adoption curve dot net

I have problems getting my head around the logic of putting wifi hotspots in McDonald restaurants, or to be precise I have problems getting my head around the charging structure. GBP6 for 60 mins strikes me as being expensive enough to make me think twice, especially if I have to be organised enough to plan far enough ahead to buy credits.

And the idea of lingering in a McDonalds to check my email isn’t something that appeals – I’m not sure what the atmosphere of stale frying fat and spilled burger does to the insides of the average laptop, but it can’t be good.

which reminds me of the occasion when I came as close as I’m ever going to get to being thrown out of a Kentucky Fried Chicken. I was standing in a queue in (I think) Llandudno after going there with a group from university for a radio rally (electronically-geeky car boot sale for the uninitiated), and finding that the only place open for any kind of semi-edible purchase was a KFC. The woman in front of me in the queue asked for a family bucket, and the person standing next to me wondered out loud what you would do with the bucket afterwards. Without putting brain into gear, I suggested that it was to throw up into after eating the contents, causing the potential chicken-purchasor to turn around and ask if I was normally in the habit of trying to put people off their food. Sometimes I just can’t help myself, because I made some reply about how it didn’t matter, KFC didn’t sell food. At which point the manager intervened, and it was only the fact that if I’d been thrown out he’d have lost the half-dozen-or-so sales from the rest of the group that allowed me to get away with it…

The BBC reports that Beagle 2 is dead, which is all the more depressing for the fact that the NASA probe landed (bounced) successfully…

A couple of firsts received recently – an email from an AOL address that wasn’t spam, that announced that this site is a googlewhack for ‘terracotta’ and ‘roofribs’. My first thought was something along the lines of ‘how on earth did I manage to get ‘terracotta’ and ‘roofribs’ onto the same page’, followed closely by ‘if I post this entry up, there’ll be two pages with terracotta and roofribs, so does that mean it’s no longer a googlewhack?’

I knew it was going to be a mistake, thinking to myself that Pop Idol and Celebrity Wifeswap marked the lowest nadir of TV formats – shattered is the format that exposes the mistake.

Presumably the format was conceived by someone who had themselves just stayed awake for seven days – hallucinations being one of the side-effects of long-term sleep deprivation, it’s just possible that it seemed like a good idea at the time. But then presumably everyone involved in the entire commissioning process must have stayed awake for a while, or have been imbibing columbian snow long enough for sanity to have been suspended completely. Quite apart from the ethics of messing with the potential for long-term psychological damage, since when have tired people made for interesting visual images?