He swung, then

So this morning they strangled Saddam Hussein to death with a big rope, his final mumbling of the monotheistic dogma to which he subscribes doing little to make a difference. Funny that those who felt up to killing the man didn't feel up to putting their faces to their actions, whereas he refused a hood. Can't wait to see the video of that one. I wonder what sounds he made? If he died instantly, or writhed around for a bit, kicking his legs or just twitching slightly. Who knows? I know that the society that would put him to death would tease their own with snippets of the build up, as far as the noose going on, but draw the line at showing us what we are actually doing. The full thing will be on the web eventually, I'm sure. Everyone who supports the hanging, or the trial, should be sure to watch this and test the strength of their own convictions. If you feel anything other than grim satisfaction that the problem hs now been resolved, you need to reconsider your outlook.

And while you are doing that, you can keep a count of how long it takes for reprisal killings to outnumber the deaths for which Saddam was hanged. Shouldn't be long, now.

I wonder how Bush would approach being hanged? Not that we'll ever find out, as the Western media reports a cowed, trembling Saddam with fear in his eyes while the East has a commentary which reads more like a list of observations than a victory chorus. And then there's Al Jazeera betraying the workforce's BBC roots - a 'Should he have hanged?' poll exists, with those amazing "yes, no, don't know" options which allow you to register opinions you haven't got with a single deft click of one's mouse.

It's all progress, I suppose.

Generic festive pun title goes here

Every day (and moreso over the commercialy mandated gift giving season than normal) I will check the park for attractive women. In doing so periodically over the last fourty-eight hours I have deduced that I am the only person in this part of town not to get a puppy for christmas. Perhaps Mars would have bought me one if I didn't spend so much time looking at girls jogging through the park.

Neal was worse, though. He was always peeking.

Almost three months to the day...

...after I moved down here, I begin my new job on Thursday.

Can someone remind me how to work?

Agencies: The fun keeps on coming!

Three weeks ago the Council were on the phone to me ruing having to turn me down for a thoroughly decent full time job as I'd been pipped to it by someone who'd already done the job before. They were awfully nice about it and I came away feeling valued and not at all despondent as they'd been more than satisfied with all the things I would have brought to the role.

This morning I got a letter from the Council's own agency, which puts people in simple admin positions for a week or two to cover backlogs and such. I 'didn't meet their required standard'.

It'd be funny if I wasn't so skint. Ten year's administrative experience, with a little management and customer service and a degree in communications, H&S and First Aid qualifications and all the rest is clearly not going to be enough to see me through copying a few forms into a spreadsheet. I do hope they find someone out there that is up to the job though - with so many exciting telesales positions up for grabs, I doubt if anyone would want to look elsewhere for employment!

Alternatively, it could be (as one of their number confirmed to me over the phone the other week) that they are not being called upon to provide cover for anyone at the moment, and are having trouble justifying four people working there on a job that doesn't actually have a point at the moment. These days few will say 'you are overqualified' or admit to not having any positions open. The agencies that offered me callcentre in the first instance are still not willing to admit I'm 'trouble' for not wanting the work they offered and holding out for something less morally bankrupt. I can phone any of them and they are overjoyed to hear from me - I'll be promised a callback regarding one of the 'exciting' opportunities they have on offer but the call never comes.

Ironically, as I wait for my CRB to come through I'd be glad to do one of their dodgy jobs for a few weeks at the moment, crap as I am at pretending I give a toss when I don't.

Of course, were I crusading through a career in paid journalism as my youthful self once aspired to I'd be no better off, as yet another friend 'on the inside' has been shafted by the market leader - a certain Japanese games, no - electronics - company clearly leaning on the main publisher in the field to control the content of magazine editorial, bringing it 'on message' with the adverts they are paying so handsomely to have in the mags. Were their marketing campaigns not so laughably out of touch and ham-fistedly trying to court a myspace generation so cynical they'll never even notice the stuff is aimed at them, they might have a point in being so controlling. As it is, I think as a gaming species, Wii might be looking elsewhere for our fun anyway. Let them yank all the strings they like - their product is inferior to the competition at the moment and nothing changes that.

Wiithout

Well, it is launch day for the single most exciting piece of technology I've ever looked forward to. I am bereft of cash and therefore cannot have one. I am tackling this shame in two ways:

1: Looking for interim work - no progress today

2: Flickr - Quite a bit of progress today

Touching the Penguin

Let's just say my ace new job is 'not an immediate start' and leave it at that for now. In the meantime, much twiddling of thumbs would ensue, were it not for the fact that other stuff is quite happily managing to fill up all my available time. In the last weekannabit I've managed to get Mars on a walk round the park, which I thought would never happen. I've been to see Tool and Mastodon, cured Lee's laptop to the tune of 42 spywares and 19 virii, dismantled 2 PCs (I PII 233 with 64 meg onboard (Alan's old machine I gave him) and one PIII 330 with 256 onboard), using those bits made one WinXP mainbox (with Firefox, MediaMonkey and installed modem for when Alan is ready (thus bringing the machine he uses up to the same OS spec everyone around him is at, and giving him the plug and play functionality he needs for his new media players) and one miraculous little Xubuntu Dapper box (which needs a keyboard and display badly as Mars will want her mainbox's periphs back eventually) that I can't believe is running in 64 megs. It is lush. Granted, I can't do anything with it because I'm still halfway through learning how to confgure WPA-PSK authentication over my 802.11g network but I've noted the following so far:

1: In Ubuntu (any flavour) they've got an OS that installs for me with less hassle and in less time than WinXP.

2: The UI is every bit as good

3: When something goes wrong on the install on XP, you try every combination of settings imaginable until it works, or you reformat the universe and start again with a new cup of tea. In Linux, you f2 into the console and command it to stop wasting its time on the little thing (and it tells you which!) that is halting progress and deal with it later from the comfort of a GUI.

4: Using Xubuntu I feel like I'm directly using any given aspect of the computer. Take this wifi config - still not working but when I was teaching myself wifi on Win32 platforms I read and read and clicked stuff and got advice and so on - lots of 'have you tried?' and 'what did it do when...?' and such. With Linux, you 'sudo' into the text editor from the command line, you look at the script for networking and see what it says. Every problem I've solved so far has involved looking at the actual process the computer is following and giving it a better one, not hoping that this or that util or wizard is going to do things properly for you. I'm not a logical bloke, but computers run on logic and this OS seems to be allowing me to apply logic to get results. It is liberating, but I've a long way to go. My mainbox remains WinXP. Well, that's a whole 'nother paragraph....

Hello. You made it. Shall we go on? Right - I 'b0rked' my mainbox 'through teh face'. Really hard. By trying to dual boot Ubuntu. I believe the term is 'lol'. It wouldn't have been a problem but my main HD is a tad old and has had the same FAT32 main partition on it since 2001. As such, when the Ubuntu installer hit a glitch at the GRUB installation point, my master boot record was nuked. My Winstallation (see what I did there?) was still on the drive and mercifully my media drive was intact in glorious 'other disk entirely' NTFS sanctity, but my bootable XP installer disks (wot I made myself and everyfink - because I bloody had to, to get it on Alan's new PC) weren't allowing me to repair it properly, nor to repartition, nor to reformat, nor anything. Mercifully, I'd just built the other one for Alan and a hasty Usenet raid later I had an ME boot installer in my mainbox's drive, ran that, got to the old-style command line (why remove that from XP? Scared someone might take control of their own machine, Bill?) and did a proper job on my old c: drive, nuking my XP install and repartitioning into one big, new, gleaming NTFS 40 gigs fresh for Windows, which has reinstalled and is running like a dream, as 4 years of software which never quite left the registry or hard drive during uninstallation have no actually gone, and (just like Linux) half my data isn't comprised of useless libraries no application wants, lying around the backstreets of my system like yesterday night's kebab wrapper.

Also, I went to a party and it was good.