Given the choice of

1. jack-knifed lorry on the A14, one lane blocked, and
2. major roadworks on the M11 with a long contra-flow,

go for the contra-flow every time. The “one lane blocked” is a complete lie. The whole damn road is shut.

Four and a half hours it took me to go 14 miles. And yet only twenty minutes to go back the other way.

Bloody guided bus, bloody not reinstating existing train lines to get the freight off the road. The jack-knifed lorry was carrying one of those containers that can go so easily on a freight train.

I’ve only ever found one person in favour of the guided bus, and I’m afraid her opinion, in my opinion, was particularly parochial.

The guided bus system can only take people. A train line would be able to take people and freight. The A14 would be a delight! Even if just the freight were taken away, it would be a massive improvement. The trainline could have been reinstated all the way to the port at Felixstowe. The guided bus only goes to Cambridge.

If the container that had been on the back of this lorry had been on a train instead, it wouldn’t have held the eastbound A14 up, the lorry driver wouldn’t have needed a blood transfusion (a blood-carrying car attempted to squeeze past all the traffic with sirens and lights a-blaze), and I wouldn’t be having this rant now! And I’d have got to do all the things I was supposed to do today.

Picture the scene: a group of three people go to Tesco in York on Saturday morning and buy, amongst other things, three bottles of wine. At the checkout - one of those do-it-yourself ones - the wine brings up the message that its sale needs authorising. Fair enough. Up comes this jaqui, and she says she’s going to have to ask how old each person is. They tell her; the youngest is mid-twenties, the oldest mid-thirties.

“Have you got any ID?” asks this jaqui.

No-one does. Only university cards, which are neither use nor ornament when it comes to buying alcohol from Tesco.

“It’s Tesco’s new policy,” she said, when questioned about why someone in their thirties is asked for ID. “If you look under 30, we have to ask for ID.”

“Where does it say that?” asks one of the group.

“There,” said the jaqui, pointing to a sign hidden round the corner from the check-out screen.

“But you’re wearing an if-you-look-under-21 badge,” said another group member.

“Oh,” says the jaqui. “The policy doesn’t start until next week,” she continues. “But we’re doing it this week.”

There was much mind-boggling at this point.

The group ask for the manager. A supervisor comes along. Same story.

“We can’t authorise the sale until you show us some ID.”

Eventually, the staff members are persuaded that all members of said group wouldn’t be holding university cards if they weren’t over 18, and the wine was purchased.

I’m going to start shopping at Asda. I’m not taking my passport to Tesco every time I want to buy some booze!

Sharia law in UK is ‘unavoidable’

Is the Archbishop of Canterbury in his right mind? He wants the UK to adopt Sharia law just because there’s a load of Muslims here, who seem to want to live by it. I say if you don’t want to live according to UK law, don’t live in the UK. Simple.

It’s an absolute disgrace that there should be one law for people of one religion and a different law for people of another. Where does that leave the non-religious?

According to the Beeb, he said, “there’s one law for everybody and that’s all there is to be said, and anything else that commands your loyalty or allegiance is completely irrelevant in the processes of the courts - I think that’s a bit of a danger.” I think he’s got this the wrong way round, completely. What does Sharia law say about suicide bombers and other such terrorist activities? Is it going to be ok for Muslims to bomb London in the future?

Luckily, the politicians seems to have their heads screwed on, for once, and are rejecting this nonsense.

If this does go ahead, I’ll set up a religion whereby it’s ok to kill the Archbishop when he has crazy ideas like this. That’ll show him.

I wish people would stop sending me emails warning me of this and the other, without checking whether it’s genuine or just a hoax. I know people mean well, but it’s irritating, like those chain emails people send (incidentally, nothing’s ever happened to me as a result of deleting them without forwarding them on). It means I have to check on Snopes whether it’s a hoax or not, and then reply to them to tell them it’s a hoax, including the link to Snopes, as proof. I’m hoping people will get the hint.

If it is valid, like one I received not long ago about dubious deliveries, then people should include the link to Snopes, if there is one, so you can see straight away that it’s valid. If Snopes haven’t got any information about it, then they should be informed.

Rant over.

Why is the Internet so broken? Why are pages and pages of links set up and consequently neglected, so that when you find something that looks useful, it’s not there anymore?

“Argh and gah,” I say, frustratedly.

I take back all the nice things I said about those bloody kids.  There’s only one vaguely half-decent one amongst them; he’s the one who realised I was right during a dispute about whose wall it was they were sitting on.  Obviously, they weren’t sitting on the one the biggest one (a slightly chubby girl) broke with a football.  Ok, so the bricks were loose anyway, but still.  I almost wish she had climbed up onto that one, actually.

They use our black wheelie bin to get onto the wall.  That wheelie bin is one of those little ones.  Its lid’s quite depressed now.

Blimey, such a hassle to get Linux to install a printer! It did find the printer and realised what kind it is, but of course it needed a printer driver installing. At least I think that’s why it wouldn’t print anything. It might have just been that it refused to use the cartridges that were in there already of course, because they are ancient and dried out, but it wasn’t giving me any useful hints or clues or tips. It told me absolutely nothing, and didn’t even tell me it wasn’t going to print the test page. It just sat there, as if it was busy sending it to the printer. Such lies!

I decided I must need a printer driver, like you do on Windows. So I went to http://linuxprinting.org/, amd downloaded this gutenprint thing, which promised to work wonderfully well with the printer. After spending ages trying to find some instructions telling me what to do with all these files the archived file unleashed, I followed said instructions, which resulted in it doing all these checks (really, if you ever download and install this stuff, don’t ever tell it to make check because it takes about 17 hours or so to complete. Anyway, when it was done, I told it to install it, as per instructions, which of course failed because it was denied permission to do all this stuff. C said I had to use sudo blah-blah so it would do it as the boss, or some such nonsense.

Not that it worked after that, either. Oh no. That would have been too simple. The installer dialogue box was telling me I needed a PPD and to tell it where it was. Ididn’t know where it was, so I couldn’t tell it. I searched the file system for such a file, but it couldn’t find one. I looked for some more instructions. I found some that told me I needed to update the PPD by typing some stuff, so I did, and it told me it had updated one PPD file (which it still refused to find for me) and that I needed to restart this thing. The instructions said this was system specific. T’rific. I restarted the computer instead.

Still no success at making the thing work. I changed the connection type and everything and it still wouldn’t play. I went out instead. I came back, and looked at it again. I faffed with how it was attached again, then followed the instructions on how to remove the cartridges from the printer, which are handily stuck inside the printer itself. I put them back in again and noticed the on/off light was flashing, so I pressed the on/off button, not noticing it switched off. I sent it a test page then turned it on. It whirred and clicked and whirred and clicked and whirred some more, much more than it did when I turned it on before. It seemed like it was trying to get to the paper I’d put in, but couldn’t quite. I took out all sheets but one, then eventually, it did a big, decided click, and the paper started vanishing into the printer! And it printed faint blue lines across some of the pages, in that test-page sort of manner you get from printers. Fantastic. I bet that’s all it needed in the first place.

All it needs now are some new cartridges.

Now it’s time for a rant. It’s all very well all all these people saying how much better than Windows Linux (or Unix, for that matter) is, but for ease of installation of stuff, Windows wins hands down. If I want to install something on Linux, I have to decide what version I want, what architecture I want, what kind of file I want to download (and these are never just executables that’ll install stuff; first they have to be extracted, then a palaver gone through of making it and then installing it), then I have to work out where it’s supposed to go, and so on and so on. You might be reading this and thinking, yeah, but see how flexible it is? Flexible it might be, but it’s bloody daunting to someone who doesn’t know what’s what. It’s just not intuitive. Why can’t these people who have files for downloading also make available a file that’s similar to what a Windows user might expect. Make it more friendly. Maybe if it was, then more people would make the switch. Rant over.