Firing: another round

Friday both barrels were unloaded once more on our fucked company. The people who've been here longest have grown quite blasé and seem to take it in their stride and there is a danger that given some more time in this environment I might do the same.
Fortunately, I'm still angry. It remains the case that people have lost their jobs because the sales team is poorly managed. Those who so desperately continue to clutch to the purse strings that have unravelled from the venture capitalists with so much stake in the company, are those who persistently muster sufficient semblance of competency that they're not on their way out just this time...
The COO appears to know what he's doing, though he has some difficulty enforcing anything in particular. He's offered me an opportunity to be his right-hand man, but what he doesn't seem to have grasped is that few have faith in the company. Who can trust it, who can like working for it, when the environment is so poor? Anyone who can leave will; those who remain will be the talentless, the unimaginative too set in their ways to leave, or those who can't move for personal reasons, and these will be the most resentful.
I've been offered another job at 35% more pay in a more dynamic environment, but it would mean spending most of the week away from my wife. Isn't that enough to make anyone despise their job?

Nouveau venu, qui cherches Rome en Rome

I spent the long weekend waiting in the Vatican. It was my wife's birthday, so we went to Rome and she wanted to see the Pope. So we hung around St. Peter's square getting elbowed by eager septagenarians waiting for Joseph Ratzinger to show at the window...
and when he appeared there were gasps from the throngs, applause as he berated politicians for promoting IVF (in Italian), cheers as he told South Americans how important they were in Spanish, and assorted flag waving has he polyglossed to Slovenes, Poles and his compatriots.
The papal cult, where so many congregate in a massive square to hear such a distant tiny figure surrounded by giant statues who has been invested by a conclave to which they ostensiby belong but in reality could never form part of, reminds me of Beijing and Mao. Indeed I noticed a recent sculpture of John Paul II that strongly resembled the monument to the Long March; wish I'd taken a picture. Of course if the Maoists wanted a cult to imitate they could do a lot worse than one which has survived over two thousand years. But do those who are imitated see any resemblance? Do they perceive this to be the sincerest form of flattery?

Kind Zeitgeist

The BBC reports on a policeman in India who is only five years old. While it's quite cute to think of a policeman who needs to hide behind his mother if you get too close, the article rightly highlights child exploitation in the country, just as I expressed in my previous reservations about Indian social order.

Who will bring these people to task?

This you have to see.
While Tony is galavanting around telling everyone how he's going to save Africa from debt and despotism, it's worth drawing your attention back to events in Iraq. In July 2002 -- before they had anything resembling a resolution to go to war -- the U.S. and U.K. doubled the bombing raids on Iraq trying to provoke Saddam Hussein into giving them an excuse for war. Isn't this a war crime? Isn't it a disgrace that people who were starving were killed by our leaders, with our taxes, that our compatriots perpertrated this?
The Times reports that during 2000, RAF aircraft patrolling the southern no-fly zone over Iraq dropped 20.5 tons of bombs from a total of 155 tons dropped by the coalition, a mere 13%. During 2001 that figure rose slightly to 25 tons out of 107, or 23%. However, between May 2002 and the second week in November, when the UN Security Council passed resolution 1441, which Goldsmith said made the war legal, British aircraft dropped 46 tons of bombs a month out of a total of 126.1 tons, or 36%. By October, with the UN vote still two weeks away, RAF aircraft were dropping 64% of bombs falling on the southern no-fly zone. It was not until November 8 that the UN security council passed resolution 1441, which threatened Iraq with "serious consequences" for failing to co-operate with the weapons inspectors.
The briefing paper from a meeting in July 2002 reveals not only that the bombing would be intensified, but that Tony Blair acceded to George W. Bush's efforts to bring about regime change in April 2002, even though this explicitly contravenes United Nations treaties. You can read the briefing paper for yourself here.
Who will now bring these people to task?

Browsing before browser wars

In the early days of the web, when we used to surf the information superhighway using Lynx (before Netscape burst onto the scene and allowed us to view images inline instead of saving them locally to look at them in Paint ten minutes later), getting to interesing content wasn't that hard. After all, there wasn't very much content out there and what there was seemed fresh and new in its presentation -- those animated under construction and mailbox GIFs aside -- and exotic in its location.
Moreover, we knew what was out there. A few thousand active webmasters would maintain sites based on small subject areas that would link to content on other sites; yes, these were portals way before JSR-170 and other complications. These index sites were in turn submitted by their maintainers to Yahoo! which classified them according to their owners' preference, so that with the paucity of categories and sites listed under each (I created categories for French comedy, French 17th century theatre -- which wasn't Renaissance despite Yahoo's protestations -- and water polo history) it was a simple matter to browse through the dozen or so sites under each subject area. You could just go to Yahoo, find a category, and surf.
Those days were doomed once the lofty-peaked logo of AltaVista emerged on our browsers' collective horizon. This new search technology allowed you to find content regardless of context quickly and, while Yahoo struggled to keep pace both with its competitor and its growing queue of submissions, AltaVista's acquisitive approch enabled it to secure the bulk of search traffic and change browsing gambits. Thus it came to pass that we interacted with sites according to keyword rather than concept, paving the way for the millions of browsers that now have Google (or indeed MSN or AOL) as their homepage. However (now that I've grounded but hopefully not interred you in my perception of web history) at least one community of web users is reverting to a subject-based browsing model, effectively suggesting which sites would merit a pair of Yahoo's long since forgotten "hot" sunglasses.
Stumble Upon provides a toolbar for IE and Firefox that takes users to a random site on a subject they have expressed an interest in, based on a selection suggested by other users. I strongly recommend it: it's surfing how it used to be.

Displaying link types in Firefox

Ever been to a site and found that you're launching a link in new window without warning, or downloading a link to content that then starts another application like Acrobat or Word without you realising?
If you use Firefox, you can alert yourself to these sorts of links by editing your user stylesheet: userContent.css. This can be found within the chrome folder for your profile. Typically for Windows users this is located in: C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[eight-digit].default\chrome\. Note that you will need to view hidden files to browse to this directory. From your document window menu select Tools > Folder Options > View > Show hidden files and folders.
This file is unlikely to exist yet, so here's one I made earlier. Right-click on the link, choose Save link as... and save it to the relevant folder.
If you then edit this file you'll see where I've made some changes. The bulk of work, changing cursors to flag up where target links change was done by Chris Pedrick. My bit is for different content link types. You can use this as a basis for altering other sorts of links, if you know css. For example, this line finds where there's a PDF extension in a link, creates some space to the right of the link and puts a PDF icon there.
a[href$=".pdf"]
{padding-right: 17px; background: transparent url(http://www.site-moliere.com/images/icon_pdf.gif) no-repeat top right;}
a identifies the link as in a normal stylesheet, while the element in square brackets identifies the type of link. This is a really simple tool that you can manipulate and extend it yourself to suit your needs, so have a play around. Note that you'll need to shut down and restart Firefox each time you make a change.

You dancing?

This evening will bear witness to another Flash mob event in London, mobile clubbing at Liverpool Street station. While this seems a little less outrageous than some other events of this ilk, my PDA and I are planning an evening out equipped with headphones and Peaches, ready to set it off (provided we get past the door policy).

Referendum à remporter

I vaguely recall from my small Latin that referendum is a part of speech known as a gerundive. This appears in a passive voice with an accusative (direct object) form to show obligation: that which must be done.
I believe this particular word has as its root referre, literally to carry back (hence refer in English). So a referendum is something that must be brought back; in politics for the people rather than for their delegates to decide upon. In French it would translate as qui doit être remporté, a verb which has extended meaning. Not only to win (Roger Federer devrait remporter Roland Garros -- Roger Federer should win the French Open tennis) but also to delay (les matchs de hier ont été remportés à cause de pluie -- rain delayed yesterday's matches).
It would appear that such Derridean sub-texts have been brought to the fore in Sunday's French no vote. The referendum was there to be won and the constitution delayed; opposition to the constitution has been carried back to its architects. And I as a europhile shed no tears for this ill conceived work of free-marketeering.
L'Europe sera socialiste ou elle ne sera pas, François Mitterrand told us, and even if you don't agree with this in its harsher practicalities, its central tenet is correct. What is the point of Europe if it does not serve to protect the people living there from exploitation in working practices, health and other human rights that are taken for granted in other parts of the world?
Europe exists to protect our education, our democracies, our livelihoods; to disseminate this idea across its member states and proselytise to the unconverted outside its membership.
If Europe cannot satisfy these underlying principles, what do we need it for? Financial liberalism dependent on centralised banks and markets already exists without a dedicated European bureaucratic layer. Is the constitution supposed to give us a sense of identity? The last time there was a cohesive image of Europe it was riding a bull out to sea. This vote was for terra firma. Forget how much money can be made out of this venture and remember who your true shareholders are. We want to reinvest Europe's dividends, not make a quick sale.