Classic headline

Sometimes the world of coincidences is too much for me – I went off to a place called Brighouse today for an interview. While there, I spotted that the local paper had a website and being a sad git, I couldn’t resist having a look when I got home (and remembered the URL).

And then I just had to laugh when I saw this as one of the headlines. Click on the headline for a bit more of the story. Small towns are strange, strange places…

And Yay, though I struggle through the valley of fuckwits

Ah, the joys of dealing with the council tax department of an authority first thing in the morning.

Over the last three months or so, I’ve been getting council tax mail addressed to the person who used to live here. What’s FAR more impressive is that this house isn’t even in the area of responsibility of the council that is sending me the shit. So I’ve been hearing “oh, I’ll sort that out” from the person to whom the mail was addressed, and it’s still getting sent out.

Today though, I decided to call them myself – and lo and behold, they’ve promised not to send any more stuff to the wrong address. Of course, only time will tell if they’ve actually managed to do so.

The fact that the conversation started off with me giving my address and them saying “well we can’t be sending it to you, because you’re not in our area” wasn’t all that promising. But it looks like they’re more sorted now, so we’ll just see how it goes.

Oops

One day I’ll learn to type. From the error logs, it looks like I’ve managed to call this page radnom.html instead of random.html on a comment log-in from somewhere else. *Sigh*

Tivo – part 2

Further to some comments about TiVo from when I was blethering about installing it here, I thought I’d slap in a couple of photos, including two screenshots – they’re not best quality, but they convey the idea.

Yes, Pinky, it’s like the Sky+ device that Sky TV released, only better. It’s not all that impressive to look at really, but the power within the quiet little box is quite something. On a geeky note, it actually only has a 54Mhz processor, but it doesn’t need a great deal of speed, so that’s ideal.

I’m still getting my head around the “TiVo suggestions” where it saves programmes it “thinks” you’ll like, according to what you’ve recorded and enjoyed (via use of a simple ‘Thumbs Up’ or ‘Thumbs Down’ process) before. At the moment it seems to have decided that I like all kinds of documentaries, so I’ve been going through the lists getting rid of the ones I’ll never watch – but the more I watch and record, the more it’ll “learn” what other things I might want to see.

The other thing that I’m already getting used to doing is “pausing” live TV if the phone rings or whatever. It saves up to half an hour of TV, so you can pause it and watch it when the call’s finished or whatever – and also it means you can rewind a live tv programme and catch some detail you might have missed, any time up to 30 minutes ago. It’s a fun toy, but also it’s something I could get very used to.

A full review (and better screen shots) will come along in a few days when I’ve got more used to the system, and sorted out the little teething problems (like an addiction to documentaries *Grin*)

My father would love this

Via Blogs Life comes the story of the literacy scheme’s advert that contained it’s its own grammatical error. Just the sort of thing my ultra-pedant of a paternal influence would thoroughly enjoy.

Getting out more

Well, no matter how much people I know tell me I should get out more, there’s one thing I’m pretty certain of. And that’s that I don’t have the time on my hands to carve pencils like this.

Then again, I did have the time to find the link, but for that I blame UserFriendly. It’s my excuse, and I’m sticking with it.

Brief attack of dyslexia

Looking at the cover of one of the Sunday papers this morning (about Tony Blair facing yet more trouble if he goes to war) I managed to read “Go to war now and we resign” as “Go to war now and we redesign“.

Amazing what just a couple of letters can do, isn’t it.

Conspiracy Theory

I swear it’s all a plot. Batteries communicate with each other. That’s the case – it has to be. In the last week I’ve had to replace the batteries in the remote controls for TV, Video, TiVo (although that’s a bit irrelevant, as it was new and didn’t come with batteries), and the stereo upstairs.

Now, the batteries in my alarm clock have just upped and died too. Bastard things are AAA size too, so I’ve got to buy a 4-pack, with naff all else running on them. Ah well.

Cheesy Beans

I know various other bloggers have written about the weirdo photographing a woman’s feet covered in baked beans, but it still makes me smile every time I read the story. Now that‘s what I call Comic Relief.

And how the hell did the police issue their advisory warning without pissing themselves laughing at the same time? I doubt I could’ve done the same.

TiVo

After much deliberation, and also because the boxes are hard to find at the moment while they plonk about sourcing a new supplier, I ended up buying a Tivo unit last week. I’ve waited ’til today to get it all sorted for a variety of reasons, not least that I simply couldn’t be arsed to go climbing over the TV and fuck about with cables and wires.

But today, with shitty weather outside and not much else on the agenda once the shopping had been done, well, it might as well get set up and sorted. So out come all the cables, manuals, and the TiVo box itself.

Connecting it all up went surprisingly easily. (Famous last words) Then it comes to powering it up so it can call home and set up channels etc. Turns out it’s still on Demo Mode, but a quick call to Customer Services sorts that out. Yes, amazingly enough, customer services are helpful, know what they’re talking about, and can sort out problems. On a Saturday. Wonders will never cease.

And after that it was a piece of piss. It’s now all connected up, has downloaded all the TV schedules for the next two weeks, and is up and running. This goes down as a successful Saturday.

Yet more hysteria

Following on from all the shit at the end of last year about certain councils banning video-cameras and cameras from school nativity plays because of the media hysteria about paedophiles, The Register is today reporting that some councils are now equally paranoid about mobile phones with cameras being used in swimming pools etc..

When will this sort of thing calm down again? At the end of the day it’s far more likely that someone who was into that type of thing would simply go along to the swimming pool and watch from the visitor’s gallery, or even just go swimming and “accidentally” brush past people/children. I despair.

Lemsip and Lockets, oh my

Interesting to see that both Meg and Vicky both commented on the naff Lockets and Lemsip ads in the last 24 hours.

I was going to blether on about this a while back, but kind of hoped that if I ignored it, they’d go away.

I’ve never really understood the entire craze for ‘flu and cold medication, to be honest. At the end of the day, both are viral in cause, and as such, there’s a grand total of fuck all we can do about them. The medications don’t cure the illness, they just alleviate the symptoms. It’s the same with people who get the flu and go to the doctors – they can’t do a fucking thing, it’s just that we seem incapable of realising that there are still plenty of things we can’t cure, even though we “should be able to”.

As for the ads, well, they’re just shite really, aren’t they? Not really any more offensive or crap than the craze over the last couple of years for the other ones where the flu medication “sorts the men from the boys” or whatever other bobbins the advertising fuckwits came up with during their latest crack-fuelled brainstorming session.

For myself, I have absolutely no idea whether these campaigns are all by the same agency just recycling ideas over and over (I suspect this is quite probable though) or if one agency came up with the idea and the others stole paid homage to it. I don’t know if they’re supposed to be all self-referential, ironic and post-modernist, or if their down to ad execs wanting the world to go back to the 80’s “greed is good” ethos. Nor do I care.

It’s all advertising bobbins, and at the end of the day all it does is make me take note of which brands I wouldn’t buy even if I ever really did bother with flu medication in the first place. (At this point I should point out that I got “advised” to take some over the last couple of weeks – got Beechams Flu Pills, and took ’em. Yes, I felt better, but that’s because they’re loaded to the gills with paracetamol and caffeine. And then I felt shit again, because they’re also loaded to the top with E110 Sunset Yellow food colouring, which always makes me feel like shit.)

Easter

Having inflicted some daytime television on myself for once (call it a motivational exercise to make me want to work) I couldn’t help noticing that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is busy banging out a half hour video on the life and works of Jesus Christ. The ideal present for that special person in your life – get ’em into the Morons Mormons.

No, he’s totally ‘armless

I’m sure I’ve seen too many horror films or something – but whatever the reason, while it’s very clever etc., the idea of a double arm transplant really does make me shudder.

Well, that’s new…

I’m sorry, but Ron Davies’ excuse that he was “watching badgers” at a well known gay haunt has to be one of the funniest things I’ve read in ages.

Still, if he can come up with an excuse like that and think people will believe it, he’s certainly ready to be the next Prime Minister.

Congratulations

A quick little additional post – congratulations to Gert on writing the 500th D4D comment on Haloscan.

It’s Spring – time for a rebranding exercise

I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this, but Immac, that well-known cause of depilatory screams everywhere, has now been renamed as Veet. Why? Who knows. I can’t think of what the name Veet is supposed to represent.

Personally, I’d have opted for “Yelp“, or maybe even “Jesus Fucking Christ, can’t you think of a better way to do this?“. But “Veet“? It sounds more like a German chiropody cream.

Also, there’s a new “calorie-free sugar replacement” called – um – Splenda. *Spit*. I hate that name – I think it’s the way it sounds like a word, and actually isn’t spelled the same way at all. And again, what the fuck is so “Splenda”ful about calorie-free sugar replacements? I can’t come up with a decent alternative to it, but the name really does suck arse.

Winter Gardens

I knew there was something I’d forgotten to write a bit about. Over the weekend, we all went over to Sheffield to see one of the new developments there, the Winter Gardens. I must admit, I actually really liked them – they’re a lot smaller than I’d expected from the site and so on, but they’re still an exceptionally pleasant addition to the city.

When it comes to Sheffield, I hadn’t really been there for many years. It’s actually a place that’s linked in my mind with visits to the Grandparents, and all the joys that involves. Just thinking of the place made me simply think of grotty power-station cooling towers, grimy city and generally not that pleasant. But over the last five years or so, it’s undergone a huge revamp, what with the Winter Gardens, the Peace Gardens, and much more besides.

I think I’ll have to make a couple more visits to Sheffield before I can make a full re-assessment of the place, but it’s already gone a long way towards improving my own perception of the place.

Meme of the Galactic Toss Monkey

And yes, just to keep on with a theme, there’s even something on Blogpsot now – I’m amazed Gordon didn’t think of it first….

Text message abbreviations

A very quick kudos to Vicky for her comment in Green Fairy‘s website regarding some of the nastier abbreviations.

Tw@ is going into my own lexicon and dictionary for phone texts, that’s for sure…

Scotland

Yes, it’s taken me some time to finish and upload (and in fact there’s still one day’s stuff to be written), but the tale and photos are finally uploaded and sitting pretty in the scotland section. Enjoy…

Interesting points

Watching Jonathon Meades’ new programme on Britons and their food was a complete joy. His observation that the more cooking programmes we watch on TV, the more pre-prepared ready meals we eat made me laugh out loud.

Day of Weirdness

Yes, I’ve been very slack on the blog front since returning from the wilds of Scotland. Truth be told, I picked up a dollop of flu (again – it’s the clean air that does it, I swear) and have been feeling truly vile since returning, in conjunction with having guests (and a dog) until yesterday.

But today, despite the fact I’m still coughing like a laboratory beagle, I’m almost back on form. And (via Mike at Troubled Diva), the saga of How to cook a Goose Egg.

And in my own email today, spam about terrorist attacks in the US and how to survive them.

Some people are just dafter than others

What a welcome back to society. The news that some idiots are going to try replication a 200 year old endurance challenge might not seem all that relevant. Until you realise that what they’re doing is actually attempting to walk 1000 miles in 1000 hours. That’s about six weeks without proper sleep, just sort of napping between miles.

I wish them all the best luck in the world – but they’re definitely totally insane.

Turin Brakes – Manchester Academy

I can’t really come up with a valid review or thoughts on this concert. For once the Academy was absolutely rigid with people, and had turned into a complete sweatbox – supposedly fire regulations meant that they couldn’t – um – open the exit doors. (No, I haven’t worked that one out either, but there we go) So it was rigid, full of fuckwits barging through for booze and/or talking to their mates instead of listening to the fucking music they’d paid £15 to hear, and it was just generally shit.

Musically, from what I heard, Turin Brakes were bloody good – but the crowd and venue combined into such an epic level of cuntdom that I’m afraid to report, dear reader, that for the first time in five years, I left early.

The return

Well, I’m back. *Raspberry noises* at Helen, for implying that I’d get withdrawal symptoms, and dial in from the mobile. (The fact that I was completely out of mobile coverage is utterly irrelevant – honest *Grin*) It was a fantastic time, loads of mountains and stuff, and there’ll be more pages about it when I get round to it. (Probably write more tonight after Turin Brakes)

Hiatus

Well, it’s now Saturday, and I’m off to the wilds of Scotland ’til next Friday. So there won’t be any updates – no internet, no mobile phones, no nothing. Just lochside, mountains, woods, hills, and bloody huge log fires.

Upon my return there’ll probably be some new stuff added in, as lappy will be going with me (spot the true IT addict) and knowing insomnia, I’ll have plenty of time to write. All the same, it’s a break, and a much needed one.

If you fancy it, have a ferret round the site – but otherwise, don’t expect any more updates ’til late on 28/02 when I come back. Oh, and then I’m out seeing Turin Brakes in concert anyway. Might be best to leave it ’til 1/03 then. *Grin*

Pop sensations

Having seen the way TaTu‘s single “all the things she said” is now the UK No 1 for the third consecutive week, it does make me wonder how many record producers and “Svengali” types are busy kicking themselves at not having thought of marketing the same type of girl group.

Will it mean a glut of pseudo-dyke duos in the next year? Will we see “PopDykes, the rivals”? Who knows – obviously TaTu have managed to be the front runners in this little marketing glitch – but I think it’ll be quite fun to watch the rest of the herd dashing to play catch up.

Hallucinations? Or just kids TV

I was trying to persuade myself this afternoon that I really hadn’t clicked on the TV and seen a purple and green badger. Having checked the programme’s website, I can honestly say that I wasn’t hallucinating.

All rumours about the drugs influence of people who write children’s TV are blatantly true. How can anyone doubt it now?

Exercises in Scale

Very silly, but quite clever too – a set of photos of parking spaces “filled” by toy cars. Pity about the hands etc holding the cars, but still fun.

Maybe it has potential to be like a Mirror Project 2.

The test of a true blogger

Over at Troubled Diva, Mike was answering some questions about “Are you a proper blogger?

These are my answers…

• You ditch the standard template you grabbed off the shelf when you first started blogging, in favour of a design of your own making. Guilty Well, not strictly true, as I never used the standard templates, and worked from the d4d “design” right from the start.
• You start caring about what happens in The Bloggies. Innocent Supposedly I should care – but I just can’t bring myself to do so.
• You get listed on Daypop or Blogdex. Innocent What’s even sadder is I didn’t even know of them.
• You discover that you’re in the Google Top Ten for something completely unlikely and unintended, which generates loads of hits. Guilty As I’ve commented on more times than enough.
• People start leaving you sneery, snarky, anonymous comments. Innocent Nothing yet. Mind you, I’d just delete them anyway, so what’s the point?
• You purchase your own domain name. Guilty Although in fairness it was before I even considered blogging. I came up with the name and liked it before I had any idea what would go on the site.
• You migrate from Blogger to Movable Type. Guilty well, semi-guilty – I’m considering it bigtime after the Haloscan farce.
• You start a “meme”. Innocent What’s one of them then?
• You stop participating in “memes” (ahem) and online personality quizzes (as well as re-posting chain e-mail “funnies”), because you’re above all that now. Innocent As this proves, I still do them if it’s a subject I find interesting/thought-provoking. But no, I’ve never been interested in doing every single one.
• You string loads of other weblog names together in the middle of a post, in one great long list of linky-love. Innocent Nope, not me. The biggest bunch of links is when I add people to the blogroll.
• You start dropping cute little in-jokes into the main body of your posts, which only a tiny handful of other webloggers will understand. Innocent Most of jokes are crap anyway, not worth the effort of being “in”.
• You attend a Blogmeet. Innocent – so far.
• You make a submission to the Mirror Project. Guilty
• You register your site with Blogdex, Daypop, Popdex, Technorati, Blogtree, Blogstreet, Blogwise, the Ageless Project, the Eatonweb Portal, GeoURL, Is My Blog Hot Or Not?, the UK Weblogs list…et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Innocent As explained above, I’m obviosuly still new to all this, as I haven’t linked to any of those. Yet. *Grin*
• You set up an RSS feed. Innocent Maybe one day. Maybe not.
• You start saying things like: actually, I’ve started to find the whole terminology surrounding so-called “blogging” so limiting these days, because you know, I don’t really feel that I fit the definition of a “blogger” any more, and couldn’t we all start to move away from these wholly arbitrary restrictions, because I suppose that if anything, I would consider myself more of a “personal publisher”, but even then I feel that… Innocent Nope – not going to happen. I did write some stuff about this over here on Naked Blog but no, I don’t give a damn what this type of thing is referred to as.

So, guilty on five counts out of the fifteen or so. I’m pretty sure that makes me a completely improper blogger. Good, isn’t it?

Browser Wars

As regular readers of this site will know, I tend to avoid using Internet Explorer as much as humanly possible. Out of preference, I use either Opera or Mozilla for everything web-based. There’s a variety of reasons, but the main one is because IE is well known to be a major load of shite for security.

So why is it that companies like Royal Bank of Scotland and Britannia insist that people can only use their services through IE or old versions of Netscape?

Tarot

Yes, on occasions I do have a play with my own deck of tarot cards, and have a look to see what’s going on. I’ve been using them for about 14 or 15 years now. Anyway, I thought I’d do a reading yesterday, and this is the results. I’ll add more to it while I’m away, a more definitive read and diagnosis from the layout.

BBC News

A lot of people have been busy commenting on the new look of the BBC News website. I hadn’t really bothered, because it’s like everything, the human race doesn’t like change, so I’m giving it some time to get used to first.

However, I have to say that first impressions aren’t all that good – I’m glad to see a wider layout, rather than using mere 600×480 resolution – but why do they use fixed resolution anyway? Surely it’s easier to use percentages, so it fills whatever size window you’re using?

As for the layout – it’s harder to read at the moment, because the eyes/brain are used to one thing, and this is different. I’ll see how I get on with it.

Violence

If there is a report later in the day of a man found with a hammer stuffed up his own rectum, claw end first, then you’ll know exactly where I live – because it’ll be my neighbour who has received such treatment.

Having finally got to sleep at 5am, I was woken at 7 by the sound of the fucking cunting selfish bastard considerate gentleman bashing on the walls with aforementioned hammer. It’s now 12, and he hasn’t flaming stopped yet. I’m praying he sticks a nail through an electrical cable.

Sarcasm is just one more service we offer

Should I worry at having a conversation with a friend about whether our brains run on Linux Sarcasm 8.0™ or Windows Sarcasm Professional Server™?

The general conclusion was that Windows Sarcasm would be prone to crashes at the most relevant times, having just spent three hours fine tuning the sarcasm requirements for the current situation, but that Linux Sarcasm didn’t support all the necessary input modes to deal with the cretinous habits of the real world.

A decision about which OS is to be used on d4d will be forthcoming in March.

Finger on the Pulse

Normally I’d have titled this “No Shit, Sherlock“, but I’m on version 8,653,082 of that now (roughly), so I went for variety instead.

Archbishops doubt the morality of bombing the shit out of Iraq – well, they’ve never been up to much on moral decisions before now, and I suppose they’re still not. All the same, it’s quite amusing to see the church following the people’s views rather than the political aspects. Maybe there’s hope for the hypocritical old bastards yet.

Seems reasonable to me

The Guardian today is reporting that Jeffrey Archer has been banned from doing “charity” work by prison officers. Considering his past history with charity work (a certain alleged syphoning off of funds) can you really blame them?

So that’s where’s it’s going

Further to this post a couple down about good old congestion charging, it looks like the BBC has been having the same kind of thought process, and now has a piece on what the money from it is being used for. They reckon the charge will raise £130 million per year. By my calculations, that’s what it would make just on the people who pre-paid it on Monday (100,000) – and doesn’t include any fines at all. So, £130 million per year is a decidely low-end estimate. The article makes for interesting reading. Let’s hope that it does plough the money back into proper transport schemes, rather than some pie-in-the-sky shite like we’ve seen too many times before.

Your chance for fame

Looking through the website for one of the local estate agents I discovered that I too could live in Coronation Street, Manchester – weird but true.

Hallelujah

Finally, after five days of being totally shonky, the comments system is back working, and *Gasp!* People can actually post to it now.

Looks like on of the next things on the shopping list is either moving d4d to a different hosting service that allows PHP for a migration to Moveable Type, or at least a comments system that works without needing reference to external companies, or upgrading the existing space on the current hosting so that it’ll handle PHP too.

Joy – just what I wanted to have to deal with.

Plenty of questions

Looking at the horrendous reports from South Korea about the blazing subway train and it’s victim count it did leave me wondering what the hell they were using on the seats. Supposedly this ultra-intense blaze was caused by a man with a cigarette lighter and a “carton of flammable liquid”. So what the hell was it that burned that intensely?

I’m sure that sooner or later it’ll turn out to have been “a terrorist attack” or some other load of shonky old shit, but I do wonder what kind of anti-fire stuff (yes, I know there’s a better word for it, I just can’t remember it right now) they had on the seats – or even if they had any at all. The smoke seen billowing out, and the flame intensity was very reminiscent of a couple of the fires we had in furniture stores etc in the UK before flame-retardant foam became the legal requirement.

Nice little earner

Looking at this story about the infamous London Congestion Charging that was introduced yesterday, I did some of the maths on it. 100,000 drivers paid the £5 fee. So that’s half a million pounds in London’s coffers for one day. 10,000 drivers failed to pay the charges, and will receive fine notices for £80. So that’s £800,000 in one day. £1.3 million income in one day. Not bad work, if you can get it. Extrapolating that, we get the princely sum of £6.5 million in the first working week. Over the year that comes in at £338 million.

Jesus H Christ on a warped pine floorboard

While floating through search requests etc. earlier, I came across Teens for Jesus. I’m pretty sure this isn’t in the same context as “Teens for Michael Jackson” or even “Teens for Gary Glitter”, but it’s still pretty weird.

For those with strong intestinal muscles, the Statement of Faith is good, so long as you don’t bust a gut laughing.

Search results

I have to admit, on looking through the referrer logs this morning, that I felt a certain frisson of bizarre pride for knowing that I come up second on google for cunting bugger as a phrase. Even funnier (from my own slightly silly perspective this morning) is being first for “Things to do to a friend” (the mind boggles why this was being searched for, but there we go). And who was the strange person who found my site while searching for Andrex adverts?

Surreal search request of the day (Non-Google for once) has to go to 8 second clicks on old cunts

Brits stuff

Not that anyone outside the UK will care about it, but the hype for the Brits awards has now kicked in. Thank christ it’s only on Thursday, so the hype won’t be around too long.

Anyway, the current rumour is that Miss Dynamite and George Michael will do a duet, probably an anti-war song. It might be an interesting combination, not that it’ll have any effect on weasel-boy President Blair.

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.

Collectors Corner

OK, it’s not a hobby I was aware of, but I suppose it makes sense. Beer Can collecting. (I’m assuming they’re empty, or still sealed, but who knows?) However, there’s always someone who’s prepared to take it to extremes.

Now that’s that I call quite random

Just a brief thought that sometimes I’m not sure which is funnier, the people who use Google or the way it sometimes works.

Looking through the search referrers today produced something which I absolutely love:

And lo, d4d is there within the top ten results. (And so is Anna) – how cool is that?

Go bart.

Cinema Queues

Why is it that if there’s a group of, say, 10 people all wanting to go to see the same thing at the cinema (i.e. a group, not just five lots of couples, or whatever) they ALL have to wait in the queue to buy the tickets?

Do they expect that if they pool the money (at £5 each on a weekend, a whole £50) then the person elected to buy the tickets will just do a runner to Brazil or somewhere and never be seen again? Is each person incapable of standing separate from the bunch, even for the five or ten minutes necessary to queue for the tickets? Or are they all just such fuckwits that noen of them can remember what they want to see unless they all bunch up together?

It wouldn’t annoy me so much if it was a rare thing – when I went to the cinema today there were three groups doing this. The queue looked fucking huge, yet disappeared quickly once the bunch of retard daytrips had gone through.

Valentine’s Greetings

On a complete tangent, if the Anti Valentines Cards at Not So Soft aren’t to your liking because they’re too nice and polite still, the flash greeting at this location really should suit you nicely. Definitely not for the faint of heart though.

Daredevil

Yes, Yes, I know that it’s “sad” to go see films on your own, and all that bobbins. What can I say? Much as he’s a total knob in a lot of films, still the idea of Ben Affleck in tight red leather was a thing that had to be seen – and when better than on Valentine’s Day?

Actually, if truth be told, I was just as interested in how they’d manage to deal with Elektra (unfortunately played by Jennifer Garner of Alias infamy) as I’ve thought she was a fascinating character, possibly even worthy of her own film, right back to the late 80’s. (I know, showing my age again) So all in all, it was going to be an interesting film, regardless.

And in honesty, it’s not that bad – well, it could’ve been a lot worse. Considering that the two main(ish) characters, played by Affleck and Garner are about as capable as the local park bench of showing emotions, it’s quite a fun film. Not one I’d see repeated times – I think once was enough – unlike some of the others in the genre, for example Spiderman, which is still fun the second or third time round.

There’s a couple of very noticeable bugs in the film too – the grand finale (about 20 mins of the film) is all done with Daredevil supposedly nursing a knackered left side, where his body has been pierced through with a short sword. (Sai, for the pedantic among us) Considering that he seems to be dying at this stage, it’s really quite impressive how agile and strong he suddenly becomes again. Maybe I missed a plot twist, and he’s actually twinned with Wolverine from X-Men (Speaking of which, the trailer for X2 preceded Daredevil, and looks like it’ll be much more fun…) or something, but it’s definitely a pretty large bug. There are a couple of others too, but I can’t be bothered to go into the ins and outs of it all.

If you can suspend disbelief, and just sit and enjoy a film (ideally without gobby Mancunian fuckwits in the row behind commenting on every “twist”, making it blatantly obvious to all in the audience that they’d have problems following the twists in a Mr Men book, let alone a film) then Daredevil’s worth a go. If you’re an impassioned fan of the Daredevil comic books, I’d probably save time (and a nasty case of mouth-froth) by simply avoiding it altogether.

For a different (and in my opinion, far funnier/more pious) review of this film, go here. (Thanks to “More than a way of life” for pointing to it initially)

By hook or by crook

Another title I just couldn’t resist, seeing that Abu Hamza’s son is in court for burglary. There’s so many different levels to all this, but I do wonder if the judge would have a sense of humour and expel the boy from the country by telling him to sling his hook.

Bloody sodding Valentines Day

Just to top off my mood, I’ve just received a lovely little spam text message from the considerate caring marketing droids fuckwit cunts at O2 telling me “Give Valentine's Day a twist. Treat yourself to romantic ringtones, logos and horoscopes. For details, reply to this message, or go to o2.co.uk“. What a load of old shite – what the hell is a romantic ringtone, anyway? Even Rolf Harris wouldn’t find the beepy stylophone style of mobile ringtone to be romantic.

Anyway, I’m about as uninterested in the entire thing as it’s possible to be. To me Feb 14th is very much a day for the unimaginative, the day where every couple seems to know what they “should” be doing, by getting cards, flowers and teddy bears, going out for meals, proposing, all that bobbins. But it’s just for the people who seem to fail to realise that this is all stuff they can do any time – and in fact should do anytime. There’s no such thing as a special day to show your partner you love them – in fact, to me the idea that my partner would need a special day to do that kind of thing, when they feel they should do it rather than wanting to do it, well, that’s not romantic, it’s just insulting. On a personal basis, I’d rather receive absolutely fuck all on February 14th, and instead just be surprised at some random time of year, when it was something that meant something, rather than just going with the crowd, following on with “well, it’s what everyone does”.

But I know my standards are too high, to want someone who actually has independent thoughts, rather than being a mob-follower.

Jammed up

Nice to see that the website for London Congestion Charging is jammed solid. The BBC caption writer appears to be having a field day with it.

And what a shock – The Useability Company has had a look at the website in question and it’s too complex, doesn’t even cater for those who are visually impaired, and is really just a sack of shit, although they’re too polite to say that in public. I don’t know wo did the work, but looking at the standard of it, I’m almost tempted to say it looks like an EDS job…

Apt initials

Am I the only one who smiles upon seeing people referring to Valentine’s Day as VD ?

Obi Wan Kycensus

So, there are 390,000 Jedi in the UK according to the 2001 Census. Frankly, who cares?

I’m sure that deciding to make Jedi an accepted religion had some wider point, some sociological theorem behind it, but I’m sorry, I just can’t bring myself to look into the whys and wherefores of it all.

Solomon Burke, Manchester Academy 2

Tonight, there’s no other way to put it, I was in the presence of true greatness. I’ll freely admit, until the start of this year, I hadn’t really heard of Solomon Burke at all – my first real sighting of him was on Jools Holland at New Year’s Eve. So it came as quite a surprise tonight to learn that he’s been coming to the UK for concerts since 1965. There was actually a couple he invited on stage who had a photo of him from his first tour, which they’d copied and given back to him – and regardless of everything else, it’s pretty impressive for a star to allow members of the general public on stage with him – not just once, but twice, the second occasion involving about 15 people as his “dancers”. How to describe the music? This is a man who’s either performed with, or written songs for, everyone in the Soul and Blues world. The band come on stage, and immediately it feels like a scene from the Blues Brothers – only without the car chases, fights and chickenwire. Drums, bass and lead guitar, a trio of sax/trumpet players, organ, and – um – a harp?!? Novel. The band went into a jam before Solomon Bruke himself appeared on stage, so there was about five minutes that simply set the mood – and what a mood it was. Once Burke himself came out, we were treated to what amounted to a history of soul and blues – Stand By Me, Fa fa fa fa fa (Sad Song), Sittin’ On the Dock of the Bay, and Everybody Needs Somebody to name just a few. In addition, there were tracks from the latest album – the only way to describe it was as a party, or as an out-take from the Blues Brothers films. Even the band turned out to have some well known members in it (I’m stuffed on who, exactly, because the entire thing was just overwhelming in the end), and really the entire thing was just a huge line-up of “we’ve been there, done that, and can now give away the T-Shirts” – except it wasn’t smug, it felt more like a bunch of guys coming together for a good time. One of the touches that I found to be really impressive (whether it was planned or not, I have no way of knowing) was when Burke called out the singer from the warm-up “band” (duo is more descriptive). Lavinia, the singer – who deserves to become a star in her own right, from the songs and voice she showcased tonight – was asked to come back, and sing again – this time covering “Killing Me Softly”, which she did superbly, with Solomon Burke providing some counterpoint vocals on the chorus just for effect. It’s rare for me to see a concert that manages to provoke emotional responses – the only other performer who can do that (although for slightly different reasons) is Marc Almond. But the show tonight even brought tears to my eyes – not for any good reason, just a reaction to how incredibly good the entire performance was. The entire audience applauded after every track, and were totally involved in the performance too – it didn’t feel like a concert, more like a collection of friends. Faithless used to do a track about “This is my church” (UPDATE As Gordon so rightly pointed out, the track was “God is a DJ”), relating to nightclubs, and music in general. That was how tonight felt too – it’s not often I come out of a concert feeling like it’s been more of a celebration, but that was how it was. Music and concerts are as close to a religion as I have, and Solomon Burke tonight was definitely two hours in the best temple I know.

Hating Christina Aguillera

In a fit of bravery, Anna tries to list 10 reasons to hate Christina Aguillera. Personally, I find the best reason to simply be “Because she’s Christina Aguillera” – that seems to pretty much cover the waterfront on these things.

Memory loss in the over 30’s

Well, it’s obvious that I’m picking up the early symptoms of Alzheimers, as I’d completely forgotten I’m supposed to be seeing Solomon Burke in concert tonight. Luckily, I’ve remembered in plenty of time to get down there and enjoy the gig. Photos etc. will follow later tonight when I get in…

GeoURL

Yes, I jumped on the bandwagon with GeoURL, out of pure interest as to who was close geographically and so on. Of course, as Gert points out it would’ve been more informative if I’d put the right location in for myself first of all, rather than keffing it up royally and making it look like I lived somewhere in lower Amsterdam…

The Second Coming – ITV

Various thoughts are running through my head, having finally seen this drama in it’s entirety. I’m amazed there hasn’t been more hysteria in the media about it, considering the subject matter – it’s the Second Coming of Christ, and this time he’s a normal man from Manchester. Already I can hear the fundamentalists foaming at the mouth. Scripted by Russell T Davies (No stranger to controversy, having written other dramas such as “Bob and Rose” and “Queer as Folk” before this one) it’s definitely a thought provoking work – although the knee-jerk hysterics will completely bypass that side of it.

One thing it reinforced for me is quite how good an actor Christopher Eccleston really is. If he’s not the second coming of christ, he’s definitely way up there in the pantheon of acting deities. Both the acting and the scripting were superb, neatly avoiding problems like how the Son of God avoids omniscience – it’s not going to be a decent drama if he already knows how it all ends.

I’m not going to give too much of the story away, even now it’s been transmitted – there was so much to go into, so many ideas and concepts that were brought into it, and the finale for it was a very impressive way to avoid all the potential problems of showing a vision of Judgement Day. I’ll admit, I wasn’t expecting it to work out the way it did – Jane said that the ending was a let down, and in some ways I agree, there were a couple of things that didn’t feel completely right about it, but within the limitations of the format, it worked fine for me. Nice to see some decent drama finally coming out of British TV – there’s been a definite dearth of it in the last couple of years, and between this and some of the other dramas over the last couple of months, let’s hope it’s a corner turned, heading towards better productions again.

Internet Rarities

Now there’s something you don’t see every day – a Virtual Voodoo Doll. Just in time for Valentine’s Day too. What could be better?

Weird thoughts again

Yes, Five is having “slightly dodgy film week” from the look of it. Tonight was “Deep Blue Sea directed by Renny Harlin. And it struck me that Harlin is a man obsessed with a certain type/look of woman. He married Geena Davis, and then had Saffron Burrows star in Deep Blue Sea. See if you can spot the similarity…

Scary, isn’t it?

OK, Bloody 00’s Saxophone too

In connection to the post below, about the 80’s Saxophone fetish (and the sixties, according to Peter‘s comment on the subject) it looks like the entire thing must run on a twenty year cycle, give or take. I was listening to the media’s new sacrificial goat TaTu’s album, and one track is utterly obsessed with a sax solo…

Scary, but true.

Bloody 80’s Saxophone

OK, I confess, I was watching Lethal Weapon on Channel Five Five, and during it something occurred to me.

What the hell WAS it with films in the 80’s (Particularly American ones) and saxophone music on the soundtracks? Seems like every mainstream film from the mid to late 80s in particular had to have a sentimental “memories” scene or love scene with a saxophone soundtrack. Fortunately it seems to have faded out again in the 90’s, and I don’t think it’s been witnessed since (thank the Lord), but you can be pretty sure that if you’re watching a film with a sax on the soundtrack, it’s from the 80’s.

I’ve no idea of the reasons why it started, but I’m seriously bloody thankful that the trend has faded out again.

Cashless Society

There’s an interesting piece on CNN about France introducing a “smart” card to replace cash. It’s a decent idea in this case because it’s not storing any personal data, and like cash, if you lose the card and someone else picks it up, they can use it instead.

Site referrers

Sometimes the search requests I see on the logs the brought people to this site are too bizarre for words. Yesterday, the following ones brought people to this site. (I’ve included links so the google search page can be seen)

• Get me the names and email addresses of contractors in russia updated 2003 – Ranked #1
• Drawing fucking nuns – Ranked #17ish
• UK citys direction driver – Ranked #5 and I’ve no idea what it means either
• Decomposing fruit tate modern – Ranked #1. (which must piss off the artist who did it).

And yahoo lists me under

• Find the perfect medical profession – Ranked #2

The world is a very strange place sometimes.

The more things change, the more they stay the same

Ah yes, my favourite telecoms provider, NTL are back at the trough again. They’ve just introduced a 1Gb per day bandwidth cap on their cable modems and broadband access (previously advertised as “unlimited access, always on” – guess they’ll have to rethink that one too) and some people such as www.dont-pay-ntl.co.uk explain why.

Of course, around where I live, (in an area sponsored by the useless bastards wonderful philanthropic company) they can’t even organise broadband with cable modems. Instead, what they did was lower the threshold on what broadband was, and tried to make out that dual-channel ISDN (128Kbps) was an always-on broadband connection. Thankfully, I went back to a BT phone line as soon as I got the chance, and went with ADSL for broadband instead.

Blogroll

Oh yes, and a quick piece of extra maintenance got done yesterday. The semi-regular (and roughly quarterly) editing of the blogroll over on the right. So (and about bloody time too, in at least one case) welcome to the roll, ScaryDuck, Chaos Angel, Kennamatic, More a way of life and (last but definitely not least) Neil Gaiman too.

More Birthday Bits

Along with Scaryduck and Gert, it looks like Kitchentable also had his birthday this week. On the same day as the other two as well. How bizarre is that?

Still, from the story of the birthday party it looks like the little sod had a good time of it.

Clash of the Titians

Sorry, couldn’t resist the title. Looks like it’ll be worth a trip down to the National Gallery in November to see the exhibition of Titian paintings all in one place, and situated in a facsimile of the Camerino gallery they were initially housed in as a collection..

Speaking with the Dead

I still really don’t believe that anyone would go for something like this, but there we go, as Barnum said, “There’s one born every minute“.

So, with that thought in mind, there’s not a lot else I can say about Afterlife Telegrams where, for a mere $5 per word your message can be memorised by a terminally ill person, and then sent into the ether once they peg it.

Proof of sending is not proof of delivery, as our own Royal Mail would say.

Conversations with Mother

Yes, following on from yesterday’s realisation that I’d keffed up the diary, I spoke to the illustrious parents again tonight.

My mum called me a fuckwit, which is true, and nothing particularly shocking coming from her. And they’re coming down the weekend after instead. Probably. She didn’t have her diary with her, so we’ll see, but it looks OK. Not bad, only being booked for two solid months before seeing them.

An intriguing way to exercise

Emily over at Dubberley has a new fitness regime to play with. It involves the Pelvicisor. Looking at the site, it just looks vile – do some women actually use this kind of thing? The mind boggles. Although I must admit I did like Emily’s thought that after a week she’d be able to fire ping-pong balls across the house…

Bobbins

Anna goes to see a play. Funniest thing I’ve read in quite a while.

Child Exploitation – the real story

So, Manchester United are heading a campaign to stamp out child exploitation. All very worthwhile – except that all the newspapers and programmes were full of images of the Man U team when they made a trip to Thailand – and were filmed at some school/refuge for exploited kids. And now they’re doing photoshoots with loads of kids.

Call me cynical, but aren’t they exploiting the children too? Building up the Man U brand by looking all cute and caring? And are they now an ethical team? Do they shun Nike footwear and boots (famously made in Thai sweatshops) in order to help stamp out child labour and sweatshops. Do they cobblers. It’s all for the nice public face of Man United – and they’ll hope you forget about the Nike stuff, and the protests about them using boots made of kangaroo leather.

Maintenance

My apologies to anyone who was looking at this site recently and found it was bringing up errors.

I decided to delete everything and start again, because the “photos” directory got renamed. I won’t go into all the whys and wherefores, but basically I was getting a lot of hits out of google’s Image Search which I wasn’t happy about, so I’ve now renamed the directory, and left a few additional bits in the robots file to mean Google shouldn’t index it any more.

I may explain more at another time, but for now I’m going to see if this cures the “problem” and go from there.

Normal service is now resumed, and all the images should be repointing to the proper place. If they don’t, please be so kind as to let me know. *Grin*

I’m a crap git

Last weekend, I got a call from the illustrious parents. We were trying to organise a weekend when all three of us were free so they could come up to see little old me. Having gone through diaries etc., we decided that the next one we were all available on was March 21st.

Excpet I’m not free that weekend at all – I’m seeing Avril Lavigne in concert, and have friends over here. So I’ve now got to call the parents and say “Ooops, I’m a shit git, how about the weekend after?” At the current rate, I’ll end up seeing them in May sometime.

Trust and Buried

Over the last five weeks, I’ve got more and more into the new BBC series Trust. Scripted by Simon Block, who I thought (I was wrong) also wrote Channel 4’s legal drama “North Square” (sadly not chosen for another series), it’s been basically a drama set in a lawyer’s office in London. Starring Robson Greene, and the BBC’s new favourite actress, Sarah Parish, it started off fairly mediocre, but has definitely been a stunner of a series. Legal dramas, or dramas set in legal offices, seemed to have hit their nadir back in the late 80’s and early 90s, but with both North Square and Trust there’s some hope for the genre yet. I hope it’ll get optioned for a second series.

Over the same run-time, Channel 4 has had “Buried“, a drama that again should be mediocre and cliched, starring Lennie James as a new man in prison, one who believes he’s innocent. But the series hasn’t descended into cliches – instead it’s been an absolute tour-de-force of scripting and acting. I don’t know how it will turn out, but I want to find out – and again, I’ll be hoping for a second series.

Both of them have been really exceptional character-driven dramas, well scripted, stunningly acted, and ultimately well worth watching. In fact, I’d probably get both of them on DVD if/when they’re released in that format.

It’s just a pity that these are the type of series that stands out, and becomes worthy of attention for that fact, rather than being simply the kind of drama we should expect from current scriptwriters.

Keffed links

Yes, for a while the perma-links were utterly keffed for no good reason. That problem now seems to be sorted having administered a swift virtual boot to Blogger’s gonads.

Haloscan’s still playing silly buggers and losing comments, but they’re working on it.

All in all, a semi-frustrating day of website problems I could do feck all about. Apologies (again) to those whose comments have disappeared into the great golloping chasm in reality.

Birthday mentions

Happy 1st Blog birthday to ScaryDuck and also to Gert.

Also, Happy Birthday to Gert proper, not just her Blog.

Michael Jackson “I feel betrayed” ‘shocker’

Since the documentary here on Wednesday about Michael Jackson, it seems the media has been full of it, how he has children sleeping over at his ranch, that there was nothing wrong with him dangling his child over a hotel balcony to show himt o fans, blah blah blah.

And now today, he’s released a statement saying he feels betrayed by the documentary makers. Poor baby. If he’s dumb enough to say stuff like that and then NOT expect it to go into the final cut, then he’s even madder than I’d previously realised.

But wait a minute – what’s actually made Jacko feel betrayed? Not the revelations that are causing all the controversy, oh no. Instead it’s (quoted from the BBC story) – “Jackson said his trust had been betrayed because the camera crew kept filming his children against his wishes

The statement said Bashir had promised Jackson the footage would be taken out of the final edit. “. So all the other stuff is OK, it’s just the footage of Jackson’s children that is in dispute.

The man’s madder than a roomful of hippos.

My body clock, it rejoiceth

All things considered, not much has been going on today. But at the same time it’s been a pretty good day.

My illustrious fuckwit wonderful employer got a call from the agency I’ve been dealing with yesterday. They were asking why their contractors (i.e. myself and one other person) were so pissed off at the work atmosphere, what with not being trusted, being patronised, and generally treated like we were six and slightly retarded.

By a strange coincidence, we were both told today that our skillsets weren’t what the company wanted, so would we kindly fuck off. Because our skills weren’t suitable, our boss wouldn’t have to pay the two week’s notice that he was required to pay as part of the contract, unless (big shock) our skill sets were unsuited to the required work.

However, the retarded knobber kind of screwed up his own case on that one, as he happily informed both of us that there would be more work coming up in April/May time, and at that point he would contact us privately rather than through the agency, and offer us work that way. So – we haven’t got the skills, but he’d happily re-employ us.

And of course it would be utterly infantile to then inform the agency of this conversation, so that they can charge him the two week’s notice, which will come back to us too. Needless to say, it would be infantile and petty – which is exactly why I did it. *Grin*

But for now I’m just thinking that I can turn off my alarm clocks, and not have to crawl/stagger across Manchester to be at work for 9am. And yes, I’m a happy bunny. I’ll talk to more agencies tomorrow too…

Amazing what you can do in the name of research

And yes, someone at The Guardian has obviously heard of the Internet Movie Database for researching about the woman shot by Phil Spector…

Is this really news?

Imagine my complete lack of shock at reading on the BBC that Yahoo!’s chatrooms still don’t follow the latest UK government guidelines on safety etc. (Think of the Children, and all that bobbins)

Snowfall

For the first time ever, we had thunder while the snow was falling. Most bizarre, but pretty cool…

And it’s off to work I go…

Valen-fucking-tine’s Day

Well, it’s February. That means we’re now in the run-up to my second most loathed season of the year – February 14th, Valentine’s Day. St Valentine, the patron saint of tedious unimaginative fuckwits, and romantic CD collections everywhere.

Just watch, the florists will put the prices up, the TV will be full of ads for “romantic” shonky slop on CD, and there’ll be a complete OD of ballads in the fucking charts for the next month. Sap-faced teenagers will be mooching about wondering what to buy for their latest and greatest love of all time. The Julia Roberts and Meg Ryan seasons of films are due to start any minute.

I’m going into hibernation. I’m sure I’ll get more pissed off with it the closer it gets. Watch this space for developments…

Wheather. (Yes, it’s a bad spell of Weather)

Ah, what a joy. Following on from the last couple of days of comments about shit weather etc., today has pretty much beaten all expectations.

It’s taken two hours to get home (normally a journey of 45-55 minutes) including waiting 40 minutes for a bus at all. The reason why the busses weren’t running? “Because the brakes can’t cope in snow/icy conditions” Pathetic, isn’t it? Not even an inch of snow (and it was more just like heavy hail than proper snow) and our transport system grinds to a bloody halt.

Of course, it was topped off by having to being the queue behind three mad crones all wittering on about who was to blame for it being snowy and crap. Not who was to blame for roads not being gritted, or for buying buses that can only work in decent weather (or the british equivalent of it – they work fine in rain, in other words), or for letting people know what the hell the problem is with the transport system so they can at least piss off and stay warm or whatever. Oh no, instead it was who was to blame for the weather.

I now need a visit to the dentist to replace the teeth I’ve ground to dust while making sure I didn’t scream and or verbally abuse the idiots.

Iraq

President Blair today said “we are entering the final phase of a 12-year history of the disarmament of Iraq“. It’s all a load of cobblers really – the easiest way to “disarm Iraq” would have been to not sell them the fucking weapons in the first place.

After all – that’s how they know what weaponry Iraq is supposed to have. The UK and US sold it to them. Isn’t it lucky that politicians can’t even spell “hypocrisy”, let alone understand what it is.

Silver text

I must admit, I’m not quite certain why there’s the interest in one person who uses text messages. Big deal, she’s 78. She uses text messages because “Text messaging is a wonderful way for me to keep in touch with my daughters and grand-daughters“. Surely that’s what it’s all about?

Or is it news now for someone to have an open mind now? The “Silver Surfer” phenomenon is alive and well, and will become less and less remarkable. (Let’s be honest, it’s pretty unremarkable now) Maybe it’s just me – both my parents are in their late 50’s, yet both use email, text messaging, Internet, phone banking – in fact, anything that makes their lives easier. (My father is slightly more techno-idiot, in that he used to think “E-Mail” was what Yorkshire people said when the post arrived. I kid ye not – in mitigating circumstances, I should just state that he is actually from Yorkshire) They book flights and hotels from various websites, use Hotmail (in this case, I can forgive them), and have even talked about setting up a home page for themselves. Are they in the minority for having this attitude, for being open-minded enough to accept new technologies and see the benefits of them? In honesty, I don’t know – they’re what I’m used to, so maybe that’s part of it, because I simply assume that there have to be more people like them, rather than their being in the minority.

I suppose only time will tell. Personally, I can’t wait for the people who go on Club 18-30 holidays at the moment to become the Saga holiday people of the future. Pensioners on piss-ups in Ibiza – now that’s what I call progress…

Sum41, and Mighty Mighty Bosstones – MEN Arena

Hmmm, this is unnatural – two gigs at the MEN Arena that haven’t sucked. I’m beginning to worry. Anyway, Sum41 – this is the second time I’ve seen them, and last time was in a smaller venue, whereas today was in that epitome of crap gigness, the MEN Arena. The warm-up act (OK, I missed American Hi-Fi, the first warm-up) was the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. Last time I saw Sum41, they were supported by Reel Big Fish, and basically the Bosstones were like them, only not so good. Not helped by a really dodgy sound mix that needed a good kick to the techie. However, seeing the number of empty water bottles chucked at them, it did give me faith that there’s still an element of abuse at gigs – something that’s been sorely missing for a while now. *Grin* Sum41 however, hit the stage and were simply superb. Musically I really can’t fault them – it’s rare to see that level of co-ordination, skill and simple speed playing – let alone realising that they can all do each other’s jobs too – for the finale, the drummer sang, and the singer drummed – the only way to tell the change was by paying attention. I think they played pretty much every track they’ve recorded, much to the delight of the children adoring fans all around the arena. Yes, I felt old, but still, what the hell, it was fun, and bloody good. However, either my hearing is naturally more naff, or bands are getting quieter- my hearing was fine, and didn’t take the requisite couple of hours to recover. Sum41 are an awesome band live, seriously well put together. Some of the teenage rebellion ethos seems very cliched, and really they’re the kind of rockers you could pretty much take home to meet your mother, but they’re still one of the best bands live. Can’t wait for them to tour again…

Lizzie Dripping

Ok – a quick post, following a question from the friends I’ve got staying here – who IS the Lizzie Dripping who also posts on WafflyBollox.

Call me nosy…

ALL over Texas…

Well, that’s what the word coincidence is custom designed for.

Less than a week after posting about it being 16 years since Challenger went Pop, it looks like NASA yet again is sponsored by 7-Up, as it’s lost contact with Columbia as it was re-entering the atmosphere.

Or maybe they’re just unlucky once every 16 years, particularly with craft whose names start with a “C”…

Snowy weather

The BBC asks Why can’t we cope with bad weather? The answer is : Because we’re a completely crap nation who make no preparations for these types of occurrence. We get the same story every year, as soon as some snow falls, or the temperature goes below about -1 C.

Surely you’d think we might get some kind of clue in the end?

Employers

A quick pop quiz : What do you do when you realise your new employer is a complete twat?

In the three weeks since I started off on this new contract, my boss has definitely turned out to be a fuckwit. It’s hard to list the exact reasons for this conclusion, mainly because there are so many. The fact that he readily admits he doesn’t trust anyone who works for him is a pretty major point. I should have taken the hint when it turned out he doesn’t even allow his employees access to email, let alone internet access. Insisting that the programmers wear shirt and tie is never a good sign.

Another convincing factor is his tendency to talk complete bollocks. The conclusion between myself and the other main contractor at the moment is that he’s trying to dazzle us with the stuff he knows – maybe this has worked with other employees, if they’re new to the industry or whatever, but we’ve both been doing databases and IT stuff for a minimum of seven years, so any amount of bollocks spoken is duly noted, and then made fun of in our office. (For example, the boss uses a query to “SELECT TOP 100 PERCENT FROM” the database – we have no idea why, because it’s exactly the same as saying “SELECT ALL FROM” the database, which is of course much easier to remember.)

The real insult to injury today though was getting one of the reception people to lock his office because he wasn’t around.

Oh, and even the reception people think he’s a complete fuckwit – and one of the rudest people they’ve ever come across. Thank god I’m only there for a maximum of three months.

January 31st

Hold on – we’re at the end of January already? Where the hell did that disappear to?

Ah well, if it’s the last day of January today, that must mean I’m seeing Sum41 tomorrow.

Actually, February’s a pretty good month for gigs for me – Sum41 tomorrow, Solomon Burke on the 12th, and Turin Brakes (supported by I Am Kloot) on the 28th.

In the post

Many thanks to Mike for the CD, as promised for being a runner-up in his wordsearch.

The CD’s storming, and is currently annoying the neighbours. *Total Grin*

Abusive emails

I had to laugh at this story in The Register about a schoolboy who’s been suspended for sending an abusinve email to the truly shite search engine Ask Jeeves. I’ve “used” (more like attempted to use) this one a few times, and it’s one of the biggest hunks of crap on the Internet – I can’t blame the boy for sending the email, only for senidng it from his school email address…

Much delayed

Oops, knew there was something I was going to put on here. At the start of this week, d4d went past it’s 25,000th page impression, which isn’t bad considering it only hit 20,000 on New Years Eve. Anyway, I forgot to put that on here, and now it’s just gone over 26,000 so it’s slightly irrelevant.

But all the same, it’s pretty good. *Grin*

Opera – it ain’t over ’til the fat lady sings

As regular readers will know, I loathe Microsoft in all it’s nefarious guises. So it’s no surprise to know I try and avoid using Internet Exploder Explorer as much as possible (in fact, I use it for precisely one function – Internet Banking) because I loathe it.

Instead, my browser of preference tends to be Opera, and I’ve just downloaded the latest release, version 7. It’s human nature to “prefer the old version” because we’ve got used to it and so on, so I’m still learning the idiosyncracies of this new version, but it seems pretty good, and it’s got some funky new stuff to play with too.

A more detailed review will probably follow when I’ve been using it for a while longer…

On the Piste

Not for those with a faint heart or nervous stomach, this story concerns an Australian ski resort that’s found a way of creating snow from, um, recycled human waste.

Apparently it goes through three stages of filtration, but all the same, you wouldn’t want to be caught in an avalanche of it, would you?

And maybe they can link it up with this job that was advertised recently (thanks, Pat for the link)

Comment system weirdness

Hmmm, for some weird reason it looks like any comments posted yesterday have been deleted on Haloscan. I have no idea why, and they’re busy not answering questions at the moment…

Apologies to all involved, and I’ll see what happens during the day to see if they get restored or anything.

Updated – Bizarre, looks like they’re coming back, slowly but surely. I have absolutely no idea what’s going on (Some people would say that’s my normal state of being) with it, but there we go.

Clots and the Internet

According to stories here and here it’s now thought that people spending long hours in front of computers can develop DVT (Deep Vein Thrombosis).

And there I was thinking the only clots on a computer were the ones using AOL.

About Fuckin’ Time

Hallelujah. At risk of being a complete sad person, I’d just like to say that I’m dead pleased Channel 4 is finally starting to show Season 3 of West Wing, as of 8th February.

And to top it off, Season 2 will be out on DVD on the 7th April, according to Play.com. So I’ll be a happy bunny then…

New Legislation

So, in response to various dollops of media hysteria, we’re now getting new legislation to deal with on-line paedophiles – most of which is probably a good thing.

One of the weird ones is that the sentence for “Paying to have sex with a child” is a maximum of 14 years. Why 14? Why not round it up to 15? Or even 20? What makes 14 years so special?

I’m not sure about the new offence of sexual “grooming” of achild. I know what they mean by it, but it still comes up with an image of someone tidying themselves up and getting clean etc before sex. (Then again, I’m weird.)

As for the new offence of “befriending children with the intention of abusing them”, I can see that one being hard to prove, but hey, what would I know?

Professional appearance

As regular readers will probably already know, I loathe neckties. They’re a bizarre piece of “clothing” that does absolutely keff all, yet for some reason some workplaces insist on their workforce wearing them. (Although in fairness they do make exceptional keyboard cleaners) They seem to think that people are more professional if they’re wearing shirts and ties, or smart office dress.

Personally, I think that’s complete bollocks. I hate wearing them, it’s not like I’m dealing with the public, or even with clients – I’m a sad little web geek/code hacking type person, I don’t need to wear a fucking tie.

But no, the place I’m at currently insists on geeks in ties – it makes us more acceptable or something, makes us all look more professional. Fuck it, they’re paying for my skills, not how I look in a poxy tie.

So I’m being hugely infantile, and wearing the vilest colour combinations known to man. Let’s see how professional I look in that. (And yes, the code’s still getting written, so that side of professionalism isn’t affected at all.)

Interruption of service

Blogger was down earlier, hence no new posts – I was wanting to write some, but for the first time since I started using it, the fucking thing was tits up. Or maybe it just hates the iMac I’ve got to use at work.

Which is a reasonable excuse – I hate the fucking thing too.

Fine spell of weather

This morning in Manchester was absolutely vile, pissing it down, quick gale-force gusts of wind, grey skies (well, greyer than usual) and street lights coming back on.

What I want to know is this – when people get off a bus and realise it’s blowing a bastard gale, why do they put umbrellas up? I saw more inside-out brollies today than I have in ages.

OK, it’s comedy to watch, and rather like a street-based IQ test, but all the same, it does leave me wondering what the point is of even trying…

Ouch

Now that’s a way to kill someone. Brings a whole new meaning to “my balls are killing me.”

Time flies, Challenger didn’t

Hard to believe that it’s 16 years today since the space shuttle Challenger exploded. There’s a lot that’s happened since then…

Now there’s a shock

The Government moots taking over the fire service and forcing them to accept a pay “offer”. Just another case of blurring the line between Labour and Tory policies.

And how do you call it an “offer” when it’s something you’re forced to accept?

Gasp! A review

Well, looks like I’ve been reviewed by Bloggy Opinions. I’m not quite sure whether they like it or not…

Though I love that the layout is unique in the blog aspect, a word to the wise, if you are not careful I am certain that you are infringing on copyright and trademark laws, especially if you do not have the permission from them (http://cda.dummies.com/WileyCDA/). [But then again, the author clearly knows, this as stated in his about section] The theme is the same as the “… for Dummies”, the yellow and black background, and even their mascot/icon guy.

You, the jury, can decide…

Protected Data?

Worth a laugh – the fact that Microsoft UK have let their Data Protection Registration lapse. So in theory they could now be sued by the Data Protection Registrar until they register again.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer corporation…

People

Looks like it’s not just me who needs to get out more. First there’s the man addicted to refuse lorries – a very worrying case. Then there’s also the sad twat who’s complaining about a youth football team’s logo and motto. It took me a minute to figure out the motto, and when I did I just thought it was funny.

But the complainant definitely needs to get out a hell of a lot more, if they find that offensive.

New bits

A weird piece (well, technically “pair of pieces”) today that have relevance to how my mind’s been “working” through the throes of Insomnia recently. Within the insomnia section itself, the piece Yet Again is the end result. It may be a bit disjointed, and may need some editing once I’ve had a respectable level of sleep, but for now it resembles my mindset pretty well.

The second piece, in the thoughts section is almost a follow-on, almost a parallel process, but not quite either one. It’s held at the imaginitively titled Thoughts and Insomnia piece.

And for now that’ll do. I’m going to try and get some sleep.

Quirky

Emily gets to hear a porn star utter his immortal phrase.

(I could say more, but it would give the game away slightly)

Fully signed-up geek

OK, I’m definitely a techie. I’ve just found myself laughing at this cartoon about American football and IP addresses. I need to get out more, for sure.

Another step closer to Minority Report

Interesting piece on the BBC News today about advertisements that can send internet links to your mobile. Luckily, it only appears to work through an infra-red link, which is something that the great majority of mobiles no longer have, since IR became the least popular way to transfer data between phone and PDA or PC.

Once they get an ad that works via Bluetooth instead, that’ll be more functional.

Questions

While the world and it’s wife blethered on about the funeral of the police person who was killed in Manchester on the 14th January I notice that a lot of it has managed to avoid the relevant questions.

Like – Why wasn’t he wearing a stab-proof vest? It was a raid on a house suspected of being involved in terrorism.

And why was the person who stabbed DC Oake (and four of his colleagues) not handcuffed? Again, you’ve got four people in a room who you suspect are involved in terrorism. You don’t exactly sit them down and say “have a coffee while we search your place for bombs/poison/whatever”, do you?

Supposedly an inquiry has been launched. I’d like to see the answers to those questions, instead of some bullshit about President Blair attending the fecking funeral.

I’ve been dying to write this

Because of the media hysterics about it all, I’ve been restraining myself from writing anything on here about Reginald Crew, the man who travelled to Switzerland to fulfil his wish to die.

I’ve never understood the British laws regarding murder and suicide. This was a man suffering from Motor Neurone Disease with no hope of recovery, and knowing that his life would only get worse in the years until he died naturally. He was going to die – that was without doubt. He still had the ability to decide what he wanted to do, and he’d decided that he wanted to die without all the garbage that would precede it. Yet the British law system decided that it knew better than he did, and wouldn’t allow it.

So the poor sod who wanted to die had to fly to Switzerland in order to be in a country where the doctors could help him die without being arrested for murder. And when he’d died, it was stated by Merseyside Police that his wife would be interviewed in conjunction with possible charges of murder. (They’ve since recanted on that threat)So not only do we force people to travel to bve allowed a decent death, we also plan to sure their partners and/or families when they come back with the corpse. How charming is that?

Personally, I feel that assisted suicide isn’t something that should be illegal. When someone is diagnosed with a fatal illness, shouldn’t it still be possible for them to choose when to die? To be able to say “That’s enough”, to go through the process and say goodbye to loved ones, and then be able to finish things without letting them have to remember the person as they die slowly and painfully. That’s a humane way of doing things – to know you’re dying and to have the right to choose your time of death.

It wouldn’t suit everyone – but that’s why it’s a choice. You don’t have to do it in that way if you don’t want to, but to have the ability to choose – to me that’s paramount. Don’t you just love living in a nanny state that insists it knows best for everyone else?

Tis the season for re-invention

Damn, Gert beat me to the original thing about part-works, but I was going to write more anyway, so what the hell.

As she observes, come the start of January, the magazine publishers kick in with all their “new” part-works. For those who’ve been living in a cave in the desert for the last twenty years, part-works are the magazines coming in like 50 parts, courses on cross-stitch, painters, collectible bird statues, you name it, you can get a part-work on it. (Oddly enough, one of the biggest publishers of them, Del Prado Publishing, doesn’t appear to have any web-presence at all.)

It’s all part of the New Year conspiracy – once we’re through the bollocks of Christmas and the Festering Season (™), it’s the season where we’re supposed to change the things about us that we want to alter, what with New Year’s Resolutions and so on. So along with the part-works starting new skills or new interests, we’re pestered by TV adverts for Weightwatchers, Holidays, Diet Programmes, and things for stopping smoking.

Does it work? I don’t know – the entire “self-improvement in January” is something I don’t claim to understand, and I’ve never really gone in for it. Do people aspire to change themselves come January? Probably – as I said, there’s the entire Resolutions tradition to contend with, so yeah, they probably do.

Feeling shite

Well, the insomnia’s after-effects are now rising up. Having felt pretty crappy yesterday, this morning was accompanied by aching joints, my nose having been replaced with a broadband snot production facility, and generally feeling crap. So, like the brave little bunny I am, I took the day off and have mainly spent it vegetating and feeling shite. Oh, and fomulating plans to work for 37.5 hours over four days instead of five, and get a three day weekend. What an ace way to spend a Friday.

Interesting coincidence

Spotted in today’s BBC News Site:

  

Should I worry?

OK, now, I’m going to be nosy now. Who is it who’s reading this site from work at the International Atomic Energy Agency? It comes up fairly regularly on the referrer logs, so I’m just a bit intrigued really…

Somebody’s Girl

In relation to Jane‘s comment here about who the next celebrity paedophile would be, I must admit I didn’t put any money on it being R Kelly (although it does amuse me that BBC has this story filed under “Entertainment”)

So, who next? Personally, I’d love it if Jack Straw or President Blair got done for looking at child porn, but that’s hardly likely. So instead I’ll nominate Delia Smith or Jeremy Clarkson. No particular reason – but hell, we can hope.

(Oh, and the title for this piece is also the title of one of his “songs” – apt, eh?)

Black Irony

During a phone conversation with a friend tonight, I came up with the following concept…

“Wouldn’t it be fun, considering the levels of emnity between them already, if Osama Bin Laden assassinated Saddamn Hussain? I’d love it – having to see George Bush admit that bin Laden had eliminated ‘the biggest threat’ (blah blah blah)”

Maybe it’s just me that would find that funny. Maybe I need to get out more.

Hiatus

Not much has been going on today – brain’s pretty much hibernating, due to a hugely impressive attack of insomnia, coupled with absolutely keff-all worth going on in the world that’s worthy of blethering about.

I’ve written a small piece about the hopes I’ve got for 2003 which got written over the weekend and I’ve only just remembered to upload it. Which shows how braindead I am.

Normal service will probably be resumed tomorrow. Ish.

Pong

Ah the joys of working in an office building (part of the Regus bunch of buildings) where the toilets are blocked. Every single one of them.

Turns out, some kind soul (or several of them, unless he was feeling very productive) managed to block them with a combination of toilet paper and – um – impressive quantities of faecal matter. In every male toilets in the building. (Three on each floor, two floors – this person had obviously had a LOT of Guinness)

The smell has to be experienced – it’s impossible to describe. Throughout the building, everyone is trying to breathe solely through their mouths, so the entire population of the building looks slightly retarded and slow.

All in all just another vile day. Hopefully they’ll be fixed by tomorrow…

Nothing wrong with a nice tight seal (as the walrus said)

Interesting to see that Tupperware have decided to change their sales party marketing technique. Of course, they/re not the only ones who sell plastic goods in parties at people’s homes – who knows, maybe that’ll be changing soon too…

Bollocks

The world hates me. I’m now sure of it. Come April 12th, I’ll be seeing Massive Attack in concert – bought the tickets, and can’t wait. Last night I saw somewhere that Henry Rollins is doiing a spoken word concert (as opposed to a shouted song/music concert – he does both sorts) in Manchester. He’s someone whose gigs I love going to, and so I go every time he’s in the area. (only about once a year, in fairness)

Guess what day he’s doing the show in Manchester?

You’ve got it – bastard April 12th.

Quote of the Day

In this BBC story, I found myself laughing at the synopsis “Two men admit to plotting to cause explosions in London and Birmingham as three others go on trial for the same charges” – is it just me, or is there a double meaning to the phrase “charges” in this context?

Back to Stalin’s days of history editing

Not that I give a flying toss about the album itself, I still think airbrushing the cigarette out of the Abbey Road cover is more than a bit ridiculous.

So the American anti-smoking lobby wanted to stop advertising the smokers on the cover of a thirty year old album? Smart move, sherlock – it’s now a story in the international media. So like, that’ll stop the smoking coming to the attention of impressionable teenagers, oh yes…

Musical Interlude

Having been away with friends for the weekend, the MP3 collection here has grown a bit. Old age is creeping up on me, as I love the new album by Tom Jones, the imaginatively titled Mr Jones. There’s a slightly ill-advised cover of Bob Seger’s “We’ve got Tonight“, but the rest of the album is pretty bloody good. And with bass to kill for. (Unsurprising, considering it’s produced by Wyclef Jean)

However, the crowning point (other than the two Yazoo albums, but I’ll stay quiet about those) was being introduced to a very queeny cabaret act called Topping and Butch. I’d never heard of them before, but they’re obviously popular. Having listend to the “Absolutely Fatuous” album, I can see why.

Winner? Well, near enough.

Over at Troubled Diva, Mike had a blog wordsearch going on last week. As it had been a quiet evening, I had a go at it, and just about broke the 50% mark (26 out of 48 possible answers) – so you can imagine how surprised I am to know I came in fifth and even get a runners-up prize.

Of course, there were probably only five people who entered ( *Grin* ) but I won’t let that affect my current good mood. SQL Server can do that easily enough later…

Now that could backfire impressively

Not that I give a monkey’s toss one way or the other about whether Matthew Kelly is a perv or not, I can see that the letter of support from other “stars” could backfire impressively.

More than anything else the phrase about “he’s a sweet and gentle person” reminds me of the garbage that neighbours say every time the person in the house next door turns out to be a serial killer, or a terrorist, or a wife-beater, or whatever else. “But he seemed like such a nice, quiet person”.

Only time will tell.

Can’t be bad

Maybe 2003 will actually end up being a good year. *Gasp* As well as me being back in the wonderful world of employment, another friend of mine has just been offered the job she’s been wanting for the last month or so. Dead pleased for her.

Ug.

It’s official – I hate Mondays. I’m not even going to comment (much) about RBS and their various fuckups over the weekend.

However, if anyone out there got plenty of sleep, and in fact feels they had too much sleep, would they please be kind enough to send it to me? I could really do with at least a couple of hours worth, if possible.

You can tell I’m tired – I’m saying please.

And now back to the “joy” that is Microsoft SQL Server 7.

Thoughts from a train – Part Three – The Return Journey

It’s getting to the point where I can’t even be bothered to rant about train journeys. Right now I’m on a train that’s travelling from London to Manchester. I’m on this rather than the one that goes from Reading through Birmingham direct to Manchester is because of track maintenance work, which has cancelled the services. It’s not emergency repairs – they’re going on over the next three months, every weekend. So there’s no real explanation for why the useless cunts utterly helpful people at Virgin Trains can’t be bothered to explain this when booking tickets and saying “I’ll be travelling on the Sunday”. Of course I don’t want to know that my journey is going to be an hour longer – what possible use could I have for that information?

So it’s been an enforced journey from Reading to London Paddington on a packed and cruddy train, a brief trip through London’s Underground to Euston (which I must admit was surprisingly empty, quick, and almost respectable – we’ll ignore the graffiti covered carriages) followed by the joys of a minimum two and a half hours on the way to Manchester. I say a minimum of two and a half hours because we’ve already been delayed by thirty minutes due to an unexplained “technical fault on the engine”. Quite how we’re now moving again with thus technical fault is also unexplained. Maybe Virgin have hired flying carpets to levitate the train slightly off the track and keep us going. Oh, and they’ve somehow managed to “forget” to attach a buffet car to the train – I’d have thought that was pretty fucking difficult, they’re not exactly small.

It still strikes me as somewhat ironic that Virgin is the name for the most utterly fucked train service in the UK.

Thoughts from a train – Part Two

I’m getting worried – I’m on a Virgin train on a Friday night, it’s not packed solid with people, it’s running on time, I’ve witnessed the staff actually being helpful, and I haven’t heard anyone say “Is this the train for…?”

Has war broken out? Have I been abducted by aliens?

Update – Of course that was tempting fate, because within ten minutes of completing that post, we were stuck with a points failure for half an hour.

Thoughts from a train – part one of an Odyssey.

This is the Fashion Police. You there – yes you, with the shirt. That thing’s not just offensive, it’s a frigging weapon. It’s not bad enough that you think lilac gingham is acceptable as material for a shirt – trust me on this, it’s not – the real problem is that scarlet tie with the green polka-dots on it. Can’tg you see the people around you wincing?

The only possible excuses for wearing an outfit that offensive are a) you’re colourblind; b) you’re mentally retarded, c) it’s a bet. It’s not big, it’s not clever, it’s not even ironic, you bastard, it’s just piss-poor taste, and you deserve to die. Painfully.

No Shit Sherlock – another in a long line.

Sometimes I just despair of the way people seem to keep on coming up with new methods of stating the obvious. In this story from the register Donald Rumsfeld finally figures out the American Military (.mil) websites might not be such a good idea after all…

You couldn’t make it up, I swear.

In my email box today

Sometimes I love being able to save e-mails as webpage files. It allows me to post up some of the bizarre bollocks I get in my spam-tray Inbox – but this has to be one of the better ones of recent times. Not quite as good as the umbrella one but close – hysteria and cures for sleep apnoea and snoring.

A true gem.

Now that’s what I call classy

Hmmm, I’m sure that would make a fascinating fridge magnet – or even a paperweight.

Maybe a pen holder?

(Link via Emily.)

Some people really need to get out more

Sheesh, and I thought I was a geek. Amazing the things you can do with a Speak and Spell.

Blimey, what a day

Well, not much at all appears to have happened in the world today. I’m still trying to get used to this entire “proper work” thing, although as it includes having to be in an office for 9am, and I’m not getting to sleep ’til 5am at the moment (insomnia having raised it’s ugly head once more) as you can imagine, sleep deprivation is becoming a bit of an issue.

I should also point out that it really isn’t a smart move to be trying to write ASP pages and VBScript when one is so low on sleep that concentration is becoming an issue, and maintaining it is becoming more of one.

So, in the name of sanity, I’m afraid I haven’t done much here today, and the weekend will probably be fairly slow on that score too, as I’m seeing frinds in Reading. I’ll add stuff as and when I can, or feel like it.

Other than that, well hell, there’s plenty of other reading material both on this site and on the blogroll over on the right…

Another one bites the dust

It’s a plot to get rid of dodgy “celebrities”, I’m sure of it.

Mind you, if it means we never have to see Matthew Kelly or Michael Barrymore on our screens again, then please, lock ’em up now…

Well, it’s another way of getting a bird pissed

Thanks to H for this link about pissed Swedish birds. Most surreal.

Then again, I’ve seen a bird hit a window hard enough to leave an imprint.

Welcome to the Hype

So, it’s less than a month ’til Valentine’s Day (*Spit*), the cards are in the shops already, and what’s going to be next on the hype list? The new Harry Potter book finally getting a release date of course. I’m amazed GreenFairy isn’t frothing at the mouth.

Knock Knock

In the aftermath of the idiot policeman getting murdered yesterday (And just WHAT was the thinking there? “I know, we’ll go and raid a place, but not wear the stab-proof vests, not do a proper search, and forget to handcuff the suspects?” Bizarre) it seems President Blair is now banging on about ridding the world of fanatics.

I agree – let’s make sure George Bush is front of the queue when it comes to killing off the war-mongering idiots. With El Blair in second place…

Working…

Well, the site isn’t going to get as many updates as normal for the moment, as I’m actually working for a living, and for the moment it looks like the office doesn’t have internet access. Odd, for somewhere that primarily works with websites and databases, but hey, what the hell would I know?

Still, I’m sure there’ll be plenty of opportunity to add stuff on still – just not during 9-5. I can live with that.

Linkage and other webthings

Just a quick little post to congratulate Pat on being the author of the 300th comment on the site. Well, the 300th Haloscan commenter – there were a fair few in Enetation before I got rid of it too.

Also, a quick thanks to Emily and Mike for adding yours truly to their link lists. Maybe it sounds all lovey-type stuff, but I’m really still bizarrely chuffed that people whose blogs/sites I read, and whose writing I respect, apparently think the same about this one. Quite an ego boost, in a strange fashion. (And most people I know will agree all my fashion is strange…)

Mike’s also got a blog wordsearch going at the moment, on which I managed a score of 26. I’m sure it’ll put me nowhere near the winner’s podium, but it’s a fun way to waste an hour or two…

Without Prejudice

Last week, Channel Four released a new programme on the public, Without Prejudice. In it, a panel of five “normal people” choose who out of a group should receive £50,000, based purely on their own perceptions and prejudices. Peter wrote some views and comments on the first edition, and having just seen the second in the series as well, it’s time for some of my own thoughts as well.

As a TV programme, it’s really quite a fascinating psychological study. Watching the panel of “judges” form their own opinions, seeing how those opinions are formed, and what they’re based upon. In fact, it’s more interesting to see the bias and bigotries of the panel rather than what the “contestants” are like. Quite an interesting state of affairs, to say the least.

Some of it makes for viewing that is pretty offensive in some ways, hearing/seeing the amazing bigotry that people are capable of. But it’s fascinating for the same reasons. I’ll certainly be keeping on watching it.

The new question mark

As astute viewers will have noticed, there’s a new little graphic in the post below. It’s this little question mark which won’t link to anything, but if you hover the mouse over it, the pop-up text should explain a bit more about whatever I’m blithering about.

Fun, eh?

Quote Of The Day

Yes, quote of the day is back. Not often, and not rock solid in the way it used to be. But sometimes I just see a story with a quote in it that begs for a (slightly) wider audience. Today’s one comes from this BBC story about postcode snobbery and made me laugh out loud…

“It’s a dump. You can call it Peckham Village. You can call it whatever you like. It’s still a dump.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself…

How is this attractive?

OK, I was unlucky enough to be channel-flipping last night, and landed on BBC’s “drama” Mersey Beat. One of the people who stars in it is Leslie Ash – who’s been receiving some media attention recently for plastic surgery she’s had done. I hadn’t seen the effects of it ’til last night, and it’s left me fairly surprised, to say the least.

The woman looks like she’s been beaten around the mouth with a blunt instrument. Surely it’s not something that’s supposed to be attractive?

What the chuff possessed me?

I know there must have been some good reason for me to think that being at a dentists at 9am was a good idea. Right now, I can’t think of that reason.

I’m not frightened of dentists per se – I don’t like them, that’s for sure (but who in their right minds enjoys a visit to the fang-fixers?), but I’m not terrified of them, or anything like that. I’ve seen people who are terrified, and wouldn’t ever belittle that fear, but it’s not something I have. I just don’t like ’em.

I think it’s the attitude more than anything – I’ve never really seen one that wasn’t a patronising twat. I haven’t met a phrase more homicide inducing than “Oh, we’ve got some cavities that need filling. Someone hasn’t been very good about dental hygiene have they?”. No, WE haven’t got cavities, I have – and I’m paying you to sort them out. Now get on with it and shut the fuck up.

Anyway, this experience isn’t going to be fun. I know I’ve been lax on the entire dentist thing (insert whole loads of excuses here that really come down to “I didn’t get round to it”) and that my teeth are a mess. I’m fully aware of this, and have no desire for anyone to be patronising about it. It’s going to be the best part of a year before it’s all fixed, but I’ve finally got round to wanting it done. (It was supposed to be done in the year I was 30, but that was disastrous, so I’ll do it in the year I’m 31 instead)

At 9am on a Tuesday for the first bit. What on earth possessed me?

Say Hello Wave Goodbye

Bit of a tenuous link in that title, but there we go, tenuous is should be my middle name. Anyway, I was watching a repeat of the BBC’s Horizon programme on mega-tsunami, and it made me wonder about a couple of things.

1) How aware are Americans of this “threat” to their eastern seaboard?
2) Would it be possible to set this off without a volcanic explosion?

Really, 2) has some interesting extrapolations. If the Cumbre Vieja could be blown apart by conventional explosives (or, for example, diving a jet liner into it) could it not be used for terrorist purposes? Would it be too random (along the lines of “we don’t know if it would work or not”) to be a valid threat?

Anyway, it was just a thought – I wonder if there’s any type of guard on that particular island…

Pinball Wizard

So, Pete Townshend is potentially a p*a*edophile (Stars so I don’t get ultra-linked by google) and is ready to hand his computer over to the police. Amazing what a quick run of FDISK’ll do, isn’t it?

Still, does anyone really care about this story? Yes, the excuse that “he gave his credit card details to see a child porn website, but insisted he had done so for research and was not a p*a*edophile.” is about as piss-poor as they come, but I do find myself wondering if the entire thing isn’t now becoming a bit of a hysterical witch-hunt, with the media as the accusers.

Personally, I’m about as virulently anti this stuff as it’s possible to be, but there just seems to be so many people now accused of viewing it, that I do wonder if it’s not hysteria, coupled with the sort of attitudes that homophobia brought about twenty years ago…

The sound of silence

Sorry for the break in updates, I’m sure I’ll think of something to write soon.

In the meantime, it’s down to sorting out ideas for what needs doing over the next few months, and that’s taking up most (if not all) of my brain power for the moment.

Normal service will be resumed as soon as IQ points are freed up.

I need more sleep

I’ve just been made to realise that sometimes sleep is a good thing. The precursor to this thought was when I tried operating my computer with the cordless phone instead of the mouse. It’s not even like they’re similar…

Stayin’ Alive, Stayin’ Alive

I was never really a fan of the BeeGees, although as Robin Gibb lives in the same town as my parents, I’m not unfamiliar with them, and had met them on a few occasions. So yes, I’m a bit gobsmacked that Maurice Gibb has pegged it after Friday’s heart attack…

RIP and all that.

Update : And in a stunning piece of timing, the Mail On Sunday‘s magazine today has a piece interviewing Robin Gibb. Sometimes you just have to laugh.

8 Mile

Well, Eminem makes his proper film debut. (For once I’m going to ignore the derivative shite like Da Hip Hop Witch, an abortion that should’ve been killed along with whoever came up with the “concept”) And yes, it’s pretty impressive. I liked it, anyway – more than I was expecting to, to be honest. I’d tried to read as little about the film as possible, so I could go in with an open mind, rather than with any pre-conceived ideas.

Actually, I think that’s the best way to look at it. Since coming home I’ve looked at other reviews, and most of them seem to centre on “Is is autobiographical?”, “Can he Act, or is just being him?” and various other lumps of crap that seem to be the reviewers raison d’etre at the moment.

Frankly, I couldn’t give a good dump whether it’s supposedly biographical or not, nor about most of the other things that are supposedly important. At the end of the day, is the film itself any good? For me, the answer to that is “yes”, without a doubt. There’s a definite feel of “it’s Rocky for rappers” in a lot of the scenes, but what the hell, Rocky and it’s ilk are a staple of the film world. Classic “underdog beats the bad guys” type storyline. But it’s still capable of being absorbing for the nearly two hours of runtime. Kim Basinger is actually good (which came as quite a shock) as Jimmy/Eminem’s mother, and while there are bits of pure American gut-wrenching tackiness, it’s still a good film.

Yesterday

Well, in reference to Pat‘s comment, yesterday’s running around was actually pretty productive. By the time I’d finished the second interview (all for IT contract positions, Gordon, not a nork or head nork in sight) the first one had called me back and said “yes, we’d like you to work for us”. So I didn’t have to bother going over to Bradford for the third one.

So, a three month contract, working on yet more databases and ASP sites. Starting Wednesday. It’ll keep me busy ’til the end of April, and by that point they’ll almost certainly have more stuff to do, and more need for contractors. So it could be pretty promising, but for now I’m just looking at the next three months, and sorting out a load of stuff that needs doing.

But yes, it was a good day, and I’ve already felt a big weight leaving me again. Can’t be bad…

Quote of the day – an occasional series

Regular readers will recall a certain shitty day I had, involving dealing with loads of inefficient cretins all at once. Yes, I’m still getting the backlash from one of them – Nationwide Building Society to be precise.

The letter I got this morning was a perfect gem. It involves the phrase “Your e-savings must be closed before the current account. (Bear in mind, it’s taken the useless cunts 9 months to tell me that) To close your e-savings, please send an email on the internet to eservices requesting that the account be closed.” which leaves me completely dumbfounded.

First of all – how the hell do you send email NOT over the internet? (OK, some smartarse will now say “with a g3/gprs mobile phone” but balls to that) And second, wouldn’t it have been useful to have actually included some relevant information like the actual email address for eservices? I’m sure that if they have to specify sending email over the internet (as opposed to email through the snail post, I suppose) then several people will have tried sending an email just to “eservices”.

Now that’s impressive

How the hell does someone manage to run up parking tickets worth £28,000? That’s one hell of a figure, even in three years – we’re still talking more than £9,000 per year. In fact it works out as £180 of parking fines per week. Which is quite an achievement, I’m sure you’ll agree…

Um – interesting phrasing

OK, so the UK’s longest running siege is finally over, and the gunman is dead. I, however, am still trying to figure out the logic of this statement “The gunman at the centre of London’s longest armed siege had vowed never to be taken alive before he died“. OK, so he was prepared to be taken alive after he died? Or he’d made the vow never to be taken alive before he was shot. Because of course it would be stupid to say he made the vow after he died.

Don’t you just love Tautological statements?

Happy Happy, Joy Joy

Following on from several bits on here recently, I’ve added in a new piece in the thoughts section. This one is about some of the joys of depression. It’s a happy time chez Lyle, as you can see…

Hearse in a long room

RIP Peter Tinniswood – as always, the year seems to be starting off with some high-profile kicking of buckets.

Tomorrow

Not much will be added to the blog tomorrow, as I’m going to be running round like a nork going for interviews and the like. Unfortunately, depression’s risen up and whacked me in the head today, so I’m not really up to much.

Should make it a fun one tomorrow. Oh yes.

Bloody hell, that’s cold

Note to self : Don’t live in Russia in winter. Frankly, chuff that.

Spam…

Sometimes I really do find life very amusing. I received a spam yesterday from a company in Hong Kong. It was in relation to the piece that I wrote here about umbrellas. Basically, I’m not a fan of umbrellas, and firmly believe that people should be forced to hold an “umbrella proficiency certificate” before being allowed to possess such an item. So receiving the following email amused me no end…

Dear Sir or Madam,

Eric Lee
Neo Umbrella Mfg. Co. (Contact details deleted here)

I’m not going to take the piss out of the oddities of the English used – mainly for the pretty good reason that this email from a Hong Kong company is infinitely better than anything I could write in the language of Hong Kong (Cantonese?). I just find the entire concept of me selling brollies to be quite funny, particularly when the link is from something saying I can’t stand the bloody things.

At Bloody Last

Finally, three months down the line, I’ve got the problem with Nominet sorted. The whois information changed a while back, and printed names/addresses of the people who owned domain names. It’s supposed to be “only” for commercial sites, except through some wonderful piece of paperwork bollocks, my name and address was easily available to anyone who knew about this change.

Obviously, it’s not something I was happy about – even just for relatively simple things like saying “I’m away til Sunday”, it advertised a nicely empty house. Which is why I also haven’t really mentioned it here ’til now.

Changing the details has been an amazing exercise in futility – it’s needed a form about the “change of registrant details” from Nominet (which conveniently got lost twice), which could be only sent by snail mail. No PDFs for our friends at Nominet, oh no. Electronic documents? What would we need them for? The truly bizarre bit involved having to transfer ownership of the domain from myself (as a personal site) to – um – myself (as a personal site), including two covering letters (one from each person – I thought I was going schizophrenic for a while) confirming the “change” of ownership, which allowed Nominet to change the details.

Having done that, I then had to re-inform my hosting service that the details had changed, and that I wanted to opt out of having the personal details (address etc.) displayed. And it’s all finally happened. The rules changed at the start of October. It’s taken 3 months to carry out something that should have taken a maximum of ten mouse clicks.

I love bureaucracy.

Worra Lorra Insults

Poor old Cilla Black. Not only does she announce her retirement from that sack of shit staple of Saturday Night television, Blind Date, but now she gets insulted on the cover of the Guardian’s G2 supplement. I wish I’d bought it – I’d have framed the sodding thing.

Updated – the cover’s visible here – thanks to Vaughn at Wherever you are for pointing it out…

Smart-Arse

It’s hard to believe that he pretty much failed in school, but now, donkeys 88 years later, it seems Einstein has been proved right (again) – the first measurement of the speed of gravity agrees with him that it does, in fact, travel at the same speed as light.

Does this mean that light has a gravity all of it’s own? Or just lend weight to the argument? *Grin*

Ricin and the fun you can have with it

Since yesterday’s discovery of ricin in London, and the follow-up stories about further people being sought and whether the NHS can cope with posion attack victims, it seems that people have found this site because I’ve belted on about ricin (used in the assassination of Georgi Markov via an umbrella tip) in a couple of pages on the site already.

Weird, the way these things work, isn’t it? Still, always good to know I’m getting hits from Yahoo and Google about this kind of current stuff…

Got to be a trigger for happiness

Yes, I missed this one at the time, but I’m making up for it now.

A century ago, that wonder drug was – um – heroin. Ten years ago it was MDMA (Ecstacy to it’s friends). Now we have this equation for “thinking yourself happy”. It’s no different than pain in the arse humans people saying “cheer up, it might never happen” to depressives, as though they believe they’re simple concept will make the whole world a better place.

It’s bollocks. A nice little sentiment if you’ve never been totally terminally depressed, and have no idea what it’s all about. And the “consultant psychologist” quoted in the article as saying We can all be happy in a heartbeat if we make the decision to be so. should be struck off the register as a disgrace to her profession.

You’d think I was a fuckwit or something

OK, I admit it, I do kind of enjoy having a go at people when their companies get things wrong. I’d expect the same treatment myself, if my own company (or the one I worked for) had keffed something up.

However, having spoken to three different companies already today, it does get a bit wearing. One lot tried telling me that a courier service might take 28 days to bring the items back to the warehouse (the response “Best change courier services then, even Royal Snail does it quicker than that” didn’t seem to go down all that well); that just because someone’s changed their address with the Halifax building society that doesn’t mean it’ll stop junk mail coming to that person at her old address from, um, Halifax building society; and that when a company sends me something, the fact they posted it is proof I must have received it – this from a company who actually state in all their own literature “Proof of posting is not proof of receipt”.

It’s going to be one of those days, obviously.

New stuff

Right, finally got the new additions uploaded. The weekend got kind of extended, I’ve come home to find I’ve got three interviews on Friday (nothing like planning – and I do mean nothing like it at all), 700 emails (don’t you just love spam), and a couple of updates to the thoughts section, one in the shape of a witter about natural states of being and one about the alcohol drunk over Christmas. I’m sure there’ll be even more over the next week or so.

Until then, enjoy…

The Weekend

An interesting weekend, what with one thing and another. It srikes as bizarrely amusing that living in a city that used to be known as the gun-crime centre of the UK, I end up going to Nottingham and someone gets shot at the pub down the road. It wasn’t me who did it, honest…

Other than that, just pretty relaxed, staying with friends, and utterly incredulous at the new government guidelines on how to avoid online paedophiles. Will they stop stupid 14year olds from being in chatrooms and sending out their own “A/S/L” queries (Age/Sex/Location, for the uninitiated) to all and sundry? Will they shit as like. Normally I’d file this under “No shit, sherlock”, but this time it’s far more like “I don’t keffing believe it, you fuckwits”

The rules are :

• Keep the computer near you (You mean not everyone has cordless keyboards? How the FUCK do you keep it a long way from you?)
• Talk to your child about what they do online (If you can understand when they talk about ASL, LOL, LMFAO, VPN, OCS, so forth, so fifth)
• Keep a ‘favourites’ folder of agreed sites (And let Daddy store his under “everyday porn”)
• Ask your ISP about safety features (And if you call most support lines, they’ll have even less clue than you do)

As Peter says, the parents who care about this stuff are already doing all of this crap, and the ones who aren’t won’t care enough to change the habits of a lifetime and give a flying fuck in the first place. Well, until they become victims (or, more accurately, their child does) and then they can sit and bollocks on about “Well, SOMETHING should be done about these pervs”

In short, it’s much the same as the rest of the stuff Labour’s come up with recently, and it’s bollocks of the purest variety. Complete window-dressing, looking like it’s worthwhile, when it’s got all the value of a condom on a cactus.

In fact it’s much the same as the stuff on possession of illegal guns blah, blah, blah – and why are so many guns now in circulation while they’re now completely illegal? Because the knobbing government banned them after Dunblane back in ’96. So, another load of hypocritical old shite from our wondrous government…

The Geek-o-meter

I know, I know, it’s sad, but I just had to take the test.

And I came out with 62%. The report of “You are practically computer-literate, in an almost real sense. This could be a good thing, or a bad thing, depending on whether you use your knowledge for good or for ill. Looking at your answers, I’d almost certainly say it was a bad thing.” is a bit of a worry, but pretty much accurate.

Away

Knew I’d forgotten to do something. I’m away from home this weekend, and not really doing much, so I’ve written some new pieces for the main site that’ll get updated when I get home later tonight. Other than that, it’s all a bit chaotic, and not much going on.

Australia’s planning to build a new target for Al Qaeda to attack, Yahoo is blethering about the weird and wonderful sites of 2002, Peter’s put up his Hunk of the Week, and I’m sure I’ll have more to say later.

Here’s to a sober January, and just relaxing after the manic stupidity of the last month or so…

You’ve got to be fucking kidding

Right, that’s it. It’s not enough to have already seen an ad for Christmas Hampers for 2003, I’ve just seen an advert for Cadbury’s fucking Creme Eggs. It’s not even the end of the first week of January. Cunting fucking bastard advertisers.

Come the revolution, those fuckers will be first up against the wall, I swear it.

(Oh, and a big Nyah Nyah to Green Fairy re her challenge – I saw one first :¬P )

Blah

That’s pretty much my summation of the day so far. Lack of sleep last night, working today, listening to bushels of inane drivel about christmas parties, christmas presents, what people did for christmas, what they had for christmas dinner, and just for variety what they did on new year’s eve.

It’s been like Chinese Water Torture. So for now I’m going to go and curl up and consider emigrating to somewhere that doesn’t do Christmas at all. Maybe India. Maybe somewhere good and Arabic/Moslem/Muslim (what the fuck is the correct spelling of that now? Normally I’d know, today I just don’t give a shit) or similar. Or maybe just somewhere like Antarctica. Hmmm – Roast Penguin on Dec 25th. For some reason that appeals…

Google

Every so often, I manage to be really impressed with Google and the way it works. About a week ago, I wittered on about Elizabeth Shaw’s Vodka Shot Chocolates, and today when I look in my referrer logs, I discover that a google search for them brings up this site, and lists it #3 for that search.

Which is pretty impressive.

Ooops, yet again

You’d have thought that by now other ships would know where that sunken car transporter was in the English Channel, wouldn’t you? Well, obviously yet again I’m over-estimating the intelligence of people, as yes, another idiot ship captain has managed to whack it. All that sea, and they still manage to hit the keffing thing. You just couldn’t make it up, could you?

To redesign or not to redesign

Well, as the year becomes a new one, a geeks thoughts turn to redesign. Do I bother, do I say “arse” to the entire thing?

I know the yellow does most people’s heads/eyes in, so the real thing for any real redesign will be that I put some skins on the site, redo the graphics so they’re based in transparent rather than yellow, and skin it from there. Can I be arsed to do it? Maybe.

Other than that, I’m not sure – maybe the black bars top and bottom could be changed into something funkier, but we’ll see. And I know I’ve got to add the awards section into the navigation too – that’ll be a pig of a job, for one day when I’m bored comatose (AKA Sat on a train) or something. Next time I look at hosting for d4d, I’m going to go for somewhere that supports PHP, then I can just do the nav as an include file. Much easier.

Anyway – as I asked before, any other ideas on what could be done for a redesign? What would you like to see on here? More importantly (other than keffing yellow) what would you like to see got rid of. (Any answers saying “the author” will be deleted *Grin* )

Health Warnings

According to the BBC, there’s going to be a new set of health warnings on cigarettes – why? Surely the people who smoke already have picked up the news that smoking is bad for them? Are they suddenly going to realise now that the print is bigger and blacker? Don’t think so.

Are they aimed at the people buying their first pack? If so, wouldn’t it be better to have the warning a) on the front of the pack and b) to have it on all the ads and shelves. (And yes, I’m aware they do that already) So, frankly, what’s the point of making the warnings bigger?

Because all this seems like to me is a kind of “you can collect the entire set!” marketing ploy…

Happy New Year. Blah Blah Blah.

And sometimes it occurs just to fulfil one’s negative expectations.

Another one where experience outweighs optimism. Hope everyone else has had a good one.

Phew

I didn’t say much about it yesterday, but I knew that the 20,000 page impressions mark was coming close. And yes, we went past it on Dec 31st 2002. How cool is that? *Grin*

In fact, geek that I am, it actually brightened up an otherwise shite day. Hey Ho.

New Years Eve

No resolutions, no promises, no real expectations. No review. That was done here, so I’m not going to repeat myself.

Just the normal NYE feeling of impending letdown. I can’t help it – I’m not a fan of NYE (for different reasons to Peter but at a similar level of blah for it) but I try to be optimistic about it, and not expect it all to fall flat on it’s arse.

I try. But I fail.

Have a good one, to all. Seeya in 2003.

Do people still fall for this kind of thing?

I’m not sure if this is the first virus warning of 2003 or the last one of 2002, but it seems like Yaha’s doing the rounds again. I must admit, I find it amazing that companies still allow anything with file extensions like .scr and .exe to get through the firewall. Then again, I’m amazed too that people still seem willing to click on any old attachment that comes through in their email.

Books

Damn, sometimes I love Waterstones (even if they do use the amazon website, which is a bit cheaty, but there we go).

The week before Christmas, I looked on Amazon to see if one of the authors I’d used to read all the time had churned out anything else, as no UK bookshoip seemed to have heard of him any more. Sure enough, he had – three books worth, in fact.

So, because at the time they were listed as “ordered within 1-2 weeks” from Amazon, I wandered into Waterstones. “Can you order these?”, sayeth I. “Yes, no problem. We can’t guarantee they’ll be here before Christmas (which was only three days away) but they’ll be here before New Year”.

And today I went in to pick up all three that I’d ordered. My post-New-Year recovery period is now fully fuelled with books…

Honours

Good to see Stephen Lawrence’s family receiving an honour from queenie in the New Years Honours list. And Brenda Blethyn, Ridley Scott, and loads of others too.