I am not the Robot Tourist

Since his earliest days, humanity has been entranced by movement. From tribal dances to the subtle signs of emotion given by the actors on the daily soap operas. And now we can watch all these things on our phones. However, back in the day, while your computer had advanced to a whole 256 colours and might have been able to show you video at a few frames per second, there really wasn’t a good way of getting that video to your computer. Unless you were AOL, CD-ROMs were still expensive and Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) technology was only a twinkle in some engineer’s eye.

The future finally arrived when video compression techniques and the grainy mobile phone camera met the popularisation of home broadband internet connections. However, in those primitive days before video on demand we had to get our kicks in a way that was just a bit more low-fi.

You probably need a connection speed of at least about 1 Mb/s to watch medium quality videos without having to wait too long for it to load. Even with dialup’s best, a 56 kb/s modem (or 0.056 Mb/s), Youtube is a hardly worth your time. So back when modems were approaching a blistering 19.2 kpbs someone thought it would be a good idea to extend Compuserve’s Graphic Interchange Format (GIF) so that it could be used to show animated images within 10 minutes of opening the page.

Times were good, for a while. We had little sparkly images that said ‘New’ beside the new links on the Yahoo directory and then along came the ‘Hampsterdance’. This was awesome. Music, and dancing hamsters, in your web browser. The world should have been satisfied, but it wasn’t. Clones appeared everywhere and despite the great things that could be done with an animated GIF, the web nearly descended into animated chaos. Everywhere there were advertisments laden with animation, which meant I spent even less time at ad-supported sites, but worse was to come: the horror of the animated emoticon. Thankfully I discovered a great feature in Opera: I could uncheck a little box in the preferences labelled ‘Enable GIF animation’. That little action did not make the world perfect, but at least I am now sane, and if I have to read a phpBB forum I don’t see those crazy animated signatures the creators think are soooo cool!

I just discovered RocketBoom via a parody written by Verity Stob at the Register. Apparently it's a video blog, though I wouldn't call it such. Rather it is eclectic news aimed at geeks, presented by a woman. So geeks are guaranteed to keep watching, because if my experience is anything to go by, geeks don't get to meet many women. So it may all be flim-flam, but some of it is quite interesting and Joanne Colan is fuego [obscure Malcolm in the Middle reference]!

The Stob's parody is also much funnier if you read it again after watching the hoverboard/shovercraft building episode and the Make Magazine gift guide episode.

In other news, when I first read What's So Amazing About Grace (whuzsaaaag! think about it, it is funny) I realised that I was finding it hard to forgive a person who had not wronged me, but had pretty severly wronged a family I know. Then at the last WSAAG discussion group meeting at church, I realised I was also very prejudiced against Socialists/Communists/Cuba Solidarity Movement. I recently saw a representative of the UK's Cuba Solidarity Movement on BBC News 24 for the occaison of Castro's 80th or something (CSM is apparently affiliated to all the major UK trade Unions, hence representing 7 million people - whatever, I bet if you asked those 7 million people they wouldn't know it). I won't make an official complaint because he was unintentionally funny. He continued to claim the US was being agressive towards the glorious heavenly planned market-free utopia island paradise. I will admit I don't agree with the USA trying to assassinate Castro, but I don't think the USA has been particularly agressive in the past few years. There have been a few regime changes in the USA after all, according to the World's best written constitution (the UK's unwritten one is obviously better) and the will of the people and all that. Clinton probably didn't care much about Cuba, except to get in on the Elian Gonzalez story. Bush obviously has other things to worry about than some tinpot dictatorship whose principle exports are cigars, political asylum seekers and economic migrants so desparate to get out they once converted a minibus into a boat. Neither did the CSM rep mention that Cuba, at the height of its world-wide notoriety and influence was a mere pawn of the USSR and was not free to pursue its own sovereignty. Thus Cuba is likely more sovereign now due to the evil USA's evil capitalista pig-dog Reagan defeating the USSR in the Cold War. Anyway, to me the CSM guy sounded more anti-USA than pro-Cuba.

Do you see? Just don't get me started on Ken Loach who says we should have a planned economy and start major coal mining again in the UK. Note: the USSR tried a planned economy, it didn't work. Actually Loach needn't wait for the oppressed proletariat to revolt and take over the means of production: market economies are planned! Intelligent people look at the state of the economy and plan what they will do. Thus the market is created by the plans of many people. Loach, you are a genius and you don't know it! Unless you want some single expert person or committee to do all the planning. You did read Animal Farm, didn't you? And you do realise it was written by the socialist Eric Blair?

I think I have issues. But at least this post has fewer than 600 words!