Zorac's LiveJournal

I wasn't at the protests today, because our last, best hope for peace has failed. Our Glorious Leaders (spot the sarcasm there) have failed to observe the first half of my title quote - and if they had followed the first half the last time our troops went into Iraq, maybe we wouldn't be in this position. But now that it has begun, I hope this war reaches its conclusion as swiftly - and with as few casualties on both sides - as possible. And I'm really going to try to avoid saying anything further on the subject.

Tried to do some shopping, but had extraordinary difficult in finding a nice, simple, non-fitted underblanket. It seems that such things no longer exist. I really don't want a fitted one as I know from bitter experience that they don't stay that way - a bit of turning in the night and it gets pulled into a rumpled and uncomfortable mess in the middle. I ended up finding something that encloses the entire mattress, albeit with little more than a thick sheet. An old double blanket put on the wrong way could at least be tucked in fairly well at the sides, although not at all at the ends. To finish off, an over-sized flat sheet which I can tuck over a foot of on all four sides. Hopefully this will be a little more resistant to my nocturnal movements.

I was hoping to get a bit of general tidying up done in preparation of hermorrine's visit next weekend, but unfortunately my current book reached the critical point where I could no longer stop reading, so there went the rest of the afternoon. *sigh* I'll just need to get busy the next few evenings.

Oh and today's brief review: ( Collapse )

The two UK covers for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix can now be viewed on the Bloomsbury website. See also this article at the BBC which also has the US cover.

That is all.

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A few random items:

1) Finally got the bathroom light sorted out. Yay. I no longer have to bathe by candlelight.

2) Took delivery of my swanky new cordless, optical, rechargeable mouse. Just because I am a true geek and must have the latest gadgets.

3) I've moved rigby-jones.net and t00b.net across to our lovely new web servers for testing purposes. Both sites should be faster and generally better (unless I break things while finalising the configs).

Amazon.co.uk appear to have some slight pricing problems with iPaq Pocket PCs at the moment:

Get an H1910 for £7.32 (normally around £300 or more)

Get an H5450 for £23.04 (normally around £450 or more)

Doubtless this error will soon be corrected, and we'll have to wait and see whether Amazon actually honour the orders, but about half my company have confirmation emails already ;-)

Update I: The site seems very sluggish at the moment...
Update II: Looks like they've finally got wise and shut up shop completely.
Update III: Stories at BBC News, The Register and Slashdot. Doesn't seem very likely that the orders will be honoured. For a humorous take, look here.
Update IV: Have had an email though from Amazon saying that they're cancelling the order. No great surprise, really.

FYI, tonight's votes from Parliament:

The backbench amendment that war isn't justified yed:
Ayes: 217, Noes: 396

The govenment's motion to "use all neccessary force":
Ayes: 412, Noes: 149

At this point, I'm very glad that I took the effort to go down to the polling station at the last two general elections, and that my MP is voting the way I'd want him to do.

Well, it seems that Dubya (read his Very Secret Diary, thanks to cygnusfap) has started the final countdown and that in 36 hours time we'll be at war with Iraq. How delightful.

Meanwhile, closer to home, the government is showing serious cracks with several ministers and others resigning in protest. Most noteworthy is Robin Cook's resignation speech which makes excellent reading. On the flip side is Claire Short, who has surely lost all credibility after U-turning on her announcement that she would resign.

I Wish for Peace

Another lazy Sunday of doing not very much - I did get some perl hackery done, although rather less than I'd hoped. On the plus side, I did get the Fandom Monopoly posting out. Recent viewing includes (as the title suggests) Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure - which is every bit as daft as I remember - and the Buffy episode Tough Love. This episode is for me every bit as distressing and emotionally wrought as The Body, albeit for somewhat different reasons. *sniffs*

Hmm. I'm sure I actually has something vaguely interesting to write about, but it seems to have completely slipped my mind. Ah, well...

Went into town today and met up with addedentry and huskyteer who were in town for the day. Thanks to the unexpectedly good weather, we were able to grab sandwiches from the covered market and picnic in Christ Church meadow. After lunch we fought our way past the gaggle of lobbyists to vote in the election of a new chancellor for Oxford University. This noble duty completed, we retired to a pub for the rest of the afternoon for general chatting and copious quantities of cider.

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More disturbing yankees can be found at the Project for the New American Century, an article from the Guardian about it can be found on George Monbiot's website.

One is a megalomanic warmonger who is endangering world peace. He has his finger on the button of nuclear weapons and is infringing the civil rights of his people - most of whom didn't vote for him. The other is Saddam Hussein

For those of you who haven't already done so, now would be an excellent time to donate some money to Comic Relief. These fine folk have raised hundreds of millions of pounds over the last eighteen years to help people throughout Africa and the UK. You can donate here, or fandom folk might want to pop over to