alex.mullr.net/blog

McDonalds just doesn’t seem to get it. In the UK, specifically London (and possibly elsewhere) they’ve just given all their "restaurants" a facelift, changing the colour and material from tacky red and yellow to what looks like green wood. Yes, they do look nicer – they don’t give you quite the cornea pain they used to. But the fact is that consumers are starting to realise (I hope) that the quality of the food is pretty far below decent.

Please, McDonalds, please improve the actual meals as well. It’s badly needed, and I think we’ve got to a point where people are willing to pay a little bit more for it (see: Nandos).

This Guardian article from the beginning of July this year mentions the redesign. Fact is, I’ve only seen it happening round where I live in the last week or so. I haven’t been in for a nice long time, so Marianne Barriaux can probably describe the interior better than I can…

A dark green or black facade replaces the trademark bright red and yellow one, armchairs, low-hung trendy lights, quirky designs and different types of seating areas are all an attempt to attract a more discerning customer.

The image is from Knebworth Chap (website) on Flickr, under a creative commons attribution license. That branch of McDonalds is in King’s Cross.

Sorry to steal the name of a fantastic Mac software site, but that’s what this post has to be. There’s been so much Apple stuff happening over the last few days that I haven’t written about.

Leopard was released last Friday, the 26th. People really seem to love it, with the exception of a few install problems. I played on it at the Regent Street store (which was absolutely crazy on Friday evening, by the way), but don’t ask me for an opinion. Using a MacBook with all the RAM it can take (2 gigs), and a 2.16GHz processor it was incredibly snappy – that’s probably a clean (erase) install, but still. It’s pretty, it’s new, and it’s made by Apple… of course I’ll be buying it eventually.

More to the point, for me at least, is that I just discovered Crucial are selling 2GB of RAM for my MacBook for only £34, including P&P – that seems incredibly cheap, so it’s another thing to add to the list.

And went to MacLive Expo at Olympia on Friday morning – saw some fantastic things, including a demo of Vertus’ Fluid Mask, Wacom’s graphics tablets (refreshing seeing somebody who actually knows what they’re doing with Photoshop) and Fujitsu’s ScanSnap scanner – which is crippled in the hardware to prevent one device from being used across Mac and Windows, by the way. Finally, meeting the folks from RealMac Software, who make the fantastic RapidWeaver. Oh, and a demo from Microsoft of Office 2008 – even though all the demo machines they had sitting around were running Office 2004, so nobody got to play with it except this guy.

A fantastic day, and some pretty nice times for Apple at the moment. That was pretty full of links – I love you Google, don’t do something to me that you’ll regret.

It’s getting harder and harder to find stuff online that actually makes me smile to myself. This just showed up in a quick look at the public timeline on Twitter:

J’ai froid aux pieds… C’est où, le plugin “chaussettes chaudes” pour Firefox?

And yes, fine, I guess I am easily amused. Whatever…

More to come on this, but TorrentFreak and the BBC both have articles up already. Developing since about 8am UK time today.

A 24-year-old man from Middlesbrough was arrested on Tuesday morning.

The IT worker was led from his home in the town’s Grange Road and is being questioned on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud and infringement of copyright law.

Suspicion of conspiracy to defraud? Really??

Interesting that every article so far has said that the servers were confiscated by Dutch police a week ago – erm, the site was working fine after that…

I need to form an opinion, I guess – to quote somebody on a forum, who sums me up pretty perfectly

i’ve never felt such a horrible feeling over something on the internet.

To expand on what’s happened since the 23rd October (it’s now Sunday the 28th):

Most of the active members have reconvened at another online forum, set up specifically for discussing the current situation. People are creating and uploading videos to YouTube. In short, this community isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. And based on the fact that the original OiNK index page is now showing a message about waffles (what The Pirate Bay did the last time they brought back a bittorrent tracker), it might even be coming back.

A quick post on how ridiculous my daily sleeping schedule has become:

• Wake up at 6:30 to get to school
• Get home in the afternoon and sleep from about 6 until 11
• Spend from eleven in the evening until about 2 or 3am doing all the stuff I should’ve been doing the rest of the time
• Sleep from 3 through till 6:30

The best part – I’m still getting about eight hours sleep a night (well, a day) so technically I shouldn’t be tired. Practically, I’m absolutely shattered.

The news story I never want to hear again: Children face ‘intense pressure’. Let me be very clear that my being tired is not at all the fault of pressure from school, and help the first person who says it is. For now, let’s just blame the web and leave it at that.

The most ridiculous part – this is habit now, and if I want to break it, effort will be required. Guess I’m lucky that there’s no school for the next two weeks, so I can sleep whenever I like. That’ll have to fit in around me redesigning the blog to make it look less WordPress-y.

Today somebody asked me why I don’t set updates to twitter.com so that only my friends can read them, and I just thought up a satisfactory answer – which a few people I know won’t agree with. Online privacy is nonexistent for me. It always has been, and it’s not a big deal. The fact is that as soon as that message is made semi-public, anybody can actually see it. It doesn’t take much for a friend to show his phone to somebody else, or forward on an email.

The great story I’m reminded of is a Microsoft employee who sent an unpleasant message to a colleague, protected by some feature in MS Office to prevent copying and pasting. The receiver took out his mobile phone, took a picture of the message on the screen and sent it back via MMS. Unfortunately I can’t find a link to back it up, but I’m sure it’s out there somewhere.

As a fantastic side-note, it’s half past four in the morning and I’m in an unfamiliar house, pretty much on my own. My two friends are “occupied”, so I plan on enjoying the morning (after blogging of course, which was the obvious first choice). Hope everyone else got more sleep than I did.

Interesting to see the types of pages that we (people from our IP) vandalised on Wikipedia over the last two and a half years:

2005 – Arsenal FC, The Musketeers, Wham!
2006 – Vitamin D, Retinol, Domitian, List of Star Wars diseases, Awo, Guild Wars, Nick Ross, Jason, Berlin Blockade, Photoresistor, HOAC, Australia, Care Bears, Lake District, EU
2007 – Kitsune, Domestic Goat, Indian Standard Time, Polyphemus, Cyclops, Calcium in biology, Magnesium in biology, Root, Copper (II) Sulfate, Battle of Salamis, Greece, Griffon Hovercraft, Maginot Line, Testaccio, Chris Scott (cricketer), Weasel Thomas, Carbon fiber, Spectrometer, River Eea, David Beckham

Conclusion: it’s got worse over the last few years, but we’re still vandalising articles about footballers that we don’t like. And of course, this school wouldn’t be complete without vandalising articles on vitamins, elements and compounds – what the hell were they thinking? I’d be interested to know if there’s anybody we haven’t offended yet…

Which button do I press for “not really…”?

Just got this buying an album from Amazon’s MP3 service – looks like they “fixed” the bug where people outside the US could buy music:

We are sorry…

We could not process your order because of geographical restrictions on the product which you were attempting to purchase. Please refer to the terms of use for this product to determine the geographical restrictions.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

Don’t worry Amazon, no inconvenience to me… guess I’ll have to think of somewhere else to get my music from.

Oh look at that, iTunes doesn’t have the full album. eMusic have it, but I’m not signing up for a subscription. And Napster have it, but it’ll be a cold day in hell when I buy WMA DRM’d music. Fucking ridiculous, excusing my language. I want to give you my money, please take it from me…

Yours Sincerely,

A very pissed off (but $8.90 richer) Alex

Now I’m wondering whether Facebook profiles are destined to look like this forever: