Strangely Perfect

What Does That Title Mean! A. Those who practice Buddhism do so without any expectation of grace or favour.  They do it for two reasons: To Improve their own life and continuing existence To improve other’s lives and future existences You don’t have to believe that they do this – after all, it could all [...]

It’s Just Like Bladerunner, And Not Just the Weather! Tears in Rain Bladerunner, the movie, based on an old Philip K Dick science-fiction story, was made by Ridley Scott from North-East England, someone I’m distantly related to.  Made in 1982, it presents a very grey, wet, bleak future, heavily referencing Scott’s (and my own!) upbringing [...]

RBS and Lloyds’ Banks Carve-Up Call me stupid if you like, but there’s something particularly disturbing about the ethics of the planned carve-up of the big two banks rescued last year by our taxes.  (see RBS and Lloyds in major shake-up for details) Normal Practice During Business Mergers If two companies merge or one buys [...]

Alan Johnson Sacks the Messenger This, of course, relates to the recent sackings and supportive resignations of Government Scientific Advisors (see More advisers may go in drugs row) . The home secretary faces the threat of more scientists resigning after sacking his chief drugs adviser Prof David Nutt for his comments about cannabis policy. Two [...]

As MP’s expenses come to the fore again, Peter Mandelson spoke on Radio 4 this morning and did his usual self by not explaining anything and being perfectly unclear about everything!  Listen hear here! Thank god the interviewer cut him off. The question was “Have you got much sympathy with MPs who’ve claimed under one [...]

Introduction Poacher turned Gamekeeper I’ve been rss following a little thread where a job-seeking homeworker has been diddled out of thousands – see Saundrak’s Blog. It seems to have close ties to Pacific Webworks et al, maybe not directly, but the Golf Course, techniques,  or something. Read this curious comment from someone called mlwood79 that [...]

Introduction & History Recently, Microsoft has reworked it’s search engine (MSN Live Search) and renamed it Bing.  This was followed even more recently, with a joint venture between itself and former search king Yahoo! into a hazily explained search and advertising combination. Microsoft is well known for wheeling out the lawyers as backup to it’s [...]

Northumberland Northumberland is a lovely place – cold, sunny, windy, dry, overcast, damp, clear, clean and historic.  But mainly brrr  and wow!  Especially on the coast. It’s quite popular with tourists.  Here’s why I go there… …why do the fuckwits? The historic island of Lindisfarne (Holy Island) is connected to the mainland via a tarmac [...]

Introduction An unfortunate consequence of posting stuff online is that you enable your ‘work’, ‘your words of wisdom’, your ‘copyright’ or your petty scrawlings (choose which you think is the most appropriate), to the world as as such, it’s freely copyable. My website is proudly running on WordPress sat on a standard shared hosting LAMP [...]

Paris Cycles Freely with Loaded Questions and Answers In Buddhism, there’s a concept called the forces of negativity which is inherent to the whole universe – but especially when applied to living sentient beings like ourselves. These negative forces are extremely apparent when the Velib Cycle Scheme in Paris is considered.  We have: The initial [...]

Introduction Following up an earlier post of mine “Use the Green Stick, Mr Postman!” and how unfriendly competition in the delivery market actually is from the point of view of the environment and the actual service to the customer (us!), the recent news of a  Delivery firm’s 686 jobs at risk should be taken with [...]

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/ispphorm/ Please fill in the form (no pun intended – well actually, it is!) at the number 10′s office.  Phorm is clearly breaching or “avoiding” compliance with a host of moral and legal charters.  It seeks to monitor all users browsing habits, store them up and then flog them on to provide you with a [...]

Amadeus Meets His Nemesis in the Land of Make-Believe Photo Details These were all taken on my recently repaired Fuji Finepix F30.  Everything was on auto and with virtually no flash used.  It’s a shame it doesn’t have variable zoom and aperture when in video mode.  I could have done with that. Hopefully, you’ll get [...]

It’s True! Record profits at Gazprom as it forms Opec-style gas cartel The news that yesterday,… (new bad guy?) Russia (aka Putin Inc), Iran (axis of evil?) and (our friend?) Qatar have decided to collude together like OPEC to drive up gas prices (sorry, control the market in a uniform way beneficial to suppliers and [...]