UKHamlet's Blog

Sean Hodgson, also known as Robert Graham Hodgson looked fearfully at the tall, broad shouldered man standing at his cell door. The officer’s black uniform seemed to cast its own shadow, filling the room with despair. Sean shrank back into his bunk, pulling his knees up to his chest, rocking back and forth.

“I didn’t do it,” he whimpered, his voice breaking with choked back tears. “I didn’t fucking do it. Please don’t do this…”

“Come along, Sean,” the officer said in a deep, throaty voice, “be a man.”

He held out a leather gloved hand and touched Sean’s shoulder, softly at first, but then more firmly. His cold, blue eyes locked with Sean’s, his mouth a firm line of determination. Sean knew there would be no getting away, and in that moment he gave up.

They stood him up; hand and leg cuffed him, and then carried him into the next room, a room dominated by the inverted L of the gallows.

Sean stared at the priest with wild eyes, his mind scurrying around in his head like a mad mouse cornered by hungry cat. A dark suited man stepped forward and slipped a thick hemp rope over Sean’s head then everything went dark as a musty hood was pulled over him. He wet himself and managed to say; “I didn’t do..” before the floor opened and his head was jarred to one side, distending his neck and pulling its bones apart before severing his spinal chord.

The attending officers grimaced at the smell. “Oh fuck, he shat.”

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Oooo... myself....

Have you noticed how call centre people, shop assistants, customer facing civil servants and local government officers and occasionally TV and radio personalities have started using “myself”, rather than “me”, or “I”? As if this were not bad enough, they are also juxtaposing “I” and “me”. The commonest error is to use “I”, because it sounds posh. It’s not; it just reveals the paucity of your knowledge of grammar. So stop it, now. 

These are the very same criminals who use “lesser” instead of “fewer”. Flogging is too good for them, but before I go around beating these low-lives, and probably getting myself arrested, I thought I’d explain in simple terms how to use me, myself and I. Continue reading

Nail, err screw

Search Engines: look guys, you really need to get your act together.

No, really you do. A customer of mine is an image consultant and they wanted suitable images for their website. They have various categories that needed pics – one of which is  ”Older Women”. So, I Googled it. Please tear that image from my brain! Oh my effin God.

I appreciate the form of women of age more than most – take my ex-wife… (please…) she has a great figure – but some of the stuff that came up on the screen is enough to put your breakfast back on the table.

Okay, I laughed it off, because it’s a once in a while occurence that maybe my incaution contributed to, or at least that was what I thought. Anyway, today I was designing a new front end to the Hammy Cave and I decided I would have a wall with pictures on it. So, I got the wall, got the pictures, but then I realised you have to hang pictures on something.

Yeah, I Googled “Nail”. Christ on a bike – is that all the internet is all about? I’m hardly Mister Innocence, but let’s draw the line somewhere. Even with Safe Search on, I had SOME dubious results. I have to say, I was getting quite fed up with it all and decided to give it one more try before I jacked the whole idea in. So what could I use instead of a nail, I asked myself.

That’s when I decided to Google “screw”.

Spam is everywhere now. You can’t open an email account without it being infected with this most modern of afflictions – the doorstep salesman in your inbox. The main problems are: the sheer volume, the monotony and the lack of quality. Surely someone, somewhere has something to sell me other than body part enlargements, stiffeners and painkillers. Well, yes, actually they have.

I had an email – quite uninvited – that purports to increase the likelihood of someone responding to my e-marketing efforts. Yeah, I can see the cynically raised eyebrows: so YOU’RE a spammer too, you’re thinking. No, I’m not. I do send out lots of emails, but only if people ask me. There’s the difference. Anyway, they reckoned I was more likely to respond because they’d sent me a picture that was personalised to me. Clever, I thought, but unlikely to do more than interest me in buying the technology that produces personalised pictures to amuse my friends. Once I’d seen the prices, that went West instantly. Still, it gave me something to blog about today.

Martyn's Apple

It’s quite nice, I’ll admit, but not exactly the kind of thing that would make me want to check out anything other than the technology that did it. I think this one gets filed under “interesting, but useless”.

I wrote this article a few years ago when Microsoft  started imposing DRM on everyone. It was meant to be a rant against digital rights, but ended up as a critique of the direction of modern capitalism. At the time, I thought: “This is all going to end in tears….” I’m pretty sure it now has.

Digital Rights Management is more than just a software device to maintain the copyright of published material. It is a reflection of a new philosophy that will ultimately lead to a society in which consumers own nothing, where the nightmare of the dispossessed comes true and corporate bodies own everything. The logical extension of this is: you lose your home, car, all your possessions and everything you own to some vision cooked up in the boardrooms of America. Their vision of the model citizen is someone who is heavily in debt, but owns nothing, who consumes without assuming ownership, and who is powerless to influence the tide of events because the democratic process is meaningless.

The most fundamental premise of capitalism is the concept of ownership. It is the guiding principle that allows everything else in the market economy to work. Ownership is the idea that an individual is able to possess something exclusively, sell it and use the tokens of exchange to buy other things. It is the primary motivational force of incentive. Take away ownership and you take away capitalism. Continue reading

After tearing up the formbook to beat Samoa in the sevens RWC final, Wales reversed their pool defeat to the Argentinian Pumas to emerge victorious and find themselves crowned as World Champions.

Full article on the Cardiff Guardian

“I being of sound mind…”

Last Will and Testament? No, this is a service level contract. The training department has decided that they want to become a semi-autonomous organisation within the company and as such have sought to renegotiate their inter-departmental agreements.

This caught the I.T department on the hop, Jiffy our I.T. Manager quickly realised this has nothing to with golf or rock climbing so delegated it to Mungo, the User Technical Support Manager. This was a rare moment of perspicacity for a man who quite frequently scores lower in tests than the Doom artificial intelligence parser. Mungo on the other hand is a thinker, although in a weasel-like-avoid-work-at-all-costs fashion admittedly. He took one long look at the draft letter and returned it to Training with a series of grammatical corrections scrawled in the margin.

This is a classical negotiating gambit, the opening shot of the three-phase postponement strategy. This comprises; quibble about technicalities like grammar and definitions, reject the entire document and replace it with something completely meaningless, wait for the counter blast and repeat phase one. It’s the management equivalent of

10 REM
20 KILL *.*
30 GOTO 10

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Ciara Adams... sigh

This is an unashamed plug for a singer who surely deserves a wider audience than she’s currently getting.

Ciara Adams is a charismatic and versatile performer . Her background in opera, theatre, and cabaret, and her undeniable soul for jazz combine to create a delectably original style.

Ciara’s new record, Last of the Bohemians produced by Tim Abraham at the Hive Studios in Toronto, blends her style with an influence of pop, electronica and contemporary groove. The record contains her own original music with the addition of a soaring cover of the French torch chanson La Bohéme by Charles Aznavour and an original rendition of Compay Segunda’s Chan Chan, made famous by the Buena Vista Social Club.

A classically trained opera singer, Ciara moved to London, England shortly after graduating from Queen’s University. In London, Ciara attended the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. While at the Guildhall, Ciara had the opportunity to study the music of Kurt Weill in Italy, opening up an entirely new world of influence including the songs of Jacques Brel, Hollaender, Tom Lehrer, and more.

After graduation, Ciara recorded a series of Children’s CD’s for National retailer Mothercare, and performed on stage as an ensemble member at The Royal National Theatre. Ciara has even found herself singing Irish folk music in a Mongolian Ger and Fauré on the streets of Toulouse.

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Ian Kerr, private investigator, could be named more appropriately, but only just. He is to be prosecuted by the Information Commissioner for allegedly selling private information to companies in the construction industry who wanted to vet potential employees.

Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner says he seized documents on individuals that had comments appended such as: “communist”, “definite problems, no go”, “lazy and a trouble maker”, “do not touch”, “orchestrated a strike” and so on.

Kerr kept an illegal intelligence database on over three thousand individuals, of which the commission said: “This is a serious breach of the Data Protection Act. Not only was personal information held on individuals without their knowledge or consent, but the very existence of the database was repeatedly denied.”

So, here we have a man trading illegal information to companies on individuals who were participating in perfectly legal activities such as trade union membership being brought to book. It’s probably the tip of the iceberg though. An employer I know has been approached on a number of occasions by investigators who have offered services of this kind. How serious they were, I have no idea, but their existence and this case leads me to believe this is the norm rather than the exception.

The construction industry is particularly hairy arsed and most of the people at the top of the ladder are incredibly thick: classic examples of the buoyant characteristics of faecal matter. So getting caught with their dicks in their hands is par for the course and not particularly surprising. The Tarquin and Rodney set that run the City, the banks and the blue chips are not so stupid. They have the common sense to cover their tracks and not employ dumb-arses like Kerr.

The truth of the matter is the board rooms of Britain are populated by men (and a few women) who are of a similar political mind. Their social standing is an irrelevance, but a disproportionate number of them are from similar social backgrounds, mostly what used to be described as the old ruling classes. The latter is increasingly becoming less the case, but the former is entrenched. You simply do not see anyone with a left leaning outlook in positions of responsibility in these companies. There are virtually no exceptions to this rule.

Now, there may be many reasons for this, not least the simple fact that if you are of the left you probably do not attempt to climb the corporate ladder, but surely there might have been a few exceptions to that rule. Or even one.

When was the last time a leading banker, industrialist or anyone at the top of British business was criticised or complemented for being too socially responsible? How many companies have policies that make Trade Unions irrelevant? Because that’s the crux of this matter: if Trade Unions didn’t need to exist, they wouldn’t. Continue reading

Ronny cries all the way to Nat West

The press has been in a lather about Fred’s pension recently - and to be fair, the revelations that his pension isn’t just £600k, £650k, or even the figure I’ve given of £693k, but actually tips the scales at a humongous £703,000 – which is sufficient to make even the most steadfast of editors to self-righteously foam at the mouth. I’ll admit I did a bit of foaming too, but it’s all just jealousy really. I’d have a bit of that if I could.

Anyway, to put it into perspective – the oily footballer Ronaldo has been offered £200k a week salary – so Fred’s annual pension is roughly three and half weeks pay for the Portuguese international. The difference, as my mate Kev says, is Ronaldo hasn’t lost anyone twenty-four billion pounds. Still, £200k a week for falling over is good money by anyone’s standards.

Postscript. It appears Sir Fred is getting ten grand for doing eff-all for about about a month. This has got Wapping beating their collective bishops again, barking out headlines of outrage and contempt like he’s done something wrong. So what guys? It’s the system you wanted. Just saying, like.