Archive for March, 2007

Not something I have to worry about, being on or around my 360th day of giving up, but something which apparently vexes the minds, hearts, and souls, of many of the good people of Britain, or at least those who have felt sufficiently moved to add their comments to the BBC’s “Have your say” page for the imminent total ban on smoking anywhere except in your own private bubble. Does that make me sound biased? I’m not really - both sides of the argument are too heavily populated with self-righteous, pompous egotistical idiots for me to want to sympathise with anyone on this one, so I’m going to play the smug outsider card and ‘observe’ the ‘debate’.

10.

Everyone in this country has a perfect right to inhale tobacco smoke anywhere and at any time. However, they have absolutely no right to exhale that smoke.

Ooh, get you and your satire!

9.

The one good thing about this ban must be that it will be almost impossible for find enough non-smoking “celebrities” to make another Big Brother. Since the house there is also a workplace for the film crews and people are being paid to be there, it must be classified as a workplace and hence smoking cannot be allowed.

Yeah! Right on! Smoking ban = no more reality TV!

8.

i think that if they ban smoking in the pubs then alot of the pubs will have to close down due to people staying home therfore there will be a lot of publicans out of work this is suppose to be a free country isnt it?

i like commas and other sort of punctuation things dont you think there useful

7.

What a welcome relief to many of us who end up with our hair, body and clothes smelling like an ashtray after a night out.
Hair, yes. Clothes, definitely. Body? Um… maybe try pulling a non-smoker next time?

6.
Smoking is bad. So is drinking. So are fatty, salty foods. They should like, build a place in each town were you can go and like, drink, smoke and eat steaks, chips and pork scratchings if you want. Maybe like, call it a pub?- oh my God!!

This might hurt, but sometimes you need to hear the truth. You are unfunny.

5.

I agree with the smoking ban as I am a non-smoker have to breathe in second hand smoke wherever I go. I know it is slowly killing me. The government has enforced this ban just now to help cut down the number of people dying of cancer and to save money on health costs, but if more people stop smoking where is the government going to get its money from as the tax on cigarettes is very high and brings in a hell of a lot of money - £10,500,000,000 a year - which this country really needs.

…and breathe (smoke-free, naturally…)

4.

Yep. Smoking sucks (!) in every way you can think of. It serves no positive purpose. Those involved in its production could find other things to do. Consider - if there never was any tobacco, those people would be doing something else! It is antisocial and unhealthy. I wish I could give up something as expensive as smoking!!!

Hmm. Ever thought of taking up smack?

3.

What civil rights??? How many people will leave the pubs & Clubs now!!!! I ONLY Smoke occasionally and now that right has been taken away, looks like i’m stoppin g in!!!!

We’ll miss you.

2.

I work and pay taxes I am now being dictated to.
Well done! Now quit whining, and get back to work…

Number 1

Top of the pile, though, without question, is this gem. I don’t think I even need to add a footnote…
What’s next? Banning gay bars? Banning Christians from preaching in the street? Seems to me the only people who think a full smoking ban is a good thing is non smokers. The only anti-Christians are non Christians. The only anti-gay are non-gay. HELLO? Sound familiar? Pattern emerging here! No way am I going to start shouting “Heil, Cabinet!”

In the most unexpected of places…

Church Sign

Sorry about that. Not sure what happened - I’m waiting for the verdict from my host on what triggered this site being redirected to another domain.

And sorry to all those who went through the hassle of registering on the other site, only for me to take down the converter. It won’t be there in that form for long, so I didn’t too many people wasting time and registering.

Cheers,

Neil

Sorry for the lack of up front communication, folks, but I decided I had to try restricting the hand converter to registered users to see if it would help solve any of the crushingly awful performance problems you’ve all been experiencing lately. At the same time, I’ve taken the comments off the page, so for the time being there isn’t a way of getting touch with me, but that’s ok, because:

  • I know what the problems are
  • I have a list far longer than both my arms put together, even if I stretch really hard
  • You all think I’m ignoring them anyway

Well, 1 and 2 are certainly true. 3 is questionable - I really do plan to work on this again soon, but it’s kind of my third job out of three at the moment, and the pay seems better on the other two, so that’s where I’m focussing.

But to whet your appetites, I’ve done a little work on a super-duper version of the converter under Drupal. If you don’t know, Drupal is a CMS that’s a bit like Mambo and Joomla, only better. I’m having to learn as I go, but so far it’s shaping up to be pretty cool, with configurable options stored in your user profile, rather than stored as cookies, there will be fancy ways of reporting problem hands, and at some point I hope to expand it into a proper tournament or session replayer. Or something.

The possibilities are not quite endless, but we can dream. Perhaps I’ll even canvass all your thoughts, all you good users, and see what you’d like done.

Laters.

Apologies for any inconvenience it causes, everyone, but I decided to add a requirement that users are logged in to this site to use the hand converter. There was enough of a chance, I felt, that it would bring an improvement in performance, and that would make you all happier, so you wouldn’t mind the one-time extra hassle of registering.

Don’t worry, though, I have no interest in any of your personal details, and I don’t know anyone that does, so your email addresses are safe with me.

If I can figure out a way of putting a poll up here, I’ll canvas opinions on whether there’s been an improvement. If not, I’ll have to take more drastic action like restricting the number of hands that can be processed at one time, or crikey try to write better code. I hope it doesn’t come to that or we could all be stuffed…