All about Alton Towers.

Alton Towers was, of course, brilliant. Not that I was doubting it would be :) Going up midweek, away from school holidays, was definitely the thing to do. It helped that the weather was awful. The longest we queued for any ride was 20 minutes for the Black Hole, and that was when it was actually raining (it's one of the few indoor rides at AT).

We went on Nemesis and Oblivion, the two biggest rollercoasters, three times each. Both of those are rides that I have queued for over an hour for before - I remember standing in a queue for Nemesis for 75 minutes. This time, as the park was so empty, we queued for 10 minutes the first time, and walked straight on the second. Amazing. As were the rides. Nemesis is a very fast hanging coaster, with several loops and inversions - it's exhilarating rather than frightening. Oblivion is the UK's first vertical drop rollercoaster - terrifying just before the drop, when the carriage is tilted down and hung there for a few seconds so that you can see how far you have to fall, but utterly thrilling afterwards. These are the kind of rides that work better than any mind-expanding drug for making me feel alive.

( More Alton Towers geeking... )

How to make money on the internet by ripping off gullible idiots.

Security level changed to Public on Thu 11 Apr 2002.

Have a look at http://www.bigextramoney.com. Does anything strike you as strange about the site? If you don't get what I mean from that alone, try requesting the free information. You'll have to provide them with a phone number and email address, but I don't think they do any checks as to whether that information is valid, so you can just make one up. You'll get redirected to another site (http://www.hbitl.net/default.htm). Have a good read of it, particularly the bit entitled "Your Next Step".

The site's all about how to make lots of money. Strangely, it doesn't say anywhere how you make the money. It goes on and on about the big company that will be backing you, but doesn't say anywhere what the company does or what you will be doing, other than that you need net access. To get any information like that, you have to send them £36. Hmmm, says h-l, looking decidedly unconvinced.

This is almost certainly a scam. The fact that the web site says in large letters "this is not a scam" doesn't convince me otherwise. Why would you need to send £36 for further information if it wasn't? My suspicion is that the way you make money is to set up your own domain, then give out flyers in the area in which you live inviting people to look at your website. The site, of course, follows a standard pattern - lots of bombardment with "don't you want to make lots of money?" stuff, but no actual information. The poor gullible idiots have to hand over money to get the information. And I bet that the information they receive will simply say "You've been had", and explain the trick. I bet this is even legal in the UK - but it's dodgy as hell.

Bastards.

Update: I've confirmed that this is a scam. I went through a pile of old job papers that I had around, and looked for all the "make money fast" adverts. I took the URLs posted in said adverts, and did a whois on the domain. They are all owned by different people, but all point to the same servers. There must be hundreds, or possibly thousands of domains all pointing to hbitl.net, with websites identical apart from the ?DistID= number in the URL that follows http://hbitl.net/index1.htm. Fucking hell - I can see how many people got ripped off and decided to do the same to others, but how many people have been ripped off and now can't do a thing about it?

Noodles & change.

Yesterday I spent the day with Tim, an old friend who I hadn't seen in a long time (not to be confused with meeping Tim, who I see all the time!). We were very close during my first year at college, and quite close for a while after that, but then he started travelling around the world, and it's hard to keep in contact with someone when all you get is an email or postcard once every six months or so.

I last saw him in February 2000, and then only for a couple of hours. During that time, he came across as a very different person from the person I'd known at college, to the extent that I wasn't really sure if we would be able to remain friends. But I kept an open mind, and when I heard he was back in the UK, I definitely wanted to see him. So I rang up, and we talked and talked until his mum started making "I want to check my email" noises. We arranged to meet for lunch, but ended up spending the entire afternoon together because we just had so much to say.

I found myself thinking out loud about the three different versions of him that I'd seen. I liked old Tim, and I like new Tim, but I wasn't sure if I'd liked the middle Tim. I said that new Tim seemed very similar to old Tim. He replied that inside, he felt very different. And I thought about it, and worked it out.

It's so obvious that many people overlook it: change is just a natural part of living. It's hard to be alive if you never respond to anything that happens to you. But for some reason, people tend not to notice changes in others unless they see someone again after a long time apart. Then, they only notice because they are comparing the new person to the old mental image that you have of them.

It's hard, and sometimes scary, to find yourself suddenly having to rewire a mental image that you've held for years. So many people worry when they find an old friend having changed considerably, especially if it seems that someone's become very different from the person they used to know. It's possible to work out rationally that changes in someone else aren't necessarily a bad thing, but I at least find it much harder to get that through the emotional part of me.

I think I've worked out why I was somewhat distressed by "middle Tim". It's that the way he was presenting himself then was not only different from the Tim I used to know, but different from the person I thought he actually was at that time. I believe it's possible for someone to become hugely different than the person they used to be, yet more like themselves. You know how sometimes, if you're able to do the mental image adjustment, you find that when you finally manage to fit the new information into your picture, some old information that you'd puzzled about at the time suddenly makes sense. I believe it's possible for someone to become hugely different than the person they used to be, yet more like themselves. And the problem with "middle Tim" was that not only was he less like the person he used to be, he seemed less like the person he was.

[dedicated to griffen].

potery from irc.

I write in my livejournal when I feel like it
sometimes I go a week without posting, sometimes I make 10 posts a day.
It's not so much a diary as a place where I dump ideas,
to stop them floating around my head and bothering me.