Category: Comment

Better off, but at a cost

Wednesday March 12th 2008

According to the BBC’s budget calculator we’re going to be about £350 better off next year, assuming things stay the same. They wont, of course, and I don’t exactly put much faith in these off the cuff budget-o-matic things.

Skimming through what the 2008 budget has to offer and it’s clear, too, that Labour have only paid lip service to the environment. It’s been well documented that the aviation industry gets massive tax breaks on fuel, while the railway industry takes a hit, and I had hoped that something might be done to level the playing field. Not so.

The car tax changes are a cop-out, too. Why not hammer the gas guzzlers with road tax hikes?, rather than the poxy £950 “showroom tax” that’ll most likely be absorbed by dealer discounts or cash back incentives.

Environmentally, it looks like they bottled it – either that or they’re saving their big (false) green promises for election year. Change, as ever, happens at glacial pace.

budget, environment

Unspecific Gravaty

Wednesday March 12th 2008

I noticed this morning that my Gravatar icon in the comments isn’t working, which is odd – it was working fine yesterday.

So I went to the Gravatar Management area on Gravatar.com to check that everything was as it should be, but found that the hash that they were expecting – 28cd6950f10df8311388f3edb13f70be – was different from the one that was being generated at my end – 4d91675dc4500f3dfa028bd776450422. How very strange, I thought. I tried using different methods to generate the hash of my email address to see if that would help – switching between md5, md4, and other variants by way of the hash function, but none of them were generating the expected hash value.

I don’t think anything has changed at my end, so I’m going to assume that something is going down at the Gravatar.com end to cause it. I thought about removing the Gravatar images for the time being, but decided I’d leave them in place in the hope they fix it soon-ish.

Weird. 😐

// Update at 23:00

And just a few hours later the Gravatars are working again, yet the generated hash hasn’t changed at this end.

Must have been gremlins. 😉

Flickring on

Saturday February 16th 2008

This morning I was clearing space on my PSP’s memory stick, deleting folders of images because I knew they were safe on Flickr. It was only later when I visited my Flickr account on the PC that I found my Pro account had lapsed. A few years back this would have been a disaster – they were in the habit of clearing out people’s lapsed accounts, although fortunately this hasn’t been the case for a while now.

I’d only signed up for a year’s Pro account when I first started using Flickr, as I didn’t know how much use I’d make of it, but over the course of 2007 it’s been great to save and organise batches of images there. It’s the fact they’re safe there, too, that makes it well worth the money – I could have a total hard drive failure on my PC at home and lose stuff that hasn’t been backed up. Yet my pictures at Flickr are safe and sound and available whenever I need them – I can even view a Flickr slide show on the big TV downstairs by visiting Flickr with my PS3’s web browser, so I don’t even need to have them on my PS3’s hard drive..

So this time round I signed up for two year’s worth of Pro account, and I’m going to try and make full use of it by taking a load more pictures. 🙂

2 Comments