An error of judgment led me to take on more work recently. In fact, it can’t fairly be called an error of judgment really because it’s far more stupid than that. Totally and inexcusably stupid. What was I thinking ? I don’t even need the money. I certainly don’t need any more stress.
So I spent the entire weekend working on a critical, heavily used server and essentially caused myself to be responsible for a load of stress for a load of ex-workmates/friends. This, of course, led to a load of self-inflicted stress for me too. Everyone lost.
Note to self – find some way to give up work in favour of wealthy indolence. I wish I was Bertie Wooster.

It’s easy to look back through claret-coloured glasses and think “ah well, it wasn’t so bad after all”. But it really was at the time. It brought back horrific memories of past work crises and made me realise that I don’t want to do any of this any more. Tough shit I know.

But, we did find enough time on Saturday night to watch Harry Hill, Hot Fuzz, and eat a typically delicious curry (King Prawn Butterfly, Lamb Tikka Jalfrezi, Sag Paneer, Keema Naan) whilst Humph charmed us with her comical avian antics.

Tonight I was out doing some more, different, work. But that was almost fun by comparison. Installing debian on an HP server, even over ADSL, is a positively life-affirming experience.

The nearest pub to our home has had a turbulent recent history since the days when Michele used to work there. The last landlady, Sherry, managed to hold onto it for longer than usual and she also managed to make it back into a “local”. So it was a sad occasion to help her celebrate her last Friday night before moving on to the gold-paved streets of Stains. Now I’ve seen a load of glasses get shattered in pub fights over the years but the two that broke on Friday were particularly disturbing. The first was directed at the landlady by a young lad at the bar, after an argument over a Pool-cue. The second was directed by the landlady at the youth. Both impacted on the wall behind their respective targets and caused no bloodshed.
The young lad was the landlady’s brother of course. No-one but family can trigger that sort of aggression. Families have a sort of kung-fu ability to hit your dealdy pressure-points with just one raise of an eyebrow.
After the aggro, while the young lad sat outside, fuming, I spent the remaining time with Sherry and her boyfriend at the bar discussing happier things. I also bought a really rather good Pool-cue for a fiver in an attempt to diffuse a still explosive situation.
Still, at least seeing all of that broken glass all over the deck helped bring forth some happy memories 🙂

The weekend was as perfect as I could have hoped. Quiet, with a curry, a couple of films (Churchill: The Hollywood Years and Deliverance) and a superb Roast Beef Sunday dinner with my family, culminating in watching my mum’s PVR recording of Preston storming off of Buzzcocks, and Harry Hill being stupid.

Mondays are traditionally miserable, but I managed to write some nice code today that appeared to work! You know that despite hating Winblows, I’ve had my head up Bill Gates’ arse for the last year, well today I managed to write an entire, functional, COM object in pure C that extends IE to allow you to call proper code from Javascript. Well – I’m proud of it anyway, despite hating the whole idea…and at least I wasn’t filling the world with any more of that poisonous C++ shit. The wonderful, if not deluded, people at codeproject.com deserve some serious thanks. They also deserve not to have to use Windows any more and switch to something more enjoyable.

Good night.

This laptop keyboard is buggered so excuse me if there are loads of typos…even if they involve serious breaches of grammar.

Ronni Ancona has a new sketch show coming up and last night we were lucky enough to see some of it being filmed at the BBC. Some of you may already know that I run ronniancona.com, well the Beeb wrote to me in an attempt to publicise the new show recording, and with pleasure I complied.
Michele and I turned up early and decided to queue in the rain. This was mainly because we couldn’t find a pub nearby (I know! The BBC! Weird), but it turns out that they have installed a cafe/bar for audience members since I last visited the place. LWT take note.
Let me tell you, if you get audience tickets for the Beeb, please get there before the door-opening time. It’s great. You get to have a glass or two of rather good wine, whilst watching a bunch of lazy arses having to queue.
Both of us tried to spot punters that found out about the show through ronniancona.com, which basically meant looking for snurglars, and Michele spotted 3 in our row at least. It seems I’ve inadvertently found a superbly effective way to meet snudgers, pervs and generic saddos.

Anyway – the new show looks good, even if it does suffer from many of the diseases of other recent shows: unoriginal material, too little material for a series etc etc. Overall she’s still great is our Ronni.

This makes me cringe more than I would over the lovechild of Basil Fawlty and David Brent.
Whoever made this video epitomises the type of middle-layer, airhead, cretin that really believes there is such a thing as “Web 2.0” and also believes there is something special about XML.
Go away. Unless you can write an XML parser in whatever language you prefer (English included) then you shouldn’t be philosophising about it or making statements about how it has changed the world.
You seem to think that we don’t use HTML anymore. WRONG!
You seem to think that web 2.0 precludes the use of HTML and therefore that web 2.0 sites don’t use it. WRONG!
You seem to think that separation of style and content was not a facet of HTML (and presumably SGML). WRONG!
You seem to think that before web 2.0 (whatever the bloody hell that is) there were no online communities. WRONG!
You didn’t mention the improvements in developer tools for web technology (cgi/asp/php/ruby-on-rails), or the consequent improvement in on-line software (blogger/myspace/flickr/etc). STUPID!
You seem to never have heard of SGML…

In all,
It has nothing to do with the markup language.
It has nothing to do with a change in attitude.
It is to do with the slow, inevitable change in technologies.

It was not because of a “switch to web 2.0”

This is the same type of irritating twaddle that leads many to believe that Karl Popper invented falsification. He didn’t, he merely named it. Without such “thinkers” the real scientists would have continued and developed regardless. The clever people do the stuff, the practical people help them. The morons write about it and get jobs in the media.

I haven’t forwarded this to him, but I figured that he’d probably be the sort of person to Google himself every week and so would find this.

Great news today from ailing, desperate, minister John Reid; a law will soon be in place that will put an end to all Internet child abuse once and for all. Like all wonderful ideas it’s very simple. Paedophiles, snurglars and child pornographers will be forced to register their “email addresses and chatroom names” so that other net users may know whether they are actually talking to a nonce, rather than the 12 year old boy he purports to be.
Personally I think the law should be extended so that sex-cases are forced to append the word “kiddy-fiddler” to their chatroom names. This would simplify the identification process considerably.
Well done Dr Reid, this will surely guarantee your legacy will be favourable as opposed to the hopeless mess it would otherwise have been.

The dullard interviewing Shilpa Shetty on TV at the moment is truly sub-Kentish-Times, but Shilpa, yet again, is managing to prove how thoughtful, intelligent, perceptive, and educated she is.
She should run the UN.

No! Wait! Come back! Yes it’s about Jade Goody and Big Brother, but not what you think…probly.
On the day we flew to Mexico the Big Brother “racism” story hit the headlines in the UK and, as we discovered, slowly propagated around the world. Well, at least we know it got to Canada and Mexico. The Guardian printed an interesting comment about a remark from Jade’s boyfriend Woodchip, or whatever his name was. He wanted it known that when Channel 4 bleeped him, it wasn’t because he called Shilpa a “Fucking Paki”, as suggested by the many complainants. What he actually called her was a “Fucking Cunt”. So that’s alright then.
Since when has it been worse to call someone a “Paki” than a “Cunt” on TV ? Bernard Manning used to regularly talk about “Pakis”, as did many of his peers, on national prime-time TV. In fact, the 70’s were the television heyday of the word “Pakis”. In every case that I can think of it was used in a directly offensive sense too.
Now, being a total TV moron, of course I watched CBB. What you should know is there was no racism there. There was ignorance, offensive bullying and pathetic bigotry, but it was not racist. I’d go as far as to say that the main culprits (IMO), Danielle, and Wallpaper (whatever his name actually is) did come out with some racially prejudiced remarks. But this was simply impotent bullying behaviour. If Shilpa had been white with glasses she would have been “four eyes”. If she had been fat she’d have been “lardarse”. This was just the lame attempts of the intellectually inferior, envious, dullards to try and belittle her.

What astounds me is the hypocrisy of the people who are complaining. Where were the 30,000 complaints when Manning talked about “not liking pakis” on Mrs Merton ?
He is a bona-fide, genuine, racist. He admits as much! In fact, there are loads of them.

Now Jade is being bullied by the public at large. Since when did Britain have such a massive anti-racist movement ? Certainly not at the last election where thousands of fucking ignorant, bigoted, dimwits voted BNP. You can bet these are the same arsenecks who threw stones through the windows of paediatricians, pedalo minders and pedantic people during the nonce-hate months.

Please let me clarify my position for the benefit of the fucking stupid: I hate racism (and nationalism) with a, probably very unhealthy, vicious passion, but that is not what this issue is about. If there is genuinely a massive anti-racist movement in this country then direct it to the racists.
Chuck a few stones through Nick Griffin’s window. Gob at Jim Davidson or something constructive like that. Or turn up to some Anti-Nazi demos please! That would be great! But what this is really about is giving the even dimmer, even poorer arseholes than Jade something to feel passionate about.

I wonder how many of the 30,000 complaint calls to channel 4 were from Endemol employees ?