Marc Palmer

I’m against censorship, but we all know controls are needed when it comes to children. In fact in the UK at least, advertising regulations for ads targeted at children are getting increasingly strict - especially when it comes to junk foods. We are after all becoming nations full of obese children doomed to an early death, according to many reports.

I was in London the other day and noticed a lot of Cadbury chocolate adverts for Dairy Milk bars, along the lines of  "There’s a glass and a half of milk in every bar". This is a very disturbing ploy for which the ASA should be punishing Cadbury – effectively trying to sell their awful chocolate (which it has been argued can’t be called chocolate due to the high level of fats relative to cocoa) as a "healthy" food on the basis that most people, incorrectly, believe cow’s milk to be a healthy food product.

The conspiratorial side of me wondered if there was a joint promotion going on between the Dairy Council and Cadbury to do what is effectively promotion of both products.

Instead, I happened on a link of sorts. Yahoo appear to be in the beta testing phase of a new service called Yahoo Kids! One presumes this is to protect children from all the potentially offensive and/or insanely boring parts of Yahoo – or you could argue its to collate as much marketing information on children as possible… there is a caveat at the footer of their pages about collection personal information.

Anyway, I found the Food and Eating section. Oh the horror. Take out a couple of entries from oxfam about chocolate and tea, and you have direct links to:

• 4 (yes you read correctly, four) Cadbury chocolate sites, presumably "educational" in nature
• The British Egg Information Service – hey we all need more cholesterol
• Kellogg’s – those bastions of sweet cereals
• A site selling sweets
• The Dairy Council’s website – cow’s milk is for… cows
• Ribena – mmm more sugar
• Walkers – makers of crisps (who notably -do- make unsalted crisps)

There’s a couple of minor information sites there too, but that’s the section so far. No doubt Yahoo! will say it is early days yet, but I have this one question:

How long will it be before advertising regulations on children’s junk foods are extended to places where children will be given false "educational" material on the web?
You can bet this tactic is in use elsewhere on the web, where frankly pathetic people are paid to find sites like this to list links to the "educational" content they are providing to suck kids into their products.

The Grails team has been hard at work testing and polishing of release 0.5

The release notes are ready to go and everything’s looking good for a release tomorrow.

Jason Rudolph tagged me with this "5 things non-geeky we don’t know about you" blog viral concept. It’s taken me a while to get some time to see to this.

So here we go…

1. I love energetic/complex music and have very wide tastes. Death Metal (Strapping Young Lad, Mastodon, Cephalic Carnage, Death…), Progressive Rock (Gentle Giant, Jethro Tull) , Skacore (Voodoo Glow Skulls), Qawwali (Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan), eastern European folk music (Marta Sebestyen), contemporary classical (Steve Reich, Steve Martland) and even some unusual pop (Cardiacs, William D. Drake) and even Outkast. However I tend to like only a few artists from each genre that really do it for me. "Metal" does it for me the most though, and now I am the "old guy in the corner" at metal gigs as this passion won’t ever leave me, which is going to get strange when I’m 60 (I’m only 34 now!).
2. I have two wonderful daughters, both born into this world naturally, at home in our living room in birth pools, medication- and intervention-free thanks to the dedication of my wife. They are healthy, full of vitality – at times it seems like too much!
3. I am passionate about organic food, food production issues and environmental ethics and sustainability. This is a large part of the reason for me being a vegan.
4. I’m a "flunkie". I left school at the age of 16 as I did not like what conventional educational offered me, and my computer programming skills were already far beyond what the system could give me… my path was already predetermined. Anyway, that means no science degree, no further/higher education etc. Funnily enough I feel like I’ve turned out OK, and have avoided a whole load of pointless examinations and assessments and student loan debts.
5. I love helping people and organisations improve working methods and IT stuff, but sadly the job description of "someone who will help you organize your sh*t" isn’t often found, so I work for myself as a freelance contractor as I have done for 10 years now.

Somehow I don’t think the world will change for me revealing this information, but hey…

Monday morning circa 11am I call Apple support to complain about my "gritty" trackpad, off-center iSight, and blurry screen in my new MacBook, 7 days after it arrived.

The next day I have my new replacement MacBook around 2pm! Incredible. The TNT courier even took away the previous MacBook even though I’d only spoke to them an hour or two previously suggesting that they combine the pickup with delivery.

The MacBook is better than the one before, iSight positioned properly (and the support guy said they would have swapped it out just for that problem alone).

However there is no improvement in the screen at all. i.e. MacBook C2D screens appear to have very bad pixel lag and the backlight is too bright at the bottom and too dark at the top, leading to contrast/saturation problems. To see the "true" colours at the bottom of the screen, you have to slouch down about 6 inches and have the screen folded all the way back.

The vertical viewing angle is also terrible. I just find it so hard to believe they put these screens out like this. Unless you move your head to a specific, uncomfortable position for example, you cannot see the alternation white/blue background colours behind download items in Safari’s download window – they all apear almost white.

So Apple Support 10/10, Apple QA 0/10