You can't park there, mate

28 April 2004

A colleague of mine is fighting the local council after receiving a parket ticket. There were yellow lines running along the kerb but he parked in a marked bay adjacent to a parking meter. Would you believe it - he gets a ticket. He accuses the council of entrapment. Why have a marked bay AND yellow lines? These are conflicting signals. I'll be interested to know whether the appeal works.

Driver wins 'yellow lines' case. A man whose car was moved so yellow lines could be painted underneath in Hull wins his fight against a parking ticket. [BBC News]

Sophie Large

19 April 2004

This pretty poem was written by Sophie Large when she was fifteen. She died in a car accident at nineteen leaving a collection of writing her parents published as a tribute. They set up the Silver Lining Fund in her memory.

Sunglasses

In an attempt to escape reality I put on the sunglasses, Because my eyes were dazzled by life. I grew used to their comforting dimness And it was only when, many years later, I remembered I was wearing them, And found the courage to take them off, That I realised what I had missed.

Another poem of hers is Swans On The Wing which has a lovely lilting rhythm. The first verse is:

Swans On The Wing

There is nothing so simple Or so grave, or so gentle, Or powerful and graceful As swans on the wing.

Corporate Bollix

18 April 2004

My employer has sent me a memo asking me to complete various personnel documents. One of these is 'a pre-populated application form' - which is just a pompous way of saying the form has been partially completed. There, such nicer English, conveys the same thing but so much more elegantly.

Democratic Apathy

18 April 2004

This comment from In These Times is worth quoting in full because it seems to sum up a general disaffection with the US political classes. This disappointment is something that is happening in the UK as well. Reports last weekend said that the governing Labour Party is struggling to recruit new members. All this may have something to do with the way the electorate perceive that politicians will do whatever they want once in power. There is a lot of hand-wringing about falling voter numbers. At local and national elections fewer and fewer people are bothering to vote. In the last US election only 50% bothered to vote at all, this from a population that knows it is being asked to vote for the most important world leader. I don't see this as a problem for politicians. It must suit them to have a reducing audience since they can target the people that matter more easily - the floating voters who will vote. That means they can tailor their messages to that one tiny group. The problem is for the mass electorate. Apathy at the polls lets in unrepresentative governments who might think that if you can't be bothered to vote why should they care what you want.

You say in November the voters will "bring it on?" And I ask: bring who on? John Kerry? Is he not just another Yale, Skull and Bones alumni who is as much a child of priviledge and member of the same elite insatiably greedy class that Bush is enriching through this current presidency? Do you really think the American people are being given any kind of real choice in the coming presidential election? I don't. I see it as a loss either way with business as usual no matter who wins. Sadly, I remember being told as an impressionable youngster that if one worked hard and kept his nose clean one could someday grow up to be president. Not true. Only the children of the wealthy and the elite get to do that. Hell, even if somebody from a modest background somehow got through to run for office, he would have to sell his soul to those same elites just to get there and his own people would no longer recognize him. I ask you, humbly, where is our great democracy? America has sold it's soul and now the rich and greedy rule while the country sinks deeper and deeper into debt while making more and more enemies by abusing its power. I don't like where we are heading. Indeed, it frightens me. [In These Times]

Desk Tangle

13 April 2004

This is the mess under my colleague's desk - a snake's lair of twisty plastic coils. We had to send a volunteer under there last week to trace a line from a computer - we lost her for two days. It's a bit of a health and safety hazard for my colleague who often finds he's resting his feet on the sockets. If he gets up in a hurry he risks dragging this mess with him. Call the Health & Safety Officer!

Tangled Cables

Reith Lectures on mp3

12 April 2004

The BBC are offering this year's Reith lectures as mp3 downloads. The first one is available already but it's a 20mb file, which is huge. An alternative is to copy the lecture as text and then use a text reading program to listen to it on your PC. On the mac I just have to highlight the text press a key and off it goes. Not quite as good as hearing Wole Soyinka himself but a lot quicker to get to.

Welcome the liberators

10 April 2004

Cheney:The read we get on the people of Iraq is there is no question but that they want to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that. [...]

Russert: The army's top general said that we would have to have several hundred thousand troops there for several years in order to maintain stability.

Cheney: I disagree. We need, obviously, a large force and we've deployed a large force. To prevail, from a military standpoint, to achieve our objectives, we will need a significant presence there until such time as we can turn things over to the Iraqis themselves. But to suggest that we need several hundred thousand troops there after military operations cease, after the conflict ends, I don't think is accurate. I think that's an overstatement.[The Agonist]

Quicksilver to VoodooPad

6 April 2004

I've spent a few hours this evening copying and pasting the Quicksilver online manual into a VoodooPad pad. It's quite excellent the way VoodooPad creates links between pages and it makes the help file much easier to navigate. It does mean I'll have to keep checking the QS site for changes in the documentation but I have much better access to the information now it sits on my Mac, all nicely indexed. I even made a nice opening page for it. It's pushing 1mb now but the file opens up quite smartish.

VoodooPad is just right for this sort of thing; a self-contained browsing database. Everything, including images, is compressed into one easily editable file. One thing I've noticed is the lack of a Search & Replace option which would have saved me some time.

Quicksilver

5 April 2004

Another launcher for Mac OSX 10.3.3. This one is Quicksilver, in 'pre-release' at present but destined to be a major player. Off the top of my head I'm aware of several similar file launchers for the Mac. Forgive me if I miss your favourite. There's Butler, LaunchBar, My Favorite Things, and Quicksilver. The common feature with these is that they can be called up by a simple key press and can browse quickly to a file or program by typing the name of whatever it is you're looking for. They complete this in slightly different ways but all the ones mentioned work well and quickly. As far as I'm aware LaunchBar is the grand-daddy of this type of application but the rest add features and options so that each has it's own character.

[Links: Butler LaunchBar My Favorite Things Quicksilver]

How to clean your house

4 April 2004

This sounds an interesting idea but how could anyone take a whole hour just to drag a vacuum across a couple of carpets and rearrange the dust on their shelves. I can do this in a time-saving 5 minutes - unless the parents are expected in which case an astonishing 10 minutes is required, for that special professional finish.

New concept - don't clean until your house is clean, instead merely allocate time to the cleaning process and clean until that time is over whether you finish or not. Also if you finish before the time is up (unlikely) then clean something better than you would normally. I started this insane cleaning regimen yesterday with a statement that I would clean in a high-impact fashion for no more and no less than precisely one hour. I created an iTunes playlist full of motivational music with the sole intention of keeping me psyched about the whole horrors of cleaning my flat. It is precisely one hour long and is called Precisely One Hour of House-Cleaning Music. It contains a fair amount of cheese, for the specific reason that it's designed to get the heart-pounding and the mind focused on doing things (rather than being subtle or nuanced in any way) so don't get on my case about how lame it is. The first tune is designed to set the scene and the final one to get the pace back down to useful human-levels. [Plasticbag]