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End of week 1: "The hardware was broken. It has not been fixed. The chicken replace-inator(TM) was not available. The staff have worked evenings and weekends. We have slipped by a week."

End of week 2: "The hardware was broken again in a different way. The cause has not been identified. The chicken replace-inator(TM) was in use by another project, preventing testing. The staff have worked evenings and weekends. We have slipped by another week."

End of week 3: "The hardware was broken and it was taken off site. It has not been fixed. No one has been able to attempt to identify the root cause let alone fix it. The chicken replace-inator(TM) was in use by another project and is now broken. The staff have worked evenings, weekends and on their death beds. Spouses have filed for divorce. Engineers are being carted off in straight jackets by men in white coats. We have slipped by yet another week. The project has now slipped by three weeks. The deadline will be missed by three weeks."

PHB: "What will you do to recover the time?"

I'll let Pink Floyd do most of my talking. They do it far better than I ever could.

Divided we fall. As we single out minority groups as scapegoats for the ills of the modern day, we weaken ourselves. Life is hard enough without making it arbitrarily harder and more unpleasant, or even dangerous, for some demographics.

It should be pretty apparent to anyone who has read any books on Evolution that people come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, with all sorts of differences.

I dare say they'd find a reason to put me up against their wall too.

I'm saying this, not because I'm scared for myself. I have white, male privilege. I'm technically middle class. I can afford to eat and heat my house. I have something of an education. I was born in an English-speaking country that used to have an Empire covering one quarter of the Earth.

For several years now there has been the nasty undercurrent of a fascist revival. They call themselves things like "the new right." They elected Trump and the got us Brexit. There's also a war in Ukraine, started by a foreign dictator who has been using Orwellian rhetoric for two decades to brainwash an entire nation. These things are all linked.

It's the little things that we have to be vigilant about on a daily basis, when arbitrary groups are picked on and used as scapegoats. Whether that's refugees fleeing war-torn countries, people with a certain religion, people who can't work for a living, people who work but are still poor, "undemocratic marxists," gays, lesbians and now "trannies."

Whether you're a righty complaining that "trannies" are costing you money, corrupting your children or holding you to ransom in some way, or whether you're a TERF with a paranoid and arbitrary hatred of male-to-female transsexuals because they might use the same bathroom as you. (As a friend pointed out, nobody is naked in a public toilet so where's the issue?)

Final words from Bertrand Russell, "Love is wise. Hatred is foolish."

As you know, the UK is sliding backwards rapidly to the 19th century following democracy's final decision, the one and only Will of the People(TM) decided on 23rd June 2016. This "will" is being imposed on all parts of the UK whether they voted for it or not by the Mother of Parliaments.

We have an unelected, hereditary head of state (Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II) and the second chamber of our parliament, the House of Lords is also unelected, largely hereditary but also by appointment by the Establishment (the Monarchy, but nominated by the ruling political party of the day).

When "the country" (England, mostly....) chose the final answer to democracy once and for all on 23rd June 2016 this was touted as the beginning of a new era of freedom, hope and prosperity.

So far we are back to 1970s levels of inflation, there's a labour shortage, people starving and having to rely on food banks, people waiting so long for emergency ambulances that they are dropping dead before they arrive, people waiting in ambulances for tens of hours to get into hospitals, school buildings falling down, racial tensions and buying and selling things across borders is becoming much more expensive. Companies have gone out of business and/or have had to relocate. There are queues of commercial vehicles at the ports. There are tantrums from the "unionists" (the ones who don't believe in dinosaurs or women's rights) in Northern Ireland which have effectively halted democracy and threaten a return to the violence and terror of decades past.

Scientific research collaborations are falling apart, contracts are being lost, people are being forced to "go back to where they came from" particularly if they are well-educated professionals paying tax and so on.

However, to cheer us all up, next weekend is the Queen's Platinum Jubilee. In February, she passed 70 years in the post, the longest-serving British monarch. So we need to put up bunting featuring the Butcher's Apron, drink a toast and sing patriotic ditties.

But what's even better, to really get the party started, our Prime Minister, Boorish Johnson, now that we are truly free of the Undemocratic Marxist Liberal Fascist Globalist Protectionist Utra Free Market Socialist Captialist EUSSR, is proposing to bring back imperial measurements. We'll be able to have our fish and chips in feet and inches furlongs per fortnight again as God intended.

There are other things on their to-do list, like repealing the Human Rights Act, you know the thing that gives us in law the right to life, the right to a fair trial with due process, the right to free speech, freedom of thought, freedom of religion and so on.

What's really cunning about getting rid of Human Rights in law is that it paves the way for the reintroduction of the Death Penalty.

There are Death Penalty enthusiasts in the current government.

This is Britannia Unhinged. They knew what they were voting for.

"Aw, it's a funny old world," Said Henry's Cat.

So I went from being the engineer doing something while training up the PHB above to being a PHB organising a bunch of people to being...?

This is the thing: what am I?

I did the PHB stuff because it needed doing. I put in new processes, got some infrastructure in place and got some stuff going, LART'd more senior people, did lots and lots of work outside business hours, just about lost the plot... and then got some more technical stuff to do.

Here I am, compiler, interpreter and VM in hand, fixing bugs, telling people that compiler warnings are Useful(TM), stopping things from crashing and generally doing stuff.

I'm not sure I can do it fast enough, though. We'll see.

They gave me a pay rise (hooray!) and so I thought I might treat myself to some new second-hand toys (junk) from Ebay and today I got a motherboard, CPU and RAM bundle (AMD Phenom II X6 3.2GHz, 16GB ECC RAM), and a new case and got it all up and running.

Yesterday, my Phenom II X4 940 BE broke. It boots, and crashes (in the kernel) after a few seconds. I'm sad. That CPU goes back a long way, and it keeps my feet warm under my desk during the day while I'm working, but no more. I have tried cleaning out the heatsink, a different power supply and I have run memtest86+ on it. Single-threaded it passes. Multi-threaded it fails. I wonder whether years of being a little too hot have broken it?

Fortunately, the CPU I got today will work in the old motherboard of the X4. This motherboard will take an AMD FX processor. I'll look out for one of those. That should really keep my feet warm.

And I finally wrote a line of Python on company time!

Firearms killed more children and adolescents in 2020 than car accidents, which had long been the leading cause of death for youngsters, a Washington Post analysis has found.

The change was caused by a 30 percent increase in gun deaths for people 19 and younger in 2020. Gun deaths continued to outpace cars for that age group in 2021, The Post found, as the rate of gun killings increased an additional 8 percent.

Guns killed more youngsters than cars for the first time in 2020

Firearms now exceed motor vehicle crashes as the leading cause of injury-related death for people ages one to 24, a new analysis shows

Guns Now Kill More Children and Young Adults Than Car Crashes

How do you find the time to do the things you want to do as well as the things you need to do?

What are your time management strategies?

Protesting outside of an abortion provider's home: FREE SPEECH!
Protesting outside the home of the person who decided that protesting outside of homes is protected by the 1st Amendment: Throw 'em in jail!!!

UPDATE: Oh yeah, they're all-in on this shit!

You may have had a credible argument it was just the nutjob wing a couple minutes ago...

House GOP says protesting outside justices’ homes is illegal

Top House Republicans accused the White House and Democrats of encouraging illegal activity, asserting that recent pro-abortion-rights protests outside the homes of Supreme Court justices are unlawful.

“I’m disappointed that this White House is still encouraging people to break federal law and go and protest in front of the houses of Supreme Court justices, as Jen Psaki encouraged yesterday,” House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) said in a press conference on Wednesday.

Supreme Court has voted to overturn abortion rights, draft opinion shows

We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” Justice Alito writes in an initial majority draft circulated inside the court.

There is still time for this to be reversed by the court but what do you think?

Since I am a high-brow cultural snob, I was listening to BBC Radio 3 this morning and they were playing some Cleo Laine, which reminded me of an idea I've often thought of: great duets that never were. Which two great singers have never performed or recorded a duet but you think would sound great together?

Dame Cleo Laine apparently has a four octave range and I think she would sound great in a duet with Rob Halford.

However, I really think that Axl Rose and Tina Turner would have made a great singing pair. "Steamy windows.... You could be meyeyine!"

Can you think of any great duets that never were? Remember that Shakin' Stevens and Bonnie Tyler doesn't count, because that really happened.

Is there something wrong with me? I hate musicals. I hate the music. I hate the dancing, the flailing and gyrating. I hate the lyrics. I hate the doggerel. I hate the constant torrent of auditory and visual disruption.

Is it just me?