PigBlog

Pigblog is 5 years old today.

Was a swift pint or two, but it seems all the local pubs are closed, presumably having sold tickets for tonight. Bastards.

“*ching* *ching* *ching* *ching* *ching* *ching* *ching* Christmas!”, as sung by everyone’s favourite pervert. There’s someone you don’t want messing with your stocking, though I suspect if you’re old enough to wear them you’ll be safe.

Well, now Christmas is actually nearly here I can finally stop stop being a miserable shite about it.

Just waiting for the end of the day (should be an early finish) then home, beer purchase, pub, curry.

Merry Christmas all.

That well-known purveyor of bullshit Gartner are trying to persuade the music industry to abandon CD and adopt dowloadable formats instead.

Great Idea. DRM and lower quality. Sounds fantastic. Or not.

Looks like SA-CD and DVD-Audio are dead in the water for mainstream.

Is it patronising shit day or something?

So far tonight we’ve endured a very long load of patronising shite about lowering our CO₂ emissions by unplugging our mobile phone chargers (etc) (while large companies and shops carry on pumping heat into the atmosphere regardless), patronising shite about not letting your kids drink bleach, and patronising shite about all the dangers posed by the festive period. All within about an hour. Fuck Off. In the nicest possible way.

Whatever happened to natural selection? This is why we have a nation of idiots.

Evil overlord 16: The removal of crap like this so the stupid can kill themselves and their offspring.

…tree car road.

We’ve managed to avoid the hell on earth that is Christmas shopping so far: Amazon and Play have made a good few quid and packages have been steadily arriving.

Today, however, we had to visit actual real shops.

I am lead to understand that some people shop as a leisure activity.

They are mental.

A couple of hours had me craving the Red Lion.

I’ve upgraded to Wordpress 2.7. It all seems ok and was, as usual, easy.

Ok, they weren’t Country and Western, but describe themselves as Bluegrass/”Country”. We went to see the Clarksville Mountain Band, with the added attraction of excellent Thai food and Staropramen on tap.

A very pleasant afternoon of drunkenness in the ever excellent Bartons Arms.

Damn, just when I give up drinking coffee, someone works out it’s a source of biodiesel. Mind you, you’d have to drink a lot, or scavenge at the back of Starbucks.

Watch out for the black helicopters and Thought Police.

The IWF have in their wisdom decided that the cover of Virgin Killer by The Scorpions is kiddie porn, and then, in their great wisdom of protecting everyone, added the Wikipedia article to it’s block list, which is then used by many ISPs. The upshot of this is that the article is unviewable on some connections, and as a side effect, large amounts of users can no longer edit pages, as all traffic to Wikipedia is now being redirected via a transparent proxy.

Now, I’m all for the eradication of kiddie filth, but this image has, since the 1970s, been freely available in record shops. It has caused some controversy- and an alternative cover exists- but the IWF haven’t censored the many other copies of the picture on the web (including the copy that was available from Amazon before they changed it, and Google’s cache of it), just Wikipedia.

So then.

1) Is the image pornographic?
2) Is it in poor taste?
3) Should people be allowed to view it at all? Should we burn all copies of the 1976 album sleeve featuring it?
4) Should the IWF be able to do this? Should the web be censored?
5) Should the report of one reader of Wikipedia be sufficient to allow the block?
6) Should they have done a better job of it, instead of a half-arsed approach that doesn’t work, and slows access for thousands?
7) Even if the image should be blocked, should the whole article be blocked, as is the case?

Discuss……

Meanwhile, the online retailers are falling over themselves changing the image artwork for the alternate version, the Wikipedia article has gained a lot of views, and a new article has surfaced on Wikipedia that discussed the controversy, features the image, and isn’t blocked….

[edit 9-12-2008]
It’s now been unblocked.