Guido Fawkes, or Guy Fawkes as he is more commonly known tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament on November 5th 1605. He was the explosives expert of the gang in the gunpowder plot. He was caught “red-handed” before he could set the explosions off & arrested. After being tortured into revealing the names of his co-conspiritors he was hung drawn and quartered along with the rest of his gang – as was the style for anyone tried as a traitor. He was trying to kill the King James I (or VI of Scotland) who was to address the joint houses of Parliament (Commons and Lords). The aims of the gang are thought to be comparable to those of modern day terrorists. They also had religious motives – James I was Protestant while the gang was Catholic.
Saddam Hussein – sentenced by the Iraq Special Tribunal to death by hanging on November 5th 2006 for crimes against humanity. An infamous dictator who rules Iraq with an iron fist and used chemical weapons on Kurdish separatists in the Iran-Iraq war. It may never be known what other crimes he committed due to lack of evidence and willingness of witnesses to testify.
Dhiren Barot aka Abu Musa al-Hindi – born in India in 1971 to a hindu family. Moved to the UK in 1973 and attended Kingsbury High School in North London. but after leaving he converted to Islam in 1991. From 1995 onwards he lived the life of a terrorist, participating in campaigns in Kashmir, wrote a book about it in 1999 and served as an Al-Quaeda agent. The list of what he has plotted seems never-ending, and today on 7th November 2006 he was sentenced to life imprisonment (which must be a minimum of 40 years).
Category Archives: News
Going to America
By 10am tomorrow I’ll be on a plane for my first trip to the United States of America
We’re going to spend 4 days in Boston and 5 days in New York give or take a day travelling
It should be great fun and really looking forward to it
The last 2 days at work have been a bit mad as I’ve tried to get everything done in time and I just about got it done by 5:45 this afternoon
Did my packing in about 10 minutes as I always do and we’re just about set.
Am back on the 30th but I wouldn’t expect anything out of me till the day after as I will almost certainly be jet-lagged – esp since the last flight this long I did was 6 years ago.
Hopefully will have photos and stories to tell
Digital Magazines
I was surfing around today waiting for the tennis to start (Federer vs Nadal) with the prospect of watching the football world cup (Italy vs France) this evening, when I stumbled on something I must’ve missed: Digital Magazines
I know it’s something that’s been around for ages, but a company now looks to be properly distributing it called Zinio
They offer a broad range of magazines which you can buy either as back issues or subscribe to
About the same price as buying off the shelf, and it’s pretty convenient if you want a specific issue and don’t want to go down to the shops. Plus since you pay in US Dollars, the exchange rate works to my advantage eg. MacUser UK is £3.95 per issue over here, but only $3.50 from Zinio
An annual subscription works out at £62.46 by direct debit for a real copy
From Zinio it is only $49.95
When you consider that there’s $1.85 to the pound, it works out pretty cheap
On the downside, the digital version comes in Zinio’s own format, (.zno) and has to be viewed using their viewer. The viewer is available for windows & OSX, though isn’t universal binary yet (but has been confirmed as in development)
It uses some form of DRM called contentguard
A reader program is required to access the magazines, which utilize a combination of technology licensed from Adobe and Contentguard
and if you print anything it puts a pale grey watermark on the page
They offer a free sample section, so i took the opportunity to try it out. The freebies are a little lacking though oddly you can get MacWorld Sweden as well as the US version
You can only view one magazine at a time, as the viewer doesn’t seem to support multiple viewing of documents, and while it is based on Acrobat reader, it lacks a lot of the features you’d expect to have such as scrolling
I suspect you wouldn’t get anything to replace the free CD/DVDs you would normally get though they may have a way of having online links to the content.
The downloads magazines in OSX are stored in your users folder/Zinio Library/
The site itself is a little confusing, as there is an international section, but MacUser UK appears in the US section but not the UK, and there are some publications that they sell which don’t appear on the main site as they are acting as agents for the distributors.
Finally, they offer a US textbooks section for students. It’s a little lacking on variety, and since it’s US textbooks they won’t have scientific books that use metric units like Peter Atkin’s Physical Chemistry the defacto standard text for most university chemistry courses.
They say there are plans for adding interactive features into the digital versions of magazines and books to make them more attractive
Overall i kinda like it, but can’t see myself buying through it – and they do need to add some scrollbars to the viewer.
Nokia and Siemens Merge
There was big news this week in the telecoms markets as Finnish mobile phone company Nokia and German Telecoms (incl mobiles) & technology monster Siemens merged to create one of the largest network firms.
Read the full story on BBC News here
Nokia and Siemens are to merge their mobile and fixed-line phone network equipment businesses to create one of the world’s biggest network firms
It follows the recent merge of France’s Alcatel and US company Lucent Technologies
But it reminds me most of when Sony and Ericsson merged their mobile phone divisions to start making Sony-Ericsson phones which had a huge impact on the market about 5 years ago.
Nokia are already the most common phones that I come across – I’m onto my 3rd or 4th one and my next phone will probably be a Nokia. Their intuitive menu system and reliability makes them a good choice of manufacturer. I’ve also had a couple of Siemens mobiles too and found them to be good value for money (they were very cheap) and it was only after i’d thrashed them for about 1 1/2 years that things started to go wrong. They also have very funky blue backlights, though this deal seems to be more related to the carrier network as opposed to the phones themselves
Beware of the Cat
This article appeared in the paper last week and features some incredible pictures of what cats are capable of including one where a ginger cat called Jack forced a black bear to seek refuge up a tree in New Jersey.
Unfortunately while the article is available online they don’t put the photos with it, so i’ve had to google it up, so here’s the link to an article on BBC news with picture
It says it’s a tabby, but Jack looks more like a ginger tom to me!
The picture in the article also had a couple of other photos of cats with mice, birds and rabbits looking very smug about their catches
I am a huge cat fan but i think this particular cat, Jack, has taken things a bit far. Remember, Black Bear:
1.5m tall
~ 500lbs
Big claws that can rip through flesh
Big Teeth
Loud growl
Bounds around the forest looking scary
Ginger Cat:
~ 10lbs
Sleeps 16 hours a day: 
Likes being stroked
Lives in human houses
Has small claws that would feel like a massage compared to bear claws: 
and while their teeth are designed for flesh it would be difficult for a it to cause damage to an animal bear-sized: 
That must’ve been one terrified bear
On a sidenote, it has been pointed out by MHC that my views plugin isn’t working properly. Haven’t had a chance this week to look into fixing it, so i may end up disabling it at some point if it doesn’t work for this post
Last Couple of weeks
I haven’t posted anything new on here for a couple of weeks cos it’s been a little bit hectic both socially and workwise. It was a long weekend two weekends ago and I ended up doing four days drinking in 10 pubs with a few mates.
Then the next weekend was the first day this summer where it’s actually been nice so I took advantage of it with a trip to see a bloody shakespeare play Titus Andronicus at the London Globe Theatre – it’s an almost exact replica of the original from Shakespeare’s time in nearly the same location
Afterwards I ended up in a party till 4am full of Greeks, Spanish, French and Dutch
Which reminds me a blog update: I’ve installed another wordpress plugin a while back but thought i’d mention it, to keep the spam out. It’s called Spam Karma 2 and seems to be doing a good job.
Monday afternoon saw Sri Lanka win the second test against England levelling the 3 match test series 1-1 where the first match was a draw. This will give the Sri Lankans huge confidence as England are currently number 2 in the test rankings. England on the other hand have a tough few months with the one day series coming up where they have not done so well and a test series against Pakistan.
Monday night was the first gig for French Car and the Bulimic Wizards who have been around in some shape or form for 10 years but have never played live. They have now made 4 albums as an unsigned band. It was a good gig with a strange combination of people there
I heard this morning that Mars Chocolate bars sold in the UK are going to be renamed “Believe” for the duration of the world cup to encourage fans to believe that England can win the 2006 Football World Cup which starts next week. In other world cup related news, I drew Ukraine in our office world cup sweepstake – somehow i don’t think i’m going to win the grand prize of £100 (Ukraine are 40-1 outsiders!)
And finally, I’ve been receiving a lot of invitations this week for people on myspace wanting to be my friend. Of the 10-15 who have invited me, I have known only one
BBC Interviews wrong person
I’ve been a little slow in picking up on this, but following on from the Apple Computer vs Apple Records trial, the BBC called in an expert Guy Kewney
However, a taxi driver apparently raised his hand when they called his name and before he knew what was happening he was being ushered into the news studio as this blog entry describes
But presumably wanting to be on TV he didn’t tell anyone he wasn’t the expert they had wanted to interview but in fact Mr Goma and it went out live on BBC News 24
Google video has the footage available
It is also available in real video on BBC’s own site. It was a little more difficult to get the link but here it is
Someone must of realised that he really had no idea about the story and it was all over the press
Eurovision Song Contest 2006
The Eurovision Song Contest 2006 takes place this year in a bit of controversy mainly due to this year’s entry from Finland which is the first ever time that a death metal band has represented a country in the competition.
Before we get into that, let me explain a bit about Eurovision… if you knew nothing about Euro-pop, Eurovision is the epitome of it. The entrants by and large are more concerned with looks, clothes and appearances than musical ability. Technically speaking, the countries entering aren’t all in Europe, and the most famous artist to come out of it are:
ABBA
Cliff Richard
Bucks Fizz
and… erm that Israeli artist who everyone thought was a woman but was actually a transexual man!
You can read more about it on Wikipedia’s entry on the Eurovision Contest
The UK, which probably has the best quality of music tends to pander to the competition’s style entering artists who are more likely to score well than those that will perform “good” music.
Which brings me onto the voting, a languishing affair broadcast in it’s entirety on tv and i’m convinced is fixed by the powers that be in that Russia always votes for the Slavic countries, Turkey and Greece never gave each other a vote until 2003 (because of Cyprus), Cyprus and Greece mostly give each other maximum points, Poland always gives the UK a point (because of World War 2), and all the Scandinavian countries vote for each other!
I kid you not, that is what happens
This year’s contest is taking place in Athens, Greece on 20th May
Which brings me back to the story that has filled the newspapers. Finnish Death Metal band Lordi spectacularly won the finals to represent Finland in the competition, fighting off competition from 11 other bands which included an opera singer.
This is Lordi:
And here’s a big picture of Lordi
Yes, they dress up in monster outfits and have released 4 albums
Of their 5 singles, it is their most recent 2006 hit Hard Rock Hallelujah that is their entry song in the competition
What spurred all this on then?
Lordi is a melodic theatrical heavy-rock band, mostly known for their unusual monster costumes and lyrical themes…The members have never shown in public without their masks. Lordi itself says the band doesn’t exist without the masks. The selection of such an unusual style of music and stage theatrics has caused a small controversy in Finland and there have been calls for a reconsideration of the choice.
Finland have never won the competition, and have scored the infamous “nul points” 3 times
The last two years they didn’t even qualify for the competition
So radical measures were called for – so Lordi it is then!
UK (available in London, Scotland and Manchester) rock radio station XFM thinks it’s about time that some rock/metal was played in the competition and has pledged to support Finland in the build up and has encouraged their listeners to email or mail the UK host for the contest, Sir Terry Wogan showing their appreciation for the band. The station has been playing clips of their track but has yet to play it in full.
Could this be the biggest revolution in Eurovision history or will it just end up being a bit of a stunt that nobody pays any attention to?
Here are a couple of links that are asking the people of Finland and Greece to stop Lordi from performing at the competition:
President of the Greek Consumers union , Mrs. Niki Kostantinidou’s public plea
Monster band has Finland fretting over face it shows
Greek religious fanaticism rears its ugly head once more – Lord Stay out of Hellas!
Make up your own mind – personally, i think they should play and the people should vote
April Fools
Today is April 1st, AKA April Fools day
And today would not be complete without having a look at what jokes newspapers and internet sites have tried to pull on us
I always try and find the newspaper i get’s April Fool’s story, and today it is If you want to get better – don’t say a little prayer
The paper also did a quiz on april fools stories see how well you score on it!
Wikipedia’s entry for April 1, 2006 has a good list of hoaxes
Some of the best are:
W3C ‘s CSS update – it’s a good’un!
Ubuntu’s site has been ROT-13’d – ROT13 is an encryption algorithm where every letter is swapped for either the one 13 letters in front in the alphabet or 13 behind (read the article, i’ll just confuse you!)
Unconfirmed as it was announced on 31st March, but the new Race in Warcraft is the Wisps!
Racial Traits:
Detonate: Destroys the wisp, dispelling all magical buffs and draining 50 mana from each unit in an area around the wisp.
Gatherer: Skill to herbalism, mining, and skinning increased by 10.
Permanent Death
Treeform: Turns the wisp into a tree for 30 seconds. During this time, spirit is increased by 300. However, the wisp’s chance to dodge or parry axes is reduced by 50%.
The google operating system blog claims Google has launched Google Browser – it’s cross platform and is only 1.68mb download – i won’t spoil it for you what you get
Google launches Google Romance – and as usual it’s in beta
For more, see Urgo’s 2006 list
In the past, my favourite site resexcellence.com used to pull off some corker april fools jokes. Sadly, with the changes that have happened, the new owners have not continued this.
The UK justice system has gone mad
Two stories for you
The first is a sad story about a three year old girl who was killed by a joyrider. The “killer” was caught but the sentence is appalling
Driver Mohammed Hussain, 26, admitted careless driving, having no licence or insurance, failing to stop and failing to report an accident…In addition to the driving offences, Hussain admitted handling stolen goods when he appeared at Burnley Magistrates’ Court on Friday. It emerged he was out of prison on parole after being convicted of wounding in 2001…
What do you think from that that the sentence was? Years right? Well this is what he got:
He was sentenced to four weeks for the handling charge and 12 weeks each for the fail to stop and fail to report charges, to run concurrently. He was also banned from driving for five years.
Apparently they couldn’t charge him for death by dangerous driving because they couldn’t prove that his driving was dangerous and “Careless driving is an offence which does not carry a jail sentence”
Shocking! He’s killed a human being and the only offence he apparently committed was not stopping and reporting the incident – exquease me? Baking soda?
From the sublime to the ridiculous we head to Dudley in the West Midlands where a man has been charged with Actual Bodily harm for Cutting his girlfriend’s Ponytail off
Man, 21, admits ponytail attack
A Dudley man who was cleared of assault after chopping off his former girlfriend’s ponytail has pleaded guilty to causing actual bodily harm.
Apparently the reasoning behind this is that your hair is considered to be part of the body and therefore by cutting it off he was causing actual bodily harm!
I’m lost for words – the UK justice system has gone to the dogs
Let us consult wikipedia on Actual Bodily Harm
Actual Bodily Harm (often abbreviated to ABH) is a type of criminal assault defined under English law. It encompasses those assaults which result in injuries, typically requiring a degree of medical treatment of the victim. The offence is defined in s47 Offences Against The Person Act 1861 and it is a hybrid offence, i.e. it can be tried in either the Magistrates’ Court or Crown Court. There is a maximum sentence of 5 years imprisonment (or 7 years if it is racially motivated).
So get this, the driver who kills a small girl while driving a car which is not his, with no license or insurance gets 16 weeks (it’s not clear if he got 12 weeks for each offence of failing to stop and the other of failing to report the incident but it doesn’t make much of a difference) while a disgruntled boyfriend could potentially get 5 years for cutting his girlfriends hair off – anyone see a problem here?
Magistrates courts – whatever next!