Just watched two chavs get £20 penalty fares on the train for tickets that coud have cost them £2 each. It's not often that railway staff make me smile, but watching them fine fare-dodgers is pretty good fun. 
I may have linked to this in the past, but it's been lurking in my Google Reader 'Saved Posts' list. Open Culture's Free University Podcast list is excellent. It ought to be an OPML file. And iTunes ought to be able to subscribe to pod-lists (via Lifehacker).
James Randi on that fraudulent and inane psychic floozy, Sylvia Browne: "recent developments have brought her into prominence, though in ways that certainly have not made her any happier. As you will have seen from items included earlier on this SWIFT, she and her staff appear to be on the run: despite direct invitations from the TV producers to do so, she as not appeared on TV to face me and answer to my comments, her flunkies are floundering about offering excuses for her, and the excuses on her website are meaningless and appear to be desperate."
Looks like another lame conference 
There's so many rubbish conferences going on and so little time between them. Last December, it was Le Web 3. Coming up soon is Ajax2007 with it's conference and masterclass weighing in at £2,695.45.
And going on in Miama, Florida, is We Media 2007. Mark Glaser, a blogger for PBS, has some great things to say about it:
But this conference uses the "we media" moniker loosely, making the gathering a hotbed of broadcasters, newspaper folk, venture capitalists, and advocacy groups who all want to understand how they can dance the "we media" dance. Usually I insert a metaphor about square people in suits trying to look cool doing hip-hop breakdancing, but in this case the conference was kicked off today with a couple hip-hop videos, so my usual fiction was strangely coming true.
But remember, it sucked just as much last year when it was in London. Suw summed it up pretty well last year (and again in video - QuickTime MOV). The difference seems to be that it was $795 for WeMedia 2006 and an eye-popping $1,000 for the WeMedia 2007 in Miami.
Suw's comment on this one is good too:
I was at last year's WeMedia, invited to be one of the 'online curators' responsible for taking part in irc, and reading blogs, so that I could then feed questions and topics back into the conference. Except the organisers didn't like what was coming out of the backchannel at all. They ignored much of it, and as the people taking part by IRC or blog got more and more critical, so their views were swept more firmly under the carpet.
Funny, I've heard that story before. Pretty irksome, isn't it? Don't worry - bad conferences are gonna be a recurring theme on my blog. There's more than enough infuriatingly bad conferences to go around.
