Category: Uncategorized

‘Labour planned to assassinate Idi Amin‘ shouts the Sunday Herald. Only, that’s not what David Owen said at all. Interviewed on Radio 4 over the weekend, he said he’s raised the idea, but it hadn’t been viewed remotely positively. Indeed, the Sunday Herald’s own story quotes his next sentence:

‘I’m not ashamed of considering it, because his regime goes down in the scale of Pol Pot as one of the worst of all regimes. It was a disgrace on us all that he was allowed to stay in office for as long as he did.’

…and that’s it. There is no more information that would lead one to the headline. Not in the printed story, anyway. So: do the journalists know something they haven’t bothered telling us, or was their editor too lazy to read his own front-page copy and write an appropriate headline? Or were they just trying to shock people into buying more papers?

I meant to post about this at the time: this astonishingly callous Washington Post Editorial was published last Thursday; it lambasts wussy Europeans for whining about it being ‘a bit warmer than usual.’

As my friend Vinay puts it, this is not the first time we’ve heard somebody say ‘Hi, 3000 of your people are dead: we’re largely responsible. woot!’. At least some of the Post’s readers would appear to take similar offence.

But what really got me was this passage:

…maybe they will now at least stop turning up their noses at those American summer inventions they’ve long loved to mock: […], the air conditioner that produces sub-arctic temperatures…

Er… those would be the same air conditioners that, later in the same day the article was published, contributed significantly to the failure of an overloaded power grid? Result: roughly as many people as live in the UK were without power for up to 30 hours. Hmm, OK.

And no, actually I still don’t think this is an example of irony. Schadenfreude, perhaps?

I bought a new hard drive the other day, for Mike’s sickly iMac. A sticker on its case reads ‘Warranty invalid in event of damage sustained from shocks in excess of 350g.’ So, I was trying to work out how one could possibly manage that… then Vinay sent me this link. And now I know.

Yes, I was the last of these three cars to park.

No, I didn’t hit them.

But yes, there was a fair amount of shuffling involved.

 

I haven’t looked at Atom Films for months, but this caught my eye on some other site: Pink Five, the story of a Valley girl at the Death Star battle. Nicely done; funny; we like.

Oh: not sure if it’s just me, but the Safari/Real Player/Atom Films combo isn’t too great. You might prefer to paste this link into RealOne directly.

Amongst the far-too-many things on my ‘ToDo’ list is ‘sort out this blog.’ It’s high time it had some static pages, links, that sort of thing; I want a list of recent comments in the sidebar; and this layout is one of the off-the-shelf Movable Type designs – not very distinctive. However, the MT learning curve is somewhat steep and TypePad isn’t enough of an excuse for that, frankly.

However, three things have helped recently. First is Blogstyles – though if you want to try a few styles on and see if they fit, it could get very pricey. Second, the MT-Plugins Directory. Looks like SimpleComments will handle the sidebar thing (and do other bits too). Third, this excellent explanation of how the DIV structure works in MT. I was planning on compiling something like this myself, since I was thoroughly appalled that it’s not a standard part of the documentation. Thankfully, somebody beat me to it, and made a rather better job of it than I would have.

[Posted here for my own reference, as much as anything. Oh – that’s another thing on my ToDo list – start a second blog (or maybe Wiki) just for things I want to note to myself. Maybe I should just stuff my Newton online and stop carrying it around…]

‘Come to dinner,’ said Mike, leading up to the catch, ‘and you could bring my Mac up-to-date while you’re round.’ This is typically a better deal than it sounds, since a meal with Mike and Jo involves at the very least terrific company, and usually (as tonight) rather decent food too. Copious wine, etc, all that jazz. If you’re very lucky, Mike digs out his recording of the Treorchy Male Voice Choir singing Queen covers, which is a work of stellar genius.

Unfortunately, on this occasion Mike forgot to mention one teensy detail, which finally came out just as I finished installing 10.2.6: his iMac is, in fact, utterly buggered. It only boots about one time in twenty.

Three hours later, it was still goosed, part-way through the installation of some essential update or other. So… when I arrived, he had a kitchen full of food and a marginally-working Mac. When I left, he had an empty kitchen and a non-booting Mac.

Oops.