I’m off on my hols next week and the place we’re staying doesn’t have internet access!!! Spooky, off line, no google to solve the crossword, settle arguments or to look up how to play that song I keep humming (I will be taking a guitar!). They tell me the local McD’s has wireless but my laptop is an ebay special, the battery doesn’t last through the lengthy boot process

Cold turkey for me then. I guess I can score a fix at the library or internet cafe but I’m not sure that I’ll visit any site that requires a password (the same, only more, could be said of McD’s open wireless).

Oh well, I guess I’ll survive, but will the world survive without a post on my blog?  Only time (or the patently obvious) can answer…

I read over at http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/29/young_usaf_predator_pilot_officer_slam/ that when it comes to remote piloting drones a combination of automatic pilot and non-air trained pilots do better than “real” pilots. Describing those with no real air experience as “X box pilots” seems spookily reminiscent of “The Last Starfighter”. It’s always been a fantasy of gamers that they could do it for real - I guess even as far back as “Flight of the Phoenix” (the 1965 one - I haven’t seen the 2004 version).

Interestingly much of the article focuses on rank - normally pilots are officers - however because I’m a bit of a spitfire nut I can tell you that many of “the few” that won the Battle of Britain were Sergeant Pilots. Although they had a separate mess and had to salute their officers on the ground they could be flight commanders and give orders in the air. Indeed Ginger Lacey who shot down the He111 that bombed Buckingham Palace was a sergeant and when the King visited the squadron to congratulate him bought HRH a pint of bitter rather than his usual sherry as he talked him through the dog fight.

Anyway, if you’re on an aeroplane and worried looking stewards are looking for “anyone with piloting experience” maybe you can quote your 3,00o hours logged on MS Flight Simulator.

I’ve just had to moan at the Beeb (again). They have been reporting in the social housing report saying that claims of “queue jumping” are proved wrong by evidence that “equal numbers” are in social housing. Der, queue jumping is about the time spent waiting not the final results.

Does it matter? If equal numbers of ethnic groups are housed (by which I assume they mean proportional to the population or to the applicants or … it could get quite complicated!), anyway if some sort of equality is in place isn’t everyone (except the BNP) happy?

I doubt it. If you have been waiting for years for housing you are not going to happy! If authorities deny problems then extremists pick up supporters and if someone can provide a scape goat to aim your anger at then it takes strong person not wallow in a blame fest.

So yes it does matter because by potentially miss-reporting angry people will feel unrepresented and be driven into the arms of the BNP etc.

Has this got anything to do with IT? Only that accuracy is important - maybe that is a lesson I learned coding. Many of us create / review reports, read / generate statistics, make / influence management decisions and doing it right and being seen to do right can make a huge difference to work force moral.

I am starting a campaign to find a new term for someone who wants things to be right - perfectionist, pedant are negative terms. Is there already a word for someone who expects the details to be right when they matter but doesn’t get fussy when they don’t? I can’t think of one so I’m inventing “accuratist” - I expect it’s copyright to a watch company!

With the shock news that Hollywood is planning to make a film based on that <irony/>great</irony> video game “asteroids” http://popwatch.ew.com/popwatch/2009/07/asteroids-movie.html I am left wondering about how IT has inspired movie plots (as opposed to movie techniques).

Fortunately before I cudgelled my brains too hard I found http://www.linuxhaxor.net/2007/08/14/top-20-movies-about-computer-hacking-and-geeks/

So what other films spring to your mind? And do any of them have any credibility from an IT stand point?

I was going to suggest  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099864/ as a joke but its tagline of

“The Master of Horror unleashes everything you were ever afraid of ”

it seems pretty appropriate to quite a few IT  systems I have worked on…