Cats, why are they here?

Hi All,

Not content with finding out why we are here, I have expanded my horizons to ask the burning question on nobody's lips....Why are cats here?

Ok, they are fairly cool, they are friendly, fluffy and generally make us happy. There are even websites dedicated to those furry friends of ours, pictures taken by their owners that are cute and funny and what not, but why are they here?

I like cats. Always have. I even had one when I was little. He was great fun. But now I've grown up. I have a small garden, with an even smaller veggie patch for my own amusement. But why is it that all the cats in the area where I live insist on filling it with crap? It seems like the only thing that these cats are here for. Crapping on my sodding lawn! WHY?

There are people who are going to say "They are marking their territory". Well to them I say
"Shall I crap in the street then? It's my territory, shall I crap in your garden? its just as much my territory as my garden is to your sodding cats!"

Crapping in my garden I can just about understand, the cats I mean. But why, why crap in my veggie patch? My poor lettuces were shat on then dug up. They crawled underneath my plastic cover and crapped in there, they crapped on my carrots, they crapped on my garden fork, in fact anything to do with me trying to be pro-active and green they have crapped on.

I'm just glad I don't have a Prius, they'd probably take great care in crapping on that. So I guess that's why they are here. To crap on things. Little furry, meat eating, shit machines. The only advantage to me that I can see is that they eat pigeons. That way they save my veggies from being eaten so the bloody cats can shit all over them later.

Thanks for reading.

Even Philosophers are human

Hi All,

I have been reading many quotes from philosophers, mainly because back when being a philosopher actually meant something they had a lot of time to think, and they could make a few quid from spouting thoughts about random things. Life was good. Sitting in a bath all day just thinking, and working things out.

Then I came across Voltaire. He was a very wise and very clever man, and lived for a very long time, back then. Some of his quotes are absolutely amazing and are still applicable today. He wrote, for example this nugget:

Behind every successful man stands a surprised mother-in-law.

Wow, still means something today. But he did start to lose it at the end of his illustrious career. As is demonstrated by one of quotes towards the end of his life.

I have lived eighty years of life and know nothing for it, but to be resigned and tell myself that flies are born to be eaten by spiders

Eighty years! Eighty years, and one of the best philosophers of all time, and he said that all he knew was that flies were born to be eaten by spiders. Shit. I could have done that. How about this then?

"All things fall over if you hit them hard enough. Apart from Weebles."

There you go, 26 years of learning compressed into one sentence. Can't wait to see what juicy knowledge I'll have when I'm Eighty!

Philosophers are not all they've cracked up to be. Yes you can read their best bits, but if you read their books they are just normal people really. No-one special other than they can write down some of the things it sounds stupid for someone to say out loud or at least say out loud sober. Don't look for answers in books to life, go down the pub and listen to drunken idiots talk. You may get some good nuggets out of the garbage they normally spout, or at the very least you can be glad you aren't like them. Maybe that's my bit of knowledge that I have gleaned so far.

"Be glad that there are those who feel lower, or who are worse off than you. Just as there are those who are glad they do not feel as bad or doing as badly as you."

Thanks for reading,

Stupid advert!

Hi all,

Has anyone seen that advert about that bloke who had a crash in a car? You know the one:
"Richard had a crash."
"It wasn't hitting the windscreen that killed Richard"
"It wasn't his chest hitting the steering wheel that killed Richard."

I thought,
"Hmm was it the length of this advert and the labouring of the point?"

It went on,
"It wasn't the broken ribs that killed Richard"
"It wasn't his ribs puncturing his lungs that killed Richard"

At this point I was screaming at the telly
"What the hell was it then? For Christs sake give us a bloody clue will you?"

But no, it went on....
"It wasn't his ruptured artery that killed Richard"

I was thinking,
"Shit is this guy a machine or superman or what?"

it went on....
"It wasn't his heart failing that killed Richard"

I was shouting again,
"Was he smoking a cigarette?!?!?!"

Then it said
"He was not wearing a seatbelt, and that's what killed Richard"

Eeerrrrr, no, don't get me wrong, but for him to have that list of injuries and not die, and then get killed by a loose seatbelt, they sound pretty dangerous to me, I'm not going to wear one. They're lethal. I'm going to take mine out.

Thanks for reading,

Windows vs Linux Vs Mac OSX

Hi All,

I'll get this over with. Windows is the best.

Stop yelling and listen. Windows is without doubt the best. With Windows you bang a CD or DVD in you computer, click a few buttons, crack some other disks in for drivers and within an hour and a bit its completely usable. On any hardware you care to use. Every piece of hardware, from really old stuff to really new components there is a Windows driver for it. Ok so you have to pay for it, but that's Ok because everything works, and it is really user friendly. Even your granny can use it. In fact even with the new Mac hardware, you can install Windows on that too. It'll go practically anywhere you want.

Linux is good, but isn't the best by a long way. You might think that it's a long way to Belgium, but that's nothing. I have recently been playing with Fedora 9 and the new Ubuntu 8.10 releases (which no matter what they say are impossibly similar. Only the coffee stain makes the difference) and what has really struck home over the last few days, is that you really, really, need to be a fan to actually like it. These two I have tried are supposed the best for new comers to the OS (shouldn't call it an OS because neither Ubuntu or Fedora are, same as Win95, 98 and ME weren't) and they have been abominable. I can't use my driver disks that came with my hardware....no Linux support, and what I really hate is that there are about 14 different installation methods. I have spent more time in a terminal/command prompt window over the last 4 days than I have in the last 4 years. I used to enjoy this when I had DOS 6.22 and Win 3.11 but I'm tired of it now. I want my desktops to just work. Seriously. When Linux pull their respective digits out of their respective arseholes it'll be good. But just like Wikipedia this is just gonna fail. I'll give it another go in about 12 months, once the RSI has worn off.

Mac OSX
Well, well, well. What can I say. I'm impressed. You buy a machine, the OS is on there, it works. End of conversation. Wow. It's based on a random Unix kernel from the birth of Christ and has been altered so much you can't recognise it. But when it's on its home turf it's amazing. I'm not a fanboy. I hate Apple in fact. But their OS is really good. But you try and put it on some other random hardware. What happens then? It doesn't work. At all. And because Apple have their own proprietary kernel you can't just grab linux drivers and jam them in, it won't work. But it does go to show that when you have a specific hardware base and some decent programmers who are full time, just what can be achieved. You also pay the price with this though. Literally. It is expensive and you will lose all your friends, as well as any respect you have. You will also only be liked by other Apple users. Both of them.

But at the end of the day you can't compare Windows and OSX. One is designed for just about any combination of hardware you can possibly imagine. The other is purely for a specific hardware configuration. You can only compare Linux with Windows, and to be honest, the amount of money and research and development that has gone into it really shows. When Linux can speak to hardware manufacturers and and get some real drivers for the specific hardware, that's when I'll switch. But not before.

To be honest I wasn't sure where I was going with this blog, I think I was getting there gradually, but I was distinctly lacking in parking facilities, motorways and the cheap hotel. I did however manage to get hold of a Corby Trouser Press at the end, which, judging by the quality of this article, I used for making toasted cheese sandwiches.

Thanks for reading,

Top Gear...too fast for some?

Hi All,
Last Sunday I went to see the Top Gear Live show and the MPH in London. Absolutely amazing. I had a really good time and we had a really good hotel and whatnot. I recommend it to people. But...
I had to drive from where I live to London and back. It's about a million miles or something, and most of that time is spent on the motorway. The more I go on these roads the more and more I appreciate them, we can get from one side of somewhere to the other side of somewhere else unbelievably quickly, even in a Honda Jazz.

But sometimes, just sometimes I think that the people who do the electric information boards are having a laugh. On my way home, again driving down the motorway I saw one of these signs and it said "50mph debris on road". I looked for this debris everywhere, but all I saw was a rusty old Ford Fiesta, and he was doing 60, so it couldn't have been him.

I had to go down an A road. the sign at the side of the road said "Hidden Dips for 1 mile". Well they must have been well hidden, because not once did I see a ketchup or a salsa bottle big enough to cause a hazard. I suppose it could have been some retard from a nutterage, who had escaped and was likely to run out into the middle of the road, but again, there was no-one there worth mentioning, even though I was driving through Surrey.

Anyway, the Top Gear Live show. I would say that the best bit was the "audience in a reasonably priced car". We were all given cards to hold up that were red on one side, and green on the other. Green was left and red was right. The more people held up red cards the more the car turned right and the opposite is also true. But what made it interesting for me was how the throttle worked. The more noise we made the faster the car went.I want this fitted to my car. It makes sense because eventually you would be absolutely screaming through fear and your car would do nothing but try and go faster. It'd be even funnier when the police tried to pull you over, they'd put their sirens on and shout at you to pull over, and you'd be in the car screaming your lungs out, and your engine would be whining and trying to tear itself apart, going faster and faster, and then...

Maybe it's not such a good idea.

Thanks for reading!

I'm back, and what the hell is going on?

Hi All,

I haven't written in a while, I've been away, sorry.
But I had a good time, thanks for asking.

Bonfire/firework night tonight, and that got me thinking once again of all these whingers and whiners who read the Guardian. All those people who write in to OFCOM about abusive programs and about who said what to whom. First of all, there are about a billion other channels to watch or listen to. If you don't like it just change the channel (and the record). Also stop screaming "Won't somebody think of the children?". Our kids are more rounded and psychologically sound with death and serious injury, sarcasm and insinuation than you think.

Every year we take the piss out of some guy a couple hundred years ago who tried to blow up the houses of parliament by doing something he obviously couldn't do. We set off hundreds of tons of gun powder. If he's up there and has finally pulled himself together, he must be screaming at us for taking the mickey out of him. But that's just little stuff compared to what else I have noticed really.

What we do every year for our children is build an effigy of a human, and tell our kids that his name is Guy Fawkes. Then we go in a long procession to a field, with torches and fireworks, where there is the biggest pile of wood you can imagine, and sit this thing on top. All the kids stare at it in wonder of what is going to happen next. We set fire to it. We are performing ritual burning in front of our kids, and they smile and laugh and have bets with each other about which bit of him is going to fall off first.

The kids are fine! Will someone please think of the adults?

Thanks for reading!

Children and the WWW

Hi All,

"Three out of four children have seen images on the internet that disturbed them, an NSPCC poll suggests." This is how the BBC news story begins. So it is how I will start mine. It goes on to say that these figures are taken from a poll of visitors to there there4me.com website, which caters for 12-16 year olds.

Ok, yes fine, there are lots of images out there that can disturb children. What got me were these quotes from Zoe Hilton, who is the "policy advisor" for the NSPCC. I shall deal with them individually.

"Children are just a few clicks away from innocently stumbling across upsetting or even dangerous pictures and films such as adult sex scenes, violent dog fights, people self-harming and children being assaulted."

Children are always a few steps\clicks\hops\limps away from all the above all the time. With the exception of "violent dog fights" (as opposed to the non-violent type?). Where in the hell did that come from? But anyway. Any child between the ages of 12 and 16 who has stayed up beyond 9pm has probably already seen all of the above. Even some 12 rated films have these scenes in, so why pick on the internet? Can also someone explain to me what a dangerous picture is? Is it one with really sharp edges? Or one you can fall off quite easily?

Ms Hilton said that ..."every child should be using a computer with child protection software."

It's traditionally called a parent.

"High-security parental controls installed in their computers would help shield them. "

Do we really need another bunch of controls forced upon us, to teach us what is right and wrong?

"Currently computer manufacturers and retailers leave it to parents to find and install software that filters out material unsuitable for children...."

Since when has it been their responsibility? When I buy a PC I don't want to be asked if I have kids so they know what software to put on. Or, why the hell should I have more bloaty ad-ware that will go out of date in 12 months and that I have to renew or whatever?

When I was in high school, I remember quite vividly being shown images of the holocaust, seeing all these people in trenches, dead bodies being rolled into the pit and then covered in lime, people being shot, lined up in bloodied tattered clothes against a wall. I also remember seeing sex scenes in various programs on telly and films. Dog fights is a hard one I admit (unless they mean Spitfire vs. ME109), but then I have never seen one of those videos, and I have been on the internet for a long time. I reckon if I looked for it I'd find it, but I'd have to look for it.

The kids need to be taught to be "web-wise". I have never seen a video or image that I haven't expected to see. I am a true googleite too, and their safe search is fairly good. I don't understand what these kids have been looking for in order to get hardcore porn, self-harm and children being assaulted. In fact....

Hey, this is a thought, what if the children now are so obsessed with finding help that they are now looking for it. They are going to Google and typing "sex advice" or "I self harm please help me" or "I am being abused, help" all 3 I imagine would throw up these images and videos they don't like, and then they finally get to "there4you.com" and sure enough the ones that need help have found abusive stuff on the internet.

I have kids, young kids admittedly, and I have always supervised them on the internet, and they do well. They shall become web-wise. Also if they have a problem they are secure in themselves so they can come and talk to me about whatever, they don't need some webby, self appointed, self regulating, nationalised, pointless group of childless do-gooders helping them. What we actually need are parental classes to help the minority of parents bring up their children. You don't need software for that. In fact its a bad idea. "The software let it through, the software blocks badness, so this must be good"

Ok, last quote:

"I've seen violent images I didn't search for. I was freaked out."
I'd be freaked out too, if google came up with matches and I hadn't typed anything in.

Be careful what you search for, you might just get it.

Thanks for reading.