... about a laptop touchpad is that you al
to
ways manage hit it at the wrong time...
Well I used to have mine disabled and reverted to using a mouse (still use it by habit) until I found a piece of software that solves the problem by disabling the touchpad when you start typing. The utility sits in the System Tray and waits. That is it. Brilliant. Here.
... BBC article with Gordon Brown pressuring Karzai to end corruption... here.
... whatever that is supposed to mean here. Regardless of the behaviour of the leader of a sovereign state, the law states that no armed force should be used against them. The action in Iraq was convenient as is the sabre rattling towards Iran...
A simple reading of the weapons inspectors reports will show how little threat Iraq posed militarily... likewise, the yellowcake fiasco, where we were led to believe that a shipment of 500 tonnes or so of glow-in-the-dark radioactive material was to be carried through the Suez Canal and around the corner to Iraq through the Persian Gulf where fishermen in wooden boats were complainign about being stopped so often by the naval ships patrolling the waters. Once there it was to be shipped to a processing centre to turn it into enriched uranium using the cascade method. Errm.... a TEST facility had been removed years before. A simple search on the interwebnettubes will show that, in order to process this material, it would be necessary to have a large tower that would even be spotted by Stevie Wonder on a bad day...
More than 'questionable legitimacy'...
... apparently. There is Panama disease... Black Sigatoka Disease ... lots of stuff to make them limp and kill off the plants. The variety grown and eaten world wide is the Cavendish, the Gros Michel variety grown in the early 1900s is virtually extinct except for a few pockets here and there. Problems with the spread of Panama Disease could lead to the infection of other varieties. While this may not concern those people who use it as a snack food, for many it is an integral and necessary component of their diet. More information at The Scientist website here.
Ever get the feeling you are being royally shafted?
Check out the report discussed in this article here.
It is happening throughout the banking world and affects every tax payer in countries like the US and the UK. As far as fiscal responsibility goes you only need to look on some of the sites that are recruiting temporary workers. Banks are offering rates for contract workers that are often more than double that for someone with equal skills in the required area working in other industry sectors. Smells a little iffy to me...
... or a scene from "Saw nnn". Doctors discover that a man was conscious and aware after thinking him to be in a coma ... errmm... for 23 years. Story here.
Think about it for a brief moment. Then think about it for 23 years.
I mean, what if you have the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything? Or just want to say something seemingly insignificant. It would probably be like sitting in a perpetual traffic jam or waiting for a kettle to boil or expecting visitors or waiting for a program to load from cassette to a ZX Spectrum or something equally without quantifiable measure, or even an obvious end or meaning.
It is a different matter entirely when compared to something like a boring meeting, that you do not need to attend, dragging on beyond a sensible time so that you just know you have missed your train. I mean, what would you do for entertainment? I-Spy would soon get repetitive and almost second-nature. You could not even do Sudoku in your head because it was not a well known game 23 years ago. You would get fragged in no time in any online FPS combat game; Frogger or Pong would be more your cup of tea. There again, after 23 years you would probably want a ginger biscuit with that cuppa.
There again, there would be benefits. The time to plan that sweet revenge for that certain something in your life that has been bugging you for 23 years. Like... the faded tea stain that you remember when it was fresh that nobody has bothered to clean up... for 23 years. Lots of really important, nagging things like that. You could think about writing that book you have been thinking of doing... 23 years later and be the only person who could say that with honesty. How on earth would you catch up with your mail backlog? You would be one of a few people with an empty email account. Think of the accrued interest on any savings.
The list is endless. A bit like being an aware, sentient being, who is unable to move or communicate with anyone for 23 years. Sort of like being married or living in Rhyll.
... A short while ago, Jeremy Clarkson posted a rather scathing rant about Peter Mandelson. For some reason it was pulled, but not before someone got a copy. If it had not been pulled it would have glowed slightly before fading to ash and blowing away in the wind. Instead it has now gone viral and I am sure there will be far more publicity as a result... thanks to MD for the heads up on this one...
Jeremy Clarkson - Sunday Times 8/11/09
I've given the matter a great deal of thought all week, and I'm afraid I've decided that it's no good putting Peter Mandelson in a prison. I'm afraid he will have to be tied to the front of a van and driven round the country until he isn't alive any more. He announced last week that middle-class children will simply not be allowed into the country's top universities even if they have 4,000 A-levels, because all the places will be taken by Albanians and guillemots and whatever other stupid bandwagon the conniving idiot has leapt upon. I hate Peter Mandelson. I hate his fondness for extremely pale blue jeans and I hate that preposterous moustache he used to sport in the days when he didn't bother trying to cover up his left-wing fanaticism. I hate the way he quite literally lords it over us even though he's resigned in disgrace twice, and now holds an important decision-making job for which he was not elected. Mostly, though, I hate him because his one-man war on the bright and the witty and the successful means that half my friends now seem to be taking leave of their senses.
There's talk of emigration in the air. It's everywhere I go. Parties. Work. In the supermarket. My daughter is working herself half to death to get good grades at GSCE and can't see the point because she won't be going to university, because she doesn't have a beak or flippers or a qualification in washing windscreens at the lights. She wonders, often, why we don't live in America.
Then you have the chaps and chapesses who can_t stand the constant raids on their wallets and their privacy. They can't understand why they are taxed at 50% on their income and then taxed again for driving into the nation's capital. They can't understand what happened to the hunt for the weapons of mass destruction. They can't understand anything. They see the Highway Wombles in those brand new 4x4s that they paid for, and they see the M4 bus lane and they see the speed cameras and the community support officers and they see the Albanians stealing their wheelbarrows and nothing can be done because it's racist.
And they see Alistair Darling handing over £4,350 of their money to not sort out the banking crisis that he doesn't understand because he's a small-town solicitor, and they see the stupid war on drugs and the war on drink and the war on smoking and the war on hunting and the war on fun and the war on scientists and the obsession with the climate and the price of train fares soaring past £1,000 and the Guardian power-brokers getting uppity about one shot baboon and not uppity at all about all the dead soldiers in Afghanistan, and how they got rid of Blair only to find the lying twerp is now going to come back even more powerful than ever, and they think, "I've had enough of this. I'm off."
It's a lovely idea, to get out of this stupid, Fairtrade, Brown-stained, Mandelson-skewed, equal-opportunities, multicultural, carbon-neutral, trendily left, regionally assembled, big-government, trilingual, mosque-drenched, all-the-pigs-are-equal, property-is-theft hellhole and set up shop somewhere else. But where?
You can't go to France because you need to complete 17 forms in triplicate every time you want to build a greenhouse, and you can't go to Switzerland because you will be reported to your neighbours by the police and subsequently shot in the head if you don't sweep your lawn properly, and you can't go to Italy because you'll soon tire of waking up in the morning to find a horse's head in your bed because you forgot to give a man called Don a bundle of used note for 'organising' a plumber.
You can't go to Australia because it's full of things that will eat you, you can't go to New Zealand because they don't accept anyone who is more than 40 and you can't go to Monte Carlo because they don't accept anyone who has less than 40 mill. And you can't go to Spain because you're not called Del and you weren't involved in the Walthamstow blag. And you can't go to Germany ... because you just can't.
The Caribbean sounds tempting, but there is no work, which means that one day, whether you like it or not, you'll end up like all the other expats, with a nose like a burst beetroot, wondering if it's okay to have a small sharpener at 10 in the morning. And, as I keep explaining to my daughter, we can't go to America because if you catch a cold over there, the health system is designed in such a way that you end up without a house. Or dead.
Canada's full of people pretending to be French, South Africa's too risky, Russia's worse and everywhere else is too full of snow, too full of flies or too full of people who want to cut your head off on the internet. So you can dream all you like about upping sticks and moving to a country that doesn't help itself to half of everything you earn and then spend the money it gets on bus lanes and advertisements about the dangers of salt. But wherever you go you'll wind up an alcoholic or dead or bored or in a cellar, in an orange jumpsuit, gently wetting yourself on the web. All of these things are worse than being persecuted for eating a sandwich at the wheel.
I see no reason to be miserable. Yes, Britain now is worse than it's been for decades, but the lunatics who've made it so ghastly are on their way out. Soon, they will be back in Hackney with their South African nuclear-free peace polenta. And instead the show will be run by a bloke whose dad has a wallpaper shop and possibly, terrifyingly, a twerp in Belgium whose fruitless game of hunt-the-WMD has netted him £15m on the lecture circuit.
So actually I do see a reason to be miserable. Which is why I think it's a good idea to tie Peter Mandelson to a van. Such an act would be cruel and barbaric and inhuman. But it would at least cheer everyone up a bit. onto in the meantime.
"In retrospect it becomes clear that hindsight is definitely overrated!" Alfred E. Newman
My favourite... Korean.
And Japanese (Mario Brothers) style here.
Francais... here.
Chinese... it's waterproof too... remarkable considering it's a washing machine... here. Russell Peters explains why there will never be a Chinese version here.
... and the funniest.... is from "Whose Line Is It Anyway?"... H.O.W.A.R.D.... here. The up tempo version...
