Toms View of the World

There’s a guy who is using Friends Reunited to send emails to everyone who ever attended Swansea University (and has registered with FR) - now So far he’s sent the same “invitation” 4 times - and it’s not a reunion at all, it’s a fundraiser.

So what is a reunion? Well, to my mind it would be a small group (a class, or a year group) who would have known each other during their time at the School/University. To my mind, a “reunion” cannot cover a 40 year timescale, as most of the people addressed would not have been at the university at the same time as me. A “reunion” would also not include an auction of sporting memoriabilia to raise funds for the Athletic Union.

As FR’s abuse department do not consider sending invitations multiple times for a fundraiser to everyone registered at a particular establishment over 40+ years to be an abuse of their system, I’m advising everyone not to use this service, and furthermore to remove their details.

Their advice “let the organisers know and they will not contact you” - remember that to send an email through FR to someone else requires a paid registration - something I have no intention of doing just to ask a spammer to stop.

As a result of the inaction of their abuse department I have removed my details from the site, and urge everyone else to do the same, before this spamming becomes more and more widespread, as clearly FriendsReunited do not intend to do anything about it, and don’t see why this is spamming rather than organising a reunion.

Update the link to remove yourself is fairly tricky to find, from the Friends Reunited homepage, select “Contact Us” link down at the bottom of the left side linkbar, then the option to delete yourself, confirm your password and that’s it.

The first episode of Channel 4’s new sit-com “The IT Crowd” is now available online, a week before it’s television debut.

Just finished watching the episode, and apart from the very stereotypical presentation of the “computer geek”.

We don’t all tell you to reboot.
We don’t all wear thick glasses and RTFM T-Shirts.
Us techies do sometimes get excited about antique hardware.
We don’t all work in dark basements with racks of computers piled up everywhere…
We not all slow witted.

However some of us are loners with no social skills whatsoever, at least that part is accurate :-/

Go see it on the official website: http://www.channel4.com/entertainment/tv/microsites/I/itcrowd/

A superbly funny movie - charting the rise and downfall of Dick (Jim Carrey) as he’s promoted to the board of his company, then made a scapegoat for it’s downfall.

As their situation gets more and more desperate, the family resort to more and more extreme solutions - leading to a very funny finale.

Well worth seeing, and there’s a ton of jokes the average 12 year old certainly won’t get.

A multi-award winning movie, and rightly so. The “Gay Cowboy Movie” is simply excellent - no compromises.

All I’m going to say is forget any preconceptions, just enjoy the story as it unfolds.

Today I popped into the Dr Who Experience exhibition in Cardiff - featuring a selection of costumes and props from the 2005 Series (plus a few older costumes too).

All in all, a nice exhibition, featuring not only the most recent series (Christopher Ecclestone as the Doctor) but also small exhibits of each of the earlier Doctors, including some “monster” costumes like the Cybermen.

However once through the introduction, there was plenty to see, costumes, the Tardis itself, including a very small section of the interior set - did give a good idea of how big the new sets are though, then onto into the series specific stuff.

This is where I came face to face with the Dalek. They’ve animated this one, so on the press of the button, the head rotates, and the voice speaks… Other exhibits include the bomb that Captain Jack rides in the WW2 episode, and some of the aliens from Platform 1, including the small, blue Moxx of Balhoon.

Although a fairly small exhibit, I enjoyed it. Full photo gallery is here

The exhibition can be found at the Red Dragon Centre, and runs until February 26th

Feel like you’re drowning at work, what you need is a quick row….

View in Google Video

According to this post on Jensense.com Google are apparently planning to bring in more “rich” advertising to Adsense, including intersitals, floating and expanding ads.

In other words, adsense goes from nice, subtle text ads (which I’m happy to have on my site) to annoying, expanding, floating, intrusive rich media ads.

I really hope they give me the option to not show these “rich” ads that I find so annoying on other sites, or I’ll be forced to remove the Adsense ads from this site. Google could be shooting themselves in the foot here - the thing that people like about adsense is that it is controlled, and doesn’t try to take over your site…

I think Google’s biggest problem with this is going to be selling it to the webmasters and bloggers who use adsense precisely because it doesn’t have these kind of adverts on it.

Looking at the other trackbacks and comments on that post, I’m not the only one who feels this way either.