A shameless plug for anyone and everyone in Cambridge: a friend of mine, James Knight, has moved from London and has started a club. He's currently teaching one night a week - the club has one student already - on Tuesdays: contact him for details and see a lesson for yourself.

I shall probably get up there sometime myself - I was a regular visitor when he was the Assistant at Blomsbury Ki Club, and lessons with him were a pleasure - and I'd be more than happy to go along to with any of you.

Sensei Knight and the Cambridge Club are part of the Ki Federation of Great Britain; there's some material on our website - and plenty of it elsewhere on the web - but Aikido's something you do rather than read about, and your best introduction is to see it first-hand.

Tags: aikido

Dear UBS, CitiGroup and Others:

• You did not get into the mess that you are in through overstaffing.
• If there are businesses that you want to move out of and you no longer need the staff, fine. Go ahead.
• But as you are almost certainly doing this as an across-the board 'cost-cutting' measure in the hope that this will propitiate the Gods - or the markets, or dissident shareholders, or whatever - it's probably worth pointing out that systematic understaffing will not rebuild your profitability.
• Quite the opposite, actually. There are up-front costs to mass redundancies and some very nasty operational risks.
• But as you always do it when your profit takes a dip, and nothing will change your minds, consider this announcement purely a matter of record.
• In other words, we will all read this again in a couple of months, and point at you, and laugh.

( A note on 'Operational Risk'... )

Consider it an insult or a compliment that you are giving your institution and our industry the leadership it deserves in these difficult times.

Oh hooray, boojums is the mayor!

Said Mr. hairyears with a certain air of forced jollity and a total lack of genuine enthusiasm.

Am I the only person to have noticed his campaign commitment to eliminate the social housing quota? The media, of course, prefer the 'performing animals at the circus' approach - presumably it helps the advertisers - and rarely if ever report substantive policy issues.

I think it's taking it too far, that the previous incumbent wanted to raise it to 50%, as that would render many housing projects uneconomical. But the only way to get any affordable housing built at all - or at least, any social housing built in significant numbers - was to impose an obligation on developers to include a percentage of small low-cost residential units.

But property developers are an important constituency within the Conservative Party and, despite his chums at Eton being rich as Croesus, someone had to foot the bill for the 'Vote for Boris' campaign.

Wait for a slew of planning applications being withdrawn in the next six weeks; and, if BJ is voted out in four years' time, watch a huge bulge of projects waved through before he goes, none of them with any flats for less than half a million. We're lookng at five to six years of no affordable housing being built at all.

A quote from spiritof1976:

Dear London

You makes your decisions, you accepts the consequences.





Yours Sincerely


The Rest of the UK

Those managers he's promising to bring in: they'd better be good.

Last year, friends of mine - miss_soap? - reported mobs of nasty sideways foreigners turning up in Wapping High Street.

At last, we are taking steps to send 'em back where they came from where a horrible fate awaits them.

I wonder if they got a postal vote.

Some of you are 'working from home' * Ahem *doing software testing on this morning's delivery of Grand Theft Auto IV.

Others, like yours truly, are working at home because we have builders in, replacing the windows: I am currently logged-in on the laptop, and will be moving from room to room as my apartment is - apparently - being demolished around me. The soundtrack on GTA-IV is, I'm told, frighteningly realistic but it's not a patch on real destruction.

Although, come to think of it, naval bombardment would be preferable to the current background track: Radio 2 on a cement-encrusted transistor radio.

Current Music: I truly do not want to know what tracks Terry Wogan is oozing out

Raise a petition to Scarborough Borough Council, asking them to spend the week preceding Whitby Goth Weekend drenching all their domestic refuse and the discarded fish offal on the dockside with squid ink.

That way, when seagulls crap on the goths, it will be colour-coordinated and entirely drama-free.

This has been brought to my attention.

That is all.

A question for serious SQL Geeks... Reporting edits to a record. ( cut for extreme geekiness... )


I'll ask you a harder question in a couple of days.

Tags: geeky

It has come to my attention that there are, among my readers, Shakespearians, Doctor Who fans, and Programmers (assorted). Here is something for you all.