112: BlackBerry, bytes, divining and 01101101011011110111001001100101

I’ve never been as annoyed by someone else’s phone as I am now.  Not even when some loudmouth cunt has been yammering away on speaker, or pumping out some tunes, in the simmering prison of public transport.  My girlfriends ‘new’ second-hand BlackBerry, the piece of shit (the phone, not my girlfriend, she’s lovely), is destroying our lives.  Her endless daily calls to customer care being told the same misinformation in various different permutations, is then regaled back to me in excruciating detail including the bits I have just heard her say; “so I said to him...” yes I know I just heard you.  One day its half-truths about new SIM cards, today its meaningless shit about BIS and BES, and instructions that bare no relation to reality.  What was supposed to be a lovely birthday present from her two thoughtful sisters has turned into the worst present anyone has ever received in the whole of human history thanks to the incompetence of O2 and the fine idiots at BlackBerry.

Update on yesterday’s binary insanity:

I stupidly couldn’t understand the simple error instructing me that the binary code must be divisible by eight.  Already having knowledge of the concept of an 8-bit byte I should have immediately understood, and in a brief moment of clarity it just occurred to me what it means.  It’s so pathetically simple that I can only assume that the Kevin of yesterday was a drooling simpleton.

Binary is represented by ones and zeros, but really it is just electrical switches on and off.  I learnt this at college all these years ago.  The number one (1) is represented by the binary code 00110001.  Don’t ask me why, it just is.  Two is 00110010, three 00110011, four 00110100; a is 01100001, b 01100010, and c 01100011.  All divisible once by the number 8.  So all I needed to do was add a couple more digits to the end of my random string of numbers.

So

1111001010001110101010100010110101010110101010110101001010010101000101010010100100101010000101010010100100100101001001010010011010101010100101010101001001010100101011101010111111001011111111010111010100101000101011101010001101001001000010101010101001010100101011001001010101010100101010010111011010010101010100101001010101010101010101010100010101011100100010

becomes

111100101000111010101010001011010101011010101011010100101001010100010101001010010010101000010101001010010010010100100101001001101010101010010101010100100101010010101110101011111100101111111101011101010010100010101110101000110100100100001010101010100101010010101100100101010101010010101001011101101001010101010010100101010101010101010101010001010101110010001000

by sticking a couple of zeros on the end.  And now we have the magical string divisible by eight.  My fingers tremble, my brow perspires and my loins twitch as I click convert binary to text.  What magical key will it unlock, what secrets of the unknown, what futuristic tea leaves will reveal my fate from the bottom of my figurative teacup?

Yes, that’s correct:

You heard me right the first time.  I can hardly believe my eyes.  The repeated ampersand (&) is clearly an indication of a long life with many changes and opportunities, or possibly additions so it could mean a large family.  There is a single asterix (*) or star represented in the string which probably indicates monogamy, but its proximity to two consecutive percent signs suggests unexpected success in a game of chance.

There are patterns of numbers including, most significantly, four instances of the number 8226.  This I cannot immediately account for, but the final digit is a semi-colon.  This means the divining is not complete and I must look for explanatory signs in the world around me; anything that can suggest meaning to the vitally important number 8226.

I am not mental.  Millions of people every day go in for this kind of bollocks, be it horoscopes, prayer or offering greetings to magpies.  Incidentally yesterday I saw a charity mugger in Manchester stop a shopper in the street with the opening words, “I’m not mental...”  It was downhill from there on in.

Tomorrow I cure my cold by getting dietary advice from randomly generated Morse code.

(NOTE: the original upload of this post didn't render the text from the translated binary properly, hence my adding the screengrab as a replacement.  What a waste of time - if it was anymore pointless it would be modern art.)

111: 0111100101100001011110010111001101100001011110010110010101110010

111  10010100011101010101000101  10101010110 1010101 101010 01010 01 010 1000101 010 010 10 010 0101 01000010101001010 01 001 001 0100 10 010 10 010 01 1010101 01 0100 1010101010 0100101 0100101011101010111111001011111111010111010100101000 1010111010 10001   101001 001000010101 01010100101 0100101011001001010 10101010 010101001011101 101001 010101010 010100101010101010 10101010101 00010101011100100010

Well, laugh; it’s a funny joke.  No, I don’t get it either, but I just had the urge to type in binary.  No doubt it’s meaningless.  Wait a doggone minute, I’ve had a brainwave.  Hold on while I google binary translator and see if I can find out what I just typed.

Well that’s a massive disappointment.  It says:

Error: Malformed binary. Your binary code is must be divisible by 8.

Who can tell me what that means?  OK, let me try and work this out myself.  I’m on a website called Binary to Text (ASCII) Conversion, and if I type in the word ‘hello’ and press convert its tickertape tackers out with 0110100001100101011011000110110001101111.  So logically my first step should be to take the spaces out of my random key hammering.  So

111  10010100011101010101000101  10101010110 1010101 101010 01010 01 010 1000101 010 010 10 010 0101 01000010101001010 01 001 001 0100 10 010 10 010 01 1010101 01 0100 1010101010 0100101 01001010111010101111110010111111110101110101001010001010111010 10001   101001 001000010101 01010100101 0100101011001001010 10101010 010101001011101 101001 010101010 010100101010101010 10101010101 00010101011100100010

becomes

1111001010001110101010100010110101010110101010110101001010010101000101010010100100101010000101010010100100100101001001010010011010101010100101010101001001010100101011101010111111001011111111010111010100101000101011101010001101001001000010101010101001010100101011001001010101010100101010010111011010010101010100101001010101010101010101010100010101011100100010

and again we get Error: Malformed binary. Your binary code is must be divisible by 8.  This doesn’t seem to be achieving much, and looked at from some angles could easily be judge a total waste of fucking time.  But only by naysayers.  And I am a yaysayer, and I’m going to stick a zero on the start and see what happens.  I hope it works, because if I need to start working out divisions of eight I’ve got no chance.  My efforts at turning random meaningless strings of ones and zeros into meaningless strings of abcs and xyzs will be entirely in vain.

And what a surprise, adding a zero to the start (which I had no logical reason to surpose would make a difference) has made no difference.  “...must be divisible by 8.”  What is my weak little mind to do with that instruction?  It’s not a challenge I can accept.  Let’s see if 0110100001100101011011000110110001101111 (hello) is divisible by 8 for no good reason whatsoever.  Well yes, it apparently equals 1.3762, according to Ambleside Primary’s Big Calculator.  But 1.3762 times 8 equals 11.0096 so what the hell is going on there?  I obviously need a more robust calculator.  Web 2.0 scientific calculator gives me a more convincing but equally pointless answer of 13762500137512626376375013763750137638.875, but what am I to do with that?  

Same thing I do every night: record it in my online filing cabinet along with all petty gripes, pointless observations, used plasters, bottles of urine and bits of litter collected from the street in front of my house.  OK, job done.