Generally speaking, in my own experience, I find people dress smartly only when they aren’t as good as they need to be. This seems to doubly apply in the field of IT.

That isn’t to say scruffy people are immediately capable.

(Upon normalising the above, you get: “humans aren’t generally as good as they need to be”.)

Dell seem not as stupid as I had first hoped. I ordered four VGA projectors for 20 each on Sunday from their website. I received a confirmation later that day but as of an hour ago my order has disappeared from their tracking web site. I ignored the clauses in their terms and conditions that suggested they were able to change civil and criminal law on a whim in the hope they’d process the order automatically before noticing. I guess ten million other people also placed an order, immediately arousing their suspicion circuits.

I checked into the uk consumer protection laws and they seem to suggest they’d have to honour the deal, but in practice this has been proved otherwise. In their favour: 20 is a far cry from 900 and apparently this proves I knew the price was incorrect (along with this blog entry :). In my favour: the item was on sale, which may have led me to believe the ultra low pricing was just a price war with Dabs.com. I’d also be much more likely to win them over if I could rally together all the other people whose orders vanished and organise some kind of class action effort. The publicity alone might work. It was worth a shot, nevermind. I might call them up anyway, just for shits and giggles.

Anyway, they’ve lost my 80 quid haven’t they. Losers.

I've never been so amused by a Daily Mirror front page (not counting my amusement at peoples obsessive interest in David Beckham).

Diebold/Chad '04.

Iraq owes Britain about 1 billion dollars which, along with 199 billion debt from others, the US is trying to get us to drop.

Iraq produces something around 3 million barrels of oil per day. Thats 1.1 billion a year. At the current price touching $50 per barrel, thats about 55 billion dollars a year, with estimates suggesting 165 billion a year by 2006.

That aside, what I'm really interested in is what Iraq owes us $1 billion for? What did we supply to Iraq that they haven't paid for yet?

I forgot to mention that I went to a NOFX Gig at Manchester Academy in May 2004. I met guitarist El Hefe. I told him I downloaded their last album (War on Errorism) from the Internet and felt bad so wanted to give him the cash, and handed him 10 quid. He told me it didn't matter and I could have it for free.

I think my ticket cost more than covered it. Though I bought that from a tout outside.

I wonder if the news about Kenneth Bigley escaping before being caught and executed was just made up to make him sound heroic; to help his friends and family avoid imagining his 30 days of hopeless waiting, just to be beheaded. It sucks that another human life has been brutally ended, but tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians have died due to our war on terrorism and not one of those subscribed. Not one of those were paid a thousand quid a day by the US government. Every one of them would have preferred to have been elsewhere but didn't have the choice. Bigley went out there for the big bucks. We shouldn't forget that.

We see that the preparations for the US November elections are in full swing.

Also, in perhaps related news, see photos of some dumb undercover Swiss cops at the anti-G8 riots.

My suggestion for Tony Blair's epitaph: "here lied Tony Blair".

George. W. Bush will win the USA November 2004 election. He will win, not because a majority of people will vote for him, but because he controls the voting system.

It's been demonstrated that the Diebold voting software is utterly insecure. Votes can be changed without anyone knowing, including the officials who run the election,

The voting software has a backdoor that allows this easy manipulation of votes, but in a way that passes all spotchecks and verifications. According to internal Diebold memos, this backdoor appeared just after embezzler Jeffrey Dean became the senior programmer. Prior to working at Diebold, Dean was convicted of 23 counts of embezzlement which he admitted to commiting due to being blackmailed over killing someone in a fight (!).

This software, complete with Dean's backdoors, has been in use in elections for over four years. It was used in November 2000, where Bush famously stole that election, and it will be used again this year.

Appeals to the use of the software, or to implement measures preventing the kind of known backdoors are all being refused. The independant observation process is a joke. The press are even publishing fake poll information showing Bush ahead of Kerry, to manage expectations. Everything is set up perfectly.

"We are succeeding in Iraq. We are succeeding against the forces of evil."

This isn't fucking Lord of the Rings. This isn't an episode of the power-puff girls. We aren't the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Tony Blair isn't He-Man. George Bush might live in a little world of his own, but he's not in The Chronicles of Narnia. Dick Cheney isn't Pokemon.

These people that we're 'succeeding' against are not zombies, or decepticons or armies under the control of Baron von Greenback. They are people. They are fighting for what they think is right and what is invaribly being proved to be the truth.

"Professor Katsuma Yagasaki ... calculated that the 800 tons of DU used in Afghanistan is the radioactive equivalent of 83,000 Nagasaki bombs. The amount of DU used in Iraq is equivalent to 250,000 Nagasaki bombs."

"In 1989 there were 11 abnormalities per 100,000 births; in 2001 there were 116 per 100,000—an increase of over a thousand percent. In 1989 34 people died of cancer; in 2001 there were 603 cancer deaths. The 2003 war has increased these figures exponentially."

"There is no treatment and there is no cure."

"67% [of post-Gulf War babies of veterans] were found to have serious birth defects or serious illnesses. They were born without eyes (anophthalmos), ears, had missing organs, missing legs and arms, fused fingers, thyroid or other organ malformations."

"babies are born without brains, organs are outside the body, or women give birth to pieces of flesh. In babies born in Iraq in 2002, the incidence of anophthalmos was 250,000 times greater than the natural occurrence."

http://www.projectcensored.org/publications/2005/4.html

I filled the iron up with water from a cup that had apple juice in it. Now when I use the iron my shirts smell of apple pie.