Shiny Babules I Have Grasped This Week

Time to take a very brief break from hoisting bile about the place and look at some things that I’ve actually liked this week, and when I say this week, I mean last week, because this was supposed to go up on Saturday but I was busy writing something else.

No News is good news

I like news, me. On a pacey news day, I lke to keep track of several channels at once. Up until now, if I wanted one of those to be SKY I had to get up and put the TV on, but yesterday I noticed that you can view SKY News live on line from their website. Good Oh.

For other news channels I also like Zattoo and Livestation. Both of which give access you a number of news channels that you can watch on your desktop. Shiny.

Still on the subject of news, an excellent BBC Newswatch program which focuses on changing audience attitudes to news delivery and the effect of new media, mobile tech, and social networking on the news agenda.

Not on iPlayer, but you can watch the latest episode here.

Twitter Toys

I seem to be getting more and more into twitter, which is a great surprise to me, because I have no time at all for, e.g., facebook.

This week I have played with various bits if twitter tomfoolery, as previously mentioned I have quite enjoyed @tweetminster’s Tweetminster Wire, which is a twitter client for aggregating MPs’ and PPCs’ tweets, as well as various other things.

There are two slight drawbacks with it (but then it is in beta), firstly you have to keep refreshing it, and secondly most MPs are fucking tedious. Still, it lets you see who’s tweeting during #pmqs, which is frankly what we all want to know.

Next is a web based app called TrendMaps which shows twitter trends by geographic location, allegedly in real time. Neat.

Finally, another web app Twitterfall which is pretty useful for watching twitter witch hunts, or keeping abreast of the shouting during #bbcqt. Twitterfall presents a waterfall like animated display of tweets matching your chosen search term, you can adjust the speed of the display to suit. Quite handy when there is a high volume of tweets on a hashtag and you want to get a good sample of them.

Annnnd back in the room

Well, that was a much longer break than I had originally expected, almost four months it seems.

Gosh.

A Short List Of Hateful Things

Normal service will resume shortly, in the meantime here is a short list of hateful things

Builders
The very few amongst you who are not, in fact, shiftless, lazy, cak handed fucking half wits need to spend some serious time putting the rest of your cretinous brethren to the sword or driving them into the sea, or whatever is appropriate. I will happily help with corpse disposal.

British Telecom (Wholesale)
After the twelfth phone call to your muppet farm call centre, I do not expect the pimply faced twat advisor who takes my call to say, finally, that it was impossible to test my broadband connection when you said you would because there is a fault on my line. I KNOW THERE IS A FAULT ON MY FUCKING LINE YOU COMPLETE MORON. That is precisely what I wish I want you to fix. That is also exactly what the last muppet told me that there wasn’t.

British Gas(Or whoever you are this week.)
When I discover a surprise gas pipe (a bloody great big surprise, since I have no gas, and have been repeatedly told that I can’t have any) running into my property that is unsupported, uncapped and rusty, I do not expect the fuck monkey of a jobsworth that you send round to check whether it is immediately dangerous to BANG ON IT WITH A FUCKING BIG METAL SPANNER. It is a well known fact about me that my favourite DIY tool is the Yellow Pages, but even I know that is an unutterably stupid thing to do. And no, I can assure you, it will not cost me 400 quid to have it removed. It’s your rusty, dangerous, gas main, not mine. Out by the end of the week or the damages and compensation will be paying for my builders holidays this year.

Sky, BBC, CNN, esp John Simpson and SKY’s Tehran correspondent.
When I have spent the night watching uploaded footage of events unfolding in Tehran, I do not expect to see you useless fucks on my screen the next morning telling me that nothing much has happened, or probably will happen, especially when the air in shot is wreathed with smoke from burning buildings. Knobs.

MPs, still
And particularly those, Anne Widdecombe, who continue to insist that the expenses ‘scandal’ is a ‘distraction’. More on this later.

Brown, as ever
I shall continue to uphold the principles of transparency and openness in government by suppressing the report into a ministers expenses and holdingthe Iraq enquiry in camera. You cowardly, dishonest, shitweasel.

Former speaker Michael Martin
Who else could possibly have brought themselves to continue sullying their office right up to the last possible second by whining like a spiteful little girl. And how dare you try to suggest that you tried to reform the expense system when you have spent the last four years trying to prevent the public from finding out that our representatives are liars and thieves to a man jack.

Builders again.
Useless fuckers.

New to the BlogRoll

A couple of additions to the BCU blogroll to mention.

First of all there’s Muffled Vociferation one of the many creative tentacles of prolific expat blogger Sue. I am tremendously honoured to be included in her blogroll as she has a blog with actual readers. Thanks Sue !

Next up a couple of Lib Dems, Mark Reckons who was responsible for the excellent ‘Safer the seat, more bent the MP’ research and generally manages to post some thoughtful stuff on subjects as diverse as electoral reform and the pastoral role of MPs.

And of course Charlotte Gore whose server must be wheezing under all the new traffic, and on whose blog I enjoyed a lively debate about the BNP and the left’s ‘no platform’ policy yesterday.

Widget fiddling

There will be a period of flakiness while I twiddle widgets and the like. Please do not be alarmed, normal waffle will recommence shortly.

There are also tweets now, this was probably inevitable.

Quelle horror!

Broadband speeds the last few days have been substantially slower than those achieved by my last dial up modem many moons ago (a rather nice external 56kbps voice modem with the lights and the switches and the excellent features for wardialling, but I digress).

I am told that this will improve “sometime in the next 72 hours”, will require an engineer to “visit my exchange” (where are all the engineers hanging out if not at the exchange, which is a fair sized staffed branch office ? Would have thought there would be at least a couple handy.) presumably to reset the DSLAM which appears to have decided that my connection should be running at 256 Kbps, some 16 times slower than it should be configured, and that in fact I can’t really have all of that either (my typical data transfer rates at the moment are around 29 Kbps, approximating the third dial up modem I ever owned. In about 1990.) and may even constitute “an outage in my area”.

Hmm.

“find play slime at wholesale” …

Is apparently the top search term leading to this blog. Fascinating stuff.