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

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.

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

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.

In other gaming news I now have an N64 with GoldenEye, Perfect Dark and 3 new in box controllers. Sweet.

• 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:
  • Congratulated themselves for doing a great job before the shit hit the fan (and even if it hadn’t there’s only 617 people signed up)
  • Didn’t understand how twitter, or html injection worked
  • Caused a funny graph to be made
  • and got a torygraph stooge to say it was teh hax0rs

The internet is great