experience I've ever had.

Turns out the issue was that my phone was still marked as being in transit. I'd had it delivered and collected it from the Orange store in Cambridge, and apparently somewhere in there they hadn't marked it as received. Once I confirmed to the customer service guy that I had received the phone (which seemed like a totally stupid question given I'd already stated that I'd collected it from the store, and who the fuck rings up to complain about their phone being barred from making calls if they haven't even gotten it yet?) he was able to unlock it and everything was fine.


Aside from a new phone, the other stuff I've been putting off until term had finished was applying for jobs. This also meant updating my CV, which I hadn't even looked at since halfway through my 2nd year of Uni, and man it sucked balls. Initially I spent a bit of time re-working it, before I picked up a booklet from the Careers Service on how to make a CV that isn't totally shit and figured it would be best if I just started again from scratch. Plus it turns out that MS Word is a pain in the ass when it comes to formatting things easily into columns and sections and MS Publisher is way easier.

So CV mostly written now, I just have the somewhat scary process of applying to jobs and such. I've mostly figured out now what sort of job I actually want to do and which companies I want to work for, which is good in that it gives me some direction, and bad in that I now have a small number of companies that can reject me and leave me totally fucked and out of ideas. I guess worst case scenario I can just cop out of the real world and dick around doing a PhD and being a student for a few more years?


The combination of it now being REALLY FUCKING COLD in Cambridge and also myself and my housemates being in the house all day means we've experimented with the wood-burning fireplace in our living room. We had a pallet that myself and Peter had nabbed from a skip outside the primary school next to our house and smashed up for wood, but that stuff burns really fast and is only really useful for kindling, so I went out with Peter to go get some proper wood from somewhere.

Being students and cheapskates we figured that instead of buying wood from a store (it's actually really expensive for the duration it lasts) we'd go get our wood from nature instead, so we cycled out to a small bit of woodland on the edge of Histon armed with rucksacks and a saw.

Pretty much as soon as we got there the weather unleashed hell, and the wind and rain was absolutely ridiculous. We were actually somewhat grateful for the fact it was raining sideways, because large trees in winter actually provide better shelter from the side than they do from above. Despite this, we still got pretty drenched.

"We've gone on holiday by mistake!"
We also left late afternoon, and it got dark pretty quickly, meaning we ended up having to do most our foraging under torchlight, but we did come across a huge dead old tree that had fallen over and managed to hack two full rucksack's worth of decent firewood from it, so all in all it was a fairly successful expedition. We'll just pick a somewhat more sensible point in time when we go back for more.


And finally term being done means it'll be Christmas in a couple of weeks and I'll be going back home for a bit. I don't really plan on going home for too long because I hate my family all my stuff is in Cambridge, and going home for a while either means not having it for a while, or having to cart it the whole way across the country on the train, and I'm not really keen to do either.

I'm looking forward to being back home for a week or so for Christmas, where adulthood and slightly less awesome presents means I am actually mostly looking forward to the food and the drinking and the inevitable family rows that take place when everyone has had a bit too much wine (my Nan ended up in tears last year). And the Liverpool match on Boxing Day is at home, meaning there's the possibility of scabbing a ticket off one of the guys my Dad goes to the match with. So all good.

On Occupy Wall Street

The Occupy Wall Street movement has been fairly big on the internet for a while now, especially on Reddit, and I've been meaning to write this for ages because I've slowly been getting more and more annoyed by a lot of the crap coming out of it, and a lot of the really bullshit anti-government and anti-capitalist crap that various people spew over Facebook and various other parts of the internet that I spend meaningful amounts of time on.

Before I commence ranting I'd sort of like to be clear on something:

I am white and middle-class, I went to a fairly esteemed private high school (on a scholarship, but an academic one rather than an income-assessed one), and from that I've gone into a degree in Cambridge that will quite potentially put me into some sort of consultancy or financial managements position on a salary that's probably more than I'm worth. My family isn't particularly rich, but both of my parents are employed, and we have a nice house, two cars and generally seem to be fairly sound financially (at least as far as I know). I'm not raised as one of the 1%, but I'm definitely not in the bottom ranks of the 99% either. I'm not claiming to speak from a position any different to what I am.

Having said that I am generally pretty left-wing and liberal when it comes to politics. I voted for Labour in the last elections and dislike the Tories pretty strongly. I hate FOX News and The Daily Mail. I support socialism, and I agree with a large amount of what some people in the Occupy Wall St (or OWS as I shall refer to it from now on because I can't be arsed typing it out every time) are saying. I believe America should have socialist healthcare, that it should put measures in place to tax the rich and redistribute the wealth to the large number of citizens it has that live below the poverty line. I think that certain American corporations (and corporations in other countries for that matter) are far too powerful and that laws need to be put in place to restrict what they can get away with. I think that the cost of higher education in the USA is totally ridiculous and should be brought down. There's plenty I agree with - quite strongly in fact.

The thing is, whilst some of the people at OWS are there for sensible reasons, and are making fairly valid statements about how the US could potentially be improved, there also seem to be plenty of people backing the movement or participating in the protests who are, in my opinion, complete idiots who really have no idea what the hell they're claiming to be angry about.

For example, banks get a lot of hate these days, when really they shouldn't. I remember supporters of Bitcoin claiming how Bitcoin would eliminate the need for banks, and I considered this to be a totally stupid "advantage". If you need to buy a house, then you need a bank, because you're sure as hell not going to want to or be able to borrow that kind of money from anyone else. Banks play an absolutely key role in our society.

The issue with the current economic situation is not the financial institutions themselves, but the poor government regulation of them. If these institutions need to take risks to make money, and the collapse of these institutions has widespread ramifications, then it is up to the government to limit the amount of risk they can take - there's nobody else with the capability to do this.

Sure, companies could be responsible, and could not stretch the boundaries of ethics or risk management to try and make money, but most of these companies sit in a competitive environment where if they're not taking advantage of lax regulation then some of their competitors are going to anyway and they'll get driven out of business. The problem is not companies doing bad things; it's governments not putting the restrictions in place to stop companies doing bad things, because it only takes a couple to overstep their mark and suddenly everything is in the shit.


Another thing I find gets an irritatingly bad press are bailouts of companies and financial institutions. I read a quote by Richard Dawkins once along the lines of "Evolution is universally accepted by people who understand it and universally rejected by those who don't", and I feel that this applies perfectly well to government bail-outs and stimulus packages. To take another quote, from Liverpool FC owner John Henry:

There seems to be this really daft suggestion that bail-outs only exist so that the heads of failing companies can keep their pockets lined and keep their bonuses at the end of the year.

It's not. The whole point of bail-outs is to try and stop or at least slow the free-fall of the economy and keep things from complete collapse. When the US government agrees to bail-out General Motors, it's because the collapse of GM will just maintain the snowballing landslide of companies going out of business. If GM collapses, then that's 200,000 people instantly unemployed, and any company that acts as a supplier to General Motors (probably a lot of companies) is almost certainly going to go bankrupt as well, because they'll rely on GM for a large portion of their revenue. The same goes for the UK government bailing out RBS - Northern Rock caused enough carnage when it went under, imagine what would happen if RBS (and NatWest, because they own that too) disappeared? These things have almost nothing to do with the companies themselves, and certainly don't have much to do with their CEOs, but are about keeping jobs and hundreds if not thousands of other businesses afloat.

Plus these bail-outs aren't completely lost money. Most of them are loans that are expected to be paid back at some point, or money given in return for a stake in the company that can later be sold off when it (presumably) becomes profitable enough to sell again. It's not like governments just throw money out the window on these sorts of things - it's just that nobody else can afford to do it, and it's seen as a responsibility of the government to look after its citizens and do stuff like this anyway.


Somewhat similarly to the student protests, the sorts of people that I find really depressing on these sorts of things are the people who don't really know much about what they're really protesting and are largely just bandwagon jumpers or people who enjoy being somewhat rebellious.

There are people who are protesting genuine socio-political issues in America. People protesting issues that genuinely cause the social divide, make living standards difficult for the poor, and which could be easily rectified (and in many cases already are rectified in plenty of other countries). Except these people are somewhat drowned out in a sea of idiots complaining that some people are too rich or that banks are evil or that the government doesn't know what it's doing or some other herp derp bullshit that doesn't really say much other than "some people have more money than I do and I don't like that".

Suddenly there's this social bandwagon of ripping on capitalism, or the media speculating that this crisis is the 'fall of capitalism', and even as a fairly socialist-leaning person I think that's total bullshit. The notion that OWS is some sort of protest against capitalism is the main reason I think it's a really stupid thing, and despite some people holding valid views at the protest it's not helped by the fact that some people at OWS rallies seem to genuinely think that's what it's all about.

Fundamentally people going to these sorts of things and protesting against capitalism are almost universally ignorant, hypocritical, or both. The capitalist system is the system that has provided such a high standard of living in the West over the last half a century, and the number of people who seem to be suddenly condemning it and cursing it because it's failed to provide the same standard of living to everybody in the last few years is just stupidly staggering.

A lot of this hate on banks, stock traders and capitalism is equivalent to hating on a man who has given you £100 every month for your entire life, just because they've refused to give you this any more. It's totally ungrateful and unappreciative of what market traders and capitalism has actually provided the western world with.

I do think it's bad that some people have extortionate amounts of money whilst other people struggle to just buy food and shelter, but at the same time I think it's extremely close-minded for westerns to bitch at the current situation given that the overwhelming majority of "the 99%" are still a shitload better off than most people living outside of the bubble of the first world. These people are claiming that they are being unfairly exploited by a group of people in their country, yet despite this they are still maintaining a standard of living far higher than people in the rest of the world, largely because of the exploitation of foreign countries by the US and the EU. The 99% still stand on wealth gathered by screwing over large portions of the rest of the world.

These sorts of complaints aren't what OWS is meant to be about, but it's what a large number of spoiled, ungrateful and stupid individuals seem to be trying to make it about. Heck, even some people who are somewhat closer to the mark than others are still creating lists of demands that are completely over the top and totally infeasible:

The original OWS is about egalitarianism, about how the best education, healthcare and company contacts are only available to the extremely wealthy, and regardless of talent or hard work it's almost impossible for the lower classes to break into that 1%. They're not about banks making lots of profit, or the core principles of capitalism and excessive consumerism being evil for society, or Facebook violating your privacy, or about how it sucks that people in Wall St still have jobs when your daddy just got laid off and you can no longer afford to have an iPhone 4S on release day. And I really hate that there seem to be enough idiots out there who are doing a decent job of turning it into all of the above.

Rage Against The Machine (or Laptop)

So besides MET taking up most of my day, I've also sort of been goaded into coxing again by the possibility of coxing Fairbairns M1 and the fact that I actually can for most likely the last time ever. It also allows me to feebly attempt to justify a place on the training camp to Banyoles, but that's a different issue.

The off-set of this is that I basically have no time for anything properly any more. I wake up at 6am, go rowing, go to lectures until 5pm, and then I get back absolutely knackered and have a few hours to eat, shower and unwind and then I sort of need to be going to bed because I have to be up at 6am the next morning.

I'm totally cool with this existence. It's pretty good fun to be back within the rowing squad, the morning outings are generally OK, MET typically doesn't give any work outside of lecture hours, and I just spend my evenings mindlessly shooting the crap out of people on Call of Duty instead of playing SC2. Or I was cool with it, until my laptop got virused to shit.

I have a somewhat symbiotic relationship with my laptop. I provide it with a loving, caring home and electricity, and it provides me with internet, television and gaming. If my laptop feels bad, I feel bad. And holy shit was my laptop feeling awful.

I seemingly picked up some badass trojan from an image hosting site. And I'm not using "image hosting site" as some sort of euphemism for a porn site, I literally mean a site like photobucket or imgur except apparently far more dodgy and virus-riddled. I had one of the typical adware "your Computer is volnurable to Viruses!![sic]" messages in the bottom right and a fake scan ran, and I instantly closed Firefox and disabled the wifi. Then I got rid of it. Or so I thought.

As it turned out, this wasn't just the standard sort of adware crap that typically only takes me about 10 minutes to manually remove. This was a proper trojan, and the moment I reconnected to the internet it did a whole fuckload more than the adware program. Something was constantly trying to write stuff into the registry, ping.exe would constantly run in the background, taking up a shitload of CPU and memory, and would restart whenever I killed it. Firefox was behaving weirdly. Things were not cool.

So I defaulted to my plan B. Start in safe mode, keep the wireless permanently off, and kill this shit with fire.

Many aggressive virus scans and combing through startup lists later, I was finally in a position where I was fairly confident the virus crap was gone. I'd had networking disabled the whole time, so I rebooted and restarted it. Except it didn't restart. Apparently the no-nonsense kill it with fire policy had caused pretty serious damage to the Windows services that my computer actually needs to connect to the internet (Winsock, TCP/IP etc for people who actually know this shit) and absolutely no amount of effort on the command line or reinstalling of stuff seemed to fix it. Bollocks.

At this point I managed to have what was probably the shittest day I've had in a long time, which included a 6am start, an outing, lectures from 9am-5pm, some bullshit Analysys Mason competition that was opt-out and I'd not read the email properly and therefore hadn't opted out from and which went on until 9pm, giving me about an hour to get home, cook and eat dinner, shower and then get 8 hours of sleep. Except the veg in the dinner I cooked was off and vinegary, and I managed to knock half of it off my desk and onto my floor/keyboard anyway.

By now I was in a mood probably most accurately described as "completely fucking fed up with this bullshit" and had two options that seemed viable. The first was a repair install of XP, the second was that I just cut my losses, format the drive and then reinstall all my shit functional and virus-free. The preference was obviously for the former because I couldn't be bothered installing everything, so it's what I tried first.

First problem I encountered is that my Windows CD is XP SP2, and my laptop now runs XP SP3, meaning the disc doesn't do shit because I apparently now have a newer version of Windows. So first task was to slipstream an SP3 disk from my SP2 disk (props to this guide which worked fantastically). Done.

Second problem is that when booting from the CD it wouldn't find my hard drive. At all. Some faffing in the BIOS led me to discover that I apparently had my drive set to a SATA type that XP doesn't natively support. After changing that, it found my hard drive and started the repair install. Awesome.

So the repair install ran some stuff for a bit and then said it needed to reboot before resuming the install. It did, apparently working fine and booting like my computer usually does, until it got to the point at which XP should start and instead it gave me a BSOD about my graphics driver. I tried booting into safe mode, and apparently I couldn't because XP was still being installed.

Some Google-fu led me to a solution involving deleting files from the recovery console, which worked, and it successfully started the second half of the install. A this point it was fairly late at night and I had an outing the next morning, so I figured I'd just go to bed and let it run overnight. Sure, it said it only had 39 minutes remaining, but whatever.

I woke up the next morning with it on 37 minutes remaining and seemingly crashed at some point through the install. FFFUUUUUUU. Would it be OK if I just turned it off? Did I actually have a choice? The answer to the latter question was no, but the answer to the former question was apparently yes, and it ran the install fine a second time with no issues. And after having to reinstall a ton of windows updates and many nights of screwing around and making very little progress I finally had a working computer again, and one which was seemingly free of viruses too.

The real stupid irony of all this shit is that only a week earlier I'd made the claim that I thought NoScript was a waste of time, because constantly having to allow stuff and faff with settings was way more trouble than the hour I'd maybe have to spend removing the virus I'd get every one or two years from not using it. TEMPTING FATE, MUCH?
Though I still don't really want NoScript, so I guess the real lesson from this whole escapade is that I'm a fucking idiot who won't learn his lesson.

On the bright side, last week was made somewhat tolerable by the fact that my course was awesome. We were doing an assembly robot lab that was good fun, and was something I was actually pretty awesome at. The entire day spent tinkering around successfully in the lab was certainly a shitload more enjoyable than the entire evenings spent tinkering around unsuccessfully with my laptop at least.

Bish Bash Bosch

Somewhat terrible pun for the blog title, but I like terrible puns (and despite Sadia posting it on Facebook first, it was my brainchild), so there you go.

The placement at Bosch was somewhat good. The project itself went fairly smoothly, although it's fairly difficult with these sorts of things to tread the line between not really doing enough work, and overcomplicating things so much that it's impossible to get anywhere because you keep spending so much time on details. There's always more that you [i]could[/i] do, but there's only so much time you're actually there.

One thing that I did really learn from the placement is that whilst I enjoy doing that sort of work, but I don't enjoy that sort of lifestyle. If I ever want to go into some sort of manufacturing improvement consultancy stuff it'll ideally have to be one where I'm either largely stationed in one place, or I'm just employed by a single company at a single factory. There are perks to living in hotels, such as having full English breakfasts cooked for you every morning, and having a shower that isn't completely shit (like the one in my student house is), but after a couple of days they quickly stop being novel and I find that I'm just really not that much of a fan of spending every evening eating out in a pub and then having a hotel room to go back to. It's a fairly soulless existence and not one I'm particularly keen on.

It also doesn't help that almost all of UK manufacturing is based in towns that are completely shite. Other than a particularly epic sports centre (which is the only reason I'd been there before), there's basically nothing in Stowmarket. It doesn't seem to be much better for many of the other places we've visited either. I guess working for Newton or Stroud or a similar company you get jetted off to various places around Europe, but I'd expect that shithole manufacturing towns in Germany are still fundamentally the same as the shithole manufacturing towns in the UK.

So yeah, the project itself was interesting and good fun overall, but I vastly prefer living at home over living in a hotel.

Because I don't have a humorous image for this week, here is a compilation video of babies tasting lemons:

A fair amount of stuff seems to be happening now to start mapping my summer out too. Aside from the somewhat scary prospect of having to find myself a job (though I'm at least starting to get a decent idea of the sort of companies I want to work for), there's the MET overseas research project and a few other things.

The MET overseas research project is basically a two-week study tour of various factories in some far, foreign land. The current plan for the tour is for it to be a week in South Korea followed by a week in Japan, which I'm looking forward to so much because they're basically the top two countries I most want to visit in the world, and I expect it'll be unbelievably cool.

Pretty much all of the expenses are paid for by sponsorship fund-raising, and quite awesomely we don't have to fly back with the group at the end of the study tour, but can stay out in Japan, and our eventual flights back will only cost us the difference between the flights we get and the flights we'd have otherwise gotten if we'd flown back with everyone else.

The tour leaves the Sunday or Monday right after graduation, and my plan was that after the two weeks of the tour I'd stay on for another two weeks in Japan as a holiday. This has sort of been thrown into disarray by Paul 'rubbish tekkers' Erdunast announcing that the inaugural UK Tetris Championships is going to be held in London on the 21st July. Given I mostly don't play that much any more I'm not really sure whether I want to sacrifice a second week in Japan to go, but at the moment I probably will because the format of the tournament means I have a pretty good chance of getting at least to the final assuming I put in a little bit of practice beforehand and no big names decide to fly over from the USA or Japan.n Plus three weeks in South-East Asia should be plenty anyway.

Then there's also potentially Eindhoven 2012 to fit in somewhere, and whenever my job starts. It's only November and I'm already massively looking forward to July.