Pinochet dies! – Hooray!
He never received a sentence or adequate punishment for his crimes against humanity – Boo!
He’s been in quite a bit of pain recently though – Hooray!
“He died surrounded by his family,” – Boo!
Margaret Thatcher is said to be greatly saddened – Hooray!
She’s still not dead – Boo!
She’s confused, insane and utterly bewildered. As a result I personally suspect she shits herself regularly – Hooray!
etc

Astonishing stuff in the news: the British Police have announced that they are treating the murder of the murdered Russian ex-KGB agent, Alexander Litvinenko, who was recently murdered in London, as murder.

In other news:

• George Bush is told by everyone in the world that the failed war he illegally created in Iraq, that has led to civil war, has caused civil war and failed.
• Pope catholic.
• and so forth…

When I was a boy (and old shep was a pup) everyone in the UK got given a free set of telephone directories. If the number you wanted wasn’t there, or opening and using a book was too much for you, then you could pick up the phone, dial a short, memorable, number (192) and ask them to look it up for you. This service was called “directory enquiries” (DQ for short) and was free.
“Ridiculous!” I hear you cry. “How can the customers benefit from the increased efficiency, competition driven low prices and customer choice afforded by the free market if it’s a free service?”
Well that’s a good point – if there’s only one number and it’s free to use then how can there be any improvement ?
So, the government came up with a simple but brilliant solution that has led to so much room for improvement it’s difficult to see anything else.
Nowadays, instead of an undemocratic single three digit number the consumer has a choice of dozens of six digit numbers, all of which cost a fucking fortune and most of which are subcontracted to overseas (Indian/Pakistani) call centres. The free market does it again.

However, one enterprising company (118118) have introduced a revolutionary new service – “FREE directory enquiries“. What a revolutionary idea! There are three catches:

• You have to listen to adverts.
• It uses voice recognition, which as I am always banging on about, does not work.
• It doesn’t work.

Another free market triumph.
Here’s the BBC’s version.

M&S managed to relaunch themselves by getting a bunch of models (including Twiggy) to dance around in their undies to a few rare grooves. Matalan followed suit with some slightly crapper tunes and Melanie Sykes in Twiggy’s place. Fair enough; Matalan is to Marks and Spencer as Mel Sykes is to Twiggy.
But now, Debenhams have pulled rank on both of them with their latest advertising campaign. It features a “state of the art” Santa who is thin (natch) and wears a red suit (bien sur), has trimmed his beard (yeah – I always thought that original beard was a bit too rrrrock), drives a motorised sleigh (reindeer are so passe), and is dancing to a def version of “Santa Baby” that sounds like it was produced by the DJ equivalent of Ronnie Hazelhurst. It’s impossible to describe how bad this tune is but if I told you it has someone saying “DJ Santa on the Wheels of Steel” over it, perhaps you’ll have some inkling of the enormous distance by which the mark was overshot.

Once upon a time there was an Emperor who was a bit crap. One day he had a thought: “what if I were to be rebranded ? Maybe people would take me more seriously and perhaps I’d be less crap.”
So the Emperor called the finest consultants in the land and gave them a ludicrous amount of his wealth. The consultants returned in 6 months with a small piece of fag packet, onto which was scrawled a badly drawn crown and the phrase “B0 Emperor!”. The Emperor was furious when he saw how little they had produced in return for his great wealth and ordered the guards to kill the consultants.
“No your highness,” pleaded the consultants, “this is no ordinary logo! It’s a magic logo! It will make everyone in the land respect you except for the very, very foolish.”

You know the rest so I won’t bother to continue.

On a totally different topic, Goldsmiths College has recently been rebranded and they have a glorious new logo:

But it’s more than just a logo! It’s a new visual identity! At this point I feel I should stress that just because it’s the same as the previous logo, but in a different font, and cost £143,000 ($224,000), doesn’t mean it’s an obvious fucking con. It also doesn’t mean that the management there are a bunch of pig-ignorant dullards who don’t know their arses from their elbows.
All I’m saying is, if I were to be put in charge of rebranding, I’d want something more impressive like this:

But that’s because I’ve been getting into PimpZilla a bit too much…and GoldAmp.

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!

You forgot to mention the painful joys of passing a gigantic 2. As you
stand beside the throne, panting with effort and tears of joy and relief
in your eyes, you hit the flush handle and are then presented with the
sight of your ginormous 2 pitching stern-up like a sinking ship and
whirling round and round with the water, coating the insides of the bowl
in all four quadrants. It is, if done at the office toilet, a
statement: "I was here, and I passed what was to be passed, and I did it
mightily. Your mere skidmarks do not impress me." (that's assuming
you're a thoughtless twit and don't apply the brush to it at once)

Just a cheery bit of scatology to entertain you.

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.