Prog Jock..

Leafing through my Spectator this morning on the train (gash avoidance tactic #2) I read Hardeep wossisface eulogising about Marillion from his youth.

His comment is spot on. Have this:

AJ

It’s a ve’y shiny day….

On the way home from customer in London, I tripped on the kerb and stumbled headlong into a branch of Dixons (fuck off Currys Digital). Honestly.

Because yesterday, this happened:

 

+

+

 

=

My Creative Zen MP3 player died.

Now, I know that today I ordered a new phone, which can, at a stretch act as an MP3 player, but I’m only prepared to go so far with convergence.

I explained to my colleagues, who asked “why not the iPhone?”,

“I’m something of an Apple Bigot. If Steve Jobs and Bill Gates had a geek fight, I’d cheer Bill all the way to the top of that motherfucking hill.”

So WTF?

Having spent almost 4 seconds browsing anonymous MP3 widgets, none of which appeared to offer anything adequate, I started looking at these:

 
They only had an 8GB model on display.

8GB? WTF? My 2 year old Zen had 16GB and is less than half the size.

Asked shop wallah if he had 16GB model. Computoh sez no. But he has 32GB model.

32GB? Now we’re talking. How much? £286

Fuck me. That’s a lot of money, but fucking hand it over.

Yeah – save £20 on teh intertubes. Fuck off. Right now, I have to have this, and the stupid amount of overtime I did last month would pay for it tenfold. Fucking bring it. And out of the box it was 60% charged. By adding my laptop and 3g, I was able to get iTunes installed and was listening to choons 20 minutes from London.

So what do I think of this thing now I have it?

Fucking genius. It’s brilliant. I love it.

Do I now regret ordering the Magic? Not in the slightest. As I said, convergence only goes so far for me, and the Magic has fuck all memory (max 8GB mu-SD) and you have to plug your headphones into the USB port via a converter. Also, Vodafone is still the best mobile operator by a cunt-tree mile – rather be tied to them than O2.

Moving on.

On this v2 Touch, the headphone socket isn’t recessed anymore, so my favourite headphones slot right in, out of the box.

Is it loud enough? Fuck yes. I was worried it wouldn’t be, but it’s way louder than the Zen. I’m a deaf bastard and max volume is dangerously loud even for me.

Having hooked it up to my WLAN, I’ve been playing with the browser and so forth. Again, excellent. Browsing this blog, it’s easy to click on the Choons category on the right, then scroll down and watch all the YouTube vids, at the other end of the garden. When the vid finishes, it drops back to the browser window.

I haven’t tried email and calendar yet, but I probably will.

One thing did remove my gruntle, which was having spunked close to 3 ton on this, I still had to pay £5.99 to bring it up to the latest OS version. Dickheads.

Also, the accelerometers may be great, but you can’t flip the main screen to horizontal, it seems (so far), and once a portrait keyboard is launched, you can’t flip it to horizontal on the fly.

So tomorrow, my HTC Magic should arrive and I’ll be able to do a genuine head to head between the two, only having ever touched an iPhone (minus phone) for the first time this evening.

AJ

UPDATE: Of course, I’m not going to stick this sweetie in my CamelBak, so I still need to get a player for when I’m out on the heath. I figure I’ll find something properly cheap on Amazon and buy 3 of them.

Oh my….

Sat in a train. Starting to get crowded.

Sat opposite me is a woman and her mother (or much older sister). Think they’re septics.

The woman has one foot up on the ventilation duct.

I swear on my fucking life, her twat is staring me in the face.

I’ve had to reposition my laptop so I can’t see the damned thing.

AJ

Shiny…

Just ordered one of these….

Which is rather a step forward from my current phone…

I’ll report back when I have played with it. As it were.

AJ

Get in there….

I was only musing on this a few days back, after Steve Shark reminded me of the very point…

Next stop, The Hague, for you Blair, you terrible cunt.

AJ

ROFLiscious.. Have that you righteous, middle-class hokum suckers…

Thankyou Sanity.

Click the story to read on…

AJ

If you can do one thing every time you drive….

it’s to terrify anyone who isn’t up to it.

They’ll go home and curse you, and probably have vodka and valium, but they’ll never drive again.

Job done.

Call it a congestion charge. Everyone loves that.

AJ

Speed limits

Now look, you fucking numbskulls.

See this?

This means. DRIVE AT FUCKING 50 MILES AN HOUR.  (See also “Speedometers all over-read and legal limit = posted limit + 10% + 2MPH.”)

“It’s a limit not a target” say smug cunts in Volvos, with slippers.

Wrong, says the driving test examiner, who’ll fail your ass if you sit at 40, holding people up in a 50.

Failing to make due progress is the official name of the fault on the test.

Being a fucking brainless dithering cunt is what it should be called.

But I digress. What’s worse, is that these people, having been absolutely convinced by the head of their chapter of the Caravan Club, that “it’s a limit, not a target”, then find righteousness in rebuking those of us who like to overtake. Usually with flashing headlamps and gesticulation.

And now we get to the reason why you will fail your driving test for failing to make due progress.

It’s because one day, I’m going to overtake you, and you’re going to remonstrate.

Then I’m going to stop, blocking the road, get out of the car and break your windows and your smug stupid grey cunting face with a tyre iron.

Now, get out of my motherfucking way, or I’ll ram you into a ditch you cunts.

Now fuck off

AJ

Useless Government Propaganda Brass-necked Dickheads…

Back in December 2008, for posterity, I relayed to you the Met Office’s assurance that 2009 would be one of the warmest on record.

But long range forecasts suggest that next year will be among the warmest.

The average global temperature is expected to be more than 32.7F (0.4C) above the long term average, making next year warmer than this year and the hottest since 2005, researchers from the Met Office and the University of East Anglia said.

They issued a press release in April 2009 confirming their earlier prediction.

The coming summer is ‘odds on for a barbecue summer’, according to long-range forecasts. Summer temperatures across the UK are likely to be warmer than average and rainfall near or below average for the three months of summer.

Chief Meteorologist at the Met Office, Ewen McCallum, said: "After two disappointingly-wet summers, the signs are much more promising this year. We can expect times when temperatures will be above 30 °C, something we hardly saw at all last year."

Well, now they’ve annouced that this will (no shit motherfucking Sherlock) no longer transpire. Perhaps ermbarassed? Apologetic? Contrite?

Not on your fucking nelly.

The Met Office refused to apologise today after admitting that the “barbecue summer” they had predicted was no longer likely.

As rain lashed down on most of Britain, a revised forecast was published suggesting that the weather in August would be changeable with more rain as well as sunny periods.

…

The revised forecast will come as an embarrassment to the Met Office who published a press release in April detailing news of a hot summer. Ewen McCallum, the chief meteorologist, said the wet summers of 2007 and 2008 were highly unlikely to be repeated.

“This year will be much drier than normal,” he predicted. “Get the BBQ out. Probably with spells of weather with the temperature reaching 30 degrees Celsius.”

Philip Eden, vice president of the Royal Meteorological Society, criticised the Met Office for publicising such an optimistic prediction when they had relatively little evidence of how the summer would unfold.

“The key is that these are experimental forecasts. That’s fine by me – it’s exactly what they should be doing,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme:

“They should be doing research into long-range forecasts. The problem is that we don’t actually know very much about the forcing factors, the outside influences which affect the weather during a period of, say, a month or three months ahead.

“The big problem with these forecasts was the spin that was put on it by the Met Office’s press office – the ’barbecue summer’ bit.”

He pointed out that the wording of the forecast was actually “unambitious” and had a “very wide target”. “They simply predicted that temperatures for the summer quarter would be above average,” he said.

The Times imply that Gordo was behind this piece of distracting “barbecue summer” bollox. Which is just fucking typical.

Put a team into the met office. Sack all the AGW true believers. Break it up and sell it off to the private sector.

Why am I paying for any of these cunts?

AJ

Mongnitive Dissonance….

Love teh xkcd.com…. or don’t.

AJ

Fucking. Genius.

Cheered me right up, has that.

I will admit that.. when it all comes together… the effect is errrm.. [sniff] Profound.

Powerslide. Powerslide. Powerslide. Powerslide.

Powerslide. Powerslide. Powerslide. Powerslide. Powerslide. Powerslide. Powerslide. Powerslide.

Powerslide. Powerslide. Powerslide. Powerslide.

Powerslide. Powerslide. Powerslide. Powerslide. Powerslide. Powerslide. Powerslide. Powerslide.

AJ

H/T Obo

UPDATE: I chuckled to myself the first time I saw it. Then I flipped to HQ and clicked replay. And again. By the fourth time I was literally ROFLing. The drugs do work, kids. It’s a work of genius on so many levels.

Barry For President. Of Kenya, muthafucka.

Subsequent to the mention I made last week, here’s more on the possible illegitimacy of Obama’s presidency.

Since the original selection of wingnut ideas was floated, some ‘facts’ have been established.

A ‘short form’ birth certificate from Hawaii has been produced, ostensibly proving Barry’s a US citizen. Let’s take that as true.

As if that means anything. Every time Jack Bauer wiped his ass on a sheet of Andrex, he produced a short form birth certificate.

What this so-called certificate doesn’t detail is the nationality of his parents. That would be on the ‘unavailable/lost/eaten by the dog’ long-form birth certificate.

This is important, because the US constitution decrees that only a ‘natural born American’ can be president.

It appears that ‘natural born’ means born in the USA to a father who is a US citizen (though not necessarily natural born US citizen himself).

All the evidence shows that Barry’s old man was a national of Kenya, which was part of the British Empire, thus Barry Snr. had an implicit allegiance to the Queen.

But so what?

The requirement  to be a ‘natural born citizen’ was written into the US Constitution in 1787 and could only have drawn on Vattel’s 1758 ‘Law of Nations’ for its intended meaning of the term, since there was no other definition in existence at the time, nor has there been any amendment to the constitution since that could have changed its meaning.

Surely irrelevant now there’s no Royalist threat to the presidency? Uh huh…

There is a multi-faceted legal bunfight, and this happened:

Major Cook was recently issued with orders to deploy to Afghanistan.  He wasn’t filled with glee at the prospect. It is how he has chosen to voice his conscientious objection to this deployment that has divided the American people.

His orders were issued by his Army commanders. Those commanders posses the power to deploy him by virtue of the authority of the President, since Obama himself must possess the authority of President in order to delegate it to the Army, Major Cook has demanded that Obama prove he has this authority before he can lawfully delegate authority to order Major Cook to Afghanistan.

There have been over a dozen lawsuits filed since the inauguration disputing Obama’s eligibility to be President, complaints that the Oath was incorrectly administered, on the wrong date, at the wrong time; you may have heard of some of them. All have been dismissed.

This challenge is somewhat different. This challenge required the court to look into Obama’s parentage, and his claim to be a ‘natural born citizen’ of the US.

So what? So this:

After Cook’s lawsuit was filed, but before the case was heard, the Army revoked his orders to deploy to Afghanistan, they didn’t court martial him, they didn’t discharge him, they didn’t declare him insane – they just quietly agreed that, OK, he needn’t go to Afghanistan if he didn’t want to.

Just like that, huh? Yup…

The court was thus given the ‘out’ that they needed proceed no further with their investigation into Obama. Opening the flood gates to lawsuits disputing Obama’s parentage to anyone else who would really rather not go to Afghanistan.

Again. On 7 December 2008, I wrote:

there will inevitably be a legal bunfight. Equally inevitable is the fudge that will be put in place, to ensure that Obama can continue as President.

The unexpected consequence of this will be that Arnie [Schwarzenegger] will, by default, become entitled to run.

I bet Arnie will be on the GOP ticket in 2012.

AJ

H/T Old Holborn

Quote of the week

I’m glad to say that Mummylonglegs is back on top form, bringing with her what will almost certainly remain, on Sunday, the quote of the week. On the matter of her pending and sprawling spring clean:

“The garage has as much chance of getting emptied as Graham Norton at a Lesbian Mud Wrestling Contest.”

Peachy.

AJ

Errrm.. the odd one out is number 3, Ed…

The bind moggles once again…

AJ

A superb post-mortem of the LPUK’s Norwich result & the way forward…

I’m taking a liberty here.. that’s what I do. But I’m going to repost John Demetriou’s analysis of the state, and malaise, of El-Puck (Libertarian Party UK).

If JD’s points (and for that matter, those of his buddy Kevin Boatang) made in the following post and elsewhere (LPUK blog etc.), were taken on board by the party ‘machine’, I’d fork over membership fees and donations in a heartbeat.

As it is, my post of some time back still seems to be a good interpretation of the state in which El-Puck finds itself.

Anyway, here’s Mr Demetriou’s effort, in an easy-to-read flexible column width. All praise be to him.

Anarchy in the LPUK

For those still unaware of the Libertarian performance in the recent Norwich North by-election, the party to which Mr B and I are members scored a total of 36 votes.

This result cemented concerns that we both already had, in that we felt that communication in the party hovers between lacklustre and non-existent, and it is a grey area as to what the senior people in the party actually do.

I, for instance, have received one email (relating to the AGM) since I joined the party one year ago. That is it.

Presumably, when the party was founded, there were at least a handful of people willing to take the job on of taking the outfit forward with the purposes of accumulating members and public popularity.

Yet whenever Mr B and I raise our hands to make constructive comment, criticism or points of view, we are (irritatingly) told that the party doesn’t have a ‘machine’, that the senior people ‘have lives’ and that with little resources, the party does the best it can.

This is inevitably followed up with ‘put your money where you mouth is’ type challenges, which is like saying ‘if you don’t like it, you bloody do it’.

A resounding chime of confidence rings out of our heads, I’m sure you can imagine.

Well, I am happy to be a paid up member and so is my colleague Mr Boatang. We too have ‘busy lives’, though this singularly fails to stop us from writing thousands of words of blinding, genius and original content every single day on the world’s best blog.*

* Recommendation may be absolute shite. Your mileage vay mary. Caveat Numptor.

As it happens, Mr B and I are actually up for becoming more active in the party and getting out there to help in campaigns. The LPUK would realise this were so much a a solitary individual with responsibility disposed towards communicating with members properly. Email, and ten minutes of time, is not exactly like asking someone to organise the next Cannes Film Festival.

So, when the Norwich North election result came in, Mr B and I braced ourselves for the predictable and infuriating waves of spin that got pumped out on the LPUK blog.

One chap did a post trying to gloss over the result, whilst still (after the campaign was dead and over) making negative remarks about the Tory candidate and winner.

The Party Chairman, Mr Withers, produced a more down to earth article on the result, though there was the notable air of spin about the piece and a lack of comment on how to move forward and progress. Members would read that and wonder where the hell the party can possibly go, unless we start to look deeply and inwardly at ourselves and our approach to campaigning.

This is where Mr B. and I decided to step up and make an appearance. The more we offered constructive criticism (read the comments sections of the articles on the LPUK blog for evidence), the more certain people got annoyed.

Interestingly, the level of irritation and panic over our comments solidified once we popped on their blog and ours to cock a snook at the incestuous, cliquey and inbred manner in which the party (and its core, root cabal of blogging campaigners) conduct matters.
If Libertarianism is (and it is) about openness, accountability, democracy, fairness, transparency and power to the individual, it is obviously of some concern when a small clique of faceless people start to try and shut down debate.

‘We have a forum, this is not the best place to discuss this, go there instead’ is one type of refrain we’ve been getting.

‘This blog should be deleted’ is, amazingly, another idea, along with ‘the comments should be heavily moderated’.

The deletion of a place of accountability? A public forum where people can talk and air views, which are fairly and rightly offered to prospective members and the public?

The institution of a ‘heavily moderated’ place of discussion?

What the hell is this, fucking Pravda? Views like this are valid, but please, if you genuinely think that the LPUK should conduct itself in this manner, then I am sorely disappointed to inform you that maybe – just maybe – you are possibly not that much of a Libertarian.
People in the LPUK may not like what we have to say, but we have the god damned right (as members) to go on the members’ blog to voice our views on how we can improve and move forward. We have the god damned right to ask questions of this campaign in Norwich, and what the hell happened. We note that there has been a piss poor attempt at answering those queries. But hey, ‘they have lives’ huh. So I guess I’ll just have to sit back and accept what is doled out to me.

We did find out one thing, however, after our attempts to relentlessly pursue some answers. There was no discernible ‘LPUK campaign’ to speak of, outside of one lady who turned up from the West Country.

Brilliant. And, er, was there no bloody campaign co-ordinator out there with the common sense to email members to ask for help? Or are we all expected to read every thread or article on the blog or forum thing in order to grab what snippets of info we can?

Little wonder there was nil man power. Little wonder poor Thomas Burridge could only get his family and friends out to vote for him.
I, many years ago, worked as an intrinsic team member in a political campaign during a general election. I witnessed countless volunteers, unpaid people of generous years, give up their time to campaign for a party they didn’t even quite agree with, but helped anyway because they were made to feel important. They had morale in their hearts. And all that brought them out was a fucking phone call or a knock on the door.

We’re talking common sense, not money or resources, just a little bit of effort.

There will be LPUK people who will read this and fucking fume. They’ll hate our guts. They’ll think we’re mad, or trouble makers, or just plain arrogant cocky arseholes who haven’t the balls to make their own efforts to help.

They will be angry for these reasons: we are right, and they know we’re right…and we have the fucking bow locks to tell it how it is. If people like us didn’t, no-one would. We do so because we are libertarian, we actually want the party to go somewhere and do well, and we don’t like being bullshitted.

I’ll leave all our readers with this quote from a bloke called John Stuart Mill. You might, if you are even vaguely libertarian, have fucking heard of him:

If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.
…the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error…

Mr B and I do not state opinion as though fact; as though we are 100% correct, 100% of the time and our interlocutors axiomatically wrong. But we have the right to speak up and voice our opinion. We will offer that dissenting voice and we seek answers and responses. We will not be silenced.

I will be doing more articles over the next few days on libertarianism and what it is to be libertarian in modern Britain. I also hope to feed more into party debate. I know Mr Boatang wishes to feed into this process – though it is never quite clear if anyone in the LPUK is listening.

It is possible that we will end up being silenced, or banished from the party. It’s human nature and libertarians are no less immune to it than anyone else – people don’t like having their cosy little boat rocked by others. The apple cart simply must go on, with all the fruit aboard left in tact.

Mr B and are are like libertarian bandits. We’ll fuck up that cart, we’ll eat all the apples and we’ll put a fucking hole in the quaint little gondola if it makes people wake up, listen and help get things done.

Posted by John Demetriou at 18:51

And breathe. This guy’s a leg end in his own lunchtime.

AJ

Fantasy Garage. Hubba Hubba Edition…

So long as it is the genuine 427c.i. (7 litre)…

Sadly, it’s so far out of budget as to be ludicrous, but all the cheaper ones seem to have Rover V8 engines in them. Why? What’s wrong with an LS1?

But….. if it’s such a great car, why has it only done 2500 miles in 10 years? If I had this at my disposal, the entire home-counties tarmac footprint would have to be re-laid monthly. Smells of Cerbera syndrome.

It could probably use some roll-hoops too. And a proper fucking steering wheel.

You see, ladies? Beauty isn’t perfection.

AJ

Blogroll Update…

I have belatedly updated my blogroll to include two splendid blogs by chaps who regularly comment here.

First up is Dick Puddlecote – a committed and thought provoking libertarian and libertine, fighting the good fight against what the miserablists are doing to our Pubs and Clubs, as well as providing good quality libertarian analysis of current affairs. Could try harder with the swearing.

Which brings me to a man who needs no encouragement in the swearing department, as his latest post can attest. Steve Shark, writer of ‘Hundreds and Thousands (on the Trifle of Life)’, takes no prisoners. Or at least when he does, he tortures and kills them. At which point, no more prisoner, no more problem.

While I find Steve’s Trifle metaphor of interest, I come from the philosophical school of thought that regards life as a pavlova, frankly.

I’ve also dropped Guido, as I don’t read it anymore and he doesn’t exactly need the referrals.

AJ

On the absence of political commentary…

Well, I’ve said fuck all about current affairs in the last couple of week. Yeah there have been a few things going on… just more layers of egregious cuntitude from the current lot, hanging on like the T2000* before the hydraulic press of a general election crushes the the fuckers for good.

If it’s been worth considering, it’s been mentioned by someone or other in my blogroll (see right), so I needn’t bother.

Because I can’t be fucking arsed, okay? I think it was DK who said something to the effect of him being in a holding pattern, just waiting for a general election, so he can start laying into the next lot. I’m there.

Because the novelty of punching a decaying carcass has a strictly limited shelf-life.

Next thing to look forward to, though, is another attempt to topple Brown at the party conference.

In the meantime, please continue to imbibe my heady cocktail of bad music, dodgy motors, whimsical ramblings and generally highlighting the sort of bollox that takes the gruntle right out of my day.

AJ

*If all this government wanted was my clothes, my boots and my motorcycle, I’d be relatively sanguine. Rather, they want our income, our children, our obedience, our subservience, our devout belief, our property, our organs and our thoughts.

Or, rather better….

AJ

In honour of all this car-related nonsense….

AJ