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 ?

A couple of weeks back, my sister followed in the family tradition of dumping some expensive equipment into a bowl of water. In her case the equipment was her iriver H10 mp3 player. I took it home to try and fix it and, when I got back from Mexico, I took it to bits with some Mexican Torx screwdrivers. There was a tiny bit of liquid damage to a little, soldered, battery, but other than that it looked fine. So I put it back together and, magically, it worked perfectly.

Unfortunately, my sister had bought a new player in the meantime and so she had no option than to donate the iriver to me. Terribly unfortunate state of affairs.

Obviously I wasn’t going to try and do anything useful with it while it was crippled with all of that Microsoft MTP crap and so I decided to upgrade it. A couple of near brickings later and I was losing faith in the iriver firmware.

To cut a long story short, I found RockBox and installed it. What a beautiful piece of software. It’s a complete operating system and user interface for a variety of mp3 players, including the iPod. Unlike the firmware that normally comes with your mp3 player, this is written by and for its users. It’s not trying to keep an eye on you and it’ll play a whole bunch of formats including mp3, Vorbis (ogg), AAC and FLAC. It isn’t soiled by an association with filthy WMA/DRM and it’s also totally customisable, has themes support, and allows
you to run external “plugins” such as games (including Doom), utilities and tools.
And, of course, it’s free! I love it. If you get the chance, liberate your old mp3 hardware and experience some quality programming.

The other good thing about it is that its name is a classic Run DMC track

erm…sorry about the last blog entry. It was written during a period of extreme jet lag combined with some celebratory red wine. I won’t delete it, simply as a reminder to myself of the perils of BUI.

Jet-lag is a bit of a bugger but nothing compared to the torture of being confined in an aluminium tube with a bunch of irritating, screaming, children for two hours. Once the plane has taken off you can walk about, sleep, watch the film, and have a pee. Before you take off you’re supposed to sit still and deal with hell.
Luckily, it was only two hours before our plane left the ground in Toronto and headed towards the UK. No children’s lives were taken.
Now we’re back, and reunited with dear Humphrey, we only have our memories to comfort us through the cold rain of London.
Our visit was as perfect as any holiday can be. Apart from spending some quality time with Alex, his family, Tony, Catalina, and everyone else we also enjoyed the food, car-horns, weather, buildings, people and history of Mexico. We even enjoyed our experiences of the locals pre-judging us in the way that we would them in London.
No-one speaks English there. In fact they’re almost as arrogant about their unilinguality as the English. A white face with blonde hair is a signal of massive stupidity combined with a massive wallet. Oh dear.

“How much for this bracelet?”
“For you, as you speak such good Spanish, almost free”

The streets of Mexico City smell pretty similar to those of London except for the overpowering smell of their crap sewage system and the slightly nasty smell of fried corn.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved the tortillas and tacos that were in abundance in the streets; it’s just that it turns out to make proper tacos requires the production of some evil smelling gasses. Perhaps this is why so many taco vans were parked up by such smelly sewer outlets.

The amount earned per day on the Mexican minimum wage is around 40 pesos (£2; $4). We were paying more than that for the wireless Internet access in our hotel and it was still a major bargain. In fact, if you ever go to Mexico City (AKA DF) then Casa Gonzales is the place to stay.

In all we loved every minute of the trip. The weather, the wonderful people, the food, the buildings and the weddings. I even managed to indulge in one of my all-time favourite activities: wandering aimlessly around the city, talking all kinds of stuff, with Alex. If you’ve never tried it then perhaps you should. Call Alex, I’m sure he’ll understand.

At the end of it all I managed to leave my mobile in the cab that took us to the airport. We also managed to leave our bedtime MP3 player in the hotel. If ever you’ve doubted the existence of honesty and sociable behaviour, then please know that I’ve been re-united with both items. This is thanks to the cab driver, the cab company, Alex, Alex’s mum and the wonderful people at Casa Gonzales

Flying into a city at night affords those by the window a wonderful schematic view of the town as described by its lights. Generally speaking, all cities look similar from the air: small, isolated pools of amber light from the outlying villages become larger and more frequent until they eventually join together to form the central city. If you look into the distance you can usually see the edge of the central sprawl as it dissipates back into blackness.
Coming into Mexico City was not like this. People always tell you that Mexico city is “huuuge” or “absolutely massive” but it wasn’t until we’d descended low enough to see the lights that the vastness became truly apparent. At the stage where you can see the city, you are already inside it. The city extends as far as you can see in any direction and appears as a huge duvet of lights over a body of mountains. Every now and again we observed large dark areas and tried to establish what they were. Were they lakes ? Parks ? Holes ?
It was only once we’d descended lower still that we realised they were huge, self-contained, mountains poking through the duvet. There you go; it’s so big that it has mountains in it! Ten minutes of flying and we were still over the city and still we couldn’t see the edges. Suddenly I realised why I didn’t understand the maps we were sent in preparation: it’s just too big to grok at street-map level.

We’ve been here for nearly a week now and we’re only just getting our heads around the geography.

I’d planned to write a long rambling blog detailing the minutiae of the trip thus far, but apart from the fact that you wouldn’t read it, I can’t be arsed. So here is our trip to Mexico City in pictures together with wedding pictures. Animal lovers (bird lovers especially) may also like to see our pictures of Mexico City Zoo.

Michele and Tony really went all out to learn Spanish and I’m so proud of them. Tony now speaks so well he managed to have full understanding with Catalina, the friend of Alex he’s staying with. Michele speaks well enough to converse with cab drivers rabbiting at full speed. Even I’ve gone from knowing nothing to being able to order food and drinks, ask directions, and comprehend cab drivers when they’re trying to persuade Michele that they’d make better husbands than me 🙂

Seeing Alex again has been wonderful. I was filling up at the wedding.

More to come…