Fritters

Over the last week or so, I’ve started using a different anti-spam filter on my email at home. It’s one of the newer Bayesian filters, going by the imaginative name of SpamBayes – and so far, I’ve been fairly impressed. The learning curve has been pretty high, with it learning from scratch what I regard as spam, but after a week it’s been working well, with less and less false positives – in fact, I’d say there’ve been no false positives in the last couple of days.

However, the BBC is now reporting on a method to bypass the Bayesian filters. It’ll be interesting to see how SpamBayes handles this kind of thing.

History Repeats Itself

I’ve tried to avoid mentioning much about I’m a non-entity, get me a publicist, but today’s news of people complaining because John Lydon said ‘fucking cunts’ struck me as quite amusing – and rather high on the deja vu scale.

Of course, it’s what the TV executives were hoping for when they put Lydon into the show – after all, he’s the same person who said “fuck” back in December ’76 to yet another outcry. The execs were wanting him to swear – it’s free publicity, and hardly unexpected – and they’ve been waiting over a week for him to do it. They must’ve been shitting themselves in case he didn’t do it at all.

I also find it quite amusing that in the 12 hours after the transmission, 91 people had complained – 18 to Ofcom, the rest to the channel itself. Out of an estimated 10.2 million viewers, 91 people complained. That’s roughly 0.001% of the viewers. (Very roughly – I’m sure someone will correct me and be more accurate), 10 complaints for every million viewers. Fark, that’s what I call high outrage.

Shit Shower

It has to be said, it couldn’t have happened in a more appropriate place. a town-centre “superloo” exploded, blowing the roof off, and lifting areas of the surrounding pavement. Thankfully, it happened in Hanley which needs all the publicity it can get.

Smoking

So, the latest ‘repulsive’ anti-smoking ads have been one of the most successful campaigns ever, have they? There’s one fact missing from this – and I honestly don’t know if it was a question that was even asked – and that is this :

Out of the 68,000 who visited the website, and 10,000 who called the helpline (0800 169 1900) , how many had been motivated to do it because of the advert itself? And how many just wanted advice on stopping smoking, rather than were “persuaded” to do so by the advert?

Yes, it’s good that so many people want to stop – but I’d rather know how many were actually influenced by the advert to do so.

Teasers

Has anyone else seen the set of teaser adverts on Channel 4 at the moment? There’s two so far, to my knowledge – one where various C4 presenters and cast members from C4 dramas are asked when they lost their virginity, and one where they’re asked what makes them happy. There’s no tagline at the end of it, and no idea what it’s promoting.

So – any ideas?

UPDATED : Many thanks for the responses. I should point out, I actually like them, think they’re quite interesting and novel – and strangely reminiscent of the BBC’s “Perfect Day” promo from a few years back. I was really hoping it’s not a promotion for some wank “celebs tell all” show, and the majority of responses indicate that they really are just channel promos. Happy day. *Grin*

Love Film

Recently, dvd at Fuddland was talking about Love Film (which used to be “DVDs on Tap” but has recently rebranded) so I had a look. Basically, it’s a DVD rental place, but everything works online and through the post. Depending on the level of subscription (£10, £15 gets two DVDs, or £20 per month) you can get one, two or three DVDs at a time. There are no late charges, and they include a postage-paid envelope to return the disc in.

Once subscribed, you select a range of the DVDs you’d like to see, and then they send them out when they’re available. Currently there’s also a two-week free trial happening, which has been interesting, and has enabled me to see what they’re like. So far, I’m very impressed with the service, so we’ll see how it keeps on working. Oh, and the other good thing is that there’s no minimum contract term – if you want to bail out and stop using the service, it’s a simple process that says “cancel subscription”, no hassle. I like that too…

Back to normality

Well, as close to “normality” as d4d™ ever really gets, anyway. I hadn’t realised quite how much I’d changed the templates and so on while I was at work, and I also hadn’t realised that I hadn’t backed it all up back to home in a while. Big Oooops. Still, I’ll remember for a while again now. And at least I do keep back-ups, just not always up-to-date ones – well, I do, it’s just they’re at two different locations, which can sometimes be problematic.

Anyway, the problems have been rectified now (and in fairness it turned out mainly to be errors with how d4d™ renders BlogRolling more than anything else) and everything’s backed up and been sent back home too (I love .zip files. ) Now, what else can I screw up?