The education minister was on TV last night ranting that (some) students were being taught to analyse Big Brother rather than the “classics” like Shakespeare and shit. Now, I don’t watch “reality” television because I think it’s trashy, and I’ve never seen Big Brother, but based on my analysis of other “reality” television it must be trashy, and I actually like Shakespeare. However, I have to say that I disagree with the esteemed Lesser Monster of Education. I think it is probably more important for our next generation to be able to dissect modern culture and hopefully help them see through the marketing and the hype.

Advertising is lame.

Two lame things about LiveJournal that vaguely annoy me, but not enough to make me stop using the service:

1. When I click onto a bookmark to a friend group filter when I’m not logged in, I get this annoying VERBOTEN! kind of message and then a link to where I can log in. First of all this is poor design, the message should just ask for my username and password, second the text for the link is simply “here”. It’s really bad form to tell your users to click “here” as apposed to saying “visit my photography website” or what have you. Also, once I have actually logged on it doesn’t automatically take me to where I wanted to be in the first place! I have to click on my bookmark again!
2. Before selling out to SixApart, “Brad” and the LJ team “promised” never to have advertising. Since the sale, they have added free accounts with extra features that include advertising. Not surprisingly, the web page that proves them to be liars has been removed from the LJ website. I don’t think it’s lame that they did this^[1], I think it is lame that they quietly removed the statement that they would never do this without any explanation. Maybe they are worried about a lawsuit.