Month: December 2004

  • ID Card Vote Goes Through

    306 MPs voted for it, and 93 against. I don’t know who the MPs who voted against are at the moment, but there was an estimate of 18 Labour rebels. The suggestion is that those against the card were asked to make themselves scarce rather than voting against. I watched a fair amount of the…

  • ID Cards Bill – Second Reading

    Well it’s due to be debated in the House anytime now – well once everyone’s finished talking about Blunkett’s rail ticket. The Guardian’s Newsblog has a good summary of what some of the key supporters are saying in putting forward good reasons for the card and databases’s introduction (incidentally, I’m hearing far too little about…

  • Madcap: Privacy and Information

    On January 1 2005, the Freedom of Information Act comes fully into force. This will give us the right to ask various government departments and public authorities what data they hold on us. Remarkably, the Cabinet Office has suddenly decided that now would be a good time to delete all emails older than three months!…

  • MT Comments

    Wow. This article scares the hell out of me in regard to comment spam that I’ve been suffering. And it may well be the case that something to do with comment spam was the cause of my massive file issues. Although that may have been a broken RSS link. In the meantime, I’ve got to…

  • Blunkett’s Gone

    Well I can’t say I’m sorry he’s gone.

  • Terrestrial Live TV is Out

    Well the ECB have done it. They’ve gone completely to Sky for live coverage. All live cricket is now exclusively available to satellite and cable subscribers. The sop to the rest of us is that channel Five are going to show highlights between 7.15pm and 8.00pm. Of course large parts of the country don’t get…

  • Is It Stumps For Terrestrial Live Cricket

    Today’s the day when the ECC decide whether or not they’re going to deprive the masses and do for themselves what rugby (union and league) already does by removing themselves entirely from terrestrial television. Do they take the extra £20 available and go exclusively to Sky? How much less should nPower, Vodafone and other sponsors…

  • Golden Globes – Who Are They Anyway?

    The Golden Globe nominations have just been announced and there’s the usual hullaballoo about them, but what exactly are the Golden Globes? Well they’re awarded by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association – an important sounding institution. Hollywood’s films are of interest around the world, and it’s only right that the various critics “who disseminate information…

  • Worth Reading

    Check out this Carl Hiaasen piece from today’s Miami Herald. Jon Stewart showed that clip on his show earlier this week, but I think we in the UK have missed it (aren’t torrents wonderful?). Rumsfield was so out of his depth in that arena it was a joke – and he appeared with the ridiculous…

  • Massive File Sizes

    I’ve got some kind of hosting problems at the moment – it seems that this page is being recorded as somewhere in the region of up to 100MB which kinda kills my hosting. I’m looking into the problem ASAP, but in the meantime, please bear with me, and I apologise in advance for any outtages.…

  • Treasure Hunt

    I’ve been spending waaaay too much time chasing down elusive prizes in the Ebay treasure hunt. Complicated to play, yet strangely compulsive… Been looking in forums and chat rooms.

  • Randomness

    There’s a lot more to randomness that you might realise. I actually did a course in it once, but I’ve mostly forgotten it all. This is a good primer (via Boing Boing). Incidentally, it seems that coin tossing isn’t fair.