The Ministry Of Truth

Take THAT, you green-faced PCtards.

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

So, Woopra.

It’s been active for one month.

Excluding the freak results from The Day Of The Wikileak and visits from search engine robots, the Ministry is somehow attracting an average of 20.8 visitors each day - 603 in 29 days.

76% of these visitors come from the United Kingdom, with the United States of Yankee Doodle the next most frequent visitors (accounting for 11% of traffic).  However, the Ministry has stamped visas from residents of Canada, Iceland, Australia, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, Spain, Singapore, Sweden, the Netherlands, Norway, France, Ireland, Germany, Switzerland and Poland.

Three-quarters of visitors spend 0-5 minutes wandering the corridors, but 6% stay here for more than 20 minutes.  (Why?  Even I don’t find it that interesting…)

59% of visitors are running Windows XP as their operating system, 18% run Windows Vista, 17% are Mac converts and 4% use various flavours of Linux.

46% use Firefox to browse the Ministry, 39% inexplicably favour Internet Explorer, 11% opt for Safari and 2% use Google’s new Chrome browser.  Sadly just 0.5% of visitors use Opera, which is arguably the best of the lot.

61% of visitors find the Ministry because of search engines (with Google accounting for very nearly all of that traffic), while 30% of the site’s visitors arrive here directly, suggesting more than 20 people have the site bookmarked (assuming they visit 2-3 times a week).  5% come here following links on Facebook, of which I am not a member.

Very few searches come up more than once, but one that regularly appears is for variations of the name Renee Fladen-Kamm.  Amazingly, the most popular page of the Ministry - apart from the home page - is that containing SMIP #8, the story of Walk Away Renee: this page accounts for a full 12% of the site’s traffic.  Billy Bragg’s never been so popular.

Among the more unlikely Google searches that have led here in the past month have been “sue grabbit run”, “thesauretical”, “alec baldwin 30 rock meat locker” and “mouthofthemersey”.

And to complete the stat attack, I’ve been intrigued to learn about my visitors’ screen resolutions.  The most popular screen resolution for visitors is 1024 pixels x 768 pixels (24%), followed by 1280×1024 (18%), 1280×800 (15%), 1440×900 (12%), 1152×864 (10%) and 1680×1050 (5%).  I’m not sure what this means but for some reason I find it mildly piques my interest.

As I said the other day, the thing I find most amazing is that the Ministry pulls in any visitors at all other than the ten or so people to whom I have given the URL, at least one of whom - and I’m looking at you, Minister’s Wife, even if you’re not looking at this - has forgotten it.

I do not advertise or promote the Ministry and never have done, apart from having had three t-shirts printed for myself, one for Domdeplume and one for julesallen.  (Bearded_baby is owed one, too, but has still not told me his t-shirt size: this may be because that information is increasingly embarrassing to him…)  I have left one trackback link on Popdose but otherwise this site is invisible, which is just how I like it.

Nevertheless it’s gratifying that anyone finds the site intriguing enough to read it at all, let alone to return regularly, and I’m grateful that you would spend your time here.

So hello, thanks for stopping by and do please feel free to contribute: everyone is welcome - we’re an equal opportunity Ministry.  Unless you’re Nicky Fucking Campbell.

As of next Monday, when I get my hands on this…

…I’m going to drive everyone around me nuts.

VERY Cool Software, indeed.

(I already have a Mellotron on my iPhone.)

Seven years ago today……

1,000 songs!!!  5 Gigabytes!!!  10 hours’ battery life!!!

I’ve just come.

Two things.

First, I’m getting an iPhone 3G.  And I’m not even paying for it!  Said thing of beauty is to be provided by my employers.  (Of course I’ll probably have to forfeit this year’s remaining annual leave entitlement, but…)

Second, The Moral Bankruptcy Of 21st Century English Football (Part Infinity + 1) and There Are Times It’s Embarrassing To Be A Lawyer (Part Infinity + 2), courtesy of The Guardian’s George Monbiot.

In the past few days, Sheffield Wednesday Football Club has dropped its [libel] cases against some of its fans. I am now allowed to write about the worst example of legal bullying I have ever seen.

The club has had serious problems, on and off the pitch, and many of its fans use an internet forum - owlstalk.co.uk - to discuss them. They make the kind of comments you would expect to find on any talk board, and which would normally be forgotten within 15 minutes. Two and half years ago the club launched its first suit. Only now have the people who posted these comments emerged blinking from the labyrinthine nightmare of English law…

Sheffield Wednesday went to court to demand the names and email addresses of 14 people who had posted comments on owlstalk. Here are some of the comments over which the club complained. “What an embarrassing, pathetic, laughing stock of a football club we’ve become.” “Another day, another blunder. I doubt even Leeds were in such a mess this time last summer, and look what happened to them.” “I am waiting with bated breath to hear who the Chuckle Brothers have signed after their trip to watch players abroad. With the amount of money they have to spend and the wages they can offer the best we can hope for is that little known Transvestitavian International I Sukblodov, who last scored in a brothel.”

Such comments were deemed by Sheffield Wednesday’s lawyers to be “false and seriously defamatory messages” which had caused grievous injury to the delicate flowers who ran the club. (They should try posting an article on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site.) The lawyers threatened “proceedings to include claims for injunctions, damages, interest and legal costs (which could be substantial)”. The judge threw most of the application out, but instructed the forum’s host to reveal the email addresses of four of the posters, whose remarks seem to me to be almost as trivial as those he dismissed. This took place a year ago, and the long shadow of the law hung over the posters until the club’s lawyers dropped the case last week.

Another case dates back to February 2006, when the club sent a warning letter to a fan called Nigel Short. When he received the letter he offered to apologise and to change his comments, but the club rejected this. He was able to fight it only because he found a lawyer - Mark Lewis of George Davies Solicitors in Manchester - who was incensed by this case and was prepared to represent him. “I’ve had two and a half years of worrying I was going to lose my house,” Short tells me. “It’s been hell. If Mark hadn’t done this no win, no fee, I would have been bankrupt by now.”

In November 2007, Short was diagnosed with throat cancer. The case continued. But on Wednesday September 3 he announced that his treatment had been successful. On Friday September 5, the club dropped the case and agreed to pay his costs. It issued a press release which suggested it had done so because of “Mr Short’s medical condition”. I asked the club whether it had abandoned the case because it knew that Short would now live to fight the action. It has refused to answer my questions.

Full case report of the fiasco here.

I dare say if I thought about it long and hard enough I could come up with some pithy pun or other on which to end this post - given my origins it would probably centre around an (entirely justifiable) insult towards natives of South Yorkshire.

As it is, I’ll suffice myself to say that the firm of solicitors instructed by Sheffield Wednesday Football Club, its directors and shareholders in the above matter was Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Preston Gates Ellis, known colloquially as K&L Gates.

Decide for yourself whether you would ever entertain the notion of instructing such a firm.  The Minister will be taking his (admittedly limited) purchasing power elsewhere.

THIS is brilliant.  (Click the link, then “Watch the Video”.)

The Minister is not on commission: he just thinks Dropbox is mighty fine.

Right on cue…

This, incidentally, is my first post using my beautiful, new, shiny kit.  It’s lovely.

Oh, yeah: look what I bought.

I knew the Minister’s Wife(’s 15% educational discount) would come in useful eventually.

The Minister craves an iPhone.

By placing this link on the Ministry’s façade, the Minister enters a free prize draw to win an iPhone.

Contrary to all appearances, the Minister is no fool.

And in any event the Minister actually likes Upstart Blogger (from which he took one of the Ministry’s previous themes), and wishes it and its owner well.

At this point the Minister will be taking a short sabbatical as he spends the next few evenings mending his laptop and reinstalling all his software in a last desperate attempt to stave off having to buy a new one for a few more months or - worse still - having to use The Minister’s Wife’s PC.

Fortunately, Apple’s introduction of Time Machine in the latest version of the Mac operating system and the Minister’s investment in two more external hard drives means that the second draft of The Novel should not completely disappear into the ether when some hardware next goes tits up.

What did we do with all our spare time before computers meant we had no spare time?

The good news is that the next SMIP is 90% complete (it’s been quite a researching job, this one) and, therefore, almost ready to be released into the wild; it’s also safely tucked away on the flash memory drive of the Minister’s EeePC…