The Un-Funny Truth about Scientology

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Screenshot of the Un-Funny Truth of Scientology

This was originally a guest post at Stupid Evil Bastard, re-posted here following that site’s demise.

If you have a few moments to spare, watch The Un-Funny Truth about Scientology over at YTMND. It’s a presentation showing how people’s lives have been affected by the Church of Scientology and how events have been covered up. If you were ever in doubt about just how cooky these people are, then this should confirm your suspicions. Beware of some disturbing images, however.

A sequel has also been published which details the Church’s reaction to it.

Things

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Thanks for all of the birthday wishes over the past couple of days – I had quite a good birthday but most of my presents aren’t coming until tomorrow. Not entirely sure what I’m getting but I think they will mostly be vouchers for driving lessons.

I’m having a brief experiment with Trackback. A while ago I removed the block of code that allows other weblogs to discover the trackback URL and post to it, in an effort to reduce trackback spam. This turned out to be very successful, making the trackback problem almost non-existent, however since then I’ve been getting almost no trackbacks at all which makes the feature almost useless. So I’ve re-added it, but now I’ll only be opening trackback on a handful of entries (with it off by default). I’ll see if I start getting more pings this way, or if the spam problem becomes intolerable again.

I’m looking at alternatives to trackback, such as getting data from Technorati and displaying a list of blogs that link to that entry, but I’d like to give trackback another chance before I give up on it.

Poorest Brits are healthier than Richest Americans

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This was originally a guest post at Stupid Evil Bastard, re-posted here following that site’s demise.

A study published by the American Medical Association shows that even the poorest Brits are healthier than the richest Americans:

Middle-aged, white Americans are much sicker than their counterparts in England, startling new research shows, despite U.S. health care spending per person that’s more than double what England spends.

A higher rate of Americans tested positive for diabetes and heart disease than the English. Americans also self-reported more diabetes, heart attacks, strokes, lung disease and cancer.

The gap between the countries holds true for educated and uneducated, rich and poor.

The study focused only on non-Hispanic whites and took factors like smoking, drinking and obesity into account – Brits tend to drink more heavily and more Americans are obese. It concluded that Americans tend to have a worse diet (eating more junk food) and took part in less exercise, but also that in Britain the primary health care provision was better, so that ailments were being picked up and treated earlier.

The media on both sides of the Atlantic constantly derides Britain’s state health care system but actually it does work nearly all the time, and studies like this show that.

British racist politician tries to justify his views on TV

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This was originally a guest post at Stupid Evil Bastard, re-posted here following that site’s demise.

Sky News, a 24-hour-news channel partly owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., held an interview with Dr Phill Edwards, the press officer of the British National Party (BNP) – a far-right political party. Though the BNP claims it is not racist, it is essentially opposed to all forms of immigration and several of its members have been taken to court charged with making comments which may incite racial hatred, which is a crime in the UK.

The video of the interview is here – in it, Edwards stands by comments made to a student in January 2005 where he says that young black people have low IQs and are likely to mug you, and that black people generally are not high achievers. Edwards has a PhD and he claims that black people are genetically disadvantaged.

It’s worth a watch.

Eve of Valentines

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Tomorrow is Valentines’ Day, and for once I’m actually looking forward to it. This is the first February 14th where I’ve been in a relationship, and so rather than sulking about the fact I’m still single, I can enjoy the fact that I’m not.

Because we’re both quite busy tomorrow with various things, Hari and I are not doing anything special tomorrow, though we are planning to go somewhere nice on Wednesday instead. Wednesday also has more significance to us since it’ll be 4 months since our first date. It doesn’t feel like 4 months but I suppose time flies when you’re in love.

(Feel free to throw up now if you like.)

We spent the weekend at my parents’ house in York. Saturday was spent shopping, where we bought lots of chocolate, hot chocolate, and meat (over 2.5kg of beef mince between us), and yesterday we went around the Yorkshire Museum.

The user experience of email encryption

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Matt Haughey has written about the poor user experience provided by email encryption. And in doing so he hits the nail on the head:

I’ve often heard prominent computer scientists lament the low uptake of email encryption — that in the age of many gigahertz machines we still send plain text to each other (usually) over non-secure connections. Every couple years, just for the sake of my personal freedom and curiosity, I make an attempt to try and use encryption for a few days. Every time I do this, I am disappointed.

Late last year, I installed GnuPG and Enigmail again to see if the experience would be much better than last time. It certainly has improved, but it’s got a long way to go. A newbie user would struggle to even follow these step-by-step instructions and it involves lost of commands in a command prompt window which really end users should not have to do. Even if you follow these instructions to the book, you will only have GnuPG set up for email – to use it for verifying and encrypting files or the clipboard contents you need to download other programs like WinPT and GPGee as well, and configure them. It’s a lot of work and not a whole lot of benefit, really. It’s a bit different with PGP as the interface is much better, but PGP is now a commercial product.

Someone needs to come up with some kind of security suite for Windows, which integrates with all common email programs (Outlook, Outlook Express, Thunderbird and Eudora) and also Internet Explorer and Firefox, and provides a common user interface for working with GnuPG. There should be wizards for key generation and any complicated tasks and seamless integration with Windows Explorer, too. Is that so much to ask?

Cleaning out my closet

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Pile of old clothes

When I came home 3 weeks ago, it was the first time I’d brought most of my clothes back with me since Easter, during which time I’ve amassed additional garments. Trying to fit all of this in my drawers and wardrobe at home became somewhat of a challenge, so today I had a clear-out of clothes that I no longer wear or that don’t fit. This came to:

  • 7 t-shirts
  • 6 shirts
  • 3 jumpers
  • 5 pairs of trousers
  • 1 coat

These will all be going to a local charity shop sometime soon. There was another pair of trousers that won’t, on the basis that it had that many holes in it that it wasn’t really fit for anyone. That’ll be going to a textile bank for recycling.

I also found some clothes that I hadn’t seen for years which still fitted, including a pair of jeans that are probably 4 or 5 years old that fit almost perfectly. I’m guessing they get relegated to the back of my wardrobe because they were too big for me at the time, or because I was starting to lose favour with jeans in favour of khaki trousers with big pockets.

I’m 30% Gay

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Channel 4’s Gay-O-Meter is something that I’m sure I’ve done before but have seemingly never blogged about, however Dave blogged it a couple of days ago and so I thought I’d do it again. Here’s my result:

Neil is 30% gay!
Loosen up my straight mate! These days women like a man with some softer edges to grab onto.

Which means I’m mostly straight, as I suspected. Still, it’s 10% more than Dave, and only 10% less than someone who was actually gay. I haven’t yet got Hari to take this as she’s sitting an exam at the moment.

Producing exams

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The poster for the musical version of The Producers film

Hari and I are going to see The Producers tonight. I saw it last month but Hari hasn’t yet, however I enjoyed it the first time so I don’t mind seeing it again. Ideally, we would have liked to go tomorrow night, but the last showing of it at our local cinema is tonight. So, we don’t have much option, short of waiting for the DVD.

This is a bit unfortunate because we both have exams tomorrow – mine is at 9:15am and hers in the afternoon. I’m reasonably confident about the exam, as it should be somewhat easier than the last one. It’s about networks and protocols, so I’ve been busy revising things like the TCP/IP reference model and ways of controlling congestion. Thankfully, I covered quite a lot of this stuff 2 years ago, so I knew a lot already.

4 years

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At about 6 minutes past 5pm on the 14th January 2002, I wrote this entry. 4 years, 4821 entries, 6689 comments, 757 trackback pings and a whole shedload of spam later and it’s my fourth blogiversary.

Four years is a, to put it bluntly, a bloody long time, and I’m really pleased that I’ve been able to keep it going this long. So many of my projects in the past have come and go – this is one that I’ve managed to stick with and it makes me proud to think it’s still going strong. I have no intentions of giving up now.

Most of all, I’d like to thank all of you who have commented and trackbacked over the years, especially people like Andy, Kim, Ben, Richy and Ciaran who have been commenting here almost from the beginning. It’s the feedback I get, more than anything, that keeps me going, so keep it up and I should still be here in another 4 years time 🙂 .

The blog has also been with me through some interesting times. Back in January 2002 I was a 17-year-old college student. Since then I’ve had my 18th and 21st birthdays, left home, been to university, got a degree and started another one, met Hari and visited lots of new places, met lots of new people and done many new things. I can’t guarantee that my life will stay interesting but at least if it doesn’t I have a good record of when it was.

And the blog itself has changed – back in 2002, there were no comments, trackbacks or RSS feeds, and I was posting using Blogger to some webspace that only had 100MB of monthly bandwidth. Now I use 100MB in about 6 hours, the site is powered by Movable Type, and I’ve graduated from RSS to Atom for all my feeds. I also started the sideblog in November 2003 which has been doing well too, despite a few quiet periods.
I don’t regret starting this blog one bit – through it, I’ve made many new friends and got a lot of enjoyment.

Here’s to another 4 years! 🙂

Previous anniversary posts: 2003, 2004 and 2005 (when I nearly forgot).

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