I just wanted somewhere to remind me about things I was going to write in the future. So here it is.

• Yet another Global Warming grumble.
• Judges and their concept of computer evidence.
• Whether I should start a security weblog.
• Michael on Containers.
• An update on TV after my last posting on it.
• The curious incident of the Mouse that died horribly
• The top 10 ways I have nearly killed or maimed myself.
• How to win the Widget game.
• The top 10 reasons to leave this dump of a country.

That’s about it for now, but I will probably edit it. If you did ignore me and actually read this, then you do realise I will probably never write any of this don’t you?

Next week, thank the Gods, Sturgeon and Wonklebottom will not be appearing in a comic in which they discuss stuff they learned in class earlier about how three made up numbers can be combined together to form the word ePii, which sounds a little bit like the word pee-pee.

Somebody commented that I didn’t update my weblog very much so I thought I would respond. I don’t update my weblog very much because I don’t really have anything of much interest to babble about that seems to fit into a weblog. I don’t want to go all Stephen Fry and write undoubtedly interesting articles (he calls them blessays I think) which are simply too long to read and I don’t want to write 10 posts a day describing every bowel and bladder movement I have like a lot of other bloggers seem to. After all, I use IRC for that.

Mostly I write something when I feel I have something to say that may interest my regular audience of 3 or 4 readers or the few random people that the search-engines pull in after a few weeks. I don’t write it immediately – I wait a few days and if I haven’t forgotten about it then there is a possibility that it may actually be worth a few minutes writing it down and maybe worth a minute for somebody to read. This isn’t to say that every post will be interesting but hey, I try.

To try and add some value and interest to this post, I think I will add some things that wouldn’t really have warranted a post of their own…

Firstly – I was wrong, and the controller of Radio 2 was right. When he announced that Chris Evans would be taking over the afternoon drive-time slot I was one of those grouchy folks who said that they’d never listen to it again. The controller chap told us to give him a chance and we may be surprised but nooo, I didn’t believe him. In the end, I forgot it was Evans presenting the show and accidentally listened to it and, amazingly, I carried on doing so. I am never going to become a Chris Evans fan but I have to say I don’t hate him and he really does do a very good show.

Oh yea, and since I am babbling – I am reading all these things about Microsoft and Vista’s “Kill Switch” for unlicenced copies with amusement. Every one of my copies of Vista is licenced and legal and this is a novelty to me. It’s almost become a slightly perverse hobby watching people complain at Microsoft getting more and more evil while I sit in my little cloud of smug, legal self-satisfaction at it not being my problem at all. It’s rather nice not having to keep up to date on all the little cracks and workarounds to stop Microsoft breaking my computer any more than they already have.

Right! That’s it… Shoo now, get back to whatever you were doing, don’t let me get in your way.

Having been raised in this belief, I would consider it sacrilege for somebody to suggest that there may be something better and more practical than the shed. It doesn’t seem possible, does it? Well far be it for me to try and improve on the shed, but I do think I have found a possible contender for the next generation of shed. The Ambulance!

Before you scoff, think about it! It’s a huge shed, with lots of twiddly things in it, loads of cupboards, built in seats, and and and… AN ENGINE AND WHEELS!

You can drive it away and have your shed somewhere else. Think about that! Ok, so now the more naive of you may be asking “Why an Ambulance? Why not just get a camper van?”. Camper vans are gay, that’s why. People who have camper vans are generally utter knobends who should be banned from the road and then shot. Ambulances on the other hand… Well, you can tell people you got it because it’s a big van, whilst secretly dreading the idea of ever actually having to use up all that space in there. When you get really bored, you can hunt for the sirens, and work out how to reconnect the blue lights. You can try and work out what all the data cabling is for, you can even try and work out why the interior lights only work sometimes. AND THERE ARE BUTTONS! LOTS OF BUTTONS!

Trust me on this one any Northern Men out there… Before you go out to the Shed Shop to look for a new hideaway; have a look in Autotrader and see if there are any old ambulances for sale first. You will thank me.

Oh yes. Here’s one I made earlier: http://lorry.org/Misc/Ambulance/

She finally seems to have got bored with basing all of her books on Enid Blyton rejections and moved onto Tolkien’s adolescent period ones instead. This time there is very little Mallory Towers in there; it starts off quite nastily in fact which will probably come as quite a shock to kids reading the book. It then meanders through a whole load of repetitive nonsense and twisted logic before ending up back at Hogwarts, where she fairly pointlessly kills off three random characters in one line, apparently picked by sticking pins in the secondary character list just so that she could say she killed some people. It’s not that badly written. Unlike most of the stuff I write; all of the commas and things are in the right place and there aren’t many spelling mistakes. Of course, you kind of expect this from a woman whose writing has made her the second richest woman in the world but I thought I would mention it just so that I had at least one positive thing to say.

The biggest problem is that I don’t understand the ending and that seems to be something of a major flaw in a book that people have been waiting for, for years. I am told that I would understand the ending if I had re-read the book before and remembered every single minor incident that happened in it but I didn’t. I barely remembered the previous chapter as I was reading on; it was all just so much inconsequential fluff. Anyway – I have read it now and it is over. Thankfully. If you can’t be arsed to read it for yourself everybody important lives, Alan Rickman turned out to be good in the end (another person who dies in less than a paragraph, she really doesn’t write death well at all) and everybody you’d expect to, gets married to one another and they all live happily ever after and send their kids to Hogwarts in a flash forward to 19 years later in the last chapter. In fact, all that is missing, is the line “And they all lived happily ever after” which would have been sweet.

Enough of that drivel anyway! In contrast, I finally read “Moab is my Washpot”; Stephen Fry’s autobiography. I didn’t know much about this at all but since it is one of my closest friend’s favourite books and I do really like Stephen Fry, I decided I had to read it.

It’s pointless saying that it is brilliantly written since anything by Stephen is going to be brilliantly written. What did come as a surprise to me was that it also seemed very honest. Of course, since part of his honesty seems to be about him being a more or less compulsive liar it’s anyone’s guess which bits are to be believed completely but hey, this is Stephen, I’ll believe the moon is made of orange Roquefort if he tells me so.

I am not going to write a review; it’s an autobiography and I suspect a rather enlarged letter of apology to a few people (mostly his family). If you like Fry; read it. If you are interested in a much more accurate and truthful view of British Boarding schools, with all the buggery and thrashing left in; read it and if you just want to read a really good book after turning your brain to mundane, unimaginative mush by reading Potter. Read it, dammit!

I am not sure I think too much of the jokes, but it’s a nice touch.

Can I just say… amazing! But then I guess every Revolutionary needs their own lip-balm.

I am not a fan of Ernesto so I don’t think I will be wearing his lip balm. The only thing that amuses me is that it is being sold in what was formerly East Berlin, and his various dodgy causes won’t benifit even slightly by any sales of this, nor do they from the wonderfully Capitalist use of his image on just about anything that will take it.

I don’t like regurgitation in weblogs, so I will simply paste a couple of links:

http://lorry.org/Weblog/che-standard.html

and:

http://www.slate.com/id/2107100/

Actually, thinking about it – I may be wrong. Ernesto Guevara may well have been quite the fan of the capital of Capitalism that is modern America; they are, after all, both huge fans of concentration camps in Cuba.

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breath free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
We’ll watch them carefully, inside our golden doors.
And should they stray, or think aloud,
Thoughts deemed extreme, rebellious or untrue.
So onto Cuba, they will go.
To keep this young land, pure and clean.

(Apologies Ms. Lazarus for not keeping it as a Sonnet)