Techie labelled 'disgusting filth merchant' by disgusting hypocrite Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's weekly reader-contributed column that recounts readers' stories from the frontlines of tech support. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Ogden," who shared a story from a couple of decades back when he worked for a young firm that sold mobile phone ringtones, wallpapers, …
Rather reminds me of a mate of mine who went on a family holiday to France whilst still at school. His dad had located a house they could rent on the south coast that was close to a beach so it seemed perfect. At this stage dear reader it should be pointed out that this predates the internet as we know it today. You relied upon the travel agent and a guidebook for information about where abroad you were going. Well my mate was thrilled to discover that the fabled beach was within walking distance, even more thrilled to discover when he got there it was a clothes optional beach. Very few people there were wearing anything which added to the seaside fun.
He was always asking to be able to go to the beach and his parents happily let him if he promised not to go into the water. So the 12 year old him armed with a bucket, spade and towel went down morning and afternoon for two days. That was until he didn’t go back for lunch on time on the third day and his mum came down to get him. The way he told the story his mum marched him straight back to the house. She had a blazing argument with his dad about booking the place because of the beach. He said he was just going on what was in the brochure which never mentioned anything about it being a nudist one and he hadn’t even been down there to see. My mate said it was the closest they came to divorce and he was forbidden to go to that beach. He said he found out that Pron wasn’t very realistic on that holiday. His mum was down the holiday company when they got back telling them about the unsuitability of that beach and therefore the villa for families in language he said you couldn’t possibly misunderstand.
My folks always used to go to the nudist beaches in France when we were on holiday, which I guess gave me the French attitude of "naked people are just people".
Although it did make it tricky to chat up a girl, when you'd seen both of her parents naked just that afternoon. A teenage boy has enough on his mind, without having to consider the effects that forty years of ageing will have on a body.
HST125 = High Speed Train. Also known as British Rail Class 43, or Intercity 125 (125MPH was it's top service speed)
Note: The Intercity 225 was the electric version, and it's top speed was not 225MPH, it was in theory supposed to be 225KM/h but was limited in service to 200KM/h or 125MPH by track limitations.
should we be worried enough about your parenting choices to call someone?
Hang on - How do you know the parent doesn't have those wank mags on his coffee table only because he retrieved them from under his kid's bed after finding out he'd been charged for some porn download?
Maybe the kid admitted to everything, handed those mags over.
But, sure; burn the witch. We can ask questions later.
"I mean, the WWW was only created for 4 things: smut media, cat media, warez and email"
Nah, at least 8 things: rumo(u)r, lies, conspiracy, sensationalism and gossip, with sides of pR0n, warez and cute cats.
Email is not now, never has been, and shouldn't ever be thought of as a Web thing.
> How do you know the parent doesn't have those wank mags on his coffee table only because he retrieved them from under his kid's bed
So - maybe he put the wank mags on the coffee table, the most prominent place in the house for casual boastful advertising to any visitors ("oh, you're reading "Brief History of Time"l)?
What was the line supposed to be? "Your lad grew a chin hair, that's nice. Oh, those? Well, our boy..."
"Ogden was the startup's first tech hire and after a few years on the job found himself leading a team comprising eight developers, a pair of sysadmins, an IT manager, and the customer support team"
I feel like this doesn't add up. Mainly because I remember those businesses selling ringtones, wallpapers etc. to people to tech-unsavvy to simply generate them themselves - and that business model seemed only to be a viable thing for about two years at the absolute outside.
Am I just remembering wrong? Were people really PAYING for low-resolution background images for their phones for "a few years"?
>>Whatever you do, don't at this point remember Crazy Frog and have it as an earworm for the rest of the day.
The only response here is to mention that you have reminded me about The Game... which I have therefore lost. And so have you.... and the rest of the people reading this post.
I hope you can sleep easliy with that atrocity on your mind.... no.... wait.....
Shame there isn't a troll beer icon... is it beer o'clock yet?
I've had the pre-chorus and chorus from David Bowie's Life on Mars playing on repeat in my head for a week now. Playing Queen hasn't shifted it. Luckily, I (still) think it's a good song.
My brain has a wide selection of ear-worms it keeps on going back to, and not just pop music. The transition between the third and fourth movement of Beethoven's fifth symphony is one, as is the main theme of Smetana's Vltava (The Moldau)
I once got stuck on a train where one of my fellow passengers had that as the ring tone. Unfortunately, despite her desperate rummagings, the phone had lodged itself into a unreachable corner of her bag and whoever was ringing did not have the brains to leave a voicemail, just kept on redialling. We finally crawled into Clapham Junction where she managed to shove her way off before someone found enough room to do her a serious mischief (the train was overcrowded to Tokyo levels due to signal failures), as the entire carriage had endured over 20 minutes of this.
Aaaah Clapham Junction ... I pased through in the first few days of my time living in London. Having previously only seen touristy and nice residential bits it was quite a revelation ... I later learned that the district was gentrifying. All the 20-somethings I worked with referred to it as 'Claaahm' to denote its upmarket shift.
*Were people really PAYING for low-resolution background images for their phones for "a few years"?*
Yep, lasted for about 6/7 years between the first ones that could be bought and installed through WAP and the last ones that were sold and put on the phones through early 3G.
For the tech savvy : it lasted as long as GPRS and EDGE where the only option in town, once 3G came ( and the smartphone craze ) all those companies when the way of the Dodo or moved to Internet.
Yes, and I worked for a (now defunct) company specialising in early personalised 3D avatars where the VCs panicked, brought in someone to pivot the company to sell said low-res images of the custom, personalised, hi res 3D image as that's where the quick money was.
My preferred ringtone was never for sale, but I found a .mid version about 25 years ago. Which has ever since been my ringtone on my private phone.
I'm slightly bemused that you felt it necessary to spell out 'not suitable for work' in full, then add the abbreviation.
Pretty sure no one who reads this column needs any introduction to that particular abbreviation.
Maybe you should take to spelling it out in full in all those headlines as well.
I suspect the caller's unhappiness had more to do with the cost of his son's interest in les femmes déshabillées than the actual provision of the images of the same.
How NSFW could these images be without attracting the attention of the old bill? I suppose in the day Altavista wasn't as willing as Google &c is now to ante up such material (and I imagine much less hrmm... tasteful.)
Probably has a lot to do with the notorious prudery of the English - I can not imagine even at that time an eyebrow would have been raised in AU. Our second public broadcaster SBS used to televised on Friday nights a lot of Continental (EU) and Art films some of which could be an "education" in themselves.
This SBS was later responsible for my seeing "Madame Kovarian" sitting on a bed, starkers singing "Teddy Bears Picnic" to her companion in "Zed and Two Noughts" which was akin to "a paradigm shifting without a clutch.*" ;)
"How NSFW could these images be without attracting the attention of the old bill?"
Well, Usenet was available through virtually every major Uni world-wide from the early '80s on ... Once in a while a bit of a stink was raised, but it usually blew over before anybody contemplated attempting to censor the uncensorable.
Most Universities dropped the alt.binaries.* due to bandwidth issues as well as the lack of storage. The majority of issues Universities had with USENET was trolling, basically one religious group baiting another, or bored students trolling rec.pets subgroups.
Ah some of the very first BOFH stories where Simon was working at a University. In one of them he somehow or other finds himself as a guest lecturer in a class and when they ask questions he brings up embarrassing details about them. One of them was something like, "Ah, the only person on campus who subscribes to alt.sex.clown.buggery!"
Mine was referencing the years before the Great Renaming in 1987. alt.* didn't exist yet, and almost everybody took the full feed, which was right around 1000 posts per day, averaging about 2.25 million bytes total spread out over around 250 groups and read at somewhere around 6,500 sites.
I stopped reading all of Usenet during xmas break in '84, it was getting ridiculous with sometimes 250 posts per day! I stopped scanning all the headers in early 1986 when the number hit 600 posts/day occasionally. I stopped subscribing to all groups when it hit 250 groups and 1000 posts/day in '87 ... but by then I was running my own news server, so it hardly mattered.
Ah such fond memories. In the UK in the 1980s and early 1990s Channel 4 used to show Peter Greenaway films quite frequently. Also it showed many other films from Europe and beyond which were seen as somewhat outside the mainstream. Today Channel 4 is a case study in enshittification.
C4's entire (original) remit was to show material that was outside the mainstream, by any measure they could think of, and anything else that the other 3 channels wete unlikely to broadcast. So we had nerdish Countdown in the afternoon and Eurotrash that same evening. Plus Greenaway films, Tartovsky films, and the absolutely brilliant and much missed 4mations.
C4 started broadcasting US comedies, SF and whatever category Buffy falls into, before the other channels caught up.
They also suffered (and still do) a lot of shit by promoting LBGT+ material before, e.g., BBC caught up with "This Life".
They have pulled in the reins, unfortunately, in the last decade or so, but Film 4 still sponsors the making of less-mainstream films (which don't give a monkey's about making a big opening splash in the US - yes, that is a real Irish accent and no, you don't get subtitles!). And they still show stuff others won't (e.g. Big Bang Theory every. single. day. No other channel does that!).
Still have a lot of live for the C4/E4/Film4/etc channels - they are not as radical as they were but then everyone else is catching up, even in the free-to-air channels, so to keep up with what remains of the remit they do put out stuff with far less nerdy appeal. Nowadays you watch a Greenaway film just for the brilliant vocal acting of Gielgud; if you want the boobs, BabeStation will suffice.
That's long gone. C4 and the BBC are now becoming the inexorable in pursuit of (censoring) the unspeakable - C4 has removed its entire Russell Brand oeuvre and the BBC "material that falls below public expectations" from their player services*. No doubt fresh faced interns are busy winding up AIs to deepfake such persona non iam grata out of old programmes in the hope of salvaging any residual media value.
(ITV and C5 were always too scared of frightening the advertising horses to push the free speech envelope very far.)
* Not that I care at all about Brand, but the sight of the canary dropping off its perch.
@Bebu: the notorious prudery of the English
I do wonder sometimes what Mary Whitehouse would have made of the current media.
See the quote attributed to Michael Grade, CEO of Channel 4, reflecting on her career:
"I don't think she has had any effect at all. She never sees things in context..."
I was just going to make a similar comment. Especially considering right now there's a story on El Reg's front page about how someone called in a threat over the Unity game engine change caused them to cancel some events because of threats.
The past is another country. They do things differently there.
My aunt was working at the Royal Danish Mail, responsible for correspondence in English with other postal services.
In the seventies there was a lot of publications of graphical nature posted from Denmark, and in one case a shipment was returned from the US with the comment that they could not let that sort of stuff into the country. My aunt took a quick look and wrote back: “yes you can, it says printed in the USA”.
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