So then, the work laptop…

Right, working from home today was actually not bad, and I’m settling into the new job, bits I need to learn and speed up on, but overall, not bad at all.

Of course, the advantage of working from home is I get to bring home the work laptop. The only problem with the work laptop is it’s about two years old and my predecessor had been using it heavily. With no maintenance routine or temp file clearout. Let’s here it for an 18Gb hard drive with 3.5Gb of temp files and 0.98Gb free space, shall we? Oh, and shall we look at the defragment report and see it’s more red than blue Way more red than blue.

Still, it’s chuckling along nicely with some maintenence routines, and I’ve got time now to see what else is loaded on it. Given it’s a marketing and print design firm within the IT sector…

Hmm, shall we hear it for a fully registered and legit copy of Adobe CS2. I think we shall.

Now, can anyone point me towards some basic level tutorials for text based gif animations in either ImageReady or PhotoShop? Because, y’know, I could google, but there are far too many decent icon makers out there reading this already, so I thought I’d ask…

On the subject of cool icons, I yoinked this one from earlier, innit cool?

Daddy or Chips

Following on from this discussion, I can has poll!

On the subject of polls, best poll ever?

Brown’s reshuffle–we got it right!

OK then, I’ve taken a screenshot of the final state of play in our predictions poll and compared it to El Gordo’s new team

What we got right

Margaret Beckett: 47.4% said Out! (and good riddance–why were the media surprised?)
Charlie Falconer: 88.9% said Out!
Jack Straw: 78.9% said Change job, he’s been promoted to Lord Chancellor (how will he sit on the Wool Sack?
Alan Johnson: He’s changed (55.6%) to Health–interesting.
David Miliband: Yup, changed (61.1%) to be the youngest Foreign Secretary for, well, a few decades. I suspect he’ll keep the dull blog though.
Patricia Hewitt: Yup, 66.7% said Out!
Peter Hain: Changed (52.6%) to Work and Pensions, although he does keep Wales (wonder what’ll annoy more, keeping Hain or the Plaid/Labour coalition deal?
Alistair Darling:82.4% said change, and he’s ended up in Gordon’s old job.
Hilary Benn: Yup, changed (68.4%) to DeFRA
Hazel Blears: We were forced to accept she’d not (55.6%) be Out!(38.9%) and is instead now to be Minister for telling the local councils what to do and listening in a patronising manner to all those awful self-appointed “community leaders”.  I feel sorry for the councillors, but the other part of her brief may see some fireworks.
Jacqui Smith: Big surprise here; we said change (56.2%)–as Brown’s team were expected to all get promotions, but there was no way I’d have expected a jump from most junior Cabinet Minister all the way to Home Secretary.  Yowsers!  One to watch.

What we got wrong

Baroness Amos: 72.2% said Stay–she has in fact been appointed EU ambassador to Africa
Des Browne: We said change job (50.0%), but all that’s really happened is he’s gained the Scotland brief, which is fairly irrelevant–wonder if he’ll ring or call?
Douglas Alexander: We said stay (47.1%) in Transport, but he’s taken Benn’s old job in IntDev
John Hutton: We said stay in Work and Pensions, he’s moved to the renamed DTi/Board of Trade/Ministry for Red Tape
Stephen Timms: We said change job (75.0%), instead in a surprise move he’s Out! (0.0%) Weird, thought Brown liked him

What we couldn’t decide

Ruth Kelly: She’s changed job (47.4%) to Transport, but an equal number of us expected her out (47.4%). Wishful thinking there I suspect, but still, I can’t directly see how her insane lunacy directly creates a conflict of interest, unlike her previous two roles.
Tessa Jowell: Um, yeah, we actually got this 100% correct, but only by changing the definitions. She’s Out! of the Cabinet (36.8%), has changed job (21.1%) to London and the South East but has also remained (42.1%) Olympics minister. Weird.

So, overall, 11 correct predictions, 5 wrong, 2 undecideds.  Given that this has been described as “Night of the long knives II” by some, and is definitely the biggest reshuffle in my memory, that’s not at all bad.

So, tell me LJ brain trust, what do we want to decide next?

---

Which reminds me, ? Don’t suppose by any chane you could update the icon for me?

Voice Post:-The internet is down

Paging the palaeontologists

Via , Palaeos Vertebrates: Glossary Ta - Th:

Thagomizer: this started out as a Far Side joke, but has now more or less become a part of the serious anatomical literature. The thagomizer is the, otherwise difficult to describe, collection of spikes at the end of a stegosaurid’s tail. It is named after the late Thag

Is that for real?

Boots, the beach, and “nice” weather

I am, naturally, disgusted at this Boots advert. Not, as it happens, because it sends the message that women need to look good to get a man. Nor because it perpetuates the conformity agenda, and also not because it says women are the problem. It does of course send all of these messages, but that’s not the biggest problem. The biggest problem?

It portrays beach culture as healthy

And that’s a really bad thing. It’s getting to that time of year when thousands, nay, millions of idiots will flcok tot he beach in an attempt to ‘get a tan’ and ‘look healthy’. Bullshit.

Those of you that have met me will know that I don’t look my age. I look, in fact, about 8 years younger than I actually am (whenever someone asks my age I ask them to guess it first, I’ve had as young as 21 within the last 6 months). Any guesses as to why? It’s because I’m in a huge skin cancer risk group. I’ve known this since I was 12, a long time before my mother had to have many operations to remove non-malignant melanomas. Skin cancer is a growing threat, especially with the ozone depletion, but it’s always been a problem. But even if you don’t get a cancer, by tanning constantly you dry and prematurely age your skin, you look much older much faster. So I look younger than others my age, becaue I’ve not really tanned my skin since I was a young teen.

Yes, I’d rather like it if people in senior positions didn’t treat me like a kid on a regular basis, but y’know what? There’s a little bit of me that likes being underestimated because of my “youthful” appearance. Because the reality is my appearance is fairly natural; it’s the sun-seekers who’ve aged too quickly, not me. Up until her mid-thirties, my mother was very attractive (seriously). After that, she started aging very quickly. Why? Perpetually brown skin, much sun tanning. Prematurely aged, and eventually gave her skin cancer. Having a deathly white palour is bad for you, this I know. But more than a little exposure is such a really bad idea. Do yourself a favour, don’t buy the boots products to “look gorgeous for the beach”. There are many ways to enjoy yourself near the coast; I grew up in a coastal resort. Sunning yourself isn’t a good one.

A sun tan’ll kill you

And on that happy note, I’ll turn in for the night, great first day at work today, here’s hoping it continues.

Now, is this the post of a caring boyfriend?

I said:

Loads of politics posts in a row. Time for some frivolity methinks…

The problem being that I’ve had a bit of a ‘meh’ day and can’t summon the inclination to be frivolous; folder full of fun links but can’t be arsed to sort them. Had a quick drink with earlier but even that and the walk there & back wasn’t working. Then, to top it all, Jennie posted an entry entitled Woe!:

I have teh pain. I have never had appendicitis, but this is what I would imagine appendicitis to feel like, and it’s in the right place… [info]ginasketch, however, assures me that I am not, in fact, dying of appendicitis, so if I DO die you can all blame her. Stupid hurty innards. :(

Which naturaly got me all worried in a caring boyfriend kinda way, and got many people to comment with various medical suggestions. Then she commented to tell me to check the edit…

ETA: OTOH, maybe five hours of pain and discomfort was just leading up to the world’s longest and loudest fart… Oh dear. *blush*

Laugh? I surely did. Darlin? Love you, you seem to be able to cheer me up in many different ways.

I’m in a good mood again now. Not a good enough mood to figure out whether I loved or hated Doctor Who, but still, the meh funk has gone…

Harman wins by playing the system better

I said:

I hope for Johnson, but think Harman has a strong chance, and she made a blatent play for Cruddas’s second prefs near the end,

And after the results are called, we see that:

Electoral college results

Candidate	1st round	2nd round	3rd round	4th round	5th round
Hilary Benn	16.40%	18.22%	22.33%
Hazel Blears	11.77%
Jon Cruddas	19.39%	20.39%	23.89%	30.06%
Peter Hain	15.32%	16.42%
Harriet Harman	18.93%	21.23%	25.88%	33.58%	50.43%	ELECTED
Alan Johnson	18.16%	23.74%	27.90%	36.35%	49.56%

Her blatant grab for his support worked like a charm. Cruddas won the first round, but barely picked up any second preferences, Johnson was picking up more until close to the end, when Harman then jumped ahead with Jon’s votes. Interesting times it seems. Lots of people on the Labour blogs bitching about the voting system, one even said it was “stalinist”. To me it remains the best way of determining a result acceptable to all, allows for multiple candidates rather than requiring a stitch up before the actual vote and is invaluable in a close contest, as this undoubtedly was. It also shows that Harman knew to play for second and third preferences a lot more than others, apparently internal canvassing wasn’t asking for preferences at wll–and the media constantly referring to it as a “complicated” system was really annoying me throughout.

But most important aspect: Blears last place on barely 11% of the vote. Labour members renew my faith in humanity a little with that one, word has it there was a massive cheer when her elimination was announced.

Loads of politics posts in a row. Time for some frivolity methinks…

So then, Tony’s off soon

Tim at was working on this one for a bit, thought I’d already posted it but must’ve forgotten. His breakdown of the dramatis personae is rather good as well. The basic theme we could’ve been anything that we wanted to be pretty much does sum up this Govt; so many lost opportunities, broken promises, half hearted efforts and poorly thought through responses. Ah well. Enjoy:

The ever excellent sums it ups nicely:

But with all his talent - and public goodwill - Tony Blair really could have been anything that he wanted to be, really could have been up there with Clem, Sir Winnie and the Iron Lady.

ETA: I thought I had better say it before someone else does:

There’s is an awkward clash on the TV schedules tonight. On one channel at 7PM there’s a programme about an evil meglomaniac who gets himself elected prime minister for his own nefarious purposes, while at the same time on the other side it’s “Doctor Who”.

Very droll.

Brown’s Cabinet–Who stays, who goes?

Righty ho–I said I was going to do this, but, y’know, life got in the way. So, of the current Cabinet, Blair and Prescott are retiring, and Reid says he doesn’t want another cabinet job. Leaving a huge list of other people, of varying degrees of talent. Some of them I have a grudging respsct for, some I think are crap, some inspire intense loathing on site and a few, well, I’d not even heard of them–if I’ve not heard of a Cabinet level minister, let’s hear it for Nonentities R Us, right? Following on from Paul Linford’s list of a real “government of all the talents?”, I give you a poll^[1].

Remember you can not tick a box for someone if you’ve never actually heard of them or have no real opinion, and this is a question of who’s likely to be there, not who we want in/out. For example, I suspect Blears has secured herself a plum job, despite the visceral hatred many of us have for her, and I’m guessing Ruth Kelly will survive despite obvious unsuitability for her various recent roles–I really hope Brown moves her to a job without a clear conflict of interest though:

I’ll pimp this poll about a bit, let’s see how good LJ is at predicting El Gordo’s actions…

---

[1] If you don’t have a livejournal account but blog elsewhere, you can log in to LJ using any OpenID, including your technorati or typekey profile or your wordpress.com account and still vote in polls &c–not a bad little trick