Today’s comedy moment is brought to you compliments of the baaa website:

Terminal 5 opens for business (and pleasure) at 04:00 on 27.03.08. Designed by Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners around people, not just planes, it’s going to make flying in and out of London as easy and enjoyable as it should be. New technology and direct transport links will make your journey simpler and faster. We’ve created shopping and eating that’s inviting, not intrusive. And with construction finished a new era for world travel can begin. Queuing, walking and waiting have made room for light, space and time - to relax, take in the views and rediscover the joy of flying.

You couldn’t make that shit up! And now, back to reality…

Flights from Heathrow’s new £4.3bn Terminal 5 are departing with hand baggage only after luggage check-in was suspended due to a processing backlog.

British Airways, which has sole use of T5, announced check-in of all hold luggage was suspended until Friday.

The airline has already cancelled 34 flights because of baggage problems and passengers have had to wait up to four hours to reclaim their luggage.

I feel sorry for the passengers involved, but this really sums up everything about the UK these days. What a worldwide embarrassment.

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I should probably make everyone aware that WPG2 3.02 and the latest Wordpress (2.5 now in RC2) DO NOT WORK TOGETHER! I nearly found out the hard way - as most people using the theme that my blog runs (vslider 3 - see link at bottom of this blog) will be using WPG2, I urge everyone to follow this thread to check when WPG2 3.05 is ready. Until then, hold off.

Tags: themes,vslider,wordpress,wpg2
Categories: tech stuff
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This isn’t the denigrate or make light of the troubles in Tibet, but every time I hear the Dalai Lama, I just can’t helping thinking of Yoda.

Military rule leads to suffering, suffering leads to anger, anger leads to riots. Resist, we must.

Turns out I wasn’t the only one…

Categories: my stuff
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Have a listen to this - it’s only a minute long, a short segment of the Price of Peace programme on Radio Four, Sunday

Now, have a listen again, but this time, swap the words Catholic and Protestant, for black, and white.

This is 2008 - not surprising at all.

Tags: politics,religion
Categories: religion
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I managed to get an interview with Mark Chaffer, of the highly acclaimed http://www.chaffagraffix.co.uk/

NOTE: Unfortunately, the site appears to have gone offline after all the interest.

Mirror of http://www.chaffagraffix.co.uk/

Sadly, my USB mic froze a moment after starting recording, so some of the first minute is missing.
However, Mark goes on to explain how he uses his skills to make the animations, and also explains about his new website, http://www.chafferweaver.co.uk/

Sadly, I didn’t get time to ask him about his photography, but those are certainly some… awesome …pictures of Reading there.

Certainly makes for a great CV, though…

The interview:

digg it

Tags: ,humour,webdesign
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It’s Pi day today!

Here’s a great spoof 1970’s video by Keith Schofield, music by Hard n Phirm

Pi

Librivox recorded various vocal contributions of the first 50 digits of Pi

Here are my contributions:
Rap:
To the tune of Modern Major General:

Tags: pi
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I donated a bit of time and voice to what looked like a good idea - reading audio books for Librivox.

Trouble is, it turns out that anyone can sell our work.

From the rules:

If you volunteer to record for LibriVox, you must agree to release the audio files you make into the public domain. This means that anyone can use those audio files however they wish.

What does “however they wish” mean, exactly? People may use our recordings to profit; they may remix them into other projects; they do not need to give credit to the individual reader/writer/creator or to LibriVox. Anyone may do all kinds of things that you would prefer them not do - and you have no recourse to change that. For example you might see:

• CDs of Romance of Rubber sold as a fundraiser for a charity you don’t like;

• Origin of the Species as background atmosphere for a pornographic film;

• Fables for the Frivolous sampled into a violent rap song;

• The summary of Frankenstein used to promote a major motion picture;

• Your recording clipped apart and rearranged as a ransom note, signed with your name and city.

Screw that! Turns out that people are selling our work on ebay and other places.

The other thing that bothered me and a couple of others is…what’s the point in trying, when they seem happy to accept anything and everything, quantity over quality every time.

How do you know you’re not downloading something like this:

while missing out on something good like this:

There seems to be no peer review or rating, in fact, it’s actively discouraged. It’s a real shame, and this ridiculous and unnecessary Public Domain nonsense means they’re missing out on some good recordings.

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According to this article, there used to be a website called  http://www.saynottooverseascallcentres.com/ but this site seems gone.

Although many companies have moved away from Indian call centres, too many remain. Right now, top of my hit list are Three and Virgin Trains.

Does anyone know of a good list of companies that DON’T use Indian call centres, so I can choose to use ONLY these companies?

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