Virtual Economics

WLTM salvation

Just noticed this on the OKCupid dating site - under "favourites" it tells me "You haven't saved anyone". This struck me as oddly poignant. (Read the disclaimer, just under the name of my blog at the top - I write about whatever I like.)

As famous as the Queen

I just spent an instructive few minutes trying to find people whose own websites are higher up Google's results than their Wikipedia entry. Jim Carrey has a very new website, but no; IMDB, fan pages and Wikipedia are all higher up the Google results. Sergei and Larry you'd have thought might have made exceptions for themselves, but again no. Barack Obama, Jerry Yang, Vladimir Putin, Mike Arrington, Bruce Lee, Silvio Berlusconi, Rupert Murdoch...no, no, no, no, no, no and no.

In fact, the only person I could find whose website comes ahead of their own Wikipedia entry was the Queen. (The website of her son and heir Prince Charles is beaten into fourth place not just by his own Wikipedia entry but by multiple listings for the West End cinema which shares his name.) Oh, and porn actress Jenna Jameson (link is safe, sorry). It works for me too, but that's only because I'm not famous enough to have a Wikipedia entry (I've never been able to tell whether the one I did have was deleted on reasonable enough grounds of non-notability or because it was composed entirely of lies by my friends claiming I was a spy for the Bratislavan government. Though possibly that's what all Bratislavan spies say). So...me, the Queen, Jenna Jameson. For everyone else in the world though there's the mighty Wik.

Hey eBuyer - we noticed that thing you do with the recorded message

I tried to buy a computer from eBuyer last week. I found that to be impossible but that's no big deal, the world is full of computer companies that can take down credit card details correctly at least once given three attempts so I'll use one of them instead. That's not the interesting thing about eBuyer.

The interesting thing about eBuyer is the recorded message when you're on hold. Here's how it goes.

(1) on getting into the queue, the message tells you there are anything between half a dozen and twenty people in the queue ahead, and estimates a waiting time

(2) as that waiting time counts down, the message comes back on to say that the number of people in the queue has fallen, and offers a fresh estimate

(3) sooner or later, the number of people in the queue apparently falls to one and the estimate falls to about a minute

(4) then - and this is the good bit - the wait goes on for another five minutes, without any further comment
from the seemingly-helpful countdown system.

One of three things is going on  here. One: on each of several occasions, the very last person in the queue takes five times longer to deal with than the people before them. It's not quite impossible, but it's so unlikely that we can discount it. Two: I am mad, or lying, or can't tell five minutes from 60 seconds. Possible, but I'm not buying it. Three: someone at eBuyer thought that no-one would notice if they made a recording that lies to you and tries to keep you on the phone as long as possible with a wholly spurious estimate of the wait remaining.

You know what? My money's on three. Try ringing eBuyer and see how credible those estimates sound to you. Five minutes, fine; three minutes, fine; two minutes, fine; and then finally one minute that in reality goes on for five more.

But why does Brian Pickle Lawn Mowers?

You'd be surprised how people make a living in my home town of Otley.

"Password too weak"? StumbleUpon must have a *lot* of inactive accounts

So I just tried to throw a link up on StumbleUpon to, you know, something cool I found on the Internet. Couldn't log in to my account (actually, can't remember ever creating one but hey, I must have at some point.) Create an account...fine. Go through the usual CAPTCHA bullshit...fine (I guess). Create a password. 

"Password is too weak". Well, maybe. It's an unguessable string of non-word letters but whatever. I substitute some numbers for letters. "Password is too weak". Still? OK, got a solution for that common obstacle too. I switch an "a" for an ampersand.

"Password can only contain numbers and letters".

WTF?

As far as I can work out, the only way to get a password that meets StumbleUpon's fairly unusual "strength" requirement is to arbitrarily uppercase some of the letters. So I do that. Now I have a password I'll never, ever remember, and suddenly I realise why logging on didn't work in the first place. I needed a password, that couldn't contain anything except numbers or letters, that was stronger than a meaningless string of numbers and letters. It reminds me of nothing so much as a line from the Simpsons - "I want all my groceries in one bag, but I don't want that bag to be heavy". Quite.

I wonder how many dead StumbeUpon accounts I've created and then been unable to get back in to in the past? Must be quite a few. Can't just be me. And why would I even care if someone went to the trouble of hacking my (now necessarilly one-time) StumbleUpon account anyway?

Post Rapture Pet Care

If you haven't seen Post Rapture Pets, or their competitors Post Rapture Pet Care, you really should. If everyone in this newly-found market really believes what they purport to believe, these guys should be raking it in - and it seems to be a big enough market to warrant at least two players, and there are apparently unaffiliated ads on Craigslist too.

(PS isn't it amazing that an apocalypse cult can struggle on for more than two thousand years and still, even now, be claiming that the apocalypse is just around the corner? Got to admire that sort of tenacity.)

Firefox3 vs IE7

Amusing myself this morning by imagining the conversations going on at Microsoft now Mozilla's Firefox 3 browser has overtaken IE7 as the most popular in Europe.

"Why do people still bother switching to Firefox now we've copied the entire damned interface?"
"Because we're evil and they're not. Given the option, people don't seem to like evil."
"Crap. What can we do about that?"
"Be less evil?"
Laughs all round.
"But seriously, what can we really do?" 

It is now safe to turn off your ATM

One of the minor perils of trying to use Microsoft to do, well, anything - an ATM at Tottenham Hale station earlier today bearing only the message "it is now safe to turn off your computer".

 

Hamlet

Offtopic thing review: opening night of David Tennant's Hamlet at the Novello Theatre.

It is not, as others have said, the Hamlet of a lifetime or even a generation (though it is very good I have seen a lot of very good Hamlets and this one merely makes it into my top five). It is patchy. But there is much to like.

Tennant is superb and more-or-less carries the performance (an exact reverse of my expectations, which were that the token celeb would be propped up laboriously by the RSC). Patrick Stewart is inexplicably lacklustre - it is hard to believe the same actor gave such a magnificent Macbeth only a year ago, and he seemed at times to be almost playing a different interpretation of the play to the other actors. (His "give me some lights" (III:2), on which intonation for me the whole play hangs, is merely wearied.) Some of the effects are the best I've seen - when the ghost exits (I:5) he does so through mirrored doors so Hamlet is left staring at his own reflection and the audience rightly left to doubt the reality of the encounter. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are treated throughout as the absurdist comic foils they were made by Stoppard rather than as Shakespeare's originals, which was charming. And the (few) omissions are very well chosen - the last few lines by Fortinbras which are commonly permitted to spoil the denoument and Hamlet's reference to Nero which makes too explicit the misleading oedipal sub-plot in are both better left out and were.

So it's good; very good in fact. Branagh's in Stratford was better as spectacle, though Tennant's portrayal of Hamlet's arc from antic to true madman is much closer to the Hamlet I see in my mind's eye than Branagh's. One student production I saw at the Old Fire Station in (probably) 1997 was better in almost all respects but ran for perhaps five days and is presumably remembered now by no-one but the cast.  

Finally, a note about the theatre. They clearly had no idea the scale of the thing they were taking on when they booked this production; when we first tried to buy tickets (and my wife stood in a queue outside for a few hours in hope of same) they seemed to have made no efforts to scale up for the demand, and last night they seemed to have learned nothing from this, with a veritable mob of attendees milling outside the tiny doors. And the Waldorf Bar was reduced to chaos because someone had chosen this of all evenings to train a new barman in the various skills of taking orders, pouring measures, operating a till, making change and, err, speaking English.

A brief lesson in digital rights management; or, The Internet isn't only for porn

Tonight I am going with some friends to see Avenue Q for the second time. I saw it a couple of years ago when it first came to London and thought it hilarious. Tonight I will see it again, spending about £100 on three tickets - something that would never have occurred to me had I not spent the past couple of years occasionally hunting down and listening to songs from the show on YouTube.

Avenue Q, like almost every other performance on earth you'd never have made money from me trying to sell me songs. But since you - however accidentally - gave them away you get an extra £100 for the live show. Well done on your digital rights management.

(And here, since I'm sure it's now in your head too, is The Internet is For Porn. Enjoy.