17 July 2007: Fraud

Saints Takeover Exposed As Fraud

In new Saints developments this morning, it was finally exposed that the forthcoming "massively big" takeover of Saints by a mystery consortium was, in fact, a load of old bunkum.

It turned out the consorts were actually a combination of failed local businessmen: Barry Beardall, a convicted fraudster, Barry Brylcream, the slick-haired 'face man' of the operation and Barry Beegee, a local karaoke star. The three of them nicked a Dubai flag from a Dubai-registered container ship down at Dock Gate 20 and announced via The Saints Forum that they were a major international consortium going to take over. Sheik Hn'vac, an Arab rich guy who made his money in the carpet trade, was rumoured to be the 'Mr Big Money Bags' backer, a man who would allegedly "bring the freshness back" to the club.

Unfortunately, after a tip off from Saints' own undercover journalist superstar Richard Chorley, the police raided several football clubs yesterday, including some annoying little blue team down the road, and as a result of the investigations, the "Barry Buyout" was exposed as being a con.

As a result, the British government have expelled four Russian diplomats and Foreign Secretary David "Steve" Miller Band said that unless the Russian government extradited Barry Blabbingov (the unofficial spokesperson who initially contacted The Saints Forum) then the deal could not go ahead. The Echo picked up on the story too, and it soon became clear to everyone here that the whole thing was a hoax and there were no carpet barons and race horses about to mount a hostile takeover at St Mary's.

However, it still appears there are a few small bids on the table, seemingly from (1) Barry Souness (2) Barry Londonbusinessman and (3) Barry Lowe. Barry 'Cillit Bang' Scott was unavailable for loud, pointless comments.

11 July 2007: Rumblings

Well, the rumours continue and seem to be gathering a little pace, so I'd better post about it now so that at least I have a chance of saying "I told you so" if it does actually materialise...

Yes, it's Southampton Football Club yet again, no longer to be bought out by Paul 'Microsoft Founder' Allen, but instead by another mysterious consortium. The Saints Forum has had a humorously long-running thread series dedicated to the 'imminent takeover' of the club since the PLC first officially went into 'Bid Situation' status back in April on the Stock Exchange (the previous incarnation of the thread was called 'Now That's What I Call A Takeover Thread Volume Nine') but now the thread title is 'Woo Hoo the last takover thread.........hopefully'.

This thread is largely a one-upmanship discussion between those who are 'In The Know' (ITK) and those of us who are mere mortals. Interestingly, though, in this case those who are ITK seem to be quite normal, regular posters on the boards and indeed have claimed that the papers (well, the Daily Echo, if that counts) have a bunch of information on the imminent takeover and will publish as soon as given the ok by the incoming masters. Who, incidentally, WILL be coming whatever the current board do. The Paul Allen deal reputedly fell through because the executive directors said they'd only walk if they were given a full 18-month payoff (including the guy who just became a director last week - how convenient, Mr Oldknow!) but this one is to be a hostile takeover from what I can gather.

Anyway, the normal rumours and rumblings abound, usually stating an announcement will be forthcoming in about two or three days from now (this is what could be termed a 'rolling announcement' - it's always two or three days in the future), but hey, maybe things will actually happen sometime soon and the announcement that will "rock the footballing world" will occur. I'm not excited particularly, more bemused, and certainly seeing Gareth Bale and (fairly certainly) Chris Baird head off in order to balance the books has got to make you wonder if it isn't just someone's imagination.

Still, who knows? If it doesn't happen, at least I'll be able to deflect attention by blogging about graduation and root beer.

Footnote: Outside the bubble of The Saints Forum, the rest of the world laughs loudly: alternative (=rougher) messageboard 'The Ugly Inside' features a goodly number of threads ridiculing the whole process and describing it as a group hallucination. ForeverSaints, originally set up to mock TSF's predecessor 'SaintsForever', features threads introducing pictures such as the one above, which looks quite a good idea to me: a large rollercoaster is probably a better right-back option than Ostlund, and the giant ugly 'Ted Bates' statue and his enormous left fist hanging over opposition left-midfielders is bound to scare them... I can just see it thumping down on the poor wingers, week after week.

6 July 2007: Dear Aunt

It seems the Norway post stirred the happy debate concerning PCs and Macs: not the debate as to which one you should use, but the debate over the best reason for choosing a Mac. The above video is one of the more compelling pieces of evidence.

Personally I'm still not a Maccer just yet, partly because as a developer it's something of a requirement to make sure stuff works on a PC since most of the world uses one, and partly because I actually find half my time working on Linux anyway and I'm very happy with that. My problem with Linux is that I can't - or at least couldn't some two years ago at last attempt - use it for mlb.tv because (1) the Linux version of RealPlayer looked like a very poor attempt at a hack that barely worked and (2) mlb.tv dropped RealPlayer in favour of Windows Media format anyway shortly after.

Best plan might be to get an AS/400 and do everything in RPG or COBOL, outputting the baseball results on punch cards. Just have to make sure the punching machine didn't get RSI from constantly having to output "Chipper Jones injured again". Honestly, it's nearly as bad as when Graeme Le Saux 'played' for Saints.

28 June 2007: Bravely

What was that I said in my last blog about Tim Henman?

"My tip? Expect Tim to lose, bravely, later this week."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/tennis/6244822.stm

If you want the rest of the results before they happen, you'll have to pay me. Cheques payable to "The Wise Man In the Ninja E-Defence Grotto" please.

26 June 2007: Tennis

Bizarre sight here on Level 4 a few minutes ago. I was meandering through the lab and was suddenly faced by a whole slew of people walking out of the coffee room and back to their desks, all smiling.

Turns out they'd had the Wimbledon coverage on in the coffee room and they'd just witnessed Tim Henman winning his first-round match against Carlos Moya, an epic five-set battle eventually won 13-11 by Henman this afternoon after it just got too dark last night to finish the game.

"He won!" exclaimed one happy IAMer.

Of course he did. It's round one. Even though Timmy's powers are definitely waning, he's still a better tennis player than me, you or most of the rest of the world. He's a better player right now, for instance, than Jeremy Bates was at his peak, or Mark Petchey, or any of the other nonentity players we used to cheer wildly for as they bravely lost in the second round or, maybe once in their careers, played with real heart and incredible luck to make it through to the fourth round. And it seems to me that the optimism and excitement shown today much more closely mirrors those good ol' days than the last ten or twelve years when we've had at least one (always male) player with a not-totally-unrealistic shot at actually winning the thing.

My tip? Expect Tim to lose, bravely, later this week.

My reason for meandering through the lab, incidentally, was to do with the still-tight deadline for graduating this year. Despite getting the amended thesis back from the bindery and actually handing it in, the process remains every-so-slightly incomplete as Dr Les, my internal examiner, still hadn't (as of this morning) handed over the necessary paperwork to the admin folks. So a quick chat with Dr Les (during which he assured me - and I repeat this for reasons of public record - that he will get it done before he leaves today) and that was, hopefully, that.

Meaning not only will the visiting relatives from the US be able to see me graduate this year (passports pending...) but I'll also be in the same graduation ceremony as my second bunch of students to whom I had the joy of teaching programming. Their results came out on Friday and showed a slew of 2.1s but just one first-class honours degree being awarded: congratulations to Kerry, and indeed to the rest of them.

25 June 2007: Norwegian Blue

This was the scene from the lakehouse in Hamar over in Norway. Not bad, especially considering the sunset lasts a good three hours at this time of year.

We were there a week ago but today's the first chance I've had to blog about it, what with visiting IBM for three days of ITA stuff, racing to get the thesis signed off and to the bindery in time to graduate this year (it's looking hopeful for Thursday's deadline - Dr Les said 'ok' and the bindery said 'we'll turn it around in two days if you give us lots of money'). Not to mention the laptop dying over the weekend, of which more anon.

Norway first: we went as Gloria's college buddy Kelly met and married this nice (and very tall) gentleman named Vegar, a Tolkein-loving Norwegian. They were married in Texas back in December (and we were there for that ceremony), but decided to wait for the good weather in Norway (about three days of the year, I gather) to hold their 'blessing' ceremony - like a wedding, but with the vows in the past (past-continuous I suppose) tense. So over we went, paying £160 for 2 return train tickets from Southampton to Stansted and £20 for two return flights from Stansted to Norway (there's a time, incidentally, where irony over prices is overtaken by sheer bewilderment at the price differential). Flew into "Oslo (Torp)", which is naturally nowhere near Oslo (it's like having an airport named London (Manchester)), bussed and railed it through the capital and a couple of hours north to Hamar, not far from Lillehammer (of Winter Olympics fame), and stayed with Kelly's family in a gorgeous lakeside cabin affording the almost continuous sunset view above. Celebrations all went well of course, and there are more photos online at: http://www.duncmcrae.com/norway.html if you'd like to take a look.

Back home, of course, things were a little crazy. The stupidly-large eucalyptus tree is now gone from the garden (due, I'm happy to report, to tree surgery rather than high winds - photos also available at the above link); the car engine no longer smokes; the thesis is signed off and at the bindery and the laptop is, well, currently undergoing a form of therapy known locally as "a complete reinstall of Windows because Microsoft, Intel and Dell can't get their act together".

The reason? Try a Google search on: ialmrnt "infinite loop" and find a nasty problem to do with graphics cards, driver updates and the Blue Screen Of Death, a problem about which Dell support seem (from these sites) to be in continuous denial. All I did was allow Windows Update to perform a driver update for me, which it duly did, and naturally asked to restart the computer. When it did, it started ok, let me log in, but as it was running through its startup script (and before it gave me the chance to open anything), up popped (ever so briefly) the BSOD, and the computer then immediately restarted. Logged in again, waited 10 seconds, there's the flash of Blue Screen and reboot. And again. And again.

Eventually I got the camera out and started trying to snap the message on the blue screen before it vanished. After about eight attempts I got this, and discovered that something nasty was going on with this ialmrnt thing causing an infinite loop. The solution? Roll back the driver! Of course! Except the computer reboots itself before I can do anything, and good ol' Dell/Windows/whomever is responsible for such things have elected not to give me a "start up in safe mode" option (of course, that itself may not have worked either, but it would have been nice to try).

So out came the Windows XP disk, let's try rescuing this Windows installation. Well - it worked, kind of: a whole slew of "missing DLL" error boxes came up in the process, but eventually (and very slowly) it did let me back in to Windows. Of course, the Wireless connection threw lots of errors and Internet Explorer and many other things were totally corrupted; so all there is to do is to back up all the nice photos from Norway on to a safe place (thankfully the CD writer was still operational) and attempt a total format-and-reinstall-and-do-it-again-from-scratch. Currently the format operation is at 23% - maybe it will finish in time for a spot of lunch.

Or dinner, at this rate.

Vegar is right: PC bad, Mac good. Or maybe Macs are just as bad, they just look better when they fail?

10 June 2007: Doctor

Very little time to blog this morning as we're off to London on the yes-you-can-actually-go-to-London-for-one-pound Megabus. And the eucalyptus tree is to start being chopped down this morning so I need to get some photos of that before it goes to remember just how disproportionally huge it is compared to the garden and house we're currently renting.

But it's probably important to note a milestone event in this AKTing Lark which took place on Friday morning, a 'viva voce' meeting between three professors and myself at which, subject to minor revisions, my thesis was successfully defended (somewhat vigorously at a couple of points) and thus I became Doctor Duncan. Got to turn the whole thing round and get the final hard-bound versions handed in by June 26 in order to graduate this year, but the wonders of email, word-processing and laser printing mean this is actually a relatively simple process, give or take going to London/London/Norway (as is happening this week, and yes London is deliberately mentioned in that list twice).

I'm not totally sure of the implications of this successful outcome for the rest of my life but graduation will take place at a ceremony on 23 July, at which I expect to receive my Tardis.

Happy days!

Postscript: What kind of dictionary does Blogger use such that the spellcheck function doesn't recognise 'Tardis'?