I didn't quite catch that...

I went for a little party t’other day. Initially, I was told it was a little barbecue. And then it was upgraded to a 70s theme party for reasons that were unspecified.

When I turned up, some of the reason for the 70′s theme was made clear. The house was itself somewhat 70s themed.

Something didn’t just sit right about the house though. It was new to the hosts – they’d only just bought it. It was large, well situated, and they got it quickly for a whack below market value. There was a pretty special little barbecue area out the back.

The catch?

Well, it was very seventies styled. There were extensive electrical installations all over the show, wood panelling, a bar where the kitchen should be, a big double door fridge and a large corner bath upstairs. The door handles were made of transparent blue plastic.

The biggest catch? The upstairs layout. There were fully a dozen plug sockets next to the heads of the beds. There were large, built in wardrobes with hidden compartments. And there was sound proofing in place in each bedroom.

In short, it was at best the kind of place where the idea of a good party involved a dish full of car keys. A less good option that was mentioned might be to do with a knocking shop. And the least good option – the cops come calling in a few months and ask politely to dig up the patio…

Either way – a good place to visit for a party. Not the sort of place that I’d want to live in though.

The national ID card scheme: a perfect example of a solution without a problem. At least from the point of view of the citizen, there is nothing that it’s needed for and only downsides to it. Like all that “being reduced to a number” and “handing over guardianship of your identity to someone else”. Oh, and the bit about “not trusting this shower of political bastards as far as you could throw them, let alone the next unknown lot”.

But our political masters want ID cards, for reasons unknown. As do elements of the Home Office, probably because it makes life easier for cops if the more law abiding can be safely reduced to numbers and statistics, while the really bad folks won’t have ID cards and can therefore be ignored.

Because they want these cards, and because we don’t, they keep having to come up with solutions. Originally, they were to stop terrorism in its tracks, but that was shown to be a lie seven seconds after the claim was made when it was pointed out that Spain has a national ID card and still has terrorism. Then it was identity theft that was to be banished, but that waas shown to be a bit of a paper tiger, and the controls on the ID card were shown to be stupidly easy to beat.

So now all the claims are about how it will be easier to interact with the state. And funnily enough, those interactions are getting less easy and more delayed, just in time to say that an ID card would improved them. What fun.

Millions could be asked to provide ID card and fingerprint data to get a job under new systems being developed by the Home Office following a collapse in the accuracy of background checks.

News of the plans emerged in the response to a Register Freedom of Information Act request to the Criminal Records Bureau (CRB). Today campaigners warned it could be used to help impose ID cards through the back door.

Remember: the CRB is another thing like the ID card. It was introduced by this government in a cack handed manner, and won’t solve any problems because it works from flawed data. Also, it erases the concept of presumed innocence and once again says that only the state can provide a proper judgement of character. A concept that is so beyond laughable I just wept a little.

Saying that having the ID cards would make it easier to get your CRB check is like saying that having one leg broken would make it easier for people to catch you to break your other leg: it ignores the rather basic assumption that leg breakage is a bad thing, and something to be avoided.

But the circular arguments (that ID cards will solve problems that the people who want us to have ID cards keep creating) will go on, I fear. Because those arguments are all that they have left.

Growing up in Norn Iron, I thought I’d seen protests. I’d seen people gathering in their thousands to register that we’re not all the murdering bastards that we’re made out to be. I’d seen running battles with police in protest at something or other. I’d seen roadblocks in the city centre about people not being able to march and impromptu fires because people were allowed to march.

But that was nothing. It wasn’t until Ii went to uni that I witnessed real protesting. Where people though up nonsensical slogans and then marched about insisting that the world change no matter how stupid their desired outcome would be. That’s real protest.

And another fine example of such sillyness was in evidence on Blackheath yesterday as I wandered between one workplace and another…

Don’t you love it. They had the tents, they had the nonsensical slogans decrying capitalism (despite staying in tents from Argos…), they had spaces where the speakers could spout their nonsense from.

What I didn’t see was any eidence of showers. Surprising, that. I think that I’ll avoid the downwind areas for a few days…

The competition in the e-reader field seems to be picking up. In the States, at least.

Sony’s new Daily Edition is aiming to take on Amazon’s Kindle with its 3G connectivity and touch screen, but it will have to provide an acceptable face for DRM, with library lending and open standards.

The Daily Edition will be available in the US come December, and includes 3G GSM connectivity that will allow users to download books and magazine subscriptions over the air, removing the unique selling point of Amazon’s Kindle while also boasting about open standards and interoperability.

Now, if they can get that over here and established before Apple comes out with it’s purported all-beating tablet, then I’ll be in very interested. For the reasons I’ve mentioned before: I quite like reading, and I really like reading on the move. Papers leave smudges all over the place, and books are too big to bring more than about half a dozen with you at any one time. And that is just unfortunate – how is a man supposed to get away with that puny amount of reading material?

So a device that doubles as a massive portable library and an automatically updating newspaper is to be welcomed. If only they bring it over here before the bloody Apple lot get in on their game with their inevitably well marketed but somewhat silly product…

In case you didn’t notice, I have yet to find an Apple product that I’d be happy to own. Because I don’t like Apple. At all.

I’ve been sitting here for twenty minutes or so, trying to think of a single recent government idea that hasn’t been stupidly anti-freedom to some extent.

Nope. Can’t think of a single one.

But clearly some folk just haven’t got that message. They haven’t noticed it.

Internet service providers (ISPs) have reacted with anger to new proposals on how to tackle internet piracy.

The government is proposing a tougher stance which would include cutting off repeat offenders from the net.

UK ISP Talk Talk said the recommendations were likely to “breach fundamental rights” and would not work.

Breech fundamental rights? Of course they do, that’s pretty much how you can tell it’s a brain fart from Brown or Mandeson. Ditto for not working.

Another quote from that article that tickled me, this time from a random Tory talking head:

“Personally I am on his [Lord Mandleson] side; peer-to-peer sharing is the greatest threat to our creative industries,”

Well, he managed to get the cause and the caused there, but not in the way he meant it. Over-regulation, as embodied by the mindset of Lord Mandleson, is the biggest threat to the UK’s creative industries. And its non-creative industries. To be honest, the service sector isn’t exactly safe from his little ways of screwing things up…

There is something about modern festivals that just, to me, doesn’t ring true.

In my time, I’ve done a fair bit of camping. Quite a few ten day efforts with the Scouts, and a couple of long walks with overnight stays in a random tent in a field in the middle. You pitch the tent yourself, you check the layout. You wash in a basin and you shit in a bucket that gets emptied daily and the contents buried into a hole that is dug by one of the group. You do something physical during the day, you gather wood and make fires for cooking. You camp.

what’s called camping at festivals isn’t anything like that. Yes, there’re tents involved but that’s about it. There’s no sense of actually preparing; there’s no sense of acceptance that you’re in a field and that you need to make allowances for that. You sleep in a tent, yes, but most people insist on bringing an air matress. Instead of washing in a basin you join a queue for a shower, into which the men take three bottles and a loofah to make yourself shine. God alone knows what the women brought in, because there’s strict gender separation so that nobody gets at all uncomfortable. there are special places for using hair straighteners. There are extensive facilities for charging mobiles and places to get a manicure.

It’s all very depressing. I like the idea of a festival, because it’s something different from normal every day life and you get some music in the middle of it. Unfortunately, most people want to bring the mundane parts of life with them. Somewhat lacking in adventure.

Some of the music was good, though. Pendulum were, as I’d expected, fantastic. Nothing beats dancing like a loon to some of the random drum and the bass. Others that were better than expected were McFly (they knows their place, and don’t take themselves seriously), the Noisettes (whose frontgirl is too big for them, IMO), and the Streets. The Human League are as polished as you’d expect after a lifetime of performing, the Lightning Seeds much less so. My weekend was vastly improved because Oasis didn’t turn up. All the people who didn’t belong there (Katy Perry, Lady Gaga) were as dull as you’d expect.

Other problems? The security was shit. Yes, they all had their security registration and proudly wore their government approved badges, but they didn’t actually seem to be any good. Let that be a lesson to people utterly dependent on state registration – being approved just means that you can do a paper exercise, not that you can actually do your job. They couldn’t take control of a blind puppy, and they didn’t even have the authority of Gordon Brown at the dispatch box. It was laughable. or it would have been if they hadn’t been so incapable of stopping people getting crushed. Standing at the front and asking people politely to behave, because y’know, people might get hurt is not crowd control. Hiring a bastard with a microphone and a bad attitude would do it better.

So, in summary. Some good music, and the company I was actually in was excellent. The rest of the people there fitted into the “10% are total cocks” rule, and the organisers were too pandering to silly whims and not sensible enough with security and organisation.

V 2009 – minor fail. I suspect that somewhere new may need to be found for next year.

For the best part of this decade, the Republic has been spending quite a lot of infrastructure money and getting results with it. The road network is on a different scale to that of the 90s; train lines were re-opening and the Luas is moving people around Dublin rather well.

Then the dreaded crunch de credit hit, and all that seems to have gone away.

However, it looks like it’s quite good luck that there weren’t any trains there at the time. That could have been very messy…

This has been a rather hectic week thus far. I’ve been settling in, I’ve done a week of work (ish), I’ve walked about a fair bit, I’ve gotten rather inebriated more than once.

So I’m taking today off in reward, and we’re heading to V. Let there be drunkenness, let there be hints of debauchery, let there be sleeping in fields. And let there be random attempts at music.

See y’ll later.

What do you know? High profile, loud and potentially very powerful people who have wrongly found their way onto the DNA database can get themselves removed.

Well done, Mr Green.

Now, if you just remember this particular inconvience when you get to the top table after the next election, and ensure that the damn thing gets cut way back for the rest of us, that’d be fantastic. Because as it stands, the police and the Home Office seem to think that just about everybody in the land should be on it. And that just ain’t acceptable.

I took a little detour on my way home this evening. Nothing much, maybe added another ten minutes to the walk.

But this is the view when you do it:

If only it wasn’t for the crazy kite-ists, it’d be damn near perfik…

There are a few things that have struck me after my first few days living in London.

• the part of London I’m in is rarely in the news for good stuff. Yet the car insurance people have decided that it’s much less a risk than the fairly nice bit of Belfast that I used to live in. So they refunded me some money. Odd.
• I tried to get a few jobs all over the city, and ended up getting a job a mile and a half away from the flat. It has appeared to be quite a pleasant walk. How embarassingly eco of me, walking to work…
• Speaking of which, London folk aare somewhat bonkers about distance. In some cases, a five mile distance is talked about as if it’s the actual end of the world, in others they’re happy to move forty miles without thinking. Very strange. How they’re going to respond to Oxford airport renaming itself ‘London Oxford’ when it’s sixty miles away remains to be seen.
• The pub just around the corner from the new office would appear to have a beer list that extends to about six pages. SIX PAGES. OF BEER. HURRAH.

Further to all that, it’s really quite pleasant having TLF* about. Much more preferable than having to fork over money to thon Stelios nutter…

–
* – so called because none of you have yet come up with a better solution…

So, what do you do when you’re convinced that you’ve got the data to prove that global warming/cooling/climate change is real, and is caused by humans? You release it to the world; you shout it from the rooftops and you preach it from the highest hill. You have proved the theory, you have closed the argument: you’d tell everybody.

Or, in point of fact, you’d hide it, and get defensive if anybody asks for it.

We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it.

Because, sir, the point of science is that it is checked, and that something is not considered proven until it has been peer reviewed. That’s how it works. And if it’s not being released, then you’d need to have a good reason for it, otherwise people are going to assume that you’re not releasing it because it doesn’t actually say what you say it does.

We’re waiting for that good reason, fella…

I am on record as thinking that the developing vetting database is a very bad idea, and it’s moving us from a place where we presume innocence to a place where all are guilty until they prove (through the wonders of bureaucracy) that they are not a threat.

Which is a very bad thing. Especially since the bureaucracy that is going to be doing the proving is working with datasets that are fundamentally flawed.

However, trust the Norn Irish to be leagues ahead when it comes to such flaws.

In 2008, he [Sir Ian Magee, investigating the implementation of the flawed response to the dodgy Soham inqury recommendations] reported there were “only limited links” between the Police National Computer (PNC) in GB and Northern Ireland police information.

It meant that only information relating to sex offences and some other very serious offences in Northern Ireland was put on to PNC.

They forgot a bit there. They should have said It meant that only information relating to sex offences and some other very serious offences in Northern Ireland was put on to PNC as is just and proper.

For it is not important that lesser crimes are on the PNC for this vetting scheme – the point was that sexual offenders and other serious offenders are the people that the vetting is supposed to stop. Why worry about lesser offences if they’re not going to be, at some point, barring people from being on the trusted list. And then who decides what minor offences stop you from getting one of the 11.6 million jobs that will eventually require vetting?

In short: they’re talking shit, and the PSNI isn’t (yet) playing ball with them. For which they get a pat on the back.

See if you can spot the differences between this old post and the current one that’s doing the rounds:

Economic Models Explained
SOCIALISM
You have 2 cows.
You give one to your neighbour.

COMMUNISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and gives you some milk.

FASCISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and sells you some milk.

NAZISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and shoots you.

BUREAUCRATISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both, shoots one, milks the other, and then throws the milk away.

TRADITIONAL CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
You sell one and buy a bull.
Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows.
You sell them and retire on the income.

SURREALISM
You have two giraffes.
The government requires you to take harmonica lessons.

AN AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows.
Later, you hire a consultant to analyse why the cow has dropped dead.

ROYAL BANK OF SCOTLAND VENTURE CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for five cows.
The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island Company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company.
The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more.
You sell one cow to buy a new president of the United States, leaving you with nine cows.
No balance sheet provided with the release.
The public then buys your bull.

A FRENCH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You go on strike, organize a riot, and block the roads, because you want three cows.

A JAPANESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk.
You then create a clever cow cartoon image called ‘Cowkimon’ and market it worldwide.

A GERMAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You re-engineer them so they live for 100 years, eat once a month, and milk themselves.

AN ITALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows, but you don’t know where they are.
You decide to have lunch.

A RUSSIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You count them and learn you have five cows.
You count them again and learn you have 42 cows.
You count them again and learn you have 2 cows.
You stop counting cows and open another bottle of vodka.

A SWISS CORPORATION
You have 5000 cows. None of them belong to you.
You charge the owners for storing them.

A CHINESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You have 300 people milking them.
You claim that you have full employment, and high bovine productivity.
You arrest the newsman who reported the real situation.

AN INDIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You worship them.

A BRITISH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
Both are mad.

AN IRAQI CORPORATION
Everyone thinks you have lots of cows.
You tell them that you have none.
No-one believes you, so they bomb the crap out of you and invade your country.
You still have no cows, but at least you are now a Democracy.

AN AUSTRALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
Business seems pretty good.
You close the office and go for a few beers to celebrate.

A WELSH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
The one on the left looks very attractive

I’m not generally a fan of change; it tends to unnerve me.

However, recent events are part of a fairly significant set of changes that are going on at the moment, and I have to say that I’m quite excited by the lot of ‘em.

First off, yesterday was my last day in work. I’ve left it and am taking up a slightly better position elsewhere.

Also, yesterday was the last day in my house; it’s to be occupied by someone else from now on.

Thirdly, today I’m back tracing some steps from five years ago.

Back then, I was returning from uni to home. I’d spent my uni life under the name Ed, and was returning to a place where people knew me as John*. Things didn’t quite work out that way; more people than ever now know me as Ed. And I’m now getting into a car to head back across the water to take up residence once more in England, with the artist formerly known as TLG (and for whom I’m yet to devise a suitable replacement acronym) in close attendance.

Interesting times, I think. And very, very exciting.

–
* – Don’t ask, it’s a long and tedious story.

There was a time, many years ago, when I remember walking along the quays of Belfast and marvelling at the olde-worlde sailing ships moored there.

At this time, a brother of a really good friend of mine was crewing one of the boats, and so we all went to have a look-see. To be fair, at that time, Belfast was still surrounded by security; bombs went off weekly and people were shot weekly. Rarely did a week go by without a drive into Belfast being disrupted by a security alert or a protest.

And yet, for a few days, Belfast behaved. Hundreds of thousands of people turned up to see this boats that should never have been here, but for a concerted effort.

Back then, I was but ten years old. But I remember it more vividly than I remember many other (more personally important) events, and I think there’s a reason why.

Because it was normal. It was a large part of the country acting as if there wasn’t a bigger problem; we all turned up and oohed and aahed over the boats, as if we came from a normal part of the world. Every other big event that I remember from back in the early 90′s was unique to Norn Iron – peace rallies, security operations, funerals of untimely deaths. The Tall Ships was something that any nation would have celebrated, and the fact that we got to get involved made it something special.

Plus, it should be said, there’s something about sailing ships that stirs the soul. They may be show and they may be vulnerable, but the image of a ship powered by canvas that just makes me smile. Even if said ship is only moving at 6 knots.

There is no doubt that the bonus culture within the banking crisis was not ideal; there is also no doubt that those hand wringing over said culture are overstating the problem to fit their particular beliefs.

Similarly, there is no doubt that the bonus culture within the NI public sector is seriously flawed. The same problems hold in the public and private sectors: bonuses are sometimes given for reasons stipulated in simplistic contracts, rather than sensible operational reasons. And they may favour short term performance instead of longer term performance.

But the Sinn Fein position is so far beyond sensible that it’s quite scary:

Sinn Fein MLA Martina Anderson: “When you consider the public anger that was rightly directed at the bonus culture within the banking system which caused the economic crisis, it is unfortunate to say the least that we are still witnessing these kinds of payments. “

[emphasis mine]

Wow. They’re so smart. They managed to condense a very complicated economic problem (which includes factors such as wars, media sensationalism, economic nationalism, unrealistic expectations, poor governance, lax fiscal policy, fraud and cyclical variations of the market) into being just the fault of banking bonuses.

That’s some high class thinking there… I wish I was that intelligent, then I too could be a leech and get paid for talking shit to the media…

During helicopter training, they spend quite a lot of time showing you how to cope with a little thing they call vortex ring. This is basically a nasty state of affairs that, uncorrected, can result in heading towards the ground very very quickly indeed. Like, nosebleed quickly.

In the training, they tell you what to expect, how you’d end up entering it and how to get out of it, and then induce a vortex ring state. And if you don’t cope with it well, then I very much doubt that the instructor would be happy getting on board with out again.

To demonstrate why, have a look at what a very small and controlled vortex ring can do:

Now, just imagine that the thing creating that weighed a ton, was moving at a fair speed and was suspended (in defiance of physics) two thousand feet above the rocks.

It was a lot of fun, that part of training. But I’m quite glad that I don’t have to do it again for a while…

You know that a country is in a bad way when the police all of a sudden decide to systematically and deliberately flout the law.

Chief constables across England and Wales have been told to ignore a landmark ruling by the European court of human rights and carry on adding the DNA profiles of tens of thousands of innocent people to a national DNA database.

Senior police officers have also been “strongly advised” that it is “vitally important” that they resist individual requests based on the Strasbourg ruling to remove DNA profiles from the national database in cases such as wrongful arrest, mistaken identity, or where no crime has been committed.

So: official police police, as encouraged by the Home Office, is to ignore the few limits put on their power in this regard, and to continue doing as they want until the politicians can change the law to their liking.

And yet we’d get in trouble if we flouted a law of much less seriousness.

That sounds just about right, don’t it? Remind me again, what is in this ‘society’ malarkey for us plebs again?

For the record, when it comes to shooting handguns, I’m rubbish. However, it’s still fun to do.

Likewise, first person shooter PC games – I’m not very good at them, but they can be a lorra lorra fun.

Put the two together, and what do you get?

This.

Waterloo Labs – a group of engineers and “other nerds” from Texas – recently projected a Flash version of Half-Life onto some drywall and, well, destroyed the game’s aliens using a Ruger Mark III silenced pistol.

The assorted nerds stuck accelerometers onto the drywall’s rear side, connected them into a PC and then used LabView software to triangulate the location of each shot fired at the drywall.

LabView turned the location of each shot into a mouse click, the team explained, which the connected PC then translated into a mouse click in Half-Life – making the game think that the main character had just fired off a round at the assorted aliens ahead of him.

Genius. I’ll take one, thanks…