Last time he lost a vote, Blair threw his toys out of the pram, then said he’d not lost his authority. Yet, despite having a Parliamentary majority of sixty-six MPs, he still can’t get legislation through Parliament.

Let’s break this down. Mr Blair leads 356 MPs. There are only 290 other MPs. Yet Mr Blair can’t get legislation through Parliament. As much as I happen to agree with the fact that this particular legislation is completely useless, it cannot be denied that Mr Blair is losing his authority.

No doubt Mr Blair will make a big deal of the fact that he only lost by one vote. But that means that at least sixty-seven of the people he ‘leads’ voting against him. That’s nearly 20% of the Parliamentary party. And not only did he lose, he’s so out-of-touch with his own party that he thought the legislation would fly through, and didn’t even bother voting himself. Now that’s losing authority.

For those of you, like me, who are having difficulty coming to terms with the fact that the seventh season of the West Wing will be the last, you may be heartened to know that today’s G2 has a couple of articles (here and here) about the show’s demise. And me being somewhat behind, it means I still have 36 episodes still to go. But with 118 gone already, that’s no so comforting.

There’s rumours flying around all over the place, though, that the final episode will give a proper send-off to the late John Spencer, which would be right and fitting. Some would says it’s too late, and that the show should have ended when Sorkin left, but I say The West Wing still can die with dignity. Let’s hope it does.

Two years ago today, Bill Gates promised he would rid the email world of spam within two years.  18 emails I’ve received today says he’s failed.  Unless, of course, “teen girls get anally violated” and “Very sad German statistics say in average” don’t count as spam, for some reason.  Luckily, I have Reg to back me up on this one.  He’s failed miserably.  Let’s all point and laugh.  (via)

The software that powers this very site, WordPress, is three years old today. I’ve been using it for over a third of its lifespan now (there’s a scary thought), and for my needs, it’s the best blogging software I’ve come across. I can’t give a full and completely fair review of every blogging tool out there, but as a previous user of three, I can offer some (possibly outdated) opinions on those.

The good ol’ days of The LBSC were powered by Movable Type. Admittedly, I’m commenting on an old version of Movable Type, and that’s not entirely fair, but I didn’t particularly like it. It’s an incredibly powerful tool, but just somewhat over-powerful, and not terribly easy-to-use. It’s not particularly pretty, either. But the main thing which stopped me using the Movable Type software over here is that it seemed incredibly difficult to install, and it’s emphasised that no support is offered for the free version. Given that I originally hoped to have multiple authors on here, too, Movable Type had a financial disincentive compared with other blogging tools.

As a complete novice, I was taken in by Blogger. This is designed as an incredibly simple blogging tool to use, and there’s no question that it fulfills that requirement. It’s literally click-and-publish blogging, which can be hosted either by Blogger themselves, or can be published to your own host. I used the latter method, and it worked well for some considerable time. Eventually, however, I became frustrated with the limitations of Blogger. It is an incredibly difficult , if not impossible, tool to modify, as it is entirely run by Google, and so outside of my personal control. So if I want to display something in a slightly different way, if Blogger doesn’t have a built-in expression for it, then that’s too bad. Also, every time I made a simple change to the site template, the whole site had to be re-uploaded, because Blogger serves static pages. When you only have a handful of posts, this is no problem. But when you’ve got a wealth of them, it becomes a very real issue, and it can take extraordinary lengths of time to correct the smallest of spelling errors in the sidebar, for example.

So after a while, I moved over to WordPress. I haven’t looked back since. Its got almost everything I need built in, I can tweak the PHP to my heart’s content to do cool things, and there is a huge amount of support available when I get stuck, from the fantastic community who’ve helped me out time and again, to the codex when you just can’t remember the parameters for a particular command. The latest version even looks pretty visually stunning. And on the occasions I think WordPress is missing something, there’s almost always a plugin available to fix the problem. Most recently, the new built-in spam filter has made the pretty huge headache of comment spam on the site a complete non-issue. And all of this for free.
If I was facing the decision of what tool to use again today, there is no doubt in my mind that I would’ve chosen WordPress. I’m unsure whether I’d have gone for the Blogger-style easy hosted set-up offered by WordPress.com, or set up the site myself, as I have done now (which is remarkably easy to do), but WordPress would undboutledly have been the tool of choice. And with the flexibility now in-built to bring posts over from a number of other blogging services, there’s really no reason for anybody not to swtich, even if they already have a blog elsewhere.

So Happy Birthday WordPress. May you continue to grow and develop, and make my life ever-easier.

Mark Oaten has been forced to resign as the Lib Dem Home Affairs Spokesman, as he has some, erm, Home Affairs of his own to take care of, after some Away-from-Home Affairs to be reported in tomorrow’s News of the World.

The 41-year-old father of two allegedly had an affair with a 23-year-old rent boy. If you’re going to screw up your career, I guess you should do it in style – and a homosexual affair with someone half your age is about as far as one can credibly go, I guess.

Some will no doubt claim that it’s unfair he’s had to resign over something which says nothing about his professional competance, and I have some sympathy with that point of view. But it’s just not a realistic stance to take in today’s society, sadly. He had to resign, because he would never be allowed to talk about the issues.

More surprising is that he gave a classic non-apology in his statement, of the type perfected by New Labour:

I would like to apologise for errors of judgement in personal behaviour and for the embarrassment caused, firstly to my family but also to my friends, my constituents and my party.

He apologises for errors in judgement – that is, getting caught – and the embarrassment it caused, but not actually for the incident itself. Which is surprising, because I thought he’d be the kind of guy to give a grovelling apology practically for being born. But then, I guess he’d have had to resign as an MP as well if he’d gone down that route, so perhaps it’s not so surprising.

On something of a sidenote, it’s been an amazing couple of weeks for the NoTH – Sven allegations last week, more promised this week, a journalist in the Palace, and Oaten allegations this week. Certainly not bad going on their part.
One Springeresque final thought on Mr Oaten: His website hasn’t been updated yet. It says

It’s been an eventful past couple of weeks … I’m looking forward to a quiet weekend with my family before making any decisions on what the future may hold.

Somehow, I doubt he got his wish.

Nick Robinson’s latest blog post seems to suggest that he’s hearing mutterings of Mr Blair’s departure happening later this year.

Could they have reached another agreement on the handover? I just leave that question hanging… for now.

Does this mean he has some info that he’s not ready to share quite yet? Interesting… Or am I just reading too much into it?

[flashvideo filename=”http://sjhoward.co.uk/video/bushblair.flv” /]

Whoever wrote the script for tonight’s Six needs to be sacked.

[In reference to prostitution] Fiona Mactaggart went out with police to experience the problem first-hand

Is that not libellous?

Even if it’s not, why on Earth did the next item need a live from inside a waste incinerator, with a noisy crane operating in the background? What did that add to the story? Not to mention that the package following opened with a lengthy shot of someone putting some rubbish in a bin. Just in case we didn’t know what rubbish was.

I’m not normally one to moan about these things, but that was, frankly, ridiculous.

A book I’ve mentioned before on the site, enormously enjoyable, is now available to download free in PDF format. It actually has been available for a while, and I’ve been meaning to post about it on here for ages, but never quite got round to it… Until now.

For those of you wondering why Mr Adams has decided to give it away for nout, I shall blatantly steal the explanation from the above link:

Frankly, this is the hardest book in the world to market. When it first came out in hardcover, booksellers couldn’t decide if it was fiction or nonfiction. Was it philosophy or religion? It’s a religion/science book written by a cartoonist, using hypnosis techniques in the writing. It’s a thought experiment. It’s unlike anything you’ve ever read. How do you sell something that can’t be explained?

Nonetheless, the hardcover version of God’s Debris was a solid success. I lost count of how many people e-mailed me to say it was the best book they’ve ever read. By way of comparison, I’ve published over thirty Dilbert™ books, two of them number-one New York Times best-sellers, but I’ve never gotten the kind of excited responses that I did from readers of God’s Debris.

Still, God’s Debris is emphatically not for everyone. Although there’s no sex or violence, I don’t recommend it for readers under fourteen unless a parent has screened it. And if you don’t like to have your perceptions challenged, this book isn’t for you. However, if you like a good book-induced buzz now and then, I think you’ll agree that the price was right.

It’s free because it’s designed to be discussed with people who have also read it. I’m confident that some percentage of the free e-book readers will be inspired to buy a physical book for friends or for their own collection. And if you like it, you might want to try the sequel, The Religion War, available only in hardcover. At the end of the e-book you’ll find some links to Amazon.com for your impulse-buying pleasure.

And for those of you wondering what it’s about, let me enlighten you via the same method…

Imagine that you meet a very old man who—you eventually realize—knows literally everything. Imagine that he explains for you the great mysteries of life—quantum physics, evolution, God, gravity, light, psychic phenomenon, and probability—in a way so simple, so novel, and so compelling that it all fits together and makes perfect sense. What does it feel like to suddenly understand everything? God’s Debris isn’t the final answer to the Big Questions. But it might be the most compelling vision of reality you will ever read. The thought experiment is this: Try to figure out what’s wrong with the old man’s explanation of reality. Share the book with your smart friends then discuss it later while enjoying a beverage.

Now go download it (or, if you prefer, buy the hardback), read it, and think about it. You will enjoy it.

Fans of the now-defunct LBSC will, no doubt, be delighted and thrilled to hear that JRC (formerly known as Fat Tony) has started blogging (again) at twoflow.co.uk.

For the uninitiated, The LBSC was originally a site where three people blogged in communal harmony, started on 14 May 2003. It was, essentially, JRC’s creation, and was very entertaining and occasionally disturbingly popular, possibly because (at the time, at least) it just worked. There was also some NS connection that I never really understood, not being a big gamer, but I’m sure that was some crucial part of the story, too.

However, in December 2005, despite the addition of two further contributors, it finally keeled over and died, mainly because we’d all moved on, and didn’t really fit the LB description any more (not that we ever really did…). Ever the medic, after it keeled over, I attempted to resuscitate it, and that resuscitation attempt resulted in this site turning from this to the blog that’s here today, with just me posting, though bringing all of my LBSC content with me. A few very odd people followed me here from The LBSC, probably because I continually plugged my site over there even before it became a blog. Whether they’re still around or not, I have no idea. But if they are, I’m sure they will be glad to learn that JRC is back. As, of course, am I.

Thanks to the Internet Archive‘s Wayback Machine for many of the above links