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I realise that's a bit of a bold question, but bear with me on this one…
The first part of my argument is based on the televisions themselves.
I recently bought a new TV and found that traditional CRT TVs were very hard to find in my local electronics stores, other than small portables. They were almost exclusively stocking plasma and LCD flat screen sets. Now I'm not going to deny that aesthetically speaking they are much prettier than CRT TVs, but I found the picture quality to be almost universally appalling. The pictures were blurry and pixellated and suffered from horrible motion blurring as well. On those rare occasions that there were CRT and LCD or plasma TVs side by side in the shop, a blind man could have seen that the CRT picture was far superior.
One of the reasons for this is that flat panel TVs are designed to cope with the resolution of high definition (HD) TV, with standard definition (SD) pictures being zoomed to fill the screen. Quite often the TV doesn't do a particularly good job of this, making the picture look nasty (think of when you have a video clip on your PC and then go 'full screen' and the picture looks much worse). Therefore, the logical conclusion is that HD TVs are a bit of a mistake if you predominantly watch normal TV - which is of course what we will all be doing for quite a while to come - even Sky only have a handful of HD channels among their lineup of hundreds of SD channels.
The second part of my argument is based on the bitrate of the broadcasts themselves.
Whilst I was TV shopping, I saw some pretty enormous HD TVs which were showing what appeared to be computer generated HD pictures. There's no denying that the picture quality was mind-boggling. It was faultless. So how come I have heard that people are generally not exactly blown away by the quality of their Sky HD pictures? This is because the quality of the picture you see is largely dictated by the bitrate of the channel.
The bitrate is the amount of information which is sent to form the picture, per second. To (hopefully) illustrate this point, I've created two short clips of a Britney Spears live appearance - one with a high bitrate (30 seconds to download) and one with a low bitrate (10 seconds to download). Right click the files and save them on your desktop before opening. There's no sound, I chopped it out to reduce the file size.
I hope you could tell the difference between the files! They have exactly the same resolution and frame rate, but one is less than a fifth of the size of the other. As you can see, the smaller file is much more blurry. However, your Freeview aerial or Sky dish can only receive a certain amount of information at once, so the broadcaster would have the choice of either broadcasting one clear channel (like the big clip), five blurry channels (like the small clip), or something in the middle. The amount of information per channel can be fixed individually, which is why, say, BBC One looks a lot more clear than some of the crappy music and shopping channels.
Anyone who watches football on Sky Sports (I'm talking about normal SD television now, I can't speak personally for HD broadcasts) will know that the pitch turns into a gooey green mess whenever the camera moves, and 'catches up' when the camera stops. This is what happens when the amount of information per channel is too low. Sky could quite easily make the pitch look like a pitch again if they removed a few Box Office channels and shared the freed-up bandwidth between the sports channels, however this would reduce their revenue, so it will never happen.
HD broadcasts suffer from exactly the same problems. Whilst HD television is technically capable of producing mindblowing levels of graphical detail, it will never do so as long as channel bitrates are set by commercial organisations. Hence I would speculate (and I'm open to debate on this) that a satellite or cable HD broadcast may well not look that much more impressive than SD channels on a traditional CRT TV.
This might all seem to be a bit of a rant, but the whole SD v HD, CRT v LCD/plasma debate seems to be based on broadcasters and electronics manufacturers pushing products which cost a fortune and yet offer very little benefit in return.
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I use Blogroll to produce the list of links displayed somewhere down my sidebar. It's a very handy service, but I find that it's often unreliable. The javascript code that inserts the list of links seems to jam up quite often, preventing the rest of the page (including the actual posts!) from loading until it either frees itself or gives up entirely.
I discovered tonight that it is possible to use PHP to directly insert the list of links into your site. I'm hoping that by bypassing the dodgy javascript, it will increase the reliability of my pages. Instructions for using the PHP instructions are given on the Blogrolling website, but I guess there's no harm in replicating it here… 
Note: this only works if your blog's hosting uses PHP - if you don't know the answer to that question, you probably don't want to be doing this
The existing javascript code will look like this:
<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript" xsrc="http://rpc.blogrolling.com/display.php?r=uniqueuserid"></script>
You need to replace it with this PHP, substituting uniqueuserid for, erm, your unique user ID:
<?PHP
//replace the value of $url with your own link from the code generator
$url = "http://rpc.blogrolling.com/display_raw.php?r=uniqueuserid";
if($my_blogroll = @fopen("$url", "r")){
while(! feof($my_blogroll)){
$blogroll = fgets($my_blogroll, 255);
echo "$blogroll";
}
}else{
echo "ERROR: $url is currently inaccessible";
}
?>
I hope this is of some use :)
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I've been doing this a lot lately… that is, completely mis-hearing what people are saying to me.
As some of you may know, I've had dodgy hearing all my life. I had a lot of operations on my ears when I was little and I also used to wear a hearing aid. I had to stop wearing that when I was about 11 because of infections and whatnot, but I was given a shiny new digital hearing aid earlier this year, as I started to notice more problems in understanding people. I've been managing pretty well with it, especially since my last visit to the hospital, where they made a few micro-adjustments to the settings.
I had a monster head cold a few weeks ago, which resulted in my good (no hearing aid and no T-tube) middle ear filling up with gunge and the eardrum retracting. This meant I was in the unusual situation of having very poor hearing from that ear.
This period is illustrating how my normal hearing loss is really nothing more than an annoyance. My discrimination of sounds, even with the hearing aid, is bad enough that it is very hard work to hold a conversation in anything worse than total silence. As a taste of how my hearing may become in the future it is quite worrying! Maybe a second hearing aid would help, but I think the bottom line is that I would have to start making more deviations from the norm when it comes to everyday situations, e.g. ensuring there is a hearing loop or equivalent in public places, being more overt in making people aware that I have hearing problems, and so on.
Hopefully my supposedly better Eustachian tube will get its act together soon and start draining stuff so that normal service can be resumed!
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Tonight I did some grocery shopping at tesco.com - eventually. Once I'd selected everything I wanted to buy, this usually reliable website took a wobbler and started giving errors when I tried to checkout. At one point it let me enter my card details and press the 'buy' button only for it to crash again. I was able to figure out that the order had not gone through, but it's still unnerving. Indeed, it took almost an hour to checkout, and the majority of people would have given up way before then.
A recent BBC News story said that people are likely to abandon a website if it takes longer than four seconds to load. How patient are you when it comes to misbehaving web pages?
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Mike Newell is currently the manager of Luton Town FC - though whether he still is by the time you read this is another matter. He has a reputation for being a straight-talker, which is something sadly missing from a lot of people involved in football these days. Indeed, earlier this year he claimed publicly that giving 'bungs' was rife in football.
As I know more than most though, there's a fine line between being blunt and talking crap and he's definitely crossed that line this weekend. There was a woman assistant referee (lineswoman?) for his team's game against QPR. Between Amy Rayner and the referee Andy D'Urso they failed to award Luton a penalty, prompting the following comments from Newell (taken from the BBC News website):
"She shouldn't be here. I know that sounds sexist but I am sexist. This is not park football, so what are women doing here?"
"It is tokenism - for the politically-correct idiots"
"We have a problem in this country with political correctness and bringing women into the game is not the way to improve refereeing and officialdom."
"It is absolutely beyond belief. When do we reach a stage when all officials are women because then we are in trouble?
"It is bad enough with the incapable referees and linesmen we have but if you start bringing in women, you have big problems."
If anyone can give me a coherent reason why they think Newell is right then I would be very surprised, because he is clearly talking total bollocks, to put not too fine a point on it. I'm a firm believer in the fact that if any person possesses the qualifications and attributes needed to do a job then they should be allowed to do it, regardless of gender. The lady in question is a FIFA assistant referee, and so there can be no doubt that she is fully qualified to officiate at a Championship game. In case Mr Newell hasn't noticed, male officials have been known to make the occasional error as well, so what these "big problems" would be if more women officiated is beyond me.
Luton Town have called a board meeting for 4pm today to discuss the matter, and given the clear embarrassment he's caused to his employers I wouldn't be surprised if he's shown the door. And he'd deserve it.
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As something of an addendum to my previous post, I was pleasantly surprised to be asked during the archery competition yesterday "Are you from the North East?" or, even better, "Are you from Durham? You sound like you're from the North East but not a Geordie" - which is a brilliant thing to hear 
I've never had a particularly strong regional accent and the one I do have tends to be a little strange. When I was at college in Durham, the contingent from the murkier parts of the North East used to find my accent hilarious ("Say scooter again! Now say spoon!" etc) whilst, closer to home, I would say that my accent has ended up being a bit more 'standard' than most peoples. I'm certainly not saying that that's a good thing, only that it ended up different somehow.
Despite this, I'm pleased that my speech hasn't degenerated into the 'generic Northern' that seems to happen to a lot of people who move away and mix with others from all over the country. To still be able to be picked out as being from the North East is a very good thing and shows I haven't inadvertently abandoned my roots!
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