Im on the train, after a long and tiring day. I’m writing this offline because the wifi seems a bit flaky, but I can live with it. What I cant live with is the whinging and whining of the 2 fat man who’ve just grumbled at the bloke pulling the tea trolley thing. The first [...]
A rant I’ve been queuing up for a good couple of years, but haven’t yet got round to committing to ink (or pixels) is the strange phenomenon of e-things. It started reasonably enough with e-mail. Its like normal mail, but sent electronically. Fair enough. I’d argue that the UK should be talking about “I’ll drop you an [...]
Most of my readers can ignore this, or just roll their eyes. I’ve just seen a tweet by Suw that made me thing of a post I half wrote about a year ago and never got round to publishing. I keep hearing people mixing up their nouns for “nu-media”, so here’s a handy guide for [...]
I received a very wierd email today. Somebody has signed up to the Barbie website, and given my email address as their parent (which I hopefully am not, or at least nobody got round to telling me). The site has then email me, giving their username. They’ve also included lots of helpful links which I [...]
I’m sitting this evening, watching TV, something I normally pour scorn on. Call me elitist, called me a snob, call me posh (if your vocabulary only gets that far) but most of the stuff on TV is just drivel. Thats why I’m watching a stack load of divx files, not whatever it being beamed into [...]
This little gem landed in my inbox at work this week… I was totally correct about Wolverine (even the name…arghhhh). It is a pile of pants about two men competing to see who has the longest fingernails, and therefore biggest cock. I hated it so much that when my friends said they liked it I [...]
So, another day, another story about people wanting to monitor everything you look at on the Internet. What a surprise. I imagine that when books became popular people started monitoring what people read, they certainly started banning books. When radio came of age people definitely wanted to monitor radio transmissions, and still do. Television also. The problem [...]
I really must stop swearing as much, it does me no favours at all in the long run, the words fall out of my mouth and drop onto the world like so much cold custard. Nobody is shocked, rarely am I ever pulled up for it (very occasionally) and all in all I imagine I have [...]
Image by Getty Images via Daylife Well, it would appear that the UK is perma-fucked when it comes to all things economic at the moment. Those heady days of rising house prices making you more money that your job earned you are over, and cheap trips to the USA to do a bit of shopping [...]
Healthy cooking has it’s place, and given the state of the nations waist line, that place might be more and more pressing, but I am sick to death of the War on Fat. Too many times I have been served meat which is dry, tough and flavourless, primarily because it has been grillind to within [...]
Funny what makes grumpy about things isn’t it. When I was a regular windows user and I was copying groups of large files around it was the totally bonkers time estimates that annoyed me. You really had not idea how long copying a thousand files around locally was going to take, but 7777623 minutes seemed [...]
The Dyson vacuum cleaner is something of a design legend. The man who created is probably is a genius, and reportedly learns pneumatics in the space of 6 months. There is no bought that they are excellent at sucking hard and continuously, but I’d like to call them out on their over all design. They [...]
Slow living is all a bit fashionable at the moment, and I’d happily knock it without thinking like most other “ways to live” that rise to prominence, but I can see some merit in it. This weekend, I spent a few hours in the launderette, watching my clothes go round in circles getting cleaner, as I read [...]
I’m pretty sure I’ve bitched about the “celebrity chef” use of foam before now, but I blooming hate it. Foam is not food, at best it’s savory Angel Delight, fit only for children and people too infirm to have teeth. This morning on “Great British Menu”, (a program so pretenious that I hope one day [...]
People seem to be have to inflict themselves on the world around them. People play music out loud from their mobiles on the bus. People shout out at pub quizzes with “funny” answers. People feel the need to shout out at people in the street because they are wearing funny trousers, or they are fat, [...]
Image by Getty Images via Daylife The news is full of tales about the youth crime, gangs, “the break down of the family” and “the break down of society”. It’s very fashionable to blame drugs, schooling, teen parents, lone parents, teachers, drugdealers, politians and a hundred other people. Well, I’m sitting watching Nick Broomfield’s film [...]
Image via Wikipedia I’m staying in a hotel this evening. It’s rather nice, with a great room and a lovely view. For £150 midweek it should be however, especially as there is little to no reason to stay here on business as far as I can tell. I don’t begrudge them the 150 notes, it [...]
Image via Wikipedia Right – straight off the bat, I feel I should say I’m sure this does not apply to all BMW drivers, in fact my friend Adam has a wonderful M3 which he drives with great care, however … BMW drivers – Stop Driving Like Wankers. In the last two week I have [...]
a,b,c,d,e,f,g, AITCH, i,j,k,l,m,n… Ladies and gentlemen, of the class of 1955 onwards. I may not be able to spell, my grammer is dreadful, my punctuation almost non-existant, but I am finally loosing the plot when people see incapable of saying the letter H correctly. As I sit on the train, the half-wit who is speaking [...]
It would appear the fat white right wing racists are getting a bit scared by the prospect of a black president and are having to play on peoples fears with piss poor jokes. You know the end is near when you have to fall back on campaigns such as “If Obama is president… can we [...]
Image via Wikipedia Good lord this train is hot, and smelly, and …empy. Well, take your wins where you can find them. The airconditioning is broken, so it’s basically as 180mph greenhouse. It’s so hot my eyeballs have dried out and I think the edges of my laptop are starting to sag a little. Certainly [...]
There’s lots of buzz about cloud computing, virtualisation, and elastic scalability at the moment, with some of the really big players throwing money, time and people at it. When you first start to thing about it, virtualisation makes a huge amount of sense. The ability to have new instances, virtually instantly, from snapshot (and thus [...]
I hate this sofa. I hate everything about it. It’s a sleek, low grey number, topped with several black leather cushions. Looks brilliant, doesn’t bloody work. The it’s so low, when you sit on it, your knees come up round your ears, and the depth of the seat front to back is clearly designer for [...]
I think everybody agrees that reuse is a good idea generally. Reusing glass jam jars is vastly more efficient that recycling them into new jars. Reusable templates are much more efficient that drawing the damned thing ever time. Reusing code libraries is the only way the majority of programs could ever be created. There are [...]
I am not Irish. Really. Not even slightly. And this is why I’m not out drinking myself to destruction tonight, on some vague claim to be decended from the people over the water. This however is a subject for another day, probably tomorrow, in all honesty. No, tonights diatribe is reserved for American cooks mutilation [...]
Now I’ve got myself into a huff about nation id cards before now, but it would appear that the government is steaming ahead, regardless as to whether people want them, re interested in them, or would pay for them. I listened to a discussion on Radio4 as I drove into work this morning with an [...]
Capitalist society puhed you to make enough money to have other people do things for you. At the very lowest level, most people don’t grow their own food, they pay somebody for it. They don’t make their own clothes either, they buy them. Once you move up the food chain (the financial food chain) a [...]
Dear Paranoid Ameriica, Putting police men with fuck off huge machines guns on the street will not make you more safe, it will just make your populus more scared, meaning yet more draconian laws can be passed. If your police men can’s kill a suicide bomber with their current arsonal of 9mm semi automatic pistols, [...]
…they sometimes don’t say what you want them to say. Personally I beleive in being a speaker of unplesent truthes, and generally it serves me well in work, life and hopefully other areas. The easy thing to do in nearly all cases is to ignore the really rough bits, and hope everythign works out ok, [...]
Of late I’ve reached near nuclear levels of frustration dealing with people on the phone. This is nothing new, if you’re one of the call centre workers who’s rung me to try and sell me a new mobile phone contract and I’ve either used the airhorn on you or put you on hold by leaving [...]
edit: Oh look – another big data fuck up I’m getting bored of all these government agencies losing my data and it coming out in the papers weeks later, and I’m sure you are too. As such, I urge you to sign the following petition(if you are in the UK) – I’m rebranding it the [...]
As I got off the tube to walk to my hotel this week, I passed a couple and their children buying Twix’s before getting the tube home. I think they’d probably been to the theater. I was staggering back form the office, it was 11 at night, and I realsed what a complete mess I [...]
Hummer, because you have a small penis. A really small penis. Possibly Related Posts: What a miserable bunch of lame bastards you are E by gum A lexicon for the uninitiated Child security gone wrong The state of the nation
There is a world of fuss about Gillian Gibbons, a teacher who’s class of children in Sudan named a teddy bear Muhammed, and was thus accused and charged with “insulting religion”. Now, my level of patience with religious crazies, but lets look at this another way… She visited another country, she broke the law in [...]
I always come back to the power of Unix tools, and the ideology of using many small tools in stages to achieve a goal rather than crafting a monolithic solution. Tonight was a great example how how a little automation can save a huge amount of time. My dad has a massive stack of Excel [...]
There seems to me to be something very fucked up about using private security firms once you invade another country. Mercinaries have always existed, so lets call them what they are. Somehow it is even worse when they are being offered immunity when they screw up, something that might well not be offered to a [...]