08.25.06
Posted in Theme Parks at 5:28 pm by Lee
In a survey of healthy food available at leading tourist attractions in the UK, Alton Towers fared poorly compared to others.
The survey, conducted by The Soil Association, ranked Alton Towers joint seventh out of 14th. You might not think that was too bad, until you realise that the park scored just 6 points out of a possible 25 in the report.
The survey, carried out in June/July 2006, saw a ’secret mum’ head to various tourist attractions, and rate each one on a predefined scorechart. The categories included “how long it took to find fruit”, “availability of healthy drinks in vending machines” and “quality of children’s meals”.
Alton Towers scored 0/3 in the “access to free fresh drinking water” category, 0/5 in the “healthy food promotion” category, and it took over an hour of searching before the ’secret mum’ could find any fruit at the park.
Alton Towers: ATA: Home
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Posted in Tech From The Net at 10:04 am by Lee
There I was, minding my own business, orbiting the Sun just like all the others. I got my little bit of atmosphere going, got a lot of ice. I was cool. I stayed out of everybody else’s way, sometimes way out.
Then some eggheads on that uppity third rock — they think they’re so hot because they have “life” — went and decided I’m not a planet anymore. What’s up with that? My life is hard enough as it is.
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08.24.06
Posted in Tech From The Net at 10:53 pm by Lee
Yesterday the ‘Boy Spammer’ David Lennon, who was 16 when he electronically snubbed his former bosses, has been told by a judge that as punishment for his crimes he can’t leave his house between the hours of 12.30am and 7am on weekdays, and between 12.30am and 10am on weekends, for two months.
It doesn’t seem much of a punishment to me as a teenager.
I’m generally sleeping 12.30am and 7am on weekdays and between 12.30am and 10am on weekends. If i am up, I’m probably on my computer chatting with friends or reading newsvine. If this person had access to the computer it’s still nice and easy to send spam.
The curfews I normally seem in place are during the afternoon/evening at times when people are usually socialising with friends or causing the problems. Perhaps a 2 month computer ban would be more appropriate?
read more | digg story
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08.22.06
Posted in Tech From The Net at 10:53 am by Lee
Reports are coming in that Amazon.com is down…and sure enough it is. I’ve got a ping into Amazon PR to see if this is something serious (for a site like this to go down on a week day, it probably is). It sounds like the outage has been for an extended period of time and is affecting international sites as well.
Update: It’s back up as of 12:30 PST, at least for me.
Further Update: From Amazon PR:
“The site was down briefly earlier today, but it’s back up and running now….”and“I’m afraid we don’t comment on our technology, except to say that these are complex systems, and we do our best to make sure they’re always functioning. When there are problems, we try to get them corrected as quickly as possible.Thanks for checking.”
Techcrunch » Blog Archive » Amazon Is Down
Seems strange for Amazon to go down, but it doesn’t surprise me that they don’t want to completley say what it is.
This comes just a couple of days after Wikipedia went down for about 2 1/2 hours, one of its longest outages.
technorati tags:amazon, outage, downtime, server, wikipedia
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08.07.06
Posted in Tech From The Net at 6:00 pm by Lee
Games giant EA has begun a rolling closure of many online servers supporting copies of old games.
Games include Fifa 2005, Madden NFL 2005 and other sports title. Only one of the 14 games affected, Need for Speed: Underground 2, is not a sports title.
PC, Xbox and PlayStation 2 games are all on the list.
The first series of EA Nation shutdowns, which hit servers for top titles such as Fifa 2005, took place on 1 August.
The second round of closures, for titles such as Madden NFL 2005, takes place on 1 October.
EA warned that although servers will shut down on the named dates and players can continue to log in until the closure time, “certain community programs may begin to close down prior to the shutdown dates”.
The vast majority of the games hit by the closures are annual versions of popular franchise titles such as Fifa Soccer, NBA Live and Madden.
read more | digg story
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