Madness.

The man lay awake in the pre-dawn; he was sweating at the thought of another day in the city. How far would he get before the attacks started again, the cowardly hatred of the people to whom he didn't belong?
How many more examples would he have to make?
Would there ever come a time of peace, when he was rightfully left alone?
He sat on the edge of the bed. There was silence. He surrendered to it, feeling the quiet flowing even through his bones.
He lay back.
He fell asleep again.

Much later, when the Sun rose, Nero tried to face another day surrounded by the Roman Mob.

Did You See This One?

And Now For Something Completely Different

Sorry I Couldn't Be There For You, John.

Don't Play.

Play Up, Play Up, And Play The Game.

Winter Warmth

So, my mate and I go into the jewellers in Banbury Cross.
He's buying a pendant for his mum, her fiftieth wedding.
The assistant comes over; she's about five-two. She should be 'fat', trouble is all her shapes are round and sexy, lovely bust, and the skirt really shows off her butt. We point out a necklace in the case, so she comes round to look.
Her thighs stretch the skirt, they are shapely.
She has a beautiful smile and brown eyes with black hair.
She smiles often.
Back behind the counter, she lays out the necklace on black velvet.
Then she undose the top button of her blouse, says 'Let me show you', and holds the necklace up to her cleavage.
Needless to say, she makes two sales.

The necklace to my mate, and her to me.

What a fabulous woman.

And she actually thanked us.

I Stand Corrected.

So we go up to Oxford for the shopping; and the scenery is great!
I have never seen so many beautiful girls and women, beautiful, friendly, accessible, flirting, sexy - and ravenously, smilingly, intelligent. I tell you, I nearly had a mutiny.
If you ever come to England, Oxford on a Saturday is the best of it.
I could almost have second thoughts about the place if more was like Oxford.

I've got to say it, I like Oxford.

But Today?

So I'm in a pub in the midlands. I get it walking across the car park from a guy in the beer garden.
I get it from a couple of slag-boys having a smoke outside the entrance. For two minutes while I'm buying a pint of Ringwood Winter Stout, nothing.
Sit down.
Get it from three slags behind and two in front.

England is full of shit.
It walks, it talks, it buys cheap lager, and it's shit.
Shit, worse than a battallion of invading Doberman's fed on Bran Flakes.
And there's only one thing worse - the shit that stops us from escaping.

Because, whenever we start to reach the point where we can still be ourselves, still be antagonistic to the robots of rule, and still escape too, we get shot down in flames and find ourselves back at square one, a few years older.

And then some shit weaqring a grin thinks we've had enough, and let's the Dance Macabre start all over.

It's Coming. One Day.

Not Only But Also

Now Now, Calm Down.

The heat is off and things are settling down.

The siege has begun, and I should be able to outlast the present temporay difficulties.

Above is a still shot from my new security system.

It should be going on sale in a couple of months.

The blue square is from face detection. It works very well in low light.

I'll be looking for Beta testers shortly, as soon as a license utility is activated.

Today's Message

Big Mess

Up Yours!

No mate. I don't care who voted for you. You're not my nanny. Fuck off.

Oh To Be In England Now That Hope Is Gone

Maggie! Oh Boy!

Methodical madness

Good Old Ronnie

People Can Make You Ill

Times Like These.

Commemoration Of Greatness

Following the terrible news of the death of Patrick McGoohan, channel ITV4 is showing 'The Prisoner' from 1900 GMT.

It's Official

All, and I do mean all, of the listed sound generating synthesisers available for Linux, DO NOT WORK.

They appear to have been created and foisted on the users by a bunch of lazy, delusional children, like Bluebottle from the Goons.

"Hey. mister, do you want some free software? It's free..."

"What does it do?"

"Nothing......but it's free!"

Oh, Well. Exeter is alive.

God Damnit, Will Nothing Go Right In 2009?

Number 6 has died.

And Shaves.

Exeter Still Lives

Eggcellent....

Boowaaahahahahahaha!

Exeter Lives!

Time Out For Fun

The Mad Professor Keeps His Promise

Time For A Change

This article in the Globe & Mail covered the Somali piracy situation.
So, safe passage costs 3%?
And taxes for our 'Navy' (IPod-listening surrender-monkeys) costs what? 20%?
Withold the damned thieves' tax, pay the Somalis a 3% stipend, and the problem will go away.
Also, the 'Government' pretence will be ended.

High Up In My Castle

This is the new control room. World domination guaranteed.

Excellent Work

The Globe & Mail has done a fine job today with this critique of alleged Islam.

But They Said!

So, there's going to be a recession.

What makes this particular recession most sickening is the unedifying sight of all those fourth-and-a-half estaters going into a sweating terror-funk at the thought; the thought that the same people who sold them the dream of an end to boom and bust, might have been lying.

The unthinkable thought. The chancellor who engaged in capitalism that was unfetterred, simply because he didn't do any of his controlling in public, except when he administered mob-pleasing punishments.

They are terrified because they don't dare admit that they, too, have beeen lying to us dutifully for ten years, lying to preserve the illusion of erectness in the edifice of fake prosperity that has dulled our judgement for so long.
And is being blown away like Autumn leaves in a Winter wind.

And the facts are as cold as any Winter.

They are terrified, terrified because when all the bullshit economics has been flushed away, they will be left with the unavoidable truth.

This is the truth.

Not only is freedom the only thing which is right.

It is the only thing that works.

But They Said!

So we're going to have another recession.

After the years of fat thinking, fat to the point of schlerosis, a lot of companies are going to disappear and we will be facing a new landscape.

The fact is beginning to sink in. This is not something entirely new. There have been big ballls ups before, as recently as '92 when I spent two years out of work.

What everybody is beginning to realise is that business as usual is precisely what we are experiencing.

An awful lot of bullshit economics is going to get flushed down the toilet; what makes the panic particularly unedifying to watch is that all those fourth-and-a-half estate drones who bought into the 'end to boom and bust' mantra really expected it to be true.

These alleged people feel personally the betrayal inherent in the lies which kept the edifice tottering on the verge of erectness for so long, proving to be just so many Autumn leaves in the cold Winter wind of the facts.

This was foreseen at the start of the 'experiment' when responsibility was diverted by pretending to allow the unfettered capitalism of a Chancellor who just happened not to do any controlling in the open.

A stinking decade of lying corruption has had its lid blown off, and now the rats are running around trying to abandon the ship of state - but there is no land left, and all they can do is pass ropes around icebergs to try and stay afloat.

What good this will do in the global warming of a monetary meltdown is probably none.

But there the analogy ends. The State may be a ship, but the economy is made of trade, which is a flotilla.

They will try to bind our providers together, to try to keep their lumps of scrap iron above the waves, but there are finally some signs that voices of reason are speaking firmly above the shrieking, offering the realisation that everyone for themselves reallly is the only way to allow everyone to survive.

The Swansong Of Prosperity.

I may be out of work next month.
Meantime, a little effort and elbow grease has secured me a loft that now contains my marvellous computer with 5.1 sound, all the privacy I could ask for at this stage and safety from annoying the neighbours with my hours upon hours of honeyed sound.

I'm ready for a seige.

And £15 secured me a cordless phone; I've already paid for it by going three days without beer. I moved all the furniture without breaking a sweat, my heartburn has disappeared and I feel more alert. I wake better too.

The phone allows me to move all over the house without worrying, so I can talk, make a cup of tea, go up to the music room and still talk.

It has a built-in answering machine too, so it will pay for itself over again once I cancel the answering service I've been using.

Small reasons for some satisfaction.

Bags Me For Parole Officer.

Congratulations to Mike on quitting his citizenship. The trick might then be to emigrate to the US and become a citizen. Then quit again.
Sorry to hear about Janine.
She looks great for a forty year old. I would be delighted to offer her aid and succour should she decide to go on the run.
Maybe she could lend me a few thousand dollars to get to Canada permanently. That would be all it took, and I have to say that while, on paper, Canadian slavery is at least the equal of British, the society of Ice Road Truckers, Oil Shale Men and Diamond Miners is preferable to cold blooded cowards.

Exeter Lives

Hell No!

Cheer up, Mike and Missus Mike!
Granted the stupid worm-food creeps are getting you down, granted that people are feeling depressed and suicidal, maybe even crazy, never, never, never, never, never help the bastards by topping yourself.
They are the ones who deserve it, not you.
If it really comes to life or death, turn that frown upside down and go down fighting!

Schadenfreud

Virgin Megastores have gone bust.
10 years ago I rang them up and wrote to them, suggesting they have an instore selection system where people could burn any CD they like.
"Pooh pooh! Too much trouble! We'd never get the rights sorted out!"
Couple of weeks ago, Amazon rolled out it's MP3 download service, which is more or less what I suggested.
Virgin is out of business.
Serves them bloody right! Incompetent morons.

Sponsor's Christmas Message

Miserable Earthlings!

Their Christmas is no match for the feasting on our home planet; the emotions they feel when celebrating are but a tenth of the emotions we feel when eating our roast Narchek.

Their puny Turkeys are totally inadequate when compared to Zombezian Battle Nurks, which we hunt for sport.

Religion? Ha!

The ceremonies of the Ascent of Cistar make their carol singing sound like the strangulated whining of an inferior brand of dog!

Armour Brand is the only one suitable for intergalactic travelodges!

Friends Notwithstanding

Enough from SJP for the time-being.
My new Windows computer has a big hard disk and the capability for 7.1 sound, so I'm starting to put my music onto it.
Been using the Linux box for years, but the hardware isn't 7.1 and the disk isn't quite so big.
So.
I'm duplicating the rip. I've got to say again, I'm quite pleased with Vista. The fanatic sheep at the San Francisco Chronicle were bleating about windows; to a man they waffled on about Firefox and Mac. But the fact is that Vista matched Linux for security in a recent test where the fashionista Mac failed.
And Firefox is, well, crap. It crashes every five minutes on Linux and sometimes takes the whole Desktop with it.
Anyway, I turned my Vista on at 6 tonight, and by 6:03 it was downloading the patch for the security scare that everybody was on about.
Meanwhile back in the SFC, I got a lot of thumbs down ratings from idiots who couldn't stand to hear the realities. They wanted to abuse people with their totally undeserved sense of superiority (for using Firefox), so that they could call windows users 'sheeple' and 'uneducated'.

Of course, there is actually nobody more ignorant than somebody who uses a delusion of superiority to spout abuse.
It was these people who were the mob, these people who were ignorant, and frankly they are doing a great disservice to Microsoft because they are, quite simply, mediocrities.

As Promised

Veeery Interesting

If You Go Down To The Woods Today...

The Fault Game.

The ability to blame is no substitute for ability.

Vista and Ubuntu Networking

Nobody had the answer. Not the full answer.

Get some from here:https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SettingUpSamba#Sharing CUPS Printers

But first, get this bit done:http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=202605

Neither has the full answer.

The lower has the basics.

You will need WINS to make it work.

And here is the devilish detail.

You need to get on Vista, go into Networks.

Click on your LAN.

Go to properties.

Find IPv4, select, and click properties.

Add WINS server with your Ubuntu IP address.

Click okay all the way down.

Network will open up automatically, and add printer will find your Ubuntu printer and then you can follow the route to install drivers. But only from the Vista end:( 

Then print away.

Beautiful job.

Actually....

I'm writing this from my new computer.
It's an Inspiron 530; Core Duo 2.5 Gig, 2 Gig RAM and a 320 Gig hard drive.
The standard operating system is Vista.
I've heard all the stories, relentlessly, month after month, year in year out, all saying they wouldn't use Vista if they were paid.
I've read the articles about how Microsoft is trying to avert a public relations disaster and spending millions on advertising rather than improving software.
I've seen the accounts of people downgrading to XP.

The facts are different however.
Microsoft isn't spending millions fixing the software, because frankly it isn't broken.

The people downgrading to XP are idiots.
Compared to Vista, XP is total shite.
I got my system at nine.
I had it running by half-past; I had Visual Studio Express installed and working by twelve, along with OpenOffice.
And that included my trip to town for brunch and beers.
By two, I had rebuilt my new commercial product in VS9, and it ran faultlessly for an hour, passing every test I could throw at it.

Which was not true of XP.

It has operated seamlessly and without faltering all day. XP would have hung. Linux would have asked for my passwords a dozen times at least, and a few creaks and cracks would have shown around the edges, although my hardware setup isn't half as good for Linux. But then, they say it doesn't need to be.

I won't be replacing Linux.
But 99% of the talk about Vista is cobblers.
It is a good product.

State The Obvious If You Aren't A Goldfish

The stock market boom of the eighties lasted right up until the 'Dotcom' bubble collapsed in 2000.

But wait.

What happened in the eighties?

Maggie and Ronnie brewed up some Capitalism.

Freedom.

What happened in 1997?

That's right! The 'Third Way'.

And three years later after their numerous looting attacks on the wealth of nations, the markets fell and never recovered.

After a further 8 years of the 'Third Way', we see the greatest financial disaster since 1929.

What has failed, and what nobody has the guts to say, is The Third Way.

Yet again, socialism, whatever it's outer shell may resemble, has pauperised all of us.

And yet again, the fact is being covered up.

God help them, they are even appealing to the socialists for help!

When your house is burning down, you don't call an arsonist to put out the flames.

Monkeynomics

"Pump billions into the economy"

What part of that rubbish is English?

'Pump'.

They really think that they control something physical, yet arbitrary, which can be 'pumped'.

One thing's for sure. It isn't money.

'Billions'.

This must be the preferred expression for amounts, an expression that conjures the comforting sound of the big guns, the legions, the host, hammering our fears back into the grave.

Where we all go eventually.

'Into'.

Apparently there is a shortage of 'billions', somewhere, which only these heroic lawyers of legal action can rectify.

'Economy'.

The economy is a statistical unit of what amounts to the total productiveness of the population of the country, insofar as it expresses our legally extracted information concerning our lives.

But the monkeys think it's a real thing that drives people, not vice versa(real people driving a fictional statistic).

And there we have it.

The supermen are turning the world upside down to ward off death.

How much is a mortgage on a mud hut? And will it keep out the monkey-men's spear?

The Telegraph's MATT comes through again.

Anybody remember the 70's Smirnoff Cinema Advertisement?

Once Bitten

With the best will in the world, some crud gets through, and so it was for me when I bought my third e-bay computer.

It was a Dell Optiplex 270, comparable to my usual device.

The cooling fans don't work.

So, that's that.

I stripped out the memory and parked the carcass in a corner.

My main box is now super-equipped, with all the memory it needs, a strong processor and good old Linux.

However, I really need a Windows computer for preparing new products which will work on everybody elses Windows boxes.

So I took the plunge. I went to Dell, and bought my first ever new computer.

It cost £292.

For that, I get: Pentium Dual Core 2.5 GHz; 2 GB RAM; 320 GB hard drive.It comes with Vista, a keyboard and a mouse.

And if I need to, I can blat it back to XP Pro.

I think that is quite good value.

Beware The Experts.

There is a secret culture in many countries, old culture, old countries.

It is quite precise in its application, violating us with almost scientific delicacy, keeping the sane mad and the loonies on the path.

It is practised by the powerful, from within the cages they haven't quite managed to destroy, the cages we tried to put them in many years ago.

They don't mouth quite so many platitudes these days, because their confidence is growing, or at least their insolence is; they control us through the application of torture, the torture allowed by the rules that were set years ago and they haven't quite got round to abolishing yet.

The rule for torture in England is 'White Noise'. This has long been the standard form of 'pshychological' torture that people such as Special Branch and MI5 have been allowed to practise in their lairs.

What isn't so widely known is that it is spread out into the wider world, like wiretapping, by agents who may or may not belong to agencies, or by agents who are just psychopathological sadists. 

These 'people'(I use the term loosely) are quite happy to go about our business, doing whatever they can to break us down and turn us into productive little drones who see nothing to object to in the daily diet of inhuman sewage that passes for 'life' here.

In America, the Government used Rock Music to destroy General Noriega.

Here little fellows with big sounds use 'White Noise' to rule our roosts and prevent us from ever coming to.

White Noise is a loose term also. It can be anything from the rumble of air-conditioning to a constant background like distant gunfire.

It is used against us when we eat, sleep, watch TV, write, but especially to prevent us from thinking or feeling anything that might remind us we are men.

Because when that happens, we either break free and leave(together with our taxable productiveness) or crack up and go stark, raving mad; at which time they criminalise us or just kill us.

It is a dangerous game sometimes.

The Daddy of all Daddies

This from the excellent Randolph Hearst Paper in San Francisco.

Animal Farm

Just been watching the BBC4 series on Versailles.

Apparently when the owner indulged in vainglorious spectaculars, he was the subject of a Revolution and was put to death.

Now they do it all the time, and the poor French people are supposed to feel 'patriotism'.

Such is progress, eh?

AAFreeTibet

Check out AAFreeTibet (on the left) for David Millipede's latest atrocity.

VB.NET 2008 Printing

Tired of all those useless cunts attempting to give really crappy advice?

Here's the real deal.

Drag and drop a PrinterDocument onto your form.

Set a button.

Button click does PrinterDocument1.Print()

Create a handler for this, ie override .Print().

Use System.Drawing.Printing.PrintPageEventArgs for 'e' in the argument list, and set to 'Handles PrinterDocument1.PrintPage.

Then, in the body of this method, say e.Graphics.DrawString(fill this in) for text,

or for a picture, e.Graphics.DrawImage(fill this in)

It really is that simple.

Five lines, and there are all these uselss dickheads filling the www with rubbish going on from reference to reference and site to site, sometimes pages long, telling nobody anything.

It's an embarrassment.

Windoze Bloody Windoze

So, I thought I'd do a little Windows programming.

The first time I switched on, ten minutes and I'd had some rubbish suggestions about 'unused' icons. Then the system tried to update half a dozen things at the same time and died.

I pulled the plug.

Attempt number two, and I opened Program Manager sztraight away to head them off at the pass.

No upgrades this time, just an unasked-for security scan that killed everything, including Program Manager. Complete with a 'cancel' button that didn't.

Pull the power cord out again.

This is the third attempt.

So far I've been trying to boot up for half an hour and I haven't written a single line of code. 

Windows?

Pathetic.

The Experiment

On Tuesday I received my new DVD.

It is a Region 1 NTSC copy of Seven Days In May, which is about the best film I know of.

Try as I might, I couldn't get it to play on any of my computers; I tried the windows hacks with no success.

Linux actually issued a disclaimer because what I was trying to do was illegal (copy and convert a write-protected movie).

So I caved and went to Amazon again, where I picked up a snazzy multi-region DVD player for £30.

Obviously made in the Great Chinese Slave Hell of the East, but it arrived today, three days later, and it works.

I sat and watched the almost unobtainable 'Seven Days In May', for two hours straight.

Superb.

For those of you not in the know, it stars Burt, Ava and Kirk in a story about a military coup d'etat in the USA against an unpopular pacific president.

Awesome.

Gripping from the first minute to the last.

I Shot The Deputy-But I Didn't Mean To

This article is interesting; the Sheriff's Deputy who was invalided out of the NYPD, is now also a millionaire.

Would you take the bullet?

A Word To The Wise, Dudes.

Nero is shite.

For god's sake, don't install it.

Wild!

This guy is really out there.
I wish him the very best of luck. He's a real hero.

Truth.

A government big enough to give you everything you want is strong enough to take everything you have - Thomas Jefferson

OpenCV modifications

And now a break for business.
Dont bother with this post unless you are a nerd, or a developer.
OpenCV is a vision library that supplies source code.
It works fine out of the box.
The libraries are available in two flavours; VS6 and VS8.
Both build readily.
However beware!
The VS8 version will upgrade to and build in VS9, but if you make any changes to the open source code, it will require 'omp.h', a header file only available to VS2008 Professional, which is many hundreds if not thousands of pounds.
Fear not.
If you have VC++ 6, you can build your changes in old-fashioned style, and it will integrate with VS9-produced applications(unmanaged), so that you can use VS6 to get round the (massive) financial hit and modify the open source OpenCV code.
Happy!

Forget The BBC.

Superb comedy from Chuck Lorre et al;
'Big Bang Theory'.
I saw the last in the current series tonight.
I had heard it was not going to be renewed,
but apparently it is a current series.
Pleased about that.
Not so pleasing- blogger doesn't supply a full 'compose' window to Opera on Linux anymore.

About Time.

The BBC is finally living up to its remit.
It is showing the story of the refugees from Tibet that were shot dead, murdered as they tramped in the snow towards freedom.
The murders were filmed by an international group of climbers.
The cameraman was Rumanian!
When he got home, he gave the films to his contacts in the Rumanian Media, who immediately broadcast them.
The BBC also broadcast them, in the programme 'Murder In The Snow'.

Finally, a little bit of the truth about Red China.

Gore Vidal?

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

Loony!

Americanism.

Americanism was the simplest religion ever conceived.

Its bible, the Constitution, was a few sheets long, and essentially boiled down to 'go and be happy'.

There was no god.

There was no governing class.

Anyway, that was Americanism. Let's hope they have a fundamentalist resurgence.

Correction.

It is open source.

It is assholes.

But it is the Banshee music player, not Opera.

Banshee, if you remember, was the music player written in that god-awful C# open source clone, Mono, that ate memory and hung the system after a day or two.

This time it failed to go away when asked to, and left a zombie behind that slayed the sound resources Opera needed.

Now I will uninstall Zombie, sorry Banshee, since it seems to be really really, well, *crap*.

Rhythmbox takes two goes to start, but Rhythmbox rules.

You Gotta Love these 'Open Sauce' Assholes.

So they bring out a version of Opera, 9.60, that WORKS!
WONDERFUL!
Then a week later, 9.61.
Then, this week, 9.62.
And guess what?
Yes!
The fucking idiots have BROKEN it again!
Well done!
You half wits.

Remember..

The next time that the MSM 'reports' on the plight of someone from their approved list, or stresses the misery of people with guaranteed jobs who don't 'feel safe anymore', or the next time that someone tries to tell you about the sufferings of this, that or the other.....

remember this.

Humans have feelings too.

Thunderpants removed.

The smell is terrible. The Times cannot guarantee to publish all comments due to the number received, that number being '8' on this occasion.

Once again, they have been evicted.

I can guarantee to get published in San Francisco.

I can't get published less than 6,000 miles from home.

According To The Plan Of The Split-Second...

Interest rates in the USA have been cut again.

This means that those still earning can borrow a little bit extra and spend it.

This will provide a boost for another couple of weeks or months, until the elastic runs out again, and people are again in as much debt as they can support.

Meanwhile, the dollar will weaken, as it returns less, and so the prices of all the imports will go up.

This means that the people still earning, and now in even more debt, will actually be physically capable of buying less.

If this was Japan, where they are capable of building for the home market, the impact would not be great.

But this is the USA, where they rely on imports from China.

The Chinese will be urged to cut interest rates also, to prevent the dollar collapsing.

And here is the point;

in 1929, the UK urged the USA to cut interest rates to prevent a Sterling collapse.

And we all know 'what happened next'.

But just in case, here is the Great Depression.

Norton Commando

is BACK

Three Strikes.

The Telegraph has been evicted again. Although I put them in because they (or rather Simon Heffer) kept mentioning Ayn Rand, they are up to their old tricks again with the comments.

So tata.

Come Again?

They are crowing about the end of 'Reaganism-Thatcherism'.

Apparently its time has come. 

What they fail to mention is that they killed it ten years ago. Maggie was forced out eighteen years ago, Ronnie in 1988, twenty years ago. Ronnie is dead. Maggie is broken.

But at the time, Maggie and Ronnie were unstoppable, popular, effective and wildly victorious.

It was their enemies who looked to objectify them, by creating absurd 'isms' linked to their names.

And it is these enemies, dismayed by the continuing expectations of the people that the eighties will continue, who are now seeking to murder the strawmen they invented and take our freedom with them.

They hate and fear the realities of that time so much, there is no atrocity to which they will not stoop in their quest to murder our hope.

The Neighbour Situation.

What do you do when your neighbour finally and irrevocably proves that he is an asshole?

Simple.

Print out the Wikipedia entry for 'Asshole'.

Fold it twice. Put it in an envelope. Address the envelope to your neighbour. Put a stamp on it. Place it in a post box.

Then, write a letter, to his landlord. Keep it friendly. Mention the noise. Mention the pets. Mention Civil Action in the courts.

Address it to his landlord. Put it through the agent's letterbox.

Then go and have a beer while looking out across the Bay.

Boowaaahahahahaha!

Riddle Me This.

I went away on holiday for a week.

Now that I'm back, I've turned on my main computer again, and started up my private website.

It has been switched off completely from last Saturday until yesterday.

Yet, when I looked at the stats for the site, it was shown as having received a couple of visits on Thursday.

This is rather strange, as the tracking is included in the site and only runs at the same time as it does. So unless there is something I don't know, somebody must have switched my computer on while I was away. I assume that the server runs even even when no user is logged in, unless somebody very sophisticated hacked me.

Meanwhile both music playing programmes have been suffering unexplained database corruptions, and all Skype does is crash and hang, taking Ekiga with it, which is new.

On the plus side, I've installed the new Opera, and it works perfectly.

It Finally Happened.

Gordon 'The Moron' Brown is going to make it law that this country produces an estimated 80% less CO2 in thirty years.
Yes.
They really are going to tax the air that we breathe.

Don't Ask Me(Shrug).

According to Channel 4 News :- The newly nationalised banks have been ordered by the treasury to maintain lending at last year's levels!
Directive 10289 is here!
I would say that you couldn't invent this, but Ayn Rand already did.
Next-the collapse of the cities.
This really is the end game.

Welcome To The Orphanage.

The government wasn't satisfied with owning our money.
Now they own our bank accounts too.

Sadly Too Typical.

Tonight I watched the Harry And Paul Show on BBC1.
Once you get past the jokes and see where they are headed, the usual suspects are only too apparent.
First off, the title sequence is not 'making fun of' the Soviet Politbureau.
It is embracing it in the warmth of a proper BBC welcome. But it is not the BBC. It is Harry Enfield, that famous champagne socialist, who is admiringly tipping the wink to the Soviets.
No?
So why, in the first sketch, was Margaret Thatcher murdered by Nelson Mandela?
This is what all the other sketches were leading up to.
As if nobody would notice.
Once that basis is established, then the rest of the sketches fall into place like the dominos in the Guinness advert.
Harry pretends to have a 'kind smile' for the benefit of the 'Polish girls'.
He presents himself as a bumbling, kind, amiable little fellow who is going bald, and is lonely.
In fact, this is a front, the front Enfield has been presenting to the world for thirty years and more.
But every time he fumbles, something gets trashed. If you don't see the method behind his alleged aimlessness, you haven't been paying attention.
Like all the socialists, he has been playing a long game, the only kind of game that could have sustained them through the eighties, when their arch-hate Margaret truly scared the shit out them- by being successful and popular with the people.
And they have been trying to tuck we, the people, up in our prams again, ever since.
Their kind smiles follow us from the cradle- to the grave.

My Dear Chap....

The Times is concerned that two NHS doctors planned mass murder.
My dear fellow, they do it all the time!
Why all this melodrama with cars?

I Say, Have You Seen...?

The Conservative website?
It has been totally revamped.
New vampires on every page.
The local party in my new neighbourhood has quietly ignored my transfer approaches, so I now must consider myself expelled by virtue of no longer being a member.
This is as it should be.
I have never before associated myself with malfeasant milquetoast weakness dressed up as statesmanship, and I'm not about to start now.
The conservative party fills me with the urge to defacate.
The have about as much principle as Hitler, and less competent image management.
They really mean it when they say that they are ready to hold hands with NuLabor.
It's like the Ribbentrop Pact.
This time what's left of England is the new Poland, and the Long Knives are out for any person of principle still silly enough to remain within their sphere of influence.
President Haguenberg won't be here in thirty years time.
Maggie can do no more.
It's up to Major, the last Prime Minister with anything even approaching a set of principles, to become the senior statesman that salvages some dignity at least from this appalling farce.

Let's See Now......

They promised an 'end to boom and bust'.
This was the key to giving them control for as long as the lie could sustain.
And to hell with everybody and everything that didn't fit the plan.

So they sold cheap money to the banks; the interest rates were kept low, so that we could buy cheap credit.
The credit went to buy real produce in China, which we could afford not because we had earned it, but because we had cheap credit.
The Chinese got tons and tons of money for their work, and used it to buy government credit notes in the West.
Thus, the governments provided more cheap credit.
Thus we bought even more Chinese produce, and they bought even more credit.

Our governments could see no reason why this would ever end.

Confused?
You won't be.
After next week's episode of......SOAP!
(laundry soap, chinese laundry soap, Chinese money laundry soap).

Trouble is, they have told so many lies about the Industrial Revolution being 'founded on slavery', that they see nothing wrong with contracting out slavery to a government that enslaves 1/4 of the population of the world.

It was for the best.

Sometimes it's kill or cure. My troubled area is dandruff.

The Empire Strikes Back.

From the BBC:

The West Bengal government acquired 1,000 acres of land for the Nano project two years ago.

More than 10,000 farmers accepted compensation for their land, but just over 2,000 of them refused and demanded land be returned.

During the protests Tata's engineers and workers were attacked, prompting the group to stop work.

Finally, someone has the guts to stand up for the RIGHT OF PROPERTY!

Vomit In Print.

The front page of the Observer, the socialist comfort blanket for all those champagne types in Notting Hill and Camden who may have lost their nannies - it carries the legend 'Crash Of 2008' with 'Disaster' writ large underneath.

You can bet that the creators of this page don't believe for a minute that it is anything of the sort.
They still publish, confident that there will be a market of people with money and leisure to invest in this form of idle schadenfreud, thus negating the point they try to make by the fact that they are making it.
You can be sure they waited until it was safe in their eyes, before making the cowards' shout from the back of the crowd.

If the Observer goes absolutely broke and goes out of business forever, I will be convinced that something cathartic is on the cards.
Then and only then.
Until then, we can rest assured that all the usual people are safely behind the eight ball.

Stranger Than Fiction?

This is what comprises the establishment of Britain. Whether it is any better than elsewhere I don't know. But I certainly hope so.

Got Bloomberg?

Then you can watch it on TV.

Oh, Boy!

Courtesy of Djomama.

Ohhhh, Yeah!!

Oh, Yeah.

It's Official.

Ekiga is okay, okay, okay.
It works well, and offers many attractive features that Skype doesn't.
Skype is probably a more mature technology in some respects, but Ekiga, once tuned, is better and doesn't conflict with other applications trying to use audio resources.
In other words, if you have music playing, you can still hear the ringing tone.
It has to be said that if you hit the lucky sweet spot, Skype will do this too, but only if you are lucky. Ekiga co-exists right out of the box.
All you have to remember is, that like many other Open Source applications, a certain amount of adjustment is required to obtain good performance.
In Ekiga's case this is minimal, and I've probably lost less time with Ekiga than I originally did with Skype.
Plus, Ekiga is compatible with the new industry standard.

More Open Source

So, I decided to persevere with Ekiga. It couldn't really be that bad, could it?
In a word, no.
Ekiga is Open Source down to its boots, which means that unlike the free ride provided by Skype to a certain extent, Ekiga is endlessly configurable.
For example, ring the '500' number to test, and audio works out of the box.
But video can be configured in a multiplicity of ways, and '500' will loop your transmission back to you for inspection.
This works( after a delay), and you can begin to tune your video in terms of bandwidth and quality.
This is very open source, and I'm beginning to think that Ekiga has potential.
I'll get my co-worker to have another transmission session tonight and see if we can't get it working.

Open Source.

The fact is, that some 'open source' stuff is only open source because the developers can't get real jobs.
They pretend to be able to programme, do a little bit which is enough to convince the gullible that their product really is a product, then release some half-baked rubbish into the world.

Example being that 'Ekiga' intends to take over from Skype.
Thing is, boys, Skype really does work, while Ekiga is an embarrassingly poor audio phone which swallows resources whole and tries to pretend it does video by enabling the fake menus, while echoing like a soliloquy recited in a toilet bowl.
While flushing.
It is touching that enthusiasts (wankers) go on saying it is okay, and praising its alleged features, but somebody should tell the two men and a dog (and a monkey) at Ekiga that no amount of TSR (viral) programming is going to entice people to use their crap.
Point in fact: 90,000 people are registered with Ekiga, typically 500 on line at any time. 12 million people are typically online with Skype at any time. And they are both free.

Curiouser and Curiouser.

Lured by the links on the anti-CP site, I visited the European offices site.
Here was their art gallery.
Oddly enough, in the paeon to 'strong' women in culture, especially political culture, there is no mention at all of Margaret Thatcher.
So it is a religion, then, and she is its shibboleth.
You may know who we are.
We also know who you are.

Conspiracy Theory.

Over the years, under my own name, I have possibly made an impression in certain circles as someone who opposes the state, as a concept and as a reality, especially all forms of Communism, which changes to evade detection in the same ways as the HIV virus, using the same methods for the same purpose.
I have published many public articles, gotten into many public arguments and stood for public office twice.
Many strange things have happened to me.
I have been approached by total strangers wishing me to join peculiar societies or social groupings, I mean absolutely out of the blue; I have found my ambitions laid bare before unsympathetic people, and people who have watched all this and offered nothing but sympathy. Nothing.
Then there were the times that people seemed to know things about me and my loved ones. Times when I was down on my luck, and found myself 'kicked', threatened, abused, initmidated and helpless to fight back.

I don't think that they understand me.
I think that they hate me.

Who and how?
The who could be these people, for example.
They would fit the bill, but what of these 'methods'.
Item: I was due to become rich, through an invention.
Item: I was swindled, which prevented this.
Item: I enjoyed 15 years of peace at my old home.
Item: A new criminal moved in upstairs and began a personalised persecution which was actually physically dangerous. This happened when I fought back against the swindlers.
Item: I overheard my opponent talking about me wiht pure hatred in the election; he didn't know I was there(old leather jacket, flat cap, no rosette) and so I heard. Bearing in mind I was only expecting 10% of the vote, what was his beef?
Item: They were discomfitted when I moved to a better situation.
Item: I saw one of these funny little men hanging around my new street.
Item: A couple of weeks later my new neighbours left and another of these 'funny litle men' moved in.
Item: This one uses Drum'n Bass on an industrial scale to disrupt the house.
Item: Nothing personal, but the police have recently had all their domestic noise powers removed. So much easier and safer than employing criminals, if it is Common Purpose and not paranoia.

Could be a load of nothing.
But I don't expect that I will be suffering these fools much longer. I am making money, fast, and I'll be able to afford a bomb-proof place in a couple of years.

Why Ugly Betty?

Why do I love 'Ugly Betty'?
I was just watching 'Wire In The Blood'.
This is essentially a poor relation, juvenile pretense at ersatz 'American' drama, as imagined by the tired old collection of mentally neutered dramatists employed by ITV.
They want to sneer at American drama, as too violent and melodramatic, yet seek to 'prove' that England is just as exciting by relying on the very same drama-bites and throb-cues for an effect which is so much less than the sum of its alleged parts.
There is no plot, no mystery, no characterisation - the non-events are puppeteered by gutless cyphers and the entire process is nothing more than televisual roughage intended to act as a vehicle for the requisite number of advertisements in the requisite number of hours.

The BBC imitates this, but without the adverts.

Oh yes. And everybody looks miserable to convince us of the seriousness of the non-proceedings.
Even Doctor Who has to be pimped up by using a full blown symphony orchestra to play the theme tune.

Ugly Betty is actually very, very good.

British drama is badly acted, badly written, and boring.
The talent exists somewhere, but it is all pissed up the walls of the studio executives offices in the name of keeping egos down.
It is not for nothing that Patrick McGoohan lives in exile in America. This country was too small-minded to hold him after 'The Prisoner'.

Generally, America is also filled with a surfeit of very bad television, but occasionally the talents get together and produce something good. Of course, Ugly Betty is based on a Mexican soap, but sometimes it takes talent to know talent and adapt it.
Similarly, underdog films in America, such as 'Thank You For Smoking' and 'Crash', are absolutely superb, while the vast majority of mainstream Hollywood produce is pure shit which is not worth watching. Recycled shit at that. But at least it doesn't rely on nauseating English whimsy like most domestic crap, and at least two or three good films are produced each year.