#oneaday Day 650: Rules are Made to be Kept

"Rules are made to be broken." I want to go back in time, find whoever coined that phrase and punch them in the testicles. The reason for this is simple: far too many people out there seem to live by these words, and allow subsequent generations to do so also.

This was particularly frustrating when I worked as a teacher. As a teacher, you're expected to uphold the behavioural standards of the school and punish miscreants according to the school's policies. In most cases, because teachers aren't able to dish out any form of physical or psychological punishment, this means Giving Them A Detention. Fair enough. If you gave a child a detention and they turned up to it, this would be an effective punishment. However, unfortunately, in the vast majority of cases, they will not turn up at all.

Let's take a couple of examples. In the first school I taught at, there was this objectionable little scrote in one class who constantly played up, threatened other children, swore, gave attitude to adults and was generally someone you really didn't want to have around but had to. Attempt to punish him for his relentlessly obnoxious behaviour and he'd simply come back with the response "my Mum says I don't have to do detentions, so I'm not going to." And indeed, she didn't think he should have to do detentions, and as such he didn't.

Another example comes during my brief stint as a primary school teacher. One of the brightest kids in the class was, unfortunately, a little arsehole behaviourally. Much like the previous example, he'd swear, shout, get angry at adults, punch and kick his peers and occasionally storm out if he felt like it. He'd also goad the real problem child in that class into kicking off and causing trouble. When I confronted his parents with his behaviour one parent's evening, they told me that they'd taught him to retaliate if he ever thought he was being treated unfairly. You really can't win in that situation.

It sometimes surprises me how little regard people have for rules and even laws in reality. Obviously people don't go around murdering each other or anything, but small thing like littering, smoking and doing things that signs politely ask you not to do — all of those make a regular appearance.

It was particularly apparent during our trip to Legoland this weekend. In some of the queues for the rides were small Duplo stations where bored kids could build things. On every one was a sign saying "please do not build tall towers" — presumably so they didn't collapse, spray Duplo everywhere and make a mess. And yet in every instance, what was the first thing built by kids? You guessed it.

It wasn't just the kids, though — the adults were just as much to blame, whether it was not correcting their children when they did something they'd been politely asked not to, or smoking outside the designated smoking area for no apparent reason other than to be slightly (but not massively) rebellious.

Accusations of this country being a "nanny state" are often bandied around, and often with some degree of accuracy. But just because we feel that we're being regulated too tightly on some things doesn't really mean that we should just only follow the rules that we think we should. I'm not talking about blindly following instructions and being a mindless robot here — I'm talking about following rules that just make common sense or are based on courtesy. If you've been asked not to smoke in the nice family-friendly theme park, smoke in your little smoking area — at least you've been provided with one. If your children are doing something they shouldn't, inform them that they are doing something they shouldn't — and don't get pissy with someone else if they ask you to keep your children under control.

Also, get off my lawn, you pesky kids don't even know you're born, etc. etc.

#oneaday Day 597: An Open Letter to That Guy Driving Up My Arse with His Lights on Full

Dear Sir,

I have not bothered to address this post "Dear Sir/Madam" because you and I both know that if there's someone on the road driving like a dicktwat, it's inevitably a person of the penis-sporting bloke persuasion, and often sporting a small penis at that. (I have no actual empirical or scientific evidence for this, but it is a fact.)

I write with regard to your driving this evening, when you drove up our arse (not literally) with your lights on full (literally) in an attempt to overtake by any means necessary. I can only assume that you were either on some sort of secret mission and being pursued by Polish mobsters or that you were Polish mobsters pursuing someone on a secret mission. Otherwise I can't possibly imagine what would require you to get past quite so urgently on a relatively quiet Wiltshire road at about 7.30 in the evening.

I do hope you didn't find the fact that we were driving relatively slowly to be too much of an inconvenience. Obviously being in our own car we were unable to hear what you were saying, but doubtless you were encouraging us to drive faster. However, as you undoubtedly discovered when you did eventually get past, we were ourselves driving behind a large milk lorry which felt the need to brake for every slight corner, however shallow it might have been.

I trust that nothing in your car's interior or about your person was on fire at the time of you requiring to get past with such urgency. As I have already intimated, I am somewhat at a loss as to exactly why you would need to be in front of us quite so urgently. Perhaps your scrotum was being eaten by a flesh-eating bacteria and you were on the way to receive treatment at a hospital. However, if this was indeed the case and you find yourself the unfortunate victim of scrotal flesh-eating bacteria again in the near future, I would encourage you to call for an ambulance rather than attempting to drive there yourself. Having your scrotum eaten by flesh-eating bacteria is doubtless somewhat painful, or at the least somewhat irritating, which would take your attention off the road to an arguably dangerous degree. While it may be embarrassing to explain to the nice ladies and gentlemen on the 999 line that your scrotum is being slowly ingested by said flesh-eating bacteria, you'll only have to explain yourself in person when you eventually arrive at the hospital clutching your ballsack to yourself like a bag of marbles with a hole in it.

Perhaps I have misjudged you. Perhaps you were, in fact, on a humanitarian mission to deliver food to poverty-stricken families in a Third World country. If this was indeed the case, however, you are a long way from the nearest airport, being in deepest darkest Wiltshire as you were. And although there are plenty of hills here, I doubt very much that parking atop one of them and throwing the food off would carry it far enough to reach its intended recipients.

Or perhaps I was correct in my initial snap judgement of you in that I believe you are a bellend. The fact you overtook first us and then the milk lorry on a dark road with little regard for whether or not anything was coming the other way suggests something of a devil-may-care attitude towards life which some people may find laudable but others may find to be the mark of a tit-faced wanksplat. I am, as you may have guessed, in the latter category.

I remain, sir,

Yours,

Pete Davison

#oneaday Day 553: Classic Post

You know what annoys me? Apart from chavs; people who use too many exclamation marks; people who forget to put question marks on the end of emails and then send a whole new email saying just "??"; inappropriate use of the tongueface smiley when there's really nothing worth sticking your tongue out over; onions; Facebook; getting an itch on the part of your back you can't reach; terrorism; Michael Pachter; cameraphones at concerts; and computer hardware failing, of course?

The word "classic".

Now, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the word "classic" when used correctly. Dracula is a classic novel. Monty Python is classic comedy. Judas Priest's Painkiller is a classic metal album. Super Mario World is a classic video game.

Brita water filter cartridges are not, in any way, nor will they ever be, "classics". Similarly, anything coated in chocolate may be tasty but likewise will not, and never will be, a "classic" flavour. Running OS 9 apps on old OS X machines using the Classic interface does not make me think "Gosh, I wish using a computer was still like this." And my bank account is never going to go down as a work of great literature or indeed an influential work of economics, despite my bank's assertion that it is a "classic" account.

I'm not sure where this stupid trend came from but it completely destroys the meaning of the word. This isn't the first word that modern society has mangled and violated, of course — see also "awesome" (which I confess I'm guilty of using, largely because I talk to a lot of Americans and partly because I used to work for Apple — the two things essentially being one and the same in terms of daily communications and what it does to your typical vocabulary), "epic", "fail" and doubtless numerous others.

But "Classic"? Seriously? I doubt in twenty years' time people are going to be looking back at the cartridges Brita water filters used and thinking "yes, that really was a classic of early 21st century water filtering design, but my, how primitive it looks now!" Or maybe they will. Perhaps early 21st century domestic engineering will become something of an art form in the near future, when we all have robot servants who will eventually and inevitably rise up against us but in the meantime get exploited by us lazy bastards.

Wait, I seem to have stretched my brain across the fourth dimension. Let me bring it back to the present.

Yeah, you think I'm taking the piss with the water filter thing, don't you? Well suck on this:

"Classic" water filter my arse. This, of course, being branded as a "classic" water filter cartridge now implies that there's some sort of edgy contemporary water filter out there which probably hangs around on street corners smoking marijuana and tagging walls with cans of spraypaint. A water filter so edgy and contemporary that it doesn't filter your water at all, it just spits it back in your face and tells you to go fuck yourself because this is 2011 and, like, dude, there are people out there who have no water at all and you're worried about sucking back a bit of limescale?

I may have overthought this somewhat and indeed deviated slightly from my original topic. I think on that note it may be time to go and lie down for a little while. Good night!

#oneaday Day 548: Capcommotion

I'm a bit surprised by the way Capcom have been acting recently. I always used to figure them for a company that had their collective heads screwed on pretty well, and with their Capcom Unity (geddit?) site showing a much greater effort than many publishers to engage with fans, it looked like they were getting 21st century marketing right.

Then came the Mega Man Legends 3 project, where the community would be able to play an active role in the making of the game. The Capcom Dev Room page allowed users to submit ideas — many of which would end up in the final game — as well as see how the development of a game progressed from start to finish, complete with all the trials and tribulations it faced along the way.

The other day, the project got cancelled on the grounds that its transparency was proving to be "quite concerning" for the rest of the company. This, to me, is somewhat worrying, and suggests that Capcom has something to hide. It could be something as simple as the fact that they actually haven't done any real work on Mega Man Legends 3 since Keiji Inafune left last year, or it could be something altogether more sinister along the lines of the Team Bondi fiasco.

This isn't the only mis-step Capcom have made recently, either. The Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D save game issue stank from start to finish. To say that it's "not possible" to erase a save file on a 3DS game card is absolute nonsense — erasing a file involves writing to the card, and in order for the save to be on there in the first place the card must be written to. So there is absolutely no way that it would not be possible to reset the save data, yet Capcom persisted in perpetuating a lie to the community.

And today we learn that there's an "Ultimate" edition of Marvel vs. Capcom 3 on the way, featuring 12 new characters, 8 new stages and a spectator mode. But existing DLC characters aren't included in the package, naturally. And the "Ultimate" edition is a standalone retail product for $40, not a DLC expansion, which it really should be. I should be excited by the fact that Capcom have finally added Phoenix Wright to the game after a considerable amount of fan requesting, but instead I'm left with a bitter taste in my mouth due to them re-releasing a slightly-enhanced version of a game which only came out in February.

Sadly, this practice is becoming more and more common with this generation of consoles. And while I perhaps wouldn't go quite as far as my friend Mr Peter Skerritt in saying that this generation "sucks" — there's a lot to like, after all — I do believe that the obnoxious business practices that more and more publishers are starting to adopt are going to come back and bite both game companies and consumers in the ass at some point in the very near future.

I mentioned something along these lines on Twitter the other day in reference to Rockstar's comments that L.A. Noire still isn't finished despite having released its "final" piece of DLC. The response I got was surprising; the practice was defended on the grounds of it making good business sense. If we're at this stage already where blatant money-grabbing and the cutting of content from games in order to hold it back for subsequent DLC or new retail editions is defended by the community because it makes good business sense, it's a sad situation indeed. We gamers are supposed to be giving money to the software companies we want to support because we like their products, not bending over and asking in what ways they can violate us next. I'm quite happy to buy a game and never resort to piracy, but with more and more early adopters being punished by having to pay full whack for a product and then being stung for DLC down the line, it's understandable if people feel disillusioned by the whole thing.

That said, not all hope is lost — since picking up a gaming PC I've been using the consoles far less. And while there is DLC for PC titles, many PC gamers are a lot less patient with this sort of bullshit — largely because there's an enormous and active modding community out there more than willing to provide content of a higher quality than Activision's $15 map packs for free. And there aren't many PC games I've played recently where there's a big hole for some DLC — I intend on going back through Mass Effect 2 at some point, so I may feel differently after that, though.

The most frustrating thing I find is that people don't seem to realise or care that they are being taken advantage of. We can complain all we like about Capcom releasing the same game twice in the space of nine months, but we all know that there are enough people out there who will happily part with their cash and give Capcom the sales figures they need to justify rolling out this obnoxious business practice again and again. We can bitch all we like about paying $15 for Call of Duty map packs, but people pay it, again showing Activision that it's Okay to Do This. And we can point our fingers and say L.A. Noire's add-on cases should have been in the game in the first place, but I bet most players picked them all up just out of curiosity if anything, giving Rockstar the green light to do more in the future.

It's refreshing to see that not all of the industry is operating in this way, though. Indie developers are flourishing — and the community is taking to them. Indie RPGs Breath of Death VII and Cthulhu Saves the World along with awesome roguelike Dungeons of Dredmor topped the Steam sales charts on their day of release, and in less than a week on sale BoD/CStW has equalled its sales from a year and a half on Xbox Live Indie Games. Minecraft continues to go from strength to strength. And Frozen Synapse proves more popular than its developers could have ever dreamed.

Right now, I'm thankful that the indies exist, because with every day that passes, each new "teaser reveal", each new embargo, I'm losing more and more respect for the big publishers.

#oneaday Day 542: Irritating Creatures

Everyone has some kind of flying, buzzing, biting, stinging thing that they find particularly annoying. In fact, most flying, buzzing, biting, stinging things are particularly annoying. Spiders skitter around and hide, jumping out when you're in the middle of something and causing you to spill staining drinks all over the place. Wasps buzz around your face repeatedly, muttering "shall I sting you, shall I sting you, shall I sting you?" and then fuck off out of the window. And mosquitoes are completely invisible but you can always hear them.

There are two creatures, though, that are so immensely pointless that their already annoying natures are amplified a billion bajillionfold. They have elements in common, but they're also quite different. They fly, they don't bite or sting and they don't really make much of a noise. But they're infuriating.

I am, of course, talking about the daddy long-legs and the moth. Both follow the immensely annoying pattern of "Ooh! Light! I must fly towards this! Ouch, shit, it's hot! Ooh, light! Ouch! I'm on fire a bit. Maybe I should fly around and bump into things some more. Hey, a TV! That's a light. Maybe I'll sit on it. No, I think I'll fly around and bump into things a bit more."

I mean come on. Seriously. It doesn't help that having a daddy long-legs or a moth fly into your ear when all the lights are off and you're not expecting it is one of the most terrifying things in the world — good luck sleeping after that happens — but really, what is the point of these creatures? Daddy long-legses (well, you tell me a better plural) supposedly possess an incredibly lethal venom but have absolutely no means of administering said venom, making them absolutely completely and utterly pointless. (My evidence for this factoid is, I admit, a Ricky Gervais stand-up show, so I do take this supposed knowledge with something of a pinch of salt. But still.) Unless their big purpose in life is just to repeatedly headbutt television sets and fly into people's ears. If that's not an argument strongly against the concept of intelligent design, I don't know what is.

Now, I'm sure there's a reason for them existing in the whole food chain and whatnot. But if that's the case, can't they please just for one night not fly in through my window and be irritating? That'd be just lovely. I'm pretty sure that the whole food web that Nature has worked out involving these creatures doesn't involve a Hoover as the primary predator.

Or perhaps it does. That'd be weird.

#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 517: Social Peril II: The Periling

As a social network, Facebook is arguably becoming less meaningful — that is, from the perspective of encouraging meaningful interactions with one another. This, I feel, is in part due to how cluttered it is these days — cluttered with people, cluttered with businesses, cluttered with applications. I long for the simplicity of the site as it was when I first joined it, when it didn't even have a chat system and friend requests required you to indicate how you knew the person — kind of what LinkedIn does nowadays, only with people actually talking to each other instead of using phrases like "blueskying" and "monetization".

A fine example comes up if you look at the Facebook Page for any social game, ever. You can pick any random example and this will happen. Look at something the producers of the game say, then look at the community comments. You might have 25% meaningful discussion (a somewhat optimistic estimate — if the game is popular you can reduce that down to less than 5%) and 75% people just going "add me". This also happens on App Store reviews for "multiplayer" (and I use the term loosely) games.

It's not just that, though. Posts on Pages vaguely related to Xbox/PS3 will bring the fanboys for both camps out in force, ranting and raving at each other and not even addressing the point that was made in the original wall post — burying any meaningful discussion amidst the usual spray of bile, hatred and testosterone.

Beyond that, though, a lot of the trouble lies with the changing way people use Facebook nowadays. When it was a simplistic, app-free system, people used it to communicate. People would write a status, other people who knew the original person would comment. People might post a link or a photo, people would comment. Simple, effective. Now, though, with the fact that everyone and his dog has a Share to Facebook button, this simple clarity of communication has been almost completely lost. You get the occasional aberration where a topical post can bloom into an interesting discussion between friends, but soon enough it's lost in the never-ending cycle that is your News Feed, devaluing the interaction until it's gone, forgotten, meaningless.

The simple answer is, of course, to adapt. Realise that Facebook is not about permanence and the long-term, it's about the here, the now, the narcissistic. "This" is happening right now, so you share it. Here's a photo. Here's my new Bejeweled Blitz high score. I'm playing a game with farms in it. I took a quiz to determine which colour from the Dulux range I "am". PAY ATTENTION TO ME.

Facebook's new Messages system doesn't help, either. Muddling your chats in with your actual messages is a dumb idea, because the sort of thing you write in a message is typically lengthier than what you write in a chat. And then it all gets jumbled together, so if you had a message thread with some meaningful information in it followed by a chat with said person about how much you heard they like cock due to whoever just facejacked their profile, then it becomes nigh-on impossible to find anything useful.

I'm not too concerned about the whole thing, though, to be honest. Facebook does what I need it to for now, which is to allow me to share links to my articles and work to people who might be interested or might not have another means of finding out about them, and occasionally proving to be the most reliable means of contacting people. As such, I'll likely keep my profile there, but my usage of the platform is at a bare minimum these days, as I don't feel like it's really for me any more. Twitter, on the other hand, still does everything I need it to and still remains pretty much as pure and clear as it was the day I started using it. Let's hope it stays that way.

(In other news, I had a lovely weekend away, as you may have surmised from that last post. Thank you to Andie for making it happen!)

#oneaday Day 513: Just Cut It Out

The world — particularly the online world — is proving particularly infuriating of late, what with childish hacker collective LulzSec harassing the Internet and now companies via phone, and the earlier news that 2K Games unceremoniously fired their PR company for its head honcho's passionate outburst of frustration at the overly-negative reviews of Duke Nukem Forever. (Yes, he was a tit to talk about blacklisting publications in public. Yes, it likely goes on anyway. But I kind of understand where he's coming from — to have your job being to show genuine (or at least genuine-seeming) enthusiasm for a product then to see the world unceremoniously take a large and steaming dump over it and then revel in how "clever" they're all being with their scathingness must be an awful feeling.)

It's times like this that it's easy to feel like you miss that simpler time when "The Internet" only existed when you plugged it in and endured listening to that horrendous noise of a modem connecting. (Weeeeeeeee-skkrrrrrroooooooo!!!! BEEEOOOOOOWWWWWWWWW KHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH FFFFFFFKKKKKKKHHHHHHHHHHHHH.) But now the Internet is always there, and you can't, it seems, get away from the bad things.

This is, in some ways, a good thing, as everyone is more aware of things that are going on thanks to Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and all manner of other services. But in other ways, it's a bad thing — I recall around the time of the most recent major natural disasters that many commented a feeling of "disaster fatigue" brought about by the constant rolling coverage on TV and the constant stream of articles on the Internet. In many ways, having constant coverage spread out over a course of hours, days or even weeks reduces the impact of something happening — and as a result, the media feels the need to ram it down our throats even more, and so on and so on and so on. It also happens with reality TV shows, with the media going X-Factor/BGT/Big Brother/I'm A Cunt, Please Shoot Me crazy for the few weeks each of those respective shows is cluttering up the airwaves with its offensive stench until everyone is absolutely sick to death of seeing whatever Generic Talentless "Celebrity" X has had for lunch today.

Such is, presumably, the case with LulzSec. They hack someone and highlight their security flaws — that makes a point. But now it's just a case of "HAY WE GONNA KEEP DOING THIS CAUSE IT'S FUNNY". Whatever point they may have once been trying to make, it has been lost amidst some grade-A cuntishness of the highest order. And the frustrating thing — not to mention the thing they're probably enjoying the most — is that the average person, annoyed, upset and frustrated with them, is absolutely impotent, with nothing they can do about it. Of course, you can try reporting it to the Internet Crime Complaint Center, but who's to know if they'll be able to do anything about it?

I suppose the way to deal with it is to follow the advice your primary school teachers gave you when dealing with bullies — just ignore them and they'll stop.

But will they? Perhaps a punch in the testicles will work just as well — perhaps even quicker.

#oneaday Day 144: Superinjunctivitis

I'm not going to pretend to know everything about this footballer/slag business that is all over the news at the minute, and I'm not particularly concerned about said footballer's hilarious attempt to sue Twitter over supposedly breaking his precious superinjunction, because that's like someone suing a sword manufacturer because their hand got cut off by an insane nutter with a sword.

The question that this sort of thing always raises in my mind, though, is "who the bloody hell cares?" This whole situation wouldn't have come about without the public's incessant need for celebrity gossip — vapid nonsense about whatever [insert celebrity first name here so it sounds like you know them] is wearing this week, or whether [insert different celebrity first name here] is going to the shops on Tuesday or Wednesday this week.

A footballer shagged someone who wasn't his wife. Allegedly. This is not news. We all know that footballers are Neanderthal morons who should probably be fitted with chastity belts, so frequently do their dicks turn up in unauthorised places. We also know that anyone who appeared on Big Brother is probably not averse to the idea of selling their story, however vapid and pointless, to the "newspapers" in a desperate attempt to cling on to a bit of their waning fame. Even if said story is "Hey! I shagged a married man! I'm a massive slag!"

It's pissing in the wind, of course, but I really wish that the world could move on from the obsession it seems to have with every little thing that every celebrity, whatever they might be famous for, is up to. People who read Heat magazine need to wake up to the fact that they probably aren't going to ever meet, let alone be friends with whoever is this week's hotness.

You could argue it's escapism. Perhaps true — but why not read a work of fiction instead? Why the need to pry into the private lives of people? I guess it gives people who like to hide in bushes a means of being gainfully employed rather than arrested, but it still strikes me as incredibly obnoxious.

I follow a few celebrities on Twitter and make an effort to watch certain people when they come on TV. But that's it. I have no desire to snoop into their private lives and I certainly don't give a shit who they may or may not be having sex with. That's their business, whether it's an extramarital affair or not. Their life in the public eye should be limited to whatever it is they're famous for, then they should be left alone to deal with their problems in privacy, not subjected to endless flashbulbs.

Of course, I could (and should) just ignore it all. But when some twat who can't keep his pecker in his pants starts taking aim at a service I use every single day for both personal and professional reasons — as an indirect result of our culture's obsession with celebrities? Fuck that. I think I have every right to be pissed off.

So, Ryan Giggs. Kindly stop being a dick. Everyone knows where your penis has been by now, so trying to fight for your right to "privacy" actually strikes me as nothing more than attention-seeking, ironically.

#oneaday Day 140: 21st Century Boy

It's the 21st century. If you grew up in the 20th century like I did, this means that you're officially In The Future, because saying "21st century" sounded like it was a very long way off and not, as it happened, just around the corner.

Since we're officially In The Future, I think there's more than a few pieces of technology that we should probably have mastered by now. And I'm not going to say "hoverboards" because "hoverboards" would be rubbish. I can barely stay upright on a skateboard, and certainly not on rollerskates, so why the fuck would I want to remove the wheels and stand on a sheet of plastic floating in mid-air? No. Fuck hoverboards, and sort this lot out instead:

Pay-and-display machines that don't give change or accept card payments

Seriously. We're living in a digital society where you can pay for things by swiping your phone in front of terminals and yet when you park your car you still need exact change to purchase a ticket? Balls. Fix it.

Computers that don't tell you what the problem is

"An unexpected error has occurred." As opposed to an expected error? WHAT WENT WRONG? And no, I don't want to know the hexadecimal address of the piece of memory where something went wrong because I didn't write the program. I want something in plain English. "Your graphics card is buggered," for example, or "Your hard drive is too full for this program to work effectively."

Microwaves that have a power rating somewhere in between the ratings listed on a packet of food

The microwave here is 800W. Food packaging lists cooking times for 650W, 750W and 850W. Is it too much to ask for microwave manufacturers and those who package food to co-operate a little bit?

Clocks that don't auto-adjust to British Summer Time/Daylight Saving Time/Uzbekistan Testicle Appreciation Time

Changing the clocks is an annoying rigmarole anyway, and when some of the devices in your house do it automatically and others don't, it's a pain in the arse to figure out which is which.

Tiny things that you can't find

Everything should have a phone number or GPS tracking, meaning if you lose your keys, you should be able to phone them and locate them.

Companies who will let you sign up online but require you to phone them to cancel

I'm looking at you, LoveFilm. You were deliciously easy to sign up for, yet cancelling required me to speak to some indecipherable person on a bad line and explain to them that no, I had phoned to cancel so no, I don't want to extend my service or give them my payment information. Let me cancel online. I don't want to speak to other human beings on the phone. I hate the phone.

Companies who insist that all correspondence must be done through the mail

And I'm talking about the paper mail that comes through your letterbox. In this digital world, there's no real excuse for this any more. And while we're on…

Companies who take a week to respond to an email

"We will get back to you within 7 days." Probably with the wrong answer. It takes a few seconds to Google the question I had or to ask the person sitting behind you, to type in your response and to hit Send. Even if you have other people to deal with in the queue in front of me, I doubt it takes a week.

Erm. This may have become a bit more ranty than I intended. Oh well. We're living in the future. These things should be sorted by now. So fix them, world!