#oneaday Day 536: IdiotBox

TV is rubbish. TV is so rubbish that I generally avoid the act of watching it whenever possible, usually preferring to catch the few things I do actually think are worth watching via video on demand services or purchasing a DVD.

It's difficult to pin down exactly what the most rubbish thing about TV is, though. Is it the asinine programming, in which the nation still doesn't seem to have noticed that The X-Factor, Britain's Got Talent, Over the Rainbow, Shitbag Maria and literally (okay, maybe not literally) tens of thousands of other shows are all actually exactly the same thing? Yes.

Is it the stations' inability to record more than one promo reel for an upcoming show and then bombard you with the same 15 clips every 5 minutes until the show actually starts and you find yourself actively wanting to avoid it? Yes.

Is it the fact that the BBC1 announcer sounds like he's extremely uncomfortable when announcing programmed? Yes.

Is it the fact that Dave, despite having about 15 years worth of Top Gear repeats to draw on, insists on playing the same episode at least twice in one day, so that you can watch half of it at lunchtime and randomly turn on the TV around dinnertime to find yourself picking up exactly where you left off? Yes.

Or is it the fact that advertisers treat you like idiots? "We're real lawyers," say InjuryLawyers4U (pro-tip: if you have to make your main selling point the fact that your law firm employs "real lawyers", you're not exactly filling me with confidence). "I got the money I needed with QuickQuidDotCoDotYouKay," says a woman with an unconvincing mouth and all the sincerity of a jam sponge. "Special K is only for women with body image issues!" implies a cereal advert. "Only women may shop in Boots!" suggests Boots, having now used the same piece of music for so long that even fans of the Sugababes want to throw things at the TV every time the ads come on. "All men are bellends who only care about sticking their cock in things and drinking, possibly at the same time!" imply 95% of adverts. "If you smell nice, slutty women will fall at your feet and get their baps out!" screams the Lynx advert, thereby condemning the entire country to continually smelling like a gypsy's jockstrap. YES.

So in short, TV is shite and the few genuinely good things that do get made either get buried in the schedules and forgotten (Firefly) or repeated so often you can watch them with the sound off and do the dialogue yourself without any difficulty (Friends).

Thank God for whoever decided that video on demand might actually be a good idea. Because although you still occasionally get shitty adverts, you can easily avoid all the crap with the added bonus that you don't have to fit your schedule around an inanimate object — it fits its schedule around you. And that's the way it should stay.

At least until the machine uprising, of course.

#oneaday Day 535: Updated My Journal

As I sit here on my friend Tim's spare bed (which just a few short moments ago had the entirety of Helm's Deep atop it) typing this entry using a piece of software that runs on a computer several thousand miles away from the tiny computer that I'm actually pressing the keys on which has no physical connection to this thing we call "the Internet", I'm reminded, as I often am, of how much things have changed.

I'm not that old — I'm thirty and, if not proud then certainly "grudgingly accepting" — but I still find the amount of progress since I was a kid to be fairly astonishing when you think about it. Take what I'm doing right now — writing a blog post — and rewind it some fifteen-plus years. I vividly recall as a youngling, early-ish in my secondary school career, writing a secret diary, inspired by Adrian Mole. Said diary was in a really nice part leather-bound volume that said "journal" on the spine and had nice paper. My first entry was about my family's visit to the National Stone Centre, in retrospect possibly the dullest way I could have possibly started a secret diary.

Over time, though, my writing evolved. I wasn't writing for anyone in particular, but more just to get thoughts out of my head when there wasn't anyone handy to share and discuss them with — or if they were thoughts that I didn't particularly want to share and discuss with people. In some senses it was like a form of therapy, where I could discuss anything I wanted with someone who wouldn't judge what I was saying, and would simply respond with an unspoken "tell me more" for as long as it had empty pages. My journal became less about "Today I went to the National Stone Centre and we saw lots of stones" and more about "I've been thinking about [girls/school/bullies/life] and this is what I feel about it".

I took to scripting fantasy conversations for a while, particularly when it came to talking to girls, because at least in the pages of my diary I stood a chance with Nikki, the girl with the finest boobs and legs in the whole school orchestra. In reality — well, I never quite found out whether or not I stood a chance with her, but given the general standard of guys she went out with, I'm not sure my greasy-and-crap-haired zit-faced teenage self would have stood up particularly well, however much better at playing the clarinet I was than her other boyfriends.

On one memorable occasion, I recall doing a lengthy post-mortem of an encounter with a girl I liked when my friends pretty much forced me to tell her that I liked her. She turned me down, of course, but the fact I'd actually gone through with it was immensely satisfying — so much so that I recall drawing diagrams of how the event had actually gone — where I was, where my friends were (doubtless watching and laughing at me making a tit of myself) and where she was.

In retrospect, it was perhaps a bit creepy, which is probably why one day I took a look at everything I had written, became hideously embarrassed by the whole thing and discreetly threw the by then half-full book out into the trash, never to be seen again. I often wonder what happened to it, and occasionally wondered if a bin man might have come across it and had a good giggle at my teenage lameness.

The world's different now, though, and the closest people come to a "secret" these days is posting passive-aggressive tweets and Facebook statuses. I still write — every day, as you've doubtless noticed. Sometimes the things I write are still therapeutic and a way of getting thoughts out of my head that are difficult to vocalise, and sometimes it's just stupid shit that I feel like rambling on about.

The difference now is that after 535 days, I'm not ashamed of a bit of it. Sure, some of it probably only has any meaning to me and me alone, but everything I've written here has some sort of meaning and memory attached to it. Which is why you won't find me ever throwing this blog out in the trash like my teenage secret diary. We are the sum of our memories and experiences, for better or worse, and sometimes it's good to look back and see how you got to where you are now — and where you might be headed in the future.

The future's not yet written, as everyone knows. But day by day it'll reveal itself, leading us ever onward to the end of one chapter and the start of the next.

#oneaday Day 534: Who's Buying the Crap?

I'm pretty sure I already knew this some time ago, but I've come to the not-so-startling conclusion recently that I'm the one buying the crap games and listening to terrible music and enjoying awful films. It's not a conscious decision to be contrary, but I do find myself more willing than some to give creative works that have been somewhat maligned the benefit of the doubt — and more often than not actually end up enjoying them.

The first time I recall this happening was one summer when I was home from university. I got very bored and decided that I was going to go to the cinema by myself, just pick a movie that happened to be on, sit down, watch it and attempt to enjoy it. It was partly borne from a desire to prove wrong the unwritten rule that going to the cinema by yourself is somehow shameful (if it is, why is watching a DVD by yourself OK?) and partly just out of a desire to get out of the house.

The movie I went to see? 2 Fast 2 Furious. It was terrible, of course, but I enjoyed it a great deal. And the reason for this was the fact that I didn't feel "accountable" to anyone — there was no-one with me judging my tastes or making me believe that I should feel a certain way about this piece of entertainment that was bombarding me with nonsense. ("Wow, bro, it's like a ho-asis in here!") Judged entirely on its own merits and on whether or not it performed the function I wanted it to at that specific moment in time — to entertain me without making me have to think too much — it succeeded admirably.

More recently, I found similar joy in Duke Nukem Forever. The thing that annoyed me most about the vitriolic reviews scattered around the web was the fact that all the critics seemed to feel somehow "responsible" for their audience, like they had a moral obligation to dislike it because of its more questionable elements or its rough edges. I played it and enjoyed it — genuinely — and was surprised there weren't a few more people willing to stand up and be counted, saying "look, yes, it is crass, it is rude, it is inappropriate, but for fuck's sake lighten up." But that's by the by — if you found it objectionable, that's your business, but it doesn't make me wrong either.

Most recently, the recent Steam sale encouraged me to pick up Alpha Protocol, a game I've been curious about for some time. Roundly panned on its release for poor AI, questionable game mechanics and outdated graphics, most people seemed to think it was one to pass by. But for three quid I wasn't about to let that happen. So far I've enjoyed it greatly. I don't mind that the shooting and the AI isn't great because I'm not very good at shooters or stealth games. What Alpha Protocol has provided for me so far is a 24-esque espionage plot with action sequences where I at least feel like I'm a badass spy, even if the execution means it's quite difficult to mess things up, from what I can tell. The key thing about the game is its story, and for that, I'm willing to forgive its flaws — some may say too forgiving.

This is a pattern I've continued for as long as I remembered. Back when I bought CDs (oh so many years ago) I tended to purchase music on something of a whim rather than with the charts or peer reactions in mind. I bought things out of curiosity, because I liked the cover art, because I thought the singer was hot. And there's very few of those decisions I regretted, because it gave me the opportunity to experience some things that many other people might never have been exposed to.

I'm cool with that. It gives me interesting things to talk about when people want to know about obscure games, cheesy music or crap films. Everyone knows Halo and Call of Duty are good. But how many people can vouch for the awesomeness of Doom: The Roguelike?

#oneaday Day 533: More Thoughts on Google+

So I've been using the service for a few days now and the fact I've made it a Pinned Tab in Chrome should tell you how much I like it. I think it's got a huge amount of potential, and I sincerely hope that it takes off. I also sincerely hope it doesn't just morph into an identikit Facebook — but hopefully that won't happen, because although Google is gradually spreading itself over all aspects of the web, they haven't (yet) done anything that particularly offends me from a privacy or usability perspective. In fact, every change they've made to their services while I've been a user has been for the better.

So let's go over some thoughts, tips and tricks in handy bullet-point form, for those of you who are just getting started — or those who have been using it for a while. Or those who tried it once and immediately gave up. Or, well, just anyone interested, really.

Circles are made to be used. Use them! Make as many as is practical for you. Don't stick with the Facebook approach of keeping everyone in one Friends list. There will be some crossover between Circles as a natural process, particularly if you and your friends share some common interests, but they're there to be useful. Case in point: today I shared my GamePro articles only with those who are specifically interested in video games (which, as it happens, is most of my friends currently on G+) — once more people get in there, that facility will be a godsend.
The photo interface is gorgeous. The photo viewer looks great and has a nice layout, and the way the photos are tiled on the album page is attractive and distinctive. My only quibble is that you can't rename an album — or so I thought. As it happens, since G+ photo albums are actually albums on Picasa, to change an album name all you need to do is go to Picasa's website and change it there. Hopefully Google will add the facility to do this within G+ shortly — because, as I found out tonight, long album titles break the page layout.
You can format stuff with special characters, not HTML. Putting *asterisks* either side of a word/phrase/sentence/paragraph makes it bold. Putting _underscores_ either side of something makes it italic. Putting -dashes- either side of something makes it strikethrough. You don't appear to be able to underline things.
Buzz is shit. I turned on Google Buzz because it adds a tab to your profile where your Twitter feed, Google Reader shared items and various other goodies can be automatically shared. However, this only appears on your profile and takes literally hours to update, making the auto-import from Twitter in particular utterly useless.
No ads is nice. I know it won't last, but using a social network with no ads makes for a lovely, clean experience.
Face recognition when tagging photos is a good start, but needs work. It doesn't recognise some faces, and it would be nice if it "learned" faces like iPhoto does. Still, it automatically spotting where faces are is a good start.
Resharing should be an option. You can post something then disable reshares and/or comments for it after it's been posted — but that might be too late. You should be able to choose whether or not a post is resharable or commentable before you post it.
+1 is a useful bookmarking function. More sites are starting to use it now, and having a tab on your profile for all your +1s is handy. However, as the feature grows, this list is going to become long and cumbersome. It needs to be searchable, taggable or able to be organised into some sort of hierarchy. +1s also need a Share button if you want to post them to your Circles, as currently your +1s around the Web have nothing to do with G+ besides appearing on this tab.
The current absence of brand pages is wonderful. Another thing that won't last, as every corporation believes it needs a presence on every major social network. But for now, the fact that G+ remains a truly person-based social network is thoroughly pleasant.
Notification bar across all Google apps is great. This means you're always engaged with the service, yet it's not overly intrusive. The fact this is already integrated hopefully means further service integrations in the future — Events auto-syncing with Google Calendar, for example, would be smashing.
Things I'm looking forward to: Themes, non-obtrusive extensions, the iOS app, further integration between Google services, the service being open to everyone.
Things I'm not looking forward to: Social games, brand pages, ads.

#oneaday Day 532: The Unholy Trinity

Someone found my blog by searching for the terms "trinity estates" southampton today. So I'm assuming that they're interested in the estate management company that used to be in charge of the apartment block I used to live in on White Star Place in Southampton. This area was also known as College Court, or so the mail that wasn't for me that kept getting delivered would have it, anyway.

So, hello. How are you? Are you dealing with Trinity Estates? Are you a member of staff from Trinity Estates aiming to see what your company's social media footprint is? Are you a landlord researching estate management companies prior to making the commitment to purchase an apartment to rent out?

Well, whoever you are, I can say with complete and utter confidence that Trinity Estates are a complete load of old shite. And I can tell you exactly why, too. Some of the reasons are already outlined upon this very blog, but it certainly doesn't hurt to go over them again for those who haven't encountered this useless excuse for a company. I'll say all this with the caveat that I haven't lived in Southampton since last September and it's entirely possible that they've bucked their ideas up since then, but somehow I doubt it.

Their main problem is their lack of enthusiasm to do anything. They'll write a letter, sure — in fact they write lots of letters — but when it comes to actually doing anything useful? Nah.

Let's take one example. The block I lived in had a covered car park at ground level and the apartments started on the first floor (second floor to you Americans). Inside the car park, there were lots of pipes on the ceiling — mostly waste pipes, I believe. One night I heard the sound of running water outside, but didn't think anything of it — at least not until the next morning, when I had to go and retrieve my car from the car park.

Said car park stank of shite. There was a reason for this. The sound of running water was from one of the pipes on the ceiling which had burst and was, as a result, spraying shitty water everywhere. Fortunately, my car was parked nowhere near the "blast radius", but several residents' cars were. One green car in particular was festooned with lumps of crap and wads of bog roll in the morning. I felt sorry for whoever it belonged to.

Several days later, the pipe had been "fixed". But not in a sensible manner, no. It had been fixed by wrapping duct tape around it. Duct tape that wasn't very waterproof, meaning it still leaked a bit — though thankfully not quite as much as before.

Then there was the time the basement flooded. In this case, water was actually entering the building and gushing into what turned out to be an electrical cupboard. A phone call to Trinity Estates in this case yielded an uninterested-sounding operator who said he could either get someone down to us the following day (I took great pains to point out the fact that the building was, as I had already said, flooding and presenting an increasing risk of an electrical fire) or immediately, but that there would be a charge for an emergency callout.

Eventually, it transpired that the residents would have to leave the building, because the water and electricity were going to be turned off while the problem was resolved. Thus began several days of sleeping on friends' floors — actually a relatively welcome diversion as it was not that long previously that things had gone fairly disastrously wrong in my personal life — and wondering exactly how long it would take the company that I described back then as a "festival of incompetence" to sort things out.

To their credit, things were sorted out after several days and we were able to get back in. What they had failed to take into account, however, was the fact that the building was locked with an electronic keypad which doesn't function when the electricity is off. Fortunately, a drunken chav had had the foresight to tear off the door to the basement/car park entrance to the building in a fit of drunken twattishness, so when I suddenly realised I didn't have something that I really needed, I could actually get back in without too much difficulty.

As an aside, they also said that the dirty great hole they dug outside the block for the workmen to get in would be guarded by the police 24/7 to ensure that kids wouldn't play in it. On all the occasions I went back to the block while work was supposedly going on, there were 1) no workmen in the hole 2) no policemen guarding the hole and 3) children playing in the hole. So good work there, then.

In summary, then, oh mysterious reader who came across this page in search of information on Trinity Estates' work in Southampton — they are shite, and if owning a property involved dealing with them on any level, I would urge you to think very carefully about what you're getting yourself into — or run away screaming.

If you work at Trinity Estates and you're reading this, know that you made an otherwise very nice apartment complex into quite an unpleasant place to live at times. Well done.

#oneaday Day 531: Steam-Powered Sales

One of the best things about a Steam sale is not the fact that you can get packs of high-profile triple-A titles for ludicrous prices (although that's welcome too) but the fact that you can afford to take risks on obscure indie titles that you may not have thought to investigate in the past.

This has paid off on a number of separate occasions for me in the past, with some real gems coming to my attention purely by virtue of the fact that they were either dirt cheap or bundled with some other titles which had piqued my interest. Some of these have become a little more well known since I first picked them up, others haven't.

Let's take a peek at a few of them.

Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale

This utterly charming JRPG-cum-light management game is oozing with charm and character, not least from the protagonist Recette and her money-loving fairy companion Tear. The writing (or rather, localisation) of the game is probably the best thing about this game, but it helps that it's a solid (if slightly repetitive) game. The repetition ceases to matter, though, when the incidental scenes featuring well-defined and well-written characters are so entertaining, and happen just often enough to break up the curious combination of loot-whoring dungeon crawling and shop management.

BIT.TRIP BEAT

I'd never played a BIT.TRIP game prior to this one but was dimly aware of their existence. BEAT is, in simple terms, one-player pong but combined with a rhythm game and the sort of things you'd see if an Atari 2600 took too much LSD. It's a strange, hypnotic game that turns into you fusing with your mouse in an intricate dance, bouncing back the huge pixels in time with the music and going slightly dizzy in the process.

Hacker Evolution

If you've played Uplink, you'd be forgiven for thinking Hacker Evolution was something similar — but it's actually a bit different. Where Uplink was most akin to something like Elite, only you were travelling around the world's computer networks rather than the galaxy, Hacker Evolution is more tightly-focused and level-based. It's also quite unforgiving, and from my experiences so far it appears that there's relatively few "correct" ways to complete a level — but that gives it something of a puzzle game feeling which isn't entirely unwelcome. The fact that you interact with the game by typing authentic-looking commands into a text-based console helps with the whole immersion thing, too.

Altitude

If you've often thought that Team Fortress 2 would be better if everyone was in aeroplanes and it was in 2D, then Altitude is the game for you. Featuring a wide selection of aircraft, each with special CoD-style perks — unlockable via CoD-style levelling up — and a decent mix of game types and levels, this is a fun multiplayer title, even if you're shite at it, which I am.

I'd write more but I appear to have developed an absolutely screaming headache. Night all!

#oneaday Day 530: One Year Ago Today

One year ago today, according to this very blog, I was still not in possession of gainful employment, and I was frustrated with the whole jobseeking and application process.

The reason for this was, of course, the fact that job sites are shite, and I would recommend that anyone currently seeking gainful employment should avoid them completely.

They're good in theory, of course. A site featuring a searchable database of jobs by area and category? That should be awesome. That should make it ludicrously easy to find a job. That should make the entire application process streamlined, elegant and very straightforward. People will be able to get matched with awesome jobs and employers will find their model employees. Everyone's a winner.

Except they're not. Through unscrupulous recruitment agencies, listings for being a boiler engineer get mixed in with journalism listings. Recruitment agencies refuse to say what the company they're recruiting for is or where the fucking job is in the first place. And on the off chance that you do actually manage to get in touch with a recruiter, you run the risk of dealing with the HR equivalent of a cock-tease, making you think you're in with a chance of getting a job, when actually you're not.

So basically, fuck the job-hunting sites. Here's what you need to do: get on Twitter, and go directly to the people in question. Do some networking online. Talk to people. Shamelessly whore out your work — there's no shame in sharing things that 1) you're proud of and 2) potential employers might be interested in.

By following this approach rather than wasting my time with job hunting sites, I'm finally in a position where I can say I'm gainfully employed. I'm pleased to say that I'll be sticking around with GamePro, and that doing so is enough to call a "proper job". I shan't share specifics, because that would probably be inappropriate, but I shall say this: compared to this time last year, when things were shit and rubbish, things are certainly well and truly on the way up.

Which is, you know, nice.

#oneaday Day 529: You Have a Tiny Tower

Have you played Tiny Tower on iOS? This is one of those games that should be complete shite but actually ends up being strangely compelling.

Why should it be shite? Well, because it incorporates a ton of the features that make Facebook games particularly obnoxious — real-time waits for things to happen, monetization allowing you to "buy victory" in the game and no real strategy or depth.

Despite this, though, Tiny Tower manages to remain addictive, compelling and entertaining, even though your interaction with your little people is limited to restocking floors that have run out of arbitrary products, carrying people in your lift and occasionally playing an impromptu game of Where's Wally when someone bursts in demanding to know where Tammy Walters is.

A big, big part of the game's appeal is surely down to its excellent pixel-art graphics. I say "excellent", but they're actually pretty primitive, being deliberately lower-resolution than even the older iPhone screens. The graphics are reminiscent of the late 8-bit to early 16-bit era and have a lot of character about them. The little "bitizens" who populate your tower are all based on the same basic model, but the sheer number of hats, moustaches, crazy glasses and whatnot that they walk in wearing makes each and every one of them seem like an individual — particularly once you get some residents staying in your tower and you find out what their names are. Because then not only do you assign them to a job, but you can also spy on their Facebook… sorry, Bitbook page, filled with the sort of vapid inanity that your average Facebook user spouts on a daily basis along with occasional gameplay hints that you don't really need. (The Mexican restaurant is closed? No shit!)

One of the more appealing things about the game that makes it less obnoxious (though probably less profitable) than anything Zynga has ever put together is the fact that the game's premium currency of Tower Bux can be earned rather than just bought. Sure, you can pony up some real-life cash to get a wad of Tower Bux to make your life easier, but through actively playing the game and participating in its silly little Where's Wally challenges you can get a reasonable income of them without having to pay a penny. This is a Good Thing.

Then there's the fact that you can ogle your friends' towers at any point, with them organised by order of size, so you can get all frustrated when the person you've been several floors ahead of suddenly leapfrogs you.

In short, it's an excellent example of an iOS game. It's simple, easy to play, friendly to both long and short play sessions and, best of all, free. So, err, buy it.

#oneaday Day 528: Thoughts on Google+

You can't say I don't provide you with variety here, dear readers. Just yesterday I was talking about underage boys simulating anal sex in a school library in order to avoid doing work, and today I'm telling you about what may or may not be the next big thing in social networking: Google+, Google Plus, Googlyplus, G+ or whatever the hell you want to call it.

If you haven't got in yet, don't ask me for an invite at the moment as they've switched them off for now. Keep an eye on Twitter or Facebook, though — I'll let you know if I have any more spare.

So, to business. What is Google+? Well, the cynical would say it's a rebranded Facebook, and indeed we've already seen at least one article today bemoaning the fact that Google+ has some features in common with Facebook. I'm not sure why they felt the need to draw attention to this, as the features they show are pretty commonplace in all social networks.

But are those cynics right? Well… yes and no. Google+ does indeed resemble Facebook. You have a news feed, people can comment on posts, people can Like things (or "+1" in this case) and people can share content. The key difference between Google+ and Facebook is how it handles the way you interact with people. There are no "friend requests" on Google+, simply Circles. Circles is an evolution of Facebook's Groups system, in which you can categorise your friends, acquaintances and family members into, well, categories. Then, when you post something on the network, you can choose which individuals or Circles it's visible to — or even make it completely public. This is a nice idea. It allows people to tailor the content they spew out to different social groups without feeling that they need to have a "work" profile and a "professional" profile. So long as, of course, you remember to keep the stories about the hooker you threw up on to your "Drinking Buddies" Circle and don't accidentally copy in your boss.

So the way you deal with people is different. But there's more; the photo interface is simple, elegant and much better than Facebook's slightly clumsy lightbox. While I think that the lightbox was a good addition to Facebook's interface, many disagreed, and the fact it's difficult to view the image and look at the comments at the same time unless you have the highest-resolution screen in the world is not great. Google+ takes a different approach. Not only does the service allow you to upload pictures at considerably higher resolution than the artifacted messes that Facebook's compression creates, but the interface allows for simple inline commenting while still viewing the picture. It's a simple case of putting the comments in a sidebar rather than underneath the picture, and it works beautifully well.

Then there's the fact that the Photos feature on Google+ integrates with Google's Picasa service. Anything you post on Picasa will be available on Google+, and vice-versa. You can even use Picnik to edit the photo, add text and generally arse about with it, save it back to Picasa (even overwriting the original if you don't need it any more) and the modified version will be right there in your feed without you needing to refresh the page. Clever. Since Picnik is a third-party service, though, this isn't integrated quite as well as it could be — an "Edit with Picnik" option when viewing a photo on Google+ would be nice, for example — but it's early days yet. And Google+ allows simple iPhoto-style edits of colours and the like to be applied to pictures without having to leave the page, which is nice, particularly for those who either don't know a lot about photo editing or don't have the software to do anything fancy-pants.

This isn't even getting started on the excellent Sparks feature, where you can subscribe to topics of your choice and be fed a constant stream of relevant articles — which can, of course, then be shared with the Circles of your choice if you see fit.

As you can tell, I'm quite enamoured with the new service and genuinely hope it takes off. My only worry is that it, like Facebook, might try and do too much. Facebook was an excellent service when it felt personal, but now it's as much a home for businesses to engage with their clientèle as a means of communication, it's becoming increasingly irrelevant to people who just want to talk to their friends. Google+'s simple elegance that it has at the moment doesn't have any of that noise — and none of the associated spam from social games and endless "What Length of Pubic Hair Are You?" quizzes, for that matter. I'm sure it won't stay that way, as social game and app developers are already pricking their ears up at the buzz surrounding the service, but I hope it stays that way for at least a little while. There's definitely a market for a clean, clear social network with minimum fuss that offers something a little more than Twitter but a lot less than Facebook. And I think Google+ has the potential to be it if the developers handle it correctly.

#oneaday Day 527: Doing a Bum-Sex

As you may have surmised from some of the earlier entries in this blog, my experiences working as a classroom teacher were genuinely traumatic at the time, on many occasions causing me considerable amounts of stress, depression, panic attacks, you name it.

In retrospect, now I don't have to deal with the little scrotes on a daily basis, some of the things were quite amusing. These things weren't amusing at the time (and when you think about it, are often quite tragic) but now I take a perverse satisfaction in the fact that these little horrors who once made my life such a misery will surely find themselves in difficult positions in the future, unless they discover a way to stop being such a twat.

Let's take the case of Fat Barry, so named because his name was Barry and he was fat. This may sound a bit harsh, but this is a child who, among other things, decided that rather than engaging with Music lessons, he would place a cymbal on his head and wander around pretending to be a racial stereotype of a Chinese peasant in a school with a not-inconsiderable population of ethnic minorities, so in my mind he deserves all the abuse in the world.

I didn't just take Fat Barry for Music lessons. I also had the pleasure of his company in a subject known mysteriously as "Key Skills", a lesson which I didn't learn until after I'd started at the school was basically "the spaz class", where all the children too stupid (or, more often, badly behaved) to achieve anything whatsoever got the opportunity to sit around and learn how to use washing machines and read.

On one memorable occasion, the Year 8 Key Skills class was tasked with researching famous people, living or dead, that they might like to invite to a dinner party. (I hasten to add I had nothing to do with the planning of these units, so their vapid nature wasn't my choice — although it's not as if we could have got anything more intellectually stimulating out of most of them.) As befits a research task, we had relocated out of our stuffy classroom (which on one memorable occasion, I was locked in while the children found it hilarious to climb out of the window, but that's another story) into the school library.

For once, most of the kids were sitting down actually looking at books — being given the opportunity to look up things they were actually interested in rather than being forced into set topics in English, Maths, Science and all the rest meant that they were, thank the stars, engaged and quiet.

All except for two, who were conspicuously absent. Fat Barry and his friend Shane, whose defining characteristic was the fact that he habitually wore trousers slightly too short for him coupled with prominent Burberry-pattern socks. (I'm not sure Burberry actually make socks.) I could hear giggling from behind some of the shelves, so while the rest of the class were engrossed in their picture books I went to investigate.

I wasn't quite prepared for what I found. Shane was lying face-down on the floor, with Fat Barry straddling him. (Fortunately, both were fully clothed, although I'm surprised Shane could breathe.) Fat Barry was gyrating somewhat suggestively atop his friend, and I foolishly said the first thing that popped into my head.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"We're doing a bum-sex, sir!" replied Fat Barry.

In retrospect, what I should have done at that point is open the library door and yell down the echoey school corridors "What's that, Barry? You're doing a bum-sex? That's a bit gay, isn't it?" because, as everyone knows, accusations of being gay are like the worst things ever at secondary school, leading to the whole problem where genuinely gay teenagers feel that they can't come out for fear of being ridiculed. I was aware of this problem, which is perhaps why I chose not to do it.

Fat Barry wasn't gay, incidentally. He had a Grandad with a shotgun that he thoughtfully brought along to one of the rehearsals of the school play — a mildly terrifying moment — and would probably have been on the receiving end of some redneck punishment if he had come out as gay. So his proclamation of the fact he was supposedly delivering anal pleasure to his best friend on the floor of the library occurred for one reason only — to shock and appal.

It worked.