Last post

Ive finished here - twas to hard to type.
further inanities here.

Rule Britannia (late riposte to July 4th)

Living in the UK is at times an unnerving and sobering experience - think old people and crime, think Tesco and then think Darwin, Huxley and Saki (okay Im being abit off the cuff) but the point I want to make is that there is a strange duality and that this country can both at once be the 'best of places and the worst of places' (to crudely paraphrase). Im not a patriot by any conventional sense and nationalistic jingoism is for the stupid and tomorrows cannon fodder, but for all that where on earth would you rather be?

Ponder that over your shrimp and barby!

Bang goes summer

Well, its been a while coming but then Ive had the birth of a new son to keep me occupied. No summer hols this year so Im likely to have more time to rant and rave about stuff as I go...

Stay alert (theres terriers, er... terrorists aboot).

Meetings

The bane of most officelodytes like myself is the dreaded Ritual of The Meaningless Meeting. What is needed (instead of overly pervasive mobile phones) is a meeting-dosimeter. When you hit the red zone youv'e gone terminal and are excused.

Calibrarting such a device is easy. If a meeting lasts more than 10 mins your meetogen dose increments one unit. The scale is log, so after a few longish meetings your approaching life time exposure.

Life is finite, why waste it 'interfacing' with people (who lets face it) you neither wish to be with nor would actively seek out for their opinion in the first place. Don't get me wrong, meetings have their place - as long as they are focused, short, result in clear actions and are infused with liberal amounts of coffee.

Vote for sanity

The current debacle in realtion to the electoral machinery of this country (Scotland being a case in point) only serves to underline the fact that in Century 21 we really should be moving towards a more sane approach to governance.

Heres a thought: - lets draw up a long list of all the 'issues' that matter then have national competitions to select a representative for each issue (a sideeffect of this is we may get more interesting telly on Saturdays other than "Joseph"). Each rep would then be tasked with arguing the case for that issue which could be put to a telly vote and the winners of this get to kick the current Westminster/Holyrood/Assembly incumbents out and effect their hobby policies and no other...

After all, its not that different from what politicians do anyway - except the sole 'issue' for them is how to stay in power and be 'important'.

Viva La Revolution!!!

Plastic tat

As a parent who steadfastly tried to eschew as much encumberance with plastic toys, it seems that despite my best efforts the plastic accumulates. Indeed, spending time in the garden at the weekend I was dismayed to fully comprehend the scale of our plastic empire - from slides and houses to sandpits and cars :(

Never mind a carbon footprint, lets look at the plastic footprint!!!

IE7 woes

I'm currently wrestling with a crossbrowser issue. Essentially a JSP driven website works in all browsers except IE7 in which it (most of the time but not always!) does odd things when refreshing a drill down text box affair. I've tried CSS gotchas, obviuos settings and all to no avail!

Its maddening-for something so trivial it takes a lot of debugging (with no decent clue being provided as to what is causing the intermittent misbehaviours).