Well we’re all sitting here waiting to see what kind of a mess is going to appear over the horizon. Actually I’m fairly hopeful. Given that it should be a lot harder for Bush to cheat in Florida this time it’ll be almost impossible for him to win, provided of course he doesn’t manage to get half the electorate excluded on charges of ‘being found in possession of curly black hair’ (with apologies to Not the Nine O’Clock News) or whatever dubiousness (sic) he’s got planned. Not that I’m really such a big Kerry fan – it’s pretty lily livered stuff after all – but the choice is, for any sane person anyway, pretty much a no brainer – on the one hand a rather un-charismatic, in fact boring, career politician with a track record of ‘playing politics’. On the other : Nuclear Satan on Drugs - the Coke Snorting Draft Dodger himself.

Actually I couldn’t give a stuff what drugs politicians take or used to take provided they’re not demanding tougher sentences for first time offenders whilst hoovering lines off the back’s of prostitutes and to be fair Bush has pretty consistently emphasised treatment and education over imprisonment. Plus I’m sure that things were damned tough in the Women’s Auxiliary Royal Canadian Moose Mounties – why should you be stymied for being a wee bit of a rat fink 30 years ago after all. I mean what were the choices – a) stand up for yourself and become a conscientious objector – fine but you’re NEVER going to have a career in public office in America, b) go to Vietnam and have every chance of coming to sticky end over what was pretty clearly even then a total disaster, or c) get Daddy to fix you up with a sinecure that obeys the letter of the law without any risk whatsoever of all that dangerous being shot at. Provided you don’t mind being a bit of a snivelling weed the last choice is clearly the best.

OK – having the nerve to then call John Kerry a coward and a cheat was pretty stomach churning (and if you believe the White House didn’t organise The SwiftVets then frankly you are a retard), but ultimately so what – druggy, snivelling and morally vacant – none of these were or are good reasons not to vote for someone – they’re irrelevant.

No in my opinion the reason you should vote against Bush is because he’s a raving lunatic whose policies will inevitably cause the social, political, economic and military annihilation of America and probably take most of the West with him. Stop this madman before it’s too late. And that’s all I have to say on the matter.

On the brighter side of things I’ve been struggling with Java all day and it’s driving me crazy. I’m no java programmer (or indeed programmer of any kind) but I need to use some apps which are only available in a java development environment. So I’ve installed netBeans, I’ve mounted my source files, I’ve declared my classpath (whatever!), I’ve located the relevant 3rd party files I need in the jakarta-tomcat directory, and can I make it all work??? Can I arse. Nothing happens – it’s all a big con. I’ve also spent a lot of time talking to the IS team about apache servers and port 8080 permissions and we’ve come up with a great technological solution to the other half of the problem. Rather than re-writing their permission scripts to give me access to the relevant directories one of them is going to come up to my office every morning and map a drive with their secret secret passwords to a someone else’s Solaris box which has access to the relevant server area. DOHHH! And of course because they haven’t got Python or Samba or something working properly this will have to happen every single day.

I’m just *so* not interested in technology. OK – I’m a bit interested. But I’m not in the slightest bit interested in the nuts and bolts – just in the ways humans use all of these playthings to complicate their lives even more. The mere sight of something along the lines of :

public void dumpResults(TologResultsSet results)
{
for (int i = 0; i < row =" results.getRow(i);" buf =" new" j =" 0;"> 0) buf.append(", ");
buf.append(results.getVar(j));
buf.append(" = ");
buf.append(row.get(j) instanceof Topic ?
((Topic)row.get(j)).getID() : row.get(j).toString());
}
System.out.println(buf.toString());
}

and I’m reaching for the smelling salts. It’s SO BORING. I know, I’m a blogger, I work (albeit tangentially) with computers – I’m supposed to eulogise these things, but I just can’t. I would love to be some nerdy swot banging on about threading in C++ and never getting laid but I just can’t be arsed to learn it all. Fortunately though that hasn’t held me back from the never getting laid bit.

In fact I think it’s pretty much a miracle that I’ve managed to stay awake thus far. Reminds me of the people I knew on my course at college. One of them had a silicon chip (8086 generation) earring. It was so ultimately tragic but he thought it was deeply cool. And being a big nerdy geek is sort of cool – once you’ve accepted your inner nob all you have to do is let it all hang out and you can climb the ranks of university physicsy computery spod-hood with immunity. Wear enormous scuffed white trainers 100% of the time : check. Unappealing straggly shoulder length hair : check, flapping thrift store overcoat : check. And then of course once your basic numptiness has been established you can develop special powers : Only be ever seen in a variety of difference Dr Who jumpers : check. Hang around outside the Senior Common Room attempting to engage Dr Sandford in a conversation about X-Ray crystllography : check. Gaffer tape all of your remotes to a piece of 2 by 4 so you don’t ever lose any of them : check, check, check.

Actually that reminds me :-

Q. What do you get if you cross a cow with a pig?
A. N^Sin? Cow Pig