Now, a campaign to overturn the Act’s deadly Section 5 has brought together an unlikely coalition of Right and Left politicians, libertarians and social conservatives, under the inviting banner: “Feel free to insult me”.

The challenge is to do so more amusingly, more cuttingly but not necessarily more coherently than late night Arnald.

Have at it.

Which sorta makes me a scientist.

Yes, I know, more a comment on low barriers to entry than anything else.

But I find that this paper has been cited. Here.

Worstall, T. (2011). The case against a financial transactions tax. Institute of Economic Affairs. London: Institute of Economic Affairs.

OK, so it looks like a Master’s thesis more than anything else. And it’s from hte Alma Mater to boot and we all know how the old boy’s network operates.

But does this count as a “real” citation and if it does does this mean I iz a real scientist now?

That Lords committee (and yes, thank you Arnald, I do now get your little joke, it’s rather better than I had at first assumed) on the FTT. I’ve seen the written evidence, indeed have linked to it.

Yet there’s some mention of their quoting me (as Mr. Forbes apparently) in their actual report. And I’ve looked at the committee page and cannot actually see their report: only the written and oral evidence.

So, anyone got a link to that report where they do quote me?

“This American Life” has raised questions about the adaptation of AGONY/ECSTASY we created for their program. Here is my response:

I stand by my work. My show is a theatrical piece whose goal is to create a human connection between our gorgeous devices and the brutal circumstances from which they emerge. It uses a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license to tell its story, and I believe it does so with integrity.

What’s known as the “I speak of the larger truth, not your mere facts” defence.

And, to be fair, in a piece of theatre it’s a perfectly acceptable defence. Indeed, that’s pretty juch what writing any form of fictional narrative is about, manipulating events so as to create that coherent story that is being aimed at.

It’s just not journalism though, it’s not an accurate description of reality and shouldn’t be treated as such. But it was, and that’s the problem.

If you search for “Apple Boycott” (with or without the quote marks) on Google the first piece that comes up is “Apple Boycott: People Are Spouting Nonsense about Chinese Manufacturing”.

The second is “The Apple Boycott Graphically Explained”.

These two pieces, umm, by me, are about the absurdity of the complaints over the conditions there.

These results come in ahead of the pages actually trying to organise a boycott of Apple.

This drives certain types into rage which is all very amusing. And I know of their rage because they write to me and tell me so.

I’m even being accused of “seeding Google” when actually all I did was write a piece and then people tweeted it. Which is actually how the system is supposed to work, isn’t it?

And I failed to check the train times: on Saturdays there are not trains from Freiberg to Dresden every 20 minutes, no, there’s one at 5.09 and one at 7.09. That latter not quite getting me to the airport in time.

So crack of sparrow fart it was again. And for some reason there’s no hot water in the flat that early in the morning……grumble, moan, whine…..

Which is going to arrive/leave from platorm 3. So I am on platform 3.

The station has 6 platforms. Number 6 is by the exit, and is reached by stairway 1. Numbers 5/4 (different ends of the same platform) and 3 are reached by stairway 2.

Platforms 1 and 2 are reached by stairway 3.

So, does the Hamburg Express arrive/leave from platform three, as the listings, my ticket and the station announcements all say? No, of course it doesn’t, silly. It leaves from platform 1 which is above stairway 3.

When I talk to the train conductor (who is having a quick breath of fresh air at the halt and this being an international train yes, he speaks English) he says yes, Platform 3 means up stairway 3, not anything as stupid as what is actually marked as platform 3.

Dang, why are the English so dim? Are you a conservative or something?

Ho hum. And that is today’s news from parts foreign.

Weather for Freiberg, Germany

-11°C | °F

Mon

Tue

Wed

Thu

Clear

Wind: E at 11 km/h

Humidity: 38%

-11°

-20°

-11°

-15°

-7°

-20°

-2°

-17°

Amazingly, I’ve decided not to walk 5 km along the road to go and look a second hand cars today.

It is entirely possible to be “an arrogant jerk with an ego complex the size of Texas” and still know what you are talking about.

Are you a ‘hate reader’?

Tell us if you deliberately read articles you know you’ll dislike, just so you can take issue with them

One of my posts at Forbes has been tweeted by that nice Mr. Fry to his 3. something million followers.

This one.

It’ll be interesting to see the end result….especially given that I’m paid on traffic over there.

dear tim,

your writing is terrible. please stop writing. do not reply.

best wishes,
M

I rather hope that it’s not this Michael Barbazette:

Michael Barbazette

Primary/Secondary Education Professional

Greater Chicago Area
Primary/Secondary Education

Past

SES Tutor at The Princeton Review
Tutor at UNO Charter School Network

Education

DePaul University

For if it were he must have been emailing at 3, 4 am. When all good little education professionals should either be in bed or in charge of their capitals.

I know have a useless 1 GB memory card and a 2GB in the machine, courtesy of the little shop around the corner. Fortunately, as is true all over the world, computer nerds speak English.

So I’ve now 1 GB of free RAM with Windows, Vodafopne, Firefox etc running in hte 1 GB they were all taking up before. For €25 which is a bloody liberty I tell ‘ee. Why I remember when that upgrade to 640 kb was a big and expensive deal…..mumbles into his grey beard and falls asleep at the table drooling in senescence…

I’ve got a new little netbook to travel with. And the little bastard just keeps running out of memory.

I’m already running Firefox without downloading images. And that seems to take 250 MB or so of the 1GB RAM available.

As far as I can tell cache is set  to 4096. I really shouldn’t be having Firefox repeatedly crashing as out of memory.

However, poking around and looking at system resources etc I seem to have something which is demanding 600-700 MB just as normal usage. I am running the Vodafone internet acess through a pen app. But that shouldn’t take up that much. And, looking in the apps running window of Task Manager, that is all I’m running, windoes and the Vodafone app.

So, err, where’s all the memory gone? And why isn’t some of it going to cache etc?

In short, how do I get a system that doesn’t keep falling over for being out of memory?

So, update. Looking at task manager as this thing is right now.

Firefox, 120 MB.

Mobile broadband, 39 MB

Exploer 15, Plugin Container 12 and nothing else over 5 MB.

And yet something is using 800 MB and change altogether.

1013 Physical Memory, 150 cached, 214 available and 71 free.

814 MB in use according to resource manager.

And I’m beginning to get an inkling of an idea: l;ast time it fell over I had a look there and there was 300 MB or so “modified” rather than in use or free.

So what’s doing that “modified” bit then?

For what does happen is that it’s fine from a cold start and then a few hours later it falls over (it makes Firefox fall over that is) until I cold start it again. So is there some process filling up memory?

Oh, and using AVG not Norton and AVG is pretty light itself isn’t it?

Update 2:

“Oh that’s a point, the standard Windows look-as-stupid-as-a-Mac interface uses up shitloads of GPU, and if your little netbook hasn’t got much of a GPU, that’ll slow it to a crawl, so turn that off and use the standard XP type theme.”

Erm, OK, how?

Today is the day to buy a desk and a chair! Woo Hoo!

More typing when I don’t have to sit on the floor to do it.

I know this street very well. Used to work in one of the restaurants you can see up on the high pavement, at another just up the little alleyway there. Bought my flat from the estate agents you can see (upside down, when the altercation is going on) at the other end of the street.

Indeed, my flat is a whole 100 yards or so up that alleyway.

And yes, that is the A4 that she’s parked her car on.

Dunno who the bird from Ulster is but I’m sure Mr. Luke, if he should care to comment, can tell us which shop it is she has in that area.

I did everything right of course, I’ve done this turn up in a new country and get organised thing before. You’ve no references, no contacts, no credit record, but you’ve got to find a flat, rent it, get the phones in, all that stuff. The secret is to have cash. When the estate agent says, well, how do we know you’ll pay the rent, just pay the rent in advance. In printed spondoolies. Works every time.

Pretty much everything else works the same way (except, in Germany, weirdly, the banks. You’ve got to get your rental contract signed off by the town hall before you can have a bank account. This can only be done on Tuesday afternoons. I got the rental contract on Wednesday morning. Ho hum).

The other thing you have to do of course is find a good bartender. They know everything. You solve one set of problems one day and then, supping a pint or two at the cocktail hour, ply the barmaid with questions about how you do this, or where the cheap furniture shop is, or the method of providing parking spaces.

Which is where I learnt that eastern Germany just doesn’t have laundrettes. Apparently.

Just odd.

Cut and paste doesn’t work, the formatting gets lost.

Printing to a .prn file does something I know not what.

So, err, how do I get Table 2 into a form that I can stick into blogging software?

Technologically ignorant middle aged man would like to meet geek……..

Excellent, OK, thanks, I have this now. And, err, with the near dozen versions I now have it appears that this blog is better than the Geek Squad…..

If you’ve got an old desktop computer with as little as 348MB of RAM, it could be fun and useful again with the help of Jolicloud.

As little as 384 MB of RAM?

Dang, I still recall the day my XT was upgraded to 640 kb.