Personal Blogs

Given the latest Snowden revelations about the NSA [I'm 'just' going to link to Schneier because, many things are happening and I know that he will keep up with those and filter out the nonsense] I expect to hear/read many more [batcrap] conspiracy theories, because...

"Look what the NSA managed to do, getting round the government, spying on us all...."

Did they [NSA] get away with it? They probably will, in the sense that nobody will personally suffer. But in the grand sense? FAIL.

They have a budget of over $50 BILLION a year and they kept this secret [that they wanted, and tried, to spy on everyone] for how long? Under a few years. And despite having lots of clever peeps they made the moron play of exporting their sysadim responsibilities to a private company? Did they not watch person of interest?

Why has nobody been sacked? Bit embarressing for everyone, we all did it...

Every organization is useless at keeping secrets and as an organization grows that will get worse. There are no conspiracies, anyone involved in any organization realizes that the costs of cheating are way out-of-line for what you want to achieve unless you have government support. The problem that the government have is that they think that what they say means something; but in the end someone will blab, will blab with very good evidence. Because your security was useless at security.

So to say that the Catholic Church has been covering up, "really important information about Jesus..." for over 2000 years, is just fucking rubbish. Why would they want too? Given their utter incompatence at covering up their, shall we say, rather difficult celibacy problems, which they clearly wanted to cover up...doesn't jibe with reality.

Why do I care about this? Because at some point some nutter will say, something like, "the moon is made of cheese". 

I will point out the lack of evidence.

"The moon landing was false." As if that makes a fucking difference to your cheese argument, there is plenty other science and that is primia facia bullshit.

"BUT LOOK WHAT THE NSA DID!!!"

That's what they did: empowered nutters.

Here's my conspiracy theory: the NSA or some Lizard, intends to take us back into the stone-age by behaving so madcrap-deranged that nobody will trust anybody but nutcases, and they'll take the helm.

As conspirecy theories go it's a bit naff but I defy you to refute it :AFTER ALL LOOK AT WHAT THE NSA HAS DONE!!!

sigh

But I couldn't miss this.

The school, the building that is, is one hundred years old this year. So to mark this, today, we took a photograph of the entire humanity associated with said building. That would be about fourteen-hundred folks.

The time scheduled was to be two-thirty, so I wandered up to join in the fun at three. I was a wee bit surprised at what I saw.

I'm not sure what I expected, what I didn't expect was that there would be cameramen hanging out of windows and nobody in the playgound. I headed inside. There were plans onboard it seemed but they were a bit behind time. I went for a fag.

After half-an-hour or so we had the kids and the staff out, shivvering in the wind. Teachers were screaming and pointing, trying to get their class to where they should be.

There was a carnival atmosphere; ie the kids were high as-kites and the staff without care-of-kids responsibility were hob-nobbing.

We all had to squish into an area, an area defined by round black-plastic markers. This took some time and some work from those who had megaphones. Oft they [the megaphoners] took attitudes that conflicted with one another.

Eventually it was done, the photos were taken and it was time for us to get back inside. This, in itself was a bit fraught -- fourteen hundred people, two entrances.

Afterwards I walked home. With a warm feeling inside, one that I suspect that everyone who had taken part shared -- that we had done something together, that we had shown that we were a team, that we were all a part of the same something.

And, soon, we will have a photograph of our sharing. It might not mean much now but in the decades to come many of us will look at that photograph and remember what we felt today.

A sense that we were a part of a greater whole. A footprint on the path on the road that we all tread together.

Why?

Because Chelsea Manning was put away for 35 years for doing something that Judus Obama said was a good thing when Bush was doing all the bad things. But turned out to be a bad thing after all when Obama was a judge.

Why?

Because no matter what I say/believe unless I can support a political party with money, and preferably dirty money, I don't.

I'm jealous, I'm feeling tired and sore.

I have to do two third-level courses, to complete my degree: artificial intellegence and concurrency, courses that I still need to sign up for. I'm putting it off because I need to get funding and I see that this is going to involve personal hell.

I will get funding because I'm a Scot living in Scotland but it will involve me in a whole heap of nonsense. Forms and phone-crap and crap... and crap and forms.

For some years my work offered to pay my fees, as part of their personal development initiative or something, it wasn't clear. I accepted their offers a couple of times. Guess what? I was involved in nonsense, crap-crap and I ended up paying the fees with my OUSBA.

It was easier for me to go short on stuff than to spend my life on the phone metaphorically bleeding my life away. I began to dread their phonecalls.

Everybody, you talk to funding about, is nice and helpful, they go the extra mile, they want to help but the default is that everyone in this country is some kind of cheating chancer out to rape the national riches. So everything is hard. Forms must be filled, records must be collated, you must provide evidence of something that you have you have no bloody chance of producing.

They, the nabobs, speak about an educated workforce, they claim that the money is there, true, it is. It's just that the people that it is meant for and who would benefit from it, find it hard to get it.

I'll get it I suppose but I'd rather that my twenty-one year old neice got it.

But if he could he would have; playing the role of victim, rather than that of the arch-liar which he was.

"Is anyone available to work this weekend?" A 'tell' as I think they say in poker, he wouldn't have asked unless he knew that he was on shogglie ground. He was the kind of guy who usually gives orders.

I wasn't going to make this easy for him.

I'd brought, just this, possibility up from the first. He, the boss of the cock-up, had to finish by [... a date...] so that I could arrange clean-up. Then he'd laughed, "...of course...". He was confident, even a touch condescending, he beamed at the other stakeholders and shook his napper, as if to say, "get him!".

Of course then I was just the poor sucker who had to let them into the building, now I was a wee bit more than that: I was the poor sucker who had to let them into the building.

Now they were in trouble, this was near school-closing stuff: in the papers, serious fallout.

"No". As I said I was going to milk this.

"This is important you know". He unassumed the limp that he never had, ramped the voice and attempted a loom-over move in.

"To you yes, I couldn't give a fuck, it's your cock-up".

He was much bigger than me but I'd backed our conversation into CCTV territory, and while I doubted that security central was actually watching and would dispatch thugs directly, at least any attack on me would be taped and could be used in court.

He seemed temporarily mute. A man used to getting his way I felt. "I need authorization from someone in the council", I said.

This was a wee bit of a killer, overtime hadn't been written in to the contract, he'd have to admit he'd made a boo-boo, take a loss and more importantly he'd be flagged as unreliable in any future contract negotiations. I knew what was coming next.

"Is there...?" This was a cash-in-hand offer. Which while we aren't being taped for sound, as far as I know, I felt that the offer was best left unspoken. Easy enough to edit that tape to make me look bad.

I turned round and pointed to the CCTV camera, "see that? Well with that and the alarms, everything that we do in this building is monitored. Talk to {REDACTED}. I'll work, but only if he asks me to".

He gave me a look which I didn't understand. It was like some of the looks that dogs gives you, meant for you but something that you don't quite get.

He stomped off, I detected no sign of a limp.

Funnily enough today a lot of workmen arrived at eight and now we no longer require to work the weekend.

Every time I log in to my student homepage I am affronted by a selection of the 'pretty students' on the header.

I am poor, ugly and have shitty clothes. Education is something that I can't afford. I often go without food.

The charmed ones are fair, of body and face, they smile out at us, they beckon us into the fortune of learning.

Models of the call-centre world, you aren't one.

Smarter, sharper, doesn't matter, you don't look the part.

I vaguely understand this. Still, the man seems to cheat with the actuality...take this [verbatim] quote...

"Suppose that I have probability of landing heads and you have probability of landing heads."

Does that strike you as odd? Does it worry you that p2 is nowhere defined? As a mathematician I suspect a trick. Um, when did I become a mathematician? New quote...

be the first times  sees three heads in a row. Now obviously you know that , but can you prove it?

Well we know what that's all about: utter shash-headed fuck wittage, sloppy tripe that leaves the poor, math loving peons on their shaking-own.

I know wat Z is, I know what n means, I have could look up inf if I could be bothered; the rest, bottom in the wind territory. And I dislike that assumption that I obviously know your lazy shite.

Doubtless better mathos than I are laughing at me, but it is what it is, the point of a proof is to complel belief. And if you can't be even be bothered to explain the axioms/symbols then...

I will wait for correction.

Something that I have to argue my way to.

Seems

He won!

I don't know why but from the beginning of the first set I had a strong feeling that the match was going Andy's way. True there were times when Djocovic started to look as if he might charge and the last game was as iffy a game as I think that I've ever seen—I had the real feeling that if Djocovic broke the set was his and the match might have been gone from Andy.

So what now for Andy? Well sports personality of the year is a shoe-in, he will never be called Scottish by the English media again and there's a good possibility he can garner the number one slot for a couple of years. Federer is gone, in the general sense; Nadal's knees will mean that, although he will always be dangerous, he will have to choose his tournaments and Djocovic has now lost a couple of important matches to Murray, on grass the balance has changed methinks.

Oh, and Scotland will vote for independance.

This

Why am I not being targetted? Is it because a working class white guy with a protestant work ethic, a drink problem, a wife who, although vegetarian might kill a large animal to get its bones, a person who thinks that the government is out to get us and has access to Japanese Knot-weed is negligable? In the sense that we don't want to ask if he is gay.

Before you answer these questions remember that the 'good old USA' is harvesting your answer for sharing with the british government that nobody that you know voted for.

This government? Have they been nice to you? Have they done anything that doesn't seem like they were only concerned with their 'people'. The word, 'rape the poor', come to mind.

So you say that you are gay/muslim/anarchist/whatever on an online survey conducted by a bona-fide institution like the OU, what could go wrong?

You will end up at some gulag. That's what can, and will, go wrong if we don't say the basic, "What the fuck do you want to know that for?" And, "I think I'm going to sue your arse, because you are everything that I hate about minions, sold your humanity to someone with money".

I think that they might make different decision it they, or their offspting interens were carrying a gun in a a dangourous place..

These are shits of the first-order, brave with their words and and brave with other peoples' lives.

I have the ass-end of a computer course between now and February.

I'm going to get bored, I'm going to fret, I'm going to get fractious...

Heads up neil, there wasn't always the OU...oh! That's when you did that...

However we complain about it, without TMA hell we are weebles at the wobble-face of life.

For the past few days I've been suffering, what feels like, a summer flu, symptoms ; coughing, phlegm, itching, sneezing and aching. Although the itching-sneezing component may be down to hay-fever.

I've smitten my wife, about which she is not happy.

I've been on back-shift [where you are not allowed to go off-sick unless death is a reasonable prognosis.] So I trek my way to work sweating as if the heat mattered and shiver my way home in the gloaming.

You know that feeling: where you feel that your head-box has been stuffed with cotton? Well now imagine corduroy, or perchance tweed as the stuffing substance.

I won't gross you out with the various leakages that have been occurring from my skien. Other expulsions may be assumed but are definitely denied. [In the same way that governments deny stuff that casts them in too gloomy a light.]

So I was feeling none-to-good as I stood outside watching the clouds as the taxi-knowledge people oozed past. Jimmy, the knowlege, and I shared a few words, then a guy, with a bag, who seemed out of place came through the gate. My eyes narrowed.

As ever I was wrong in my assumption, he'd passed the knowledge, he wanted to say thanks to the people who had supported him. A nice thing had happened. In my world a tutor had been thanked. The clouds still looked nice.

What I know and he, my young man, doesn't is that this is the least hard step: you might know what to do, the problem is finding who want to do this.

We don't live in a sane society.