by shahid on May 12, 2005
From The Guardian today:
His third term would complete the renewal of public services, Mr Blair said. “That means driving innovation and improvement through more diverse provision and by putting people themselves in the driving seat.”
Before you suffocate under the unrelenting assault of blairshit, I’ve worked out that:
1) Someone is going to be driving innovation and improvement around in a pick-up truck, or maybe an Astra estate.
2) The vehicle will be diverse provison. So maybe it’s a Fiat Provisiona Diverso
3) You will be the driver
Ergo, public services will be renewed by you driving a Fiat Provisiona Diverso around, lugging Innovation and Improvement in the back. What it boils down to is that Blair is telling you that if you want public services renewed, you will have to do it yourself, because his message to the British public is simply “Fuck you!” Which is fair enough as two thirds of us, that’s the vast majority, didn’t actually vote for him.
by shahid on May 12, 2005
I’m moving out tomorrow. Most of my stuff is packed. It will go into storage. I guess I had better start looking for somewhere to live. Oh and by the way, I don’t believe in all that nonsense about Friday the 13th. I guess I had better get my phone disconnected! After tomorrow, Suspect Paki will go “dark” for a while.
by shahid on May 11, 2005
I first noticed time’s arrow when Boris Becker won Wimbledon. I found it astonishing that a boy of 17, several years younger than me, had achieved more than I ever would. Well, certainly in the field of tennis. I didn’t feel old, but I certainly realised with clarity that certain doors were now forever closed.
Then in 1998, when my favourite Liverpool striker Michael Owen scored one of the greatest World Cup goals of all time against Argentina, it wasn’t the slalom leaving Argie defenders flat on their arses that had me lost for words, but the sickening realisation that I was old enough to be his father.
And now, another nail in the fast-approaching coffin. I never thought the day would come when a shadow chancellor wouldn’t just be younger than me, but the same age as my younger brother. Not only a shadow chancellor, but a Tory shadow chancellor. Today, a senior politician is not only much younger than me, he looks loads younger than me too.
Time creeps up, and up, and up.
by shahid on May 11, 2005
I once sent around 800 text messages in a month. I thought that was some going. But some Indian nutter, Deepak Sharma, has sent over 180,000 SMS messages in one month! Before you ask, he was on an unlimited SMS plan for about a quid a month. Apparently, he was determined to get into the Guiness Book of Records. His bill weighed in at over 1,400 pages, that alone might have done the trick.
I’ll save you from the maths - that’s 6,000 texts a day, or 375 every waking hour. That’s more than 6 a minute. Come on, try doing that on T-Mobile! It takes longer than a minute for texts to finish sending sometimes. And even without the delay, imagine doing it from a Motorola, where you spend longer looking for the contact name and entering it than you do T9ing the actual message!
My guess is he used a computer and just sent a digital copy of War and Peace or something to another mobile he had lying around.
by shahid on May 10, 2005
Tip 1
Try to avoid making assumptions about people. Especially when you’ve spotted a pattern you’ve seen before, usually in yourself. Despite the safety in patterns, people will always surprise you - and you will have a major ego re-adjustment operation on your hands. People are unpredictable, surprising, unique and very different. Any good manager knows that.
Tip 2
If you back-up your data before applying a major operating system upgrade, everything will go smoothly. The backup will have been a complete waste of time.
If you don’t back-up your data before applying even a minor operating system upgrade, you will lose everything. If you’re lucky, you will only lose the most important documents of your life that took you a year or more to write.
I’ve just upgraded to Tiger, which is Apple’s code name for Mac OS X 10.4. It’s a fairly major upgrade. I backed up. Nothing bad happened. The highlight for me is their search technology - “Spotlight” which finds things on your hard drive you’d long forgotten about, and would rather not be reminded of. It’s stunningly fast and updated in real time. Probably the most impressive feature I’ve ever seen in any operating system.
Moral: Always back-up your important data. Or live the life of a goldfish, the contents of your hard drive disappearing as quickly as your recall of the number plate of the car that ran over you.
My deadline for moving out is this coming Saturday (May 14th), so an advance warning that until the end of the month, my output will be sporadic at best.
As you walk through life, if you keep looking over your shoulder to see what’s behind, you’re likely to bump into things.
Moral? There’s no future in history.
