Fuzzy Orange

If you’re one of those people who doesn’t like reading my rants – I’d skip this all together because this is a mahooosive rant.

Our current labour government, in my opinion, are the most useless bunch of arseholes we’ve ever had running this country

It’s -7c at the moment and there’s 6″ of snow outside my house. My car has got completely stuck and had to be pushed out 3 times this week (and I’m currently driving a 307 HDi which weighs a ton and is great in the snow – most people here with lighter petrol cars are completely stuck)

The main roads, if you can get to them, seem ok. But the villages are a virtual ice skating rink.
There hasn’t been a snow plough or gritter down here for 3+ weeks – and what are the government doing? Winging that we all need to go back to work, and kids need to start going back to school!
Well that’s fantastic, and how the hell are are we supposed to do that?
Also while I’m thinking about it where the hell does my council tax money actually get spent??? Or my road tax for that matter!!

Then there’s the beautiful work they did during the recession to help us all out by dropping VAT to 15% – WOOOO!

Unfortunately though what I predicted would happen is exactly what did happen.
When the VAT went down – shops didn’t want to relabel the retail price of everything – or change catalogs – so the retail price stayed the same. And the shop made 2.5% more profit

Now the VAT has gone back up – all the shops made a big “buy it before the increase” advertising hype – then whacked the prices up on everything a stupid amount.
A £2.05 bottle of conditioner in the supermarket went up to £2.30. Now my maths is rusty but even I know that’s over a 10% increase and the VAT only went up 2.5%… but most people just go “crikey isn’t this expensive now the VAT’s gone back up” and carry on regardless.
It was definatly worth me working all night new years eve to implement the VAT changes (again) – oh yes.

Still at least the NHS is awesome!!
My mum chipped a tooth badly 2 days before christmas and even though she is registered with an NHS dentist which she attends every 3 months – he was shut (on a friday.. probably polishing his porsche). So she rang the NHS emergency line and they couldn’t arrange anything for 2 days – and then that involved driving 40miles each way – in the end they told her to take some paracetamol!!

So… I just want to take this opportunity to say a big warm THANKS to the Labour government, the work they have done giving houses to the unemployed, splashing out so many benefits that it makes more sense to have 4 kids by the time your 17 than it does to go to college and get a career, heading blindly into wars in countries that not a single person here cares about.. it’s all just been wonderful. But if you wouldn’t mind now please piss off and give us a chance to have someone with half a brain cell run the country!

Thanks.

Stood in Netto buying my budget 99p sandwich for lunch (It’s payday on Friday – I’m always broke this week – You’ll get the irony soon!).. I noticed the newspapers today talking about the government introducing new Eco Tax’s.

I’m going to skirt around the issue that global warming is nothing more than a media-produced reason for governments to earn more money – that’s a post for another day.

What really has p*ssed me off is who they are targeting with their new eco tax, like you couldn’t guess. Motorists and home owners.
Proposals to introduce a tax on people who use too much electricity/gas – and triple the fuel tax for everyone.

Why the hell don’t these consultants understand the simple difference between Necessity and Abuse.
Owning a 4×4 landrover and only using it to take the kids to school at 12mpg is abuse.
Owning a family sized car and using it to get to work and back is Necessity.

The UK has an APPAULING public transport network. A bus from my house to the local town takes 1.5hrs – it takes 25minutes by car.
A train to my local town costs a little over £8 – it’s about £4 in unleaded in my car. And the trains stop running if a leaf hits a track which is dead handy if you’re going to a job interview or actually want to be on time for anything ever.
For my girlfriend to go home to Wales to see her parents – its either 3 comfy hours with some music in her car, or 4 different trains where the changes are mostly sitting around in a town center train station surrounded by drunken football supporters on her own!

I don’t get in my car every morning because I enjoy sitting at 40mph all the way to work behind the 92 year old who can’t see over her dashboard. I don’t enjoy dodging the giant potholes in the UK road network. I don’t enjoy any part of my drive to work. But I have to do it or I wouldn’t have a job – it’s that simple!
I don’t enjoy having a house – it offers me virtually no pleasure at all. But sleeping on the pavement is a little inconvenient.

It’s just much much easier to tax people on things they can’t avoid doing and then when they complain tell them its their own fault because if we walked to work every day and didn’t use any central heating in winter we could avoid the tax.. utter joke

Everyone has to work, everyone has to provide a place for their family to live. All of that currently involves burning fossil fuels – which are running out. But until alternatives are provided its necessary. Yes that means the earth is slowly dying, yes that means the human race is doing a pretty good job of killing itself, no that’s not necessarily a bad thing!

Thinking for a 5 year plan for myself – the way the UK is going there’s only 2 sensible options.

Move to another country .. or .. quit my job, sit in a house paid for by the government, heating on full, with a couple of screaming kids running about the place and claim benefits to spend on vodka like all the other people my age do..

Well done Labour.. well done

I’d like to love Snow Leopard, I really would. It has so many nice new features and updates. The new expose is gorgeous and running it per application when you have a load of emails open saves to find a window saves so much time. BUT, and its a big but, the current ‘bug’ with the play/pause button on the keyboard ALWAYS launching itunes is really starting to annoy me.

At home I have iTunes open all the time as it syncs with my AppleTV – so it’s not so much a problem. Though it is hugely annoying that when Im listening to spotify and I press pause – it starts playing a track from itunes grrr.
But at work I don’t use itunes for anything – I listen to my iPod or Spotify. So when I press pause or play while in spotify and suddenly itunes loads up – its rather frustrating.

I don’t know if this is a simple bug or if Apple are heading down the MS route and trying to force people to use itunes instead of any “competition” just like MS used to try to force IE as the default browser. I’m hoping its just a bug

If anyone knows a way to fix it that isn’t some horrid renaming patch please let me know