Earlier, the UK announced plans to flush itself down the toilet. Thanks to new government hysteria, you now won’t be able to walk down the street without police stopping and fingerprinting you. It’s already impossible to have a quiet drink in a pub without giving away your identity at the door but now they need to update the HM Wankerbase 9000(TM) with more life history.
And they don’t even see the police state coming.
Jon.
Photo: My Living Room
I had a housewarming last night. I’d gotten my work done preparing this place just in time – worked through the night on Friday and all day Saturday unpacking boxes. But it was good to hang out in my own place – and kudos to cjb, mad, andyo, Konrad, pjones, and everyone else who came along to drink beer and hang out for a while. Afterward, I took the T to Park Street with some of the guys, with a view to seeing the Bond movie but that was sold (yes, even at midnight) so I wound up seeing Fast Food Nation. And that was a great movie – totally convinced me I could never eat mass produced meat even if I did eat meat (which I don’t) just because of how they treat the cattle and the workers who process it. It’s just a movie, but it’s got a basis in fact.
Anyway. I’m playing with AirTunes, listening to random 80s pop and slacking off for a while writing blog entries. My espresso machine is working again (on a very large transformer) so I expect I’ll be drinking a lot of coffee tonight.
Jon.
I was just catching up with the BBC News website, when I noticed that the Queen’s speech was today. This is an antiquated and pointless “speech” by the unelected Queen in which she reads from a script given to her by the (outgoing) Prime Minister of the day. She is obligated to read it from a first person perspective and make whatever outrageous statements that the government feel are justified for the next year.
I’ll go through the specifics of the speech when I have time, but I did notice that, yes, they have decided 2007 will be another year in which the British government won’t be bothering about basic human rights in favor of introducing yet more damaging and controlling legislation to keep tabs on the little people who elected them. Specifically, they’re going to push ahead with the following sheer folly:
There was various other horse shit in there, including yet more HM Department of Vague Paranoia (The Home Office) propaganda about the need to assume everyone is a criminal, outsource more of the HO to private enterprise and the need to write into a law a provision that Reid is not responsible for anything that goes wrong – that was all Mousey’s fault, and if that doesn’t work they can blame Blunkett and Straw.
Message to Blair: Orwell called, he wants your input on a new book.
Jon.
So, I got unhappy with the responsiveness of fremont.jonmasters.org and my other UML client (with slightly better performance) in London. I’ve decided UML is a nice hack but I really want to be using something that tries a bit harder to be “real” virtualization. At this moment, that’s Xen, though that might change in the future. Various Xen virtual hosting is now available, and both existing providers are planning to switch eventually.
I don’t want to wait all year though, so I signed up with RimU (what a fucking cool name that is) and am so far impressed with the performance of dallas.jonmasters.org. I moved my US asterisk server over and now am not getting audio dropouts – it’s probably never going to be 100% perfect (it’s VoIP running over SIP after all) but it’s now at the point where I can implement moh (music on hold) and have a fully interactive menu system. Don’t worry, I paid magnatune for a license to play some of their music – it is, after all, only $12/year for personal home office use.
Next, my plan is to move other stuff currenly on fremont over to dallas, and then ask Linode nicely if they plan to give me access to their Xen beta before I pull the plug on them. I like Bytemark, but I’m probably going to can them in favor of BlackCat if they don’t have a compelling offering pretty soon. Blackcat (or Mythic) probably will provide a better service than the UML solution I have in the UK now. Oh well.
Worked out that I’m spending about $50USD/month on additional hosting and SIP/IAX for my non-printk stuff. On the face of it, that sounds like a reasonable amount to be paying for email and telephony, but I don’t pay anything to Verizon or Comcast for telephone service and I don’t have huge per-minute charges to call e.g. the UK. So, overall I think this is a more fun way to spend roughly the same amount of money.
Jon.
That’s got a nice ring to it. Let’s say it again: “Former defense secretary”. i.e. no longer in office, not able to warmonger, not able to spout off about wars on pointlessness. I loved watching the recorded press conference Bush gave earlier today in which he looked visibly humbled by the election result from yesterday. And I loved watching him cut Rumsfeld. Nobody will miss him.
But I’d rather it hadn’t been Iraq that won the election. I’d rather it had been about education, social reform and programmes, and all that jazz. But if it takes Iraq to help kill off a few Republican seats, then so be it. And they took the Senate too! Woooooo! Let’s hope they don’t waste it (and that impeachment hearings aren’t impossible). Hopefully, Bush is a lame duck.
Isn’t it cool? 
Jon.
So I just moved into this place a few weeks ago. I paid a giant deposit and my first month’s rent. Then I decided to also give them a post-dated check for next month’s rent while I was at it (makes sense, since I might go visit family for a few days over the holidays). I called my landlord and was told that would be fine, they’d hold it…
Of course what they actually did was cash the check (the one dated December 1, the one with “RENT DEC ‘06″ printed in capitalized letters on the front, the one with an accompanying note saying what it was for…). This got me into a world of pain earlier on today that I’m sorting out at the moment. But I learned two important things today:
I haven’t been this pissed off with a private company in a while (and I don’t mean the bank – I always expect them to want to screw you over). I love this apartment, really I do, it’s just a shame it can’t be as simple as “I want this apartment, here’s a direct debit mandate, let me pay you automatically”. One thing Europe does do better (I wrote about one cheque in the last year).
At least the Republicans are having a worse day
Jon.
Deval Patrick just became the first black governor of Massachusetts (first time for the Dems in 16 years), leaving MA well and truly a Blue state. CNN is also predicting the Democrats will take 16 seats in the House, giving them overall control. This is going to be a really bad day for poor old King George – hopefully it’ll get worse (the Idiot-in-chief has to work with Democrats for the next 803 days), but the full results aren’t in yet.
Interesting news from Missouri. I’m pleased to hear that McCaskill has taken the Senate seat there – especially interesting to hear that most residents are in favor of stem cell research, though there’s not enough data yet to see whether this issue won the seat. However, nationwide, I am dissappointed to hear so many people voting against allowing same sex marriage – hopefully a few more Republican/Religious scandals can help fix that next time around.
Both the BBC and CNN have done a pretty good job tonight, too.
Jon.
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