Simon Perry: Schemes, dreams & trivia

Further instalments on how out of control this country is getting.

Bloke in a locked room chooses to have sex with his bicycle - strange I know, but it’s in the privacy of his own room.

Cleaners knock on the door, get no reply, unlock the door to his room with a key, find him with just a t-shirt on and “holding the bike and moving his hips back and forth as if to simulate sex.”

Bloke ends in court in Scotland and on the sex offenders register - tarred with the same brush as child molesters.

There’s jokes a plenty that could be made about this - not quite understanding the phrase ‘riding the village bike’; he was over keen on The Queen song ‘I want to ride my bicycle’, etc - but the reality is that this was carried out in the privacy of his own room, with a locked door.

What did he do wrong?

Watched a film online tonight - next thing I saw was a video of a girl singing songs with a hoodie on.

I think she’s singing in Japanese as I assume that where her hosting site, Tudo, is from, although her words sound like Chinese at times. My understanding of either language isn’t strong enough to tell.

Does anyone know what she is singing?

The coverage of the court case against the London police for executing the innocent Brazilian, Jean Charles de Menezes, on a London tube train as been pitiful and shameful in the UK press.

From what I’ve seen, they have covered it, but the reports have been very brief and stuck deep in the papers. Other less relevant news stories dominate and distract the public.

The police have already got away scot-free, and are now having to be accused of a Health & Safety violation in an attempt to try and get some justice.

Some disgraceful details have come out like the fact that police manipulated the photo of de Menezes, so he looked more like Hussain Osman, the persons who they claim they were following.

Yes - this is the Police tampering with evidence.

The judge, Mr Justice Henriques, told the jury that a “serious allegation has been made that a picture has been manipulated so as to mislead”.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, it’s come out - quietly - that the police used hollow-tipped bullets (dum dum bullets) in their execution - strange because they illegal to use in warfare.

The court hear that they use the bullets to “immediately incapacitate” the victim and flatten, rather than pass through the other side of a body. Quite why seven were needed when he was supposed to have been lying face down on the tube carriage hasn’t come out.

The senior firearms advisor, was gave evidence anonymously in court stressed that officers were trained to fire “as a last resort, when conventional methods have failed”. Again why seven rounds into the back of the head hasn’t come out.

… one doesn’t come along for ages.

You wait for ages for along post to come along … and then there’s three of them!

The Labour government has been steaming ahead in implementing a National ID scheme, against the wishes of many of those who live in the UK. Not an unusual modus operandi for them.

The Conservative are having their conference this week, and in anticipation of an election being called, they’re announcing their proposed policies. Lots of blah, blah, blah, but the most interesting one for me was the proposal that they’d cancel the ID scheme.

I abhor the idea of an ID scheme in the UK - from top to bottom, hate it.

Given the ID card process is under way - I never thought I’d say this - but I’m considering voting Tory - _just_ because they’d cancel the ID card scheme.

On the rest of the policies - they’re pretty much of a muchness - all evil.

We moved to Ventnor over two years ago and we’re still getting junk mail to our old address in London. We’ve tried many time to cancel it, but it still keeps coming.

Taking pity on the people who live in our place now, I decided to do another call around to attempt to finally stem the flow.

One of the companies was Halifax.

I called, expecting to give the number of the address label, but they wanted my full name and old address. Reasonable enough I thought … but then went on to ask if they could “put me through security.”

No, I don’t want to change any account details, I just want to stop this mail arriving. Why do I need to go through security?

“We don’t know who you are. You could be someone else changing the details,” came the reply.

In disbelief, I pointed out that this was for cancelling junk mail!

That old faithful, “It’s company policy,” came the reply.

The UK is (in)security mad
The UK is obsessed with security - and falsely hiding behind the need for security.

Another example being that information can’t be revealed “because of the Data Protection Act.” When you point out that the Act doesn’t cover the tidbit of information your asking for, the automaton at the end of the phone just trots out the normal phrases that they’ve been programmed with.

That’s not the society I want to live in.

Lovely …

and words from the Jello

When you’ve got quite a few pages in Wordpress you need to have some sort of way to organise then. Page Category Organiser from Yellow Swordfish which looks like it could be quite the thing.

Back in March I wrote a piece about plugins that could be used to show photos in Wordpress. Well today I did some more research and found a bunch more sine the last time. Here’s the summary of the update …

Aniga gallery. “manage your pictures in categories and albums”. “Its integrated in the WP posts system and uses the WP comments for pictures.” “Add Picture Captions”. Slideshows too. Look very comprehensive.

Enlarger - show larger versions of images within the same page. Auto reformat text to account for larger image. Neat fade.

WPG2 is a Wordpress Plug-in that embeds Gallery2 within Wordpress. Might be a bit over speced for current needs.

PictPress 1.0 - “automatically generates a post with thumbnails and picture posts for all images found in a directory.” Like the idea of the simplicity. Only talk about support for WP 1.5, so might be out of date. Example site looks good.

I’ve been amazed at how many of the plugins don’t give screen shots of what they look like whne they’re running, or access to a site using the tools. How are us supposed to make a decision about a visually-driven tool without being able to see it?

On another angle - Gallery2 Image Chooser is an interesting tool to allow you to select images form the Gallery2 collection of photos - then auto-insert them into a posting

PhotoQ makes it easy to create photo-focused blogs - “It is most suited for “one photo a day”-style web pages i.e., classical photoblogs.”

Random Image Plugin for WordPress. Nifty