I received an email from a friend this morning that said "Look, look I used to work here".
My friend also knew that I didn't have a very good experience myself some years back in a similar situation: a British company taken over by an American company.
I'm generally a nice guy and I would like to say something nice about people but I cannot say something pleasant about those people.
Not so much on a personal level (I'm sure they were lovely with their families and friends) but the way they behaved in the workplace.
They introduced the philosophy of "we are in charge and you know nothing".
They were also very paranoid about people meeting and talking, worried about what emails were sent and received, hinting that people should not have left London on weekends and Bank Holidays "in case the company needs you". They were also very abrupt in a way we were not used to. Generally they were stressed and tense, it was like everything was a matter or life and death, everything was so important.
They cut down staff to the point that we were all doing an average of ten hours a day but they got annoyed when you mentioned that you wanted to take some annual leave. The thing we did not work harder, in actual fact as the amount of meeting sort of tripled we did less work. Meetings were not a democratic process as they used to be but more like presentations where you could ask questions at the end. As people were always in a hurry to leave, nobody asked any questions so it was always a one-way process. So I left...

"The annual cost per person in the country in funding the head of state amounts to 62p. This is the annual cost, not the daily, weekly or monthly cost. The total cost of the monarchy is lower in real terms than it was in 2001. Given this is a World Cup year, 62p would buy you a ticket for one minute of England's game against Portugal on Saturday."

Full article

I had doubts about any monarchy but given the calibre of politicians around the world maybe it is not such a bad idea.
After all 62p is a bargain, my water bill comes to about £260 a year, tv licence is about £110 and so on.

For this fiver you can have the Queen for 8 years.

This was taken this morning.

Third day of Wimbledon and I've not followed it at all. I only noticed it has started because on Monday it was raining and it seems to be traditional to have rainy weather during the Championship. Matches have to be interrupted at least three times by rain otherwise it would not be Wimbledon.

Besides rain, Wimbledon also means strawberry and cream and Pimms and the usual Henman's challenge that every year ends in tears.
Actually they tell me that this year has already ended. The BBC has to update the Britometer

What are we going to talk about in two weeks time when all this sport feast will be over?

A record player made of paper.

Another one of those lists (I hate lists)
1. Moscow

2. Seoul

3. Tokyo

4. Hong Kong

5. London

6. Osaka

7. Geneva

8. Copenhagen

9. Zurich

10. Oslo

Those are the top 10, you can find the rest here.

What happened to Stockholm? It always used to be right at the top, now it's only 36. I've always fancied Stockholm actually, lake, sea, nice and clean, now it's even cheap it really looks like a bargain.

CLACTON, England, June 23 (UPI) -- The Walt Disney Co., which had denied permission to grieving British parents to put Winnie the Pooh on their child's gravestone, has had a change of heart.

Disney had warned that a stonemason would be in breach of copyright if he included the bear's image along with "bear of very little brain," on the gravestone, The Telegraph reported. The parents had sought approval from Disney, but were rejected.

Full article

No comment.

Video-on-demand hopes to do for broadcasting what iTunes did for the record industry. In a VoD world, armchair viewers tap into a vast onscreen catalogue and download the film or TV programme of their choice, which can be stored on a hard drive or set-top box, burned on to a disc or rented.
Watching films when it suits a viewer rather than a scheduler is already commonplace in the cable and satellite industries, but the widespread availability of fast broadband connections is bringing VoD within the reach of almost all UK households.

Full article

I wrote about this a few days ago, it is obviously the only way forward.
You cannot fight piracy in any other way, unless they provide an "affordable" system that enables people to get hold of the material they want.
We have the technology, there is little point in moaning about piracy if nothing is done to distribute what is available.
I would prefer a subscription or rental based system as personally I very rarely watch movies more than once so I'm not that interested in owning them.

It's not even funny as a joke.
I cannot think who would buy this and why.
Do you just give it to the kids as part of their theological education? Or keep it on the mantelpiece?
It has wheels though for smooth gliding action which I'm sure makes all the difference.

This comes from Wikipedia a wonderful source of information.
In short woman gets murdered, thought it was for natural causes until her ghost appears to her mother telling her she had been murdered by her husband.
At the trial the ghost well no actually the mother was believed and the husband charged with murder.
It's a good story for a movie. I'm thinking who I should cast now.

Full story

I know that competing is part of human nature so let's have a nettle eating competition.
There is something vaguely monty pythonesque about it.

Watch Video

Nigerian citizens that are travelling to Britain are told:

Fraudsters in Britain might pour tomato juice or other substances on your dress and then offer to help remove it, robbing you in the process, the information ministry warned in its first-ever travel advisory obtained by Reuters on Thursday.

The conmen, who are mainly white, but also include east Europeans and north Africans, might also pretend to pick up an object from under a potential victim's seat to distract his attention while he robs him, it added.

Full article

I will pay more attention to people carrying bottles of ketchup in public places.

I get very annoyed at times with politicians, but then I realise that things can be a lot worse without having to go very far.

“Early yesterday afternoon, in the big lecture theatre of the Università Bicocca, in Milan, I put a few questions to the life senator Giulio Andreotti, about the strange absolution that he got on the grounds of “prescription” {timed out} for the crime of associating to commit a crime, that the judges at least until 1980, considered to be “concretely reviewable”. Because I dared to do this, I was identified and threatened by police officers and kept at the Police Station for almost 2 hours. And I was lucky it was just that.

Full article

What I find really dangerous is not only the threats and intimidations but also the fact that the main media in Italy does not cover this type of news. When the elderly guy was thrown out of the Labour conference for protesting the media in this country reported the story and you could also watch the video on the BBC website.
Politicians might be the same (more or less) all over the world but what makes the difference is whether the media is always on their side or not. And why.

Yahoo launched the newest version of its messenger that apparently does nearly everything.
It features a series of plugins that allows users to do share a variety of tasks, I've even read that people will be able to watch the same movie.

And you can even have the World Cup background

We are soon reaching the state when it will become obsolete to actually meet people. I can see me having to explain to my daughters that I used to go out to see my friends. We did not even have SMS as teenagers (I know and I'm only 35) we did not use the phone much, our landline (those days we still called it the telephone was in the hall so any conversation I had could be heard by everyone in the house. Therefore I kept my conversations to a bare minimum.

It is not just that.
I only had my first PC at the age of 25 when the Internet was still primitive and you dialled up and kept thinking how much it was costing you. I don't even remember what I was doing on the net those days there was not very much to do.
Now I think there is already too much to do, I'm still overwhelmed by the amount of things I can do on the net and most of the times I don't do very much apart from visiting the same maybe say 15 sites and think about all the other things I do not have time to do.

I got five letters this morning. They were all junk, one told me that I won a mythical prize, another one was a charity that asked for a donation, the third was an estate agent asking me to sell my house as they have someone who would love to have a property in my street(I'm renting).
The forth wanted me to get a credit card and the last one was advertising a new gym (another one?) I'm one of the few lucky people entitled to a free month if I buy one years membership.

Royal Mail has managed to lose nearly all the important letters I was waiting for in the past year, including my new credit card and letters for hospital appointments (then you don't know, you don't turn up or cancel you receive a stroppy letter, they seem to deliver that one, that tells you have been naughty and you go back to the bottom of the waiting list, nice one!). At least twice a week they deliver letters addressed to someone else (quite often not even in the same street) They never seem to fail to deliver my daily dose of junk.

National insurance contributions for the tax year April 2004 to March 2005 are missing from the records of some 500,000 taxpayers. They could remain "lost" until early autumn. The loss of contribution records leads to zero payments or underpayments for claimants for national insurance-based benefits, such as jobseeker's allowance for the unemployed, and the basic state pension. And many have been asked to pay extra to plug the apparent gaps in their contributions records, although they already paid in full.

Full the Guardian article

Once again one of my biggest reservations against the ID cards database is reinforced.

The announcement that Microsoft founder Bill Gates is slowly withdrawing from the daily running of the company did not come as a surprise.

The writing had been on the wall since January 2000, when Mr Gates handed over the reins as chief executive to his friend from university days, Steve Ballmer.

During the past few years Mr Gates had already spent more and more time on the charitable foundation he had set up with his wife Melinda.

Full article]

I can't say that Bill Gates is one of my best friends but there is something I don't understand. I've met many people that get very angry about Microsoft's bugs and policies.
I don't deny they often stink but they don't do anything that most companies would not do given the chance.
After all they're hardly responsible for major human and environmental disasters. I've seen people getting very agitated about the fact that you cannot unistall Windows Messenger and not many people getting that angry about what some other well known companies do in some parts of the world.

TOKYO (Reuters) - To woo young customers more fond of burgers than traditional whale cuisine, a Japanese restaurant has come up with a new taste sensation: the fried whaleburger.

The sandwich, which features fried whale meat nestled in a bun with salad greens and lashings of mayonnaise and ketchup-based sauce, is the creation of a small whale restaurant in the town of Wada, about 100 km (62 miles) southeast of Tokyo.

"Young people think whale and bread really go together well, so the burgers are quite popular," said restaurant owner Akiji Ichihara.

Full article

I don't know if I could eat a whaleburger, It's probably delicious but no I don't think I could.
Nearer to home there is something else which is even stranger, a London restaurant called Archipelago is famous for having strange items on the menu. Anything that goes from insects to crocodile meat.
I'm not squeamish as such and I like to try new and exotic cuisines but I have to draw the line somewhere, insects would not be my choice of menu.

YouTube seems to have deleted all videos that were copyrighted. Fair enough. Most of them were bad quality anyway.
What I don't understand is why nobody provides a service where we pay a subscription and we can watch movies, cartoons and old TV shows on demand? And not only for US residents.

We have the technology but like the musical industry used to be it seems to take ages for the movies and TV industries to move forward.
I don't download illegal movies and I've stopped buying DVDs that I only watch once, the only decent DVD rental shop is too far for me to go regularly and I don't see the point of watching trailers and I'm tired of watching news programmes or badly made video movies which are the only thing that we seem to be able to stream legally.

"Ambulance services were under enormous pressure in the aftermath of the England game as a direct result of injuries caused by a minority of drunken and abusive fans," said ASA Chief Executive, Richard Diment.

"What these people don't realise is that ambulances called to deal with the effects of their anti-social behaviour then become unavailable to those who need them most, such as people who suffer heart attacks or those involved in traffic accidents."....In Blackpool, authorities had to send lifeboats out to rescue drunken fans from the sea.

Full article

I'm not following the World Cup as apparently a third of people living in England, according to a recent survey.

I have my own personal reasons for not wanting to get involved. First of all I've never really enjoyed football, I've never been that interested in team sports, my only lukewarm interest has been directed towards individual sports.
Secondly football has become too over the top, too loud, too much money, too much attention and I have a deep dislike for anything with the word celebrity in it.
Poor David Beckham has done nothing to me but I've heard too much about him, his wife and kids and what he wears that I've stopped listening. And I'm not that interested in Wayne Rooney's foot.
I'm not really moaning, if someone enjoys that, that's fine by me, but I probably would be more interested if we went back to the actual game rather than all this overwhelming peripheral stuff.

It is not just football, I used to enjoy watching athletics when I was younger but I've found that in recent years everytime that is shown on TV has become something like:
talk, interview, talk, race, interview, talk, more talk, interview and further comments.

Out of 3,000 people questioned in a poll commissioned by UKTV G2, 37 percent thought the country was in Africa and 19 percent felt confident it was in the South Pacific.

A further 10 percent did not even know it was one country.

Full article

I would like to point out that it was part of the British Empire until 1962.

I don't want to appear a prude but I expect something better than this at work:

What it fails to mention are the naked furniture diving, sex in the lavatories and vomiting in coffee cups then leaving them to fester in filing cabinets.

Civil servants at the agency’s office in Newcastle upon Tyne have been officially disciplined, and at least one dismissed, after one of their colleagues blew the whistle on their antics.

Full The Times article

Besides the fact that these antics are paid by the taxpayer, I think that most of us don't particularly enjoy being at work, wishing to be elsewhere. If then on top of the fact that we are forced to be there we also have to put up with the company of morons, well that is a bit too much.
Who are these people?
I am not even very keen on people that swear at work (especially people in a position of authority), I don't get offended that easily, that is not the point, but I resent the fact that my colleagues and I have to put up with that behaviour. I strongly believe that people can do whatever they wish in the privacy of their own homes but in a public place, especially one that you cannot leave easily if you don't want to end up unemployed. I think that's not on.

ASBO them please.

At £5.99 it must be the bargain of the week.

But for only £2.99 I could buy this which is also guaranteed to make my neighbours envious.

I also think it's important that my pets can show their full support too.

Even our Oxford Street preacher gets ASBOed

LONDON (Reuters) - Preacher Philip Howard used to yell "be a winner not a sinner" at passers-by through a megaphone in London's main shopping street.

But not everyone appreciated his high-volume evangelising. Thanks to a court order, he faces up to five years in jail if he is caught with an amplification device in Oxford Street again.

"British society is going crazy," said Howard, 52, who has preached in Oxford Circus for almost a decade.

"It's the hierarchy that don't like you. But let's face it the hierarchy put Jesus to death."

Full article

Yes, I agree he was a bit loud and annoying but then again Oxford Street is not exactly quiet and I quite like a bit of eccentricity that is what makes the world interesting.
It also opens a can of worm...

I could think of many other types of anti-social behaviours without even mentioning those that have loud but very intimate conversations on mobiles in public places

Thinking about the tube my least favourites for instance are those that:
-choose carefully the most smelly food they can find to eat on the tube
-insist of carrying a backpack the size of a small caravan on their backs in a crowded train during rush hour
-insist on pulling their suitcase on wheels on a crowded train platform totally oblivious of the fact that other people have feet
- suddenly stop at the end of the escalator (a better effect is achieved if they are also carrying a suitcase on wheels or a backpack)
I could continue...and I could start with supermarkets next

For some reasons they annoy me a lot more than the bloke in Oxford Street and his God trip.

There is an online vote to decide which of five contenders should be the Scottish National Anthem.
There is the chance to listen to each of them and read the lyrics.

At the moment, the UK anthem is played for most events but for sport events when Scotland has a saparate team, e.g. rugby, Flower of Scotland is played.

For many, they are the nerds of US politics: laptop warriors, with brains full of statistics, no social life and devoting too much time to arcane policy details.
But last week the political blogger - someone who runs an online journal - emerged into the mainstream and shed the stereotype in the glare and glitz of a Las Vegas casino. At their helm was former soldier Markos Moulitsas. At the age of 34, Moulitsas has progressed from private policy nerd to one of the best- known public voices in Democratic politics, described last week on Time.com as 'the left's own Kurt Cobain and Che Guevara rolled into one'.

Full the Observer article

I think that everybody knows by now that the blog in question is the Daily Kos and this bloke has even his own Wikipedia entry.