That was the week that was...

Wow, what a week! The following things have all happened which have been pretty... eventful:

1. Blair won the vote on top-up fees;


2. Blair, and indeed the entire government, got an astonishing vindication in the Hutton report;


3. It snowed just a little bit in Sheffield, thus bringing the entire city centre to a standstill, despite the fact that it had been forecast for weeks now;


4. Greg Dyke, Gavyn Davis and Andrew Gilligan from the BBC all resigned as a result of the Hutton report;


5. Work Permits (UK) along woth other parts of the Home Office and various other government departments went on strike


6. The Department for Work and Pensions did not go on strike, due to them possibly getting a better pay deal


7. Joy (my wife) has been ill

I'm not even going to mention Hutton, because it'll just get me started - the conclusions seem quite incredible, considering the evidence presented before him. Stop it...

The snow was fun. It snowed a bit Tuesday night, which didn't seem to affect things too much, and then again Wednesday afternoon. Then the temperature dropped dramatically, or something. Which meant, at 5 o'clock on the High Street in Sheffield, there was literal gridlock - cars and buses were not moving anywhere. So, being an ingenious sort of chap (er...), I decided to catch a tram over to PC World to have a look round and let the traffic calm down. Which I did and got the "I wants", closely followed by the "I have no money". After that came back and, on getting off the tram, thought my plan had worked. There was no traffic. Unfortunately, there were no buses either, or none that seemed to be going to my neck of the woods. Eventually one came (I was only waiting about 15 minutes, to be fair, but other people there had been waiting a lot longer). So I eventually rolled home at about 8 o' clock...

Every time it snows, you'd think we'd never had the stuff before - it's ridiculous. They'd been forcasting it for weeks, it had been delayed for 3 days - what more warning do you want?!

Getting all technical now...

Have added stats now, courtesy of Sitemeter

1984 all over again (possibly)

Go on strike on Thursday at the wonderful Work Permits (UK) and indeed, throught the Home Office (of which we are but a small and humble part), Department for Work and Pensions and other places as well. The reason? A rather derisory 1.something% pay offer this year, which would take my pay to a little over £13k. From a little over £13k. Not very much at all (I forget the exact figures, but it's not very much).

Never been on strike before, so it's all (almost) exciting. To be honest, I can't see the union winning this one: less than 10% of those eligible to vote in the ballot for strike action actually voted in favour of this, as the Home Office was very keen to point out on Monday. Still, we shall be the eternal optimists and take up our right to withold labour and hope that the Treasury sees sense. Can't see it happening, though.

To be honest, I don't think a civil servants' strike is going to have much effect; it's not quite the same as doctors, nurses, firefighters etc. I would imagine that most people would see it as simply well-paid office pen-pushers looking to rake it in a bit more (as someone said to me at church last week "only 8% or something?"). In actual fact, the civil service doesn;t pay all that well and many of the lower-paid people are on benefits themselves. So, I don;t think the perception would meet the reality, if that is the perception.

Bloomin' chuff...

Blair wins key top-up fees vote

316 votes to 311.

Apparently, this was all about top-up fees, though seemed more like it was about Blair and his leadership. Why? Why did he make it into such a key, important test of his leadership, especially when in their 2001 election manifesto, Labour had promised not to introduce such a measure.

Don't understand...

When putting in code for comments...

Always, always, always copy the entire code into the template, or it don't work.

Just as I did...

Learn from my mistake! Or laugh at it, either is fine...

Has it worked?????

Let's try...

HELP!!!!

If anyone can help me out here, tell me why this thing is only showing the last post, minus links, archive, any other posts, I would be extremely grateful!!!!!

Where are my posts?!?!?!?!

They seem to have vanished...

HELP!!!!

Your Online Resource for Insurance

This may not be the most interesting blog ever written...

Not the upset of the century...

Hey! Guess what? Sheffield Wednesday lost on Saturday... Big surprise, huh?!

For those not in the know, Sheffield Wednesday are the football (as in proper football, as in played with the feet - "soccer" if you must) team I support through the good and the bad. Actually, the "good" bit may not be true. I'm one of those rubbish fans though who doesn't go to many games (on the not unreasonable grounds that I can't afford to trek right across Sheffield and then stump up the money for the entrance every week). So, yes, I suppose I'm an armchair fan.

Darna

Don't know how I came upon this, but's a Filipino superheroine called Darna, a heroine who seems a bit different from the DC/Marvel duopoloy. It looks interesting - about a girl called Narda who is almost a channel for a super-powered alien called Darna. She's clearly huge in the Philipines. I can't understand the comic books, but hey! It makes a change from Supergirl/Wonder Woman etc. (although she does bear more than a passing resemblance to the Amazon Princess).

New Supergirl?

Apparently, there's a new Supergirl movie being made, or so it says here. Check out Peter David's response (him being the guy who writes/wrote the latest incarnation of the comic book).

Will it be as good/bad (delete as appropriate) as the 1984 Helen Slater version? Who will play her? So many questions...

Comments: the sequel

This time from Haloscan ...

I'm probably going to be in soooo much trouble...

Work blues...

Work is hard at the moment. The managers on the team (or at least some of them) seem to be in the habit of creating more work for us. Everything little thing wrong with an application needs to be checked out, if even the slightest thing is wrong, it gets sifted as a "High-risk" application and goes up for management check. E.g. I had 6 linked applications for nurses to work in a particular NHS Trust. They were so straightforward it was almost unreal. I approved them all, 5 didn't go up for checking, 1 did. This one was sent back to me. "The salary's too low".
"Well, I've cleared five already!"
"Right, we need to get the letters back and check the salary with the Trust. THen we'll get them re-input..."
(These aren't verbatim quotes, but are my recollections of the conversation).
So, I had to e-mail the print room (where the approval letters get printed) ask them not to send the letters out, put the application that was still live in "B/F" (where files go where we're waiting for info, and from where many never return) and request the salary. Which was less than £500 less than the going rate.
They still need re-inputting...


Why? WHY?! It's so frsutrting, like they don't trust us to make our own decisions, or something. It's getting really bad, a situation not helped by the fact that our team leader insists on trying to limit full team meetings so she can have meetings with the line managers menaing we don't get to discuss this. Great, isn't it?!

(What's even greater is how I keep hitting the semi-colon, rather than apostrophe, key, when typing.)

Try this for a bit of retro(ish) gaming action.

By the way, if you're wondering what happened to the comments... I took them off, thinking (probably) wrongly that they were responsible for the lack of updates on the blog. Will get round to putting them back on, in the same way that I will get round to cancelling my old mobile contract etc...

Why won't the chuffing thing show my latest chuffing posts...?

Don't understand...

Have just added comments from the nice peeps at enetation - here's hoping they work. Feel free to try them. Or I might cry, or something...

Had bit of a strange experience at work today. Went to do some photocopying and, as I walked back to my desk, had pins and needles in my finger. No idea why, it just came on. Felt a bit flushed, but am now wondering if this was just hypocondria - I suspect so. Told someone at work about it:
"Was it in your left arm?"
"No, my right."
"That's alright, at least it's not a heart attack."
"No..."
"Might be a stroke though; that's what I would say."
Cheers...
Felt fine all afternoon.

Can anyone shed any light on this? If so let me know. You could always use my new comments system (if it works...). There seemed to be no reason whatsoever for this to happen. Then again, I wondered why no one ever used that photocopier...

In a few months' time, I will re-read the below entry and laugh at the pomposity and pretentiousness of it all...

So, "free speech" apparently means the ability to say what you want, no matter how racist, offensive, likely to incite hatred etc. it is, without impunity. As long as you're a well-paid TV daytime show host. And you're writing about Arabs. In the Sunday Express.

Yes, I'm going to have my two new pence worth about Kilroy who wants his show back despite quite probably abusing his position, never mind causing huge amounts of offence to what probably constitutes a fair proportion of his audience. How can he host the show again? What if the people he's just completelyt slagged off are due to be on the show as guests? How can they be sure he won't be biased against them?

I'm reminded of the sacking of Angus Deayton from Have I Got News For You, where the issue wasn't so much that fact that he'd slept with a prostitute, taken cocaine etc. (however you may feel about these things), but that, having done those things, it made him unable to present a show on which people in the public eye indulging in such behaviour were regularly targets for his or the scriptwriters') wit and sarcastic comments. Surely the same applies here: whatever Mr Kilroy-Silk may have intended by his comments, he has offended a large number of people (and probably not just Arabs either). How can he present a show where he may well have as guests people who will have felt included in his comments.

The whole "Free speech" argument doesn't wash. Yes, this is a free country and people are allowed to say and write what they think. And this is a good thing. We can't stop people saying things we don't want them to say, we have to be grown up and accept that people think differently from us and have the same right to express that view. And sometimes, these views will be considered offensive, racist etc. We cannot avoid these people and the best way is not to ban them but to show them up for what they are.

But Mr Kilroy-Silk is not just a man in the street expressing his ill-thought out comments in the letters page of a newspaper. He is a well-known, popular (and probably very good, although he's not my cup of tea) television presenter with a significant audience and, presumably, a significant influence. Now, I accept that most people are not sponges, they have the intelligence to think for themselves and not just accept it because some bloke off the tele said it. But if someone in the position he is in says these thinks, surely people are bound to see it as in some way legitimising their own views. There is a real danger that Mr Kilroy-Silk is inciting people to racism. He's not wholly responsible, and it doesn't excuse those who will use his comments as a pretect for their own actions.

If it wasn't what he meant to say, then he should write more clearly and read through what he's written before publishing - make sure it says what he wants it to. Surely even a column in the Sunday Express deserves that? If he stands by it, then I think he should either step down or the show should be axed.

For a more intelligent, less ranting point of view, see David Aaronovitch's column in the Guardian today.

Phew, didn't quite mean to start off that way - will be less ranting in the future...

Hello!

Well, this is my first entry on my posh new blog which I will, will keep up to date.

Honest.

I really don't have anything interesting to say, but will be back when I do (actually, that will probably be never, so I'll be back with really dull things to say before then...)