Usless Wankers

So our wonderful Government has presided over a country where there is a CCTV camera for ever 14 people (and one on the train watching me now - hope it got a good shot of me getting my knob out a second ago), where you can be locked up without charge for six weeks and where I have to have my two horses Sunshine and Pebble passported and microchipped on pain of prison (for me, probably the horses too) ...

But when they actually have one of the most dangerous men on the planet, Al Quibble's number 2 honcho no less, they can't keep the fucker in prison or send him somewhere who will do what we should be doing to the fucker and attaching his gonads to the national grid. And what is the response of our rulers to this? They are "dissapointed".

Fucking hell. Still Jackoff Smith, don't worry, you can't actually seem to get your act together to deal with the people who really pose a threat so I guess you're just going to have to press ahead with your plans to criminalise anyone who draws a stick figure of a 10 year old with a lob on; that'll make us all feel safer as the next raghead detonates himself on the 7.26 Luton to Kings Cross.

Abu - if you're reading this can you see if you can arrange for someone to drink a load of nitroglycerine, walk into the state opening of parliament and jump up and down. We'd all appreciate it, thanks.

She's Got David Davis Eyes

Well a small helping of Crow was served with my large bucket of milky froth with a coffee in the bottom of it as I have to admit that not every politician is a complete and utter foetid lump of dickcheese. That said if he was in some marginal constituency with a real chance of not jumping straight back on the the gravy train after his by-election I would have been more impressed but as it is at least he's actually partly put his bollocks on the chopping block for a cause he believes in.

Now if the rest of the Tory party would care to stand four-square behind him and back his stand rather than the rather pathetic dicking about displayed yesterday they might, just might, make me think for more than a couple of nanoseconds about voting for them but if you scratch not too deep you see that they are nearly as illiberal as the other lot. Conservative Home was all for 42 days and the only reason the Tories in the house were whipped through the "No" lobby was because they saw a chance to give Gordon a bloody nose, underneath they, like all big governments, are control freaks and historically the Tories will give ACPO anything they ask for.

Still, good luck to Davis, at least there is one member of the house who isn't a complete and utter tool.

Bye to BT

I did something I have been meaning to do for ages today. I cancelled my BT line. Living in the middle of a swamp as I do it’s never worked well and, being 10km from the nearest exchange means broadband is a non-starter (hence the reason my roof has a fucking great satellite dish on the roof with a lurid “Active radio installation” hazard warning sign on it* despite peak output is one measly Watt)

The process was relatively painless but the BT numpty on the end of the line seems to be paid on a keeping people commission basis as I got the real hard sell to stay.

"You are a valued customer, what can we do to make you stay?"
"Nothing, the line quality sucks and I never use it, I have three mobiles**"
"I see you have the Super-Friends-And-The-Takeaway-On-Speeddial-Weekend package, I can give you that for free"
"Can you give me free line rental?"
"Er, no"
"So I still end up giving you eighty quid a year"
"Yes"
"Not much good then is it."
"How about I come round and give your horse a blow-job, will you stay then?"
"My horse is a mare"
"Damn"

Made me think though it is definitely worthwhile when any sort of subscription is coming to an end ringing up and telling them that you don’t want to renew. Apparently Sky are great for this and you can often get upgrades to your packages giving you yet more shit to surf through before you inevitably settle for some disaster porn on Discovery. I always do it with mobile phones and get some ace tarrif deals.

Wonder if it’ll work with the Northern Rock?





* Well it did until I took it off in case some nimby council droid came round.
** Which, according to ZaNu Labour, makes me a terrorist.

Cum Mortuis in Lingua Mortua

Please forgive me for a small IT related rant here as, thanks to some wanker at The Times, I no longer have a work blog.

For byzantine political reasons this week has seen your little green scaly friend enrolled on a course in the C++ computer programming language. Now I last used said language, briefly, back in the mid-90's and things have apparently moved on a bit since then so off I toddle into the world of void pointers and memory leaks.

Well yes things have moved on a bit. There was a time when C++ was the language of the elite coder, when to get anything to run at speed this was the language you used and only manly men with square jaws and six-pack chests were brave enough to code in it. Not any more, now we have Java and C# (the latter being my weapon of choice) and, quite frankly, they just piss all over C++ these days. Speed and being "close to the hardware" was always C++'s strength, the price you paid was a labyrinthine syntax of addresses and pointers and having to be the top of your game to avoid writing a bunch of code that leaked memory like a leaky thing. Well I ran a couple of tests on the lappy on the train home last night doing some pretty close to the metal stuff (read in file, arse around with the byte stream, write it out again) and C# was just as fast, if not faster and an order of magnitude easier to code. as I didn't need to arse about with headers, allocating and deallocating memory and all that rubbish.

I am probably going to get a bunch of flak for this but I really can't see the point of C++ any more, it's become as legacy as VB and COBOL, the only person I know who writes in C / C++ and has justification as to why he has to writes controller chips for computer controlled milling machines. There really is no reason to write general purpose application code in C++ any more.

With any luck come 5pm on Friday I can shove the course notes in a drawer for some Tony Robinsonoid to dig up in 3427 and intone "Ah yes this clearly has a ritual meaning" over.

With my luck I'll probably get assigned to maintain some legacy C++ app. Jesus some random motherfuckers are going to get torched it that happens I can tell you.

About the only thing that would get me watching Formula 1

The Daily Mash has excelled itself today... MOSLEY TO MOUNT A DONKEY BEFORE FRENCH GRAND PRIX

Given the boring parade of high-speed advertisements that F1 has become, someone shagging a donkey would probably be the only thing that would get me watching it again.

And then only if it was a pretty donkey.