Fingers crossed

Tonight, the local council considers the licence for the Glastonbury Festival. Let’s hope it gets the go-ahead, considering that a certain band has been named to play already.

As well as all the stuff from last year with the dirty great fence and so on, the organisers this year are talking about 50 CCTV camera on the site, and also the possibility of security guards. Not quite the same spirit as a few years ago, but if it goes ahead, then that’s the main thing, I think.

Some people never learn

Today, the Conservative Party has released the name of it’s representative for the elections of the new London Mayor. Amazingly, it’s Stephen Norris – again. He’s already lost it once, but is still determined to try again. In the meantime, he’s even been sacked from his position in the London Mayor’s department, no less.

Um – no, I don’t think so

Having seen the stories today post-anti-war-march from “senior labour ministers” telling us that we should trust Blair because he knows what he’s doing, my response wavers between “Bollocks” and “Complete Bollocks”.

Describing him as “a man of courage and integrity” is vaguely reminiscent of calling Bush “a clever man who knows what he’s doing”. To most of the populace, it looks more like the founder members of Fuckwits Anonymous.

Blimey – there’s a surprise

Wow. Looks like Google has bought up the company that produces Blogger. Impressive.

Google, and other things

A couple of weeks back, I put a piece on here about changing over the images directory to a new name, and getting rid of the old name. The reason for this was because there were a couple of pictures that seemed to be getting linked to via Google/s image search far more than seemed feasible. I won’t say which images were in question – because it’s all changed now anyway.

Basically, these images were coming up through an unrelated search request, but the sheer amount of times they were being referenced (four or five times a day, always through the google images search) struck me as odd, and having looked through the search myself, it turned out that it wasn’t even in the first ten pages of search. I still don’t know, or don’t want to know, all the implications of this – but it concerned me enough that I decided to change all the references to the directory of photos that get used here on d4d.

It’s resulted in a lot of errors and 404’s (Page Not Found) going through the logfiles in the last two weeks, but to my mind it’s been worthwhile. Yeah, I could have left it all, and just accepted the extra hits, but for me personally, it wasn’t something I was comfortable with. But the searches now seem to be winding down a bit, the hint has been taken.

And now I’ve also found the page for removing items from google so I’m hoping that the problem will be gone for once and for all within the next 24 hours, with the image not even cached in google’s store. My apologies to anyone else who was linking to images etc. here – the directory has changed, and will no longer be indexed by google at all.

Maybe it’s an over-reaction, maybe I should care less, notice less, or something, but it wasn’t something I could do and be comfortable with myself. I’ve made my choice now, had to alter some of the site just because of some potential tithead out there, which doesn’t make me at all happy, but I’m fairly sure the issue won’t come up again. And as results go, that’s one I can live with.

Comments System (again)

For anyone who’s wondering, yes, Haloscan is down again. According to their site, they’re doing server work which has “run into problems”, but all the same, it’s now been down 24hours and counting.

Anyone who feels the need to vent can still email here (remember to delete the bit that says so) if they want to vent ire/thoughts in my general direction.

Of course, you’ll be able to see when the comments system comes back, because under here, it’ll say “Comments”…

The Anti-War Protest

In many ways I’d like to have been on the march in London today – but at the same time, I honestly don’t feel it will do any good. Watching Blair’s speech in Glasgow (and isn’t it awfully convenient that he’s at the opposite end to the country while the march is going on? Nice timing…) did more to convince me that he’s determined to go with Bush and war, regardless of what the general public think about it.

Maybe it’s just a spectacular display of intent to commit political suicide – I don’t know, but I’d be very dubious that anyone would want to re-elect the grinning weasel-faced twat after this. Displaying such a huge amount of contempt for public opinion about this kind of thing should prove to anyone who was still in doubt (have they been comatose for the last five years?) that Blair is more obsessed with his own image, and of being buddy-buddy with the US than he is about the opinions of the people who voted for him.

So will the March and the protests have any effect? I certainly hope so, but I really don’t think they will. Regardless of the number of people involved in the protests, this is something where idiotboy has made his decision already, and won’t be diverted from the course of action that’s been chosen. The way this is being driven through, that no protests and no alternatives are being looked at instead of war, it makes me wonder whether Iraq now is going to be the British (and of course American) equivalent of Vietnam. Hundreds of thousands of conscientious objectors, a war that goes on for years with no real resolution in sight, and hundreds, even thousands of unnecessary casualties.

Only the future will reveal what happens, but somehow I can’t help feeling that this “potential” war is really pretty much definite.