More and more headlines refer to amounts of money in the billions these days and, sadly, this doesn’t actually mean a lot to people; mainly because it’s a big number, and humans don’t cope with them too well. In fairness, the UK used to have a much bigger billion (one with twelve zeros after it), but nowadays we use the puny American billion (one with nine zeros after it). Regardless it’s still a massive amount of money.

Here are some examples of interesting billions:

• £1 billion

  …is how much you would make if you earned £30,000 a year and worked for the next 33,000 years or so.

• £1 billion

  …the total cost of building over 20 brand new state-of-the-art hospitals.

• £9.3 billion

  …conservative estimate of the cost of hosting the London Olympics as of March 2007. many people think that it will be a total disaster and a huge waste of money, but as Armando Ianucci observered “That’s what they said about the Millenium Dome.”
  In retrospect 800,000,000 quid seems like a bargain by comparison.

• £ 12 billion

  …an amount of money sent by the US to Iraq that got “lost”.

• £ 12.4 billion

  …how much money the UK government are pissing away already on the disgraceful NHS National Programme for IT.

• £ 20 billion

  …the cost of updating Britain’s crap Trident nuclear system to ensure an adequate defence against…erm…well…you know…the enemy…and bad men.

Today was the first day for many weeks that I woke up knowing the day was my own and no work would be involved. I’d taken the day as annual leave with the intention of going up to the Hogarth exhibition at the Tate. And that’s what we did! Michele and I got the 436 bus up to Vauxhall and then walked across the bridge, being sure to take a couple of pics of the MI6 building. As we crossed the bridge a bunch of particularly graceful and skillful seagulls performed for us. Even a Heron joined in the fun and allowed us half an hour of ogling it through the little monocular I always carry (present from my mother-in-law). Such a beautiful bird.

The whole Tate experience was wonderful! We had lunch in their expensive but delicious cafe, and then spent two hours looking at the huge collection of Hogarth pictures.

Several hours, a pub visit and a nice pizza later, my brain is buzzing with images and ideas from the exhibition. Thankfully I spent 12 quid on a book that covers a lot of the material we observed and so I don’t have to let the memories fade.

If you can, go and see it! It’s only a tenner and it will keep your dendrites busy for long a while.

Also, have a look and then envy the skill involved in creating something wonderful like this:
http://www.molecularmachines.org.uk/ Nuff respec an ting to Dr Dave!

Putting on some mellow bird-calming music, such as Zero-7, really does mellow little Humph’s head. She doesn’t care that Zero-7 are merely a cheap pastiche of Air..she likes Air! To her it’s all nice.
So as I type she’s drifting off to sleep on the arm of the sofa after successfully removing and playing with a particularly fluffy bit of feather. She takes such good care of her feathers.

Michele is away and we’re both sulking as a result. I think Humph blames me.

The amount of work I’ve been doing has started making me feel like I’m in prison recently. Apart from work all I’ve done is go to a pub within five minutes walk of the sofa and drink too much, which in the long run makes me feel worse.

I had loads of stuff I wanted to blog about, but of course I didn’t do it at the time so I’ve forgotten. Instead here are some things I knew already but have been forced to re-learn recently:

• When doing anything in the kitchen or bathroom that is time consuming, don’t go and “check your email” while it’s going on. Email checking leads to web clicking, which leads to wikipedia/bloglines/boing-boing/space_ghetto, which leads to anything from no tea, to a house fire or flood. The flood one happened quite a few years ago and the house fire one has been only narrowly avoided 3 times in the last year.
• Doing two part-time jobs actually means doing two full time jobs.
• Working with Windows is an utterly miserable way to spend your life.
• In the words of Sean Lock, “don’t give anybody your address ever, ever, ever”. The same goes for your phone number. Phones are so wrong – when you call someone it’s like shouting “Oi! It’s convenient for me to talk to you now, so pay attention, stop whatever your doing, no matter how engrossing or intellectually demanding it is, and talk to me for bloody ages whilst I talk at you.
• Birds are amazing.
• Oracle is a huge monster that is best avoided.
• PostgreSQL should only be used by computer scientists who don’t have the need for something fast, reliable and that actually works in the field for massive amounts of real data. Use MySQL.
• Margaret Thatcher really was as evil as you remember. Anyone who doesn’t agree should be entitled to the best psychiatric care available.
• If you arrange to meet someone in the pub, on their birthday, at 8pm, don’t get there at mid-day. You won’t be much of a positive asset to the social function when the friend arrives.

Nothing to do with our Humphrey, but this is the most funky parrot on the planet. Check the moves, especially around 50 seconds in.

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.