loving the alien.....

Quiet night in, drank too much and watched most of my new Teachers Series 1 dvd. Best quote? Simon and his new(ish) girlfriend maggie are in a restaurant having *that* conversation:

Simon: "So, where's the most adventurous place you've ever had sex?"
Maggie: "In a car park."
Simon: "A carpark? is that it?"
Maggie: "With my best friend, Jill."
Simon: "F*cking hell!!!"

And when Simon is extremely nervous and about to be interviewed for his own job:

Brian: "When's the interview?"
Simon: "5 minutes."
Brian: "Can I give you a bit of advice?"
Simon: "Yeah, sure"
Brian: "Whatever you do, don't f*ck it up."
Simon: "That's it is it?"
Brian: "Yeah, pretty much."

Oh, and Nina Sosanya who plays Jenny is red hot.

BBC NEWS | Education | Oxford accepts fewer state pupils:

"Fewer state school pupils were given a place at Oxford university this year than in 2002, figures reveal. "

"Hi. I was wondering if I could somehow try to organise a two-tier elitist further education system?"
"I'm sorry sir, we've already got one"....

In the words of Tim....

Best.Christmas.Link.Ever.....

All the news that didn't fit:

"The leader of a gang that beat, boiled, strangled and chopped up a 14-year-old boy in Wales was convicted of murder.
Lucky for Matthew Welsh, his victim was teenage, male and average-looking, rather than female, preteen, and cute, thus Huntley-type notoriety just kind of passed him by."

Hmm, interesting. 14 year old boys being killed barely makes page 5 while Huntley makes pages 1-4.

All the news that didn't fit:

"Of course, the nightmare scenario in Pakistan is that fundamentalist elements take control of the country’s nukes (by, for instance, assassinating the President) and Delhi is more or less erased from the map by the day’s end.
The US State Department and the elite Washington press corps were deeply worried about the risk of a coup in a nuclear-armed country, as was made clear by the following exchange, two days after the event:

'Question: Pardon me if we discussed this yesterday, but I don't think we did, the assassination attempt on President Musharraf and your reaction to it?'
'State Department Spokesman Richard Boucher: No, we really didn't.'
'Question: All right. I didn't think we did.'
'Boucher: Let me get you something on that.'"

LOL....

This is truly a heartwarming story about the bond formed between a little girl and some construction workers. This makes you want to believe in the goodness of people and that there is hope for the human race.

A young family moved into a house next door to a vacant lot. One day a construction crew turned up to start building a house on the empty lot.

The young family's 5-year-old daughter naturally took an interest in all the activity going on next door and started talking with the workers.She hung around and eventually the construction crew,all of them gems-in-the-rough, more or less adopted her as a kind of project mascot.

They chatted with her, let her sit with them while they had coffee and lunch breaks, and gave her little jobs to do here and there to make her feel important.

At the end of the first week they even presented her with a pay envelope containing five pounds. The little girl took this home to her mother who said all the appropriate words of admiration and suggested that they take the money she had received to the bank the next day to start a savings account.

When they got to the bank the teller was equally impressed with the story and asked the little girl how she had come by her very own pay check at such a young age.
The little girl proudly replied, "I worked all last week with a crew building a house." "My goodness gracious," said the teller, "and will you be working on the house again this week, too?"

The little girl replied, "I will if those useless bastards at B & Q ever bring us the f*cking drywall."

BBC NEWS | Business | Online media rival sues Microsoft:

"Internet media company RealNetworks has sued Microsoft, accusing it of unfairly monopolising the growing market for digital music and video."

Hmmm, the reason Realplaer isn't as big as Windows Media Player has very little to do with unfair practices or monopolies. It has far more to do with Realplayer biegn shite and attempting to hijack file associations such as mp3 and mpg.

BBC NEWS | Business | IMF gives Brown borrowing warning:

"Chancellor Gordon Brown has been warned by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that he risks breaking his own rules on government borrowing. "

Labour? Break the rules? Noooooo!

The Bottle Shop: On the arcade

My new favourite blog, very funny and Scary's choice for blog of the year (and he should know, being a past winner).

Marxist Jim: Never go out with a woman who's crazier than you.
Me: Um. Jim - no disrespect. But you went out with 'The Harridan'.
(Marxist Jim leant towards me; his grip on my shoulder tightened. A wild look came into his eyes).
Marxist Jim: I know. That's how I came up with the Rule.

Proper link thing to follow. When I can be arsed.

If you’re a data-structures kind of person you can now have some fun thinking how you’d store the words from the word list (trickier than you think), and how you store the postings (they’re fixed in size but there are more of them), and how you point from the word list to the postings list and from the postings list to the document list.

If you’re not, trust me, this is the kind of thing data-structures people live for, give them the problem and they’ll go away happily and not bother you for a while. Don’t forget to tell them that they need to allow space for somewhere between twenty thousand and a few million unique words, and many billions of documents, each with potentially lots of postings, so really a very large number indeed of postings. And, it all has to be updateable.

And the cool thing is, when you tell them those big numbers, it will make them happier! Aren’t geeks wonderful?

Full TOC here.

And that's Table Of Contents, you n00b ;-)

ongoing · On Search, the Series

Tim Bray's collection of essays on searching. As in full text/XML/ results etc etc searching.

He's been writing this since the summer and now he's finished. It's basically a textbook on searching.

BBC NEWS | Magazine | Would a microchip keep your child safe?:

"a cybernetics professor known for his headline-grabbing stunts came up with a plan to microchip children to prevent them being abducted. "

Except it wouldn't stop them being abducted would it? Just make them easier to trace once they had been.

Blinking lights. Is this the future of art? I hope so.....

Just brilliant idea, brilliantly executed. Do a search for wonderwindow to read about the colour version planned for Atlanta next year ;-)

BBC NEWS | World | Middle East | Bush promises Saddam fair trial:

"The United States will work with the people of Iraq to ensure the trial of Saddam Hussein stands international scrutiny, President George W Bush says. "

So, Saddam gets fair trial, Guantanamo bay inmates still waiting for theirs. Or indeed any legal advice or representation. Still it's election year next year, what do you expect?

Although there was a point that all the arms sales to Iraq from the West might get rolled out as part of his defence. Which brings us to the next point.

Who the hell is going to defend Saddam Hussein? Serioulsy? Who? And then... where are you going to find a jury of 12 who have no prior knowledge of the case????

LOL, I think we are in for an interesting time...

BBC NEWS | England | London | Boy banned from Christmas play:

"A disabled pupil who was excluded from his primary school's Christmas play was unlawfully discriminated against, a tribunal has ruled."

Now, I can understand him being excluded from the school play if he had Touret's or something (no there isn't any fucking room at the bastard inn) but read the article, there's so much more than that. He wasn't allowed in assemblies, he wasn't allowed to bake cakes with the other children, he wasn't allowed on trips. All this despite the fact that the school had claimed money for a full-time classroom assistant, even though the boy's mother had to come in and do the job herself for a month during the summer of 2002.

At first I thought it was a nothing story but it's sodding heartbreaking to tell you the truth.

BBC NEWS | Politics | Blair to explain summit collapse:

"Blair to explain summit collapse"

Whatever he says you can bet it won't be *his* fault.

BBC NEWS | Politics | Straw: Saddam confession unlikely:

"'His record of telling the truth is a very poor one.'"

Oh sweet irony, from the man who has lied more publicy and on more occasions than anyone other public figure I can think of.

BBC NEWS | Health | Protest as MPs 'jump NHS queue'

So, your MP is going to be given a reserved time slot to visit the doctor. I have to make an appointment and work around that. The clinic is to be reserved for 3 90 minute sessions a week when the public may not use it. These reservations are being paid for by you. Public funds are to be used to reserve the clinic.

Write to your MP today, and ask for some of your NHS contribution back.

BBC NEWS | Health | Medics slam 'distorted' MMR drama:

"Leading child health experts have called a drama about the MMR vaccine 'distorted' and 'entirely unbalanced'. "

Everyone else called it "bollocks". Just a million miles from the truth and as a result a whol enew swath of Sun readers won't get their kids vaccinated. I see a measles epidemic in your near future....