Journal Entries
It's funny the tricks one's mind plays
Posted Dec 20, 2006
I had a look at PR. One entry caught my eye: 'Fred West - The Musical'. Except my brain had mixed up 'Cats - The Musical' and 'Fred West - Serial Killer', the reading of neither of which is at all more appealing the the prospect of the original entry, to be honest.
I need glasses. And to give up any hope of PR improving, ever.
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Latest reply: Dec 20, 2006
There are some spiteful little turds about
Posted Dec 17, 2006
This Christmas I decided to change the lights outside our bungalow. I thougt it might be nice to have some nice sparkly blue LED lights: nothing too ostentatious. So I put them up last weekend. I awoke this morning to find out that some little sh*t had torn them down during the night and shredded the cable, ruining them completely.
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Latest reply: Dec 17, 2006
A dissenting voice
Posted Dec 15, 2006
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6171097.stm
Poerple trying to make a living queue for work, and a madman in a truck decides to blow them up and himself with them simply because they want to try to live as normal people do in countries the world over.
It's a sad state of affairs. After watching that statue of Saddam come down, I honestly thought there was some hope for the downtrodden Iraqi people (some of whom I counted among ny friends), who for once had a chance of rebuilding their country as they wanted it. Except that now the insurgents, who have had the upper hand ever since, are determined that the will of the Iraqi people, which would be for peace, prosperity and a quiet life, will not prevail.
It's the total failure of the UK and the US to win the peace that has led to this mess. Dubya decided to finish off the job that his dad started so he could hold his head up in the Bush family, and the Uk was dragged into the conflict on the basis of a false prospectus. Nice and simple, eh?
Except, of course, it wasn't that simple. Saddam had been making a fool of the UN for years. There's been a lot of pious cant from some quarters about 'the devil being given the benefit of the law'. Well, he was given the benefit of the law over and over again, especially after the first Gulf war when a swift and brutal dose of victors' justice would have been more appropriate. And then, when the UN was deciding what to do about the latest act of non-compliance - the kicking-out of the weapons inspectors - Jacques Chirac decides to do a bit of grandstanding (at no cost to his own country's reputation or interests, I hasten to add) and threatens to veto any second resolution that authorises the use of force. At that point it was either war, or the implosion of the Security Council and possibly the UN.
Now, of course, we have the aftermath. Children being blown to bits, academics being kidnapped, tortured and shot, attacks on the Red Cross, women simply being killed for having an opinion. Untrammelled brutality in the name of Allah-knows-what. Could this bloody scenario have been predicted? Possibly, when the neocons in the US decided to de-Baathify the government as it stood, and they ended up outside the tent pissing in, instead of inside and pissing out. It would be bad enough *without* the hypocrisy from some self-styled commentators. Perhaps the most vomit-making of this kind I have heard has been when Zarqawi, a brutal thug, was killed, and someone opined that Dubya was 'smiting' and we should all be very afraid. Another argument advanced from the same quarter was that we shouldn't have assasinated this evil individual becuase it might have made matters worse. Worse?! How the hell could it be worse? Zarqawi moves into Baquba and they find nine heads in a box within the week. Following that logic, should we all start leaving our windows open now in case the burglars break them when carrying out their crimes?
Me, I'm an aging lefty of a dwindling kind: the sort who thinks that occasionally the time for talking is over and action must be taken, even if the outcome is messy, because there is more at stake than one mentally-challenged president's ego. And yet I go back and revisit that view with each act of unbelievable brutality I read about. So I'm conflicted on this issue. At least I haven't stopped thinking about it, unlike some on both sides of the argument. But the question which hasn't been answered by any of the antis to my satisfaction is this: you have a tyrant who has been given the benefit of the law and required to comply with a UN resolution but refuses to do so. So you get your 'second resolution' (Chirac having magically decided to back the use of force) and he still doesn't comply. What then do you do? And given what actually happened, what would you have done in that circumstance? Until I get an convincing answer to this question, let's hope that everyone around here with an opinion just *shuts up* about this sorry story.
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Latest reply: Dec 15, 2006
GuideBlog
Posted Nov 29, 2006
I just thought I'd start keeping a blog about my GuideDog experiences to date. This is mainly so I patch holes in my failing recollection of events and tasks that I have undertaken to try to get the bloody thing to the point of being a viable product.
I suppose I'll start with the choice of technology. I have had a lot of flak for using IE as the foundation for the editor. This has been ostensibly because IE was a poor choice of component for the editing functionality and I had loads of people lining up to tell me how much better Mozilla was.
Well, the real reason I chose IE was this: None of the other browsers had an editor built into them that (a) was free (b) could be embedded in other applications and (c) had the range of functions and extensibility of MSHTML (IE's editing component).
This cut little ice with my critics, who really didn't like Microsoft and weren't prepared to help because they didn't want to get their hands dirty. So I was left 'on my tod' trying to write a large and complicated piece of software. I've written such systems in the past but any help would have been useful. I tried to write it using C# but found the interop issues consuming most of the programmuing effort, so I abandoned that route. I imagine that the people who scorned my approach have, in the past, privately indulged in no little amount of schadenfreude as a result.
Well, I have some news for them. I have learned C++ and I am now rewriting the system in that language. This will take no little time to accomplish, but soon I expect to have the user interface ready. The MFC classes bundled with Visual Studio now support HTML editing so it should be possible, if not easy to come up with a prototype. And all those who stood around watching me deal with all this crap without actually being prepared to help can go and boil their bloody heads.
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Latest reply: Nov 29, 2006
Why I hate....Advertising.
Posted Nov 25, 2006
It's amazing what three weeks of enforced almost-total abstinence from posting to a blog can do for the Humours, namely the yellow bile. It gives it time to thicken into a splenetic decotion that could take off three coats of paint when vomited from the mouth of a drunkard down the outside of a taxi door.
My bile is, at the moment, reserved for the advertising industry. I'll tell you why. It's because it has utter contempt for its audience. How many other industries would describe a format in one of its
products as 'Two C-'s in a K(itchen)'?
I think the bile began to force its way through the safety valve when watching the TV the other night. I hardly watch any TV now, but there was an advert on for Honda Cars, with their latest tagline 'The Power of Dreams'. Back in the day when a dream was worth something, it was introduced by somebody who then went on to elaborate: '...that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.' Not, you will observe: '...that my car will have variable valve timing.'
Then there was the Clover advert. For those not currently resident in Blighty, Clover is a butter substitute spread that one can use straight from the fridge. That's all. But in this advert there is a saccharinised version of 'The Wild Rover' propping up equally maudlin lyrics, 'We all love Clover'. This forms the soundtrack to various people being reduced to tears by the presence of this fatty substance on their food (and also, we imagine, later their arteries, although the tears would be a lot less sweet.)
The advertising industry trivialises and infantilises us. The best we can dream of is a car that doesn't pollute. The most intense emotion we can experience comes as a result of eating butter substitute.
Well, I happen to have a dream of my own. It's that no parent, anywhere in this world, will have to bury their own child as a result of poverty or any disease whose cure we take for granted in the affluent West. Go sell that to the bloody chavs. Then, and only then, do you qualify for a new Porsche.
Discuss this Journal entry [3]
Latest reply: Nov 25, 2006
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