Category: Little Voices archive entries

Warning: LONG list…

Legend:
Bold – I’ve done it.
(in parenthesis) – my comments
Read More

(Sorry if that makes you hum the stupid song for weeks – it’s just a fitting title.)

I don’t know if I mentioned the fact that I started scrapbooking? Well, anyway, while looking for info on scrapbooking I found scrapping.no, a forum for Norwegian scrappers, where I’ve been more or less active since April. When one of the other girls in Oslo suggested a purely social meetup (as opposed to a scrapping workshop) I thought “Why not?” and went along. And boy am I glad I did. It turned out that one of the other forum members is a girl I used to know but lost tough with a few years back. We met while we were both studying undergraduate English – she was studying in Oslo and I was, of course, in Trondheim, but we both went to the Norwegian Study Centre at York for three weeks and hit it off. This was back in 1995 (in the dark ages) and we managed to stay in touch for a while but due to excessive wanderlust on both our parts, keeping up with adresses became too much of a challenge at some point. However, great was the joy of meeting again so fortuitously, and we both vowed tol make more of an effort this time.

Another example of it being a small world is that Donna has suddenly taken up knitting in a big way, apparently because of this book. Which, incidentally, is also on my bookshelf, mainly because it contains a pattern for pippi stockings created by Theresa. Which all struck me as rather funny.

I have a feeling I’ve done this quiz before, but I can’t find the results, so I’m posting these anyway…

Wackiness: 10/100
Rationality: 4/100
Constructiveness: 16/100
Leadership: 10/100

You are a SEDF–Sober Emotional Destructive Follower. This makes you an Evil Genius.

You are extremely focused and difficult to distract from your tasks. With luck, you have learned to channel your energies into improving your intellect, rather than destroying the weak and unsuspecting.

Your friends may find you remote and a hard nut to crack. Few of your peers know you very well–even those you have known a long time–because you have expert control of the face you put forth to the world. You prefer to observe, calculate, discern and decide. Your decisions are final, and your desire to be right is impenetrable.

You are not to be messed with. You may explode.

Of the 54105 people who have taken this quiz since tracking began (8/17/2004), 14.4 % are this type.

But not anymore. Apparently, Google requested Gunnar Bråthens report on Radisson SASs use of doorway sites in English, and after deliberating, have now banned the relevant URLs from their search results. Check it out.

(Thanks to Timmy for alerting me to the development.)

I’ve just received a sp*m message (fake rolex, anyone?) where the “from:” address was “%RND_FEMALE_FIRST_NAME %RND_LAST_NAME (denxoyxj@%RND_FREEMAIL)”, which made me smile and just goes to show how little point there mostly is to bouncing these.

On that note, if anyone knows of a program that does basically the same thing as mailwasher but lets me blacklist things without insisting on bouncing them, I’d be grateful. Especially if it’s free.

Not only has Kerry conceeded to Bush, but I also have to face the fact that I agree with a headline in The Mirror. How can 59,054,087 people be so dumb?

Apparently.

You’re… Hornby Set. You are the indirect descendent of the knit-your-own-organic muesli, Ban the Bomb, bra-burning, fruit tea drinking, hairy-legged, pseudo-cosmic Ice Storming intellectual underachievers who mooned hopelessly through the years 1975-1983. You read The Guardian, and identify with the poor and the excluded. You can’t understand why everyone else doesn’t feel guilty about globalisation. But you’re not exactly staunch.

Which is probably pretty accurate. More here. Quiz here. Via.

Robin, your result is Circle Master!
Cheers! You’re the spirit of the night that is Circle Master – the mysterious and magical potion from Gloucestershire. Harry Potter! Pah! Just some speccy brat with a silly scar. You wouldn’t mind the owl though. You represent everything that is both fun and mischievous in life and you often do naughty things in crop fields at night, but no one has caught you yet. You may be spicy and bittersweet but you have a heart of gold, er, green. Organic throughout you go about your mischief in open toed sandals and after a few pints of your 4.7% grog you may even find yourself dancing naked in public places. You would never hurt a spider, but would have no qualms about throwing a rotten egg at a politician. This makes you a very popular, if sometimes misunderstood refreshment.

As Martin points out, you need to register to get the test results, but you can make the info up.

This is a question it’s well worth considering the answers to before declaring to the media that you’re not breaking them…

Radisson SAS, a Scandinavian-owned hotel chain, has 700 doorway pages – pages designed only to boost its ratings in search engines like Google – Gunnar Bråthen, writer of e-guiden, has discovered. This, though clearly a form of cheating, is fair enough, except Google does not like it and works actively to root out companies who use this strategy – they encourage users to report this practice so that offending sites can be filtered out of their search results. Now, Radisson SAS may still wish to use doorway pages, but they might face a Google ban, and this is where the story becomes interesting. Martin Creydt, administrative director of Radisson SAS Norway has been contacted and has this to say on the subject:

We take the criticism seriously and will go through the matter again from a legal point of view. But our IT department in Denmark does not agree with Google on what ought to be allowed. (…) It would not be beneficial to be banned from Google, but Google cannot one-sidedly define the rules for internet use and search engines. There are a lot of other players we could cooperate with, but it’s clear that Google is important.

(Emphasis mine.) Oh, so you don’t agree with Google on what ought to be allowed? Well, tough luck. It might not have occurred to you, Mr Creydt, or to your IT department, for that matter, but Google happens to have every right to define their own rules – they actually own their own search engine, you know. I would suspect they couldn’t care less about what you, or even the legislators, consider to be fair rules for internet use and search engines. THEY DECIDE. And once they’ve decided, the users decide which search engine they prefer to use. That’s how it works. If that means you don’t want to play, well boo-hoo for you…

(Coverage in digi.no, pointed out to me by Martin.)

Which File Extension are You?

(Via)