| Thursday 23rd November 2006 16:37MST | → 1 Comments |
I watched Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest on DVD with Terry the other night and have one thing to say: I want my two-and-a-half hours back.
Terry is out playing bridge. He seems to be recovering from the dental work (actually, the stress on his jaw from the extended effort required to remove the tooth). He’s otherwise busying himself making xmas cards, doing xmas shopping and arranging the xmas decorations at my work.
| Monday 20th November 2006 15:17MST | → 1 Comments |
Terry has had to have an emergency dental appointment as he has an infection around a rotten tooth and has been in severe pain for some days. Seeing as it was a private affair and will be paid for by his travel insurance (I hope!), we had our pick of dentists (which is certainly not the case for fee-paying NHS patients such as I - there now seem to be only four dentists in the whole of Surrey offerring that).
I chose Oasis Dental Practice as it looked quite professional, they had a number of dentists working there (so Terry would supposedly be seen quickly) and were in town so I could pop across from work to pay the bill.
He ended up having a tooth out, which took around 45 mins to do as it apparently required a fair bit of hacking. Now he’s gone from antibiotics to industrial quantities of painkillers and is feeling quite rough. The price was surprisingly reasonable too - considerably less than when I went into hospital (privately) to have a couple of teeth out.
On Saturday we went into Godalming and did some early xmas shopping there as well as lunch.
Thursday, I was in London in the evening at a seminar at the BCS on the subject of Identity Management which was basically a Q&A with Simon Davies, who has done a lot of work on the subject, and a senior civil servant at the IPS. I wasn’t sure what to expect (I was there on the recommendation of my boss to help me decide my career path in the company - in this case in the area of technical consultancy) but it was more political than technical - especially the vocal, but incisive, questioning of a guy from NO2ID. I didn’t hang around afterwards.
The new fan was fitted without any hassles but either (a) isn’t truely silent or (b) might well be but the overall noise of the two other fans still makes something of a racket. However, at least its just air-noise rather than the previous rattling sound.
Read this report, ‘The Human Rights Act: the DCA and Home Office Reviews‘, from the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights that concludes that practically all the criticisms of the Human Rights Act are bollox made up by the right-wing tabloids and un-ably assisted by headline grabbing politicians in this current Government.
After that, read in this Parliamentary report, ‘Financial Management and Fraud in the European Union: Perceptions, Facts and Proposals‘, that there isn’t actually rampant fraud in the EU and the failure to sign off the accounts is because the auditing standards are too high. In fact, the head of the NAO stated that if he had to use the same standard he couldn’t sign off the UK accounts either.
Of course, the BBC seemingly having been got at by Eurosceptic w*nkers, in their news item described the chairman, Lord Radice, as a ‘Europhile Peer’ - almost in some crude attempt to discredit him. Sad.
| Saturday 11th November 2006 19:38MST | → 0 Comments |
Much going on, especially since Terry arrived on the 5th with no problems. He was tired the first day so not much happened. However, he has popped into my work a few times, spoken to the powers that be and new interior design projects are in the offing.
Today we went into London to visit a rather cool furniture shop called Aram. We also wandered around Covent Garden, Chinatown, Old Compton Street (oh no!) and finally ended up at Tate Modern where many hours were spent.
Tomorrow we’re (Sunday) lunching with Daryl and guest.
Recent purchases: Flow by Jon Jenkins.
Another recent purchase is an HP t3255 desktop machine which I took a shine to and ordered through the HP website (not even charged for delivery). It’s quite a high-spec machine for
| Wednesday 1st November 2006 16:12MST | → 3 Comments |
I can fully acknowledge that there has been a surge of spam emails in the past two months. I’m currently up to around 2000 per day! Thank god I moved to a host with spamassassin. However, it is true that spammers are getting wise to score-based anti-spam techniques by turning their messages into a slew of random (but semi-plausible) text with an embedded image containing the supposed amazing offer. At least, that makes up the majority of spam I’ve received recently.
Henry Porter is my hero. He sez:
There is much more, all of it enabled by Blair’s laws and encouraged by a vindictive and erroneous contention that defendants’ rights must be reduced in the pursuit of more and quicker prosecutions. Our prisons are full, problem teenagers are, by default, exiled to a kind of outlawry and every citizen becomes the subject of an almost hysterical need by the authorities to check up on and chivvy them.
I had some hope after the launch of the Lib Dem’s plan to scrap draconian and illiberal rules and felt they were a real alternative. When I received a recent flyer from the local party that just seemed to be designed to score points over the Tories on the local council, I became disillusioned again. More and more I feel British politics is in crisis because:
1) Politicians tend to disappoint (how many MPs are there in Parliament that you could honestly say you truely respect? I can only think of a two or three.
2) The people are too stupid to understand the real issues and too idle to get themselves educated. Consequently, they look to the tabloids to do the thinking for them - there is The Sun and the truth and never the twain shall meet.
3) Political parties are part of the problem not part of the solution.
4) Parliament is being sidelined and local government is being castrated by an authoritarian, centralising government.
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