The Conrad Black Appreciation Society

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Well, well. Just fancy this…

This Web site is dedicated to the support of Conrad Moffat Black in his current battle with grandstanding U.S. prosecutors and a hostile left-wing press. More than that, it is our grateful and long overdue acknowledgement of His Lordship’s life’s struggle to confront, with unflagging courage, the Brobdingnagian forces of Canadian small-mindedness, parochialism, mediocrity and failure…

The cringing tone of this website suggests that it’s a spoof. For example:

From the outset, let us be clear about several matters concerning The Ad Hoc Committee for Conrad Black. First, none of us boasts the pleasure of knowing His Lordship personally, nor are we beholden to him in any manner, financial or otherwise. Several amongst us, however, have had the honour of an introduction to and a fleeting conversation with His Lordship in one social context or another.

No, we are not, strictly speaking, “friends of Conrad Black.” We are simply admirers of the man, beneficiaries in the broadest sense of his commitment to excellence, and–dare we say–fans of his indomitable style. Whatever transpires in the life of His Lordship over the next few months, he shall remain a blazing beacon of hope to those of us on this dull and dreary northern plain…

Nobody could write this sycophantic drivel with a straight face. So I wonder who is the joker behind it? Craig Brown?

Thanks to Pete for spotting it.

Escaping from Adobe’s clutches

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Here’s something useful:

PDFescape is a new way to open PDF files. It allows you to open your PDF files right here on the web without downloading or installing any software.

With PDFescape, you can fill in PDF forms, add text and graphics, add links, and even add new form fields to a PDF file. Best of all, it’s Free!

Have just one PDF form to fill out, but don’t want to buy $299 Adobe Acrobat? PDFescape is for you!

Have a PDF form you want customers to fill out and email back to you? PDFescape is for you!

Another useful web service. Thanks to Tony Hirst for the link. Of course, users of Mac OS X don’t really need it, because the operating system does pdf out of the box. But we’re only — what is it? — 5% of the personal computer world!

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Batman’s gizmo

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From Technology Review…

It takes about six minutes for a firefighter with a full load of gear to reach the top of a 30-story building by running up the stairs–and when he gets there, he’s tired. A group of MIT students have designed a rope-climbing device that can carry 250 pounds at a top speed of 10 feet per second. They have a contract to make the climbing device for the U.S. Army for use in urban combat zones, and they hope to make it available to rescue workers.

The students founded a company, Atlas Devices, based in Cambridge, MA, to commercialize the device, which is about the size of a power drill.

It’s amazing: see the video on the Atlas site.

EU has plans for your privacy

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From today’s New York Times…

PARIS, Feb. 19 — European governments are preparing legislation to require companies to keep detailed data about people’s Internet and phone use that goes beyond what the countries will be required to do under a European Union directive.

In Germany, a proposal from the Ministry of Justice would essentially prohibit using false information to create an e-mail account, making the standard Internet practice of creating accounts with pseudonyms illegal.

A draft law in the Netherlands would likewise go further than the European Union requires, in this case by requiring phone companies to save records of a caller’s precise location during an entire mobile phone conversation….

Apart from anything else, it’s an idiotic concept because it wouldn’t apply to services based in the US. So people will continue to use Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail etc. Unless, of course, the EU proposes to make it a crime for European citizens to have a Gmail account.

The madness of King Tony

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Perceptive observation by Armando Iannucci.

Am I going mad? I heard that Tony Blair thinks so. Not just me; everyone. You too. He thinks we’re all mad. Someone close to his circle told me recently that the reason Blair seems so resolute, so calm in the face of criticism, is that he thinks the media are just mad. And he confronts unpopularity with the knowledge that we, the public, are turning mad as well. The more we say: ‘He’s going mad’, the more it proves to him that we must be mad. Is that the logic of a madman?

I only mention this because I was struck by the madness of a remark Blair made last week. It was just as the High Court ruled that the government’s recent consultation with the public over what our future energy policy should be wasn’t consultative enough, and that he and his ministers would have to consult us on the policy again.

Asked if this would put on hold his plans to build more nuclear power stations, he said: ‘No. This won’t affect the policy at all. It’ll affect the process of consultation, but not the policy.’

Take a good hard look at that quote again. It’s mad. It’s based either on a belief in the possession of psychic powers so discriminating they can predict the outcome of a consultation before it happens (which is mad) or they’re based on the belief that words have no meaning other than the meaning one chooses to give them and that this meaning can change at any particular moment (which is at least three times as mad as the first example of madness).

A sane person would assume that a consultation about a decision would be part of the process of forming that decision.

He would indeed. Which is why Britain needs a new constitution. At present we have an elected dictatorship which can do what it likes so long as the Prime Minister has a working majority.

Cops and bobbers

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A mother has hit out at police who refused to go after thieves who stole her sons’ motorbikes – because the pair were not wearing helmets.

Pauline Nolan, from Droylsden, Greater Manchester, said officers told her they could not pursue the offenders in case they fell off and sued them.

[Source]

TechBubble 2.0

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This morning’s Observer column…

Colossally inflated valuations are an infallible indicator of a bubble. In the late 1990s, dotcom start-ups with 50 employees and zero profits were briefly valued at more than the market cap of Fortune 500 companies. In 2005, Rupert Murdoch paid $649m for MySpace and eBay paid $2.6bn for Skype, a VoIP [internet telephony] company. Last year, Google forked out $1.65bn for YouTube. Such valuations provide terrific incentives for ambitious geeks because the new web services require less upfront investment than the original dotcoms. What is YouTube, after all, other than some smart software for converting every uploaded video clip into a Flash movie, plus server capacity and bandwidth? Skype adds 150,000 subscribers a day and buys almost no hardware because it uses its subscribers’ computers to do the heavy lifting…

Shell shocks

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I’ve been reading Volume 1 of The Paris Review Interviews. The one with Kurt Vonnegut is wonderful. Sample:

Paris Review: You were an infantry battalion scout in the war?
Kurt: Yes, but I took my basic training on the 240-mm howitzer.

PR: A rather large weapon.
Kurt: The largest mobile fieldpiece in the army at that time. This weapon came in six pieces, each piece dragged wallowingly by a Caterpillar tractor. Whenever we were told to fire it, we had to build it first. We practiclly had to invent it. We lowered one piece on top of another, using cranes and jacks. The shell itself was about nine and a half inches in diameter and weighed three hundred pounds. We constructed a miniature railway which would allow us to deliver the shell from the ground to the breech, which was about eight feet above grade. The breechblock was like the door on the vault of a savings and load association in Peru, Indiana, say.

PR: It must have been a thrill to fire such a weapon.
Kurt: Not really. We would put the shell in there, and then we would throw in bags of very slow and patient explosives. They were damp dog biscuits, I think. We would close the breech, and then trip a hammer which hit a fulminate of mercury percussion cap, which spit fire at the damp dog biscuits. The main idea, I think, was to generate steam. After a while we would hear these cooking sounds. It was a lot like cooking a turkey. In utter safety, I think, we could have opened the breechblock from time to time, and basted the shell. Eventually, though, the howitzer always got restless. And finally it would heave back on its recoil mechanism, and it would have to expectorate the shell. The shell would come floating out like the Goodyear blimp. If we had had a stepladder, we could have painted “Fuck Hitler” on the shell as it left the gun. Helicopters could have taken after it and shot it down.