A month off and nothing's changed

Well, a little over a month since I last posted, imagined reader, and what has happened? Lots of things and nothing. Fashionable idiocies still determine much public action.

An email from Avaaz tells me that the source of the death of bees may have been identified. Bayer is marketing an insecticide which kills them -- as a by-product effect.

Sounds likely. The much referred to law of unintended consequences is actually the lore of unconsidered consequences. One ambition at a time and no thought to what ensues apart from that. Playing chess by draughts rules, as I have said before -- somewhere, probably the pub.

You solve one problem and then firefight the unwanted results, usually by deploying your acquired skills in English for Outwitting Customers to deny there are any unwanted results. That's the same isn't it.

Tell Bayer, I am imagining, that their products kill bees and the response from them and the sheep, shortly to be served as food for the obedient, is "But this is business; you are putting the standard of living at risk."

Meanwhile another dead soldier has been returned for waste disposal. Doing his job says a puppet or string-puller -- how do you tell the difference? -- without mentioning that the job is ill-conceived, counter productive and immoral. "Never mind all that," says someone, "let's get upset because someone pissed on a body. That'll take our minds off it all."

It's ok to kill the enemy, but you mustn't piss on them after. Course not.

That wouldn't happen if we were only allowed to use truly modern weapons; then the bodies would be ready-vapourised. No offence, no funerals, no bad publicity.

Did someone say "simples"?

So Bayer were banned from selling this shit in Germany; but they export it.

But when I logged in today it was via The Cloud. I have spoken of The Cloud before. This time it has a new website and also denies having heard of me. Probably a skilled programmer -- well how was he supposed to know the user database is important?

So I registered again and it was as delighted as always that I had joined and offered me the moon and stars and 23 hours 59 minutes before I needed to ask for more. Within an hour, everything was working oddly and windows said I was no longer linked to the internet.

I had to reboot and here we are again.

I try to work offlline; but recoding bits and pieces on a website small enough not to warrant a complete rewrite kind of needs net access.

While I was getting back on, I had a look at The Cloud's "about us" -- they're all from BSkyB

Well...

A bunch of Jeremy Hunts then.

Even back online it's odd. They clearly haven't the bandwidth and rely on people not knowing enough or not having the confidence to trust their knowledge. At one point I thought maybe the whole of London University might have been nuked and that I might now be an unaware ghost.

Not only was my college mail server not really responding but my google to pick up the current faults page had been trying to load for 7 minutes. Saturday wobble, I thought, preparing to do something else in case it took time to fix; and then remembered it is Friday.

No, it wasn't them. It was this shower of Murdochspawn offering a free service that doesn't work properly.

And after about 9 minutes I got the page I wanted.

By which time I didn't want it.

Now I'll just save this lot to RAM in case I am no longer connected...