Could there be any better snapshot of the state of our glorious nation than a gallery of fried chicken outlets whose names are ripped off from KFC? (via b3ta) I doubt it. A PhD thesis in the making, I think.

(My faves include Kenssy Fried Chicken as it’s down the road from where I live, Perfect Rooster as I can just imagine the owners going “‘Perfect Chicken’ has been taken - what shall we call it now?” while flipping through a copy of Roget, and FCKF for its sheer gall and “naughty words” value).

Paddy’s staying at Arsenal! Wahoo!

Ahem. While one sporting saga draws to an end, and another opens. Two Greek athletes were demanded to turn up for a drugs test, but instead allegedly fled the Olympic village and then got hurt in a motorbike accident, in a bizarre twist of events. Especially damaging to the Games is the fact that one of them, Kostas Kenteris, is Olympic 200m champion and was due to light the flame in tonight’s opening ceremony. A blow for the Greeks (especially as they confounded everyone and seemed to have got everything built in the nick of time) - is it the start of something that is going to shadow the entire Games?

Never, ever, give the job of writing a vacancy advert to anyone who has had too much coffee.

Mind you, they have been burned before. You have to have hired some pretty bad staff in the past, if you have to stress that “Naming variables after sexual organs is not appropriate”.

I’m quite a big fan of refactoring horrible code and getting it as neat and compact as possible, but this shortcut is a bit too far - it gets rid of the simple, familiar, condition part of the for loop and replaces it with something that you may well have to explain with a comment. And though it works when cycling through DOM elements, it will fail for any data array that contains an element that has value false or null.

However, the article where it came from, Simple Tricks for More Usable Forms, is a handy little read, and well worth looking through. I might have a play with some of the hints and tips in it.

Sat down tonight to watch a rubbish film on Channel 5 (ah, the bliss of weekday nights in), which was called Chain of Command, which stars Roy Scheider as the US President and is about how terrorists take control of US nuclear missiles and wreak havoc (and only one man can stop them). I started watching the film thinking I’d seen something like it before, but it had completely different actors and plot from the film I thought it was. So…I Googled around and it turns out that Roy Scheider has also played President in another film, The Peacekeeper, where, er, terrorists take control of US nuclear missiles and wreak havoc (and only one man can stop them). I mean, talk about being typecast, it’s a long way from being in Jaws. Now he’s permanently playing people who shouldn’t be trusted with a nuclear arsenal.

Wikipedia’s List of Fictional US Presidents (no Dubbya in there, fnar fnar) is worth looking up for more fantasy President trivia - plenty of material for the “Name your favourite fictional President” game. 24’s David Palmer takes it for me, that Bartlett bloke can bugger off.

What’s the biggest threat to the Olympic Games? Corruption? Doping? Nope, it’s actually Pepsi. As Coca-Cola hold exclusive rights to advertising the Olympics, anyone bearing cans of Pepsi or Pepsi-branded clothing will be barred from Olympic venues. And that goes for any good displaying a logo that is not that of one of the offical sponsors, but would most stringently apply to their direct competitors. Ridiculous examples include Visa not allowing anyone to purchase tickets for the Games with a credit card other than their own (presumably in 2008 no-one will be allowed to use cash either), and athletes wearing Nike shoes having to change into Adidas ones when they get onto the podium (and no bare feet either!).

While no big fan of brands and such corporate nonsense, if people want to wear a brand of their choice when visiting a stadium, with a ticket they have paid for, then they should be free to do so. The Olympics are meant to be bringing the excellence of sport to the people - stadia are not some sort of prison where what you wear or say is restricted.

This report by a firm of lawyers offers an interesting history of the recent clampdown on any brand-related dissent (or “ambush marketing”, as it is curiously described - as if people get trapped in the woods and forcibly made to wear corporate logos). This one bit was news to me, though:

In relation to the Rugby World Cup 2003, the New Zealand Rugby Football Union (NZRFU) was unable to deliver ‘clean’ stadia (by which is meant stadia clear of all sponsor advertising) to the event organiser. As a result, the International Rugby Board and Rugby World Cup Ltd had no option but to remove NZRFU’s right to co-host the tournament with the Australian Rugby Union.

Though by the time the event came round, their Australian counterparts didn’t do too well in protecting the official telecommunications sponsor, Telstra:

Stewards at the Telstra Stadium in Sydney confiscated flags bearing the Vodafone logo (the sponsors of the Australian team) […] The tournament organisers have tried to follow the example of the Sydney 2000 Olympics with somewhat less success than at that event, as it has proven to be virtually impossible to prevent a 15,000-strong scrum of England supporters entering a stadium wearing their England shirts emblazoned with the O2 logo.

While it’s almost too easy to accuse the IOC of being corrupted by wealth and in thrall to corporate sponsors (like shooting very fat fish in a barrel), so much so that it’s almost pointless to highlight stupdities like this, it reaches a point where even a cynic like me has to complain about the ridiculousness of it all. In the meantime, as the Games start in Athens this weekend, I will do my best to put the corruption and drug fiascoes behind me and enjoy the finest spectacle of sporting excellence of them all…by turning over and watching the start of the Premiership, that is. :-)

I have finally got round to reading the Hansard Society’s report on political blogging. While it doesn’t come up with any earth-shattering insights or theory, it does neatly sum up the state of the art, and also assesses the impacts political blogs currently have.

The most imporant part is when they ask randomly-selected members of the public to read and assess a particular weblog for two weeks. Deflating the blog revolution mood slightly, it turned out that nearly all of the people they asked to read political blogs said they would not carry on reading them after the trial finished.

The report emphasises how important the comments section of blogs are, and focuses on this as a way of bringing about valuable feedback to MPs and councillors who blog. While this is true, I think that the comment system is not a sustainable one - comments are unthreaded and there is no control over signal/noise ratio. Plus, in many cases (I know for a fact in my case), the blogger has simply not enough time to respond to all of the comments.

While the report focused on politicians and organisations blogging, and the impact it has on communication from representatives to ordinary people, there was little on blogs that work the other way. What would have been interesting was not to get ordinary people to read blogs, but to find individuals or local campaigns who wanted to make themselves heard to make blogs. It would have been interesting to see how the medium worked for such small, isolated, voices, and whether blogs were a tool not just for getting the message across, but also for finding and linking up with like-minded people in other parts of the nation (or indeed, the world). But then that’s not strictly the Hansard society’s remit, I suppose.

The best bit of the report is the afterword by Oxford’s Professor Stephen Coleman, which is a bit more insightful than the main report and has a better appreciation for the potential. The report itself rightly points out the problems with signal/noise ratio - many blogs are incoherent, badly written or just dull. But it doesn’t acknowledge the technology that can help people find the best blogs, whether it be simple blogrolling, or tools like Blogdex and Technorati - the more popular a blog is the more blogs link to it - which is a neat and elegant way of the blogosphere being able to sort wheat from chaff by itself. Coleman’s afterword is the only part that truly explores the potential of blogging over other forms of Internet communication, and the only part that’s worth reading for the theory.

Still, the main report is good for reporting the reality and practicality of political blogs, and the results from ordinary users rather than the blog elite makes for a well-timed reality check, which has implications for blogs (and not just political ones). If you’re a blogger (political or not) it’s worth reading to take that on board, before we all get too obsessed by the supposed revolution we’re spearheading.

Having moved back to London this weekend and then unpacked all my stuff, I’ve been staggered to find out how many books I own (twice as many as I thought), and specifically, how many Dilbert books I own (one of the terrible consequence of geekdom is that everyone buys you them as presents).

Went to a terrible Indian restaurant last night - the Everest on Craven Road near Paddington station. Food ranged from the mundane to the shocking, service poor (when you’re a party of 20 people, one jug of tap water is not enough) and we were ripped off for the beer (they insisted a pint was 660ml, and charged us accordingly).

Today I got curious about how hurricanes are named and so looked it up - I knew they relied on names but didn’t know they were assigned from an alphabetical list, nor that that they rotate between lists on a six-year basis. Nice to know there is a ‘Chris’ on the list, though some are a bit unsuitable - ‘Flossie’ is hardly a name you’d associate with something so destructive.

Oh, and have a word of the day - ampelography: the science of identifying grape varieties (usually by looking at the leaves).