| Football Scumbags |
[May. 13th, 2008|07:47 pm] |
The less introspective bits of this will probably end up edited in a letter to the MEN...
More than 24 hours before the Big Match, and the streets of Manchester are already filled with lager-swilling hooligans offering verbal and physical abuse to passers-by. The town centre tonight will be filled with the violence and vandalism which is the public experience of the vast majority of football fans. It's bad enough that we have to tolerate the racist thugs who use our home teams as an excuse for hooliganism, without unleashing scum from miles around on our innocent residents. Whoever took the decision to invite these louts to Manchester should bear the cost of policing, emergency medical care and destruction which they will undoubtedly inflict.
The thing that really annoys me is the way that the hatred and violence perpetrated by football fans is contagious. My recent encounters with them have left me feeling angry, violent and hateful. It's no surprise that football violence becomes self-perpetuating in communities, and I hate feeling myself descending to their level. |
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| Help, Help! |
[May. 12th, 2008|11:17 am] |
| [ | Tags | | | dreams | ] |
| [ | mood |
| |  worried | ] |
| [ | music |
| | if:then:goto - "Elk Statement" | ] |
Dreams of hot gay violent twincest. I am turning into ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) apiphile. I'd paint you a mental picture, but you'd get locked up for three years for possessing it. |
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| FAO London People: NO2ID Volunteer Needed |
[May. 11th, 2008|11:19 pm] |
Sometimes, it's very hard to know what to do to make the world a better place. I maintain that if everybody spent just a little time helping out here and there, this world wouldn't be in half the mess it is. And here's a perfect opportunity - campaign group NO2ID need somebody to help out with their posting and administration. National secretary Guy Herbert sez:
I am aware that there are frustrations for you with our patchy support and am desperate to improve the flow of materials to local groups. The first step to doing this is to have someone come into the office for 2 hours every Saturday morning (in central London) to deal with packing materials and merchandising under my supervision. They should be someone reliable, plainly, but also with clear handwriting and a willingness to handle simple administrative procedures in a predictable way. If you know any such person, then please point them in my direction.
Do this, and you'll be helping campaigners around the country fight the good fight against ID cards, expensive and pointless databases, and unprecedented government intrusion and control over every aspect of our daily lives. |
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| Houses Update |
[May. 8th, 2008|08:08 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | house | ] |
| [ | mood |
| | busy | ] |
greyeyedeve's house sale is progressing. The purchasers came back to us asking for £1,400 to treat some damp problem that we'd never noticed; we offered them a small portion of that and they bit. Hopefully that will complete soon, and it'll be one less thing to worry about.
Our Levenshulme house purchase has been dragging horribly. On our second viewing, we noticed some issues with the gas and electric installation and asked to see certificates. The work hadn't been performed by certified engineers, and since it's been done the gas has been cut off and the meter removed. Getting the installation certified involves getting the meter reinstalled and the supply reconnected, which is taking time. The estate agents have been lying constantly to us, telling us that the paperwork has been received by them or is ready when it the work hasn't even been done yet. At one point, one person from the agent was on the phone to Eve with one story, while another was on the phone to me with a contradictory one.
In good news, I have found a phone contact number for the actual house owner, and spoken to him. He seems quite reasonable, and has suggested giving us something legally binding which holds him liable for certifying the gas and electrics and incurring any costs thereto before contracts are exchanged. If we sort this out, then we can probably go ahead with the survey which will move things forward faster. Having each others' numbers makes it easier to know what's going on.
To keep our options open, I worked from home yesterday and visited several local estate agents, giving them a copy of a letter which stated our exact needs in a house, with a list of roads which are within 500m of the station and library, which is our search area. One of them suggested a property which was too small, and one suggested one which wasn't in the area we're interested in. Bloody useless. |
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| Pleasant Break |
[May. 5th, 2008|11:19 pm] |
It's been a very pleasant four days since polling day. On Friday, I slept in, then angeoverhere came round with the baby (who still finds me big and scary) and lunch. In the evening I went out to #manlug's Currybeer which was good fun, but I left early to get an early night.
On Saturday we had another lie-in. greyeyedeve and I were feeling pretty rubbish, but we managed to lever ourselves out and into town for a little shopping, before heading to the AMC to see Iron Man. The film was pretty awesome, with good special effects, and a lead who was engaging without being particularly likeable, which seems to be true to the comic character. We came home and I cooked a nice stir fry for dinner.
Yesterday was pretty much a stay at home day. Our washing machine is broken, so I took time out to visit the laundrette. While trying to get change for the machines, I found an off-license up near softfruit's selling a wide selection of reasonably-priced bottled ale, including wehmuth's and my Lake District favorite, Jennings' Sneck Lifter . I came home and cooked a rather good beef and aubergine jalfrezi.
Today has been great. I went out to lunch with Shadrak Will and a bunch of his old Uni friends - Mark and Laura, and Tom and his ladyfriend whose name escapes me. We sat outside Kro 2 and I had a really nice Danish beef and potato dish with horseradish, along with a pint of Landlord. Then I biked down to the Edinburgh Bicycle Co-Operative. I had solved my tyre dilemma by buying neither of the models mentioned, but instead plumping for a pair which were recommended by one of the staff. Since they were cheaper than both the ones I was looking at, I doubt that he had a fiscal motive for this. Changing tyres over, with its repeated deflation and reinflation, was rather painful with a clip-on hand pump, so I bought a track pump with integral pressure gague. When I got home, I found that my tyres were at a much lower pressure than they should be, so I pumped them to the maximum 110psi supported by the tyres and tube. This is giving me a much firmer, faster ride, but I'm also feeling more of the vibrations of the tarmac so it's less comfortable.
minnesattva came round, and Eve retired to bed with a migrane. Holly and I watched Phoo Action, before getting started on Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. foibey and brave_mercutio arrived in time for episodes 4-6, Eve came down, and I cooked veggie chilli to Holly's recipe. Tea was drunk, food was eaten, conversation was had, and Olly and I bounced along to the theme tune. All in all, a pleasant afternoon and evening in good company. |
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| FAO angeoverhere |
[May. 4th, 2008|01:35 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | tattoos | ] |
| [ | music |
| | New Model Army - "51st State" | ] |
As mentioned the other day, Science Tattoos blog has lots of geeky pretty. |
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| Sarah Connor Chronicles Marathon |
[May. 4th, 2008|11:55 am] |
As previously mentioned. My place, Monday. I'm out visiting punking for an early lunch. What time is good for people? There are 9 eps, about 45 minutes each, which makes about 7 hours' viewing. If we started at 2pm we'd be done by 10pm including random faffing time, but I respect that that may be a bit late for a schoolnight. Let me know what's convenient for you.
Food-wise, I suggest cooking up a large bowl of minnesattva's excellent vegetarian chilli for around 6pm. I will be happy to provide this and nachos and lager, plus water and apple squash. If you want anything else, feel free to bring it.
An idea of numbers would be useful too, so I can know how many to cater for. |
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| Brain Sorting |
[May. 4th, 2008|10:45 am] |
After a few weeks of really not getting enough sleep, I'm finding myself spending a lot of time in bed this weekend. I'm sleeping for 9-10 hours at a stretch instead of my usual 7 or more recent 4.
Because I'm having a weekend off and not doing very much, my brain seems to be taking the opportunity to sort out the events of th past few weeks, and producing some interesting dreams as it does so. For example, the dream in which I'm trying to persuade all city councils to pass the same motion (identity activism) to replace pre-meeting prayer sessions with locally-adapted games of Mornington Crescent (Humph's death) to demonstrate knowledge of the wards (local election hustings question). I'm quite enjoying this, though I'm still feeling pretty knackered. Still, I can feel that overall I'm recovering nicely and will be back to a tipper-topper state before long.
Of course, the party at deathboy's which descended into hot mansex doesn't require much explaining, though it clearly was only a dream since I was getting some too. The live set by Planky's new band Jason and the Argoknights wasn't bad either. |
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| Bank Holiday Weekend Sociability |
[May. 3rd, 2008|12:09 am] |
I'm heading into town tomorrow with greyeyedeve to do a spot of shopping. Depending on Eve's spoons, we might be going for a cinema trip to see Iron Man; the 5:15pm screening looks most likely.
Also, since I've worked out how to rig the laptop up to the TV, I'm inviting people round to watch Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles from the start until we all get bored, either on Sunday or Monday afternoon or evening. There may well be takeout, or possibly cooking a big bowl of chilli con carne or something (vegetarians can also be catered for). Anybody game? |
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| London Elections |
[Apr. 30th, 2008|05:08 pm] |
Dear Londoners,
Given the terrifying prospect of a late Boris surge, if you don't vote Brian and Ken in some order, I reserve the right to slap you next time we meet.
Love, diffrentcolours |
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| Tea Rap |
[Apr. 30th, 2008|04:22 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | music | ] |
| [ | mood |
| |  bouncy | ] |
| [ | music |
| | MC Elemental - "Cup of Brown Joy" | ] |
With apologies for posting links to evil, I've been directed to MC Elemental (believe it or not, his MySpace is better than his homepage), and his rather fine rap about tea, Cup of Brown Joy.
Yes, I thought it was a 2girls1cup reference too, but it's worksafe. |
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| Kink, Backlash and the CJB |
[Apr. 29th, 2008|06:07 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | kink | ] |
| [ | mood |
| |  annoyed | ] |
| [ | music |
| | The KLF - "It's Grim Up North" (part 2) | ] |
There's quite a good article on kink, Backlash and the new Criminal Justice Bill here. It looks like this stupid legislation is going to become law, which is going to criminalise a lot of decent people for no measurable benefit. |
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[Apr. 28th, 2008|03:42 pm] |
Last week I picked up a replacement inner tube, and swapped over my tyres to diagnose the wobbly problem. Sure enough, the wobble migrated with the tyre so it's definitely being caused by the tyre. I picked up Yet Another Puncture last night, probably because the wobble is causing odd stresses on the inner tube. So I'm going to head down to Edinburgh Bicycle Co-Operative this evening and pick up some new tyres, tubes and patches.
I'm looking at tyres which offer some vestige of puncture resistance rather than the cheaper ones, and I'm torn between the cheaper and lighter Continental Contact Touring and the heavier, more armoured Schwalbe Marathon Plus. My current tyres are 480g so even the lighter tyres would be a step up in weight. I'm not sure just how much difference it makes to the cycling experience. |
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| Secure Mail |
[Apr. 27th, 2008|12:14 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | geek | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Dogshagger - "Slow Lingering Death on Mars" | ] |
My server box which hosts cultofperf.org.uk and other domains provides mail for a few people. Mostly this involves just forwarding to existing addresses, but I like to use it as a proper mailserver. It's been providing secure IMAP for some time, and now I've set it up to provide secure SMTP as well - I can relay mail via my box provided I log in using my mail account details (which are different from my system account details).
This means that I can use a nice mail client like KMail to send and receive e-mail anywhere in the world, rather than relaying through my ISP which broke whenever I wasn't home, or having to log in to the server and use mutt (which is a wonderful mail client but a bit inconvenient for handling complex attachment formats). I can use it on public wifi without worrying about people reading my outgoing e-mail too.
HOWTOs: Certificate Authority and SSL Certs, and the examples in /etc/exim4/conf.d/auth/30_exim4-config_examples
PS: tobestool: You probably want /etc/ssl/certs/cultofperf-2008-cacert.pem to take advantage of this. I managed to forget my password for the old cert because I am a moron. |
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| Fail |
[Apr. 26th, 2008|07:43 pm] |
Bah, why is it that I have an atrial fibrillation attack right when I need to be delivering leaflets? By the time it wears off it'll be too late to go out door-to-door, and if I try now I'll just end up making myself feel terrible, and probably fainting.
My mention of the specific condition with which I've been diagnosed makes me realise that I haven't blogged about my heart since I was fitted with an ambulatory monitor. The seven days of monitoring were pretty horrible - I think my skin reacted badly to the adhesive, and the patches where the electrodes attached ended up very red and painful by the end of it. And no, I didn't hack the CF card.
Eventually I had an appointment with a cardiologist who told me that I have the atrial fibrillation mentioned above. Frustratingly, he was diagnosing me based on the exercise stress test I had at the hospital, because the results of the ambulatory monitoring hadn't ended up in my file, so the monitoring was pretty pointless in the end. However, the diagnosis is unlikely to have changed based on the monitoring results.
Basically, my heart condition puts me at ever-so-slightly elevated risk of stroke, which I can bring down to the normal risk levels by daily low-dosage aspirin. Despite what the Wikipaedophile article says, the fibrillations aren't damaging my heart in any way; they're just inconvenient. I could take beta blockers or similar medication to reduce their frequency and severity, but they have side-effects (notably drowsiness) which I'm not entirely happy about. I will make an appointment to see my GP and probably try them out, to see whether the drowsiness outweighs the inconvenience of episodes. |
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| Good news... for minnesattva |
[Apr. 25th, 2008|01:52 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | annoyed | ] |
So I turned up at the Central Library for the Underground Manchester talk. As I made my way up the stairs to the committee room, I noticed a lot of people coming down from the second floor, more than you'd expect to see in the library at one time. As I reached the second floor, I saw lots of museum staff standing in the doorway to the committee room and my fears were confirmed - so many people had turned out for the event that it was full. So full, in fact, that they organised a repeat of the lecture for 2pm. And they still couldn't fit everybody in.
I've given them my e-mail address and they promise me they'll do the talk again in a larger room and let me know when it's happening. Ran into Paul H briefly which was nice. |
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| Bike Fail |
[Apr. 20th, 2008|09:55 pm] |
So it's taken me until Sunday night to get round to fixing my broken bike. I followed tobestool's suggestion and tried swapping the tyres round. Unfortunately, while reinflating the front inner tube, I managed to shear the top off the Presta valve inside the pump, and I don't have any spares.
I haven't tried riding on it yet but it looks like swapping the tyres has reduced if not eliminated the wobble on the back wheel. There still looks like a bit of a wobble though, which is causing me to hypothesise that there's something up with the wheel or axle which caused the tyre to wear on one side which exacerbated the wobble. However, I'll only be able to confirm this when I actually ride it.
I was a bit confused by the markings on the tyre and inner tube - the tyre says 32-622 (28 x 1 1/4 x 1 3/4) while the tube says 700 x 25/32C . A quick poke towards the website of the late, great Sheldon Brown found me this guide to tyre sizing, and looking up the tyre model tells me that 32-622 is the ETRTO measurement which corresponds to 700x32. So I know that my tubes and tyres are a matching size, which is reassuring.
Tomorrow I'll be training in to work, and popping out to Evans Cycles on my lunchbreak to pick up a replacement inner tube plus a couple of spares. I'm not sure I'll get tyres there just yet, though they have the Continental Top Contact tyres which have good puncture protection. Still, Edinburgh Bicycle Co-Operative is cheaper for tyres and tubes, even though they no longer seem to stock the Contintental Sport Contact tyres I'm currently using, so I won't be able to do a like-for-like replacement wherever I go.
Note to self: I could do with some new patches. |
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| New Labour All Over |
[Apr. 20th, 2008|06:22 pm] |
Not a particularly serious political rant; I was just amused by a quote from Harriet Harman on the death of Gwyneth Dunwoody MP:
an outstanding politician and a champion in the fight for social justice. [...] We shall not see her like again.
Well, not on the New Labour benches, anyway... |
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sleepy
relaxed