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118800 Keep your mobile phone private

118800 is a proposed directory of every mobile phone number. If you don't want every pupil in your class to get in touch; if you don't want every paedophile in Sussex getting in touch with your child then you want to stop 118800.

Following pressure from the public 118800 have - very late in the day - made some assurances.

For example they claim they will not publish the mobile phone numbers of minors. This is very odd because they have no way of knowing whether people are minors or not.



Their website says "If someone wants to get in touch, and we have your number, we contact your mobile and tell you who they are. If you reject the call, they don't get through - and they don't have your number." So an unlimited number of unsolicited texts could be coming your way and they have conveniently disabled their website to prevent you from making your number ex directory. Incidentally they still take £1 from everyone who uses their service whether they actually get through or not.

You can still email their address which is contact@118800.co.uk and I suggest you go on emailing them until they respond. Do not phone their number because they will charge you a fortune for doing so.

If you have a blocking facility on your phone you can block them.

Randomly Shocking Monkeys

This is the second randomly shocking monkeys video and based on Bill Hicks' tirade against advertising. It is very good.



Sponsored by the Coca Cola Death Squads in Guatamala - where they used death squads to kill off union activists.

Also sponsored by the Lambert and Butler Cancer Unit and McDonalds Obesity campaign (self explanatory)

And "New Kiddie Arsenic" which is a Bill Hicks invention.....so far anyway.

Dihydrogen Monoxide

I have just been reading this website about Dihydrogen Monoxide. Talk about scary. Apparently it is all over the place. It’s in our food and it is impossible to wash it off. It is used in poisons and in nuclear power plants and it kills thousands of people particularly if they go swimming because by now it is in the reservoirs and even in the sea.

Worrying eh?

(with apologies to everybody)

ROFLAWM

In Cyberspace Nobody can hear you ROFL


ASL= what age sex and location are you pretending to be today?

BOOK = cool from textspeak predictive text in which if you type “cool” you get “book”

AUNT = see the reference to S****horpe elsewhere.

BRB= I am going away and may never return – boy are you boring!

LOL Lots of love or Laughs out Loud. An important area of cyberpsychology is the research into whether people who write this actually do laugh out loud.

Newb = a term I really hate. We were all newcomers once and people made us welcome. Newb is a term of abuse for newcomers and no civilised person uses it.

ROFL= Rolls on the Floor Laughing. You just said something mildly amusing and your interlocutor likes you or you said something really newb and they hate you.

ROFLAWM = I leave you to work this one out yourself. Or Google it.
A review of Sherry Turkle's "Life on the Screen" is available here