JoeJag :: Just Another Geek

Glasgow’s answer to Jack Bauer

Every now and again someone comes along who deserves a knighthood. So I present to you Glasgow’s answer to Jack Bauer… John Smeaton.

This is the story of a man who thanks to the smoking ban was outside the airport terminal and took it upon himself to tackle terrorists carrying molotov cocktails.

What is his message to the Al Qaeda? “Glasgow doesnae accept this..This is glasgow…we’ll set about you”

I can’t wait to get my tshirt!

Full interview:

Shambles? More like natural selection

I spent this last weekend at the SECC and numerous parties to watch/celebrate the election results. Most importantly because my girlfriend (and now blogger) was elected to represent the SNP for Glasgow council.

The story you probably heard the election being declared a shambles, mainly by the same media outlets that were calling for a Labour victory. However, as I was actually at the count I was able to create my own opinion on how the proceedings went.

The main issue here is the amount of spoiled ballots. Leading up the election every single newspaper in Scotland had a supplement or article saying how the voting system works, tv programmes including the news had stories on how the voting system works. There’s even people at the polling station asking you if you understand how it works, failing that the top of the ballot paper itself tells you how it works. The case is that if you don’t understand how it works then you can cast an eye over at Darwin and see his natural selection working again. If you are too stupid to figure out how to vote or ask then you don’t deserve a vote as your opinions are probably as incompetent as you are.

Just for you readers who aren’t in Scotland, here’s how in works. You are voting for 3 different types of system. One First Past the Post, One Proportional Representation and One Single Transferable Vote. Understanding the underling mechanics of these systems is optional (Parliament here, Council here). All you need to know is what to tick. For the first 2 you put an ‘X’ next to your favourite candidate. For STV you number them in order from 1..n in order of your preference.

Behold the Parliment complexity!
Behold the Council complexity!

Despite all this education in the media you still got people messing it up in comedy ways. Some people just put numbers all across everything messing up all there ballot papers (remember 100,000 ballot papers divided by 3 is actually 33,000 people not 100,000). Some people put ‘X’s next to their candidates on the STV sheet (so over voting). Some people wrote the candidates number positionally on the STV sheet instead of by number of preference.

Everyone who was at the ballot counting at the SECC thought the system was shit hot. It worked by taking your normal paper ballots and scanning them all. Anything which the system isn’t 100% sure on gets put over to a team of people who then manually view the problem vote and decide what course of action to take. The best part is that it’s setup so you are encouraged to debate with them what the hell the person was thinking at the time.

This allows you to see some comedy attempts at voting. My favourite ballots had something written on them such as:

• Wrote a new box saying “Peace and Happiness Party”
• Put a Vote next to Conservative then put a smiley face next to it saying “only joking”, then spoilt their ballot
• Comedy Spelling mistakes such as “None Wortie of my vote” and “Waisted Vote”

I must of seen over a 1,000 spolit papers and every single one of them was someone who couldn’t figure out how to vote properly. This was no fiasco; just natural selection applied to votes.

Do you want the bad news or the good news first?

I got a letter from Virgin Media (who bought out NTL) telling me my broadband is going up from £35 to £37 a month. I managed to quickly develop the WTF look on my face at this point. Then I read the next line….

As of May this year VirginMedia customers are getting 20MBb down and 768kbps up.

If ADSL2 doesn’t get rolled out by the end of this year I’d expect all the cool kids to flock to cable (who can get it).

TV Pro

Hello my dear readers,

Rejoice for today is a great day as today I may introduce you to a brilliant service that may even save you torrenting. Yes, I did take the holy name in vain, but for good reason. Downloading before watching is so early 00ties.

I don’t mean to put a plug in for just one reader, but it also has something he would like (though arguably owns!).

I’m off to watch the Life On Mars I missed on Tuesday

I promised to my wife and children

About this time last year most of the years best albums were out I felt. This year we’ve had a good showing from Bloc Party, Arcade Fire and now I’d like to introduce Cold War Kids. Imagine if Razorlight didn’t suck. This is how they would sound:

Cold War Kids - We Used To Vacation