Something that has improved my quality of life considerably in the last few days is a firefox theme called PimpZilla. If you have a love for the finer things in life coupled with terminally bad taste then you will love the bling, the fur, the gold scrollbars and the leopardskin. Furthermore you will gain the highest respect from pimps, rappers, players and many other baad dudes. It’s that little touch of class that you deserve. Because you’re worth it etc.

The other life-enriching plugin I’m currently loving is FlashBlock. If you’re sick of annoying sounds, flashing animations and pop-up/unders but need flash for certain things then install it now. All flash is blocked by default and replaced with a small icon. If you want to see it, just click the icon and you’re in business. Coupled with AdBlock you can PwN the web.

Instead of the usual Friday routine, which if nothing else is usually enjoyable at the time, this week I had the life-affirming experience of a double endoscopy; one up each end.

It was the worst hospital experience I’ve ever had and, apart from the loss of dignity, the misery and the sobbing, also resulted in the loss of most of my front teeth. I’m also convinced that despite being fitted with a cannula I was never actually given the seditive I was promised. He told me it was like drinking ten pints but while they were blocking my entire throat with razor blades and shoving barbed hosepipes up my arse it felt more like ten pints of coffee. I was very un-sedated. I reckon they wanted me out of there quickly.

So for the past few days I wasn’t in a very good mood. In fact I was on a right downer. This evening, in a pathetically geeky and optimistic atempt to cheer myself up, I decided to perform some almost totally unnecessary surgery on our trusty server, “teapot”. By simply replacing the 256M DIMM with two 128M DIMMS (don’t ask why) the primary hard-disk broke. Instead of working, as it was doing perfectly happily five minutes before, it simply sat there occasionally making screeching noises that really made the parrot feel uncomfortable. She’d already had a troubling day too, what with sitting through an episode of TOS Star Trek; the sound effects on the Enterprise bridge seemingly mean something significant to parakeets as she does her worried squawk repeatedly while the programme airs.

Anyway, we had a saturday night curry, some wine and watched “Shaun of the Dead” which has improved my mood.

Perhaps it would be better to count my blessings. At least I’m not a member of the England Cricket team.

Adam Laurie demonstrates how easy it is to read, and potentially clone, the new highly secure UK passports. From a distance. Without the owner knowing.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/idcards/story/0,,1950226,00.html

Last night I released a stupid little blogging tool called Ploppy. It’s a little plugin for WordPress that lets you add a line to each blog describing the state of your bowel movements using the Bristol Stool Scale. For example:

Stools: Type 4 Like a sausage or snake, smooth and soft

Anyway, this morning I received an appreciative email that nearly caused me to issue a Type 7:

Subject: ploppy rules!

Cheers,
Mike

I love the Internet 🙂

“Every time you turn on your new car, you’re turning on 20 microprocessors. Every time you use an ATM, you’re using a computer. Every time I use a settop box or game machine, I’m using a computer. The only computer you don’t know how to work is your Microsoft computer, right?”

   — Scott McNealy, CEO, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Because neither of us get enough exercise nor spend enough proper time with each other, Michele and I decided to get off the bus early on the way to my parents’ house today; sounds pathetic I know. We alighted in Kidbrooke and, in a desperate attempt to get away from main roads, decided to walk through Sutcliffe Park. Now, in my youth, this was a very dull, flat, park that was only ever really used by local football teams on a Sunday or the occasional funfair. However, a few years ago it was redeveloped and from the road it just looks like they dug a few ditches and left it.
Today we discovered that the redevelopment was a lot more impressive; now Sutcliffe park is a beautiful oasis with the backdrop of urban shite known as “The Ferrier Estate”.
What the council has done is create a wetland environment complete with bridges, a lake, and reedy marshland; it looked just like a mini wetlands centre. We wandered through the idyllic pastures towards the edge of the lake where a few families with young children were feeding the ducks, geese and moorhens. It was beautiful!

One noticeable difference, beyond the landscaping, was the people. When I was a kid they would have been white, battered-faced, fishwife women with tearaway kids shouting “fuck” all the time. Now they were excited but well behaved kids, with fishwife mums all wearing hijabs. Everyone else there was Polish. I love it.

As it was late in the day we had to leave soon after, but on the way out of the park, right where the Quaggy enters, we saw a Heron! A Heron in Sutcliffe Park!
There was also some loony bloke spouting incoherent, growling, claptrap into a video camera with a passionate by slightly mad voice. Look out for him on future Al Quaeda martyrdom videos.

One of the nicest things in the world is having a small, fluffy, green bird, with a beautiful pink neck, perch on the top of your laptop screen, grinding her beak.

Now don’t say I didn’t tell you to Choose Lewisham. And what did you do ? You didn’t Choose Lewisham did you ? No!

As a result of your negligence the poor bosses have had to make sacrifices. Yes, sacrifices! Wonderful, hard-working people like Claire Perry, the Chief Executive of Lewisham Hospital Trust, have had to personally sacrifice 68 of their staff as a result of your indifference. In her own words Claire Perry spells out the simple truth:

“The more people who choose to come to Lewisham, the more income we will get and the better our finances will be.”

It’s that simple. So go out and fucking choose Lewisham will you? I did, even though I wasn’t given a choice, so you can too. If you don’t then they’ll sack even more staff.

Perhaps even more shocking than the 68 staff they sacked are two of the senior bosses who are also about to lose their jobs. These particular people, Vivien Rhodes and Barry Etherton, are far more important than any of the 68 others; you can tell because they both earn around £90,000 which means they must be extremely skilled and talented. They also have further to fall than a bunch of common-or-garden nurses and cleaners so it’ll be harder for them. Thankfully the hospital has wisely decided to bung them £100,000 to cushion the harsh blow. Oh…and they’ll be taking them back on in a consultancy role. Even though the Trust is in financial shite, I confidently expect canny financial management like this will help them save the day.

[Don’t read this if you are eating or have a weak stomach]
Santorum got shafted by Bob Casey Jr during the last night’s American renaissance. This makes me feel a lot better about our impending move. To counter this nice feeling, and staying on the subject of Santorum, I had another visit to the hospital today. This time it was an investigation into a recent eruption of piles – well pile singular in fact but who cares – so as you can imagine I was thrilled to bits at the prospect.

Over the past few years I’ve had to get my pants off for more doctors and nurses than is healthy outside of a “Confessions” film plot; but even so, piles examinations are a little too intimate and embarrassing for me to cope with as quotidian. Fortunately the name of the doc on my chitty was “Mr E Larch” and so I felt slightly less awkward in the build up to the treatment.

However, maybe it’s the water in Lewisham but it would seem that the arse section of Lewisham Hospital is snowed under with patients these days and so instead of “Mr E Larch” I was dealt with by some young female doctor who looked not a day over 19.

The whole experience was too horrific for even me to document but if you want a vague insight into the scene, imagine lying on your side, facing the wall, and having a young woman, an older male and another student sticking fingers and objects of various lengths up your arse so high that it feels like they’re going to choke you.

I left my dignity at the hospital gates and instead walked out with two future appointments, hideous flashbacks, and an enema kit.

Choose Lewisham? My arse…

Remember that Christian-fascist preacher, and close personal friend of
George W, who threw Richard Dawkins out of his church in the documentary ?
Well bugger me if he didn’t turn out to be having a homosexual affair like
a big fat lying hypocritical bag of shit:

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/11/02/leader_of_megachurch.html
update here:
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/11/03/voice_mails_are_from.html