And So It Is Written

As Ayn Rand's character Howard said:
"the man who invented the wheel was promptly stretched on the rack he taught his brothers to make...."
Our friends in the North could probably do with a little remedial reading, eh?

Or, as one might have said of them, "been there, done that."Provided, of course, one had actually read the book with his eyes open.

Times Are Hard.

But not all that hard.

Sometimes...

Sometimes I just have to admit that I don't really know or understand what is going on.

In which case why worry?

Goodnight.
I hope to have good news this coming week.

On R&R From Keeping Russia

This warm scene is of a pint of Deuchars IPA in a Bomber glass.
Splendid on a quiet,cold afternoon in Yorkshire.

Meanwhile, nothing to report.
Except this:if you ever meet the people at London Ontario, do not be confused or misled by their apparent friendliness and enthusiasm.
They are not friendly.
They are simply trying to impose mediocrity by whatever means possible, details of which I will be happy to supply privately.

I told them a pack of lies, which they repeated and amplified in an attempt to damage.
I believe that the problem was growing for a while. The source and motivation are amusing and difficult, but I imagine that there are ways of dealing with difficult people everywhere, and I am the first to admit that I am difficult.
Missed again, I'm happy to say.

Come One Come All......

I've been very busy the last week or so, and this means I haven't been blogging.
This will probably continue, but in the meantime I have removed all logging so that this is now an unmonitored site.

That means anybody can visit and nobody will pay any attention.

If you want to mark your visit by leaving a comment of some description, you're welcome to, but, as I said, for the time being there won't be too much going on here.

Unless, of course, I finally get that dream job, in which case I'll let any readers know of new arrangements.

Final Evidence.

This is a David Brown agricultural tractor .The initials 'DB' were applied to the Aston Martin sports cars after David Brown bought the company.
The current Aston Martin is the DB9, but as it is produced by Ford, the 'DB' is rather meaningless.

A Week In Politics

The Great British Worker!

I believe the card game is called 'Crash'. Very appropriate for transport workers.

If you have a lisp, you might think that a Schindlers Lift is connected to Steven Spielberg in some way.....
Finally, an example of 'joined up government'.
This bridge is over what was the line from Leeds to Tadcaster and York via Wetherby and Thorner.
Note that Wetherby and Thorner are now dormitories for Leeds despite the closure of the line in the sixties; never mind that Tadcaster has three breweries.
What I want (as an engineer) to draw attention to is the bridge span.
It is newish welded steel, and must have been erected at some cost and difficulty when the line was already scheduled to be closed.
They could have just infilled the cutting.

Paper Scoops Saturday

I always regard software as a somewhat formalised type of invention, rather like Classical Music.
But it is a form of invention.
It does new things in novel ways, linking intellectual produce directly to results.

Not so, says the report in Saturday's Financial Times.
British courts have ruled that software devices cannot be patented.
Apparently it is allegedly all down to the European Patent Convention, which excludes 'programmes for computers'.

So I guess I'll publish the code for my inventions sometime, so that any bum can use them for nothing.

Also in the FT, the Lib-Dems may have to repay £2.4 million to Michael Brown as the electoral watchdog is considering information that will make his donation 'impermissible'.

Meanwhile in Saturday's Yorkshire Post there is a report that the government is arbitrarily seizing property belonging to relatives of Abu Hamza in order to recoup the £200,000 costs of his unsuccessful court action to stay in the UK.
Apparently, they can kick him out, but the guilt extends to more fortunate relatives who are allowed to stay.
Nice little earner.
About as rational and righteous as the Mad Hatter's Tea Party.
But not the Boston variety.

Building.

Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak
Somewhere in this town
See me and the boys we don't like it
So were getting up and going down

Hiding low looking right to left
If you see us coming I think it's best
To move away do you hear what I say
From under my breath

Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak
Somewhere in the town
Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak
So don't you be around

Don't you be around

Tonight there's gonna be trouble
Some of us won't survive
See the boys and me mean business
Bustin' out dead or alive

I can hear the hound dogs on my trail
All hell breaks loose, alarm and sirens wail
Like the game if you lose
Go to jail

Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak
Somewhere in the town
Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak
So don't you be around

Tonight there's gonna trouble
I'm gonna find myself in
Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak
So woman stay with a friend

You know it's safer

Breakout!

Tonight there's gonna be a breakout
Into the city zones
Don't you dare to try and stop us
No one could for long

Searchlight on my trail
Tonight's the night all systems fail
Hey you good lookin' female
Come here!

Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak
Somewhere in the town
Tonight there's gonna be a jailbreak
So don't you be around

Tonight there's gonna be trouble
I'm gonna find myself in
Tonight there's gonna be trouble
So woman stay with a friend

There Is Hope!

I've just seen a CTV-produced film called 'Plague City-SARS In Toronto'.

No punches were pulled.The ruling administration was portrayed as lying, incompetent, corrupt and deeply, deeply evil.
The health professionals( who were the biggest death demographic from SARS) were, fairly, portrayed in accordance with the facts, namely that they volunteered to go on working extended shifts against a lethal disease that nobody understood.

The chief nurse in Toronto Memorial was portrayed by one of my favourite actresses, Kari Matchett, who played many characters as an ensemble cast member on 17 episodes of Nero Wolfe.
My guess is she didn't need too much persuasion to represent the case of the health workers.

How anybody can seriously say that Canada is a sick culture when this kind of film is being produced, is indicative of a somewhat jaded outlook.
And an unrepresentative one at that.

The Calm Before The Storm.

I treated myself to a beer today.
I'd earned it.
Today I obtained some free time, and next week I will be taking four interviews, two of which are second interviews.
With a bit of luck, this beastly, beastly war will finally start going my way.

Oddly enough it's around the 64th anniversary of the Battle of El-Alamein.

The beer is an Archer's Autumn Mist.
The veranda of the pub looks out across Wharfedale; the River Wharfe is about a mile away.

Meanwhile....

A cold one was waiting for me in the pub close to paradise.

No.
It isn't Guinness.
It is an Archer's Dark Mild, a 3.5% Porter beer which relies on burnt malt flavour rather than alcoholic strength.
An ideal sipping beer on an Autumn afternoon miles from home base.

Of course, Guinness was copied from traditional English Porter-type beers by the Irish and always brewed in London until last year, when the West Acton brewery was closed in favour of concentrating in Dublin alone.

But Guinness, though tolerable sometimes, is merely a beer done in the style of porters.

Whoa, man, it's too much like EFFORT!

So.
On Friday I had yet another interview.
I was not looking forward to this one; I am a serious engineer, and the potential employer was a games company.
In fact, when directed to their website, I froze in horror, having never seen such a childish, facetious site.

But my agent has worked hard for me, so I did the polite thing, got into my rejuvenated car and drove down the motorway to the appointment.

When I got there, there was nowhere to park at first until I hunted around.
Reception contained about twenty or thirty takeaway pizzas and cans of coca cola.

Let's face it.
'Everybody knows' that to keep programmers happy you need to give them pizza and coke, right?

I mean, cowabunga, man.

So there were all these kids, being treated like battery chickens in tee-shirts, and I was supposed to join?
I think not.
I tried the technical test.
Frankly I have only ever used hexadecimal numbers as constant values in the implementations of C API functions going back to MFC 4.2, so I was not particularly inclined or able to demonstrate hexadecimal arithmetic.
Likewise I didn't feel like doing a C-implementation of RLE on a big number.
Especially on paper.
If god meant us to write programmes on paper he wouldn't have given us IDEs.

Then there was the usual question about Assembly language, which I have never claimed as a skill and so should never have been asked about.

The questions about which computer games were my favourites were hopeless of course, as I don't really 'do' games.

And so I came home laughing and rather wishing I'd hooked up with the beautiful mature blonde who was hanging around me in the hotel I'd stopped for lunch at.

But hey.
I had an interview to go to, right?

Talk about embarrassing. I felt humiliated to have considered it for even a moment.

Paper Scoops Saturday

In Saturday's Financial Times: The UK has the highest proportional property taxes in the world, at 3.35% GDP.

Oft complaining Canada comes in third, at 2.72%.
Oddly, the USA is second at 2.79%.

The Netherlands is way down at 0.86%, just a little more than Italy.

Austria is 0.24%.


And from the pages of the Yorkshire Post('Yorkshire's National Newspaper'), we have a column written by one Clare Beckett, a doctoral teacher of 'social policy' at Bradford University; she claims that 'Thatcher was the first woman prime minister in a Western Democracy.Ever'.

Were you to mention Golda Meier, Beckett would probably emit noises to the effect that Israel is not a Western Democracy but some sort of failed criminal state; so no surprises there, eh?

Needless to say that the subversion of reason is such that she can believe herself to be right when she is just spectacularly wrong.

China-Red In Tooth And Claw.

So what if 3000 Chinese Christian families pool their savings and build a church.
So what if the Communists send 500 police and a large paramilitary force and destroy the church on the day of consecration.
So what if the Communists are sending Christians to forced labour camps.
So what if Chinese journalists are punished for reporting these facts?
Never mind.
'China' says that they have religious freedom; especially since the 80 million persecuted Christians outnumber the Communist Cabal.
China says-because China silences anybody who tells the truth.

You've Got To Laugh,eh?

So this housewife is going out; she's been blissfully married for twenty years, and she goes out to do the shopping.
Opposite the supermarket is a trendy winebar.
Who does she see but hubby carrying on with a young blonde?

She keeps quiet.
She goes home.
Prepares the evening meal.
Along comes hubby.
She says nothing. He eats the meal.Has a couple of beers.Catches the game on TV.
He goes to bed and sleeps.

She goes upstairs in a white rage, with the carving knife.
She grabs his dingle in her left hand and swipes it off with one cut.
He wakes up screaming and shouting wildly.

She panics and runs downstairs and gets into the car and drives.


She goes past a Patrol Car doing eighty, and they set off in hot pursuit. She is still holding hubby's dingle.
They follow her onto the motorway.
"Doesn't look like she's going to stop sarge!"
"Don't worry son, we'll catch her!"

She notices she still has the dingle in her left hand, so she opens the Sun roof and throws it out. She sees it strike the police car's windscreen.

"She's still not slowing down, sarge!"
"Never mind that!Did you see the size of the prick on that fly?"

Feck! Arse! Gurrrls! Drink!

Hello Sorehead. A little feedback from the interview in Great Yarmouth on Thursday. They said you8 came across as a very clever guy....

Drink!

...but they had a candidate who had already done the job as a contractor.....

Arse!

....and they felt that you didn't quite gel on a personal basis....

Feck off!


...oh.Alright.


Feck!Feck!Feck!Drink!

What's This Look Like?

So U2 is performing in Glasgow;
Bono asks for absolute quiet.

He gets it.

Then, slowly, he starts to clap his hands.

"Every time I clap my hands a child dies in Africa!"

Somebody at the back shouts:"So stop fucking doing it then!"

On R&R From Keepin' Russia.

Work finished for the week;


So here it was. A pint of Theakston Best Bitter.
Followed by?A pint of London Pride.Fuller's London Pride, brewed in Chiswick on the South Bank of the River; I used to go walking along the river bank at low tide where you could see the occasional freshwater oyster, and the District Line trains crossing the Richmond Bridge.
This is what it looked like when it settled; the Theakstons hadn't been a particularly good one, but today's Fuller's was a winner.
Meanwhile, youth meets age when this gentleman petted the pub's baby dog.
The dog had a limp due to playing too rough with the locals.

Thought So...

As soon as I had heard that North Korea had set off an atom bomb, especially underground, I thought that the particular timing was too good to be true.

As with all Soviet-style 'propaganda coups', this was probably staged to create the illusion of 'surprise' progress into any particular field of endeavour, by hook or by crook.

As it turns out, it was by Crook!