A passing thought
If someone has a deep and abiding love of Volvos, Abba, Ikea, pine furniture and saunas, would that make them a Swede-ophile?
Archive for October, 2006
ID cards will cost £5.4 billion, and I’m a fecking pixie
Tim does a lovely demolition of the government’s latest made-up numbers for the cost of ID cards:
Quick numbers. 48 million or so adults, each having the card, the computers, the readers, the database, the taking of the biometrics etc etc etc. 5.4 billion?
112.50 per person over a decade? With all the changes that have to be made as people move house? Alter their details? That includes the costs to the individual as well as the system itself?
Smoking bans, again
Looks like the Scottish Executive isn’t the only group of politicians acting like complete and utter bastards over smoking:
the Department of Health is considering a Westminster council request that it should be allowed to create smoking “exclusion zones” outside bars, restaurants, clubs or workplaces so those caught smoking there could be punished.
[Via Tim Worstall]
Is it because they is white (supremacists)?
Didn’t see this in the papers:
A FORMER British National Party member has been accused of possessing the largest amount of chemical explosives of its type ever found in the country.
…62-year-old retired dentist David Bolus Jackson, of Trent Road, Nelson, was charged with similar offences. It has been reported that police discovered a rocket launcher, a nuclear biological suit, chemicals and BNP literature.
Networking iTunes
One for the Mac-heads: I want to network iTunes but I’m not sure of the best way to do it. Anyone experimented with various options and found a solution?
This is what I want to do: I’ve got a powerbook upstairs and a Mac Mini under the telly, running Wi-Fi. I want to replace the wi-fi with powerline ethernet to get better performance (my house kills Wi-Fi very quickly) so there’ll be a Mac up here, Mac downstairs, Xbox 360 there too – and when I replace the powerbook, another Mac kicking around somewhere. Plan is to have them all connected via ethernet.
Each machine (Xbox excepted) will be running OS X and iTunes, and what I want to do is store the iTunes library in a single, central location (possibly an ethernet-aware hard disk). No matter what machine I use, I want to be able to use a single library – so I can update the iPod from whichever machine’s handy at the time, and so I can rip CDs from whatever machine is handy and then access the songs on any other Mac. What I *don’t* want to do is have an entire Mac running 24/7 or tunes streaming from one Mac to another.
Anyone tried something similar? Any top tips or warnings? I’m all electronic ears…
FWDitOn: Digg for email
According to TechCrunch, a new site aims to bring the Digg effect to email forwards:
FWDitOn is a site that allows users to submit and rate emails that they find interesting, and higher rated emails go to the top of the popular area. The idea is to allow people to see the most popular fowarded jokes and other emails…
Just what the world needs: more unfunny crap for the comedically challenged to infest our inboxes with. As Denis Leary (reportedly) put it:
Show a little intelligence and think about what you’re actually contributing to by sending out forwards. Chances are it’s your own unpopularity.
You know you’ve been at the computer too long
When you see this headline:
Man plunged to death at sex party
And assume the story involves one of these:
[photopress:cup_plunger.jpg,full,pp_image]
Pay as you throw
Councils plan to charge people if they throw out too much rubbish – but if you don’t throw out much, you’ll get a discount on your council tax.
What a brilliant idea!
Here’s how it will work. You want to pay less council tax, so you reduce consumption, reuse what you can and recycle the rest. That way, come collection day your bins are nearly empty and you get a nice reduction in your council tax.
Or do you?
*evil cackle*
Not if I leap your garden fence at 3am and shove all my crap in your bin, you don’t!
Bwah hah hah!
A friend in need (of a hitman?)
A rare bit of seriousness: a friend is in a bit of a fix and I thought I’d ask for advice – apparently my “hire a hitman!” suggestion isn’t very helpful.
John (not his real name) married young and against the advice of pretty much everyone he knew. Before long the marriage was on the rocks, and his wife was seeing other people behind his back. Eventually she kicked him out, kept the kids and left him to pay off their (considerable) joint debts. It nearly ruined him.
Fast forward seven or eight years. For the last two years, John has been trying to get a divorce. He’s ready to remarry (his fiancee, who he’s been with for three years, is one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet), but obviously he can’t until the divorce is through. The problem is that every time it looks like things will finally be sorted out, his ex deliberately throws a spanner in the works.
John was due to go to court next week, and the hearing’s still scheduled. Unfortunately, his ex’s lawyer has resigned out of utter frustration, and the result will be that neither John’s ex or a legal representative will be there at the hearing. According to John’s lawyer, that doesn’t mean he’ll get any kind of judgement – because there’s a risk (from the Sheriff’s perspective) that John might have intimidated his ex and forced her not to appear, the best he can expect is for a new date to be set, probably in the new year.
John’s been here before. Here’s the pattern:
- John’s ex hires a lawyer, explaining that John owes her thousands of pounds and demanding that she gets it in a divorce settlement.
- The lawyer schedules a hearing and contacts John’s lawyer for the relevant financial details.
- John’s lawyer provides the details, which show that John’s ex – to use a legal term – is entitled to fuck-all.
- The lawyer explains this to John’s ex, who storms out and then ignores every further communication until her lawyer quits. The hearing goes ahead and because neither John’s ex or her lawyer are present, the sheriff schedules another hearing.
Ad infinitum.
I genuinely don’t understand this, because I was under the impression that in Scots law you can still force a divorce through even if one party has buggered off. John’s lawyer says that’s not the case, perhaps because there are kids (11 and 9, or thereabouts) involved, which makes things more complicated.
I do understand the need to protect vulnerable women, but in this situation John’s the victim – he’s paying lawyers for every stage of this farce, while his ex gets legal aid, doesn’t suffer financially and seems determined to stretch the sorry situation out for as long as possible. It’s entirely malicious, because John pays considerably more maintenance than the CSA would mandate and she has absolutely no interest in him beyond doing her damndest to ruin his life. And it’s working.
I know it’s a long shot, but do any of you know people who’ve been in similar situations? Is there anything, other than hiring a hitman, that John can do?
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