Catch a Crook

I've Buggered off to WordPress

My main interest in blogs is to mess around with the code and templates. Bored of Blogger now. Moved over to WordPress now to carry on my antics over there.

Check me out: www.mikerouse.net

Actually, I'm going to see if I can find a way to post to both blogs at once. There must be an editor out there that posts to multiple blogs using their respective APIs.

Top of the Pops Returns?

Go Donal!

David Trimble on Grammar Schools

Trimble on Grammar Schools
Uploaded by 18doughtystreet

As Iain says, isn't it logical to close grammar schools if they are not part of the solution?

God Save the Queen

Having just watched 'The Queen' I am reminded of that great institution that is the monarchy and thought I would share my thoughts and experiences with my mass readership of 12 people per day.

I'm common. In my quotes at the bottom of the blog Iain calls me the "voice of a very common man" and it is a title I wear with pride. I wouldn't want to be considered the voice of establishment, or business or politics. Being common suits me just fine. Naturally, the world that Queen Elizabeth II lives in is one that I don't really understand and have never experienced. I have never so much as attended a garden party. Indeed, the closet I've ever gotten to monarchy is when the royal motorcade sped past my dad's Morris Marina down the M6 back in about 1987.

Ten years later and Diana, the former Princess of Wales, died in Paris. My memory of it all was waking up earlier than usual that morning. Our house had cable and it was boosted throughout the house. My sister loved Nickelodeon and I think still does and she was sat in front of the downstairs TV set when I went down to try and change it to something more grown up thinking she might still be in bed. I noticed a strapline running along the bottom of the screen saying, "Please tune to Sky News for an important announcement from Buckingham Palace" and asked my sister what it was all about. She didn't know and I had to endure a small argument before she would allow me to change the channel. When I did it became clear what had happened. We both decided to wake our mum and step-dad to bring them the news.

What followed was a period of mourning as we all remember. Even I was sad, but I was probably more entranced by the media coverage than anything else. It took over everything from English lessons at school to discussion in the tree house. I still feel now as I did back then; I don't know this woman. Sure, I knew of the work about land-mines and the ever present front pages of the newspapers with one salacious story or another, but ultimately I did not know a damn thing about Diana and couldn't really see what all the fuss was about.

I watched the funeral, I listened as everybody said how great she was and all I could think was, "Hippocrites!" If they thought that she was that great they would have given her privacy and not bought those papers and would not have fed that gossip mill. I remember thinking, now that's she dead they all feel guilty for their part in her death, for their part in making her life a living hell and that those flowers piled up outside Buckingham Palace were not placed because people thought she was great, but to compensate for their guilt.

On Her Majesty's dealing of the situation, having seen this film, I feel that the country let her down. We wanted, it seemed, for our grieving to be reflected by the monarch, for her to feel as we feel and show it as we showed it. I remember discussions at the time on how the Royal Family were to blame for it all, but I think now that we just wanted to place the blame on somebody's shoulders and they were the easier option than looking in the mirror.

As I grew up I developed my politics a little and started to realise how much the monarchy matters to Britain and how great our Queen is in humanising the quiet dignity that is the British people. She is an inspiration to us all and it warmed my heart a little when she was award the Greatest Briton of 2007 as voted by the public viewers of the awards show broadcast on ITV1 recently. Those same people would probably have not award the Queen that same accolade in 1997, so perhaps the people have come to realise just how special our Queen is. God bless her, and god save her.

Congratulations to Starbucks in Coventry Broadgate!

Today was the first official day for Starbucks in Coventry Broadgate - the first time the chain has been in the city centre.

I popped along yesterday with Allan for their charity day where they raised over £1000 for Tiny Tims. Well done all... Particularly the women standing outside having to give the long speech about the place not being formally open yet and the girl behind the counter who was patient while I ran to the cash point after realising I had no cash after she had totalled everything up! It cost me a fair few quid in the charity box to make up for the embarrassment and inconvenience.

I do like Starbucks. Good coffee, normally good service and lovely hot chocolates. To have one in Coventry is surely a sign of progress. We've now got Ikea, Primark and Starbucks as recent additions. It's just a shame to see other shops closing down, particularly the deli on corporation street.

Trivia: This is not the first Starbucks in Coventry. That accolade goes to the one inside Bookers at the Ricoh that has probably been open for a year or more. Not everybody seems to know about it. The store in Broadgate appears to be the first proper store.

Broken, Fixed, Broken, Fixed!

As a bit of a geek I like to break things and fix them again, so imagine my joy when my very expensive Elonex Exentia PC that I got on the HCI when working for the NHS went tits up. In case you're interested, it was the graphics card, an ATI Radeon 9600 series, that seemed to be the problem. Windows would not boot as it hung on agp440.sys - obviously something to do with the AGP graphics card, but I have no idea what.

Now, if you've ever seen an Exentia you'll know that getting to the graphics card to examine for a hardware problem is a real bitch. You have to detach the flat panel from the stand very carefully and go through a pain-staking un-screwing exercise. Everything is so tightly-packed it's almost impossible for somebody with butterfingers the size of mine to poke around in there without causing damage. So, best to leave it be I thought. I've never touched it so far, so why start now.

Well, I thought that considering it was Windows that was struggling to boot up (I could get safe mode to work) maybe I should try Linux.

I'm getting familiar with Ubuntu at work so wanted that, but couldn't wait until morning to go down to WH Smith and get a blank CD to burn the ISO through safe mode and do a clean install.

I've never done a network installation before so I thought I would have a crack at that and see how it went. Following the advice given at this web address (click) I was successful in getting the Hoary Hedgehog version of Linux up and running quite happily.

But, not content with this new trick placed firmly up my sleeve, I wanted Feisty Fawn. I read that I had to follow a strict upgrade path and get each version up and running in turn. So, off I went to upgrade to Breezy Badger, then Dapper Drake, then Edgy Eft, then Feisty Fawn. It was going to be a long night, but I had my PSP and a magazine for the processing parts and was quite enjoying some late-night geekery.

I had the terminal running the "sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade" command quite happily until I got bored and decided to see if I could make the display go all green and black so I looked like even more of a geek - I don't know who to considering it was now 2:30am in the morning! Alas, as soon as I clicked the button to edit my profile the terminal crashed and my hard-drive stopped clicking. Panic. I pressed the terminal icon on the launcher again, then again, and then again to no avail. The damn thing would not start up. Nothing would start up. I was screwed, so I just did what I knew how to do and reached for the CTRL, ALT, SHIFT and Backspace keys to restart X... nothing. The mouse could move and the keyboard could input, but I couldn't give any commands. (I didn't know about CTRL, ALT and F1 back then in case that may have helped.) Time to reach for the power button. Click.

And so my computer was doomed. I couldn't get anything up and running. I scratted around in my drawers and found a copy of Knoppix 4.0 from ages ago and looked to the sky in thanks. A push, click and whir later and I was back into a Linux heaven, but it wasn't home. I wanted Ubuntu and I wanted it on my hard-drive. By now I was content to eliminate Windows and format my whole drive to Linux only if Ubuntu would come back to me!

So, I dug around and it didn't take me long to find this useful page on the Ubuntu site, seemingly built just for me. I was so pleased that somebody had done what I was going to attempt - to install Ubuntu from a system running Knoppix on a live CD. Praise the lord for open source!

Like Nelly the Elephant I packed my bags and said goodbye to the circus. Off I went with a click and drag and was heading off to Ubuntu once again.

But, something went wrong. It was like my starship was being pulled towards the sun and my heat shield was fading. It was now about 3:30 or 4am and I was getting tired and clumsy. The people in the flat downstairs had started shagging again too and quite loudly this time - just to make matters worse. On went the headphones, but plugged into what?! I had no system! Arrgghhh. I had to act quick.

I just couldn't see what I was doing wrong with the instructions and gave up in the end. I decided to just live with the live CD and get some loud music going on the headphones. It wasn't the best thing I could do, but it was enough to survive until morning.

Some sleep later and I got down to WH Smith. I knew what I was going to do. I was going to rely on those wonderfully expensive Linux magazines to provide me with a distro - hopefully Fiesty Fawn as it is recently out. There was two to choose from - they didn't let me down! But, one was Mandriva Spring 2007 and the other was Linux Mint Bianca - thankfully based on Ubuntu - that'll do.

I actually got both and decided to try Mandriva first. Hated it. Similar installer to when I tried Mandrake years ago and just not Ubuntu frankly. So, I thought I'd give Bianca a go... Much better!

Now... How do I get Bianca to turn into a Feisty Fawn?

Back to Coventry and Meeting some Mad Scots

Although the general lack of retail and the noticeable amount of shops closing down in Coventry I was pleased to see that Starbucks is opening up on Monday right in the centre. Bonus. I think I am being quite addicted to their range of delicious beverages.

Speaking of which, I had a few alcoholic beverages last night with a friend in Browns. We were chatting away when suddenly we were joined by these two rather loud Glaswegian girls, both quite attractive so we thought we'd let them stay awhile.

One was just mad and the other seemed normal, although she would make eye contact for just a second longer than you ordinarly expect. I would have usually taken this to be a come-on, but she was engaged so I thought better of it. My friend, however, was stuck with the absolute bonkers one who peppered almost every sentence with cunt and fuck so much that I was beginning to feel that I was back at the office of 18 Doughty Street - only joking!!

We did briefly touch on politics. The semi-normal one voted Conservative at the last local election, or so she said, while the other one didn't really give an answer. They both said the SNP are "wankers" and couldn't understand why anybody wanted to vote for them. They believed in the union and didn't want an independent Scotland. Although, I now ask myself about how sad my friend and I must be to sit talking to some game girls and have to bring politics into the conversation somehow!

Then, the girls swapped seats to my friend's relief and it was my turn to sit next to the mad one who seemed to quite like being insulted and would try and provoke me into being ever more so insulting. I indulged for a while and, rather oddly, she enjoyed it all saying I had "good patter" before propositioning me for something a little more vigourous right there at the bar. I politely declined given the circumstances and it wasn't too long before they decided to make their way to their next venue. God help whomever they they encounter.

Later on, in another venue, I got chatting to some ex-colleagues from my NHS days nearly 2 years ago now. They said that not a lot had changed, which didn't surprise me. I don't know who they were expecting to be the change considering we all knew the management of the local service clearly isn't up to the job. You would have thought by now they would have become the change themselves and and used their initiative to make things better - they have more power and influence than they think.

Anyway, end of the night and off to bed via one of the increasing number of fried chicken shops on the way. I do wonder where all these chickens come from... and if they're really chickens.

Who Said This Back in 2002?

"Bet you can't wait. A very friendly chap is designing a personal website for me which we hope to get up and running in the next few weeks - this Blog will form an integral part of it. Bait your breath - it's gonna be great! Is there no end to my vanity and ego, I hear you thinking.... Er, no. But the fact is, within about 5 years everybody will have their own site. I just like getting in there early!"

Gays and Bi-Sexuals Still Banned from Giving Blood

The Prime Minister's Office today responded to a 10 Downing Street petition calling for the ban on gay and bi-sexual men from giving blood to be lifted. The petition attracted only 5,234 signatures that perhaps shows a lack of public interest in this topic.

There is a nationwide problem with blood donations - there are never enough donors, particularly from certain blood types and there is always a campaign going on to try and persuade more people to give blood. However, one section of society has always been barred from giving blood; gay and bi-sexual men and this petition sought to over-turn this.

It is worth noting that you are not only barred if you are a open homosexual male, but also if you had a one-off affair with another male some years ago, so it affects more people than are openly gay or bi-sexual today. However, one-off affairs are easier to lie about than an openly gay lifestyle.

Homosexual couples can now, under UK law, enter into a civil partnership and certainly in the UK it is becoming increasingly acceptable for an individual to "come out of the closet" without the pressures and worries of 30 or so years ago.

So, with more openly gay and bi-sexual people in the UK it is surely sensible for the government to allow them to give blood if they so choose. Well, not according to the government. They said:

The Government has a duty to ensure that any rules applied to blood donation by the National Blood Service (NBS) achieve a balance between risk reduction and security of supply. The self exclusion criterion concerning gay men has been reached through a close analysis of the epidemiology of confirmed HIV and Hepatitis B positive tests among blood samples from people donating blood at United Kingdom Blood Service sessions.

The Government has been advised that every year from the analysis of nearly three million donations collected by the United Kingdom and Irish Blood Services, about 40 donations are confirmed to be positive for HIV. Of these, a third to a half are given by men who, following further enquiries by the NBS, reveal that they are gay men. Some are donating for the first time but some have given at least once in the previous two years and tested negative on the previous occasion. These figures indicate that some gay men are still giving blood in spite of the current rules.

Although safer sex campaigns have had an impact, it is still considered that the risk of gay men being infected with HIV remains sufficiently high to include the criterion that they should not donate blood. Unfortunately, this means there will be healthy gay men who would be suitable for giving blood but who are excluded by the rule.

However, it is not practical to expect donor session staff to be able to differentiate between gay men with lower or with higher risk lifestyles, so all gay men have to be excluded.

To me the solution appears to be simple... If a male is able to prove he is HIV negative then he should be able to take a certificate from his doctor to the donor session to prove this and be able to give blood. If, however, he has no certificate then he should be barred until he obtains one.