I dont' know. You spend a week in Southern California and when you get back it's even hotter in the UK than it was there. Something is badly wrong with the world.
Actually, it was probably hotter there, but the humidity here makes it seem so much worse.
What with the 8 hours worth of jet-lag, the heat and the humidity I've had very strange sleeping patterns since I got back on Sunday and all in all it's making me very tied and grumpy.
Yay! New Beth Orton album.
Colour me chilled :)
Hey, look at this. I can pre-date entries.
I won't actually be able to post a message on this date as I'll be flying to San Diego to attend the Open Source Convention.
Anyone remember Marillion? I do. I was a big fan at one time. In fact back in the days when I was social secretary at The City University and before they were famous, I booked them.
I mentioned this in passing on a newsgroup recently and was contacted by someone who is writing a book about them. He asked me to give more details of what happened. My reply to him is below.
Last week the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, announced that cannabis we be downgraded to a class C drug in the UK's legal classification of drugs. The effect of this change will be that possession of small amounts of cannabis will be effectively decriminalised. This follows an experiment along these lines in Lambeth over recent months.
The Daily Mail dislikes this decision a lot and every front page since the announcement has had a story saying how terrible this is and campaigning against this policy.
The problem is that, much as I hate to admit it, on this occasion the Mail may well be right. Let's look at the evidence...
I go to Brixton occasionally and to other areas of Lambeth more frequently. Recently walking out of Brixton tube station has become a nightmare. You have to push thru crowds of people trying to sell you all kinds of drugs. On Saturday night, just outside Clapham North tube station I was offered drugs by a group of teenagers who got a bit unfriendly when I didn't buy anything. This kind of behaviour has become much worse since the drugs laws were loosened in the area.
Unfortunately it seems as tho' decriminalisation will lead to more of this unpleasantness. If the drugs were completely illegal (as there were until recently) then this kind of activity does go on, but it's far more low key. You don't come across it as you're just walking down a main street. You have to know exactly where to go to be offered drugs on the street. On the other hand, if the drugs were made completely legal, then you would buy packets of joints from the newsagents and there would be no reason for pushy drugs sales-people on the street corner.
It's only this current "halfway house" that seems to give us the worst of all possible results. I wonder if it's a deliberate ploy by the government to seem as tho' they're being liberal, whilst all the time knowing that the experiment will fail and they'll be forced to withdraw it.
It seems that the British summer started today. It'll no doubt be over by the weekend.
It's too hot to do anything constructive. I can't think straight. I just want to lie down in a darkened room and listen to Beth Orton records.
The weather in the UK isn't supposed to be like this. I like living in the UK because its weather is supposed to be grey all the time.
Maybe I was a vampire in a former life.
I use Galeon as my web browser of choice. It's a Gnome browser based on the same software as Mozilla.
Generally it's a really nice browser, but there's one thing that I seem to have broken. At some point in the past I configured it to not allow popup windows. That's generally a good idea, but there are a few sites that I need popups from - and I'm buggered if I can work out how to turn them back on again :(
Any advice gladly received.
Thanks to those nice people at Fotango I now have a nice new t-shirt with my South Park character on it.
Not entirely sure how this happened, but I seem to have become teetotal.
For many years I've had a habit of staying off alcohol for the month of January. This has met with varying degrees of success over recent years, but generally it's been getting easier. This year I barely noticed it and when February started I didn't find myself rushing out to drink that first pint. I think I went until the london.pm meeting on Feb 7th before I had a drink.
Over the next few months I was drinking, but I noticed that I was drinking less than I usually did. This, of course, started to lower my resistance to alcohol. This meant that on the occasions that I did drink a lot I was a) getting too drunk too quickly and b) suffering huge hangovers that lasted for days.
So a decision had to be made. Either I could increase my drinking to offset these effects or I could cut it right out. As I was also trying to lose some weight and alcohol is a fantastic source of calories, I chose the latter.
I believe that it was the 4th May that I had my last alcoholic drink - so I've been going for just over two months now. I don't feel fitter or healthier, but I am losing weight. And I really don't miss those hangovers.
Can't be anyone in the London NooMeeja scene without a blog. So here's mine.
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