Time to hit the polling booths again. Doesn’t seem that long since the last one. But it’s a lot easier to decide this time. Brian Paddick’s a decent guy, but the Lib Dems have shown they can’t be trusted over the last two years.
Boris hasn’t been quite the disaster we feared four years ago, but he still cares more about the richer members of society than everyone else. Plus, he’s a Tory. But I repeat myself.
Ken seems kind of past his peak, but he’s still the one for the job. Though I might give Jenny Jones my first vote and Ken my second. I think that’s what I did last time, come to think o it.
For the Assembly it’s going to be Labour all the way. I’m not impressed with how they’re doing in opposition at Westminster: the Tories are down, but they don’t seem to be kicking. Kick harder, Milliband! But to run London? Obviously it’s got to be the (relatively) good guys.
What’s surprising and slightly scary is the number of extreme-right parties who have put candidates up. obviously there’s the BNP and UKIP: but who knew the National Front were still around? Then there’s ones with names like England First and Christians Against Marriage Equality. (Those names may not be exact, but I’m on the Tube at the time of writing, so I can’t check; but you get the gist.)
Anyway, that’s where we are today. Don’t forget to vote if you can, folks.
There were three slightly weird law-enforcement- or intelligence-related stories in the news today:
I heard the policeman’s wife on the radio. She spoke calmly about how getting the murderers off the streets was good for the community, and positively about the people who had bravely given evidence (at least one had to be given protection).
The odd, disturbing, and intelligence-community-related thing is that army intelligence had a tracker device in the car of one of the murderers, and at first they refused to reveal its details to the police undertaking the investigation. The police had to threaten to get a warrant. Then when they did provide the data, it turned out to have sections mysteriously missing. You have to sympathise with the PSNI here: they had both the Continuity IRA bampots and the army working against them.
So what, this GCHQ codebreaker on secondment locked himself inside a bag using magic? I’m surprised that they’re even considering that it might not be murder here; or at least that someone has covered something up. More importantly, there’s the fact that the DNA evidence got messed up by a typo. Surely there’s got to be a better way?
And then there’s this business about the corruption in the Met. Evidence allegedly deleted on the orders of crime gangs? That’s some scary stuff. I’m pretty sure that when the Serious Organised Crime Agency was set up, it was meant to be anti-organised crime.
No real connection between these, I just heard about them all today.
> …potential readers are still coming to the genre. Books aren’t the entry drug any more. Books are the hard stuff, the crystal meth of genre.
Who would have thought, this many years after The Jam, that Paul Weller could still make a decent album? Yet that’s exactly what he’s done. You can listen to it at The Quietus, an online music magazine.
Everything social and feedy in one app. Cheap, too.
Awk looks easier and more useful (for text-file manipulation) than I could ever have imagined.
Thing for generating secure passwords, based on a master password and (usually) URL components.
Interesting route home to work. Saving it here in case it generates a different route the next time I go there.
I think I need to read this.
Could be useful in getting our data access into some kind of sanity.
How good scripts get turned into bad movies.
