Telling it like it is

I missed out on my walk last night so I went around the park this morning instead. This morning is the annual HeartWalk at our local park - where people walk a mile or two miles for charity to raise money for heart disease awareness. However, in true American fashion, the organisers didn't quite get it. All the parking for the event is at the local high school which is in one corner of the park. It's a quarter mile walk from the parking lot to the HeartWalk staging area. In the parking lot there are no signs on how to get there even though it's just around the corner. Instead there are fleets of shuttle buses that bus people to the walk. Just to put into perspective how idiotic that is, because of the kerbs in the middle of the road that prevent left turns, and the one-way system around the park, for the shuttle buses to get to the staging area, they have to DRIVE 3 miles -- to get people to the WALK -- which is only a quarter of a mile away. Even worse, the shuttles are...

There's a huge problem in America at the moment with some of the Republicans - they're effectively practicing the very things they claim to stand against. The conservatives are all about freedom of speech and freedom of this and freedom of that, yet when Obama wanted to speak to kids in schools this week, to encourage them to do well and succeed, it caused an enormously blown-out-of-proportion debate that resulted in tens of thousands of Republican families and schools across the country deciding that they didn't want their children to listen to the president. They were, in effect, filtering and censoring. Isn't that exactly what North Korea, Iran and China do? And all those other countries we're told are "bad"? Cutting off the internet, blocking western transmissions? Now we've got parents who are making those exact same decisions on behalf of their kids - blocking them from being able to listen to what their President has to day? Censoring him? Some...

Anyone who's worked with a computer will know that noise - it's the sound of a dead hard drive. In this case my PS3 choked yesterday and the hard drive failed. I managed to get it to come up one more time and was able to do a full backup of the system on to a USB drive. Then it was dead to the world. I replaced the drive with a 250Gb version a few minutes ago and it looks like it's quietly restoring all the data from the USB drive now. I guess we'll see within the hour whether I've got my system back or not.