September 18th - The Feast of Genius

96 - Nerva elevated as Roman Emperor (Coward)

323 - Constantine the Great decisively defeats Licinius in the Battle of Chrysopolis, establishing Constantine's sole control over the Roman Empire. (Looney)  

1454 - In battle of Chojnice, Polish army is defeated by Teutonic army during the Thirteen Years' War  (It’s all prussian to me)

1739 - Treaty of Belgrade signed, ceding Belgrade to the Ottoman Empire (Yawn)

1759 - British capture Quebec City (Blame Canada)

1810 - First Government Junta in Chile. Though supposed to rule only in the absence of the king, it was in fact the first step towards independence from Spain, and it is commemorated as such. (September 18th is independence day in Chile)

1850 - United States Congress passes Fugitive Slave Act (Medodists and Quakers rightly ignored it)

1851 - New York Times begins publishing ($3 to search the archives)

1872 - King Oscar II accedes to the throne of Sweden-Norway  (An Intellectual)

1873 - The Panic of 1873 begins (Goddamn bankers)

1895 - Daniel David Palmer makes the first chiropractic adjustment (Take one bin…)

1906 - Typhoon with tsunami killed an estimated 10.000 persons in Hong Kong  (Splash)

1914 - The Battle of Aisne ends (All the old forests were destroyed)

1927 - Columbia Broadcasting System goes on the air (The eye, the eye – poss. illuminanti connection??)

1931 - Mukden Incident. After that, Japan occupied Manchuria. (Also called the Manchurian incident – Sneaky Japanese blew up their own rail road to blame the Chinese and annex Manchuria, replacing Russia)

1942 - Canadian Broadcasting Corporation authorized (Bringing Canadians Together - Yawn)

1943 - The Jews of Minsk are massacred at Sobibor (260,000 people were killed in this camp, after this there was the only ‘successful’ Jewish revolution in a nazi camp.  Of the 600 escapees, 50 lived)

1947 - The United States Department of Defense begins operation (formerly known as National Military Establishment). (On February 22, 2002, the Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General has reported that DOD has not and will not account for $1.1 trillion of "undocumentable adjustments)

1961 - James Gandolfini, actor is born (You woke this morning, got yourself a gun…)

1971 - Lance Armstrong, cycling champion is born (No drugs, yer honour)

1975 - Patty Hearst arrested after a year on the FBI Most Wanted List  (Heard the burst of Roland’s Thompson gun and bought it)

1975 – Conor is born (world rejoices)

1985 - Steve Jobs resigns from Apple Computer (don’t worry folks he comes back in ’97)

1989 - Hurricane Hugo hits Puerto Rico, killing six (ended up killing between 49 – 56 people)

1992 - The existence of the National Reconnaissance Office, operating since 1960, is declassified. (Read Deception Point by Dan Brown)

1997 - Ted Turner donates $1 billion to the United Nations (Good man Ted.  Blissfully happy from sleeping with Jane Fonda for all those years.  But then she left you)

1997 - Voters in Wales vote yes (50.3%) on a referendum on Welsh autonomy (Percentage of the population aged 3 or more speaking, reading, and writing Welsh: 16.32%)

1998 - ICANN is formed (ICANN, ICANT, ICANN, ICANT)

2003 - Hurricane Isabel makes landfall in the U.S. (Official reports state that 50 people died as a result of the storm, with an official damage estimate of $3.37 billion)

I laughed my balls off

From the Guardian.....

Not many people on the UK side of the Irish Sea have noticed it but Ireland is now a richer country than its former imperial master, if you believe international comparisons. In 2002, according to United Nations figures, Ireland generated a gross domestic product per capita of $36,360 compared with only $26,159 for the UK. These results were worked out using purchasing power parities which adjust for international price differences to find out what incomes can really buy. One reason this historic development has gone largely unremarked in the UK is because people cannot, or do not want to, believe it. Even in Ireland it has been greeted sceptically. Economists are saying that the statisticians are measuring the wrong kind of GDP. They have a point. One factor behind the emerald miracle is that much of the wealth has been generated by international corporations, attracted by a low-tax regime, which then dispatch most of their large profits back to their home bases.
If economic wealth is recorded by the less fashionable measure of gross national product, which adjusts for remitted profits and other international monetary flows, the picture looks different. As Ireland's Economic and Social Research Institute points out, GNP accounted for only 83% of GDP in 2003: in that year official GDP growth of 1.2% was bumped up to 3% on the GNP measure. So that's that then.
Not quite. These crude figures are arrived at before applying purchasing power parities which are supposed to give a fairer picture. On the PPP measure, the size of the UK economy is only 72% of that of Ireland - so what Ireland loses on the GNP swings, it may gain on the PPP roundabouts. Maybe it is time for Gordon Brown to dispatch a team to find out what's really been happening. They would be met with a cornucopia of reasons for Irish success, including EU membership, immigration, high investment, a multi-national base, fiscal stability, social partnerships and so on. Of course, if anyone really knew the formula for growth in an economy, there would be no need for economists in the first place.

I can’t go on. I’ll go on.

 
Last night I went to see Riverdance with my reluctant wife.  I enjoyed it, its inoffensive well produced hokum; the circus comes to town.

After to show we got a taxi home.  Little did I know that when I got in the cab I was stepping through a portal to a parallel universe.

The taxi driver was a youngish guy and talkative, he knew his job.

“Were you at Riverdance tonight?” A good solid opening gambit.
“Yep.”  I replied.
“What did you think?”
“I liked it, well produced.  A real machine.”
“Do you go to the theatre often?”
“Sure, been a few times this year.”

This is where things began to get a little strange.  The taxi driver continued the conversation.

“Did you see anything good?”
“The Price was great.”  I replied.  It was great.
“I went to see that myself,” the taximan responded, “I thought that the old guy Robert Prosky was excellent, a real surprise seeing him there.  Arthur Miller’s writing is really clever.  Did you see ‘All my Sons’ in the Abbey last year?”      

I was stunned.  Where is my lecture on the dangers of the darkie?  Why am I not listening to a diatribe beginning with “do you know what’s wrong with…”?  I answered his question.

“No.”
“Should have done.  I went to see Godot as well.  I was reading it at the time but it was much better on stage.”

Now I was being straight-up out-flanked.  I have never read Beckett, I fell asleep watching the DVDs.  Time to move the conversation.

“Pygmalion is in the gate at the moment,” was my attempt at moving the topic along.
“Yeah, I want to see that.  Have you seen the 1930’s movie of it?  It’s the definitive version in my mind.  My Fair Lady is poor in comparison.”
“Haven’t seen it.”

The conversation continued as the driver told me that he was just back from seeing Bob Dylan in Seville, spent sometime in San Diego where is saw Bob again. Bob sang a few Warren Zevon numbers.  Warren was at the gig.   He also talked about WZ appearances on Letterman.    

We arrived home.  I tipped.

Nerds at Play

Cisco systems, one of the world’s biggest companies and makers of routers and switches, have just broken a world record.  They have made the world’s fastest router, the CRS-1.
 
The 92/tBit/sec CRS-1 router has been codenamed Huge Fast Router (HFR) by some nerds taking things a little too far.  Guinness came out and certified that, yes, it can shovel data faster then anything else currently on earth.  They did this without testing it of course; you, like them, just have to take Cisco’s experts’ word for it. No, nobody has actually bought one yet.
 
This news has been great by the normal round of unintentionally funny statistics. 
 
You could download the entire printed collection of the U.S. Library of Congress in 4.6 seconds (82 years over 56k dial up) 
 
The entire population of Massachusetts could make a VoIP call simultaneously. 
 
Everyone in New York state could download a 2.4M byte file at once. 
 
You could set up a 6M bit/sec video stream for 15 million people.
 
Feel free to insert any meaningless stat of your own here; remember your 8x1 conversions, and that these are not decimal Mbytes so that 24 is important.
 
This also has implications for the Internet2’s land speed record; kind of like the Tour-de-France for geeks. Sprint and the Swedish National Research and Education Network currently hold the record at 4.23/gbits/sec transferring 840Gbytes across a distance of 16,346kms in less then 27 minutes.  This gives them the yellow jersey. 
 
The previous record (and no, I am not joking) was held by Caltech and CERN.  Caltech and CERN are more sprinters then runners, still holding on to the green jersey with a 68,431 terabit-meters per second transmission in February this year. Although they achieved an average speed of 6.25Gbps, this was only over a distance of 11,000 kilometers.
 
Both teams must be pissing their pants with Cicso’s announcement.  Making their new tech available to anyone with enough cash, it will be like steroids to any teleco that cares to adopt it.  Maybe Bell will become the US postal of Internet2’s land speed record?

Search me out? - A competition

Post three tonight as I wait for stuff to happen in work (dammit computers, work faster).  I was looking over the referrers section in my site stats and saw that a random internet punter hit the site quite by accident.  He used an MSN search engine and put in "Google Medicals in Kent" and got us.
 
This got me thinking.  I use google's free hosting on blogspot, fair enough.  I happen to have some webspace and a domain, and must really get off my ass and transfer the blog to its new home.  Try as I might I cannot google this site as it stands at the moment, but I can reference it from MSN instantly.  I think that google block blogspot hosted sites (they say not), or maybe I just need to fork up the cash to get higher up the results (google deny they do this).
 
So,  a competition.  First person to google this site and get a return on the first page of results, posting the terms they used in a comment, gets a crate of beer off me (postage not included, will deliver Dublin area only).   You are not allowed use the word "blogspot" in you search, or type the URL or be a cheating spanner.
 
My beer is safe.
 

Camera, camera, joy, joy

Because I have a spiffing new camera, I shall be posting more pictures.  I bought a Canon D300.  I'd post a picture of it here except then I'd need a second camera to take a picture of the first one, and that's just silly.
 
It takes 7mb Raw images which convert to 36mb Tiffs.  I have been assured that this is overkill for web work, and will probably really hack off any of you chaps that actually read this (and there are a few of you).  I now take the images into Canons kind of user friendly interface, save them as tiffs, bring them into photoshop, resize them, reduce the DPI, convert them to JPGs and post them.
 
Here is a lovely picture of my wife and my cat,  looking none the worse for going through this process.
 

Is there any raisin for this?

Showing a marked lacked of originality, and taking my cue from the banterist, this is the sign that greets me when I leave my apartment every day.
 
Mass produced printed stickers.  Good god.
 

Fahrenheit 9/11

I went to see this last night. Here's my letter to Michael. Also sent to mike@michaelmoore.com


"Dear Mike,

I went to see you movie last night. While it is quite obviously an overlong biased piece of mass media, it was also very entertaining. Quick cuts, out of context clips, misrepresentation of important information, everything that I come to expect from one of your films. This is not to say it wasn’t thought provoking, and interesting; it certainly was.

There were a couple of moments that really stuck in my craw all the same. Making pre-second-war Baghdad out to be some sort of innocent paradise reminiscent of a C.S Lewis novel was a little over the top. Yes, the reasons for going to war may have been flawed, but I don’t think life under Saddam was a paradise either. I think perhaps you may have been better served talking about the difference in unemployment weights pre and post war; the change in availability of food and water; the 10 years of crippling US sanctions post Iraq-1 (same thing happened in Europe with Germany c.1918 and look what happened there!!). Children running though the streets with kites pointlessly demeaned your argument.

Yes, when approval ratings were down the republicans went to war. Correct me if I am wrong, but aren’t the republicans only catching up in the war game? Roosevelt, Truman and LBJ were all Democrats. Nixon ended Vietnam. This doesn't make war right, but it is traditionally a democratic excerise(!)

Showing a clip of Bush “on holiday” while standing beside Tony Blair was kind of interesting too. Presumably this was meant for American audiences who mightn’t know who Blair is anyway. I am not sure it washed with the European audience. Again, this detracted (harmfully and for no reason) from your valid argument.

I really object to footage being used out of context to illustrate your point. People that could be bothered (in my opinion a tiny percentage) will find out that you are effectively lying to prove what is essentially a true point; surely this turns a strong argument into innuendo? Stop doing it. You have more then enough material to present a reasonable case without padding it with unrelated filler, giving detractors reasonable ammunition against you. Stop Stop Stop.

But it’s not all negative. The fact that you can make a documentary that fills a cinema in a suburb of Blanchardtown, Dublin, Ireland at 9.10 on a Tuesday evening is astonishing. That fact that it may make the audience rightly question both the government and (just as importantly) the filmmaker is also important. But surely it is extremely hypocritical of you to justify your anti-administration arguments by augmenting them with misdirection, exactly as you are accusing the incumbent American government of doing?

Oderint dum metuant,
C.”

Introducing the Not-so-Smiley Smilies

In a constant effort to make the blog a more interactive experience to you the reader, I have developed and implemented a new range of serial-killer smilies. Now you can really express yourself when leaving a comment. Why have Angry Smiley when you can have Hitler Smiley? Why have confused smiley when you can have Manson Smiley?

The range:

  The Manson Smiley
Feeling confused or angry about what is being said? Need to lash out? Misunderstood? Express yourself with Manson!

  The Hitler Smiley
Post a little too liberal? Don’t like to pander to blacks and homos? Think that we are appealing to Jewish community? Vote Sinn Fein? Choose Hitler, and let your views be known!

  The Osama Smiley
Think the writer is an infidel? Too pro-yankee? Feel aggrieved at the dichotomy of the world religions? Comment on the decline of the west with this cheerful little smiley!

  The Jack the Ripper Smiley
Tired of all the incessant prattling? Feel the content needs to be cleaned up? Need to take matters into your own hands? Looking for a return to Victorian values? Jack the Ripper is the man for you!

  The Shipman Smiley
When enough is enough, and you can’t see us continuing with our tireless blogging, choose the Shipman. The Shipman says “enough is enough, lets end this!”

Making commenting fun.

Afraid? You should be. Some real phobias.

Aeronausiphobia - Fear of vomiting secondary to airsickness.
Allodoxaphobia - Fear of opinions.
Arachibutyrophobia - Fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of the mouth.
Automatonophobia - Fear of any inanimate object that represents a sentient being, eg. statues, dummies, robots, etc.
Cathisophobia - Fear of sitting.
Defecaloesiophobia - Fear of painful bowel movements.
Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia - Fear of long words.
Klismaphobia - Fear of enemas.
Macrophobia - Fear of long waits.
Mikatikoindicaphobia - Fear of the NRIs (Non-Resident Indians).
Optophobia - Fear of opening one's eyes.
Panophobia, Pantophobia - Fear of everything.
Pogonophobia - Fear of beards.
Rhabdophobia - Fear of being severely punished or beaten with a rod, or of being severely criticized. Also fear of magic.
Tremophobia - Fear of trembling.
Walloonphobia - Fear of the Walloons.
Ymophobia - Fear of contrariety.

Of course all of these are neologisms. To make up your own fear all you need is the greek root and a -phobia.
For example:

Sinistroranidaphobia - Fear of left handed frogs.
Philosopeladophobia - Fear of philosophical bald people.
Octolepronyctohylophobia - Fear of eight lepers in a dark wooded area.
Chorovitricocleithrophobia - Fear of dancing with your stepfather in an enclosed space.
Scelerorussophobia - Fear of being burgled by a russian.
Nostonipponophobia - Fear of returning home and finding a japanese person there.
Hypengyodentophobia - Fear of responsible dentists.
Ankyloephebiphobia - Fear of arthritic teenagers.
Ostracononeirogmophobia - Fear of shellfish appearing in your wet dreams.

and my fear:

Tyrannodontopoliticophobia - Fear of being ruled by corrupt politians with bad teeth.

A Greek Tragedy

Below is an genuine article from yesterdays Irish Times

Madam, - I was visiting your beautiful country when my country, Greece,
fought its way into the European cup final by bravely defeating the
favoured Czech Republic. On the following day, Friday, July 2nd, I
travelled from Cork to Rosslare.

Imagine my surprise and delight to find that almost the entire route -
especially between the towns of Youghal and New Ross - was gloriously
festooned with the blue and white colours of Greece!

Such overwhelming support of one small country for another brought tears of
joy to my eyes. I wish to express my heartfelt gratitude to the Irish
people for making this Greek feel so at home at such an important time for
his country. - Yours, etc.,

MANOLIS ANDROPOULOS, Athens, Greece.

Go on the Deise

Boredom. Deus ex machina and I.

Rather then on the nature of boredom, which gets a fast google above hundred results for, speculates I concentrates on my boredom and from why it like that be should. Good job? Examination. Well-being paying? Examination. Bored? Examination. Itself force to settle something work which became lay? Examination. The only rescuer is the thought, which somewhat wrongly it can go even it is your job to examine whether this does not arise. The tendency crept over the entire floor, the cross crew discontent, swept above in zephyr of discontent. Is there a dissolution? Probably not. Can you read this? Probably not. It is straight somehow bored wordplay.

Taking the Piss?

Hot from the presses .....

The ex-wife of Premiership footballer Ray Parlour has won her claim for more than a third of his future income.

The Appeal Court judgement could have major implications for other divorce settlements.

Karen Parlour said afterwards she was "very relieved at the outcome of the appeal and the settlement agreed".

She was earlier awarded two mortgage-free houses worth more than £1m, a £250,000 lump sum and £250,00 a year.However, the mother-of-three's lawyers told the Court of Appeal that was not enough.They argued his £1.2m a year salary should, in principle, be split 50-50 to reflect her input on the marriage.This was because she rescued him from the drinking culture which existed at Arsenal before Arsene Wenger took over as manager.

High Court Family Division judge Mr Justice Bennett awarded Mrs Parlour £250,000 annual maintenance in January. He ruled her ex-husband's offer of £120,000 did not reflect the major part she played in persuading him to "grow up".

Mrs Parlour, 33, has accepted that, because her relationship with the premiership star lasted only seven years, she could not claim the full 50%. But the former optician's assistant from Romford, Essex, said she was entitled to around £440,000 a year from his £1.2m income.

Her lawyer said this was because the earning capacity he developed with her support during their marriage was a "matrimonial resource".

Until now maintenance has been awarded on the basis of a spouse's "reasonable needs" rather than the equal share principle that applies to division of matrimonial assets.


Western civilisation is in decline ... nonsense like this. I'm sure the lawyers on both sides made a packet as well ....goes along nicely with the oft quoted statistic that there are more people training to be lawyers in the USA than there are on the planet...

The Dreaded Planning Letter

I just recieved the dreaded letter from the planning dept.
Can you please supply us with the following additional information.....

I hate them....

The Tinfoil Hat

"How can I be paranoid if everyone is out to get me"
-- Mark @ 11-00

Regular readers will know that I love a good conspiracy theory.

Well apart from living in a sealed faraday cage the next best thing is a tinfoil hat.These things keep out the mind control rays which "They" beam down from satellites to control our thoughts.Apparently.

A quick google brought forth the following.....Honestly.

A REAL tinfoil hatter

Reasons not to wear a tinfoil hat

Something for the kids

And finally for all the geeks..