I did a bit of changing around links on gravitystorm last weekend, for two reasons. Firstly, I had read an article from the W3C recently, talking about trying to keep urls permanent, and removing links that show the mechanisms of the webserver. So I changed all the weblog archives so that it no longer mentions php anywhere, but with still keeping the same database backend and not having prolific numbers of html files everywhere. As a completely unexpected benefit (cough cough), Google now crawls all the weblog articles (it puts a heavy penalty on what it reckons is ‘dynamic’ pages; it uses question marks in the url as a main indicator of such pages), so I’ve managed to increase the noise ratio on the google results in one fell swoop. I’d give you some of the examples of what people are looking for, which is often quite funny ("I need sex Tooting" being one of them), but I’ll need to wait till I go home for that. And I don’t think that I’ll have much change of doing that over the weekend, since I’m rather busy with DramSoc stuff.

I study chemistry at the top university for chemistry in the entire country, and so when we’re taught something, it’s generally done pretty thoroughly, and to a pretty high level. Especially when it gets to the final year of a Masters course. So what gets irritating is when a bunch of computer geeks start debating the benefits and drawbacks of having a hydrogen economy. They really don’t understand the difference between energy sources and energy vectors - the point behind a fuel source is that there is plenty of it to mine or otherwise consume. That isn’t the point behind using hydrogen as an energy vector, which is completely different. Did you know, for instance, that it’s more economic to move energy in the form of train loads of coal than over electricity lines, despite having a national grid. But then again, it’s hard to convert both wind and uranium into coal, or better yet oil in pipelines, so the whole issue is rather more complicated than just comparing the energy efficiencies of GDI engines and low pressure polymer fuel cells.

I could explain it further, but I’m not going to. I’m just too lazy, and will only do so if it comes up in my exams in May. Lazyness is also one reason that I didn’t reply to the slashdot story, but also stopping me from bothering to reply were concepts like signal noise ratios, banging my head off of a brick wall (like Mr T does whenever electrical stupidity and ignorance crops up), and also because it’s quite satisfying to pretend to know more than someone else and lord over them. Suffice to say that I support the idea of hydrogen as a primary energy vector. That and lots of fuel cells hooked up to wind turbines.

Ooh, it’s nice to see that some people are finally realising that there’s more to life (on the Internet) than just Internet Explorer. The ’supported browsers’ list for the latest incarnation of SOLE reads as follows:

• IE 4.x and above
• Netscape 7.x
• Mozilla 1.0 & 1.1b
• Konqueror 2.2
• Safari 1.0 Beta
• OmniWeb 4.1.1
• Opera 5.

It even states that other browsers may work, but just that they aren’t officially supported. Now if only the dipsticks over at the Royal Bank of Scotland would sort their online banking out, I’d be happy. It used to come up with a message saying that you needed Internet Explorer 4.0 or above (hmmm), or Netscape Navigator 4.0 to 4.76 inclusive (shudder), but now it just automatically closes the pop-up window if you don’t have the right browser, which is pretty poor customer service. It’s as if I went into a branch, walked up to the counter, and when I started speaking the teller just shouted ‘Next!’, with no explanation as to why I wasn’t being served. That would be shocking; as is their website as far as I’m concerned.

Why is it that I am inexorably drawn to things that make me unhappy? Despite my best efforts, I still can’t help sticking my oar into the discussion on Live!, even though it pisses me off. Once again, the issue of the disciplinary crap came up, and I felt that I had to defend my reasons for not appealing. But why? I don’t have to justify my actions again. I couldn’t help myself though. I’ve even allowed myself to get drawn into Mustafa’s inane drivel about elections - if he claims to ‘have not been involved in the union this year’ one more time (how many papers has he taken to council this year? I even remember him making one up during a meeting), I swear I will blow a fuse.

But this attitude is pissing me off. Why should I care? Why can I not just let them get on with it, with their stupid little power games, incessant wingeing, and perspectives on issues that would make M.C. Escher proud?

Hopefully, when I get over the cold that laid me out for the end of last week and over the weekend (I’m even tempted to call it the flu, since I properly couldn’t get out of bed for 18 hours, not just prefer-to-stay-in-it style), I’ll keep up my quest to get away from it all.