Category Archives: Censorship

Games, games, games

GTA R18+The Age reports that the ACMI Games Lab in Melbourne will be hosting the Game On exhibition of video game history, which has already been seen in London, Chicago and San Jose. Should be a nice followup to the Melbourne House/Beam Software exhibit they had recently.

Speaking of games, ArsTechnica continues its series on writing in games (eg plots and backstories, rather than code).

Meanwhile in Australia there’s more campaigning for the OFLC to be allowed to give games an R 18+ rating (rather than having to refuse them classification), to bring games ratings into line with movies.

Though interestingly, a catalogue from discount chain KMart that arrived during the week reckoned Grand Theft Auto Liberty City Stories is rated R — it’s actually MA15+.

H-E two sticks?

From a recent interaction with a Canadian:

Accordingly, we’re trying not to get too far ahead of everyone while still innovating like H-E two sticks.

“Huh?” says I.

No worries, I can shuffle around this odd bit of language. I’ll Google it.

Not a lot of people (16) using the term. Then it twigs:

H-E two sticks
Hell

Oh, for fuck’s sake.

Clueless agency undermines customer’s advertisement

Compare this agency ad, which turns up in a “linux C++” search, to this homegrown ad, which turns up in a “linux C++” search.

I encourage everyone to apply for the first job. They clearly want everyone to do so. I certainly did. You’d think that agencies, with their unabashed love of keyword searching would know better… perhaps they’re fully aware of what they’re doing. I love their fourteen key areas of specialization. The second job, well, read the instructions. It’s a nice place, with a good coffee machine. And people too. And management that’s able to pull itself back from the brink of cluelessness without being yelled at. Mind you, the last few paragraphs used to read:

Now, we won’t chuck your application away if you don’t hit all these points. But if you clearly don’t match the job at all you will get an abusive email. We will be drawing our conclusions from the application you send (hint, hint). Comparisons will be drawn between yourself and a small rodent.

We’re located on St Kilda Rd near the Domain Interchange. Public transport is pretty good here. Oh, we’ve got a darn good coffee machine, if that floats your boat.

Note: Do not send us an application if you are clueless. You’re wasting our precious time, and you will get an abusive email in response.

Safe surfing for the kiddies

Every parent must wonder when their kids get to computer-using age, about installing monitoring/pr0n-site blocking software. I’ve pondered it myself, but not gone down that road yet, since there’s other methods of avoiding nasties.

What I’ve done with my kids is to set them up with an account each on the computers, and set up their browsers (both IE and Firefox) with Google Safe Search turned on. It will stick if your browser is accepting cookies.

They’ve also been shown how to customise their accounts with their own wallpaper, colours, bookmarks/favourites etc, which is a motivation for them to properly logon as themselves when using the computers. Not that it’s hard with XP; just point at the name/face from the Logon/Switch User screen. (One of the two machines is Win2K, so no Switch User capability, but we survive.)

As an added bonus, their accounts are standard users, not Admin, preventing them downloading and installing software. My account has a password, but theirs don’t (surprised they haven’t objected to that actually).

They’ve been taught not to download programs without permission anyway. Through the school internet policy they know to close any browser window/tell an adult if they see anything “making them uncomfortable”.

And I’ve taken the advice that a wise man once told me: while Net Nanny etc have their uses, nothing beats the kids being educated in what they should and shouldn’t be looking at, and placing the computers in a public, visible part of the house, rather than tucked away in a back room.