Camden

Well, Camden have rejected my written representations about the penalty charge notice, so I must either pay up or appeal to the independant adjudicator. In two minds. £50 for an easy life or stand on principle?

Update: The guy in the comments is right. It’s not about the money or the hassle, but is rather a question of civic duty to stand up against unfairness in the State/citizen relationship. Appeal papers have been filed. I will probably live to regret this.

Labels: driving, london

This is indeed a great quote from P.G Wodehouse and deservedly quote of the day.

Labels: links

Speaking of adverts, is it just me or does “I can’t wake up without my furry alarm clock” (Iams cat food advert) sound kind of ‘rude’?

Labels: advertising, TV

Confronting mortality on a Monday evening

Is the new Lloyds TSB “…for the journey” ad campaign totally egregious and depressing or what? It features a fat animated couple on a streamlined animated train passing through life from cradle to grave, accompanied by poignant music, purchasing financial products from Lloyds TSB at each critical point.

Thank you, Lloyds TSB. I am aware that my likely to be unremarkable life is slipping away towards my likely to be unremarkable death and that looking back my most significant contribution to the planet will probably have been to have acted as an income stream for various financial institutions and businesses. But, on a Monday evening in front of my television after work, I do not care to receive stark reminders that the sands of my hourglass are inexorably trickling away as I continue to consume.

Labels: advertising, TV

Washing machine

Here’s what to do if your washing machines goes through its cycle until it gets to spin, and then instead of spinning, sits there full of water refusing to open its door.

Your problem is that the pump isn’t kicking into action to drain the cylinder to enable the spin cycle to start. This is likely to be for one of two reasons:

1. Your pump is knackered;
2. Your filter and pump are clogged, so the pump cannot spin.

Fortunately in my case it was the latter. The way to fix it is as follows. Get to the bottom of the machine on the front and drain the filter by uncorking the narrow rubber pipe on the front and directing the (stinky, stagnant) water into a container (1 litre+ may come out so don’t uncork it until you are ready with the container). If it’s stuck and won’t drain, you can poke about with the dip stick inside the rubber pipe to free it. Then unscrew and remove the filter which is on the left, bottom, front. Take the filter out and thoroughly wash all the gunk off with warm water. The pump is behind where the filter was before you took it out. Take a bit of rag and clear all the gunk and/or anything that might be stuck in there (pennies, paperclips, etc) out from in front of and around the pump. The pump blades should now be able to spin if you twizzle them with your finger. Stick the filter back in and run the machine empty on short cycle to see if it works and to flush clean water through the system to get all the stagnant water out. If it goes through all the cycles OK, it’s fixed and ready for a load of wash. If it still doesn’t work, your pump is probably knackered.

Labels: teccie

Faust

Went to see Faust by the Punchdrunk Theatre Company at a derelict building in Wapping last night. Interesting idea and atmospheric venue and set, but quite hard to pick up the story from what was going on. Worth seeing though.

Labels: arts, diary, london, theatre

I have a Mac at home. This guy hates them.

Labels: computers

Blogger

The archives for this page used to be on a separate page, listed by month. This page had a separate template within Blogger and was automatically updated by the Blogger CMS. However, since the transition to “New Blogger” in 2007, it appears that, without fanfare, Blogger have withdrawn this functionality. The monthly archive pages themselves were still being created (eg January 2007) but the index page was not being updated. This is because most people on Blogger are using the Blogger standard templates, which feature archives on the sidebar of the main page, rather than on a separate page, as was more commonly the case in the old days. It took me some time and a lot of google searching to find this out and figure out why the archive index page was stubbornly refusing to update notwithstanding that everything else seemed to be working properly.

The work–around is a toggle in the sidebar. This itself presented a number of difficulties. My sidebar is an SSI and you cannot call the <Blogger> tags to generate the archive list from it, because they can only be called from within the Blogger template that generates the main page. Therefore, I had to put the <Blogger> tags somewhere in the main template (under the “want more?” link at the bottom of the page) and encase them in a <div> tag, from which I could then extract the Blogger generated html listing the archives for repetition in my sidebar by using the getElementByID() method. A second problem then arose. Because the sidebar appears on pages other than the page which contains the main blog (and therefore the <div> containing the archives), an error obviously occured when the sidebar code was trying to extract and repeat something which was not there. The solution was to run an if/else statement, so that the extraction was only attempted where there was something to extract. The sidebar code is as follows:

<a href="/" onclick="toggle('bararchives');return false;" title="Hide or show archives below">Archives</a><div id="bararchives" style="display:none;"><script type="text/javascript">

if (document.getElementById("archives"))
{

var x=document.getElementById("archives");
var y=(x.innerHTML);

document.writeln(y);

}

else

{document.writeln('archives can only be accessed from <a href="http://www.foxinternet.co.uk">main page</a>')

}

</script>

</div>

The toggle() function that is called onClick() within the above is a function that I had already coded in order to toggle the blogroll.

Thank you, Blogger, for giving me this small challenge to enliven my otherwise dull existence.

Labels: Blogger, teccie

Skiing

Just got back from a long weekend skiing in Chamonix with the boys from the office. First time I’ve tried skiing, rather than snowboarding. Took about a day to pick it up to the point where it started to be fun and by the end of day three I was having a great time with it, I suspect partly because snow conditions were better suited to skis. Of course there will be an element of “one day to learn, a lifetime to perfect”, but it’s nice to feel I’ve got the option in future. Hopefully, the laissez faire attitude to technique that I picked up from snowboarding will mean that I don’t have to get too tedious about proximity to texbook perfection at any given level and instead the plan is simply to continue to enjoy myself on either skis or board, depending upon conditions and/or inclination on any given day/trip.

Labels: diary, snowboarding, sport

I was going to post something about the current outcry about lack of rape convictions, but Camilla Cavendish in the Times makes the point well.

Labels: law, UK politics

Racism

I appreciate that I am well off the pace with this one, but I have had more important things to worry about, like being hounded by various London Councils with their demands for unjustified fines in relation to fanciful offences.

However, I am sure that it will not have escaped you in the meantime how extremely stupid it is that a programme which documents what happens when one incarcerates a number of stupid egomaniacs in a confined space has had such an impact on worldwide political and media debate, to the extent that the Chancellor of the Exchequer has been compelled to make a statement of apology to the outraged, effigy–burning people of India.

One might think that this Big Brother debate is something of an irrelevance, when our neighbors are apparently proposing to kidnap members of our armed forces in order to torture and behead them on live webcasts. Never mind what is happening in Iraq. However, the Government’s terror about being seen to condone racism is revealed by the statement from Tom Kelly, Downing Street spokesman:

“What clearly is to be regretted and countered is if there is any perception abroad that in any way we tolerate racism in this country. What the response to the programme has shown is precisely the opposite: that there is no level of toleration in this country for anything which, rightly or wrongly, is perceived to be racist. The message should go out from this country loud and clear that we are a tolerant country and we will not tolerate racism in any way.”

That is not the statement of a tolerant country. It is the statement of a hysterical, terrified country. We are so bloody tolerant that according to the spokesman for our Prime Minister, “there is no level of toleration in this country for anything which, rightly or wrongly, is perceived to be racist”. What a position to adopt! If any nutcase, at home or abroad, entirely without justification, feels that the British are being racist, the message is that this Government will not rest until the racist sons–of–bitches responsible have been hammered.

Slow down, Tom Kelly. Here is some advice. We should stop pandering to people who insist upon getting outraged and offended at everything in order to promote their own agendas. Instead, we should treat these as the childish tantrums that they are. The Government should stop being so terrified about looking bad in the media and actually try offering some strong leadership and common sense. Jade Goody should kick herself for making herself look like an ignorant bitch and potentially throwing away a highly remunerative career being a professional idiot (jury’s out on this one — a highly remunerative career being a professional recovering former racist in rehab idiot may still be available). Shilpa Shetty should continue laughing all the way to the bank and enjoying the millions of pounds that will now no doubt flow in her direction thanks to the hard work of Max Clifford.

Labels: TV, UK politics