Rob's Ego Trip!

Harry's Place has a great article called "Time to save the BBC".

A couple of choice quotes:

The BBC is necessary because, unlike all other media outlets, it is accountable to us, the viewing public, rather than billionaire owners or corporate advertisers.

and

Look at some of the appalling acts committed by malign news owners in the past decade. Rupert Murdoch has censored even his most respectable news outlet - The Times - from reporting Chinese human rights abuses, because it was inconvenient to his plan to extend his interests into the heart of the Chinese Empire. Or look at the late, unlamented Conrad Black, who promoted a fierce right-wing agenda amenable to the uber-rich when he owned The Daily Telegraph. As one of his former editors, Max Hastings, put it, Black is "seldom unconscious of his responsibilities as a member of the rich man's trade union". Do we want the editors of our news accountable to them, or to licence payers?

The comments are worth a read too!

Painted the woodwork today in Jon's new room. Hopefully this is the last stage and we can get him moved in soon! We also went to town today and bought Jon some new shoes. He's now size 7E and has a new pair of shoes witha picture of a dinosaur on them :) We also got him a new pair of Tigger Wellington boots which look really cute!

As this week comes to an end, I notice that I've been really busy at work again. I'm pretty happy with how this week has gone too as we've got lots done.

Mad musing of me has a good comment on what might happen to the BBC as a result of this. I agree that it would be really really bad if BBC News became as bad as Sky News. Even worse will be if the new Director General and Chairman of the Board of Governers are "yes-men" to the Government.

Further thought (and commentary reading) about the report itself does make me add my voice to the wonderment about how the Government came out of this so "clean"... Hmm... Have to think a bit more about this, but reading about Lord Hutton does show that they chose their Law Lord carefully!

I like the phrase "Teflon Tony" too! Describes Bush's puppy very well at the moment...

Last thought: One other thing, you can't say that the BBC don't report about themselves. They certainly are going into detail in their reporting of this issue...

Some random thoughts:


If the Government is not-guilty of changing the intelligence and the intelligence was quite clearly wrong. It's about time someone took responsibility and was fired (or resigned!) That someone is probably the head of our intelligence services.

The BBC really needs to fix it's complaints system. In my view, the making of the mistake is not the issue. The issue is that the Government's complaint was handled so badly. It was right and proper that Gavin Davis resigned. Others should too.

Does anyone else worry that the top of our Government (10 Downing St) doesn't minute their meetings? Clearly Lord Hutton took the narrowest view of his brief that he could otherwise there would have been some comment on this. I was actually amazed that the Government didn't come in for one bit of criticism for the shambles that releasing Dr Kelly's name became. From what I can tell, it only didn't because Lord Hutton only looked at if the release was duplicitous (it wasn't) and not whether it was incompetent...

On the whole, I think that the criticism of the BBC was generally fair, but that the Government got off lightly because of the narrow brief.

It's been snowing !

It's been a really busy week so far. Yesterday, we spent the evening watching the BBC's adaptation of Pride and Predudice with Colin Firth. Whilst I'm not really into these sorts of dramas, I did think it was very well done and that the show was stolen by Mr Bennett!

Thinking about Pride, I see that our Tony has got his new tax on the middle classes through (aka as the topup fees for Universities, thing!) 5 votes. Not very impressive with a majority of 160ish is it? Whilst I acknowledge that we have to pay for universities somehow, I think that ?15,000 is remarkably low point for paying it back. Look for the ?3000 per year rising very quickly in the near future too...

Also, the justification was that University graduates earn more money than those who didn't go to University. It's also true that people with A-levels earn more money than those who have't got them. Thus, I can't see what's to stop them charging "top ups" for A-Level courses soon too - the precedent has been set.

Georgina's a bit better this afternoon which is good. Such a shame that she's missed the entire weekend though :(

Gill came round this afternoon which was great as I was running out of ideas on how to entertain Jon :)

Saturday was a quiet day. Georgina isn't feeling very well - stomach bug maybe? As a result she slept nearly all day and so I looked after Jon. We spent most of the day playing, except for a couple of trips to Homebase to pick up painting supplies. I think we have all that's needed to do the woodwork in Jon's new room now.

In the evening we watched Magnum Force - one of the Dirty Harry films starring Clint Eastwood. There's something about the way that a 70s film is directed that just shouts "70s" isn't there? I'm not sure what it is, but there can't be many films from that decade that have aged well. One of the obvious differences between a 70s film and a modern one is night scenes - they are very dark, whereas nowadays a night scene is quite light. It's much easier to watch a scene when you can see what's going on!

It's been a busy week this week and I didn't make the deadline, but got close enough! Absolutely knackered for some reason too and that demotivates me to write much.

I have been listening to the Today program all week though and find it much more interesting with a dynamic opposition that is actually pointing out the Government's stupidity. It's quite refreshing really.

Georgina's 20(ish) week scan today. We took Jon with us though he wasn't particularly interested :) Baby is fine and looks "normal" (whatever that means!) and we discovered that he is a boy!

Halfway through a very busy week. One thing's certain: I don't have time to be bored in my current job. I've been looking at generic form handling today and am quite pleased with the direction it's going, even if it's taking longer than I'd hoped.

I also got back my door keys today from the client :)

Left my door key at a client's as it's got my USB Flash Disk attached :)

I'm trying to shrink the Windows partition on my work computer so that I have enough space to install Linux. The problem is that even after defragging, the SuSE installer will only let me shrink the NTFS partition by 3.2GB. I can't work out why as I'm sure that it should be able to better than that!

I borrowed a hedge trimmer from Tim and sorted out the rather large bush by the drive entrance! Now when Georgina pulls out into the road, she'll be able to see if any cars are coming !

In other news, I painted Jon's new room yellow this weekend, so just the woodwork to do next weekend.

We discovered today that the Micra doesn't have a valid tax disc and hasn't had for a while! Seems that we didn't get a reminder from the DVLA and we aren't very observant either. I went down the post office today to get a back dated one, but apparently the back date is so large that they can't issue me a disc and I have to go to the DVLA's local Worcester office to sort it out on Monday.

Think we'll keep the Micra off-road until Monday!

Some random thoughts whilst listening to the Today program today:

There's a proposal to change the train timetable to reflect the reality of what's happening on the rail network. What a good idea! As a passenger I think that what's most important to me is knowing reliably what time the train will arrive because then I can plan. Of course, this isn't the real reason for the change; the real reason is to improve the statistics. However, I still think it would be better for passengers to have a timetable that can be trusted.

One thing that's been bugging me is the phrase "Let's wait for the enquiry/report/plan". What is it about Government ministers and the prime minister himself that means they are too cowardly to have their own opinion but have to hide behind a committee's opinion? I think it's so that they have someone to blame when the bureaucratic opinion turns out to be the whitewash it usually is. Yesterday it was the Prime Minister about Lord Hutton (I think - could have been the dead soldier), today it was Tessa Jowel about a railway line and the junior defense minister talking about the enquiry about the dead soldier. It's driving me up the wall. I'd like to see the people at the top take some responsibility for a change!

Anyone else reading Ivan Noble's tumour diary? It's a good read and really makes me appreciate my health!

Spent the evening tracking down a couple of bugs for work. It's taken quite a long while, but I'm pleased that I sorted out the issues. I fixed one and palmed the other onto one of our developers in India as the solution looked more complicated than I could handle with our current dialup...

All in all quite a good evening, though working through it wasn't the plan this morning!

Does anyone else think that this is worthless? As the LibDem MP pointed out, would you trust a survey done by the vendor? Of course not! I do agree that improving the process of buying a house is a good idea, I'm just not sure that this is the way to do it. The only thing I can see it doing is providing worthless bits of paper that cost each vendor ?1000 a go. Not that I have much in the way of better ideas, but then I'm not in Government :)

Georgina's just made muffins and they smell delicious! I've had a good day at work though wasted over two hours tracking down the use of the wrong id in an html page... Most frustrating! One of the nice things about this job is that I'm palming off the "boilerplate" coding to the others and just dealing with the more complicated/urgent issues. Also, I'm getting time to start to think about longer term issues and hopefully will have time to get them implemented in the shorter term :)

Update: They are delicious!

One of the consequences of getting a better digital camera in the family is that I'm allowed to use the old one :) So yesterday when we went out to the park, I took a couple of pics of Jon. Apparently Georgina is jealous that I have managed to get good ones out of "that" camera, but I think I just got lucky...

We went down to London today to take Mum and Dad out to lunch to celebrate Mum's birthday. Jen and Tim along with Leah and Jack had gone down yesterday and as far as Mum knew it was just us lot (she had booked the table!) However, behind her back, I invited Lesley & Row, Anna & Adam, Lucy & André, Linda & Bill, Brenda &Phil! Obviously I also called the restaurant and got them to change the table reservation to 19 people :) Mum was very surprised to walk up the stairs to the eating area to a refrain of "Happy Birthday to You"! It worked really well and we had a lovely meal at The Navigation Inn.

Whilst Georgina did some chores, I took Jon to the park to see the ducks and play on the playground. It was great fun for him and he really enjoyed eating the bread intended for the ducks... The ducks did at least get some though :)

We are having trouble with our ISP - it's always timing out and reconnecting. We've spoken to BT and they've "optimised the gain" and have recommended that we talk to the ISP. We're with Lobsterpot who don't publish a telephone number on thier site and also don't respond to emails...

*sigh*

Looking for another ISP now!

The Prometheus Deception.

Did some real work today and am now really getting into it. It's cool to be doing stuff that is actually taxing :)

Back to reality today with a bump as Jon woke up at 1 o'clock this morning with a night mare and took half an hour to go back to sleep. Knackered now...

I can't remember the last time the Jon slept past 7:20, but today he managed it. Of course, as a result, we all overslept and didn't wake up until 8:10... which would have been very pleasant except that Georgina had an appointment with the midwife at 8:30! Mad panic later and we made it in time to discover that there was no record of the appointment on the computer at the doctors... Fortunately the midwife was expecting us but hadn't done the "paperwork". I bet she got a severe telling off from the receptionists!

I got to hear the baby's heartbeat too!

Happy Birthday Mum! Enjoy your retirement...

All the preparation that I'm going to do for Jon's new room is now done! The top of the walls have been sanded down to remove the roughness caused by the removal of the border. I've also washed the walls etc ready for painting and removed the radiator. Next job is to paint the ceiling...

The decorating of Jon's new room has started in earnest and I'm really not into it yet. The border around the top of the walls refused to come off until we went out and bought a steaming gizmo. The steaming gizmo is excellent and I heartily recommend spending the 30 quid or so on one if you need to strip any kind of wallpaper.

Us, being us, bought a slightly more expensive one with more gadgets in the box so it can be used for steam cleaning too. whether we actually get around to doing so is open to debate...

I don't tend to go in for New Years resolutions as I tend to break them before the end of the first week of January. However, inspired by an article on the Today programme, I'm going to try to keep my speed in urban areas within the speed limit. The interesting bit about the item on Today was an inteview with the chief instructor of the Advanced Driving Institute (I think - somthing like that, anyway!) who was saying that for most cars, you are likely to be in third gear around town as third will take you to around 45-50 mph anyway. The problem with fourth (in most cars) is that it tends to "struggle" below about 35 or so. This is certainly my experience as I find that the Rover has trouble below 35ish in fourth. However, it sounds like I should be changing gear when I'm doign 30 in third.

I don't suppose that I will always keep to the limit, but I will try to be far more aware of what speed I'm doing this year.

To celebrate the start of a another year, we took Jon to see the steam trains at the Severn Valley Railway again. He really likes watching the locomotive but does get a bit scared when it blows it's whistle...