Well at least that warmongering simpleton Reagan is dead. Only a matter of hours (I hope) until the iron lady pisses herself to death too.
All of the recent eulogies about the moron describe someone that I don’t know. Even Gorbachev sung that twat’s praises. What ? He was a pillock! I only hope that Gorbachev was taking the piss….Reagan did indeed bring about the end of cold war. But only because he nearly brought about the end of the world as we know it. We should really be thanking Gorbachev for talking him into disarmament….that was never the idea of a cowboy after all…

Elections coming up in the UK. I’m still trying to find my cards. I’m buggered if I’m going to let our thieving bastard landlady get her dirty mits on them.
Tony Blair was nice enough to be interviewed on R4 today…on a train…on his way to somewhere more important. He was kind enough to remind me of how much I hate him and his duplicity. If only he and Jack “Two Faced Nazi” Straw could be killed in a car accident together. So many worthy lives would have been saved.

Work: shit
Life: OK
Telly: Good.
Apart from the spectacularly enjoyable goings-on on BB5, tonight there was a programme about the middle-class people who gave up their well paid jobs to become plumbers. How enjoyable to watch these morons realise what true labour is all about, by literally getting covered in turds. All the more room in the city for me I spose 🙂

Apologies for the poncyness of the previous blog.
From now on I will extend my limit on EUI (e-mailing under the influence) to include blogging and domain name registration.

Interesting argument on R4 this morning about ADHD and drug prescription. Professor Stephen Rose made a bloody good point that ADHD didn’t exist as a diagnosis in Britain up until about 1990, and now we know about it, we’re simply drugging 3% of all children…Something very wrong there.
The proponent of some new drug or other, armed with the usual dubious neurological evidence, argued that ADHD has always existed throughout history, and many successful, talented, people may well have suffered with it. Well, I wonder if they would have been quite so successful or talented if you’d been around to dope them up with ritalin ?
I have a feeling that this Stephen Rose may have worked at Goldsmiths in the past. I hope it’s the same guy, because I always thought he was a righteous bloke and a great lecturer.

Sometimes I feel proud enough about the results of my licence fee that I almost don’t mind paying for it. Tonight BBC1 (yes 1) showed a Botney artumentary about Edward Hopper. It seems that the BBC, despite being a public service, will whore themselves out for anything in the name of art. Tate Britain, Opera, Boy Bands, and “cinema” (if you count “the day after tomorrow” as cinema), the beeb will push it if you tell them it’s art.
But this was more than the usual set of trailers and hype. It was a fascinating example of what journalism should be. OK Yentob, I can see why we (the British licence payers) hired you now.
The news, local and national, magazine programmes, even “Today”, have all been hyping Hopper. Until recently I’d never heard of Hopper, although his work I’ve loved for years , and I’m not just talking about “Night Hawks”.

Anyway – they had many talking heads on this programme including Sam Mendes (director of American Beauty) and Jonathan Miller (general all-round clever bastard). Until this evening I’d always hated Miller because he seems to know too much to be real, and because his “intepretation of Alice in Wonderland” was pure bollocks, in my humble opinion of course. And I loved Jan Svankmajer’s version of Alice by the way. But I just wish Jonathan Miller would stop being so perceptive and….RIGHT. Everything he said about Hopper’s paintings made me look at them differently and he certainly had a point.
Whereas…Sam Mendes…I loved “American Beauty”, but Mendes was so, so, wrong, in everything he said tonight that I’m now concerned about my value judgement of AB. Maybe he just rolled a 6. Maybe I’ve been wrong about him all along. Maybe he was just talking bollocks about Hopper. Maybe I should stop blogging when I’ve had a bottle of 2-for-a-fiver vino collapso. Hmm.
Anyway – back to the diary.
A day in Birmingham with some Moodlephiles was suprisingly enjoyable, a pint in a pub with the world’s most uptight landlord notwithstanding. The Selfridges building (I’d give a link, but they really need to know about web accessibility) is even more bizarre in real life BTW. Do a Google for it – it’s sick and wierd.
Quote of the day goes to Edward Hopper:
“If you could say it in words, there’d be no reason to paint.”
Nightyall

Well, Leo, the SMTP server is back up. In reality, if I’d followed my instincts rather than go along with Dell’s (admittedly excellent) tech support, it would have been back up on friday…ho hum.
Today, a few of us tested wireless access to the Student’s Union. It was good enough for me to spend a while working on the mail server with negligible problems. The best thing about working up there, apart from the food and drink, is that I can’t hear the office phone ringing with queries that are either not important enough for a call, or down to plain stupidity. I actually managed to get a lot done there. By 6pm Leo was back up and seemed to be working ok. It was probably ready way before that (about 3pm) but I wanted to test the wotsit out of it before putting it live. Good boy Leo 🙂
Tomorrow I have the pleasure of going to Brum for a meeting of a few people who are are attempting to improve educational teaching in the UK and at the same time benefit the open-source community. As those who know me can imagine: I dig that.

C yall.