OK, I admit, I definitely haven't been keeping up with a post per day. In fact, since my last one, I haven't even come up with any self-indulgent crap that wasn't worth publishing.

What I have done though, is left my employer of the last two years, Distilled. A hard decision, and I'm leaving behind a cracking place to work, and some really good friends (though obviously I'll try and stay in touch with them), but such is life. My new job is moving away from being a developer (truth be told, I haven't been enjoying that side of my job for a while), and as of Monday 22nd November, I'm going to be a system administrator. Which is nice.

I did have a bucket load of browser tabs open, ready for bloggage, although after almost two weeks, I was planning on making it mostly a "here's more interesting things, go read", but my macbook crashed on me, and for some reason chrome couldn't recover my browsing session as it usually does {insert swears about the laptop that "just works" right up to the point where it "just doesn't"}. I'm not going to point any fingers, but I was trying out the new free Sophos OS X anti-virus. Possibly/probably a co-incidence, but I'll be uninstalling it anyway.

Of the things I can remember though, here are a couple of links. I should warn you, this is probably going to be a bit ranty from here, so consider yourself fairly warned.

The #TwitterJokeTrial and the #IAmSpartacus re-tweet-a-thon which followed the most recent appeal, which was lost. Clearly, the original tweet

"Crap! Robin Hood airport is closed. You've got a week and a bit to get your shit together otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!!"

(and yes, I have re-tweeted t myself, as well as several variations/similarly themed tweets) could, and indeed should, have been dealt with by the police visiting Paul Chambers, and saying something along the lines of "yes, we know it's clearly not a real threat, and yes, you do have the right to say what you want, but maybe it's a bit silly to talk of blowing up airports, as it does have to be checked out, and it's a bit of a waste of our time and yours". Graham Linehan has a good post commenting on it, much better than I could come up with, entitled "Prague, 1965" (hey, maybe that's why he's a writer, and I'm not ;-p )

Want to drag a woman half your size across the floor, then throw her onto the concrete floor of a room head first, and be cleared on appeal? Join the police.

A couple of weeks ago now, Tom Harris, the Labour MP tweeted

"Just read the Telegraph's splash. Any minister who puts civil liberties ahead of security should be in student politics, not government."

You'll forgive me if I throw in some Thomas Jefferson here? I don't suppose you have a choice to be honest ;-)

"I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it."

I wonder if Tom Harris MP would rather have all of his incoming and outgoing telephone calls monitored by someone, just in case.
After all, terrorists use telephones, therefore anybody with a telephone should be a suspect.

I wonder if Tom Harris MP would mind if I open and read all of his post, incoming and outgoing, just in case.
After all, terrorists must send letters back and forth, therefore anybody who sends a letter must be a suspect.
I wonder if Tom Harris MP would consider it fine to have all of his internet browsing history recorded and published for the public record.
After all, terrorists use the Internet, so to ensure the security of everyone, isn't the logical conclusion that everyone's browsing history be published?

To steal some words from the now departed Labour government, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. According to theyworkforyou.com, Tom Harris MP voted "moderately against a transparent Parliament." I wonder what he's hiding, and what he has to fear there? Not hiding anything? Really? Then how about making parliament totally transparent. Maybe also try to remember that MPs are the servants of the general public, not the masters.

Mind you, we all know what MPs think of privacy. When coming up with a database to store details and information on every child under the age of eighteen (Contactpoint), our MPs also decided that their own children's information could be "shielded".

I love the smell of hypocrisy in the morning, smells like government.