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You have a problem with your dog using your bathroom?
I have always found the American fear of saying “toilet” or “going for a pee” amusing. They use phrases like “rest room” (if I wanted a rest, that would be the last place I would go (unless I was at work)) and, of course, “bathroom” regardless of if there is a bath or shower in there.
Because Seren is still doing a little bit of wee on the carpet in the night sometimes, I have been looking at potential products that could help. I am checking out the Dog Appeasing Pheromone Diffuser. This helps with nervousness, so may not be the product for us. Anyhoo, I was reading some of the reviews from the American, Amazon page, I particularly liked this comment:
“My dog is getting older and recently started getting more and more nervous and using the bathroom inside.”
If my dogs started using the bathroom inside, I would be over the moon. I think Griff would need to get Seren to help him flush thought, he is pretty short. Mind you, I it would get annoying if I had to wait for the shower in the mornings, and imagine the hair in the plughole.Labels: *sigh*, my life, real world
another sad story
This is a very sad post from a guy who purchase the manage-eh-uh sex toy, the feshlight, the discovered that he could not use it because he was too fat and his wily was too short.
Funny thing the fleshlight. You look at it and think “Jesus, what sort of a saddo would use that” yet for a woman to purchase a rampant rabbit is liberating and very acceptableLabels: real world, teh internets
Would you mess with this whippet?
Our dog, Seren, is part whippet (I assume). Today I was looking for some whippet pics to compare her with. I came across Wendy.
She has a genetic defect that means she has double the muscle of a normal whippet.
No one would take the piss out of her for being skinny or having big ears (like we do with Seren)
more hereLabels: real world
Arguing on the Internet.
“Arguing on the internet is like running in the special Olympics. Even if you win, you are still a retard”
I know this. Yet I still do it.
It has been a new years resolution of mine to be tolerant and less of a Victor Meldrew. To this end I am going to stop writing letters in to the Reading Evening Post, I have left the American by birth Irish by blood facebook group which I was only in to tell Americans that they are not Irish. Thus far my resolution was not going too badly. Until I joined the facebook group “I bet I can find a million ppl that DON'T want smoking back in pubs”
I have been engaged in what has largely been lively and reasonably intelligent debate on the main wall of this group for a while attempting to get people to understand my points of view. The part that I am writing this post about is when a troll wandered in to the group and started calling everyone whining pussies because there are greater environmental and social problems then the one we are discussing. I will put the basic jist of our conversation below, It was interspersed with other posts, I have cut them out to keep it readable, Names have been changed to protect the innocent. :
Troll wrote
at 12:16pm yesterday
This group really is a bunch of whining and snivelling idiots.
How exactly are you accessing the internet? - becasue unless you live in a wigwam in a self-sufficent commune on a hill somewhere YOU ARE ALL RESPONSIBLE FOR POLLUTION THAT IS DESTROYING OUR ENVIRONMENT AND KILLING OUR PLANET.
Problem is you nerds can't put it into perspective - driving round in your 4x4's, flying around the world, creating huge carbon foot-prints but oh so excited and brattish about stopping a few people having a fag. You make me sick.
YOU SAD, SAD HYPOCRITES!
Troll wrote
at 12:24pm yesterday
I think next they should ban all that ice in ice rinks - I mean, it's got to be a health hazard all that frozen water - and us non-skaters don't want to be hurt do we. Health and Safety, folks!!!
Me wrote
at 12:29pm yesterday
@Paul
what baring has global pollution got on this issue? Have you also joined the group about chavs that play music on their phones and tried to guilt trip their members too?
Troll wrote
at 1:37pm yesterday
Oh I get it - you don't like a bit of smoke in a pub because it "pollutes" the pub - but at the same time YOU are quite HAPPY to pollute EVERYONE'S environment.
You see, you don't get it [3rd party].
And considering Alcohol is the most dangerous drug on the planet why hasn't that been banned? Kids who get run over by drink drivers and students who get beaten up in the street by drunks haven't got any choice on their health being affected have they?
Don't worry it will come, because you are all too STUPID and BLIND to see you civil and human rights sailing down the swanny whilst you whinny and wine like a bunch of spoilt 5-year-olds.
Me wrote
at 1:51pm yesterday
@Troll
Where as you are en enlightened and worldly wise man who is taking on the human rights and world environmental issues by whining on at people, off topic, in a forum set up to discuss a specific issue.
Perhaps we do have wind turbines in our back gardens powering our computers. Perhaps we are active in Greenpeace. Perhaps we are lawyers who work for free on the behalf of amnesty international. You don’t know.
While I am very much against feeding trolls like you with responses, I will say this. I am pretty sure that no one in this group gives a rat’s fart about anything you have to say. Not because the points you raise are unimportant, but because you raise them like a petulant twat who is only out to start arguments because he has already had 6 wanks today and is looking for something else to do.
I am sure there are some posts with incorrectly used apostrophes somewhere you could keep yourself busy with.
Troll wrote
at 3:20pm yesterday
I'm guessing that, as you are spending all day on here defending your childish and selfish opinions on this silly little group you are NOT a human rights lawyer or environmental activist. I do love the way when a valid counter-argument is presented you go - "oh that's not the issue we are talking about"...err, try googling dialectics and comprehend things are interconnected in a holistic way.
YOU lot are complainging about air pollution - but not only do you particpate in a far greater cause of air pollution (and if you seriously expect me to believe you're existence on this planet in no way involves petrol or diesel powered combustion engines you are even more stupid that I already expected) but you also pollute the air with your MOANING and your WHINGING and your WHINING.
Hell, you've got your ban - and still you are snivelling, you pathetic wretches.
Me wrote
at 3:26pm yesterday
“Blah blah, look at me, I’m Paul Nelson. I go on and on about stuff that people could possibly be interested in if it weren’t for the fact that I put them off the subject with my insults and annoying persistence blah blah blah.”
Face it Paul. You don’t give a toss about these issues either, you are just attempting to get a rise out of some poor facebook sap for your own amusement, which, at the moment, I am providing you with.
How many other groups are you doing this in at the moment 5, 10, 15? Its really very sad.
Well, unfortunately I don’t have an ignore button I can press to stop your pointless messages popping up on my screen, so I guess I will just have to do it in my head.
Welcome to my ignore list, population – you.
And that was the last we saw of him. No real point to this post. I was just quite pleased with my putdowns.Labels: my life, real world
American by birth, Irish by blood.
Let me start this by saying that I cant stand trolling, and that was not my intention at all by joining this Facebook group. With that said….
There is a Facebook group for people of Irish decent in the USA called “American by birth, Irish by blood”. You can imagine the kind for syrupy, stereotypical, patronising, “there always after my lucky charms” type rubbish these ever-so-slightly-of-Irish-decent Americans post in it.
My reason for joining this group was to challenge the idea held by a lot of these people that they are, in fact, not Irish. One guy I spoke to was fiercely proud of his Irish heritage and the “Irish tattoos” that he has. I asked what his nears Irish relations where. Two great grandparents. That makes him what… one thirty-second Irish or something. Its laughable.
Anyway. An actual Irish guy started a discussion thread titled “All of youse… FUCK OFF”. This is what he wrote:
First post:
American by birth...hold it right there, that means you ARE fucking AMERICAN. NOT Irish. I'm Irish...the likes of you who think that drinking a few guinnesses on St Patricks day, having a few red hairs watching Gangs of new york and tatooing a 4 leaf clover on your arse makes you irish, ARE AMERICANS. What the fuck do any of you know about the Celtic Tiger economy, about the REALITY of the situation in Northern Ireland, the recent Irish elections...nothing, thats what.
I don't care where your ancestors emigrated from, don't patronise us with your fucking ideas that Ireland is a land of leprechauns who rely on your moral support to free Northern Ireland from the redcoats or whatever the fuck it is you (wrongly) think is happening back in the country you stopped having anything to do with 12 fucking generations ago.
Rant over!
Second post:
actually no, theres more!
look at all the fucking patronising shite in this group, tin whistles 'town wanker' limerick writer, leprechaun, it's all there.
if its ok for youse to stereotype, why don't you obese, ignorant, christian fundamentalist, right-wing bush-voting gun nut loud arrogant cunts just fuck right off and find someone else to patronise.
Brilliant.
I would now like to give you a rundown on some of my fave quotes from this group, in no particular order:
- my friends look at me cause i take pride in my Irish heritage cause im 50% Irish. My friends make fun of me for it cause i listen to irish music, talk with an irish accent(when im really drunk) and want to get two more irish tattoos
- all i can say is im glad imirish, and i would hate to be any other type (ie french or italian.) I think the UK region has the best and most proud people and culture in the world.
- hey i got an idea, y don't we all just put this behind us and go have a pint of the best god dam beer in the world, GUINNESS !!!!!!
- definitely. henever I bring up my heritage people just roll their eyes at me and say "your American! get over it" It kinda makes me ... pissed..
- Top of the morning to ya mates! ^_^ Today is a green ole' day! I have to get going so Cheerio :D
- nobody believes i'm Irish because I have brown hair... i mean come on!
this next one was in response to a post “Fuck Italy”. Bare in mind the guy responding to it is American:
- Why Fuck Italy they are our friend. We are all a European alliance and we shouldn't hate anybody.
I really should find myself a new hobby that doesn’t involve arguing with strangers about very unimportant stuff.Labels: real world, soap box
Welcome Seren, the #2 official brown haze dog.
This is Seren. She is a rescue dog from the Dogs Trust that we picked up on Friday of last week. She is settling in nicely with her new house mate Griff. Unfortunately she has not yet been spayed and was still in season when we picked her up, so her and Griff were getting down and dirty for the first few days. It appears to have largely warn off now.
She is between 1 and 2 years old. Not much is known about her because she was a stray picked up in Wales (just like Griff). She looks like she has some whippet in her and has the colouring of a German Sheppard.
We called her Seren becuase its a Welsh name (again like Griff). Apparenlty it means star.Labels: my life, real world
Ready To Fry Snack Pellets
I wont bore you with what I was looking for when I stumbled across this page.
You know food is going to be bad when it tells you it is food in the title such as "cheese food slice" or "ham food slice" such as you find with the tescos value lable on it. These badboys go one step worse. They dont even sugeste for a seccond that they are a propper food.
lets have a read of the description of the Ready To Fry Snack Pellet:
Detailed Product Description
Extruded Ready to Fry Snack Pellets with Cereal Flours, Potato Solids and Flavour (Onion & Garlic).
Product is available in various shapes. Product to be deep fried in oil, dusted with flaours of choice and packed in unit packs of 15, 20 or 50 g as per choice with nitrogen filling for extended shelf life.
Material is packed in Plastic Bags of 15 kg each and despatched in container loads of 1
Its a real lip-smacker enit.Labels: real world
why I *heart* Ubuntu
Yesterday I was attempting to find a solution to a problem with one of my Ubuntu box’s and found myself in a general Linux forum. A user had posted a script which may have been of use. Another user replied saying that it looked like what he was after, but it would need some changes that he didn’t know how to make. The first user replied to this with a comment along the lines of “what, you don’t know how to code, what are you doing using Linux”.
This reminded me of one of the main things that sets Ubuntu aside from the other Linux distro’s . The community. In my experience the Ubuntu community is inclusive and helpful to a fault (the polar opposite of my experience of general Linux fan-boys). If it where not for this, I don’t think I would have embraced Ubuntu in the way that I have and subsequently would have missed out on all the learning that I have achieved over the last year and a half which has benefited my professional and home life.Labels: geek, real world, soap box
Letter to the post
This is in response to Melinda Webb’s column, (Monday) where she concludes that the smoking ban is a bad idea because a) it doesn’t encourage people to give up smoking b) pubs “are not health spars” so landlords’ should be able to choose their own smoking policy and c) smoking is not illegal.
My response to this is:
a) Sure, smokers all know its bad for them and that doesn’t cause them to give up. We know the long term heath risks are not motivation for a lot of people. When I gave up smoking my mind was squarely on the short term benefits of more cash in my pocket, an increased feeling of wellbeing and the convince of not relying on smoking. It is this last point that will encourage smokers’ to give up. When doing something becomes intolerably inconvenient one may start thinking about jacking it in.
b) Agreed, pubs are inherently not good for you. But the difference here is that when at I am at the pub, it doesn’t matter how may of the other patrons are eating crisps and drinking beer, I can choose to have a glass of water and an alfalfa salad with no negative effect to me. If, on the other hand, they are smoking I have no choice about breathing their smoke short of leaving the premises.
c) Agreed, smoking is not, of itself, illegal. In that case, do you think that we should bring back smoking in the workplace? Or perhaps we should allow other non-illegal, antisocial activities in pubs? I do not believe this is a relevant argument.
One important point to bear in mind with the smoking ban is that it was not specifically designed to ban smoking in pubs, but in “the workplace”. Pubs are the workplace of bar staff. Bar staff should be able to expect to work in an environment where they will be able to breath without risking their health. If you worked in an office where the ceiling tiles or the carpet was giving of carcinogenic fumes, wouldn’t you expect something to be done about it?
With regard to the potential negative effect it will have on business (and please forgive inflammatory example I am about to use); I am sure that that banning of slavery was very bad for the slave trade, does that mean that it should still be happening today?
Personally, I don’t want the government getting in involved in my life telling me what I can and can’t do to my own body. I think it’s entirely possible that you could have pubs where being a 20 a day smoker was a required qualification to get a bar job which could potentially resolve the problem. But as an ex smoker (allegedly the worst kind of person for opinions on smoking), I think smoking is such a negative and fruitless habit that, on this occasion, I am on the side of the nanny state.Labels: letters to the editor, real world, soap box
Perhaps if your corner shop wasn’t so crap…..
I just read a feature in the Post relating to the new Tesco’s that is going to open up down the Oxford rd. There is going to be a big one where Battle Hospital used to be, and a little “Tesco’s Express” just across the road from Oxford Road School and the Jet garage.
The “exclusive” (like anyone else is going to give a turd, I cant imagine that the Observer is kicking itself that they go scooped by the Reading Evening Post) report is an interview with the Babar Butt who is one of the partners who run Butts Convenience Store on the corner of Oxford Rd and Prospect Hill (it was called Anand Stores when I was a kid,). He is saying that this is going to be a David and Goliath style battle, stating that Tesco will undercut local businesses to drive them to bankruptcy then put the prices up. I don’t know how true this is, but I don know one way in which the Tesco’s Express will have the upper hand on Butts, you will be able to purchase all the items required to make a meal.
I have been in Butts convenience store a few times. Its typical corner shop fare, far too many chest freezers so you have to walk sideways at some points. An entire gondola end dedicated to 3 litre bottles of strong white cider. Plenty of porn. Notably, no garlic bread. I know garlic bread is not a staple, but it’s the kind of thing that you want from a “convenience” store as apposed to a glorified off-licence.
Their problem is that they are about to lose their monopoly of a catchments area that just about sustains them at the moment with their focus on frozen ready meals “tramp-juice” alcohol. They (and every other badly stocked corner shop in the area) should be very worried about a business moving in from where you will be able to purchase actual, and in some cases not even frozen, food.
The choice is, Raise your game or diversify to provide something that Tesco’s doesn’t or go out of business. And if you do go out of business, for gods sake don’t do another half page spread in the Post about how unfair it was a better business model put you in the poor house, its not like you have had no choice about what sort of shop (hybrid walk-in-freezer-off-licence-sex-shop) your are running.Labels: real world, soap box
Sexism rant time
While I was cycling in to work to day I was listing to Radio 4. I do this for the Today program to catch up on news on my way in, but because I was late I heard a little bit of Midweek which starts at 09:00 and is dire, but I was cycling and couldn’t be bothered to turn the radio off.
Anyway
Midweek is a kind of rubbishy chat show where they get “ever so interesting” toffs on to talk about crap. For whatever reason they where talking about art and commenting on how, while there are a lot of successful female artists now, there where not in the last century. One of the female guests offered a potential explanation to this. I can’t remember it word for word, so I will have to paraphrase a little bit.
“There where not great female artists because all of the female artists where married to male artists and men’s ego’s (particularly men-artist’s egos) require so much massaging that they cannot stand their wife’s being good at painting or whatever”.
Figures. There where no great female artists in the last century because men where stopping them because men are like children.
Now, I don’t know what the actual cause was for this phenomena. But what this woman said sounded a lot like the stereotypical representation of men in the media that is now totally accepted. Stupid, childish, unthinking, unfeeling, I could go on.
I have another suggestion why there where no great female artists’ during this period. Its because women are all crap at art and the only reason that there are female artists now is because of feminism and we have to buy their stuff otherwise we are sexist.
Now, I dot actually believe that, but I think it’s just about as valid, and offensive, as the comment made on midweek.
And while I am on the subject.
Why is it that if there is a thing that lots of men like or do but is not that popular with women, lets say, the Internet in the late 90’s, the reason that women don’t use it is because there is some sort of conspiracy to keep women off of it. This one has particularly been shown to be rubbish with the introduction of shopping and social networking there are more women on the internet then men.
Another example. Women MP’s. Now, I do believe that women have the odds stacked against them to an extent in a male dominated organisation in the same way that I think men would in a female dominated organisation. But I think one of the reasons that there are not many women MP’s is because, and I know this is going to sound controversial, not that many women want to be MP’s. In the same way, if I where to go on a course at collage to be a nursery nurse (or whatever they are called) I would, most likely, be the only bloke on the course. This is not due to a conspiracy, I am not getting threatening letters telling me that if I start working with children I am going to be dropping in the Thames with a pair of concrete loafers on, its because I cant imagine a worse job then having to deal with other peoples little children all day. And I’m not a pedo (woops, slipped in to Daily Mail mode again)
Do I think there should be more women MP’s? Yes. Do I think that there are not that many because of a male conspiracy? Lets wait until there are equal numbers of mail and female’s standing in elections before we even try and work that one out.
To give this rant a little balance, and so I don’t come off sounding like a total Daily Mail “the-most-oppressed-people-in-the-country-today-are-white-men”-nutter, I would like to point out that I have worked with people with what I would call, a slightly old fashioned outlook in the workplace. I have heard comments made about female (as well as gay and foreign or ethnically diverse) staff that made my jaw hit the floor. I am totally against this. I am in favour of equality, not some sort of pendulum swing where one half of society has it bad for x amount of time, then it’s the other half has a go.
Well, that that rant went to all sorts of places that I wasn’t expecting.Labels: real world, sexism?, soap box
Argument in the Post
I am now officially having an argument with someone on the letters page of the Reading Post. Bellow is his response to the letter which I sent in, responding to his letter
I’m afraid I have to respond to Stuart Winter (evening post Thursday October 4) – although I had hoped I wouldn’t have to
True Gordon Brown has little or nothing to do with the Olympic committee , but he is if I’m not mistaken the prime minister so hopefully one would this he has a say within the government
Shouldn’t be any confusion with the military and the red arrows being one of the same
I also didn’t infer that the British Muslim community had anything to do with the Red Arrows being omitted from the opening of the 2012 Olympics.
What I am saying, and I assure you I am no alone on this subject, is that wheat you like it or not our armed forces are fighting a conflict on two fronts –Iraq and Afghanistan – which are predominantly Muslim countries.
So in my view that decision has been made to appease the Muslims, not just in the country but worldwide. I am not a member of UKIP or the BNP just incise you ask.
But I am British and proud of it. And the Red Arrows , the home guards, the royal marries or the Girl Guides should be able to open the Olympics or the local flower show without having to wonder if it upsets one group or another. Like I said, political correctness gone completely mad.
And while we are on the political subject, decisions like this one taken will and up driving vertian (larger then you might think) natives of this country into the arms of parties like the BNP and drive an even bigger wedge between predominantly Christian British people and the Muslim community in this country. God Forbid
Adriean Keep,
Via e-mail.
and now, for my response
This is in response to Adrian Keep’s letter (Tuesday 9th October) with regard to the Red Arrows performing at the opening of the 2012 Olympics.
Adrian,
I would like to start by addressing a few of the points in your letter.
You say “shouldn’t be any confusion with the military and the Red Arrows being one and the same”. The Wikipedia says “The Red Arrows, officially known as the Royal Air Force Aerobatic Team, is the aerobatics display team of the Royal Air Force”. The Red Arrows websites (http://www.raf.mod.uk/reds/ which is part of the RAF’s website) says, “Many of the Red Arrows’ pilots and support staff have recently returned from Afghanistan and Iraq and many will be temporarily detached on operations overseas during their time with the Red Arrows.”. I don’t think I have any confusion with the military and the Red Arrows, I am very clear that the Red Arrows are military fighter pilots flying planes that the military own. If I have got something wrong here, perhaps you can explain it to me.
You also say “I also didn’t infer that the British Muslim community had anything to do with the Red Arrows being omitted from the opening of the 2012 Olympics”. In that case I hope you will forgive my misunderstanding of your statement in your previous letter “we are actually only worried what the Muslims in our country think.” To clear up my obvious confusion, can you explain which country “our country” refers to?
From your next statement I think I am begging to understand your point. We are not having the Red Arrows at the Olympics because we believe it will offend the people in to two countries that in which we are presently fighting , and the wider Muslim community. Is that a fair summary of you points?
Now, to get to the real point. What you have done is taken rumour to be fact and got your kickers in a knot about nothing. I will now quote from the London 2012 website (http://www.london2012.com/news/archive/2007-10/no-truth-in-red-arrows-rumour.php) “London 2012 has responded to reports that the Red Arrows have been banned from the Opening Ceremony of the Games, describing the rumours as 'utter nonsense'. The London 2012 Organising Committee will decide what to include in all celebrations and they will be a showcase of the best the UK has to offer. But with five years to go, decisions are yet to be made on what the celebrations will look like.
The Red Arrows have in fact been used before in connection to London and the Games. They did a spectacular fly over of Trafalgar Square in London to celebrate winning the bid in July 2005, and also flew over the Mall when the Athens Torch Relay was in London in 2004.”
If I told you that the EU had told that the Queen that she was not allowed to eat sausages or drink tea on St. George’s day because it was “too British”, would you have immediately written in to the paper to express your rage? Or would you want to check that I wasn’t just winding you up?
What you have demonstrated is the kind of knee jerk reaction to perceived “political correctness gone mad” that, in this case at least, didn’t exist. It is letters such as yours that fuel some widely held misconceptions which do more to “drive a wedge” between groups of our society then the story to which you took such umbrage.
I had to leave a whole bunch of paragrahs out, I was trying to keep it as ashort as possible. but I think you will agree with me when I say "back of the net".
Lets hope her writes back.
Labels: letters to the editor, my life, real world, soap box
Yet another letter published in the Post.
I wrote a letter to the post which was a response to a letter sent in by another reader. I have copied the letter out so that my response will make some sense and hopfully you will see what inspired me to write in:
I see the idiotic Government along with the equally idiotic Olympic committee has decided to axe the world famous Red Arrows form the opening of the Olympic Games in 2021.
Most people from most countries would love to see the Red Arrows perform – that’s why there so popular in many parts of the worlds
I , along with countless others, am sick to death of political correctness gone mad. If Brown wants my vote he can get stuffed. We have brave man and women fighting and dying for this country and not many people give a damn. Our military do a fantastic job ain very difficult conditions – often with one arm tide behind their backs.
Lets not beat around the Bush (no pun intended), but we are actually only worried what the Muslims in our country think.
I doubt that you will print this as its probably not politically correct. But I bet you a years subscription to the Evening Post that it’s what most normal people will be thinking. Its time we woke up and had a sniff of the coffee
Adrian Keep
Via email.
You can almost hear him foaming at the mouth as he typed it. It would have been a much better idea to send this in to the daily mail. I am sure their readership would have loved to foam at the mouth while reading it.
Anyway, here is my response.
This is a response to Adrian Keep’s letter (Tuesday).
I would like to try and address a few of the many and varied topics you touched on in your letter. Firstly your comment that the Red Arrows will not be appearing at the Olympics due to political correctness. I agree with you that this is silly, but I can kind of see where they are coming from. It could be seen a little like opening the Olympics with a military tattoo of some sort.
From this point on your letter confuses me a bit. Fair enough, you are not going to vote for Gordon Brown, but I fail to see what this has to do with the Olympics (I don’t think he is on the Olympic committee is he?). I also agree that our military to a fantastic job and I am aware that they are currently fighting a war. I assume this is with some relation to the Red Arrows, but again, I am somewhat confused as to the references.
It’s the last part of your letter that really has be baffled “we are actually only worried with what Muslims think”. Does this have a reference to the Red Arrows and the Olympics? I fail to see the connection. From what I can gather we don’t wish to seem militaristic to other countries competing in the Olympics, the vast majority of which are not Muslim. As far as I am aware the British Muslim community do not have a particular issue with the Red Arrows (perhaps you can correct me on this). You go on to say “it’s what most normal people will be thinking”. I class myself as a pretty normal person (or as normal as you can get when you write letters in to your local paper), and I am pretty sure that “we” worry about what other people think too, I am defiantly sure that you do and I hope that you make up the “we” that you are talking about.
While I am sure you had some valid points in there, I am afraid your letter has come of somewhat like a condensed version of a Robert Kilroy Silk UKIP party conference speech. And before you say it, my response is not driven by political correctness, but by confusion and intrigue as to exactly what points you where trying to make.Labels: letters to the editor, my life, real world, soap box
Controlling windows from the command line
I had a window control problem on my metacentre PC. I have a bunch of programmable buttons on the remote control for it. When I press them I wish to switch between useful programs such as digiguide (tv guide) the TV software and the media centre software, which in this case is sesam TV. The problem was that when I pressed the button to switch to sesamTV, it would launch another instance of the program, very annoying.
I have found an answer in the form of NirCMD. It’s a command line program that lets you do a whole bunch of useful stuff from the command line. Because you can do it from the command line, you can script it.
After I downloaded the EXE and chucked it in to my windows directory (so it would run from anywhere) I wrote a little batch file that looked like this:
Nircmd win activate title sesamtv
I programmed a button on the remote to run this batch file and my problems are over.Labels: geek, my life, real world
Another letter
I sent another letter to the post:
This is a response to Ben Rice’s comment “Why won’t we tackle Mugabe?” (Tuesday 18th) . Mr Rice makes a very valid observation that the reason that we don’t “tackle” Mugabe is because there is no oil to motivate an invasion and occupation of a rich nation. My worry is that Mr Rice comments that “Using Iraq as a model, Britain will use interventionist strategy to depose a dictator who oversees a murderous, unjust and brutal regime”. This sounds, to me, very much like “if there is a regime that we do not approve of, then we should invade and occupy that country to fix whatever problems they have”. By this logic, we should also “tackle” North Korea and China who have not democracy and an atrocious human rights record. Or, perhaps we should “tackle” a country which has a leader who came to power under very suspicious circumstances and who has subsequently started wars and invaded other sovereign nations, i.e., America. I do agree that we (the UK) should take an active role to improve the situation in Zimbabwe, after all, it was part of our empire and until 2002 was part of the Commonwealth, but we should be very careful using the imperialistic, strong arm tactics of Iraq as a model, in part because it is a morally questionable and in part because it is proven not to work. Labels: letters to the editor, my life, real world, soap box
Slow News Day
The letter I sent to the Reading Evening Post (see bellow) got printed. Not only that, but it was today's star letter
ROLFMAYO!!1!one!eleven
edit: I would like to point out that I did not come up with the headline "Give your DNA gladly? Not me". that doesn't even make sense. I could not give your DNA, gladly or otherwise, I don't even know where you are.Labels: letters to the editor, my life, real world, soap box
Letter to the Post
I have written a letter to the Reading Evening Post, I don’t know what this says about my transformation in to Guardian reading OAP, but I’m sure it isn’t good.
Anyway.
One of their columnists, Melinda Webb wrote a column on what a good idea forcibly taking DNA from everyone on the country and keeping it on a database to allow the justice system to pin crimes on unsuspecting members of the public (I’m paraphrasing a little here). My letter is below, who knows, maybe they will print it.
I have some comments to make on Melinda Webb’s piece on Mondays post regarding the DNA database.
It appears that Melinda is of the belief that if you haven’t done anything wrong then you don’t need to worry about the government holding your DNA data. I would agree with this if the government was infallible, but they are not. I do not trust this government (with their track record of failing to implement IT systems) with this data. If they where to make a mistake, you could find yourself in a position where proving your innocents could be impossible. This has already occurred with fingerprint evidence in the well documented 1997 Shirley McKie case (check it out on the Wikipedia)
Even assuming that this government has only noble plans for a national DNA database, what about governments in the future, imagine what would happen if ever a party such as the BNP where elected, as unlikely as that sounds.
Melinda says, “most people in this country would be happy for their DNA to be held on a database”, if this is true then there is no need to make it compulsory. I will not be providing samples of my DNA to anybody without a very good reason.
Note: I managed to get through the whole thing without saying “choked on my cornflakes”, “I for one”, “come on [organisation name]” and “its one rule for X and one rule for Y”.
Labels: letters to the editor, my life, real world, soap box
I cant wear anything I like to job interviews, Boo Hoo, poor oppressed little me.
I have just read a report in the Reading Post business section that states “Lesbians believe they have to disguise their sexuality or risk being overlooked at job interviews, according to a study today”. That sounds pretty bad doesn’t it. Your sexual persuasion, like your gender or race, should have no bearing in the great majority of jobs.
But hang on, let’s read further, this whole next passage copped out of the post word for word.
The study by researchers at the universities of Cumbria and Glamorgan found that many women tried to be as “gender neutral” as possible when applying for work.
“may deemed the job interviews as being stressful enough without having got choose whether to disguise their true identity through conforming to the acceptable feminine modes of dress” said project leader Helen Woodruff-Burton.
So you could read this as “evil big business specifically doesn’t want lesbians working for them”
Or
Some people don’t like having to turn up to job interviews “business smart”
There are lots of places in the world where self expression is great, but if you want to get ahead in life, the business office is typically not one of them. We could use as an example the Goth. I imagine that most serous Goths would be pretty annoyed at having to “disguise their true identifies” by not whiting out their faces and putting on a suit. At the risk of repeating myself from a previous post “Tough Shit”. This is *business* there are *accepted norms* that you have to adhere to sometimes. If you don’t like it DON’T WORK IN THAT SORT OF ENVIRONMENT.
For most of my career I have managed to avoided wearing a suit. I hate having to iron and I hate having to dress up. I recently had a change in job and I am now suited and booted each day (apart from “causal Friday”, how depressing). Do I feel like I am being oppressed? Perhaps a little. Do you know what I am going to do about it? Nothing, because in the team I work in, we are all expected to be business smart each day. If I really had a problem with this, I would not have taken the job in the first place.
So, if you are a Goth, or a butch lesbian, or a flaming queer mincing round in a rhinestone cowboy outfit, or a chav, or you like dressing up like you are in star trek I say good for you, I love self expression and I think it makes the world a much more interesting place. Just don’t expect to be able to easily get a job in the business world if you turn up to your interview with your chained up leather gear\ purple dungarees\ sequined cowboy hat\ tracksuit\ tricorder and phaser on.
Oh, and as in interesting side note, I was recently in Cumbria. From what I saw, if I was running a job interviews, I would be hard pressed to tell a butch lesbian from the rest of the women up there. ooh you bitch, saucer of milk for table three.Labels: real world, soap box
Virgin are in my bad books again
This time its the train service. Me and the Misses had a shocking trip with them on Monday, I have sent a letter of complaint for whatever good it will to, have a read here:
To make this very clear form the beginning, this not so much a “comment about your service” as it is a compliant (there was not an option for this in the drop down box on the web form that I am typing this in to).
This is a complaint regarding the Virgin Trains journey that my girlfriend and I took form Reading to Carlisle on Thursday the 23rd of August at 16:10 and the returning journey on Monday 27th of August.
I’ll start with the outbound journey. Our tickets where purchased online and in advance so we had seats reserved (always a good idea when you expect to be on an over crowded train). For some reason, this information had not made it as far as the little screens above the seats which where occupied by a woman and her wheelie luggage. There where no other seats available so I had a go at explaining to the woman that she and her suitcase where sat in our seats and I showed her our tickets to which she replied “you’ll have to find a guard then, wont you”. As annoying as that was, I didn’t blame her, I don’t think I would have offered to stand for the rest of the journey if I could avoid it either. I didn’t attempt to find a guard because I could not move up or down the train due to mild overcrowding. A while later, two seats nearby where vacated and we where able to sit for the remainder of the journey.
Now for the return journey. This one sucked a whole lot more then the outbound journey. Right off the bat, the train was very delayed, I think we had to hang around for an extra 40 minuets at the station sitting our bags, not a huge deal and not totally unexpected. The problems really occurred when we boarded the train. Again we had seats reserved and again the little screens above the seats did not reflect this. This time I didn’t even bother talking to the people in the seats, not because I didn’t want to have an argument (this train was much, much more overcrowded then the outbound journey) but because I didn’t fancy sitting in a sauna for the next 5 hours, the air-conditioning was broken.
The unbelievable list of problems to have as soon as we board the train:
1) Its very late.
2) Its very overcrowded.
3) Our seats had not been reserved for us
4) The air conditioning in coach F was not working
5) I will throw this one in for good measure, although it can be taken as read from a Virgin train, the whole coach smelled of the toilet.
So, in an attempt to find other, more suitable, accommodation we and our large bags attempted to move down the train, we got as far as the shop when we had to stop, the next coach was far too full to take our bags though, so I was pressed up against the fridge unable to move back or forward. While I was there I had to assts the staff in the shop by passing drinks out of the fridge for customers who had no chance of reaching them (a little un-planned voluntary work). After a while a member of staff managed to direct my girlfriend and I out of the shop and in to the vestibule… well, I say vestibule, I it was the concertinaed bit that holds the carriages together. Not very comfy, very hot and again, smelling like a toilet.
We made formulated a plan to get off at the next station and run up the train in the hope that there would be space further down the train. Ha. The sight was somewhere between the pictures I have seen of the Shane Punjab Express for Delhi and what I imagine the inside of a sardine packing factory would look like. We made our way down most of the length of the train because we literally could not fit in to the vestibule of any of the other carriages. The vestibule we did manage to squeeze in to was at the beginning of the first class section. In true first class style, there was just about enough for us to sit on the floor (well almost).
As an interesting side note, the toilets in the first class section smell exactly like the toilets in coach F, I guess this an example of a classless society, but I digress…
In the true spirit of the blitz we and the other passengers passed the time by lamenting the level of “service” that we received, commenting on the temperature and the smell, discussing what we would do if any further passengers attempted to squeeze themselves in to our first class toilet corridor.
Now, to make it very clear, do not take the jocular nature of this letter as a sign that I am anything other then furious at being transported in a way that makes be jealous of Veal. This is what I would like to see. Our tickets cost £88 each, I would like to see a reasonable portion of the refunded. Please let me know what you require from me to provide this. I would also like to know how so many of these issues could crop up at once, particularly the over crowding. I appreciate that it was a bank holiday, but I do not see this as any sort of excuse.
I await your response, apologies for the length of this letter of complaint.
Regards,
Stuart Winter.Labels: my life, real world, soap box
Pikies
Before I start this rant, let me be very clear about what I mean when I use the phrase “Pikie”.
I am not saying that have any sort of problem with those who want to live alternative lifestyles, weather that be living in a commune, being self sufficient like off of the good life, or travelling the land in a mobile community. Those who do wish to travel in such mobile communities and live in such a way that they don’t impose themselves on other communities and act in a social, lawful manor, I am going to refer to as “travellers”. As it happens I have never had personal experience of such groups, but I am sure there are some out there, and more power too them. I have a fantasy about living on a barge travelling the country, so I can understand the appeal.
Now, back to my Richard Littlejohn style rant.
To coin a well known phrase from the movie Snatch “I fucking hate Pikies”. I am now going to talk from personal experience, not from what I have read in the paper or from some bigoted, demonising position. When I was a kid I lived over the road from a park, this park would occasionally fill up with white caravans covered in chrome, when this happened our local community (if you can call anything in west reading a community) suffered. I remember the knocks at the from door asking if they could buy my bike, the answer was always “no”, so the easy way to get around this? Just take it. I remember seeing this Pikie kid riding around, on my road, on my bike. To my Dad’s great credit, he actually went over there and got it back for me. He should not have to do this.
There is a bit of an epidemic of Pikies in Reading at the moment. If there is a postage stamp sized bit of land, sooner or later the caravans will appear. Shortly afterwards the rubbish appears. Great fucking piles of it. And when the Pikes are gone, the rubbish stays. Why is it someone else’s responsibility to get rid of this stuff? Why must my council tax be wasted on this?
I am not going to comment on anything that I read in the local paper, I know how inaccurate they can be in their desire for a sensational story, so this next anecdote was told to me first hand by someone I trust. She lived out near the countryside, there was a bridge over a large road which was a vital means of getting from her village to the town. Pikies set up a unilateral toll system. I.e. give them some money or you cant cross this bridge.
I have some big problems with my feelings towards Pikies. I think I am typically what you would refer to as a liberal (little L). I do not believe in tarring a whole strata of society, social or cultural group with the same negative brush. For instance I do not believe that all Muslims hate the British and would blow us up as soon as look at us. So how can I justify these sweeping statements about Pikies? Because I do not believe them to be an “ethnic minority”. As I touched on in my first paragraph, what defines, for instance, the Gypsy community should not be a pre-disposition to law breaking (weather that be trespass, theft or taking money with menaces) but a shared history, genetics and an inherited culture.
Now, you can’t say that just because an act is part of a culture or that an ethnic minority do it that it is OK. For instance, If I decided that I was only ever going to live in tents in other peoples back gardens, do you think that would be tolerated. Or if I decided that I was going to live without paying any tax, just because I feel like it, would that be OK? Of course not, these things would get me in to trouble. I don’t understand how you can have a culture which has such negative effects which *has* to be accepted by the “static” communities because if you don’t like it, you are a racist.
What inspires me to write this passage is partially because of the latest infestation of caravans that I see on my way to work each morning, but mostly because of a program that I listened to on radio 4 called Romany Roads. The program was dealt with changes in Gypsy life since the end of the war. The program was from a very annoyingly pro-Pikie position. In one section a woman can be heard to say how her family are moved on from wherever they site themselves and all she wants is for her children to have an education because they cant even write their names. Now I don’t know if I am supposed to wring my hand sand say how terrible that is and how guilty I feel. I hope I’m not supposed to say that, because I actually say “tough shit”. If you want an education fro your kids, buy some land and say in the same place. If there are objections to you doing this because it would make local houses un-saleable “tough shit” rent or buy a house.
The whole of society should not and does not have to bend over backwards to accommodate the vagaries of the alternative lifestyles of a small an non-contributory group.
Wow, I didn’t realise I had so much to say on the topic.Labels: real world, soap box
Pretty blond girls get the best A level results
If the newspapers and television are to be believed the high A level pass rate isn't the big news story, its the disproportionate percentage of them that are pretty blond girls. Apparently, they have an even better chance of passing if they are prone to hugging each other.
Lets have a look at some of the on line papers:
Times Online
BBC News
The Sun
Reading Post
If only I had been a blond girl, I may have actually got some reasonable exam results, oh well.Labels: real world, soap box
Today, I am mostly pissed off
I have a dog, he is a little angle most of the time, but has been barking a lot at night recently. It has been driving us to distraction, but we are trying a few techniques to get it in hand. The real problem is that our next-door neighbours recently got a cat. This cat hangs around in our back garden and shits I our flower bed. You can imagine what effect this is having on the dog. He is on constant alert and barks whenever it comes in to the garden.
That is not the reason that I am pissed off (although it was at 03:00 this morning)
The reason that I am pissed of is finding a printed sheet of A4 stuck through our letterbox this morning saying that the dog barking is keeping people awake, we should “get our dog under control” and keep him in the house at night (which he is anyway) otherwise they will call environmental health.
It was signed “the neighbours”. How mysterious.
They are right, the barking needs to stop and I am genuinely sorry for any missed nights of sleep, and as I say, we are working on it. The part that is pissing me off is that this information has been delivered to us in the form of an anonymous threatening letter. We do not live on some sink estate somewhere, there are no rusting white goods in our front garden, it’s not like I was going to stick a knife in the ribs of anyone coming to ask if I could stop the dog from barking. In fact, I know loads of the people in my street to say good morning too and, as far as I was aware, had a reasonably good relationship with them.
It’s very frustrating to have complaints levelled at you with no obvious route to take to defend yourself. I have a suspicions as to who it is responsible for the letter and I may have a word with them tonight if they are in. What’s really annoying is that when these people moved in I specifically asked them if they dog was a nuisance
and said if he ever is, please let us know.Labels: my life, real world, soap box
WOMUD I have been to Womad every summer so far this centaury, so I was pretty peeved when it moved out of Reading. Being a hard core Womad fan, I had been considering going none the less, until a few weeks ago when I had a change of heart. I have been pretty stressed recently and decided I would rather spend the money on a relaxing holiday for a week then camping at a festival for the weekend with no option to pop home for a shower\nap\dump. I am extremely pleased to say that, according to the Reading Post, Womad was shit. The field was a quagmire, cars had to be pulled out by tractors, they had to close one of the stages and the toilets where questionable. As one regular Womad going was quoted to say “it lacked the Womad buzz”, which is really the thing that you go to Womad for. So for all of the hippy-for-the-weekend Womad hardcore that went even thought it is no longer within walking distance of Waitrose, I am very sorry if you had a rubbish time. Personally, I am just glad that I don’t have to kick myself about missing my favourite festival when I am sleeping until 3 in the afternoon, relaxing all day and partying all night in a Greece. Labels: real world, soap box
Search in private There has been a lot in the news recently about how Google and other search organisations are going to have to disclose records of which searches have taken pace to various government agencies if required. On the face of it, this sounds like a good idea, you can identify people searching for bomb making kits and researching suicide bombings and the like. The negative side to this is that, of all of the groups of people in the world that I wouldn’t trust to use this kind of power in an ethical way, it’s a government agency, and we live in a comparatively free country at the moment, think how litte I would trust them is if we where somewhere a little more like Russia or China. Here is a vision of the future, it sounds very Orwellian, but you can imagine a world where you search for some sort of shocking\unusual (but not illegal in itself) content and the next thing you know, the thought police turn up at your door and cart you off to Paddington Green police station to be held for 90 days for being a suspected terrorist. In the past, I have searched for information on the KKK because I find their organisation bizarre\funny, this dose not make me a red neck, white supremacist. I think it would take a very clever person to be able to identify threats via what people put in to a search engine without stamping on all of the other no-threats that are going about their daily business and who may be curios about the world outside of which celebrity is too fat\skinny. The trouble is, you use Google all the time, using the web without using search engines would be pretty difficult, so it raises the question, short of becoming some sort of luddite, how do you keep your personal searching habits out of the hands of government agencies. I was thinking that some sort of distributed, peer 2 peer search engine where rather then having a massive server farm full of computers, you use computers in peoples homes (much like the SETI@home project). I’d like to see the government subpoena an unknown number of home computers from around the world. Working on the theory that I never have an original idea, I had a quick search on Google (hope no government spook was watching) and it turns out there are some project that are looking in to exactly this. YACY. This project is pretty far along, they even have a demo search page where you can try it. It requires special software to run, but it also runs in your browser using Java. I have had a little go and Google this aint. But it’s a step in the right direction. Wikia Search. This is being set up by one of the guys who created wikipedia. It s wiki based search system that looks like it could fit the bill at some point. If these systems ever did take off, my next worry would be; What if those geeks who have this search engine running on their home computers care see what I am searching for!!! Better then a government agency, but still…. Labels: geek, real world, soap box
Calendars I have a well documented and well known blind spot when it comes to dates and times. I never know what is supposed to be happening when. Recently, I started using the calendar feature of my yahoo mail box to keep track of this which has helped a lot. But after a little research, I have pimped out my calendar system, an as such should never forget anything again. This is how it works. Central Calendar:
For my main calendar I use the one that comes built in to your Google Mail account. Its light-years ahead of the Yahoo system, I think its as good as any groupware system such as Microsoft Exchange, except its free, and it runs in your web browser. I have set it up to e-mail me to remind me of people’s birthdays and the like. Desktop Calendar:
I my main desktop computer at home I use the Linux Microsoft Outlook knockoff Evolution. You can synchronise your Google calendar with it, follow these instruction. If you use outlook, you can do it too, follow these instructions Mobile Calendar:
I recently got myself a new phone. It’s a Nokia N76 smart phone running the Symbian operating system. Any Symbian phones can have their internal calendar synchronised with the Google calendar by following these instructions. Labels: geek, real world
Tree Goats
I would like to take a moment to talk about Moroccan Tree Goats.
How brilliant is that, what about this one
Apparently they do it because there is no grass on the ground, do they go up trees.
Bizarre.Labels: picture, real world
The Gender Gap Apologies for banging on about sexism, but I find a lot of it quite confusing. My subject this morning? This news report: UK gender equality 'long way off' I heard it on the radio and have been trying to find out exactly what the report means. They are saying that its going to be many years until women and men get paid the same. I know that they can’t mean that women don’t get paid the same for the same job, because that is against the law. So I am going to have to assume that women get paid less, in general, because of the types of work that they do. This would be backed up by this news story from the back end of last year: Women 'stuck in part-time jobs' Now, I am a big fan of flexible working. One should work to live, not live to work. As clichéd as it is, it’s true. But the injustice they are talking about isn’t a work force specifically targeting those with an XX chromosome for low pay due to barbaric employment policies, it’s because they are doing lower value jobs. They can, if they wish, go for the high value jobs and get the big bucks, unfortunately, that is not very compatible with taking chunks of time off or work and being a primary care giver. If we where to try and turn this on its head, we could write a news story about how socking it is that, so many years of after the dawn of equality of the sexes, that so few men get the opportunity to be stay at home dads. It’s criminal that men are forced to go to work and be the primary bread winners and miss on so much of their children’s development. This would, of course, be nonsense. In most circumstances, no one is forcing the husband to go out to work, in the same way that no one is forcing either party in to low or high paid jobs. It’s a matter of personal choice. I would love to work a three day week to have more time to spend doing things that I enjoy rather then being at work. I don’t, because if I did that I wouldn’t have very much money. It sucks, and I would love to see a change in society where we would be able to live like this, but until that day comes, I don’t expect some sort of shared responsibility of guilt that the world won’t bend itself to fit in with my particular requirements’. Now, I think a common response to my last paragraph would be to say that “you wanting to take time off to swan about and do things that you like is not the same as having a baby, having a baby is important and it is a right of all humans”. I would question this. Having a baby is something that you do because you want to do it, you don’t *need* to do it, even if you want to do it really, really badly, it’s still only a want. And before you say that we have to have babies as a species, I don’t think we have to worry too much about the continuity of the species for a while yet. Our little planet (and particularly our little island) is massively over populated. So, I can say that I totally agree with some of what this reports states. I think we should all be in a situation where we can work how we see fit, and receive sufficient payment to live a fulfilling life without being a 9 to 5 wage slave. I don’t agree that this should be painted as some sort of anti-women strategy by big business and men in general, all this succeeds in doing is generating friction and re-enforcing that “original sin” type of guilt that men are forced to bare for the wrongs that have been done to the farer sex since god pulled out one of Adams ribs. Labels: real world, sexism?, soap box
Comment to a comment…. I had another comment about the race for life thing, which I will put here to make sure it gets the exposure it deserves
Cpt Numrot said... Er...Duh, it's not discrimination if it only bars men.
Didn't you get the memo, in the same breath the PC brigade are denouncing male only golf clubs they are championing female only beaches in Italy, female only trains in Japan, and female only car insurance everywhere.
A spokeswoman for Cancer Research UK said "It has remained a women-only event because of its huge popularity and its non-competitive atmosphere."
That may sound like a gynocentric sweeping generalisation to you, but that's because you're a sexist pig. Dumbass.
Suck up that air while you're still allowed it! Labels: real world, sexism?, soap box
Comment....
I had an anonymous comment on my post below about how the “race for life” charity event was a XX chromosome thing. It went like this:
what you're looking at there is "positive discrimination". i.e. not letting somebody who is either white or male partake in a given event. it's actually surprising that white; able bodied men are the worst possible kind of person considering (as you rightly point out) they are:
1. stupid
2. lazy
3. compassionless
4. never grow up
5. obsessed by cars
6. obsessed by women
7. obsessed by football
8. sexist
9. stupid
10. generally useless and need women to help them get their pants on the right way round.
thank heavens for pretty girls eh. To which I respond: Ah, “positive discrimination”, the oxymoron to end them all. It’s like calling the death penalty, “positive murder” or the war in Iraq “positive invasion and occupation of a sovereign nation” (well, perhaps not) or to some extent, calling Stella Artois 95% alcohol free. Labels: real world, sexism?, soap box
Race for Life
What’s the deal with the Race for Life charity event being a women only thing? I understand that it’s a breast cancer charity thing and I know that men don’t have breasts (if they are lucky). But reading the site, women are racing for people who have influenced them who have suffered from breast cancer. I am lucky in that I do not know anyone with this condition, but if I did, I may want to talk part in this event, but am not allowed because of my gender.
Perhaps men would spoil the day with their testosterone fuelled competitiveity, or, as is well documented by the TV and by adverts, men are incapable of feeling any sort of compassion of anyone, what with spending all of their time thinking about beer, tits and football.
I hope someone will come up with a charity event that only white people can enter in, that would be a riot to watch.
Labels: real world, sexism?, soap box
The eugenics nightmare In the post below I make reference to the state backed eugenics program in the USA, I have been reading this a little further, its such shocking stuff that I feel compelled to comment on it further. I use the term eugenics here, when I should probably use the term forced sterilization, for that is what it is. It was done for one of three reasons. -A bizarre belief that sterilisation was good for you -A punishment for criminals (bare in mind that in the USA a protection from cruel and unusual punishments are written in to their constitution, I cant see w what part of having a doctor force you to be infertile isn’t cruel or unusual) . -Eugenics, the process of weedling out trait’s that you don’t like in your master race by sterilising those that show them. Now, you cant talk about eugenics without talking about the Nazi’s, I even used the phrase “master race” in a line or two back. Lets have a look at who the evil and villains Nazi’s forcibly sterilised for the benefit of the blond haired blue eyed Übermensch, here is a quote from the Wikipedia: he law was signed in by Hitler himself, and over 200 eugenic courts were created specifically as a result of the law. Under the German law, any doctor in the Reich was required to report patients of theirs who were mentally retarded, mentally ill (including schizophrenia and manic depression), epileptic, blind, deaf, or physically deformed Gosh, how evil, I bet Americans are glad they live in a country that is not evil and can police the world from villainous schemes such as this one. Oh, hang on, lets have another read of the Wikipedia: The principal targets of the American program were the mentally retarded and the mentally ill, but also targeted under many state laws were the deaf, the blind, the epileptic, and the physically deformed. Native Americans were sterilized against their will in many states, often without their knowledge, while they were in a hospital for some other reason (e.g. after giving birth). Some sterilizations also took place in prisons and other penal institutions, targeting criminality, but they were in the relative minority. So in America they even sterilised their indigenous people because, I guess, they where undesirable for some reason. To wrap this up, lest look at some statistics: Nazi Eugenics program
Started 1933
Ended 1945
Total years 12
Total sterilisations 400,000 USA Eugenics program Started 1907
Ended 1981
Total years 74
Total sterilisations 65,000 It looks like the Nazi’s win on points, but hey, they where the most evil organisation in history, so I guess the USA shouldn’t be too ashamed of its score which equals twice the population of Wokingham. Labels: real world, soap box
Genital mutilation is genital mutilation if you are a boy or a girl I was just reading this story in on the BBC News page: Police plea on genital mutilation Female circumcision is a terrible, misguided kind of child abuse that should absolutely be stopped wherever possible. But what puzzles me is why it’s OK to mutilate the genitals of little boys. I am not so stupid that I can’t see the difference between female and mail circumcision, one is a two minuet job on a baby, the other is a lengthy and painful ordeal on a much older girl. But my point still stands, I don’t understand why it is so acceptable to take a pair of scissors to a baby boy for non-medical reasons. In America it was and still is routine for most boys to be circumcised, in the 40s and 50s something like 70% of boys where circumcised, even today it runs at about 50%. I find this baffling and scary (but then, they only stopped their government backed eugenics program in 1981. Land of the free?) I would like to see a culture where, in apparently developed nations, this kind of genital mutilation is unacceptable for boys and girls regardless of the social, cultural or religious reasons (this includes Islam and Judaism), but then, I would also like to see an end to organised religion, so I guess you will have to call me a dreamer. Labels: real world, sexism?, soap box
Virgin update – It was all a system error. I have just got off of the phone form Virgin Media. I phoned up asking when the sales monkey I mentioned in my previous post would be calling me back, it turns out he wont. On the positive side, he did manage to sort out my billing problem for me. It turns out it was a “system error” that wouldn’t allow him to add the discounted package on to my account. He got an e-mail from the customer services person yesterday at about 12:00 and somehow managed to fix the system problem and correctly add the package to my account and provide me with a £12 credit for this month. System error eh? Sounds more like fucking bullshit to me. He was just hoping I was a typical mug who didn’t look at my bill or if I did, just assume that I didn’t understand what I had signed up to. I imagine that is why he didn’t call me back, coward.
On top of this, my bill for last month (which is recorded on this months bill) came to a whopping £68 (this includes the install change for the phone and telly (which incident I had to largely do myself because the NTL (sorry Virgin) man had no idea what to do with my media centre setup)), after a bit of encouragement, the customer services rep managed to get me a credit on that too.
On the positive side, I have by £24 back and I will now be charged at £30 per month. On the negative (and not in the least surprising) side, Virgin Media are just as big a load of, at best, useless and incompetent, at worst, lying and cheating, bastards, scum and scoundrels as NTL ever where. Labels: my life, real world, soap box
Walking the Dog Me and the missus (and the dog, obviously) went for a long walk on Sunday. Because of the rainy weather, Griff hasn’t had much of a chance for a long walk so we thought we would go all the way to Sonning. Once we go there we said “lest just keep going and see where we turn up” We turned up in Twyford. This is the route we took. Labels: my life, real world
Virgin Media? Apparently not a virgin any more, they fucked me good and proper. I get my internet service from Virgin Media (I can’t believe it’s not NTL), I do this because it’s a 20Mb pipe, and I don’t want to have to pay line rental on a phone line that I just use for DSL. This was costing me £34 a month when it was 10Mb. They upgraded it to 20Mb and upped the price up to £37, a pain in the arse, but what can you do. A few months back I got a cold call from Virgin asking me if I was happy with my service. I said I have a few concerns about the real world download speeds that I was getting, which he didn’t care about. What he did care about was selling me products that I have made clear time and time again that I don’t want when they have called me in the past. It goes a bit like this: VM “would you like our telephone service, its really cheap”
ME “no thanks, I use the internet for that, that’s why I have such a big pipe”
VM “ OK, would you like our TV service, its got loads of channels”
ME “again, no thanks, I don’t watch a lot of telly, and what I do watch comes off of the internet, hence the big pipe” I would have this conversation about once a month. I even made a point not to be rude to them, thinking this was the correct way to behave. The last time they called me I got a new response: VM “we can do you a deal where you get a phone line, digital TV with the freeveiw channel set and your 20Mb pipe for £30 per month”
ME “well, I am not bothered about getting the TV channels and the phone, but I am interested in saving £7 a month. Lets do that, I’ll make sure that I am at home on the afternoon the come to install it”
VM “brilliant, I’ll sort it out for you” And sort it out he did. Unfortunately, he forgot to do an evil laugh down the phone after he said it, otherwise I may have been able to work out he was taking me for a ride. So the phone line got installed (there is not and has not been a phone plugged in to it) and the TV got installed (I have to admit, I do like watching the infomercial channel and I now want a “Nicer Dicer” the “Little Giant” ladder and this rotisserie oven thing the name of which escapes me) and I waited for my next bill to fell all smug and clever when I see the amount I was saving. It came the other day. £42.95. Hang on, my maths isn’t all it should be, but I am pretty sure that £42.95 is more than £37. And I am really sure its more then £30. I am paying £3.95 line rental for a phone that I don’t want or use (and was told I wouldn’t have to pay) and still paying £37 for my broadband. So I phoned them up today and said “make it cost £30, or take it all away and give me my money back”. They said “not much I can do in customer service, let me get in contact with the Winsor- knot-tied-silly-pair-of-shoes-wearing-stupid-£70-haircut-sporting-shiney-suited-sales-monkey who purposely miss-sold you this to increase his commission and I’ll ask them to call you” (I may have paraphrased them a little bit there). So I now await my call to liste to the richous indignation of a professional liar about what product I had purchased and how I had not understood what I was getting. I cant wait. Labels: my life, real world, soap box
Ad non-Sense Out of interest, I wanted to see if I could earn any money off of the Google ad-sense system (you know, the Google ad-words that you see on some web pages). I have just found out, they don’t want me: Thank you for your interest in Google Ad Sense. Unfortunately, after
reviewing your application, we're unable to accept you into Google
Ad Sense at this time.
We did not approve your application for the reasons listed below.
Issues:
- Inappropriate language How rock and roll am I? Labels: geek, my life, real world
The age of the interactive movie
Once upon a time there was a games console called the Sega Mega Drive. One day they created an ill conceived add-on for this games console called the Mega CD. This add-on allowed the gamers of the time to play a range of terrible, terrible games known as interactive movies. Let me explain further: The big brains of the computer game industry looked at the vast amount of data that could be stored on CD ROMs (600MB rather then the few megabytes available on cartridge) and decided that he only way they could fill this up would be with full-motion-video. So they set about making terrible, terrible movies with a just enough interactivity that you could call them games. One of the most famous (or is that infamous) of these genera was Night Trap. A take on the teen-screamer horror movie involving vampires. Due to the *scary-nes* of vampires and teenage girls this was given a 15 certificate (quite un heard of at the time). This abysmal pile of donkey sick apparently cost $1.5 million dollars to make. In the age of web2.0 and such we can now watch all of the video from this game, without having to put ourselves through the pain of actually playing it, or he shame of owning a Mega CD and I have to say, its bad… …real bad. Second on this list of terrible, terrible “games” for the Mega CD where the Make My Video games. As far as I know they only made two of these games, one staring the got-dressed-in-the-dark child stars Kriss Kross and the then naff-Calvin-Cline-new-kids-on-the-block-brother and now pretty good movie actor Marky Mark (nee Wahlberg) and the Funky Bunch. As the name suggests, in these games you have to edit bits of video together to make a music video. Is it just me, or does that sound like no fun what so ever? Aside from the Mega CD, numerous shocking titles on the PC, such as the bizarre half (actually quite good) space pilot shoot-em-up half live action movie Wing Commander games. Platforms like the ill fated 3DO and the Phillips CD-i where awash with these terrible, terrible excuses fro entertainment, but you can look for these yourself if you like. I am pleased to say that this genre died out by the end of the 90’s, only in games such as the Command and Conquer: Red Alert series can they get away with such awful scenery chewing performances, and only then because it’s a send-up of the dross that came before it. Labels: geek, links, real world
Unreliable weather
Apparently I can have a metcheck weather report on my website.
Bugger me, I can.
Labels: geek, real world
Lets Play, guess what this article is about This is an article taken from the web, my comments about it in italics. This past year marked the 60th anniversary of the end of WWII—a war in which liberation and freedom for dozens of nations was bought with American blood. True, although not an entirely philanthropic gesture. The only reason they didn’t have to fight a war on their own soil was because the went to the fronts in other country's first (and before Briton fell). I wouldn’t be surprised if a member of your family fought in that war. And there’s no doubt that someone you know had a close relative who was killed in that war—one of the 400,000 Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice to win freedom for the world. Again, agreed. But again, they it they didn’t travel round the world to die on foreign soil just because they saw injustice in a far off land, this was motivated by self preservation. More so, I think, then the reason the war started in the fist place, the invasion of Poland. Never before, and never since have the people of one nation paid such a dear price to win freedom for others. Once more, there is an element of truth to this. But lets put this in to perspective, 407,000 US military personal died in this war, but so did 403,000 Britons, from a very much smaller country, both for “the freedom of others”. To further put this in to perspective, 12 million USSR military died. And now for the real rub, the real reason that they entered this war in the first place. Lets look at the civilian casualties. Britons 92,700, France 245,000, Yugoslavia 305,000, USSR 15 million. Compare these with the USA 6,000. The lowest number of civilian casualties of any country fighting in this war, by quite some margin. OK, that’s enough niggling about statistics, lets see where this is really going…. That’s why it’s so hard for me to believe that, right now dozens of the nations we helped liberate are working together, hand-in-hand with dictatorships and terrorist states—to snuff out freedom around the globe and dismantle the Bill of Rights here in America. Wow, that sounds serious. This must be the “New World Order” or the Illuminati or something. It defiantly sounds serious and requires the attention of all. I’m talking about the mounting effort by more than 100 members of the United Nations to impose a worldwide ban on civilian ownership of firearms. It’s a plan that includes the destruction of the Second Amendment and a ban on YOUR guns. WHAT!!!, are you having a fucking laugh. How dare these inbred, red neck hicks who cant get it up unless the have a semi-automatic pistol in their pants suggest for one second that for some reason their entering a war, which they where compelled to, for their own safety, has anything to do with their “right to bare arms”. To justify a society that carries guns in a way that would make you think they are in the middle of a war by their participation in a real war that never touched their soil makes me want to puke. You can read the whole article here, its called “The U.N. Global Gun Ban Treaty: The Ugly Truth About America’s “Friends” and How They Fund the Global Ban” Now, on with more ranting…. Lets look at some more stats, these are old, but still of interest. Gun deaths per 100,000 population (for the year indicated): Homicide USA 4.08 (1999) Canada 0.54 (1999) Switzerland 0.50 (1999) Scotland 0.12 (1999) England/Wales 0.12 (1999/00) Japan 0.04* (1998) So, for every 100'000 people in America in 1999, over 4 of them have been shot to death. And the NRA (for it is them who put together this offensive tissue of spin) have the nerve to suggest that it is an Americans god given right to have a 4 in 100'000 chance of getting shot to death each year. Not even I am cynical enough to say “if Americans want to go round killing each other, then whatever, let them get on with it”. Not with the news today about 23 students being shot in a pointless killing spree. My initial reason for writing this passage was the sick-making hypocrisy of the article I am quoting from. But as a by line, America *has* to do something about its gun problem. I am pretty sure none of those students where “packing” at the time. For fucks sake……. Labels: real world, soap box
You Tube, if it doesn’t scare the pants off TV producers… .. it really should do. Sure, you tube is great of short clips of people falling over or lighting their farts, but when used properly, it shows the potential for internet based video entertainment. Well producers, funny, made-on-a-shoestring shows are appearing on you tube that should make large production companies ashamed of themselves. At the moment I am watching: Hope is Emo: This is a series done in the stype of a an Emo girl called hope who keeps some sort of video diary. Its well acted and the script is very tight and clever. Plus it nails the “Emo” type i.e. they don’t really have any problems because the come from comfortable middle class homes, so they have to make up things to get upset about. Chad Vader, Day Shift Manager: This is… for some reason, the younger brother of Darth Vader… who…. Works in a supermarket, as the day shift manager. An odd idea, but well put tougher. The episodes are short, but there are plenty of star wars based gags. The producers have obviously been to film school, because they have managed to cram in all the stuff that movies are supposed to have ( love interest, conflict, etc…). As I say, its all star wars based, so best if you know what that is about to get the jokes. Mookie and Sam: This ones a big hit the Missus. The life and times of two Manhattan pooches. Basically, video of two cute little dogs, voice overed in the style of Look Who’s Talking. Well acted, quite funny and always cute. A must see for do lovers. Ask Ninja: A kind of a stylised talking head of a Ninja who gives his opinion about stuff. I don’t really get this, but it’s the #1 show on You Tube. Red Vs Blue: While I haven’t watched this is ages, it was the first online series that I got in to. And this was back in 2003, pre dating You Tube by quite a while. It’s a comedy filmed using the computer game Halo, voice overd and edited in to a very funy show that largely takes the piss out of computer games and the internet. Labels: real world, Review, video
Boo Hoo, Hollywood makes us look bad The latest Hollywood blockbuster “300” is about a brave army of 300 white, muscular Spartans who defend themselves from an attack by thousands of Persian warriors. Iranians are upset about this because it casts them in a bad light, as savages and basically evil. Below is a little exert form the BBC news story about this: Award winning Iranian blogger and journalist Omid Memarian has been among these voices. He is worried about what he sees as historical discrepancies in the film. "Not only does it give the wrong outcomes to battles, it grossly misrepresents the Persians and their civilization. "It is unfortunate that very few curriculum’s in the US cover world history and it is very easy to misdirect the general public on historical facts." Well, you poor babies, you have been misrepresented by Hollywood in *one* movie. The English (not the British) are always portraid as: - Bumbling idiots
- Arrogant toffs
- Master villians
In fact, I have a long standing theory that there is no Hollywood movie (since the dawn of colour at any rate) where an English actor plays and English role where they are an out-and-out Die Hard style hero, they will fit one of the three profiles above (and no, James Bond doesn’t count, he was born in either Germany or Switzerland and his father was Scottish, and anything that Hugh Grant is in, he plays a bumbling idiot). Furhter still, If Hollywood want a master villain to be any nationality other then English, they still cast Jeremy Irons or Ben Kingsly, and don’t even bother getting them to effect an accent. In short English = Evil. Aside from constant character assassination against the English, we also have had some pretty shocking incorrect reporting of events of English history to make them more palatable to the yanks.
In the movie U571 some "brave US sailors" capture the first Enigma encryption device from a German Uboat, the titular U571. In reality this was captured by the British, a year before the Americans bothered to join the “war in Europe”. Another good example is form Mel Gibson with “The Patriot”, here is a little about it form the Wikipedia: - The film has been heavily criticized for its historical inaccuracies, including the invention or exaggeration of British atrocities. Most criticized was a scene depicting the torching of a church containing a town's inhabitants.
- Even supportable atrocities, such as the killing of prisoners are inaccurately depicted, with redcoats sending roving firing squads to dispatch the wounded. In such instances however, the British were known for simply using the bayonet, as powder use in the field had to be controlled due to regular resupply difficulties.
- Also in the film, Martin justifies the described atrocities against the Cherokee in the French and Indian War by stating that the Cherokee broke their treaty with the French. Although at war with the colonies of Carolina and Virginia, the Cherokee never formally allied themselves with the French.
- Although it went generally unnoticed by casual audiences, historians also criticized the depiction of American-owned slaves being freed to serve in the Continental Army. It was actually the Dunmore Proclamation made by the British Army which first announced conditional freedom to slaves who joined them, a fact which is acknowledged by the film when Colonel Tavington tells blacks working for Martin that slaves who fight for "The Crown" will be granted their freedom upon an English victory. The new American government would maintain legalized chattel slavery until the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified in 1865. Although it is true that Blacks fought on both sides in the Revolution, the South Carolina assembly resolutely refused to allow blacks — either slave or free — into the state militia, contrary to what one sees in this film. Here Martin is no slaveholder, but a farmer who employs black workers for a salary, a labor relationship that was very rare in colonial South Carolina.
And some more propergand from Gibson in Braveheart: - Braveheart's plot includes an affair between William Wallace and the Princess Isabelle, based upon Isabella of France. The film implies she is pregnant at the time of Wallace's execution, carrying the future Edward III of England. Historically, the real Isabella was a child of nine still living in France at this time, meaning she never met Wallace, and furthermore, was never a Princess of Wales, as she married Edward II after he became king - four years after Wallace's death. This idea may have been derived from the play The Wallace by Sydney Goodsir Smith, or it may be derived from a fictional episode in Blind Harry's poem, where Marguerite of France, second wife of Edward I, attempts to seduce Wallace.
- The film depicts Edward I dying at the same time as Wallace was executed. In fact, Wallace's execution took place in 1305 in Westminster, and King Edward died in 1307, two years later, en route to put down a fresh rebellion of the Scots led by Robert the Bruce.
- The film depicts Scots going into battle wearing woad, a practice not known to have existed in the thirteenth century. This has been interpreted variously as an anachronistic use of ancient Pictishsoccer fan's habit of painting his national colours on his face (allegedly pioneered by a Scotland fan). However, in Blind Harry's poem, Wallace does dream that the Virgin Mary paints a saltire on his face, and this is the likely inspiration for the use of warpaint in the film. [1] practices or as derived from the modern
So, as you can see, my heart bleeds for the Iranians who have been dealt such an unfair hand by Hollywood. Labels: *sigh*, real world, soap box
Light a million candle's
It’s a fancy way of signing a petition.
This petition is to be use to apply pressure to governments and industry to do what is needed to removed child pornography from the internet.
The candle gimmick is not important, the petition could be.
http://www.lightamillioncandles.com/Labels: real world
Pedestrian Crossings.
I know what youre thinking. Your thinking “you’ve been posting on the brown haze since 2002 and you have never done a piece on pedestrian crossings”. Don’t worry, I’m going to rectify that problem now.
Zebra crossings are called Zebra crossings because they are white, black and stripy, pretty obvious. But what about Pelican crossings. I never saw a likeness between two sets of traffic lights and some dots on the road to a pelican. That is because it’s a kind of acronym.
PEDESTRIAN
LIGHT
CONTROLLED
CROSSING
That sorts that one out.
And here is something else about pedestrian crossings I bet you didn’t know.
Some newer pedestrian crossings look like this
These are called “Puffin” crossings. This is not an acronym, I think it’s just a take on Pelican. The special thing about puffin crossings is that they have sensors to track if anyone is waiting to cross and if they are crossing the road. This means.
- If someone presses the button but doesn’t wait by the lights, they will not change red to stop the traffic.
- When crossing the road, the lights will not change to green allowing traffic to flow. This means you can take as long as you like while crossing the road.
Fascinating. Labels: geek, real world
SoundBug
Gadget Review
SoundBug is a twist on the concept of a travel speaker. It looks a little like a silver computer mouse with a big sucker on it. Plug the headphone jack in to your MP3 and stick the suction cup to any flat surface, twist 90O to lock in to place and whatever you have attached it to becomes a speaker.
My experiments have shown the larger and thinner the surface the better the sound. For instance I got good results sticking it to my kitchen counter better still sticking it to the white board (dry wipe board, apologies to the PC brigade).
The sound bug plays both the left and right channel out of the same unit, but if you have two, you can connect them together and they will automatically sort themselves out as the left and right channels. That way you can turn your kitchen cupboard in to a set of stereo speakers.
The real question is, how does it perform? To be honest, not as well as I would have liked. I have a pair of fairly pikey travel speakers that me and the missus use in the kitchen, with the sound bug attached to the kitchen counter I swapped the MP3 player between the two. Both the sound quality and loudness was better from the travel speakers.
This is not to say that the sound bug is rubbish, far from it. It is still a very cool little device. And for its size (a fraction of the size of the travel speakers) it is loud and clear enough for most situations. I see it as an excellent speaker to take with you when staying in a hotel or similar situations. Its very easy to travel with, you could even have it in your coat pocket. Its found a home in our house stuck to the bedside table taking the place of a set of speakers we had there that where bulky and who’s cables constantly got in the way. I am quite tempted to get a second one at some point to stick to the other bed side table. I want to hear what the stereo effect is like.
SoundBug, £20 from the ever excellent firebox or a lot more from other places.
Oh, and if you are thinking of buying one, but don’t want to spend the money and want to be put off. This should do the trick. Labels: my life, real world, Review
The Ship
Game Review
Baiscs: This is a “first person” death match type game for the PC based on the Source engine (the build engine that runs the excellent Half-Life 2) created by a team of modders called Outerlight.
 
The Premise: You are aboard a 1920’s passenger ship such as an ocean liner or steamboat river cruiser. There is one person on the boat that you have to kill, you are told the name of this person and are given a rough idea of their location on the boat. Your job is to find them and dispatch them with on of a vast array of weapons that can be found aboard ship such as a fire axe, various pistols rifles or flair guns, swords, knifes, arms shop window dummies or my personal fave, golf clubs.
If you attempt to do this in the view of the guards, or by the security cameras you are fined and sent straight to the brig for an amount of time depending to the seriousness of your crime. Of course, the twist to this situation, is that you are also the quarry of one of the other passengers. This means that everybody must be eyed suspiciously and kept at arms length. There are only two people on the boat your are allowed to kill, your quarry and the person hunting you.
Occasionally, you may see a passenger acting so suspiciously that you pre-emptively kill them and it turns out that you got the wrong man, this is just part of the game. If you kill the wrong people too often you will be barred from the server, this keeps most people honest.
When you pass passengers closely enough you get to see their names and their faces are remembered. If you then get this person assigned as your quarry, you will get a little picture of them, making the hit much easier. Unfortunately , if you die, you become a whole new person and lose these memories, starting again from scratch. If you are worried that your hunger may have spotted you, you can change your clothes, hats, and glasses, all very silly.
On top of your primary task of cold blooded murder, you have needs that must be attended to. For instance, you have to sleep, eat, pee, poo, wash etc. These can all be taken care of in the usual sort of locations (pee and poo in the toilet, sleep in beds or chairs) normally when you are attending to your needs you are vulnerable to attacks.
In Practise: While there are quite a few Ship servers, only one or two of them are busy at any given time. But that’s OK, you only need the one server for a good game.
The Ship costs $20 via Steam. It’s a refreshing twist on the well worn format of first person death match games and in my opinion, well worth a look.Labels: my life, real world, Review
Children of Men
Move review
I watched Children of Men the other night. The premise of the movie is that, 18 years ago, for some unknown reason women stopped being able to produce babies. This has lead to pretty much the downfall of society because people cant see the point of doing much when the human race will stop existing within the centaury. I wont say any more about the plot, you can find out for yourself what goes on.
Suffice to say that it’s a surprisingly action packed and had me on the edge of my seat all the way through. They have managed to create characters and situations that you care about which keeps the whole thing pretty gripping.
Clive Owen is excellently cast as the stony faced, down trodden protagonist of the piece and the standard rules of Hollywood movies do not apply here.
Give it a watch, even if you think it looks a bit dry.
Here is a link to its page on rottentomatoes.com (not a lot of films get 91% )Labels: my life, real world, Review
what sort of a bastard
Would do this to somones bike
I mean, its not just the fact that they have knackered this bike it’s the length that they have gone to. Jumping on a wheel is easy, bending it totally in half, that takes some doing. Not pictured is the back wheel, which is also pretty well knackered.Labels: picture, real world
Ubuntu CE
Ubuntu is a PC operating system that you can freely download and install to use as an alterative to Windows. It’s actually very good and, if you just want to read the web, do e-mail, listen to music or watch a DVD, is surprisingly easy to use (its actually loads easer then Windows to install). It’s based on Linux, but don’t let that put you off. I am using it on one of my boxes at home, it’s not a total Windows replacement for me because its not great for gaming and there are still compatibly issues that mean it cant do 100% of what I want. But you never have to worry about spyware or virus’s, so that’s nice. If you ever want to try it, you can download a CD image, burn it to a CD and the boot your computer off of it and run it without having to make any changes to your computer, very clever stuff.
Anyway, enough of the boring geeky stuff.
While looking for some specific software for my Ubuntu box, I came across this link for “Ubuntu CE”. Windows CE is what they used to call the version of windows that runs on personal organisers like the HP iPAQ, so I thought this could be a similar thing.
Wrong
Ubuntu CE is “Ubuntu, Christian Edition”. Quote form their site “Ubuntu Christian Edition is a free, open source operating system geared towards Christians”. Now, I am not sure why Christians require a special edition of operating system software. Is there something about non-Christian editions of software that puts Christians off of using computers, like the way that software “evolves” over the years. Perhaps Ubuntu CE blocks access any websites that encourage freedom of thought, like in China.
For some reason I cant find “Ubuntu, Atheist Edition”Labels: *sigh*, real world, soap box
Call centers in India…
…are shit. They don’t understand what you say and they wind you up, 100% FACT.
Right?
Well, the talking point attached to this story has an interesting comment
This is another prime example of English racism. Most foreigners speak a better standard of English than we do!
Josephine Boyd, Bermondsey, London, UK
Its an example of *what*!!! I don’t know if this is some sort of after effect of the celeb big brother, Shilpa meeting with Tony Blair nonsense, but it really does beggar belief.
I think I will deconstruct this comment:
“This is another prime example of English racism”. Does this mean that having a problem with anything to do with another country is automatically racist? If I think its too humid in Queensland, dose that make me a member of the National Front? Come on, the problem is not that they are from a particular foreign country, its because you cant understand what they are saying to you and vice versa. If this moron thinks that being unhappy about receiving a poor quality of service makes you’re a racist, then I would suggest that they have never seen any actual racism. The over used term “political correctness gone mad“ doesn’t even start to cover it.
“Most foreigners speak a better standard of English than we do!”. Where? Where is this place where “most” non-native-English-speaking people speak English better then me, France, Germany, The Netherlands (well, perhaps), I’ll tell you where it definitely isn’t. Fucking India, that’s where it isn’t. I used to have to support (technically, not chanting from the terraces) a call centre in Mumbai over the phone every day, it made me want to tare my hair out. They didn’t understand me, I didn’t understand them when then did understand me they didn’t seem to get what I was going on about. Due to cultural differences, they thought that saying no was rude so when I asked “have your tried rebooting” they would say “yes” when the hadn’t, you get the idea. At no point did I think to myself “you know what, these fine people speak such good English, I can’t believe they are actually in India.
But then I guess I would say that, cos I’m a big ol’ racist. Jesus-fucking-Christ.
Oh, and as a side note, “English racism” what about Scottland, Wales and Northern Ireland, are they not racist there? I would put it to you that *that* is a racist observation in itself. Ha, we can all imagine racism everywhere if we want to, its easy.
Now, where did I leave my copy of the daily mail….Labels: *sigh*, real world, soap box
Scaremongering
Paedophiles are abusing your children through there Nintendo DS’s, right now.
Or so this Fox news report would have you believe.
Facts: -
The DS comes with a wireless networking capability, part of this is the built in “Picochat” facility which allows you to create a “room” that other DS users can join and send messages. This is done over a local network i.e. not the internet. So the other parties have to be pretty close. As well as this, you have to have your DS in picochat mode waiting for someone to contact you before you can start chatting.
Fox’s spin:-
Your child, sat in his\her bedroom will be contacted by a paedophile (or child molester, as they call them in this video), groomed and then abducted or whatever. To prove this point the reporter, sat on the stairs in the same house as two little girls, with their mother standing over him watching what he typed, joined in on a conversation they where having on their DS’s (in the same room, so I don’t know why then didn’t just talk). The mother was suitably shocked and horrified when he was able to join in on their conversation. Personally, I think if you have a paedophile sitting on the stairs playing on his Nintendo DS, you have slightly more pressing problems that then fact he may ask your kids what their favourite colour is.
I have two issues with this report.
1) Paedophiles on the internet are a real problem, the internet brings anonymity and an ability to communicate instantly from all over the world which is ideal for the type of grooming activities that hey wish to carry out, children should be educated about the problems and relevant steps should be taken to ensure that your children remain safe. For a paedophile to contact your child via their DS, not only will they have to be sitting, waiting for someone to talk to them, the nonce will have to be pretty close to your child anyway, basically stranger danger which your kids should be up to speed on. I have a DS and I never seen an active Picochat room.
2) These sort of panic inducing reports benefit no one. They lead parents to believe that paedophiles are hading behind every bush and there is little they can do about it short of dropping to the technical level of an Amish and locking their kids in their rooms until they are 30.
Anyway, watch the report for yourself, get upset, or don’t, whatever.
And to put a little perspective on it, here is part of the brilliant BrassEye pedo special. PANIC, EVERYBODY PANIC, THERE’S PEDOS ABOUT!!!Labels: real world, soap box, video
Gays? Not in my guest house
This is the story of a guest house in Ulster who’s owner, Adrian Watson believes in "total tolerance to the gay community", just not in his b+b. The reasons he gives for this are:
The father of three said the business was based in the family home, and his wife, a Christian, could be upset.
Well, you know what these gays are like, no doubt they will be bumming each other over the breakfast table while the other guests are tucking in to their boiled eggs. Or perhaps the sight of a man using moisturiser or carefully colour co-ordinating their outfit to go with their luggage is offensive to Christians?
"It is difficult because my 14-year-old daughter helps out immensely. And the obvious question: 'Why are two men, or why are two women in a double room?'"
I can see the problem. I think they easiest way to deal with this is that is to say “they would have got two rooms, but the only have one hot water bottle so they had to share”. If you did say “they are a gay couple” I dare say his daughter would either go in to shock and have a seizure, or worse, head straight out the door to get a crew cut, purple dungarees, a pair of comfortable shoes and a Charlene Spiteri poster
However Mr Watson did say what people did in their private lives was "entirely their own business and I have no difficulty with that". I believe that he also has no problems with what dogs and blacks get up to in their private lives (in this case I think we can take Irish as a given).
To the real point of this article.
I am far from the worlds biggest fan of religion, particularly when it is used to provide credibility camouflage to bigots. If you don’t like gays, and you don’t want them to stay in your b+b then say so, don’t mince around pretending that you are doing what the bible tells you to do.
Also
Is it just me, or dose he look like he may bat for the other side anyway?
Gays? Not in my guest house Labels: links, real world, soap box
We are very, very small indeed
This is an image of the Earth taken by the voyager probe as it headed out in to deep space in 1990. It’s the tiny little dot between the two white lines.
I thought this was quite interesting, but after I read the following passage it had a whole other meaning. This was during a talk given by Carl Sagan in which he used photo :
"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
Puts things in a different perspective, don’t it?Labels: picture, real world, soap box
Habeas Corpus
“A writ of habeas corpus is a judicial mandate to a prison official ordering that an inmate be brought to the court so it can be determined whether or not that person is imprisoned lawfully and whether or not he should be released from custody.”
Or to put it another way, this is the law that stops the state locking you up for as long as they like without a trial, pretty fundamental stuff for a free country. So I guess we can take the USA out of the category of “free countries”.
George W Bush as signed in to law some legislation that states:
"the military has the authority to capture and detain individuals whom it has determined are enemy combatants including enemy combatants claiming American citizenship. Such combatants, moreover, have no right of access to counsel to challenge their detention." Furthermore, continues the brief, "the Court may not second-guess the military’s enemy-combatant determination"
So, once they have determined that somebody is an enemy, the don’t have to prove it. They can just keep them locked up for as long as they like.
And that can be anybody.
It makes me glad I don’t live in the land of the free.
Below is commentary on this situation from the program “Countdown: Special Comment”. Its 10 minutes long, but I recommend you watch it.
Labels: real world, soap box, video
In the Dog house.
I went to the pub on Friday night, I came home some time after 23:00 and I was greeted by the sight of what used to be a very nice cushion from the living room:
This was the scene
It didn’t take Colombo to work out who was the culprit. Just the look of guilt on his face was enough.
This was the look of guilt.
So, until after midnight, while half cut, there I was clearing up about 4 ducks worth of feathers. I didn’t speak to the dog for some time after this, as you can imagine.Labels: my life, picture, real world
Hits
Thats another year since I put the hit couter up. at 21000 hits, it works out to 19.3 hits per day over the 3 years.
The hit counter was at 14009 at this time last year, so thats 6991 hits in the last 12 months, thats 19.2 per day this year.Labels: real world, site news
I love spam subject lines.
I don’t know what systems spammer use to generate their spam messages, but I imagine it is done in an attempt to circumvent spam guard software. This can lead to some quite amusing subject lines, such as:
“Relax with she-males with large C0CKS”
Tell you what, nothing helps me relax in the evenings like a she-male with a large cock. Some people like to have a little drink, others like to do some gardening, for me, it has to be a she-mail with a large cock, better than a hot bath any day.
I haven’t actually opened the e-mail so I am not too sure what it is advertising, I guess it could be an advert for some sort of coffee lounge. A place where you can go that has loads of bean bags, chill out music and she-mails with large cocks…
…perhaps not.Labels: geek, real world, soap box
Thinspiration
back in the mucky and depressing world of pro anorexia, here is an excerpt form this pro-ana site which provides "inspriational quotes" to stop yourself from eating.
40 Reasons Why You Shouldn't Eat..
1. You will be FAT if you eat today. Just put it off one more day.
2. You don't NEED food.
3. Fat people can't fit everywhere.
4. Guys will be able to pick you up without struggling.
5. You'll be able to run faster without all that extra weight holding you back.
6. People will remember you as the 'beautiful thin one.'
7. If someone has to describe you, they'll say, 'oh, she weighs like 100, 110 lbs.'
8. Guys will want to get to know you, not laugh at you and walk away.
9. Starving is an example of excellent willpower.
10. You will be able to see your beautiful, beautiful bones.
11. Bones are clean and pure. Fat is dirty and hangs on your bones like a parasite.
12. If you eat, you'll look like those disgusting, fat, ghetto and trailer-trash hookers on Jerry Springer.
13. The models that everyone claim are beautiful, the spitting image of perfection, are any of them fat? ... NO....
14. Too many people in America are obese.
15. People who eat are selfish and unrealistic.
16. Only fat people are attracted to fat people. Do you want pigs to like you because you are one of them?
17. Anyone can have 'inner beauty,' but few can earn real beauty, inside as well as out.
18. You'll be able to move as quietly and skillfully as a spider.
19. Only thin people are graceful.
20. If you slap a fat person, you can see a shockwave ripple over their skin. That's disgusting.
21. Do you want people to say, 'For god's sake get off of me, you're crushing me; I can't breathe!' or 'You are soo light.' ????
22. Underweight, a.k.a. perfect body.
23. Ballerina? Or beanbag?
24. I want to be light enough so a helium balloon could lift me and carry me to the clouds. . .like in my reoccurring dream:) I love that dream.
25. I want to walk in the snow and leave no footprints.
26. Starve off the parts you don't need. They're ugly and drag you down.
27. Nothing can't be fixed with hunger and weightloss.
28. Saying 'No, thanks,' to food is saying 'Yes, please,' to THIN!
29. Fat people are so huge, people see through them and it's like they don't exist.
30. The only time people notice a fat person is when they get in the way of that beautiful thin girl walking by.
31. Have you ever seen a person NOT notice a walking skeleton?
32. Nothing tastes as good as thin feels.
33. Is food more important than happiness in life? Your appearance to others?
34. Eating is conforming.
35. When you start to get dizzy and weak, you're almost there.
36. Hunger is your friend and it won't betray you like food.
37. Food is mean and sneaky. It tricks you into eating it and it works on you from the inside out, making you fat, bloated, ugly, and unhappy.
38. Think of anorexia as your secret weapon.
39. If you can name one reason to be fat, I will name a million to be skinny. I'll name them even if you can't find a reason to be fat.
40. Thin people look good in ANY kind of clothes.Labels: real world, soap box
Wind Turbine
Have you seen the wind turbine up by Junction 11 of the M4.
Brilliant isn’t it. And its bleeding huge. This is demonstrated in pictures on the Ecotricty page (the people who own the turbine). They have pictures of the turbine being constructed, this one shows the blades lying on the ground, Check out the size of this:
Stone the Crows, its huge. Compare it to the size of the yellow hand cart thing for scale.Labels: picture, real world
Deductive Reasoning
On Friday night of last week Me, My Bird and a selection of my mates popped in to the Monk’s Retreat for a quick pint after going to see a stand up comedian. I popped to the loo for a wee, where I discovered evidence of some very odd goings on.
This was the scene. To clarify it a little for you, the scene comprised of a) a pair of men’s pants in the toilet bowl and b) a (assumed to be empty) packet of rubber jonnies.
Where you in the area of the right-hand-side toiled cubicle in the Monks Retreat at around midnight on Friday the 19th of May, did you hear any strange noises, did you see any suspicious characters, if so you could be eligible for a community action trust reward…. Well you won’t actually. And come to think of it, whatever went on in there, I don’t think I want to know.Labels: my life, picture, real world
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