What a great town.
For the good news, after a �100 train trip, I am watching the A-Team…..Oh what weekends away can do for you. Guess who the guest star is:
Boy George!!!!! NO JOKE!
Gotta go, as this is something particularly nasty. Boy George is playing a concert in a small red neck town…
At lunchtime today I escaped the office and I don’t have to go back until Tuesday 11th. The mere fact that I don’t have to go back in next week has already started to relax me. I plan to spend next week being lazy (ok, lazier) and watching movies. Daredevil, Adaptation and Jackass are definitely on the list and I’m considering Solaris (apparently Soddenburg hasn’t bastardised the original, but rather long, Russian classic).
Brian should stop reading now, because he’ll gloat so much he’s sure to explode.
BT gave me the wrong instructions for my house move and were all primed to charge me for running out on my contract. Now I have to email them again to cancel my old broadband, then wait until 5 working days after March the 6th before I can ask for a new connection. They’ll send me email confirmation of the disconnection, which is really, really useful when I don’t have internet connection. I’m going to demand a refund, but I think everyone knows where that will get me.
I’ve long thought that I live in a dispersed community. I don’t really know my neighbours, but have a social group spread around the country of like minded friends. On a grander scale, an open-source constitution for post-national states looks to a future when the boudaries break down.
I’m just about out of here. Database building at home tomorrow, and Sky connection. Clare and James’ wedding on Saturday. Hangover on Sunday. More databasing and probably Daredevil on Monday.
PS. Gabrielle, John’s a lovely man, just don’t look under his bed and never, ever ask about his spent convictions.
I’m not entirely sure why anyone would donate their, or a relative’s, cadaver to the University of Texas Medical Branch, but you can bet it wasn’t so that body parts could be sold on by a member of staff.
Tyler received $4,005 from Watson in one transaction. alone. The money paid for 232 fingernails at $15 each and 35 toenails at $15 each
In response to demands raised in the previous attempt to unionise Spinneyhead, I have found a way to add comments. Say hello to BackBlog. We’ve got the fully featured version for a couple of weeks trial, then I’ll decide whether to pay for it or not.
Well. Well. Well. It seems as though Ian P has settled into a new hoose as they say up here and all looks swimmingly. Excellent! As to the big cheese pointing out how atrocious my spelling and grammer are, I thought it would be fair to say good point. May I also remind the gentlerman the reasons for the lack of spell check is that I am far too exciting to be posting onto the “Greatest Website Ever Told”. My dedication to self improvement will commence today and the Flesh-Kinkaid reading level will hover between 10.5 and 12.9. Enough said.
After two weeks of patient waiting to be in the Broadband premium league, I managed to muck it all up by not being in the “hoose” when the postman arrived with a brand new ADSL modem. Doh! Double Doh!! Triple Doh!!! The funny part is I am leaving for Manchester tomorrow so that means no broadband until next week sometime. The joke truly is on me and Mr. Frost please contain your glee.
In terms of visiting for Fringe Gestival and Hogomany, you all are invited. Several spaces available as I am endeavoring to take at least two weeks off during the festival season. This means nothing short of comedy, drama, loutish behavior and drunkness. Come one, Come all. Or as Bob Parker from the Price Is Right said, “Come on Down”.
I have yet to find any interesting links today, but rest assured once they are out there….
Dearest Gabrielle, no IM of late, but after I am back from Manchester I will track you down.
It seems that in Japan the tech geek has an easy life. Sat as his (or her) desk they don’t need to worry about their coffee going cold thanks to the USB powered cup heater. No need to worry about catching a chill during an overnight coding session as you can wrap up warm in a USB powered heated blanket. Finally, after spending the night at your computer, how can you make yourself presentable for that morning meeting? Clearly you need a USB powered toothbrush.
Been there, done that. Sinfest is, without a doubt, one of the best drawn and funniest webcomics out there.
The other three people in my office are working on the Major Incident Procedure Policy, covering pile-ups, plane crashes and, of course, terrorist incidents. It all sounds cool and interesting, moreso than what little I’m doing. Perhaps I should send them this piece in the LA Weekly which gets all Clancy and imagines an Anthrax attack on the City of Angels.
via GeekPress
Spam, spam, spam, spammety spam! The Guardian looks at business of spam and anti-spam.
When I get my broadband back, I’m going to have a hundred or so pieces of junk mail, so I’ll go through them and stick them all on my ISP’s block list.
A Philadelphia man and his wife have been arrested after he opened fire on a group of children because his daughter had been hit by a snowball, leaving a ten year old girl in a critical condition. The NRA blame the snow for the girl’s injuries and say the government should do something about the weather before they think about controlling gun ownership.
It would seem that, contrary to some reports, Salon is coming up for air and not drowning after all. Anything that pisses off rightwingers and gives us articles about Captain Kirk’s package and the general ‘pointy’-ness of original Trek deserves to live on as far as I’m concerned.
Yes, I have managed to get a shorter week, with Fridays and Mondays now dedicated to the contract work I have lined up (and Thursdays and Sundays dedicated to concerts if possible.)
Though, of course, with C&C:G and Sky, installed on Friday, this could prove tricky.
Now the Scots have got the right idea about immigration. They positively need incomers to boost the declining and ageing population. They’re targetting visa applicants and students, two good groups from a prosperity point of view, but they might also want to consider some of the economic migrants (translation to Daily Mail speak= “bogus asylum seekers”) who are supposedly flooding the country. Give them minimum wage public sector jobs to get them started and all of a sudden they’re not a drain on the public purse but productive, tax paying members of society.
Another reason why the US terrorist executions policy is a bad thing- the FBI decided that one old white guy was as good as another and issued an arrest warrant for a bloke with the same birthdate as, and the same name as an alias of, a fraudster. Luckily they only wanted him arrested, not killed, though three weeks of incarceration in South Africa won’t do much for a 72 year old’s health. There’s probably a clause in the Patriotism- is- the- last- refuge- of- the- scoundrel Act that means he can’t sue either.
Breaking News– He’s been released after the real fraudster was caught in Las Vegas. (Ah, those good old CSI folks.)
Well, Command & Conquer: Generals arrived yesterday. I really didn’t want to come in to work today. The graphics are very pretty, even on the lowest resolution and detail settings, though animation became jerky on the highest detail setting. Lots of the best bits from previous C&Cs are there, my personal favourite being the fortifying of civilian structures, and the building method has been heavily modified. Now, instead of the central command structure as the source of all buildings you can use roaming bulldozers (or workers) for construction. Providing you have more than one dozer or doozer you should be able to cope with even the destruction of your command post.
I’m still very much a first world war general- get as many units together as possible and throw them at the enemy in the hope that attrition will work in my favour- and that’s working for me so far. However, the ability to use the landscape is greater than in previous versions, so I’m going to start creating bottlenecks and dropping buildings on the enemy.
(I started out as America, and the first mission was to ‘liberate’ Baghdad because the terrorists were in control there and had Weapons of Cool Graphics [sorry, Mass Destruction]. Hmmmmm.)
George Monbiot thinks that the US’s undermining of the UN and WTO are a sign of its impending break from them and ensuing implosion. This is another thread I want to put in Soldiers, as America uses its military might to try and keep a grip on international trade and maintain the dollar’s special status.
The CIA and Special Forces have been given carte blanche to kill terrorist suspects anywhere in the world. Would they, could they, carry out such a hit in the UK? We have a couple of Death to the Infidel clerics, and an even larger number of politicised, but only guilty by association, lecturers and other Muslims. Back in the good old days, Jack Straw refused to extradite 9/11 suspects to a country where they would face the death penalty. If that happened again would we be faced with the prospect of black clad deniable killers loose in Brick Lane and the back alleys of Longsight?
I feel a DEx plot brewing.
