Flashbacks to 2004

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It’s been a while since I did one of these, so I figured I should just follow the example of Nelly and get involved.


You Are 50% Left Brained, 50% Right Brained


The left side of your brain controls verbal ability, attention to detail, and reasoning.
Left brained people are good at communication and persuading others.
If you’re left brained, you are likely good at math and logic.
Your left brain prefers dogs, reading, and quiet.

The right side of your brain is all about creativity and flexibility.
Daring and intuitive, right brained people see the world in their unique way.
If you’re right brained, you likely have a talent for creative writing and art.
Your right brain prefers day dreaming, philosophy, and sports.

Entirely predictable

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So, Thatcher is dead. And arseholes, up and down the country, are being arseholes about it. From random street parties, to lots of people on ye olde Twitter and Facebook celebrating, there are a lot of people who are showing that time hasn’t healed old wounds.

And the thing I like about it is that most of them are showing that they’ve successfully failed to notice that the last twenty years happened.

They’re still insisting on acting like breaking the over-powerful unions is an issue. It isn’t. They needed to be broken, they were broken, and we’ve all moved on.

They’re still insisting that nationalised companies are good ideas, and they’re generally doing so while using phones and internet connections that never would have happened had the GPO still been in charge.

They’re still insisting that the state should be propping up failed industry, but don’t seem to have figured on what the entrance of pseudo-communist business practices from China would have done to any labour-intensive heavy industry in this part of the world.

Of course, the thing that I most like about it is that a lot of the things that they blame Thatcher for aren’t actually anything to do with her. These things were to do with the world changing at the same time as she was in power. They’re upset that the world moved on from their silly ideals, and they can’t get past the fact that those silly ideas are now exposed to the ridicule they deserve. They still witter on about how Marx would have done X and how they’re looking forward to being able to piss on Thatcher’s grave, not noticing that even Marx’s grave is pretty secure from people who detest him.

In short: their hatred and bile reflects two things. Anger at losing, and anger at everyone knowing they lost.

(Well, maybe a third thing: that hatred learned young survives a long time.)

We’ve finally found her ancestry

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Roxy, our delightful hound, was advertised to us as a mongrel. Her paperwork actually mentions that she’s a Staffordshire Bull Terrier cross, without mentioning what the cross is. We’ve considered whippet, but our main thinking is that she’s got a bit of ridgeback in her.

Other sources for her build and temperament have been suggested. A popular one was Scrappy Do, for her somewhat over-confident nature and never-say-die attitude. Of course, if there is ridgeback in her, then we shouldn’t expect anything else. They were bred to take down lions, after all.

I can now confidently put all that to rest, though. I’ve discovered her ancestry: she is clearly part SBT part Gremlin.

roxy-compare-2

roxy-compare

Rest assured, all steps have been taken to manage the threat posed by this new information. All water is now out of bounds, and she is strictly denied food after midnight.

And now, the end has come. It’s finally over.

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The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose in the Mountains of Mist. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.

The last book in the 23 year, four million word Wheel of Time saga has now been and gone. Five years after the creator died, his notes have been plundered to finish the tale he started.

And it was a worthy end, although perhaps the last fifty pages felt a bit rushed. But it’s done now, and we know what happens to the immense cast of characters and their individual battles.

Which means that there now is a full picture of what is needed, so whoever decides to make a Game of Thrones style TV series knows what they’re getting into. Unlike, for example, Game of Thrones. Where the author is completely rubbish when it comes to publishing things in any kind of prompt fashion…

An unexpected turn of events

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Yesterday morning, I had a plan. I had the next few days mapped out.

  1. Normal day until about lunchtime, then a particularly challenging bit of work. Leave work at an earlyish time.
  2. Meet up with TLW in That There London, have a bite to eat, go to see a new musical that various people had raved about.
  3. Head home and get as much sleep as possible.
  4. Wake up early, get to Heathrow and get on a plane to New York to enjoy a nice break. This break would include attending a bar that opens at 9am on a Sunday just to watch the Ireland / England 6 Nations game.
  5. Home in good time for a relaxed return to work on Thursday of next week.

I thought this was a nice plan. It certainly felt nice to me, and we were both looking forward to steps 2, 3, 4 & 5. Life, however, decided that it would be having none of it. What occurred was more like this:

  1. Bloody busy day, resulting in delays, the particularly challenging bit of work being knocked back to next week, and getting out later than I’d like.
  2. The meeting up working fine; the meal working fine. But the musical was very, very, very wank. The word ‘wank’ does not come close to describing just how wank this piece of wank was.
  3. Heading home, we got an email from our airline apologising for their reservation centre being closed. This was confusing enough that we went digging and found out about the small matter of a little snow and hundreds of flights being cancelled. This is not a good recipe for a decent nights sleep.
  4. Waking up early to phone the reservation centre to be told that the only flight they could put us on would result in our break being 48 hours long, in total, for the same price as the 96 hour break we’d book. Next step: cancelling airline booking, hotel, currency exchange and airport parking. Next step: declaring the whole effort a write off and fucking off with TLW to London Zoo to look at animals.
  5. Plan for the rest of the weekend: watch rugby, and then cancel leave and return to work on Monday.

The real life set of circumstances did not match up to the plan at all. And London Zoo, while alright, is pretty quiet on a Friday in February. So half the exhibits are temporary while the main ones are being rebuilt, and all the fun animals are hiding inside. Oh well.

Time to plan another holiday, I think…

A scarily long time

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Ten years ago today, I pushed publish on a old a battered piece of software, and this appeared on the internet:

This is my first attempt at a post. So there’s not actually anything here.
But hey, I’ll give it a go.
:lol

I was young, immature, had too much time on my hands and too many idiotic thoughts in my head that I thought the world needed to hear.

Ten years, 5,272 posts, 6,531 comments, 409,072 spam comments and over a hundred thousands visitors (apparently) later, I’m still here. Much less so; I went from doing about 800 posts in my first year to doing 50 last year, and the number of comments made in the last year was even smaller. But I’m still here, still immature, have significantly less time on my hands and still have far too many idiotic thoughts in my head. Considerably less young, though.

For how much longer I’ll be here, or the blog will be here, I know not. As long as I can find a couple of things every month that I feel like talking shit about, I suppose…

Turning back the clock

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Yesterday, TLW & I joined a couple of dozen thousand people and had a little walk to a park, in aid of a very good cause. That cause being trying to stop the closure of a local, and pretty decent, hospital to prop up the finances of another almost local, and thoroughly shite, hospital.

My reasons for supporting this are simple:

  1. I would trust the local hospital with my life and the lives of those near and dear to me, based upon what I’ve seen of them and what I’ve hear about them. I would trust the other hospital with neither, and would happily sit bleeding on a train for half an hour to get to another hospital just to avoid a ten minute trip to the A&E there.
  2. The reason that this closure is being considered is that the almost-local hospital needs more business thrown at it to fund the PFI contract that built it – but that’s already been tried, three years ago, and it evidently didn’t work.

However, a great many other people who were there annoyed me to the point that I almost changed my mind. Amongst them the local Unison convener (apparently you can never trust a tory with the NHS, never mind that it was Labour who (a) bankrupted the country, (b) thought up this particular gem of a PFI contract and (c) already tried rearranging the local hospitals to fund said PFI, failing absolutely); the head of the FBU (who really wants us to go back to the heady days of the 1980s and solidarity thatcher bastards bullshit) and the local Labour MP (failed to mention anything about why this particular bunch of bankruptcy happened).

But my particular favorite wasn’t one of the main speakers, like those mentioned above. No, it was a charming gentleman who had set up a PA on his bike, and was saying that there was a better way that we all could live without these tory cunts, and that it was being shown to work in Venezuela! Yay, we can Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! just like they do with the dear Mr Chavez. I had a read through their newspaper, and was shocked to find that apparently the murder of a prison officer in Norn Iron recently was to be applauded as he was clearly a nasty imperialist; how the situation in Syria is clearly another British imperialist plot; how the progressive immigration policy of Cuba was going to destroy the United States. Oh, and how it is a shame that housing projects begun under the previous and benevolent Gaddafi-led government in Libya are not yet finished…

I’ll be honest, it’s even worse tripe than was to be found in the Socialist Worker Student Society back in the day, and that’s saying something.

It’s a shame – this hospital campaign is a sensible one. And of the 15 – 25,000 people who were there on Saturday, there’s probably only a few dozen who think like this. But by fuck, they were among the loudest there, and people were listening.

(Anyway – ignore the twats: Save Lewisham A&E.)

Perfect location casting

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A couple of years ago, TLW & I had cause to go on a bit of a mission to the darkest North West of England for a family do. The accommodation was arranged for us; we just got given an address to turn up to and check in. We did so, and then (as tradition demands) we headed to the bar of the accommodation for a pint.

The place was very strange; a motel in the arsehole of nowhere, with strange acts on and a strange clientele. We all felt that it was kind of phoenix nights meets grab-a-granny, but without any of the charm. In short, it was very depressing.

Last week, I started watching Utopia, a new and strange show on Channel 4. Early on in the first show, they needed to have a location where a man on the edge would go, where they could contemplate ending their life as bits of it threatened to fall down around them.

motel

They seem to have found the perfect motel in the arsehole of nowhere, wouldn’t you agree?

I usually don’t complain about these lot, but…

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There is a general theme amongst many of those condemned to use SouthEastern that they are totally useless; for examples of this I would urge the reader to have a look at the #southeastern hashtag on any given day, especially during the morning or evening rush.

I tend not to join in with this abuse, despite some of it being really amusing and being about a topic that I tend to get annoyed about myself. And this is why: there are a great many reasons why southeastern are the way they are, and only some of them are their fault. Many are the fault of Network Rail; many are the fault of whoever decided that the network to the south of London didn’t need overhead line electrification and could stick with the third rail; and some are the fault of the governments that ‘privatised’ without giving people any incentive to invest, any room to innovate, or even the opportunity to buy the damn rolling stock. Essentially, southeastern are stuck with a railway built on Victorian underpinnings, with the constant threat of the government taking away their franchise, and with ever increasing demand. What chance do they have of doing things properly?

Today, however, in the midst of snowmageddon ’13, I came to share in some of the hatred.

This morning was bad enough; there’d been no fresh snow for about six hours when I tried to board my usual train, only to find that it was cancelled. Happily, I managed to get the very last standing space on the very last carriage of a train going in the right direction – albeit one that was already an hour late. This mystery train stopped at such exotic (and fairly pointless) places as New Cross, Lewisham and St Johns, instead of bypassing them as the good Lord intended. Due to the previous day’s snow, the end result was me being late to work by around 40 minutes. Not the end of the world, but not pleasant. At least the driver of the train explained what was happening and tried to add a bit of humanity to the journey.

Given how the rails looked during the day, I then decided I’d try to be smart; I’d fuck off early and do a chunk of work from home in the afternoon. A brilliant plan, I’m sure you’ll agree.

And like any plan, it failed to survive first contact with the enemy:
2013-01-21 14.45.58

And here’s where I started to really dislike the southeastern operation. We live in a world with computers, and screens, and mobile apps, and drivers having mobile telephones. How, then did southeastern decide to run London Bridge? By letting all the passengers gather on the platforms, give them nothing to go by on the screens, and then randomly shout destinations and platform numbers at them and see how quickly people could run.

Passengers for the Dartford via Greenwich line, please move to platform one where a train will take you to Cannon Street, where I’m told a train might be leaving along that line soon…

Passengers for all stations to Sidcup, please be aware that there is a train for that line currently awaiting departure from Charing Cross.
Passengers for all stations to Sidcup, please be aware that there is now no scheduled service to that line for the next while as the train at Charing Cross is now a Gravesend service…

Passengers for Greenwich via Deptford, the train about to leave platform one is for you…

Each of these trains probably costs seven figures. Each of the drivers is on a decent salary. Could we not work out some fecking way of investing £99 in the cabin of each so that if the Network Rail infrastructure goes down, at least the drive could send a damn message to the stations on the route so that they can tell people what’s going where?

Also: the snow that fell probably amounted to 5 or 6 inches. Whyfor with the panic?

At lease someone liked it:2013-01-21 15.42.38

Brilliance in education

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I’m not saying that this particular educational aid should be used at primary level, but surely we can all agree that by GCSE level each and every pupil will know about the existance of each word. And they should damn well know the meaning of most of them as well. Please to put it on the curriculum.

found at dummies-for-destruction.co.uk

This was found at Lyle’s place, and I’ll give the credit to him, despite him saying that it’s not his.

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Happy Christmas

Looking back, I forgot to do post this last year. Other things were getting in the way, I think. So it’s not nine years in a row that I’ve used the same random message for Christmas – it’s seven, then a gap, then back again.

Happy Christmas, folks.

2012 in review

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OH-2012

2012 did not start well for me. December 2011 contained loss, death, stress and funerals, and that carried over into the new year. I was not a happy camper at the start of the year.

It got better, though. TLW & I took the demon hound on her first holiday and to see my lot in Norn Iron; after that we left her at home and enjoyed breaks in Bruges, Jersey and then one in Cape Town. I changed job and have enjoyed it thus far, despite now having to spend a fortune on TfLs services. We’ve been to musicals, pantomime and have the ballet lined up for next week.

We’ve grabbed a bit of life this year, and have made the most of it. Let’s see what happens next year…

Such a shame

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It would appear that excellence of driving and a fair wind aren’t quite enough to overturn not having a very competitive car. Poor Alonso, well done Vettel. And well done to the pair of you for providing a most entertaining season, and an excellent end to it.

In more pleasing news, it was nice to see the two main challenges to United trip over each other. Hurrah.

And now, the end has come

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Last month, I wrote a bit about a campaign to make the landlord of a local pub keep it open.

Said campaign succeeded in some of its aims, and the council put a stop to any plans to put a shop in the premises. But the campaign really failed, because the current management of the pub were then unceremoniously told to shut the doors by the landlord anyway.

Here’s another one of those moments where I put myself at odds to the conventional wisdom of the area: in this, I’m with the landlord.

The landlord owns the building, and one of his tenants has organised the council to tell him what he can do with said building. It’s not really an interesting building, so there’s no justification for listing it. Other than the people who don’t own it don’t like with the owner wants to do with it. So these tenants have used the bullying of the state to reduce the value of the property for their own selfish aims.

The landlord is now left with a building that can’t be anything but a pub. But the tenants in it are clearly a bunch of twats. So what I’d do in his position is get rid of the tenants and bring in new ones to run a pub.

It’s a shame; Antic (the company that managed the pub, and were credited with turning it around) seemed like a decent bunch of people, and they’d done good work with several pubs nearby. I’m really not inclined to go and spend money in any of their other pubs now.

All over, bar the annoying result

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Hooray! The election is over, and once again the guy I probably would have voted for has lost. I realise that this makes me entirely at odds to conventional wisdom in the UK, but you know what? I don’t give a fuck.

In fact, I say this to the wonderful echo chamber that is public opinion over here, and on Twitter etc: I don’t care that you think I’m an idiot for considering voting for that strange fellow. I don’t care if you think anyone considering voting for a GOP candidate is incomprehensible. I might not care for your tone when you say it, but your tone is your problem, not mine.

I looked at the candidates and decided that, while I might not agree with what the one said about everything, I agreed with less from the other. I think that the state stepping back from a few areas of life would be a Good Thing. And here’s the thing: despite what hundreds of millions of Europeans think, there are clearly enough people out there who think the same that the popular vote is within a couple of points.

At least now the damned echo chamber of anyone with a brain votes Obama should calm down…

Sad tendencies

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It is a simple fact that areas like the one I live in a a very deep red on any electoral map; in my particular part of London the only competition that Labour have is from the left (from a group whose name is so stupid I can’t even bring myself to type it). And that means that the general refrain once anything happens is that one arm of the state should ride to the rescue.

Case in point: a nearby pub is apparently under threat of closure; apparently the landlord has applied for planning permission to turn it into flats. Which is a crying shame, in my opinion – the area needs more decent pubs.

So I’m all for saving it. But what pisses me off is the way that people are talking about trying to save it: from local blogs, to the local MP, to the current people who run the pub, they’re all doing the same thing. Demanding that the council stop any planning application to change the use of the building. Hell, the main information page for the campaign lists seven ways that people can apparently help. In order, they are:

  1. Email the council planning office
  2. Email the local MP
  3. Email the local mayor
  4. Sign the petition (to be sent to the council planning office)
  5. Email the local paper
  6. Write to the landlord
  7. Email the campaign with some support

Seven ways to help, and four of them are directly trying to get the state to stop the landlord having any say over how he uses his property. Only the fifth is really a sensible way to go about it: try and convince the landlord to keep the pub in place. Or, even better, get the people that run the pub to make a sensible offer and bloody buy the place off him…

Changes and rests

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The ancient and over used saying A change is as good as a rest ignores a simple truth: sometimes what the body needs and craves is not one or t’other. It is both.

It was with that in mind that TLW & I decided that we should do something that we’ve not done since December 2010: taking a decent amount of time and going on a damn holiday1.

And so it was that we hazarded the BA website, booked a couple of weeks off, and fucked off to Africa.

But first, to Terminal 5, where I got to test FlightRadar’s recent updates. They work, and it’s quite cool being able to watch planes on the ground with their technical details on a screen in front of you. I have to admit that I was quite impressed with T5; it’s big enough and spread out enough that it’s easy to mistake it for a civilized place.

Then on one of BA’s ancient yet serviceable 747s to sunny Cape Town, on a nice night flight. During which we got to marvel at a most excellent electrical storm over the coast of Nigeria and a stunning sunrise over the deserts of Namibia.

While there, we ate well (too well – crocodile, ostrich and a variety of things ending in -bok were tasted). We saw penguins, whales, seals and the Cape of Good Hope. We tasted very fine wines and played with monkeys, and got pictures with some random birds of prey as well.

Don’t shit down my shirt, don’t shit down my shirt….

Disturbingly, we also discovered that tortoises have a sex face:

For the record, the noise is even worse than the image.

It wasn’t all light-hearted japes, of course. There were visits to District 6 and the obligatory Robben Island tour, led by a former inmate who’d learned his tradecraft in the DDR and USSR.

All in all, it was a most enjoyable holiday, both a bit of a change and a lot of a rest. And for the first time in my recent memory, certainly going back to before the millennium, I went a week without checking anything (bar confirming flights on the last day) on t’internet or email.

I recommend the destination. And I also recommend dropping t’internet for a day or seven.

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1 – Yes, I know that there have been a great many trips: Italy, Belgium, the Lake District, the Peak District. But they were all weekends or extended weekends, and we felt the need for more.

The geekiness continues

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I’ve already gone on about Flight Radar 24, at length, so I shall not go into detail about its awesomeness and how said awesomeness appeals to me, if not to others. Clearly it’s becoming a bit of a legend, what with it being used as a reference on broadcast media during last nights extraditions.

I’ll just mention a new and interesting (to me): their increased coverage of aircraft on the ground at Heathrow.

Screen capture from FlightRadar24.com, copyright belonging to them and whoever they get the imagery from

They’ve either worked with BAA to get a feed directly, or they’ve got someone who has a nice line of sight to the field to put a receiver nearby, because the level of detail is awesome. On most airfields the planes disappear from coverage before landing, whereas in Heathrow you can see not only when the plane lands but where it taxis to; in many cases you can see not only what terminal they arrive at but also what gate. For example, in that image there’s a small BA plane at the far left just arriving into terminal 5A; there’s a BA 777 firmly parked at 5B, and the highlighted line is the path an Emirates A380 has taken from Terminal 3, Pier 6 on its way to the queue for take-off from runway 27R.

This level of detail is probably entirely unnecessary and quite boring to most people, including TLW, but I find it fascinating. And quite relaxing, if I’m honest.

The next step will be to go to Heathrow at some point and see ow well the level of detail reflects what can be seen out the window. I understand that there’s a nice view of the apron from Terminal 5…

You wanna think it through a bit more, Dr Hume?

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How’s this for a fantastic brainfart: ignore geography in independence referenda.

Well, that’s not what he thinks he’s saying, but it’s what it amounts to.

People with an Ulster Scots background should be allowed to vote in Scotland’s independence referendum, a senior Orange Order member has said.

Dr David Hume said Ulster Scots had played a key role in Scottish history.

“We are stakeholders as well. Surely a decision such as this should not ignore our input?” he said.

So, anyone who decides they should be a stakeholder should be given a vote in the future Scottish independence referendum. What of other referenda in the future? What, say, the of the eleventy billion US citizens who claim Irish descent and would likely vote to get rid of the border? Or even the dozens of millions of English citizens who would rapidly vote to be rid of both bothersome celtic lands?

Or is it just people from outside the countries in question who’d vote in favour of keeping the Union that should be given these special votes?