May 2003 Archives

The accident group went belly-up today after sacking its employees by text message(?) I mention this not because it's good news--I feel for those thousands of unemployed--it's just that I find it encouraging that an ambulance-chasing outfit didn't manage to survive in Britain. AG was the first of its kind to offer 'no-win-no-fee' legal work in the UK. With any luck, Britons won't catch compensation fever;-)

...who got here searching for "koran osx". As Barry Norman claims he never said, and why not?

If you wanted to find out what you call a naked pirate in a room with a wolf you'd have to read this page at ftrain.com

Except this time round it was UK nul points. Has to be the first time--not a single point...

So Riga looks like a laugh, Turkey wins (strange song), the local presenters are exactly as suntanned, plastic and shiny as the last time I watched (1979 I'm guessing) oh, and Terry Wogan sounds pissed the whole time;-)

Strange entertainment...

Sony withdraws "shock and awe" trade mark filing

Sony has withdrawn a trade mark application for the phrase "shock and awe" which was used by US forces to describe the initial bombing campaign in Iraq. Media criticism made Sony abandon its plan to use the term for a PlayStation game.

Read the article at outlaw.com

More awesomeness on WFMU:

New York Burlesque Fest webcam special
Friday,/05/23rd, Noon - 3pm

Join Monica for a live WEBCAM bump'n'grind blowout celebrating the first ever New York Burlesque Festival. A cavalcade of demimonde D-cups from all over the country will be coming by WFMU's Love Room to ply their ecdysiastical trade on stage and discuss the history of burlesque. The link to the video feed will be at available at www.wfmu.org when the show begins.

The Apple store has just confirmed that they are not offering an upgrade path for owners of OS X Server.

I bought a full version of X server when it was version 1.2 and essentially little more than a re-packaged NextStep. I then foolishly paid good money for the OS X public beta and finally spent £400 on getting 10.1 Server. After almost £1000 spent on unfinished software I am now at the point where I am seriously thinking of going illegal.

Apple, get your shit together. I'll 'happily' fork out another £100 or so for an upgrade if you insist, but you're asking me to buy another full-whack license. That's just crazy.

So here we go: does anyone out there have a copy of 10.2 server (the cds that came with your new machine) they'd be happy to lend me? Anyone?

If not, I'm switching to Windows, at least they keep your expectations low.

So I just this second deleted the latest edition of the Nigerian scam letter and was about to go back to work when I was struck by the depth of the narrative. This particular one goes on in depth to describe the players--their age, their families, their roles in the community...

I then started wondering if these scams are created by aborigines or immigrants? I just can't imagine a western con-man painting such a vivid picture of the personal tragedies befalling the late president so-and-so or his private secretary who is now writing. Never mind the contradiction that he says he escapes with his son in one clause and that he lost his two children in another. The resonant image the reader is left with is the steely eyes of young Patrice, barely a man and yet already scarred by terrible tragedy.

He was aged 66 years. I managed to escape to South Africa with my son Patrice, aged 17 where I am presently residing as a war refugee shortly after the capital city Kinshasha was overrun by rebels. I lost my wife and my two children, and all my possessions during the rebel onslaught on the capital city.

I guess I'm just an old cynic who hasn't been properly conned in a while. Actually, that's not true, I was conned recently by a squeegee-bandit on the north circular with an ingenious sleight-of-hand trick designed to keep me handing over pound coins...

To misuse a phrase from Blue Velvet, ...why are there people like Frank in the world? Read the papers this morning and didn't know whether to laugh or cry. The sheer Orwelian-ness (is that a word?) of the Iraq situation, combined with the unstopableness (now that can't be a word?) of the American machine have sapped my will to argue. I've spent the last month composing and re-composing posts to this blog, but in the end never posted them as I used to foolishly think I might just get one or two readers to reconsider their position on the issues but have now lost all hope.

In the end I find this debate is a cruel rock. The opposing camps go over the top and human rights, humanist values cherished for centuries pile up in body-bags while the fucking front line doesn't budge an inch. Frankly, it makes me sick.

The two faces of Rumsfeld
2000: director of a company which wins $200m contract to sell nuclear reactors to North Korea
2002: declares North Korea a terrorist state, part of the axis of evil and a target for regime change

Randeep Ramesh in The Guardian, Friday/05/9, 2003

Under the US proposals, a new body comprising Britain and the United States - known as The Authority - would decide how income from the sale of Iraqi oil would be spent.

Does "The Authority" not suggest "Oceania"? From the BBC website

Hiya, I'm after a quick fav. My mate has just starting up a new website that needs a bit of advertising. Could you please forward on this address to as many people as you know, and ask them to look at it and pass the address on to as many people as they know etc..

the site is still quite basic at the minute but will be updated and added to on a regular basis. the address is:

http://www.lovespuds.com

the creator says it's like Jamie Oliver meets FHM.

Well, it's about twenty to five in morning and I've been working all night:-(

On the plus side, I can now hear birdsong outside my window--the combination of sleepless night, birdsong and that particularly lovely smell of summer you get in the city combine to make me feel like a student on a hot new York summer night in 1985 when I've spent the whole night slumming around cbgb or the mud club and have come uptown in time for breakfast...

Major Jonathan Richman stuff;-)

Do you ever get the feeling that the bloggosphere is turning into Hemingway's A Moveable Feast ? The more I read blogs the more I get the impression everyone is talking about the same ten people. We've all started name-dropping like nobody's business and it's made worse by use of first names only as in:

So we were in San José for ABCX when Ben mentioned to Cory that his new book sucked. Turns out Tom was there too, so we shared sushi with him and Cal...

I find myself doing this more and more and I've never met these people (ok, so Tom was at the RMS talk on copyright at the LSE). (arrrgggg!)

...and you've had grief from Verisign, read this news now. (thanks anil)

Billy has this to say about that :-)

My father, Jed is living testimony that if you don't have a go, you'll never know how well you could do. The man is unstoppable:-) He sent me this two minutes ago. Go Jed!

Just a quick note when there is so much to say...

Jed Falby (Independent)
1108 votes Yea! Yea! Yahooooo!

Ray Franklin (Conservative)
1075 votes

Lesley Rodin (Independent)
975 votes (confirmed at 01:00 this morning after recount)

There was a recount for third position. (There are three seats on East Devon Council) It was ( and I think ,at this time, still is,) a Conservative Controlled Council but we have sure shaken that arrangement up.

I will send you fuller notes later.

I hope I don't turn into a Politician...

Much Love, Dad

I seem to remember being aware of Mena's liking of Yéyé-girl music from reading dollarshort.org but had stored that information someplace hard to get to. So I decided to have a go at installing Moveable Type on my iBook as a mobile development thing, as so far I had always got an engineer to do it for me (yeah ok, ok). Figuring which httpd.conf file to edit was a bit tricky, but Ben's installation instructions are very good (two confusing bits but still, I'm so not complaining) and I had the thing up and running in an hour or so. Imaging my delight when the default username/password combo pops up as "Melody Nelson".

MN was a major Gainsbourg concept album and I just wanted to mention it here as the song lyrics below on their own are a bit cryptic;-)

Oh, and while I'm at it, Ben has asked for a translation of "Ça Plane Pour Moi" so I'm working on that one (trying to find good seventies French slang reference is a bit difficult but I'll cobble something together...)

...an amazing bug (OSX 10.2.5) spotted while rummaging around rentzsch.com

There's an interesting article over at rentzsch.com (thanks daringfireball) outlining his theory of how Apple has defeated the credit card handling charge on their music store. In essence, how can they afford to sell tracks for 99¢ given the transaction charge of 50¢. The man is offering this up as a theory--any Visa experts out there?