70cities blog

I've been on holiday!

Yes. Hence my silence recently. There's been a much-needed break in the wilderness, away from all things technological and busy. It's been wonderful. Now I sit in a plush hotel in Leeds, soaking up the free wi-fi as we made the sensible decision to break the journey back to London in two and meet up with some old friends - which was wonderful. I'm full of eggs benedict, good coffee and Frosties. Now it's time to hit the road and get back home.

I'm so behind on everything it's pointless trying to catch up on it all. I even gave up halfway through reading all my usual webcomics; somehow, daily content doesn't work so well when trying to read a lot of it in one go.. maybe I need to look at one of those webcomic reading apps I hear people talking about.

From an email I just received inviting me to apply for tickets to bunch of new TV shows:

"***COMING SOON*** THE KATIE PRICE & PETER ANDRE CHAT SHOW"

Arrrrrrgh! The death of reason is finally upon us. Make it stop!

So the Adblock saga that's been rumbling along for a while is finally reaching a peak, with people cottoning on to the fact that it's potentially (in theory) damaging to the very revenue streams that make the Web 2.0 world so tasty, supple and pliant. So much so that you've even got mechanisms for sites to block Adblock-enabled Firefox browsers.

This is a bit nuts, no? To me it smacks of classic internet kneejerkery. Where's the evidence that all these bottom lines are being eroded? There isn't any - this is all supposition and FUD at the moment.

Adblock, and browser plugins like it, came about because web advertising had become so intrusive, disruptive and unruly that the hacker community came up with a solution. You very rarely hear anyone bitching about Google Adsense ads, as they're both textual and usefully contextual, and anyone who wants to argue that 200Kb Flash movies choking my bandwidth and sprouting both alongside, above and directly over the content users are trying to access is in any way a good idea needs their head thoroughly scrutinised. The very existence of adblocking tools should be sending a very clear message to web advertising companies - we don't want to be beaten over the head with your shit. Plus, do you really want to be engaging in a incremental bunfight with the hacker community, either side progressively defeating the other's measures? Is it really a good use of everyone's time?

Being stung on the lip by a wasp fucking hurts. I know this, because it happened to me this evening.

Thank $deity for the Internets though, because hundreds of unverified old-wives' remedies were merely a judicious Google away. It's now much better, thanks - lemon juice really is the business for just about every random problem or malady that can curse your life.

Owwwww.

I'm going to try and make more of an effort to post here, but I don't think one of those '10 ways to get more stuff done NOW!' blogs is the way to go (not least because I'm fundamentally very lazy) but I'm a senior software engineer and I ought really to have more to say about what I've encountered over the years working on the internets than I have in the past.

Then again, there's no shortage of self-appointed pundits willing to spout grindingly obvious platitudes about software and software engineering - why should I add myself to their ranks? Can I add anything of worth? Only time will tell.