Downloading classic 80’s TV series is really rather cool.

A Very Peculiar Practice was a satirical TV series based around a University medical practice. Reassuringly nothing in the University sector seems to have changed that much since then so it’s still very aposite for today’s Universities. Things I was appalled at when I worked for Goldsmiths were going on 20 years ago and, presumably because all of the managers are still just as crap, nothing has changed.

The second series of AVPP was only ever shown once and I missed it. It’s been a great irritation in my adult life that I never got to see it, especially as the Beeb clearly deemed it unnecessary to release. So now that it’s available from the good people at uknova I’m very happy! I’ve also discovered why the Beeb didn’t release it: it’s crap.

Work has been stupidly busy recently and we’ve been working round the clock. Yesterday I got up at 4am and had an emotional rollercoaster of a day, partly because of the tiredness admittedly.

Easter came and went without a lot of fuss. Frances, Michele and I went to The Tarn on Easter sunday which was beautiful. A nice long walk, and we got to see parakeets, one-day old baby ducks (which felt very easter) and the lovely little hut, that I used to play in when I was a kid, burnt to cinders…

Meanwhile, my friend Mira was exploring the Essex Way which, it turns out, is a walkway rather than a lifestyle choice.

A thoughtful young chap cleverly selected “Never save password for this site” while he was visiting his favourite swinging and dating sites, in order to spare his fianacé the stress that would ensue if she discovered his hobby. However, the guy’s fiancé inadvertanly discovered that Firefox’s Password Manager also doubles as a convenient “dodgy sites list”.

After dumping him, she kindly submitted this helpful bug report to Mozilla.

Thanks to crypto-gram for this story.

Today we documented Humhrey’s crap attempts at Bathing with a short video.

There is so much to write about and there are so many unwritten blog ideas that this entry seems a bit slight. Sorry, I’m crap. But then again, it exists and is therefore far better than the ideas on their own…sorry

I’ve just had a massive shock; Keith Allen was presenting tonight’s religious poncefest: The Manchester Passion. This is part of the hugely hypocritical celebrations the Government forces the BBC to indulge in, also known as Easter. If you want to examine the real history of these celebrations you will need to go back far further than 2000 years unfortunately. After that it is up to you to ask whether easter is actually:

• A celebration of Christ’s death and resurrection for our sins or some such shit….although if the whole thing was that critical for the future of human kind then we really shouldn’t be hassling Judas because without him Jesus would never have had made this monumental sacrifice…Maybe he’d have ended up with a nice safe career in insurance instead.
• The original, and if you prefer, primitive, celebrations of the approach of spring, when the animals and plants all start to regenerate. A celebration that was hijacked by the Christians to bolster support for their new, equally bizarre, religion.

But Keith Allen was a bit of a personal hero, so seeing him support this shit makes me start worrying. It’s a bit like discovering that Mark Steel was planning to vote for the BNP [DON’T PANIC HE ISN’T], or finding out that my wife reads the Daily Mail…

I used to joke with Michele that she was a regular buyer of the Daily Mail. Which was, obviously, a joke. She would never buy that rag. She simply found it on the train after work….every day. Every day.

The other day, Michele got busted. It was a day that we were both forced to waste by going into work. At the station we regularly buy Travelcards, the odd mag (Private Eye/Viz etc), and occasionally an Egg and Bacon Roll, from the nano-newsagents. Consequently they know us, and what we like; a sort of professional integrity:

• Bloke: Travelcard is 1 and 2 yes ?
• Me: Yep
• Bloke: Egg bacon roll ?
• Me: Yes please
• Bloke[ to Michele]: Your Daily Mail ?
• Michele: No! I don’t buy the Daily Mail! You know that!
• Bloke [puzzled]: eh ?

So Michele, the truth is now out! Muwahhahahahahaha!

Good night.

Hooray! We have a new set of protectors! The police have joined forces with the immigration service and HMRC (formerly HM Customs and Excise) to form a new all powerful force that will ensure state power crushes all: SOCA!
According to the SOCA website FAQ (a good read by the way), they have the power of all three of the previous organisations combined. Unless things have changed in the past few years this means that they, like the good old Customs and Excise, are answerable to nobody and have supreme power! Makes me feel safer already. Especially as they are exempt from the recently introduced, meddlesome, Freedom of Information legislation.

However, playing devils advocate, I feel I should raise the ugly question of corruption: how can we be sure that corrupt forces, for example the organised crime agencies that SOCA was established to investigate, don’t infiltrate it and abuse the limitless power ?

Well, we have nothing to fear because the FAQ explains that existing safeguards, such as the terrifyingly effective Independent Police Complaints Commission, will still be in place! So that’s alright then.

Hooray for state power!

In the same week as SOCA launched, the police have also been granted powers to drug test all arrestees even if they are never charged. With any luck they will misuse this power and arrest everyone. Thus they will discover that over half the population in Britain take hard drugs on a very regular basis indeed. They think they’ve got an overcrowding problem in the jails now!

Keep an eye on the Spy Blog for more information on how safe we should all feel.

Lee is owed several pints for introducing me to trickle/trickled. It lets you limit bandwidth per process in the most simple way imaginable! So I can still download the original TV series of Whoops Apocalypse and use the Internet at the same time! Joy!

While trickled was throttling my bittorrents, I did some work on “the application”. To the observer, I have managed to make a small dialog-box appear when you click on a button. What the observer cannot observe is that

• The button is an image on an html page which is rendered in a browser object which, in turn, is embedded in a C application.
• The HTML page is sent to the browser by a nanoscopic HTTP server in the application that also contains a very basic in-page scripting engine.
• Clicking the button actually causes a javascript HTTP connection (AJAX stuff 🙂 to the HTTP server.
• The server takes the parameters supplied by the HTTP request and displays them in a dialog box.

The fact that it looks like the button causes the pop-up makes me happy because no-one can tell it’s HTML!

Anyway…that aside…

The manure of violent verbal abuse helped produce fruit within Arcel Force. Last night I got a call from the local depot by an apologetic bloke who promised a delivery today…despite being told the drivers don’t work on saturday. And so, today I received my new digital camera! Wooohoo! OK I had to put up with the delivery guy trying to justify his previous lies by lying to me even more, but I don’t care about that – I just wanted what I’d paid for. And it’s a cracker! Rest assured that there will be a nausiating quantity of boring pictures of Humphrey RSN.

The term “first class delivery” has changed its meaning in the past few years. Nowadays it refers to a value-added service provided by the post office and other couriers whereby you pay a substantial amount more for the delivery and in return they reduce the risk of the package getting stolen en route. It’s very similar to what they used to call a protection racket. Nowadays whenever you send anything by post it’s as if the delivery company say “Oh what a lovely parcel eh Ron ? Let’s hope it doesn’t get stolen during the delivery – you can’t trust anyone these days. Hey, tell you what, why don’t you buy our parcel protection service and we’ll take extra special care of it.”

This is why I don’t like buying on-line. No matter how good the vendors’ service is, and these days it’s usually much better than a shop, to actually get you the goods they throw your purchace into the black-hole of the post.

I ordered a digital camera from amazon last week and saved 60 quid on the price compared to buying on the high street. I payed for the “first class, 2 business day” delivery. Firstly because I wanted it quickly, secondly because I actually wanted to receive it. Well, bugger me backwards, I still haven’t got it and probably won’t get it until next week. pARSEl Force’s excellent tracking website has a list of the many times they tried and failed to deliver it to me. Odd that they failed, I mean there’s someone on the door pretty much 24 hours a day . It’s almost as if they’re a bunch of fucking liars or something!

However, it’s the 21st century so we need worry not because the excellent automated telephone systems will sort it out for us! They have a very simple to use voice recognition system with an understanding and apologetic male voice THAT DOESN’T BASTARD WELL WORK. Of course it doesn’t! VR doesn’t work. You’ll know when it does because all of the call-centre workers will get the sack over night. But still Parcel Force use it. I can only imagine the reason for this is that it is a very cheap an efficient way of pissing the customers off so much that they give up in despair.

Some good things:

• Trac – A blog, Subversion repository viewer, and project management system in one easy-to-swally capsule. Gorgeous diff display too 🙂
• Synergy – share a mouse and keyboard with multiple machines, all running different operating systems with no hardware. And it’s free!
• csoap – SOAP in pure C with http client and server.
• The last 30 picture uploads on livejournal – all human life, in pictures. A good way to kill those spare minutes/hours/years. Click and reload to lose your spare time.

Thanks to Nik for the first 2.

Makes you feel proud to be British it does! When our brave boys managed to rescue 3 hostages from the terrorists in Iraq. Not only that but, thanks to their superior intelligence, not a single shot was fired and no-one was even injured! And the whole rescue lasted a matter of minutes. Now, as skeptical as I am about patriotism and the military, I was quite impressed by this. The SAS have a very good reputation on the hostage rescue front, but usually at the expense of many other lives. In fact, it’s widely known that they are some of the most efficient killers on the planet…and that isn’t a criticism. That’s their job and they’re really good at it!

So when every rag printed 3 days worth of in-depth speculation, praise and jingoism about them, it was re-assuring to note that no-one was harmed….so presumably they managed to capture the kidnappers so we could interrogate them ?

Well no.

In fact, a few days after the SAN stopped waving union jacks it transpired that the kidnappers had fucked off 2 days before !.

No wonder “not a shot was fired”! I could have rescued them, and still got back to the hotel in time for a beta-blocker! All you’d need is a car and a pair of scissors. And I wouldn’t have demanded the geezers’ thanks on international telly in return.

The fact that the US Army were involved should make us grateful that no other allied forces were shot in friendly fire during the process I suppose. But when the Christian peace activist refused to wrap himself in a union flag and volunteer his back-side to the SAS NAFFI, we really shouldn’t be angry with him.

Personal stuff: we’re a hairs-breadth from getting me a work Visa in the U.S. but have some really tedious paperwork to sort out. Work has been intense but enjoyable and my mum made us the best lasagne in the history of pasta last Sunday….which was mothers day. I know, we’re supposed to treat her on that day but there are two mitigating circumstances:

1. We got the week wrong and brought her a pot-plant the week before
2. We’re going to go to a fish restaurant in Greenwich next week with the family. The reviews are either 10 or 1. Hopefully we’ll get a 10 experience 🙂

Normal, worldly, people will fail to be excited about a documentary exposing estate agents as a bunch of lying, cheating, selfish, nasty, bastards. Everyone in the civilised world knows that surely? However tonight’s BBC1 programme ‘Whistleblower’ demonstrated the problem with such simplicity and clarity that I can only encourage everyone to watch it, even if you know the truth already.
They’re like lawyers – don’t play with them; they’re dirty and covered in germs.

BTW – Expats, and any other people who like UK TV should set themselves up with accounts on uknova.com. They provide high-speed access to all of the brit-tv that isn’t available on DVD/Video to those brits with broken videos, ex-pats and TV connaisseurs. This includes documentaries, soaps and just about everything else….anyway

They even provided me with links to a load of material from recently deceased comic hero

Linda Smith

Even a fortnight after she died I’m still upset. If you don’t know the name then try to get hold of a few News Quiz, HIGNFY, or “A brief history of timewastings” because she was great.

Michele and I also watched Watchdog tonight and played PR bingo. Every week they slag-off businesses for their poor behaviour, practices and service. Every week some monkey ends up trying to defend the company. Fuck knows why. It’s not that persons fault. But they turn up and then read a string of trite cliches to the camera while we all sit at home thinking “you twat”. We came up with a list of things this week’s poor cow would have to deal with…it was a tough call because she was defending Parcel Force (a private spin-off of the recently privatised Royal Mail)….the list we constructed included:

1. Last year we delivered X million packages
2. We’re constantly striving to improve our customer service
3. Our business has increased X amount over Y years
4. Look you fuckers it’s not my fault, we all know that our decision to employ anyone off the street who will accept our diabolical wages to do a skilled job was for money reasons. None of us like it but as long as we get our 30 pieces of silver we can’t complain and have to do our pointless jobs

Funnily enough we get about 20 points on list item 1 and zero points on item 4.

A week ago I got hassled by some Eltham skallies. They yelled “Jesus!” and “Hip Hop rules” as I walked past, obviously because I looked like the messiah and clearly love heavy metal…. I was on the phone at the time and didn’t have the opportunity to tell them that not only was I an atheist but I was also going to hip-hop concerts before they were twinkles in their daddies’ hogs-eyes. Pity. Mind you when I was their age I did exactly the same thing to people walking past.