You are currently browsing the The English Guy's Personal Blog weblog archives for August, 2008.

 

Posted by richard

With the advent of the internet you’d think certain things would go the way of the dodo. Newspapers for example. Sadly we still have them (sadly for the forests, and also for celebrities having to put up with paparazzi behaviour). Another thing might be say, posters/flyers, surely there’s better ways of getting the word out, via the Internet. Given spam mail’s “popularity” however, I doubt that. So we do have posters still.

Some of them are quite well designed though, I remember lots of them at Uni, plastered over every spare wall they could get their paste on. Makes you wonder where you get them printed though doesn’t it? A friend of mine just mentioned that a friend of his does that kind of work, so I thought I would give him a link as his website just came up – he prints flyers, posters, brochures, cards etc.,

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Posted by richard

I was reading the newspaper and I came across an article about Abu Qatada. He’s the fanatical Islamic preacher who is on bail under strict conditions, after our courts ruled sending him home to Jordan would breach his human rights (and don’t get me started on -that-).

Well the articles says his family (a family of five) are living on benefits of £50,000 in an £800,000 rented four-bedroom semi-detached house. 50 grand! My god I have two jobs and I don’t even -earn- that! What is this country coming to that a man like him, who espouses hate and violence, can get 50 grand in benefits?!

The picture associated with the article, incidentally, shows him carrying several heavy shopping bags outside Morrisons, and a paragraph mentions he clams incapacity benefit for a … what for it … bad back.

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Posted by richard

When you see a headline like this:

Sweden’s ‘Loch Ness Monster’ captured on film

It kind of grabs your attention doesn’t it? Imagine it saying ‘Loch Ness Monster …’, it has that kind of draw because we’re so fascinated with things like Nessie, Bigfoot, UFOs etc., So I went to the page in question because I thought to myself, ‘Yeah right, probably some blurry video file’. But there isn’t even a video file! After all that and they fail to even show us a still image!

Bastards!

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Posted by richard

This is a quick post for teeni, mac, et al, about the cooking blog. Let’s talk this through and see if we can agree on domain name, style and so on. I can provide the design and hosting. We can cover a wide degree of categories from normal cooking, through veggie cooking, styles like chinese, russian, mexican etc., and also the tools to cook with such as slow pots, pan-frying.

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Posted by richard

Anyone ever seen this before:

Just trying to go to http://www.craigslist.org/ takes you to that other url (http://www.craigslist.org/about/about/sites) immediately. Something seems to be wrong there craigslist

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Posted by richard

So finally I have finished the work off on this theme! Yay!

The theme is released with all the usual bells and whistles: gravatar-ready comments, widget-ready sidebar, SEO-friendly coding, and xhtml-validated/css-validated (except for the opera css hacks – remove them and the css validates).

The release package also includes the wordpress login page customised to blend with this theme – see it here – see a blog post about pages.

Next: customising the corresponding bbpress theme that comes with this!

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Posted by richard

Well that title says it all really. I actually think it’s true. Our electoral system really needs a serious overhaul, it’s archaic and antique to the letter.

What makes a lot of us seethe is the fact that we don’t have a first-past-the-post system. We elect local MPs and then also elect which party we want to lead us (which interestingly, for those outside the UK, is how Gordon Brown now leads us despite us never having elected him). Some constituencies are large containing many tens of thousands of people, and some are small containing just a few thousand. You can see where it might be unfair…

We should really have an election where we vote for either the party or leader, and our local MP, and the party/leader with the most overall votes wins.

Our Electoral Commission has just come out with a report saying the same thing (that the system needs overhauling, nothing about the first-past-the-post system though):

The Electoral Commission said the rules on running elections should be simpler and the role of returning officers should be strengthened.

It also backs new electoral management boards, to support and co-ordinate local elections.

Commission chairman Sam Younger said “a consistently high standard of service for all electors” was needed.

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Posted by richard

Have you ever noticed (at least in the UK) there are never any public debates about execution? It’s never mentioned, never talked about. Sure we hear about other countries’ executions, namely the US, but also places such as China, Japan etc., The liberals always seem to offer points against execution, positioning themselves as champions of human rights, but you don’t hear about those for it.

The odd thing here is though – the last time in the UK that there was a vote on it in Parliament it was a VERY close run thing. If we had a bad series of public show trials for horrific murders and they had a vote again, I dare say we’d have hanging back on the books.

But between friends, we never talk about it. Even in my family, we never talk about it. I’d like to mind you, to hear my family’s points of view, but they don’t. I suppose it’s just one of those subjects you don’t discuss. Too delicate, perhaps?

My point of view is this: if someone murders someone else in the heat of the moment, then hanging should be off the books. But if someone plans a murder, or commits several, then the ultimate price should be paid. And in my opinion, which I’m sure is contrary to many, it should be public. Watching someone die like that certainly would be a deterrent. And if it prevents just one murder, then the deterrent has worked, because as of right now, there doesn’t seem to be a deterrent and our prisons are getting full of these scum.

As for human rights, well the murdered had theirs taken away, the murderer should suffer the same penalty. None of this lounging in prison watching TV, playing on playstations, reading, working out and so on, get ‘em up on the scaffold, don’t waste the taxpayers’ money.

So what’s your opinion? Dare you voice it, put it in writing on here?

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Posted by richard

This blog is going through a few updates. This is because I’ve finally decided to get off my arse and finish off the theme, and for that matter, to fully integrate the bbpress installation that sites underneath it. So it will be a combined wordpress/bbpress theme, which can be downloaded as one, or separately. When I’m done I’ll post it.

I was thinking of naming the theme after the painting, The Son of Man. Good idea?

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Posted by richard

Have you ever wondered how some of the sports featured in the Olympics ever actually make it in? I saw a handball match today, the first I’ve ever seen, and it’s in the Olympics. Yet a sport like say, cricket, established far longer and with (presumably) more impressive credentials isn’t.

Football is in, tennis is, but squash isn’t? And yet, to my amusement, a “sport” like dressage is included (how, for the life of me, a horse prancing around a rectangular field can be considered a “sport” is beyond me).

If we’re going to have these odd sports in, why not some more odd ones like say, chess (again though, is that actually a “sport”?), cheese rolling, or caber-tossing?

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