Some quick thingies:

• The Top 500 Worst Passwords – if your password is in this list, change it, then slap yourself about the head with a brick.
• The inevitable rooting of the G1 with RC30 – there was never any need for panic because xda-developers are powered by win.
• Charlie B’s Screenwipe Review of the Year – is right good.
• Religulous – Atheists needn’t bother. Agnostics, lapsed catholics, and the confused, need only to watch the last five minutes, but they need to watch it over and over again. Religious people just need to see the film once because if it didn’t make a difference the first time then they’re clearly unable to process simple logic and are doomed to a life of slavery.

Back to work tomorrow…oh bollocks…

Now that we live in the future, a week can be compressed into less than a minute. Consequently, our eight day trip to London lasted around 85 seconds from start to finish. The memories are still intact but feel more like a dream than anything real. Oddly, while we were in London we felt similarly about the life we left behind in Philadelphia; it surely can’t have been real. Quotidian events, like taking a bus along Lee High Road, emphasised how real and normal that life was compared to the obviously ethereal dream of a life on a different continent. Now we’re back in our home, with our birds and our own settings on the thermostat. In a typical autistic male style, here is a list of some of the things we did while we were home/away:

• Got ill. We both managed to have at least two days of snotty, hurty, coughy misery while we were there. Of course, we’re still ill now, but it’s just that tedious phase of permanent dreariness that lingers on for months after the main viral assault has been impeded. On the upside it’s quite a nice feeling to know we’ve smuggled in some foreign cold germs into America without getting caught by Customs or DHS.
• Christmas day and Boxing day! Too much food, too much drink, and an excess of quality telly! The Christmas Radio Times still gives me goose bumps when I get to the pages that eschew the day and date in favour of the magical titles “Christmas Eve”, “Christmas Day” and “Boxing Day”. It’s like normal life and time are suspended for a while, and instead you are encouraged to veg out in front of the TV watching christmas specials and old comedy films. BTW Brits: stop banging on about how crap the telly is these days. Alright, you have some tremendously banal shit available to you these days, but it’s still orders of magnitude better than what our American shit-pump has to offer.
• Lying in a bath listening to Radio 4. Sublime.
• Curry! Oh god we had a couple of arse-kicking curries while we were over there. Literally. In fact we spent our last night at home with my parents, my sister, and her boyfriend, eating a superb take-away and watching a tribute to Humphrey Lyttleton…could it have been any better ?
• Seeing friends. Actually we didn’t do nearly enough of this. But it’s indescribably enjoyable to meet up with people you really, really miss, and talk bollocks with them. The sad part is that on a short trip you end up spending all your time catching-up and never get a chance to chat the way you would if you lived back there. I miss the everyday after-work chats over a pint or two…
• Pubs! Ever tried “Oyster Stout” ? It is the perfect lubricant for social interaction in a warm, welcoming, boozer.
• Bletchley Park: Mecca for geeks. There were 15 of us, plus two children, and it was fucking ace. I can’t describe how excellent it was to see everyone again.
• Air travel via Terminal 5. Call it modernism if you will, I call it being too tight to buy plasterboard/dry-wall. 50 years ago I can imagine it being thrilling to see the inside of a lift as it goes up and down, but nowadays it just looks like they couldn’t be bothered to finish it properly. And the architects really need to be reminded that their artwork also needs to function as something beyond a big glass shed. It feels like a month before completion, one of the junior architects ran into the office in a panic shouting “Oh no! Where are we going to put all the aeroplanes ?” and was answered by the senior architect with “Oh yes, how tiresome. Couldn’t we stick them on the back somewhere, out of the way ?”
  How can anyone design a brand new air terminal, the purpose of which is to connect passengers with planes, so badly that it still depends on buses and trains to get the passengers from the departure lounge to the actual bit of airfield where the planes are ? It’s almost as if the architects have their heads stuck so far up their arses that they don’t know what the fuck they’re supposed to be doing.

Nice to be home though.

Our little Humph used to really relax herself whenever we played Air. It would appear that “wor Leo” reacts in the same way. I wish he and Humph could have met – they would have loved each other.

We’ve had a week or so of Christmassyness and it’s feeling good! And that doesn’t even include the excitement we both feel about going back to London in two days time! How did that happen ?

Last Friday was our staff “do” [Americans: “do” means a party sort of thing] and it was most amusing. We went to a huge bowling place at 11am, that had a working bar. Nuff said. A couple of hours later we went to a bonkers Italian Family Theme Restaurant and got arseholed whilst talking bollocks and eating some vaguely Italian food. That’s a good day, especially when the company picked up the tab. So much better than my experience last year when I worked for Shiti.

We’re both really excited about coming back to London, but Michele may be even more excited than I: she hasn’t been back for over a year.

Arses – there were loads of things of axis-shifting proportions that I wanted to rant about. Be thankful for my crap memory.

For many, many years I have harboured a deep grudge against printers. Apart from the old text-only models, that were astonishingly expensive and astonishingly reliable, all printers are shit and exist solely to make the world a worse place. Evidence as follows:

1. They are scabs. Printing is a very skilled job and very esoteric. Some of the greatest minds of human existence have been printers (e.g. Ben Franklin, Gutenberg, the Wright Brothers etc). When you need something put to paper for anything other than a few quick notes, go to a proper printer! It’ll be far cheaper in the long run than buying some $30 nightmare from Best Buy.
2. They don’t work. No-one, to my knowledge, has calculated the total cost printers create to the economy, but I suspect that the current economic “crisis” could well be down to wasted hours in every office in the world caused daily by printers not doing the only job they were created to do: printing shit out.
3. They’re almost never needed. 99.9% of the world’s printers aren’t needed. If you want to print photos, go to a printer’s shop. If you want to print out your emails, you should be arrested.
4. They’re way too cheap. Everyone buys one and then calls me when the fucking thing breaks.
5. They are a rip off. Oh, they’re so cheap to buy – what a bargain. When you run out of ink next time, work out how much it would cost to get a new printer compared to replacing the cartridge; bearing in mind the printer comes with a cartridge. The mechanics are so cheap and crap that they will break within a year.
6. They are so annoying! You ask them to do their job and they sit there beeping at you to press their buttons for no reason and then they jam up.

Alright, enough. But it was a life affirming experience when I watched Office Space for the first time and realised I wasn’t alone in my hatred of these ridiculous devices.

If Bernard Madoff had been British, and had prospered in the UK, don’t you think the papers over there would have made far more use of puns ? I mean the guy’s name is pronounced “Made Off” – it’s a headline writer’s dream. But so far I haven’t seen a single paper taking advantage of it. Maybe they all think it’s too obvious. Well that never stopped The Sun. Perhaps they all think it’s too serious to joke about. Well that never stopped The Sun.
Regardless, I’m in awe of this guy. He made an absolute fortune by ripping off not just the ultra-rich, but the most grasping, greedy, odious, ultra-rich, snobs he could find. He even had selective entrance requirements to weed out the people with too little public-image or [I’d love to believe] not enough to lose. Either way, the guy was very clever and could easily have ducked out earlier, taking all of the money and disappearing…but he chose not to. You can’t put this down to plain greed, because we’re talking about billions of dollars. It can only have been boredom or guilt. Perhaps the guilt he felt actually turned him on all of these years, in some sort of S and M way. Perhaps when he confessed, he finally managed to come.
Either way Bernard, I salute you.
Nicola Horlick sounded almost rabid when she criticised the American Government for failing to regulate his egregious liberties. Communist bitch.

Recipe for a shit day

1. Live in a country full of people who think that redistribution of wealth is an evil idea at the same time that they avoid doctors visits because they don’t have healthcare.
2. Make sure the sky is “England Grey” and that there’s a perpetual drizzle all day.
3. Get out of your comfy bed, unsnuggle your comfy wife and deal with going to work.
4. Ensure you have to drive along I76, because then you can watch some of the most appalling drivers try to understand why they have just crashed and are having to stand in the rain.
5. Listen to the radio on the drive. It doesn’t matter whether you listen to the pathetic, sponsor ridden, parochial NPR, or a “breakfast” programme with pedestrian crap music and a couple of jocular cunts trying to break boundaries in the most humourless, unimaginative way possible; either way it will help you get depressed.
6. Ensure you have a career in software development, are working in a cube, and have written some code that seemingly does nothing but crash in creative ways.
7. Get your wife to convince you the house is full of CO. You can then spend most of the morning attributing your tiredness and general feelings of malaise to the CO poisoning…until your wife calls back to tell you the fire department have been and found that everything’s ok.
8. Work in a business park district that has no street lights, no pavements, and no drainage, so that walking to the bus stop in the rain involves getting soaked, covered in mud, and nearly killed three or four times.
9. Ensure the bus also travels on I76 so that you can enjoy the rocky facade of the hillside as you nudge past it at 4mph.
10. Get home at 7:30pm, eat, watch a bit of “The Da Vinci Code”, realise it’s shit and then realise it’s bed time.

Actually, now that I’m sitting in our warm house, laptop on my lap, parrot on my shoulder, glass of red wine in my hand, and crab spag-bol in my belly…it all seems pretty good again.

Weird shit is afoot.

The Democrats are trying to bail-out the rich whilst closing libraries, swimming pools, and fire stations. At the same time the Republicans are trying to stop them. Someone has swapped their manuals.

Meanwhile, at the top level, the “new hope” is being accused of not being eligible for presidency by a bunch of die-hard wingnuts with loads of money instead of brains.

And on the ground, Citi have started to fire the wrong people; rather than go for the outrageously expensive decision avoiders that got them into this balls-up in the first place, they’ve started picking off the people on the low rungs who actually do some work.

I can only hope that all who were involved in the decision to cover Citigroup’s arse with $300bn will die in a fire.

Anyone who works for a company that has gone out of business recently would be well advised to tool-up, break back in, and turn on the machines. Make the shit you were making before, but keep the money. It’s patriotic.

[P.S. The only station we can find over here reporting the Greek riots is the BBC.]

One of the things about Britain that I frequently miss is “The Quick Pint After Work ™.” So when an opportunity arises to go to the pub after work for a few, with some sound people, I attend enthusiastically. This last Friday celebrated the departure from my old job of someone I really liked and so was an excuse for a bunch of excellent people to go to T.Hogans (by Wissahickon Station). Going to the pub after work was as enjoyable as I remember it from the good old days, albeit lacking the excellent New Cross company. Nonetheless, it was just right, and the beer wasn’t to expensive either. When I say “beer”, I mean “beerated water” of course.

As the night went on I realized that I could either go home, or regret the rest of the evening, so I left while the rest of the posse planned their trip to “The Ballet” [ which was actually an excursion to some strip club in Conshohocken.]

It was a 25 minute walk home in the cold so I managed to refuel the beer scooter with a traditional Philly Cheesesteak. Brits need to realise that the traditional kebab compares poorly to the Cheesesteak.

Although obviously nothing compares to a proper after-pub curry.

The weekend involved watching some excellent films [Quantum of Solace, Pineapple Express, and Burn After Reading]. They were all superb – go and watch them!

Thanks to all of the nice people who sent us links to Louis Theroux’s Law And Disorder in Philadelphia. What the Brits need to know is that the scenes depicted there are as alien to us (10 miles from the action) as they are to you. It unintentionally painted a miserable picture of Philadelphia and enabled people like this tosser to talk bollocks.
This film could have been shot in London or Manchester. OK, perhaps the guy with the cow was unusual for those cities, but the rest is just run of the mill.
Personally, I was glad that Police were accurately portrayed:

• They were [initially at least] well meaning.
• They were utterly useless at attacking the root cause of the problem.
• Instead they attacked the easily attackable such as a bunch of kids smoking weed in a car, and a few loonies/tweakers on the street.
• In doing so, they alienated just about everyone in the neighbourhoods that need the most help.
• When they did nick the real culprit, he was out of jail in 5 hours. I know people who’ve been stuck in nick for longer than that for drunk and disorderly…

As I said, just like London and Manchester.
The most annoying aspect to all of this is that the whole problem could be solved with a few million quid and advice from people who actually understand the problem. Instead, we give billions to a wunch of bankers because they can’t even do their own jobs without fucking it up for the rest of us.

Much like the Superbowl and the “World Series”, most people outside the US have no idea, nor any desire to know, when thanksgiving occurs. For the record, it was yesterday. Over here it seems to be more important and significant than Christmas – you can tell because you generally get two days off for it whereas Christmas only deserves one. Despite the importance given to it by most of North America, the capitalists have seemingly failed to commandeer it for their own filthy ends, and it remains a celebration centered around family, food and drink…which I like. It’s the part of Christmas that still appeals to me and here it is, but without all of the ornaments, presents and tat that normally goes with it.
We spent the day with Michele’s father’s side of the family. They opted for the restaurant option [very wise in my opinion – if you’re going to have a day of nice food and nice company then pay someone to wash up and cook for you at least] and it was great. Not as good as my mum’s roast dinner, but that’s a given. Despite arriving armed with political ammo we also managed to avoid any need for any unpleasantness by avoiding the thorny issues.
On the way home Michele had the idea of visiting the other side of the family, in case our new nephew was still there and available for cooing-over. He was, and so we stopped by. He now has open eyes, a larger frame and a healthy weight. His eyes still can’t focus properly and so he seems to look through everyone, and gets obsessed with places with interesting light – like the glassware cupboard. It was nice to see everyone and it really started feeling Christmassy!
I had intended to blog about Black Friday, but just Google it and you can imagine how we feel about it already.
Instead, we went to the zoo which turned out to be an excellent way to spend the day.
By the way, in case you still don’t foam at the mouth when someone says “Citi” to to you then top-up your anger here.