The worst thing about Schleck’s chain problem yesterday isn’t that Contador sped past and took the yellow jersey, it’s that it’s being referred to as Chaingate.
I hope there’s some incident in the future involving famous people and a gate causing the majority of journalists to implode.
* The title is the obligatory Simpsons reference
This is my chance to be a less famous Godwin.
Phippen’s Law: As an online discussion, that is directly or indirectly about Ricky Gervais, grows longer, the probability of someone saying “Am I the only person who doesn’t find Ricky Gervais funny?” approaches 1.
I’m liking the iPad so far, it’s better than expected as an eBook reader. It has pluses and minuses over the Sony PRS-5051. One of the minuses is a bug on the font rendering on some, but not all, of my eBooks. The bottom of the g hangs below the page and appears on the next.

And it’s in the correct position as you can see when I take out the bottom/top of the pages.

It’s much more annoying for me than the justified text (at the moment anyway, the iPad’s big enough but it would be crap on the iPhone).
A second issue that all eBook readers have but I was hoping Apple would fix is the crappy way eBooks are sold. See this for and example what I’m on about, I can pay 59p for Doodle Jump or a bunch of other apps on the app store and get it updated free of charge. But if I find a typo, or 100 pages missing, in a book there’s a refund or nothing.
If publishers want to adapt better than the music and film industries surely the best way is to take advantage of the technology. If I see a typo in a printed book I get that it can’t be fixed, but if I’m paying nearly the same2 for an eBook that has DRM, can’t be shared and can’t be sold the least I should get is the words spelt right. Right?
1 if someone releases a 5 inch e-ink without the huge bezel (the 5″ Sony is barely smaller than the 6″) it will be a definite purchase as it will improve the size/weight/readability over the iPad
2 part of this is due to the stupid VAT on software, which includes eBooks, paper books exclude VAT
I was called ‘Sir’ in The Gateway yesterday. Twice. Bugger.

As I said last time “Yay, the new John Swartzwelder book is out”. Again available from Amazon or signed from eBay.
Annoying my copy arrived hours after I left on my 400 mile weekend train journey, I could’ve read it 3 times.
of course I did, you can’t have expected anything else.
As I looked along this image I thought great I’m very trustworthy, then I got to the 16th one.
What is Mario Paint?
In other gaming news I now have an N64 with GoldenEye, Perfect Dark and 3 new in box controllers. Sweet.
Any number of things are wrong with the tory’s comically bad attempts to smear Gordon Brown, here’s a list:
- There’s a lot of actual shit things about New Labour they could talk about (although to be fair to the tories most of these things are tory policy)
- Making me think of Flash Gordon means I’ve got Queen and Brian Blessed stuck on a loop in my head, which is a good thing
- Complaining that a union, which about 4% of voters are members of, has an unfair say in Labour policy, when you’re run by a 1 guy who’s a thieving billionaire scum bag who only cares about increasing his already obscene wealth, is a bit off.
- Oh, and you fucked it up completely:
The internet is great

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