419 gets a new twist

I received a lovely 419 email today which promises me US$100,000 as a way of repairing Nigeria's standing in the world.

It strikes me that a better kind of recipient would be someone who had already fallen for a 419 or pyramid scheme, like Santander, Abbey National, the SEC and scads of others that were sucked into Madoff.

Attention:

How are you today? Hope all is well with you and your family?,You may
not understand why this mail came to you.

We have been having a meeting for the past 3months which ended 2 days
ago with the present secretary general to the UNITED NATIONS,Mr.Ban
Ki-Moon and also with the Senate President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

This email is to all the people that have been scammed in any part of
the world, the UNITED NATIONS/SENATE COMITTEE of the Federal Republic of Nigeria has agreed to compensate them with the sum of US$100,000 to redeem the country's image in the eyes of the world. This includes every foreign contractors especially in Nigeria that may have not received their contract sum and people that have had an unfinished transaction or international businesses that failed due to Government problems etc.

We found your name in our list and that is why we are contacting you,
this have been agreed upon and have been signed.

You are advised to contact Mr. Jim Ovia of ZENITH BANK NIGERIA PLC, as
he is our representative in Nigeria, contact him immediately for your
International Bank Draft of USD$100,000. This funds are in a
Bank Draft for security purpose ok?You can clear it in any bank of your choice.

Therefore, you should send him your full Names and telephone
number/your correct mailing address to enable the bank raise a draft in your name.

Contact Mr. Jim Ovia immediately for your Draft:

Person to Contact: Mr.Jim Ovia
Email: zenithbankplc.ng@orangemail.es


Thanks and God bless you and your family.Hoping to hear from you as
soon as you cash your Bank Draft.

Making the world a better place

Regards,

Mr. Kofi Annan
Former Secretary General(UNITED NATIONS)

Peevishness

* Moderated comments is back on as I was bored with deleting all the spam.
* The tone of Robert Peston's voice, if there was any good news it would sound as if it were the last bright flash of a doomed civilisation.
* A delivery that should have arrived is now never going to arrive. (Bright spot, I shall save £17 VAT by reordering after December 1st).
* The weather. It was warm all night, flung off quilt the works, its got steadily colder and greyer all day.
* The cat threw up on a bed sheet whilst said sheet was still on the bed. He waited till I could watch him do it, I'm sure of that.

Incarnation #3

The first company that I ever started was called Support pc Ltd (cool name I know), but that really only lasted a year of consultancy as the business plan it was meant to carry out didn't get any financial support.

The second was Objective 2000 Ltd after I'd been Objective Software as a sole trader for the longest time and that was only dissolved last year as all my time was occupied with Joost.

So now I have the third and it was the simplest of all of them to start as I didn't do anything except choose an accountant to do it for me and take over all of the mess of running a company. I'm really very very bad at filling in forms and doing stuff like that on time so I was always in bad odour with some official body or other.

I inherit the name with picking one up off the shelf but its not a bad name, probably better than Satis Superque Merce anyhow.

I didn't even have to set up a bank account it was already done. Now I just have to send off copies of my id. As they've been so efficient at advising me and sorting it all out here's a free link to them Bailey and Associates

I've bought the domain G30consultants.com but that's all so far.

Newspapers are not Blogs

The Sunday Times relaunched a new design last week which is part of a movement to merge online and traditional media layout. Its one thing for a media to inform another, its quite another to try and make one fake another because its seen as being fashionable.

The Sunday Times layout looks more like a web page now than a newspaper and its tedious, mostly because web pages are, on the whole, far less interesting than good print layout.

Someone, a long time ago, said that websites were aligned as landscape whereas print is portrait. Somewhere since then everyone either forgot it or its generally too awkward to float content properly in a truly landscape layout and web pages are now generally 3 column and fixed in the centre of the available display, ie portrait. In other words web pages mimicked, fairly badly, print layout.

Now the Sunday Times isn't mimicking column layout, but it is mimicking white space usage and the use of headers, single solid bars of colours to identify the category of page (or the overall section), and its somehow babyish, infantile. No doubt the designers think its clean and elegant and modern.

Well most websites are babyish and infantile.

Perhaps a development which is worse than simple design is the merging of content from blog to newspapers. In what seems like an admission that newspapers are becoming irrelevant to the majority of news consumers they are beginning to include blog columns within the newspaper.

At first it was the other way round. Once newspapers understood that blogs were getting readership it seemed to make sense to make sure that their columnists had their own blog to which their readers could get directed. At least it wouldn't be a rival's blog they'd be reading.

Now though the newspapers are including whether edited or not blog posts from the great, good and influential within the regular paper.

Does this matter? Possibly not, it is just the reuse of words after all and radio lectures have become newspaper columns and vice versa. There is though something even more transient than the "tomorrow's fish and chip wrapper" about blogs. There is frequently nothing more embarrassing than reading last month's or last year's blog post.

If anyone is looking for any kind of grand conclusion on the poverty of thought in newspapers or the ubiquity of blog as 'considered opinion' then they'll be disappointed. I have so few conclusions left to make and none at all about newspapers.

Only a slightly nasty taste in the mouth.

And Lo

a little bloglet was reborn, in new and fashionable colours. Teal, I'm led to believe by my wife, is the in colour and as we've just had the living room redecorated in it, at least partially, I thought I'd celebrate that by redressing the blog.

What has now become an almost Annual event

This blog that is. For many and varied reasons I dropped off writing in this. I may begin again, I may add new exciting content.

Or I may not.

Anyway, the blog itself though the same Zope software as before is now running on an entirely more reliable host. More reliable because it isn't mine and I'm not having to adminster to it and because its not throttled to death by MSN at 11am every morning the way the objective2k.com server is.

What probably isn't connected yet is the automatic post to the Livejournal original journal.

Belgium Man, Belgium!

Now I know why Douglas Adams coined Belgium as the worst swear word in the Universe.

I've just come back from Fosdem, which I think was my fourth and very pleasant and interesting it was meeting people again and for the first time.

But in travelling up from Leiden to Brussels on the train we stopped at Brussels North and a couple of guys (some said 4), came up the corridor, dropped change distracting everyone and made off with my laptop bag with the two laptops in it.

So thanks for that.

Belgium!

A walk in the woods

As I said, yesterday we went for a walk in the Wyre Forest. Given the nature of our winters now, the ground is still waterlogged and the churning of mountain bikes can make some of the paths off the wide limestone roads a thick chocolate cream. Its when you walk in the woods at this time of year that you really want it cold and the ground as hard as iron.

We didn't see any deer in the Forest, which given the number of dogs roaming around isnt that surprising. Sometimes its the owners that need putting on leads.

This is one of the photographs I took and I've messed it about a bit with Photoshop, the rest of the set are completely untouched apart from the addition of the watermark with Imagemagick. If you bother to go look at them, yes they are dark, it was fairly gloomy and I shot them at ASA 60. I'm still pondering whether to warm them up a little.

Five things

Pushed to do this by Andrea

• I was a Student Union President at 16.


• I have lived fewer days than I've been alive by the calendar.


• I have one book published, too remote of interest to be of any interest.


• My hair was, for a period during the reign of Pope Paul VI, longer than Sander Striker's, there are no known photographs to prove this.


• I was called Mick at one school I was at.

Being an idiot and causing people work

There used to be two things I was paranoid about when travelling, my passport and my air ticket. Now that air tickets are bits of paper or electrons and not gorgeous thick card with fare pay codes you could collect like a train spotter (Oh look I've got a K, oh a K is just a Y you can't change), I don't have to be paranoid about losing the ticket.

So all I have to take care of is the passport.

Which I've managed to do in over 20 odd years of travelling for work around the world.

Until Friday.

Somewhere between leaving passport control on Friday and going to get the flight for AMS on Tuesday my passport went to the great Biro planet in the sky. I do not know where or when it actually went, if you ask 'Where did you lose it?' I may just give you a withering look, though on the whole its more sheepish.

The knock on result is that J had done all the virtual PA stuff she does seemingly effortlessly and detailed all the steps I needed to take and the forms I needed to get by the time I returned from my fruitless trip to Birmingham Airport.

It also meant that L. and S. from work had to get together a letter declaring I needed to travel urgently (which is true) and fax that to J so I can take it today to the Passport Office in Newport. Oh and not forgetting M. who countersigned my photo and the form.

And now I'm about to drive to Newport, which is a pleasant drive over the Black Mountains, and hopefully get my passport today. After which I'll do a day trip on Friday.

Static cling

For the past week or so the keyboard on my own silver 17" wide laptop has been dead, completely.

I got around to emailing Novatech support thinking I'd probably have to end up sending it back to get plugged in properly or that I'd not bother with that and open the thing up myself. But instead I got an email from them suggesting that I remove the battery and power cord and press the power button a few times to clear any static buildup.

And it worked.

In retrospect, like all these things, it seems eminently reasonable now. But I didn't think I'd have static cling in my keyboard.

Scottish Power, the incompetence of billing

The capped agreement we had with Scottish Power ran out in June and we made a new one, the rate having doubled in the meantime, which we were expecting but its capped again anyway.

At the same time as the cap ended the direct debit per month was changed to £76 from £90 and then this month we get a notification that the direct debit was going to change to £156 per month.

That would make our costs for gas and electric around £1800 a year. In the past when they've changed it by some rate we've just rung them up and said we'll pay whatever seemed reasonable to us and that's been accepted.

So I rang them up this time to do the same thing...

After listening to the same 16 bars of the theme to Dr Finlay's Casebook (My little sutie), I finally got put through to a guy with a pleasant Scottish accent (one of their selling points is that their call centres are all in Scotland), and explained that we wanted to pay £90 a month as our electricity usage was fairly constant throughout the year.

First off we were asked for accurate readings of the meters and yes our current balance was still in credit (though that brought up a very interesting fact later on), but no according to their estimation we would use far more in the Winter and the rate has doubled you know and you were on a very cheap rate before.

Yes, I agreed that the rate had doubled, but it had been doubled for two thirds of the previous quarter and we were still in credit and at the rate at which we use electricity (all the damn computers and the tumble drier which is used all year round), we were going to be consuming at about the same rate (other than gas) in the future. Yes I agreed that because the gas would be higher we would pay more, £14 pounds more. We were not going to be paying £156 a month to them, period.

After around twenty minutes of me persistently plugging away and pointing out that their assumption was always that the winter quarter was far in excess of the middle of the year and that they didn't use previous years quarters to estimate against, he finally agreed to take to his manager my offer of £90 a month and if there were any shortfall at the end of the Winter Quarter we would pay it.

I get put on hold.

The phone comes off hold after a couple of minutes and I can hear a conversation in the background. At first I thought it was just another call in a different cubicle, but no it was the supervisor talking about how to handle our call. Essentially she said that the company was taking a firm line now and that they weren't allowing anyone to change their direct debits because of the rate change and that they had to nip this in the bud, etc, etc.

When he came back I immediately launched at him demanding that I get exactly the same treatment as previous customers had had and that I get to alter the direct debit as I saw fit in relation to rate at which we consumed gas and electricity. He was taken aback.

He then tried to convince me that when people did that, that at the end of the three months they were shocked at the amount by which they were in debt and that they weren't allowed to put people in debt. I countered by saying if they produced monthly statements people would know the rate at which they consumed and were owing and that problem would generally go away.

There was a bit of a conversation about how utility companies over estimate all usages and so overcharge everyone to cover those people who default and whose usage is abnormal. He didn't accept this of course.

I carried on pursuing my original position of paying only £90 a month and pointed out in their letter to us that we were allowed to reduce the direct debit by making a one off payment but that it didn't state when that one off payment had to be paid. We could, given the wording, reduce the direct debit now and make any required balancing payment at the end of the quarter.

This floored him and he admitted that that was what the wording said and again went off to his supervisor. This time he came back and said that if we were willing to pay £100 a month that this would be acceptable. I hummed and hawed, though I was always prepared to go to £100, and finally agreed.

I detected a certain amount of sympathy from him in all of this and so I asked him something which had been puzzling me since the beginning of the conversation.

"On the September bill we have a credit of £62, now we've given you the meter readings you say that the credit on the account is now £86. Does that mean the previous reading was wrong or what?"

"No, its the way the system works, it takes into account your next payment."

"But the next payment doesn't get taken till the 1st of October, probably the second as its a Sunday, but you're saying the account shows that money as having been taken?"

"Yes it is very odd", he said "but its the way the system works. When your account ends, say it ends on the 31st August and your direct debit is set for the 20th, the next payment in September is taken even though the account is closed. I had a customer yesterday with exactly that."

"But they got their money back?"

"Oh yes".

"You realise its a breach of the Direct Debit rules to take money on a mandate once the agreement is terminated?"

"I can pass you to ****** who can explain the terms of the Direct Debit".

"No, that's ok, I know the Direct Debit rules. But you are saying that your accounting system is recognising money that it hasn't yet received?".

"Yes".

On the face of it, this is recognising revenue before its been received and is fraudulent accounting, it can significantly inflate performance numbers and given that any Treasury scheme they have probably uses overnight funds without actual transfer they're probably making interest on money they've not yet received.

Other than that, if you do have an account with Scottish Power and you want to reduce the amount of your direct debit and save the hour long phone call I had with them to get that far, just quote the letter at them.

Of course no doubt this month any similar letters will be reworded, but I'd give them the same choice I did, accept my terms or lose me as a customer.

On how to close the show down

We had the unfortunate experience of watching Casualty on BBC 1 on Saturday night. Yes it had become hackneyed with the thinly veiled attacks on government policies on the Health Service and they'd pretty much run out of actors with liverpool accents. Oh no, they hadn't they'd moved to Holby City instead, I forgot that.

Anyway in one of these generational lurches that the BBC does from time to time they decided to give a new lease of life to the aged Casualty by sending it to Cambodia. ER in the Sudan this was not. Apart from the arthritic plot that had look now!, look here is this plot point!, yes here!, right this one! punctuating it it had some of the most grotesque acting I've seen since, well Eldorado.

It wasn't just the 'Charlie' guy waving his hand in front of his face and mouthing 'Phew' at the heat, when he wasn't sweating and it looked more like Chertsey than Cambodia; it was Simon Mc Corquindale who was acting as if melodrama had just been invented, the timing was bad, the words thrown on the floor.

In fact it was so bad I think it was on purpose. Not only was the script execrable and the acting paper thin but the cutting was clumsy, the timing between McCorquindale and the asian guy afraid of asians on the same phone was attrocious.

So, I think the entire production, the crew, the writers, the actors, their wives families and far flung aunties have all conspired in the face of a 48 week series to bring it to its knees and have it taken off.

It takes an awful lot for the Beeb to take a show off, but this time I think all those involved in Casualty have succeeded.

Getting there

Well the Super Secret Project trundles on. I still can't say what it is yet, but soon, very soon. But it will be worth it, honest.

And in anticipation of that I'm extending the fingers a little in waking this slumbering blog.

Bemused in Brussels

I was bemused when going through security in Brussels as to why they had to scan the notebook naked of bag and then a more than cursory body search because I had change in my pocket and a belt on.

After all this was Euro land and you get nothing but shrapnel as change.

It wasn't just me they were being careful with, the queue suddenly escalated over those few minutes.

I practiced the Zen breathing of the seasoned traveller.

A further irritation was that the hot zones worked in the transit area but only if you paid €10 for an hour or €20 for 24 hours. Bastard Proximus, I decided not to pay and read instead.

FOSDEM IV and truncated visits

FOSDEM has been and gone, I have some photos on the camera to get off and occasional incidents that are worth remembering.

Special highlights included meeting a2800276 and other old friends and colleagues, including Finne and Ben. The latter didn't remember me at all which given the way the last contract ended might not be unsurprising but really he's just like that.

An honourable mention for Gerv Markham who had his luggage and computer stolen on the platform at the Centrum railway station, he had a deal more humour and relaxation about it than I would have.

Stallman was slightly less idiosyncratic in some ways this year and certainly seems tidier even if still obsessed with the temperature of his tea and his inability to hear non-English speakers without shouting at them to pronounce their consonants. The crying baby was the most precise of critics, though her removal from the hall enabled Stallman to thank the father by saying 'Thankyou for removing the cause of the noise.'.

After a lunch of hotdogs with sauerkraut and beer meeting a2800276 I was on my way over to the Mozilla room when Stallman came storming out of the hall, young acolytes at his shoulder, having put his shoes back on. He muttered 'persistent hostility' and I pushed the door open to let the whirlwind pass and down another corridor with the most gauche acolyte asking 'so do they give you your own room?' I gather that some of the questioning on GPL3 was less than complimentary after I left.

I was planning on being there on Sunday morning as well but both J and S came down with the same chest gripping virus that I had before I left, but J suffers from asthma and I thought it better to try and get back earlier. Unfortunately SN Brussels wouldn't change the ticket so I ended up bouncing around the airport for the afternoon.

Creative locksmithing

Once I had the replacement lock I cut into the stiff polycarbonate packaging designed to scrape cuticles from fingers and started to look at assembling the lock to the door.

Which was when I remembered the game we had fitting the lock some 17 years or so ago. That was when my father in law was alive and he did virtually all the DIY around; because he was good at it and because I made a good plumber's/carpenter's mate. Hmmm.

The new lock wrapped around the door edge and would need rebating into the door. This didn't daunt me so much, even though I knew it would be a pain as the door was extremely hard wood and I should really take the door off its hinges to do it, but that would require someone else to manage the door with me and that I didn't have.

What was the problem was that when I removed the existing lock, which just attached to the face of the door with the face plate and I came to drill the holes for the two pegs attached to the new lock escutcheon I found that all that happened when I started the drill was that a plug popped out of the back of the door. A perfectly formed crescent shaped plug. My father in law had cleverly plugged the original hole because no lock we could find would fit that original distance from the edge of the door.

So I stood and pondered for a while and decided to go to B&Q and think some more.

A number of alternatives came to mind.

1. Buy a new lock of exactly the same kind, if I could.
2. Make a combination of old barrel and new box (which would mean one key for outside and one for inside).
3. Depending upon one leg and the barrel connection only. Somewhat dodgy.
4. Giving up on the door and buying a new front door. Rich man's alternative.
5. Banging my head against the door until unconsciousness resulted and I was found by wife whereon a professional locksmith/carpenter could be prevailed upon to make all the madness go away.

For quite a few minutes option 5 seemed the most fruitful. Then I steeled myself and found the exact replica of the lock that had been on there and suffered the payment of another £41 for the fix. I couldn't go through the ordeal of swapping yet another lock, besides which the polycarbonate packaging was now well and truly cut to extremely sharp ribbons.

It was with considerable optimism that I carried on with the new lock, all I had to do was screw the new plate to the door and assemble the lock. Which was when I discovered that the geometry of the plate had altered very very slightly but sufficiently for one of the mounting screws to hit the edge of the existing hole and do nothing at all.

Oh well I thought, one mounting screw will be enough until I get the lock mounted. And I work on using the existing hole. The head of the screw snaps off as I screw it in with the power screwdriver leaving about half of it embedded solidly in the very solid hardwood.

So I then twist and manoever the plate so I can get some purchase for another hole which I augur with my hand augur and start with a drill hole about half the width of the screw. I apply the power screwdriver and then stop and start finishing with a hand screwdriver. The top of the screw twists off in exactly the same way and leaves the rest of the thread embedded just as solidly in the same very solid hardwood.

I do not kick the door, I don't weep in frustration but I do say Fuck under my breath a few times.

I'm left with a single solution, which is to get the lock mounted using the bolts running from the face plate through the hole for the lock without being able to see where the bolt met the lock inside the door. I banished all thought of the possible hours I could take to get the one bolt connected and forgot about the ache in my fingers holding both lock and faceplate in the right orientation with the tab of the lock meeting the slot in the face plate since connecting it without that being right was pointless.

It took less than three minutes, and I managed the second bolt at the second try. It was a little complicated getting the lock even on the door and its a little stiff to turn. But it works.

I was quite pleased with myself, even if it did cost £50 more than it should have. The other lock can go in the box of other stuff useful on some other day.

When accused of fraud

repeat the allegation in a loud and clear voice.

I have to replace the main lock on the front door and the one I'd bought from B&Q was the wrong one, I need a 40mm distance from the edge of the door and not 60mm. So I go this morning to take the lock back to exchange it. The problem is my wife paid for it on her debit card to her account. She gave me her card as they'd probably want to credit it.

I knew this was a bad idea, if B&Q used chip and pin then it would be fine but they don't.

So I give the lady the card she accepts it and the receipt and then does the credit presenting me with a slip to sign, to which I say, 'It's not my card so I can't sign it.' She gets agitated and says 'That's fraud.'. I say no its not fraud, the card has been credited not debited, its the same card used in the original transaction and you have the goods back. It is not fraud and if you continue to repeat this I'll call the police and you can repeat the allegation.

So she calls the manager.

The manager bumbles over after the requisite several minutes at which the rest of the queue remain fairly patient and give fairly pleasant smiles.

Having heard from his assistant the manager says 'But that is fraud.'. To which I repeat my explanation that it cannot be fraud in a loud clear voice and say in a louder voice that if he persists in accusing me of fraud that I will call the police. He backs down immediately and has her give me a slew of vouchers instead.

All of which could have been avoided if they didn't insist on crediting the same method and instrument as used in the transaction in the first place. If they had used chip and pin then I could have just used the pin number as the one change which happens with chip and pin is that they never check the name on the card. Not that she did in this case anyway.

Seasons Greetings, Mazel Tov

As unlikely as it may seem for a hardened and well bitten atheist here is my general Christmas card for all.

It's our tree in the living room this year and its much the best tree for a great many years, thanks to J for picking this one.

Today was the Christmas lunch of my major, almost only, client and I, like most of us, chose the Thai meal. I didn't know it was going to be a banquet, the dishes kept coming and coming and coming and it was some of the best Thai food I've had outside of Thailand.

Most amusing was the reaction to the Tom Yam, from gasps to snorts and even the dribbling of mucus from noses. It was a truly excellent soup.

All that was missing was a desert, though a couple did steal christmas pudding from the 'traditional dinner' table. When I got home after picking S up from bag packing for Guides at the Co-op I had a tall mug of Guatemalan coffee along with a fresh mince pie baked by J. She really does make the best that exist.

When Nostalgia pushes you into something New

Today, and yesterday if you count Jethro Tull and the Isle of Wight, has had more than a slight haze of nostalgia to it. Firstly, J in clearing out cupboards in what is a Christmas season ritual known as getting ready for decorating, discovered my old press photograph that was done at Digital Research Inc showing me with hair (well just about), and a beard that wasn't white. It was taken in case journalists wanted a picture to go with whatever article I'd been mentioned in or provoked to have written as was the style then.

It was also the style to have the photo taken from some bizarre angle, from underneath on a set of modernistic stairs pointing up the nostrils for example. Mine though was of the kindly doctor type, fingers poised over the keyboard and a benign smile on my face. It would not look out of place on a book published by Wrox.

Then for some reason I remembered MicroCornucopia the best little technical fanzine in the world, until the beige world of PCs took over. I remembered it because I remembered thinking about what would be a good subject for the blog other than my irascibility. It was buying Dr Dobbs that provoked the original thought. That there are no (none) decent magazines on software and hardware anymore. None with the kind of journalism that do it for me the way Micro C did, or the way Dr Dobbs used to do it. Or Byte come to that.

The reasons for this are obvious. Whereas every other human endeavour has its own niche little magazine or two to keep its enthusiasts in a state of anticipatory excitement or energised post-reading frenzy and it just so happens to have a few thousand web sites as well, computer stuff saturates the InterWeb. There is so much stuff on the net that your average computer enthusiast is just going to think 'I'll Google for it', the below average one will ask on JOS. Which is fine but it isn't journalism.

There are a number of blogs (probably hundreds or thousands) that are good journalism and there are all sorts of aggregated feeds and mechanisms to build your very own magazine every ten seconds. But readers make very poor editors.

A magazine has some kind of ethos, some recognisable slant or view on its world and its readers buy into that to a greater or lesser extent or they like one author over and above any other. One person's aggregated list is just that, a list with more or less lint on it.

The sites which attempt to be online magazines quickly descend into being rumour sites. There's nothing wrong with rumour, I love gossip, after all I built I Just Heard to be my very own gossip aggregator. A proper magazine though isn't just about reacting to the next gossiped meme, it should be both reflective and newsworthy it should have opinion but the opinion should be more than just an assertion planned to provoke a flame war.

Make looks like an interesting idea. A magazine about stuff that people have made, can make, may make. There's no boundaries, though most of it seems to be about creative use of biscuit tins or other ephemeral hardware.

But I still want a magazine that talks seriously about software, hardware, strange products and new techniques but which isn't connected to a brand or a particular platform. I'm not interested in language wars, OS wars or chip wars. I'm just interested in good writing, and its not going to happen. Not in a printed magazine anyway.

After I thought about MicroCornucopia for a bit and the kind of ethos Dave Thompson the editor forged out of a frequently diverse miscellany of writers and subjects I looked for the domain name microconucopia.com and somewhat surprisingly it's available. So i bought it and its now one of the possibly useful collection of domain names I have that probably won't get used for anything useful, ever.

It is true that using the word Micro totally disappeared in computer usage at the end of the 80's in favour of PC and my mother could go on cooking things in the micro without raising the occasional eyebrow. We are still using microprocessors though and the ubiquity of the clone or even the boringly similar designs of PCs have now gone. We're almost back to a state where we can craft our own madcap solutions to problems no one else even dreamt existed which magazines like Micro C championed.

So perhaps I'll create a new MicroCornucopia site (Dave Thompson is welcome to have the name back if he wants it), and invite people to write for it, for no money obviously.

Slouching Home to Bethlehem

On the Sunday morning we woke in our small corridor of a room (Quality Hotel, Hyde Park, just don't), and I stuck the news on. An oil refinery was on fire after explosions (and still is today).

Our route home is the M40, not the M1, so I knew we wouldn't be directly affected by the M1 being closed around the area but I did think that the traffic would be increased and so it was.

In between banks of fog and low winter sunlight I kept checking the sky, even though we were well to the west of the fire. On the plateau just before the dive through the chalk cutting towards Oxford (see the beginning titles of the Vicar of Dibley for the actual spot), I looked up and to the east apart from the oddly stained clouds I could see the main trumpet of cloud, black and roiling and it discharging blackness into the sky.

Welcome to Iraq, I said to J.

Babylon at Christmas

It was an excellent weekend even if it was expensive, extravagant and excessive.

We met I for lunch in Kensington High Street and after real decent coffee in a tiny place by the church we went over to Babylon.

The restaurant is on the floor above the Roof Garden, hence the name, and is that kind of ultra cool decor that one only really finds in major cities. I'd read varying reviews of the restaurant some scathing of the service but I have to say we didn't have any complaints with the service from our blonde Russian/Ukrainian waitress who even managed to even out the wine usage.

Mine and S's starter was a grilled goat's cheese thing on a mound of salad which was pleasant enough but could have done with a sharper dressing. A raspberry vinegar based dressing maybe. J had cauliflower soup which looked very good and soup I find is the only thing that cauliflower does well as its largely water frozen into a cellular state. 'I' had smoked salmon which looked pretty much like smoked salmon.

J chose sausages with champ mash for mains and the rest of us chose fish and chips. I think this was more down to the relative cost of the dishes rather than anything else, though 'S' was pretty certain about the fish and chips from the beginning. The chips were more like railway sleepers than even fat chips being squared off but were very good and went well with the quite delicate battered fish, the batter made up with beer. Still about the only way we could have had a more expensive fish and chips would have been to take a flight and go have them on the pier at Monterey, though they are by far the best fish and chips I've had at any time in any country. Which is a little galling.

The deserts were quite spectacular, though S and I had the same, 'I' had the selection of ice creams. I don't know why S chose the Calvados Baba, probably because she didn't know what Calvados was and she did complain that I was copying her though I do have a particular fondness for Calvados. The waitress was concerned that S would find the dessert too strong and I pretty much agreed with her but (and perhaps I was foresighted enough to realise that I'd end up with the baba if she didn't like it), we felt she'd be better off finding out for herself rather than doing the you're too young to know thing.

The deserts came on some square and triangular bits of glass that you generally see in bathroom windows, opaqued with striations and bubbles. The babas were small towers of sponge soaking with calvados but when you carved a slice out of the side the sponge was crisp and dry and only yielded up the calvados as you ate it which was lovely. It came along with apple sorbet and apple crisps that were completely dry.

After coffee we took a walk on the balcony over the garden, which has its own rill and a duck was slowly paddling around the pool it ran into. It is almost Japanese in feel, though there is nothing Japanese about the design of the garden or the plants.

All in all an excellent way to begin the Christmas season.

Oh No You're Not!

Oh Yes We Are!

It's the annual corporate Christmas lunch with I and friends and such this weekend. They came to Worcester last year, so this year we're in London and staying over.

I've also got tickets for the Panto at the Old Vic on Saturday Night, Row W in the Stalls, not great but not bad its not a large theatre and S can see Ian McKellern's famed Widow Twankey.

So we'll be driving down in about an hour and a half, if you're on the M40, wave.

Steamed contryside

It's a very steamy morning this morning but the steam is cold, freezing fog. It's almost cold enough to feel the air crackle on your face as you walk through it. Almost.

Just as there are cycles in traffic flow as cars bunch up and lag behind the car in front, when even moderate bad weather happens the traffic clogs into all the corners of the town. Since S has moved schools to one across the river it's generally fine getting there but very slow to come back with three routes converging before the bridge, the large housing estate the school is on, the main road through Arley and on to Astley and Worcester beyond and the road that comes into the town from Dunley. With the freezing fog it just clagged up completely this morning.

To avoid all this entirely, I took the switchback road to Bewdley instead, which winds beside and above the Severn and was completely empty. It's called the switchback because of the stretch of road that undulates and the camber alternates from the centre to the sides. When we first lived here it used to be undermined by flood waters from the woods above every year and collapse in the Winter. Now it doesn't collapse and encourages you to drive fast along it in all weathers and throughout the year. About half way along it there's a shrine of flowers to some dead motorbike rider who was tempted into driving into a large oak.

The traffic in Bewdley itself is a dribble compared to Stourport and perhaps that underlines the continual commercial decline of the town. At one time it seemed it was going to become the Stow-on-the-Wold of the Wyre Forest with an antique shop every few yards but most of them have closed now. This is good news for locals in that the tourists disappear completely for the Winter but it has affected the health of the town badly.

Coming back towards Stourport and our house the traffic backs up from the lights at the Crossing, named for the railway line that was a spur through Burlish and joined up with the Severn Valley Line until Beeching closed it. The actual crossing is a good quarter of a mile away from the crossroads and the old signal box house is still there and has been extended and modernised completely. The foundations of the building are of the native sandstone and there is what looks like a huge cellar extending underneath the whole building.

They put in traffic lights at the crossroads about fifteen years or so ago because of the number of accidents but they never have managed to get the timing right to stop long queues forming. The best they've managed to date is to only allow one way to go at any one time. It seems the likelyhood of any one vehicle turning right from any of the four directions is just too likely. This is the one situation where I'd be glad of an automatic convoy system that kept everyone moving up the queue at a steady rate and then the worm of traffic contracting and extending would start to glide slickly around places like our town.

This morning it lurched like a drunken worm, partially because the local stone mason in front of me spent more time grappling with the girl in the passenger seat than watching for when the traffic moved in front of him.

Half an hour to travel around five miles in a loop.

Harry Potter a Film for All Seasons

S, I and a family friend went to see the HP film on Friday evening. I don't know the fourth book that well, I didn't get to read it continuously at the time so a lot of it I hadn't remembered and I didn't realised where they pulled and twisted the plot a little and swapped characters around to get it into a manageable length.

S thinks they missed an opportunity with the opening scenes and lost things that should not have been lost. She was most bothered about the loss of the house elves as they form a pivotal part of the plot development and are an important sub plot of the book.

Even so I think its the best of the films so far, and S might even agree.

On Saturday night we went to the Grand, Wolverhampton to see A Man for All Seasons with Martin Shaw as Sir Thomas More. I did have a slight fear that he might simply play it as John Deeds in doublet and hair shirt but he didn't. He wasn't as waspish as Schofield and less monastic than the production I saw at the Liverpool Playhouse in the early 70's. The supporting cast is very strong and the Common Man (Tony Bell) pitched it just right and manfully wrestled the sometimes reticent audience into the artful gags and the modern political parallels.

It's a play that is for all seasons and times as much as More was not a man to bend to the prevailing climate, the references to imprisonment without trial and the control of what people think tolling like a bell throughout the production.

I may not have got up on my feet at the end as some did but it was an excellent overall production. That the actors were unsure how the audience was taking it was obvious when I read Martin Shaw's lips as they came forward for the second curtain call, 'That's a relief' he said to his 'wife' and Thomas Cromwell (Clive Carter), punched him on the shoulder in congratulations.

Fireworks and all that

Last week was a week of weeks, this week looks somewhat better.

An abcess ballooned up on my jaw at the beginning of the week which meant going to the Dental Access Centre where for a very modest fee of £11 I had two ladies hold me down and inflict pain upon me which some would consider an extraordinary bargain. I get the pleasure again tomorrow when they dig the root of the offending tooth and its ruined neighbour.

That same day whilst I was lying down trying to think of all the good reasons to have a mouthfull of blood and clots S came home after being attacked after school by a gang of girls and a boy, slammed against a wall and punched.

The following day after having seen the headmistress and after J failing to communicate with her as well I started looking for another school.

S and I went to see the only other local school available and it was like visiting a designer loft after having lived in a Victorian Workhouse.

She started yesterday and she's been an almost entirely different girl, pleasant and biddable for the most part and she's being treated as if she's smart, which she is but which the previous school managed to ignore entirely. She said yesterday that it had been the first time she'd had to work in class since Year 2 and that she enjoyed it.

The hope is now that we can get her to catch up the lost time and opportunities.

The week ended with a Bonfire Night display at the Safari Park, 30,000 people or so all walking past each other for a few hours. I took two memory cards of photographs with the Canon, one is attached here.

Annual Christmas Corporate Dinner

We've started a tradition of our own, well its the second Annual Christmas Corporate Dinner, which is a kind of tradition. They do have to start somewhere.

The planned venue is the Pearl Restaurant in the old Pearl Assurance building in High Holborn and I'm looking forward to it. I'm not entirely sure if I'm looking forward to the entire weekend of Christmas shopping (that is my daughter's), that will come with it.

Naturally there'll be a review afterwards.

Avoiding one sort of Witch

It's Halloween tonight, well you knew that and I'm not going to bother seething about the infiltration of American tradition over and above the existing All Hallows Eve celebrations we used to have, actually it was just Apple Bobbing Night.

At least I'll avoid the noisome habit of trick or treat as I'll be at a Temporary Governor's Meeting from 6pm.

Sunflower Kiss continued...

The domain sunflowerkiss.com is now live and has a site entry page which navigates to the Café Press site.

Of course there are no sales yet :-).

Sunflower Kiss

I've finally got the sunflower photograph to the point where it can be used as an image for commoditising. It may be saccharine for some and it probably does appeal to the 'liking puppies' market, but there's no harm in that.

I've bought the domain sunflowerkiss.com and once I've sorted out the new virtual domain with the hosting company it will point at the cafe press site.

From a view to a death in the morning

October 13th is the first Peel Day, for John Peel, or John Ravenscroft, probably the best of all DJs and the one that was least DJ like, well in latter years anyway.

The point of the day is to have as many gigs around the country honouring John Peel, or remembering him but for the most part just to play music. It wouldn't be a bad day to have as a new Public Holiday. John Peel may not have been a Dr King but he probably affected even more people over the years and in just as lasting a way.

Oh and he was a Liverpool supporter as well, so he was entirely perfect.

Pimpin' the Pumpkin

American Halloween practises have almost entirely annhilated the ones we had for ourselves. S. asked if we could have a Halloween party and I said sure you can have a Halloween party, so long as we have things like blindfolded apple dunking and not some naff pinyata. This cooled the idea considerably.



This picture and several others I took today after J. had roasted a pumpkin for pumpkin soup. Pumpkins are one of imports of the Autumn that I really do enjoy, though soup is about the most palatable way to eat them.

I'm not so bothered by pumpkin carving and lighting them with candles but J. will do it and when the terrors come around at the end of the month I'll cheerily ignore them.

Daisy Miller, not so Daisy

Last night we went to see Daisy Miller at the Wolverhampton Grand, S came with us as the lead was being played by an ex-Eastenders actress, though to be fair she loves going to the theatre anyway.

Other than it providing even more material for 'A Night with the Audience' when we got to the theatre there were the ominous signs of the hastily printed notice. 'Tonight the part of Daisy Miller is played by xxxxxxxxxx' (I'll fill in the names when I find the programme). Of course S was disappointed, though this was assuaged by a box of Maltesers.

This production, and this adaptation, has only been running since the beginning of the month, starting in Malvern, so its a little disappointing that the main lead had to be played by the understudy so soon. However, it was not the disaster that Snow White had been those several years ago when Paul O'Grady as Lil Savage was severely ill and the part was read (entirely literally) by the director.

In fact, she played it very well with only a very few long pauses and stumbles that given the play could easily be seen as clever direction.

It felt more like a radio play in lots of ways as the entire play is narrated, with some style, by the male lead with a couple of suits to be admired, all the more so as he changed the tie/cravat, waistcoat and jacket continuing the narration as he did so.

Some I overheard weren't convinced by his performance, nor was J, but it seemed reasonable to me given that one of the tricks of Daisy Miller is that it is the men who are as naive as her in the light of her innocence.

The supporting cast of old ladies (some not so old), were in some ways supportive but often seemed more hesitant and in the final bow seemed to acknowledge that the production was still very loose with the timing not quite there.

The set was excellent, though already showing signs of being moved and thumped into spaces too small for it, the Grand is about the right size for the production it would be entirely lost on the Hippodrome stage.

I'll come back to this and extend it when I have the names and details to hand. Though it will likely only be on the main journal, not the LJ copy.

Ugh

The other eye stings today. Fuck.

In the footsteps of Paul

The time of the Daily Service on Radio 4 in the morning is usually the time for me to turn the radio down or switch to online and get the equivalent to the FM Radio 4 broadcast, but this week its been a pilgrimage in the footsteps of Paul in Greece. It's had an entirely different quality from the cosy singy, happy clappy broadcast it often tends to be, there have been moments of almost silence, which on radio is deafening.

Without Paul there would have been no separate Church for Constantine to recognise and it would not have become a Roman religon at all. Whether this makes him a devil or a saint is hard to say, though its true enough that what people most think of as Christianity was Paul's transmutation made with the fervour of the convert.

From time to time you get documentary type treatments of Paul who, regardless of your convictions, is a fascinating character but few dramatic ones that stray far from the line followed by that most judicious of spin doctors, Luke.

So, I'd welcome a good dramatic treatment of Acts and the journeys of Paul.

Of course the simplicity of that Morning Service programme was followed by the whining confusion which is Woman's Hour. That just has to go off.

Sunday Times does Mayfair

It's probably something to do with it being Fashion Week this se'enight but the Sunday Times Style supplement which is usually a thin anorexic affair with little to commend it apart from the occasional swell of pudenda when they do beachwear has suddenly tumesced into a top shelf publication stuffed with adverts of odalisquean subjects.

One in particular caught my moist eye and that was for Harvey Nichols Restaurants (Harvey Nicks to the congnoscenti) as it was a double page spread of an orgy of kissing the velvet tableaux, stuffed with dripping pomegranate juice, lobsters, chocolate cake and one string of pearls delivered from a thin stream of jiz like champagne.

It was startling not quite so much because of the images, but because last week Harvey Nicks entered the news as the result of a murder/suicide of a couple with the man shouting at the girlfriend as he pulled the trigger 'If I can't have you, nobody can'. It is a mercy to screenwriters everywhere that he killed himself immediately afterwards otherwise he can only have said to the police 'It's a fair cop, guv'.

The copy in the magazine is also quite different from the normal sludge pimping this or that fashion product. It's almost savage in its sardonic, wink, wink, hate, loathe and envy pieces. And there isn't just one but many.

If you haven't got to it yet this week and it hasn't made it into the recycling bin then read it do. Then consider how much better you are than all the Kate Moss's in the world and the editors that lust after them.

Three for a Girl

This morning as I was taking my daughter to school we disturbed a flurry of magpies in the middle of the road as we got closer it was clear that two of the birds were mobbing and spiking the third with their beaks.

Magpies are furiously territorial and its a sign of diminishing available food and mates that the behaviour got so violent. There's a nesting magpie at the back of the back garden which chuffs at every approaching bird. It's a pain because it means all the smaller birds are keeping clear, I hope all the occupants wander off before the winter gets underway.

Migraine

Some days are just crap. Around 4:30 this morning I woke with one of those sick headaches that are the presager of a migraine usually. A tab of Codeine/Paracetomol and stumbling around for an hour enabled me to sleep.

And yes I woke with the migraine.

Whilst I was inefficiently working through the final show stoppers on the Rosetta development the client rang with a problem with the parcel labels printout. A short visit later and everything seemed fine. They ran out of labels since then and now it won't print again.

This is really nothing to do with me.

But it is a lovely sunny day.

See a Queue, Join it.

There's supposed to be a demonstration by road hauliers tomorrow at oil refineries and the like at the cost of fuel. This prompted a speculation in the media that there would be a run on fuel, not even that there was any likelihood of there being a shortage.

Predictably enough there was a run on fuel yesterday evening and this morning and now there probably isn't a drop of petrol available across the entire West Midlands.

When asked, some of the people queuing down the road said, "Oh well I saw the long queue and thought there must be a problem, so I joined it.".

I trundled past a couple of the local petrol stations yesterday evening, as J really will need fuel tomorrow or Thursday and I had to manoeuver around the queue as it backed around a junction. Filling up at the Esso station was a guy with a large speed boat...

I just drove past them all and came home. J filled up at 6:45am this morning and there was a queue even so.

Eclectic Tastes Win Long Distance Races

Thanks to muzer for prompting me to go look on emusic.com for Antony and The Johnsons.

On the whole Emusic seems to be for those that like collecting eclectic music whatever the genre. In other words they get licences to stuff no one cares enough about not to have online.

Antony and the Johnsons won the Mercury Award this week and being out on the Lou Reed, Boy George edge are eclectic enough and were unfashionable enough to be listed by Emusic.com.

So I can download all three albums including the current I am a Bird Now. And have done.

Mutually respectful of privacy

Whilst we were on holiday we had lunch at Fowey, at Food for Thought which was the best restaurant there twenty odd years ago and is still excellent. The restaurant is right on the quayside and we ate outside, J's wish I always feel like an oik outside, and were buffeted by the wind.

We were sitting eating and occasionally visited by our daughter in between her shopping trips and there was a long table next to us that had been reserved. Towards the end of the meal the party for the table arrived and it was Sir Tim Rice with family and friends. He was really unobtrusive and kept his shades on all the time and very softly spoken.

We, of course, pretended he didn't exist and earwigged as much as we could, I can only presume that he did the same as he treated us with exactly the same respect.

One can only admire the famous that ignore their fame quite as much as we ourselves do.

An Evening with the Audience

Before we went away on holiday last week (to Cornwall, excellent weather lousy house see a later entry for more details), we'd spent each Satuday of the Summer going to the theatre to watch a small repertory company in a variety of plays at the Wolverhampton Grand.

Most of the productions were really very good and we enjoyed them immensely but at the same time we had a running gag as to the behaviour of the audience. The gag goes that we're going to put together an evening of entertainment based upon all the bad things that an audience can do. You know the sort of thing, arrive late, have lots of bags of rustly sweets, repeating the words of the play when they particularly amuse them 'arras heh heh', mobile phones going off and on and on.

The list is quite literally endless.

I think the Edinburgh Festival is probably the best venue for it. On stage there will be three or four rows of theatre seats with some performance going on and each of the reprehensible acts given full lease for the edification and embarrassment of all that come to watch. Of course it wouldn't be an Edinburgh fringe event without getting the actual audience involved so I think, a little like Hair, we'll get particularly noisome members of the real audience up on the stage. I don't think we'll have them dance or take their clothes off though.

Alternatively, it will be a monologue and if I ever got the gumption to book a venue I'd stand there and basically wank my way through it (not literally dear, not literally, its an analogy, oh please yourself).

Unblocking the blog

Time to begin writing in this omphalokeptic way again. It wasn't that I took a break for the Summer, nor that I was an unnamed casualty in the 7th July bombings though my ceasing to write on here was connected in a way.

Sometimes you just block on a way of communicating. Alright, more honestly, I sometimes block on a way of communicating. Most frequently that block is on some online medium, some channel or other. It might be stopping using any of the IM methods I have, or staying away from some online community of which I'm a part time resident. Whichever it is the impulse which stops the flow isn't immediately accessible to me.

With this blog I think it was having too much to want to write and not wanting to write about it at the same time. There was so much guff written around the 7th July that I didn't have the energy to join in and massage my ego at the same time that my vaunted objectivity would elevate my trivial opinions over and above the rest.

Which is not to say I didn't express all those same trivial opinions, I did, just not here, more often they were at ?Off and those that may come across this that don't go there may count themselves fortunate for not reading them.

?Off is such a transient and temporary medium that you can be an idiot on one day and its generally forgotten, though if you're consistently puerile you will be tarred forever with that brush.

Today is the Red Letter Day of all Days

Today has just got betterer and betterer. Not content with Steven Gerrard staying at Anfield we have the following:

• My car is finally ready, I pick it up and it purrs.


• We win the Olympics bid and when S is 18 she can buy us tickets for the events as by then she'll be a famous actress. She has informed us so anyway.


• The European Parliament has rejected by a landslide 648 votes to 14. There'll be gnashing of teeth in Seattle today.

You say Yes, I say No, You Say I Don't Know, Ohhh

Many that know me know that I've been a Liverpool FC supporter since I could distinguish between the colours of red and blue and growing up on Merseyside choosing one or the other was historically more a matter of family and religon than personal choice. As our family was mixed (Catholic and Protestant), its no surprise that as I became a Red my brother supported the Toffees (Everton).

Which meant that the reflected grace on Liverpool winning the European Cup at the end of last season felt a little like having the Pope (the last one), present you with his benediction which as a confirmed Atheist, even a Catholic one, is a very great deal indeed. Not only did we have the silverware but it also seemed that we would keep Steven Gerrard for good at Anfield and all the money that Chelsea and Abramovich could wave at him this summer would be ignored and a new Jerusalem would begin as it had in the 70's and 80's.

And then yesterday it was like being physically kicked inside. The rumours had increased that Gerrard was thinking of leaving, that Chelsea had put up some enormous sum and that despite the club wanting to hold on to him he was intent on going. Before going to bed it seemed certain that he had decided and that it would become an auction once he put his request for transfer in.

Then this morning I check the BBC News website and there is this single unadorned paragraph.

Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard has had a dramatic change of heart and decided to stay at Anfield.

Oh frabjous day, calloo callay! I don't know what was said to him in the meantime or whether it was just the reality that he would have to ask to leave in order for it to happen and that convinced him his club wanted to keep him or whether it was Benitez essentially offering to adopt him as his son and heir to all that would be to come in the Promised Land.

I think perhaps in the end him being where he belonged and knowing he was literally loved overrode any immediate feelings of rejection he obviously felt during the last six weeks as his extension was negotiated. In an industry and a time when loyalties are counted in millions of pounds and its who pays the cheque who determines the loyalties it isn't only because I'm a Liverpool fan that I'm glad that this one young man has decided that real loyalties are more important. John Peel would be very proud of him.

Geldof roars in righteous anger and indignation

Geldof was in high octane viturperative mood this evening on the Radio 4 PM program, fulminating against the "corrupt" Ebay corporation allowing auctions on the free (but distributed by lottery), Live8 gig tickets.

I particularly enjoyed his 'they can stick it up their ass', when informed that Ebay has offered to pay at least what they make in fees from the sales.

Geldof's point is that it is not a charity gig, the tickets are entirely free the method of paying for all the venues and what have you was financed entirely out of SMS revenues.

Still Learning

what the new camera lets me do. This is one of the poppies in the front garden, the morning after I took this the petals were lying separated on the ground like torn tissue paper.

The rest of them are here.

Renewed Gumption Drain

Yesterday I succumbed to impulse buying, well rather now that Canon have released the EOS 350D I couldn't resist not buying it.

The Wild Daisy from the Garden is one of the first shots from it, complete with aphids and ants. The Garden Gallery in the Photographs Gallery is all from the new camera, and there's a further shot in the Skies gallery.

Today it gets used for something like one of its real purposes though and that's photographing Siobhan's now too small Monsoon collection of clothes ready to go up on Ebay.

Sheckley Paypal update

This is now the right paypal link to contribute to the Robert Sheckley come home and get better fund.

Payback Time

I was catching up with other blog type things this morning and read my Livejournal Friends list including the RSS feed of Neil Gaiman and a little way down the list I read about Robert Sheckley's illness in Ukraine.

After initially being without visible medical cover, though he did have insurance somewhere, and needing ventilation and without much help from the US Embassy, he's now convelescing before going back to the US. Once in the US he's going to need considerable financial support to cover his medical bills. He should have stayed in Europe after the 60's, at least he'd have got his health care covered.

Anyhow, there is a Paypal donation page here. As most that know me realise, I'm not exactly positive about charity in the main but I make an exception in this case. Robert Sheckley was one of the first five or so writers on the planet that I read and loved wholeheartedly and who, if not inspired, then at the very least proved that joining words together on a page was a pleasing occupation. One day I might even get up and occupy myself with it but if I do then almost every sentence will be judged and found wanting compared to Sheckley's.

So, I threw my $50 down the hole and I wish it does more than $50 worth of medical support which will blink past.

Sans Today, sans everything

It was very odd this morning being without the BBC Today Programme as most of the News and Current Affairs people went on strike protesting the Corporation's plans on making several thousand staff redundant.

It strikes me that BBC management have skewered themselves on the horns of a dillemma. They benefit from being pubically funded (though at a much lower subscription rate than say Sky), and at the same time seem to feel guilty at being able to offer so many global services.

They should forget their guilt and glory in their reputation and that they are publically funded. I wouldn't even restrict internet rebroadcasting to only those within the geographic UK, I'd rebroadcast those programmes that I wanted the world to get, knowing that for everyone that is streamed online or downloaded many, many more would be bought on DVD, CD or watched on cable.

Stop feeling guilty and just get on with it.

BBC Weather Deathmatch

It is extremely reminiscent of every installation of new or upgraded software, 'It will take some time to get used to', and 'in the end the viewers (users) will love it'. Whereas the actual users, who in this case aren't the users but the viewers think, 'it makes my eyes go funny' and 'where are all the symbols so I know what's happening?'.

In truth, the BBC's new Weather software system is very good, very good indeed. For Weather Forecasters. But its nigh on useless for viewers. Two and a half D perspective and zooming under the clouds and around the British Isles are all very well when you have the mouse (and I'm impressed with their control of the display given they have the control clenched in one hand), but when you're just watching the results its just disorienting. What is worse because it looks like you should have control over the mouse you get extremely irritated when the attention is on some part of the map you could care less about and if you happen to live in Scotland then you just start off angry because your country is far far away and very small.

Maps have persisted for this long into the electronic age because they're symbolic and easy to relate to. Maps which look like satellite images are sugary eye candy but provide too much of the wrong kind of information.

Yes its wonderful to be able to zoom into all this stuff and no doubt we'll end up with zooming into the A1 to see the black ice, but unless its me doing the zooming for me just don't bother.

Advertising free

I've dumped using adverts on this site, apart from no one really clicking on them they always tended to be fairly horrible. No I don't want to promote Labour wrist bands or encourage people to thank Tony.

I don't care on I Just Heard and the ads on there do get click throughs, not that its making me rich or anything.

Living the Cyberpunk dream

You know all those science fiction stories of the Eighties, the journeyman cyber warrior, deck in hand, hacking into this or that company evading their ice? Well I haven;t been doing that so much as picking up TV feeds online.

The English Premier League along with Italy's Serie A is amongst the most popular football league in the country and Sky has the monopoly on live broadcast matches. It is the only reason I'd ever have a Sky subscription, but we have Freeview and you can't get Sky on Freeview.

I noticed the other day this Google advert for getting TV programs online, I had thought it was just another Bit Torrent advert but I went to the URL and it was a site selling addresses that broadcast live TV, especially football. Perhaps it was the fact that I was going to miss the Liverpool - Chelsea first leg, or that the cost was just £4.95 but I weakened and regardless of possible virus and spam attacks I joined the site and got the addresses (which are continually updated so there is considerable value in it), connected to one of the feeds giving the Liverpool game and with my streaming cold watched it in the comfort of my own Windows Multimedia Player.

Like everything else there's an additional tweak which runs a peer to peer kind of torrent passing out of bits of traffic evening out (eventually) the inevitable drops in delivery. Its called CodeStreaming and you can get it here.

Virtually all of the feeds are Chinese, Korean or Japanese versions of Star Net rebroadcasting ESPN rebroadcasting Sky which does enhance the feeling of living inside a William Gibson novel, the Chinese commentary buried on the left hand channel whilst listening to Andy Grey babble over it.

Foiled again

I had one of those disturbed night cum obsessive verbal dream things, mostly about mice and having to dispose of them this morning if the traps were sprung.

Well the traps were indeed sprung, but without any captive mouse in either of them. They rely on the weight of the mouse tripping the door closed as they go up the inclined tunnel to the bait. It's probably too fine a balance for our particular Mus musculus and they set them off just nosing around them.

Wherein squirrels are found, disposed of and early summer colds are caught and super mouse (or mice) bust out of jail

We've known we had squirrels in the eaves for some time, right over the Winter, but they started making a lot more noise and sounded as if they'd moved into the loft as well. So I got the pest man in, a very nice pest man, called Ian.

I thought I was getting him in before the doe littered and we had half a dozen of the little tree rats up there, but it seems with the warm winters and our warmer loft and the availability of food (bird food that is) in the garden she actually gave birth in February/March sometime.

He caught the mother first, then the next day a baby, though fully formed and then we knew there was a family. That second evening I saw four of them boiling out onto the roof looking for their mother. We were going to block the holes up after we got all the squirrels caught but our next door neighbour went ahead and did it, after all if they were trapped in the loft they'd be easier to catch.

Well not necessarily it seems. At least one of them made its way into his loft and buried itself somewhere, the other three were caught readily enough over a couple of nights in our loft, but still no sign of the fifth youngster until yesterday afternoon.

He'd snuck out of the main loft and into the space above next door's garage, then dropped into the garage and managed to jump into an oil tray full of oil and then distribute that all over himself and the next door neighbour's expensive motorbike. The oil made him sick and Ian had no choice but to use his dog to capture the squirrel then put him out of his misery.

Still four young and one mother squirrel rescued and out in Trimpley somewhere is a better result than might have been.

I realised along the way in all of this that now I'm nearly 50 I don't have to pretend to be athletic and jump in and out of the loft the young man can do all that.

Summer colds are perambulating their way around S's school and she's managed to give it to me as usual, so she's off and I'm typing through a fog. Tonight is also the quarterly governor's meeting and I'm weakening about going, not least because its Liverpool v Chelsea tonight in the first leg of the Champions League Semi final.

The other pressing matter (apart from wrestling with Pegasus Opera's reports and cursing them for still using VFP 6.0), is the matter of the super mouse (or mice) that have taken up residence behind the cupboard under the sink in the kitchen. You'd think that with two active hunting cats, even though they're both 15, that we wouldn't be plagued with mice in the Spring. Not so. What happens is is that they bring them in, play with them for a bit and if they don't get to kill them in short order they forget about them entirely.

J bought two new traps for the current guest and I baited them with chocolate spread and peanut butter on stale bread. The traps are just plastic lids with trap doors that you fit onto an empty can. This morning J gets up and discovers that both can traps had worked but that the occupant had bust out of both of them, in the case of one, breaking the lid entirely.

This afternoon I'm going to get sturdier traps.

UK Gets on the Map

Google has released its UK version of Google Maps and amazing wondrous it is too. Discover if your local take away is here.

'And nation shall speak unto nation', and map each other, so long as its in English.

A Day in a Lifetime

Bizarrely the Russian Parliament has declared an amnesty for all those still imprisoned after the Second World War, this includes those held in Nazi Concentration Camps (its unclear to me whether these were guards or prisoners), Home Front veterans and Veterans arrested after being captured by the Germans and then released by the Russians.

I fail to get elected Pope (again)

Well we have a new Pope, ave Papum, but we still, as of this moment still don't know who it is. But we know its not me and its not the Very Reverend.

My Sainted Aunt

One of the attitudes of the late Papacy was the bringing back of active beatification and sainthood bestowed on past celebrants. In fact he declared some 400 as either beatified or saints. And now there is already talk of nominating John Paul II and giving him the apellation of Great.

This is taking the instant gratification of the public and media more than a little too far.

It reminds me of the scene at the death of Claudius Caesar as he ascends into heaven being made a God by Nero. The Pope will be spinning in his simple coffin (with remarkably large dovetailed joints), inside the lead coffin, inside the oak sarchophagus buried underneath St Peter's.

Perhaps we should have seen Valiant

instead of Hitch. Not that the Will Smith vehicle wasn't ok as it went, it was perhaps 20 minutes or so too long but it was fun enough for all that even if we did see it in some small living room at the Odeon Worcester on a screen about 10' wide.

No the reason was that when we got back home that evening we discovered a hole punched into the transom window in the dining room. At first it seemed like a botched attempt to break in, the hole being about the size of a fist but being too far away from the catch to open the window. Now it seems evident that a pigeon just flew into the window, punched the hole, leaving a few feathers and either recovered and flew off or was carried off by one of the cats.

So, perhaps Valiant would have been the funnier choice.

Pro Forma with words

There's a lot of hoo hah and drivel written about how influential blogs were in the last US election, most of it written by bloggers and much of that blogging that is supposed to have been influential was conservative rather than what Americans whimsically call Liberal.

I can't see how they were that influential myself, perhaps a few news anchormen latched onto a couple and thought they were on the edge of a wave but I imagine most voters decided what they were going to vote well in advance of the election and the number of swing voters (which in popular vote terms is significant), made zero difference in the race that mattered and that was for the Electoral College.

So, as usual, its the seeming so rather than the actualité.

What i think is far more influential, and has always been since the development of newpapers, is the political cartoon. In the USA and Britain the political cartoon can be savage and nail a particular event in a way that text rarely does and for some reason political cartoons in the US are far more scathing of the establishment than the publications they are in.

Before blogs, well before they were called blogs and made a branch of the media, we had online cartoons, the Dilberts et al and especially with the Iraq invasion we have had anti-war, anti-Bush cartooning.

For a classic collection of cartooning in the US style click over to Cagle at the Slate (Yes Slate belongs to MSN but if you use Firefox that should be painless). But the kind of thing that more often makes me think and laugh out loud is get your war on.

No adverts just a clever use of formulated characters where the speech bubbles tell 90% of the story. The old fashioned 50's and 60's kind of middle class soap opera strip format torn down by the wicked text is just exactly right.

We know your underwear size

Microsoft is going into the commercial click through business and using its accumulated Hotmail, MSN and Messenger connection data along with the regular demographics about an area and cross referencing it all to provide a profile for an individual using its MSN Search pages to deliver advertising copy to them.

This is slightly different to Google's use of advertising, although with Gmail they could eventually garner the same kind of detail.

Information found via I Just Heard.

So Microsoft wants fairness

in patent litigation, saying that it's a lottery this is not surprising when you consider the Eolas case and yesterday the Burst case when Microsoft agreed a settlement of $60 million for misusing Burst's software. Some might see their call for a separate court to decide patent issues as innovative, others might wonder if it would be better not to have software patents at all.

Its in the Hours!

So EA Games are making some of their Programmers hourly employees and promising them structured hours and paid overtime. We'll see how squeaky clean they are when the first crunch happens and programmers start to walk after their given hours when they realise that the overtime isn't helping them any. unfortunately the link above is to a site you have to register with, Mercury News

Being Michael Winner

Well last night's stay was interesting. The restaurant appeared to be doing a late 80's theme night if the service and food was anything to go by. The service was excruciating for the most part though there was one girl that had an idea about what the job entailed, the others spent most of their time hiding behind the hot food cabinets used in the breakfast buffet (oy breakfast!).

On the menu there was mention of home made jam, in one of the starters,

as apple and plum jam and on one of the main courses but just described as jam. So I asked the waiter as he was about to take the order whether the jam was the same as if it was I'd change my mind about the starter not wanting the same thing twice. Well he didn't know but went off to find out. He came back and said yes it was the same, so I ordered the chicken liver parfait (smooth paté in other words), and the something or other of pork belly (with the jam).

After another slight strangeness of my G+T arriving after the wine, the starters arrived, we both had the paté. Together with the slab of smooth chicken liver, was a single slice of melba toast, some dotted reduced basil thing round the outside of the plate and a generous mound of the jam on the top.

I couldn't quite make my mind up which to be more incredulous about, the single piece of melba toast (which disintegrated as I picked it up), or the ubiquitous jam.

So we hung frozen above the paté waiting to catch some waiterish person to get some real toast, or failing that bread. And that's when we got the girl that seemed to know what was what. She brought us some bread with a knowing smile and that was that.

When the main course came, under aluminium domed dish covers would you believe, it arrived with a half moon plate of an arrangement of vegetables that was the epitome of dining in the late 80's, limp carrots, half way roast/fried/boiled potatoes, a piece of broccoli and a piece of cauliflower cheese. I have never understood the purpose of cauliflower, it seems peverse to eat a vegetable that only tastes of something after a glop of cheese sauce has been added. I therefore left the cauliflower, and the broccoli as that had been contaminated with the cheese sauce. I will eat cheese with meat if it is a burger or if the cheese is parmigiana or similar, but that is all. The only thing missing from this medley of vegetables was the mange tout, but no doubt they will be on tonight.

The server, stood back from the table, then lunged and removed both dish covers at once. He may have expected a gasp or a sigh of pleasure but I'm afraid we did neither and so probably disappointed him.

Revealed on my plate was a tower, a stack, a leaning pisa of thick belly pork, some herby mashed potato and then another slab of belly pork in case you weren't sure what the signature of the dish was and then this was liberally larded with the ubiquitous jam.

Though it did look like some of the worst excesses of the 80's, I felt underdressed and felt sure that I should be wearing red braces, and a refugee from a Gary Rhodes book it tasted pretty fine. I looked over at J's sea bass and inquired if she also had the jam, she did not and didn't seem to want to share some of mine. I can only think that the chef inadvertently omitted the jam.

We did go the whole hog and ordered desserts, J's lemon tart turned out to be an extremely acute wedge from a tart and was deemed 'Ok' and I had a chocolate and brioche confection that I can only presume was made up by someone extremely tired or extremely drunk, smeared as it was all over the plate.

To be charitable I shall assume the former.

The night's sleep was good enough in a twin bed sort of way but the breakfast was appalling. There is probably a government limit on the amount of salt intake allowed per day if not per hour but in the case of this hotel's breakfast it should be per minute given the amount of salt in the bacon.

I think it is safe to say that a repeat visit to the Thistle East Midlands Airport Hotel is unlikely this side of the Rapture.

Sleepily Weary

I must be as I can't think of a pithy, nor yet a pissy, title for the entry, most unlike me. Perhaps all my cycles have conspired to dip below the registerable but today I've been entirely weary and tired and feel as if I have a temperature but I'm sure I don't.

J is going to a course on quality management tomorrow and is staying at a hotel around Castle Donnington, so as S is staying over with a school friend tonight anyway I'm going to join her. Being weary may not be what is required tonight so I'll have to generate some energy.

Mind the Gap

Recently we've been managing with an event in someone else's life. A local girl, known to us, came late in the night upset and frightened and needing, as she saw it, to leave home.

J discovered the next day that Social Services aren't any longer directly responsible for 16 year olds as they're entitled to Housing in their own right and so she played ping pong with Housing and Social Services. She did manage to get her into a refuge temporarily and we hope that she now will have the time and space to decide what it is she wants to do next. Though in all likelyhood all choices will come down to one hard acceptance that she will have to fend for herself.

Yesterday, I met with another parent at S's school, and it so happened that his wife is a Social Worker in the area (and for all I know was one of the ones that J dealt with last Friday), he said there is coverage for between 16 and 18 but it did seem to concentrate on those who had already fallen into abusive drug use rather than those that might be in danger of falling into the crevasse. In any event, it being the time of year, just before the end of the financial year a lot of what they want to do is prevented by lack of budget.

Mud on the Patent Shoes

So, The Council of Ministers of the EU decided to press on with the unifying legislation for patenting even though the Parliament wanted the process restarted and all for technical reasons. The technical reasons being that the current state of affairs is untidy.

Ah well, I've generally found that a too neat state of affairs, especially in areas of standards and bueaucracy, that the people that lose out are those that produce and those that consume.

The Patents laws are bad, they're bad because they allow ideas that are not in themselves functional methods embodied in some physical product to be locked away and others prevented from using them. Software is not a patentable process, any of the methods used are implicit in the existence of software, one might as well legislate for novel methods of using water.

FOSDEM IV

This is the piece I've been putting off a little, mostly because I've been deciding how much to talk about a segment. Gervase Markham kicked off the presentations with a run through of what was new in Bugzilla, which he did with his usual humour and given that mozilla.org was unobtainable from the University site managed to demonstrate a lot of visual changes and charts and what have you mostly by waving his hands in the air.

You can see his presentation on Bugzilla here.

Bugzilla's strength has been the number of flags, properties and whathaveyou that you could categorise a bug with (its also its weakness but that's an argument for a different post), and then reporting on them. Gerv, and others, have done a lot of work in generating new charting reports which can be stored per Bugzilla user, but they rely on the data being collected nightly for each query. That's the kind of thing that makes my brain ache just because it feels that it should all be in the database and accessible whenever. But that would require maintaining the state of all those flags and properties and whenever they changed. Which is an entirely different kind of animal.

After Gerv's presentation Hisham El-Emam stepped up to talk about remote applications with Mozilla and as he'd indicated that he was looking for some possible solutions to some security problems I sort of assumed that he'd got so far with his application development and become roadblocked as so many of us have.

He wasn't quite so hampered with the lack of network connection as he ran his server app on the notebook as well, which took an age to load but he seemed fairly sanguine about all that.

He took us through Filemaker, the Windows version, which is the ubiquitous database in the Mac world and he scrawled some data into some table or other. Then he switched to Firefox and loaded his page which had a line of icons across the middle, one was a database connection,he clicked that and an almost exact same replica of the Filemaker UI was in Firefox and had the same table with the same scrawled data. A remote application running inside the Foxfire browser and accessing real data belonging to a desktop app.

He switched away from Firefox and ran Excel, shoved a few numbers into a couple of cells, went back to his web page and clicked on the spreadsheet icon, and there was the Excel spreadsheet with all the cells and buttons and UI of a spreadsheet, not as exact a model of the Excel UI but that is understandable.

Then Hish did the same with Word, and then with Power Point showing his own Power Point presentation within the Firefox browser all sharing the same data.

You might want to read back over those few paragraphs again to take in the implications...

Now, it isn't all of Excel, Word or Powerpoint or Filemaker that's been implemented, or at least emulated but given that any one user is likely to use only 20% of a general purpose application and they're implementing around 40% they stand a reasonable chance of claiming a goodly percentage of all users' 20%.

There is more, much more and a licencing future I don't claim to understand but it seems all will become clear in May or June of this year.

FOSDEM II

Second up after Jimmy Wales was RMS, not so much a feature of FOSDEM as a decaying bit of the foundation. Ok, it wasn't exactly the same talk as every other time, he gave a reasonable history of copyright and how it was created because of the market created by the printing press but he made that same leap he always does about the user having some basic and fundamental right of use, including reuse and redistribution which still evades me.

Certainly I accept that authors are as opposed to the extention of copyright as is everyone else but that is because once they've sold their rights to a publisher they no longer receive the benefit, its up to the publisher to actually generate the revenue and after a very short period for most authors, in any media, that generation dries up.

Stallman outlined a three part division between works of utility, works of opinion and works of entertainment (and I suppose art) and argued that there are different cases for copyright in each division though he assigned fairly arbitrarily ten years copyright to works of opinion and works of entertainment in the justification that works of opinion should not be altered and that works of entertainment whilst altering them could be a good thing it was generally not considered so in its 'lifetime'. This is a praphrase but I think a fair one.

Works of utility (including software) he, naturally enough, considered should not have any copyright attached to them.

Gervase Markham asked a series of fundamental questions regarding how much commercial, non free and copyrighted material could be attached to these free or expired copyright works since you can get an awful lot of stuff on a CD or DVD. RMS' response was something like well if it was a megabyte or two then you could safely ignore it but if it was the preponderance of material then it would be harmful. Again that's a paraphrasing and as I was up in the gods of the auditorium at the time I may have missed some of it, though Gerv explained the question to me later afterwards.

Many thanks to him for lending me his universal power adapter thingy in the Mozilla room so I could charge my phone as the Hotel's adapter required the constant pressure of a human hand (mine as no slave's was available), to ensure the flow of electrons.

Apart from handling that question pretty well RMS lived up to his lights and was generally rude to all the questioners claiming he couldn't understand them if there was one trace of a continental vowel.

I'm not sure if he understands what a figure of ridicule he's become, if he does then kudos to him, but I doubt it somehow, his pathetic whining about his tea afterwards tends to confirm the general view of him.

FOSDEM I

Back from FOSDEM yesterday after waiting around at Brussels airport for over six hours as first my plane was cancelled and then the next one delayed.

But this was a very successful FOSDEM visit, for me at least even if I was really only there on the Saturday.

Jimmy Wales of Wikipaedia was the first main speaker and he had a lot of very interesting things to say largely about the development help required.

With over 400 thousand page impressions a day Wikipaedia is now getting more hits than the NY Times which isn't at all bad for a volunteer group with one part time employee.

There are a couple of mediaWiki projects that pique my interest, just because of my OCD about data structures and heirarchical representations and how you get users to fill them in without knowing it, one is the Wikictionary, the dictionary and Wikispecies, naturally a phylogeny. Though as there is already the Tree of Life site I wonder if diversifying into every area won't just water down all such sites.

Another project on the cards but barely off the ground is a WikiMap site, now an open source mapping and GPS site would be very interesting.

Although he went on about Wikipaedia being the sum of all human knowledge, and in some areas that's undoubtedly so, I came away with the original feeling that it large areas its the sum of all human opinion and given the Advanced Neutrality Stand often undifferentiated opinion at that.

Get your Red Eye here

This morning I woke up with a bad stinging eye, coloured red. It happens from time to time and sometimes it happens a lot. I think its when an eyelash gets folded back or trapped in my eye whilst I'm sleeping (I think I have very long, or perhaps just very wayward eyelashes).

This makes it hard to see, and me extremely grumpy.

This is not helped in that I woke up with a stinging eye and am in an extremely bad mood and last nights pizza is reminding me constantly of its just cooked burned garlic taste.

The Great Gonzo

has done a Hemingway and shot himself to enable the last page to be written. From an entirely removed perspective it was probably one of the most likely ways for him to go.

That doesn't make it any the less sad though.

We said goodbye to the Twentieth century last week when Arthur Miller died so today, in Aspen, the Seventies have almost disappeared leaving Tom Woolfe the dubious remnant.

Just in time for the Anniversary

the Senate approves the Nazi declassification delay. It's 60 years this weekend since Auschwitz was discovered and publicised to the world and this week the CIA, Pentagon et al have been given more time before having to disclose more information on the use that was made of some SS members at the close of the war and for many years afterwards.

A short quote...

``We have come a long way and told a large part of the story, and it is time to finish the job,'' said Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, sponsor of the bill. The measure, approved unanimously by voice vote, extends by two years the mandate of the group working to declassify the documents.

I can't help but feel it somewhat Kafkaesque that Sen. DeWine can say ..'it is time to finish the job' and simultaneously extend it for at least another two years.

MSN Messenger Critical Security becomes Marketing.

So MSN Messenger throws up a dialog shouting about downloading a critical security update to 6.2. You install the thing and then right after the 'I promise to uphold all of MS's trademarks and prosecute the bad and generally be quite Judge Dreadish' another dialog comes up setting the default search engine to be MSN Search and my 'homepage' to be MSN.

Now, if I were to be prone to conspiracy theories and the like I might conjugate the release of MSN Search with the sudden pressing need to update to 6.2.

If I were prone that is, which I'm not, naturally. Nope, nohow.

Universal Truth that makes everything Fiction

I finished The Algebraist last night and deeply enjoyed it on a whole host of levels that I suspect I won't be entirely aware of for a little while.

There was one skein of a sub-plot though that is going to become insidious for a while. The beings populating Iain Banks' Universe are many and varied and they have entirely differring conceptions of that Universe and their individual place within it. But there is a Belief, called The Truth which has believers across all those varied populations and indeed he says that this is the one religon that all creatures can believe.

It's that the entire Universe is software, illusion and the beings within it simply pieces of code. Its the Matrix of course.

It's that recognition that this is one single Credo that could be shared by any intelligent being that is so insidious, even to a complete atheist such as myself.

And perhaps that's why it makes my brain cringe inside its little bone box, whereas I just enjoyed the Matrix.

The Fog Clears

This wasn't intended to be about getting made a moderator on the Off Topic Forum at JOS or as I like to refer to it DiscussGroup=9, the Fourth Place but about the progress this week. It seems to have sneaked its way in here somehow. An interesting reaction from those not made moderators is that it must seem like such a cool thing. Well its quite a cool thing to look behind the curtains and see the man bellowing into the megaphone but if that's the only view you get then you forget the audience in front of the curtain. Indeed you aren't a member of the audience at all anymore.

As for this week, it has been one of those aggravating, irritating weeks where you want to get the good stuff in only to be blocked by the minutiae and the dross.

At the beginning of the week we went live at the client's and I talked about printers and the spawn of the devil and so on. Well the Devil just kept on playing.

I finally discovered that I was being stymied by two factors...

one that the printers had been installed as local printers, though remote, instead of network printers with UNC's. This resulted in the custom form lengths being overwritten whenever there was a problem or whenever a user ran a particular report for the first time. It was like running around and around in circles, or trying to catch a rat.

The second factor was that Pegasus, in their infinite attempts to obfuscate the simple in the belief that something dire could happen were all the braces not belted and the buttons not the right colour, had so constructed their reports that you need a runtime object reference to be sure to be referencing the right field variable, bearing in mind that this is a database table not an instantiated object. The simplest thing to do is just rely upon the VFP temporary table and use the same alias because each user should have their own temporary area. But no. The result being that if you add some code into the line of a report which refers to a row in a table it may, or may not, be the right one.

I ended up with a kludge in that when the report starts it calls some code of mine, a whole four lines, that opens the same table again with a known alias and I use that to go discover what I need within the line of the report.

Ho Hum.

Second Hand Telescope Not For Sale

So, the Hubble isn't going to be rescued but allowed to gradually decay and fall into the ocean somewhere, where some small burnt fragment of it may become the beginning of a new coral reef, but more likely sink to a very great depth where future generations (or future visiting aliens), will find it and wonder at the wastefulness of Man.

Why not sell it for $1?

Sell it to Walmart, or Tescos, or someone with some imagination. It could be a good target for the private manned rocket flight programme, go up there fix up the gyros and sell the data that comes out of it.

Or turn it around and point it up the shiny white asses of the donkeys that made the decision, but then there'd be no new discoveries found there, just infinite darkness.

We can play Dressing up.

Thanks to Brer for this. I'd seen the Stars and Stripes Stormtrooper somewhere before but the entirety, along with the funny, and cruel (hence they're funny) captions are here.

No Patents, No Cry

The EU continues to stumble around the problem of Software Patents and shows the division between the Parliament, which has rejected the legislation, and the Council, who are the nominees of member governments, who want to impose Software Patents upon us,even if by the back door.

Look here for information on Software Patents and why they are a Bad Thing, not only for software developers but for users of software everywhere.

The Spawn of the Devil gains an Acolyte

I've said before, many, many times before, that printers are the Spawn of the Devil and that I loathe and detest anything about them.

Yesterday we went live at the client's with an upgrade of all of the Accounting software, Sales Order Processing and so on. I've yet to install all my additional software but I'm confident about that. On the whole the upgrade went very well, they were processing within an hour or two of them starting. The only thing that delayed them was the printing to their particular stationery.

Now I'd converted all of the existing layouts and they were there or thereabouts, just a little tweak here or there, but the printing used by the upgraded software ignored the number of lines on the form and used the default form on the printer (generally Letter, a different gripe I have is with the insistence of MS Operating Systems in choosing a default page size which no one uses outside of the US, its A4 everywhere except the US).

Now there is a documented way around this kind of thing, you define a form layout using Server properties in the Print Management thingy (You used to be able to define it on a print driver up to '98 but that got taken away), if you set that as the default form for the printer then that's the one that gets used.

Which is fine, except each computer in the network is defined as its own print spooler and so unless you add the printer again from the network it doesn't find the form defined on the server, so you have to create it again on each computer using server properties. So I did all that and it still took the default Form of Letter (or A4 or whatever) and not the one I'd defined.

When you print from Opera II (the Accounting Software), as an administrator it opens up the Report Editor in Visual Foxpro (and unless you're a VFP developer that's likely the only way you can define and change reports), there you can set the page layout, choose the printer and the form and then once you've saved that report definition it will use it and remember it.

Hooray!

Except...

When the next user on a different computer used the same report layout it didn't use the stored assignment in the report form, it used its own and then having printed the wrong form length saved the wrong form length to the report layout...

So, now I've fixed it on one machine and made the report layouts read only so none of the others can overwrite it, they still get it wrong but they can't fuck it up for everyone and I will have to go to each machine, login as an administrator, change the page layout, and have it save the environment.

Ok, a large part of the problem is VFP, but there's a much simpler way to fix it from the developer's point of view and that's to use the print preview to let the user select the printer and the form to print on at the time of printing. Once that is done once the environment that's saved for each user will get used and it won't screw up the report layout.

Dorothy McKewen

died this week. Whilst she is probably unknown in the software world now, except amongst the Digital Research family, she was the co-founder with her husband Dr. Gary Kildall of Digital Research Inc in 1974. And if you don't know who DRI are then you also won't recognise CP/M or that it was the dominant micro-computer operating system before Microsoft became an operating system company instead of just a languages and games company.

I didn't get to meet her, by the time I got to meet Kildall they'd already split up but the early marketing and the burgundy colour of classic DR days was all hers.

Her memorial service is today.

Today! Today!

Sharon Stone making a $100,000 for relief of poverty by repeating the word Today! until the mic was wrested from her.

From the Desk

I've just watched the second edition of 'The Desk' on BBC 4 which is a new programme fixed on the media, the communications media that is.

The presenter is a little like Whispering Bob Harris on speed with slightly more volume and has that combination of transatlantic and almost scottish which is probably measured as being the most tolerable to the majority of the Western World.

There was a segment on South Korea that was interesting in that OhMyNews is taking over from the regular newspaper media. It's different in that it depends upon readers that write the news, much I suppose as blogs are, but organised as a news site.

Readers vote for and can donate to the writer they like and there was the example of a poet that received something like $24,000 for one piece.

There was some talk about whether this would translate to other markets given the plethora of news media and the saturation of 24 hours coverage. Two things occur to me, one, Korea has a unique typography, possibly the only logically conceived and created alphabet and two, South Korea's news media has traditionally been very conservative and extremely boring. Whether a true news site, as opposed to a blog about something specific like an election, could take off in the same way I don't know. Regional sites just don't work, certainly national ones do but then I can't see it taking off anywhere in Europe or the Americas.

Unless Murdoch does it of course.

Later edit
There's an international edition of OhMyNews as well, I just love their graphics.

Giving Face

Last night on BBC1 there was a documentary on British soldiers on a tour of duty in Iraq and the way their families coped. It didn't enter into the politics or the whys and wherefores (which itself might be the Corporation's attempt at answering those that say its simply biased against the Invasion). It spent considerable time with a Sergeant that was responsible for monitoring, training and interfacing with the Iraqi Police.

There was a segment at an Iraqi Police Station and Gaol where they entered to inspect the conditions and discover how the prisoners were and how they were treated. The prison was overcrowded and the Sergeant emphasised the importance of removing the rubbish that was accumulating in the cells. The Iraqi Policeman in charge nodded to all this, everything transmitted via an interpreter but his face was open and he looked entirely humiliated.

The Sergeant hadn't yelled or been sarcastic he'd spoken in much the same way as any manager or quality inspector would have done but the nature of the relationship is that it came from a conquering foreigner and the Iraqi burned with the humiliation of it.

It's difficult to tell if the Sergeant attempted to give the Police Chief face or not, but it seemed that he didn't as it looked like it was in front of his men and if not it was certainly in front of the camera.

The one thing I've learned in managing people around the world is that everyone needs to be given face when you're managing them or telling them off. Everyone needs to feel as if they matter, even if they screw up.

We make sand shoes we do.

Just to show that HP is still an R&D company here are a group of engineers attempting to find a different way to make flip flops. That they look like a lot of drinks machine engineers looking for the reason that the chocolate drips over the edge of the cup is not their fault.

Most of the reports on this talk about a different way of producing transistors, or a replacement for transistors and at the 2-3 nanometer level. But that isn't really true, the crossbar latch is really a different way to make a flip flop and make a flip flop that's very small. A flip flop is essentially a switch that can either inverse the signal sent to it or replicate it and chuck several million of them together and you have a computer. The transistor was the simplest way to make a flip flop that wasn't made out of rope, or paper clips and its the size of a transistor that currently is the limit on processor density.

The crossbar latch does it in completely a different way that I haven't found a proper description of, but as its from the Quantum Physics Research Group and its nano technology its probably closer to the Dewdney rope method than most anything else.

More CBeebies than CBS

Up early this morning I watched the CBS Nightly News on Sky News and as always was partially fascinated at the different Universe portrayed than the one I generally inhabit.

For instance, the reports on the Iraqi election were almost entirely upbeat leaving out some of the events.

That it was the heaviest single day for individual insurgent action and suicide bombers. That whilst there was an extremely high turnout amongst Shi'ite and Kurdish groups the Sunnis mostly stayed home either because they were intimidated or because they really do feel disenfranchised.

I wondered what purpose CBS has for spinning the news that way, the election can still be a Good Thing but pretending that everyone is happy and violence was slight seems a far Worse Thing.

Tidying up...

I've tidied up something that should have been tidy to begin with and that's the address to the blog. Whilst the existing address is perfectly good and will continue to be I thought it might be better to have a snappy dns name for the thing. So a quick edit of the dns table and an addition to the HostMonster on the Zope server and http://sliver.objective2k.com is born. Nothing has changed just the Emperor's new clothes.

Dose p'or ol' blooz

When I picked S up from school this afternoon she told me that one of her teachers had played them some Blues and that they'd all started laughing. I think she was trying to get them to think about the causes of the music and what it portrayed, but all they could hear were the clicks and pops of the recording, the strange deep voice which S said sounded out of tune and the rattly guitar.

I played her a few other examples when we got back but if it sounds old its just old.

I can only hope tastes broaden...

ID or not ID

This morning J received a letter asking for her to send a copy of some form of ID, passport, driving licence, birth certificate and so on. This was not because she's about to enter into a transaction which will involve more than five thousand Euros, nor was it from a solicitor and she was in the beginning of instructing them, no part of the anti-money laundering legislation or anti-terrorist legislation was involved.

It was a recruitment agent.

Quite sensibly she isn't about to send copies of her ID through the post to people unknown who are going to do who knows what with the information and maybe, but not certainly, then destroy it. It's just begging for ID theft.

Which is ironic because any job that she happened to get because of this agency would significantly entail developing and enforcing the policy of getting sufficient ID from a client and minimising the risk to the firm.

This also means that for those relationships and transactions where ID is absolutely required if you have to send them copies of your ID (because its a remote transaction), you heighten the risk of identity theft and possibly terrorism in the long run.

This is, of course, one of the arguments that Blunkett tried to use in furtherance of ID cards, unfortunately it doesn't get over the intrinsic problem with ID cards. The ID card becomes your identity and not you, so anyone that stole the card, forged a reasonable facsimile with a different picture could happily steal your entire identity and with greater depth than simply using a copy of your passport and your last gas bill.

The real answer is that ID is not important, its not statistically significant if when you break your arm within the British Isles, or yet within the EU that your status is that of British citizen, or that you're an illegal immigrant, in cost terms it is and will remain negligible. If you're a terrorist then small things like ID are not going to deter you and historically every known terrorist has used their own ID, except probably the Bader-Meinhof group.

The Halal Vampire

Out in Ward End and the Saltley area of Birmingham there's supposedly a vampire on the loose, or rather there are stories of a man wandering around biting people. Saltley is an area that's made up of people originally from a couple of villages in Pakistan.

They're clothiers if I remember rightly, which is why there aren't any great restaurants around there. Though there is a very decent Turkish restaurant in Ward End.

Police are baffled, well no I doubt they are I imagine they're just laughing their socks off, that there haven't been any complaints from people that have had their necks, or elsewhere bitten.

LiveJournal down, not many dead

I can honestly say, hand on heart, that LiveJournal coming down had nothing to do with me, nor did I have any premonitions of it ceasing to be, for however short a time. But I can't help feeling slightly smug even though I have a single point of failure and the phone line just has to go down to take me off line.

But then if that happens that's a lot more serious for me than it is for you.

Cheesy Ebay Scam of the Month

A bar manager in Switzerland has announced plans to sell an oyster shell resembling the face of Jesus Christ, according to local media.

FOSDEM

if not well laundered. FOSDEM is the European Open Source Developers Conference held in Brussels every year and as I did last year I'll be there trying to work out where and when and how to make money using OSS.

Its the weekend of the 26th February and I'll be there until the Sunday afternoon. Once I've booked the hotel and the flight that is.

Amongst the speakers, as usual, is Richard Stallman and it will be interesting to see if he's changed anything at all from previous speeches. One talk that I will be interested in, is about the GPL and violations of the licence since software licencing is a kind of obsession with me, as mozilla.org members would probably nod sadly at.

And speaking of Mozilla, FOSDEM is the venue for Mozilla Europe to get together and I'm sure I'll hang around that again if for no other reason than to get a new t shirt.

Cough, cough

It feels like there's a secret and hidden epidemic roaming the UK at the moment. A few weeks before Christmas S was off school with a cold, a few days after she got rid of it, I got it.

Everyone I've met recently has had, is getting it or is still suffering the cough which it leaves you with.

I've long been more than a little persuaded that Fred Hoyle's theory of Diseases from Space has some truth to it if I'd have been one of the eminent scientists (but then I'm neither eminent nor a scientist), asked by the Edge what idea did I believe in without evidence of its truth then I may well choose this one even if only to avoid the obvious 'there is no need for a deity' belief.

If anything all the results from the Edge piece have reinforced non-scientific, non-rational opinion that all science is opinion and so their opinions about global warming, rain forests or whatever are just as valid as any scientist and that especially goes for President's of large countries.

And Mbeki is just as good a target for this as Shrub.

Golden Advice

Anyone that's spent any time at all reading Neil Gaiman's blog knows how generous he is with his time and information but not only has he excelled himself today but he's stimulated someone else to excel themselves in helping would-be authors avoid the minefield of agents and scam artists. So, commit this to memory.

Going Live

So, now I think we're just about ready to go live with the new blog. All new entries will get copied into LiveJournal at the old address. The new address, which I'll be adding to the layout on Livejournal, is http://www.objective2k.com/ObjSite/blog Hopefully, anyone that wants to comment will comment here, but given the magic of technology if you want to keep using the LiveJournal version I'll still get notifications and all new entries will get posted.

The Friends issue I haven't addressed yet. I'll still be able to see my friends on LiveJournal by clicking on the link on the main page of the new blog but there's no concept (so far) of Friends postings on COREBlog. This isn't that big of a deal for me as I don't post anything that's closed on here.

Integrating Friends

I'd like to add the Friends concept to COREBlog, certainly I can just add a link to the main Blog page but it would be nice to have a better syndication mechanism.

Crossing the Divide

This is a test of the COREBlog posting automatically to the Liverjournal journal. This is almost the final test before moving the live journal (hehe) to my server and managing everything myself, rather than relying on LiveJournal.

Testing Crossing the Divide

This is a test of the COREBlog posting automatically to the Liverjournal journal. This is almost the final test before moving the live journal (hehe) to my server and managing everything myself, rather than relying on LiveJournal.

Title

Sample body

St Petersburg Ballet

Last night we went to see the St Petersburgs Ballet in The Sleeping Beauty. When we arrived we found that they'd extended the orchestra pit into the first two rows so our row C seats were actually in the first row and right behind the conductor. It's an entirely different kind of experience being on the front row, you're involved in tiny dramas that the majority of the audience never know about; the furious gestures of the conductor as the horns become too brassy; the weariness in the musicians, laying down their instruments and almost collapsing after their part is done but immediately picking them up and starting on cue.

It was a good performance all in all, certainly very classical and the corp de ballet were very accomplished. The Prince seemed unequal to the task of steadying the ballerina as she spun and a couple of times she seemed irritated by him (though this could be part of the dance, I don't know it that well). It's fairly well known that Disney butchered the music for its own ends in creating its animated version and my favourite part of the whole score is the Cat Duet, which in the Ballet is in the post wake up Act where a lot of other nursery rhyme characters come along and do their party piece, including Puss in Boots.

It was, though, all in all, a very entertaining evening and at the same time thought of two separate plot lines for short stories (short in my terms being around 500 words) suggested by events last night but nothing to do with ballet.

A first entry

This is a test entry to discover how useful this product may be. I'm going to add an image to the right of this paragraph in my usual way.