Cllr. Gavin Ayling

The EU has been high on the right-wing blogosphere’s agenda this week…

A couple of posts you should read on why the EU ain’t for us:

Devil’s Kitchen

Strange Stuff.

A little prediction for you:
- The, frankly, vast numbers of eastern European immigrants will be remembered as the beginning of the end of Britain’s involvement with the EU.

I support Poland’s membership because I believe it is not only in the interest of Polish people (if not the country), but also because it is in the spirit of the EU… That spirit, though, is one of the things that is wrong with it, and one of the reasons we should leave!

In his first comment on this site, Andrew Kennedy has brought my attention to a video which I did not know had been captured… I saw it briefly on NewsNight or similar at the time it happened.

And when you watch it again you have to ask yourself, did he say anything that can be disagreed with? The answer, of course, is no.

You all know my position on Europe, it’s not of any benefit to the UK or, indeed, England. Given that, and the Tories naturally pragmatic and patriotic default position, you’d think the whole party would be in consensus. Well, maybe. But the point is, UKIP have the right policy on Europe and Daniel Hannan (my local MEP if there is such a thing under the EU version of PR) is in the right corner too.

Enough of me, here’s the video, watch and agree.

Let’s leave the EPP and the EU at the same time!

The game was dull, so thank you BBC, for livening it up:

I have long argued for the removal of the Human Rights Act and its replacement with something that safeguards against Blair’s unreasonable policies at the same time as rebalancing the justice system in favour of the law-abiding…

Once more Cameron delivers.

The game this evening was ruined by the referree. But it was entertaining in a macrabre way and will certainly help England’s progress…

I hope this picture of Deco and Boulahrouz illustrates quite how absurd the debacle was: Opposing players had more in common than the referree and common sense!

If the image is broken, view it on FlickR here.

Islam isn’t the enemy, it’s Islamists, but still, this is insane.

The British media has a massive responsibility. For reasons quite beyond me, the UK’s media is watched and read throughout Europe and disproportionately further afield than that — and it’s more than can be accounted for because of the BBC World Service.

And this global reach carries with is great responsibility. So why, WHY, do the British media organisations publicise that 200 English fans have been arrested as if that’s a massively important piece of news.

There have been 4,000 arrests so far and English fans don’t represent the majority and are probably not even the single largest group disproportionate from the massive number of supporters England has (60,000 I believe).

It is important that the English are not targetted as trouble-makers by other countries’ fans, and this sort of coverage (see the BBC today) is unhelpful at best.

And now I’ve found the setting to enable the Aero theme (transparent window parts, thumbnailed taskbar icons and the excellent, pretty, but pointless 3D application selector). Excellent!

Okay, everything’s working, though sadly with only 2Gb (which is not enough, honestly!)

I have played a bit of Day of Defeat before the football, just to check it works and then managed to get the TV card (not my Compro one) working by the 24th minute of the game.

And may I just say, Windows Media Center [sic] is the best piece of media software I’ve tried, and I’ve tried a few in the last few months! Showshifter, Media Portal, Compro’s PCTV, MSI’s PC-TV, Pinnacle’s PCTV — they’re all poor cousins of Windows Media Center.

For example, when you pause TV in any of the others, the PC chugs for a few seconds meaning you lose some of the programme — Media Center pauses instantly and resumes instantly too (assuming, that is, that the additional memory isn’t helping a little). Media Center’s user interface is accomplished and stable — it never crashes whereas all the others (except MSI’s PC-TV) crash at periodic intervals. Best of all, though, Media Center stores the last five or ten minutes of TV so that you can rewind and, because it’s stable, you can do this several times in a row without losing any viewing and as quickly as you could hope for (instantly).

AJD asked, why not get a Mac? The reasons are these:
1. I am a geek (hence the category) so I like to be able to download and play with all sorts of software; my PC is not a tool, it is a toy. My father uses Macs at his printing firm and they are great, especially OS X, but they are limited in the software available.
2. I want to be able to dual boot if possible. Now that Bootcamp is here, I am just waiting for Windows Vista to support the replacement for BIOS, EFI. When this happens a dual boot quality Mac and PC will be possible.
3. There isn’t so much hardware available for the Mac
4. Windows is getting better and better
5. I play games, and few reasonably priced Macs sport suitable graphics cards even when (2) happens.

I removed 2Gb of memory from my PC and now it’s recognising the graphics card… Hmmm

I’ve discovered that there are no longer enough IRQs to run all my hardware. I’ve tried switching off BIOS allocation of IRQs, disabling devices and all sorts and still the PCI to PCI Bridge cannot find enough resources.

Ultimately I suspect this is why there is no graphics card in Device Manager — and the ATI drivers will not install unless a Generic VGA card has been found… which it hasn’t. It makes me wonder how an image can be displayed at all.

My next course of action is to remove 2 of my 4Gb of RAM (which are new) to see whether that’s the problem as I hear that the last 512kb have some affect on IRQs anyway…

More later.