Category Archives: Entertainment

Getting help from twitter, just ask @walkermartyn

While trying to figure a way to test some twitter response code I thought it would be fun to get twitter to answer questions, any questions. So if you have 5 minutes to kill try out my mini twitter responder.  All you need do is follow @walkermartyn and then post your question prefixed with @walkermartyn and I will DM back the answer.  Full instructions can be found here.

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Phone spam, Arrrgh! I thought this stuff stopped in the 80′s!

This morning my phone rang.

“Hello, Martyn speaking” I said in my posh phone answering voice.
After a seconds silence I hear a click and a thick accent begins to speak, what it said at first I am unsure but it sounded like “Hello, are you home right now?” It was definetly a question.

“What?” I enquired and yet more garbled words in response, this time it sounded like “Hello, am I speaking to the person who owns the phone?”.

“Who the hell is this and what do you want?” I politely enquired.

Click! The phone went dead.

Whoever this guy was he was behaving like a dick.  No stomach for an argument.  Or so I thought…

About an hour later the phone rang again.  I suspected it was the same guy because in the last 10 years I have only ever received one call from someone without a CLI, and that was about an hour ago.  So primed for another call from this guy who forgot to mark my number down as “hostile” I answered.

“Hello, Not the Association of Chief Police Officers, how may I help you?”  I said, and yes the same accented garbled message began, the guy completely missing my welcome message. I turned the fan off and moved to a quiet area of the office so I could get what this guy was actually saying.

“Do you own the phone sir?”
“What?  This one, the one you called me on?”
“Yes sir, are you speaking from your own phone?”
“What are you accusing me of? Do you think I nicked it?”
“Oh no sir! I am sorry, I didn’t meaning to have misleading you!”

I am pissed off with this time waster now, his grammar and accent are really beginning to bug me (call me xenophobic if you must but by now I realised this was turning into phone spam).  So I interrupted his flow of apologies.

“What do you want?  My phone or what?”
“Sir, I am just wanting to ask you [garbled words again]“
“Can you speak clearly please I cannot make out what you just said”
“Sir, I am just wanting to ask you [garbled words again]“
“Chrissakes man! Who do you want to speak to?”
“The owner of the phone you are using”
“What is his name?”
“I don’t know” and before I could say anything else he rushed into his pitch
“We are taking surveys today and I would like to be asking you some questions, is that ok?”
pea whistle Phone spam, Arrrgh! I thought this stuff stopped in the 80s!“No it damn well isn’t you twonk, not unless you take the time to learn English.  Now do yourself a favour, take the number you just dialled off your calling list because the next time you might not find me so pleasant”

‘Click’

Remembering what my ‘ol grandma once told me I dug around in the kitchen man-draw and found my pea-whistle.  Oh how I look forward to his next call.

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BBC Is Pulse Enabled? Whatever Next? Advertising?

What’s changed at the BBC News site?  There must be something because I spend more time at Sky or the papers instead now.  On the rare occasions I do visit something about the site irritates me.

bbcpulse BBC Is Pulse Enabled? Whatever Next? Advertising?As I read an article today something kept distracting me, it happened so fast it was over before I could see the cause.  My head bobbing trying to find the cause must have been a site.

To find out what was happening I stopped reading the article and watched the refresh gauge on the bottom right of my browser.  After a few seconds there it was!  A brief flicker.  Not a full refresh, just the mere shade of an outline on the progress bar which suggested something was happening in the background.

bbc2 300x142 BBC Is Pulse Enabled? Whatever Next? Advertising?There was no ticker on this page so that could not be the cause.

I viewed the source and a few lines down spied an odd statement in an HTML comment “PULSE_ENABLED:yes”  WTF?

Are the BBC are trying to annoy me (as if the license fee squandered on pointless court cases isn’t enough)?

Sifting through copious amounts of JavaScript and duplicated dependencies and a bizarre selection of bloated common css errors leads to many more curious comments.bbc3 BBC Is Pulse Enabled? Whatever Next? Advertising?

It’s sad, I like their content and I suppose as I pay for it so I should be encouraged to use it but this “pulse” issue is probably the  reason I lost interest in it.

peculiar as I assume this problem is going to reek havoc with their stats, but then why should the BBC be monitoring stats?

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Is there another word for thesaurus?

I got stuck today so grabbed my thesaurus (the old fashioned version with words printed on paper) and started digging around for a few alternatives.

I found what I needed, only I don’t think many people would have heard of it so I performed a blog search to see how common it was.

The word is Peripetei and it means A sudden change of events or reversal of circumstances, especially in literary work and this is Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs explaining what it means. He also mentions AnagnorisisThe moment of recognition of discovery

If you have a few minutes take this trip with Mike to a sheep farm and you may experience your own anagnorisis!

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Six degrees of seperation rapidly becoming three

Are you still surprised when you discover a friend on a new social network?  The number of useful social media sites is growing.  Specialist sites for our interests help keep us focused as opposed to facebook and twitter.

3736525 s 300x200 Six degrees of seperation rapidly becoming threeYou have to be specific to be terrific, as my mentor used to say.  Facebook and Twitter are great just so long as you have a good tool to agrregate the data (sly reference to PalRelay).

I recently joined SoundCloud and managed to get martynwalker as a username.  A couple of days later I was contacted by an old school buddy.

How valuable is that? A school friend not spoken to since 1974 contacted me and we enjoyed a 36 year catchup that we couldn’t hoped to have done without social media.

He found me as I favourited a musician we both like and my username rang a bell (or should that be a triangle?).

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How to get a new Iphone from the Yakuza Fanboy Club

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Wordle is an interesting way to look at code

Wordle: A few lines of code
Wordle: Easy Wiki Mosaik Edit Problems!

Just spent a few minutes playing with Wordle and created a few “Word Clouds”. Grab any text or website and throw it into the Wordle generator for endless moments of word funart!

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Remix of Mosaik Nanomies

Last night I discovered Mosaik on Flattr. Mosaik released The Leandi Construction Kit and encourages you remix and have some fun with it. So I have!

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Pictures of Portsmouth Harbour

Taken on a visit this saturday.

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iPhone troubles explained in new corporate video

..and I was just about to get an iphone. The best bit shows Steve Jobs explaining how to overcome the signal range limitation.

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