Font Annoyance

Today is Patch Tuesday in Microsoft parlance; the second Tuesday of the month is the day Microsoft releases a whole set of patches, fixes and cures for the annoying bugs or the presumed inscrutable vulnerabilities on Microsoft Windows systems and products.

So, the shield in my System Tray came up and I always use the Custom Install at least to see what is being thrown onto my PC.

Well, somehow, I have a critical patch to install because some symbols in the Bookshelf Symbol 7 font have been found to be unacceptable.

How Microsoft could have been complicit in offending the sensibilities of whoever discovered that flaw escapes me.

For all intents and purposes, someone should have told the person to Get A Life rather that have millions of PCs touched to remove seemingly salacious fonts – some minds are just so below the sewer, they will see shit in almost anything.

Damilola Taylor - Changing our communities

Innocent blood would be avenged

This write-up might for some bring satisfaction, but it brings no comfort; in other cases it could bring closure but definitely no joy for all concerned.

I am of the persuasion and deepest premonition that innocent blood cannot be spilt in vain; there is a cardinal principle in place from the times of the records of the beginning of mankind in the religious sense that murder would always be overtaken by justice.

Now, that justice might not occur in time, to our sense of vengeance or outrage nor in the manner that we expect, but rest assured there is much at work in the affairs of mankind than meets the eye.

When a 10-year old boy was murdered in a stairwell of a housing estate in London in November 2000, before that murder, he was just a boy who minutes before was hopping from stone to stone without a care having just left a library.

Innocent death universal condemnation

A fate so terrible not to be visited on ones worst enemy lead to us all learning about Damilola Taylor, hardly had we absorbed the news of that wretched episode, the name was on the lips of the Prime Minister and his memory mentioned by a President.

I thought to myself, they killed the boy and released maelstrom of cataclysmic proportions, it was like there was no imagining what this boy might have become in life; snuffed out long before his time, the gathering of what he would have become gravitated into a force for change in his community, his name like that of Stephen Lawrence who was brutally killed a few years before bring us to the ground zero of humanity and the need to rid ourselves of senseless violence.

For a while, it appeared that the murder was fraught with problem witnesses, one of whom was living it large but utterly unreliable, it looked like no one would be punished for this crime.

Innocent blood cries out

I would declare, innocent blood cannot relent, the workings of this phenomenon may not have a tested hypothesis but faith in this phenomenon is more solid than the law of gravity.

When Cain in the Bible answered back about not being his brother’s keeper, God said the voice of his brother’s blood was crying out to Him from the ground. From that time, Cain was cursed from the earth that received his brother’s blood; he became a marked man, a fugitive and a vagabond.

No murderer has a lighter probably for now seemingly invisible sentence regardless of the legal or crime and punishment systems we might have in place. Blood has a voice and knows who to call for justice, and He who hears, knows how to deliver without fail.

The Bible goes on to say that the Blood of Jesus speaks even better things than the blood of Abel, blood means a lot, because life is in the blood; the theology of this beyond the scope of this blog.

The great name of a great boy

Damilola is a name quite close to my heart, it was the name my mother gave me, it is my third name and it means “Bestow me with wealth”. In fact, it is commonly Oludamilola which is translated, “God bestows me with wealth”. It is both a name of thanksgiving and a prophecy of good fortune, anyone bearing that name especially as a first name who is brutally and senselessly murdered is bound to cause ructions that reverberate beyond their community.

And so today, we know that Damilola Taylor, the young boy who months before left Nigeria to seek his fortune and future in London, murdered and 10 by senseless kids who were hardly 3 years older, did not die in vain.

Keeping brothers from offence

His killers, who are brothers and sadly, could, not keep each other from perpetrating such evil, would now spend 8 years in youth custody, a sentence which does not reflect the fact that they have shown no remorse or regret for their acts.

How children could be brought up to be so evil and without any sense of value for other people’s lives and welfare escapes me, but somehow, there is an animal in some people that has been without the gentle luxury of being tamed and tempered with good upbringing and consideration.

Whilst parents have much to blame for this, the children were already beyond the age of recognition of criminal responsibility, they must have known what they were doing will cause grievous bodily harm which lead to death and they never had the courage to own up to their acts for years.

Damilola’s legacy

It should not take the death of a child for our communities to respond to the challenges of our time be it poor forensic science, opportunities for the youth or the de-ghetto-isation of seemingly failing urban areas – these should be in the vanguard of the social, economic or political existence and wellbeing of any society.

Alas! Change sometimes needs to be triggered by tragedy or disaster, in which case, we hope that lessons will be learnt and those who suffered would not have suffered in vain.

The community has looked to the positive and Damilola’s parents have stoically stood for ensuring that no other person suffers the fate that their son suffered, I commend them.

Damilola will never be forgotten in that community and if anyone in the future asks what is this all about, it is about ensuring that we all live to fulfill our potential rather than be cut down before our prime – it is a word to both the would-be victim and the would-be assailant – there is nothing to be gained in being either – let us all ensure that in our communities, we have no place for rearing children who become murderers and children like Damilola Taylor have not died in vain.

References

BBC NEWS | UK | England | London | Eight years for Damilola killers

BBC NEWS | UK | Damilola Taylor: Timeline

Damilola Taylor - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Damilola Taylor Trust

BBC NEWS | UK | England | London | Damilola's Peckham legacy

Respect Your Life - Not a knife - Damilola Taylor Trust

Dortmund - Mythical City of the Flying Rhino

The weekend passed with a visit to Dortmund - an overnight stay from Saturday. However, having not been there for over a year, it was interesting to see the leftover World Cup embellishments which were fibre glass seats looking like half-filled footballs punched in from one side.

That, I could well understand, however, dotted around the place were painted sculptures of rhinoceroses with wings – flying pigs, I have seen, probably in my dreams – a flying rhino has to be mythical to the extreme.

I would however surmise that if there can be flying elephants, rhinos might as well fly too, though my slightly analytical brain did reason that the dimension and design of the wings would do more to keep the rhinos on the ground.

If I think back, Berlin for years had sculptures of painted bears all around the town whilst you could only pose with the standing bears, you could sit quite comfortably on the ones crafted to appear on all fours and I did sit on a few watching all sorts of parades around Berlin a few summers ago.

You can do not such thing with the Dortmund Flying Rhinos, none of the locals could clearly indicate what historical, geographical or economical significance the rhinos had with Dortmund, and the cultural part would probably be the logo of the Dortmund Concert Hall.

There are interesting churches and museums around Dortmund, but you would hard-pressed to get any tourist information since the office is closed from 13:00 on Saturday and not open till Monday.

We can basically assume that an industrial town with no particularly interesting features is not in need of a readily available access to tourist information.

Besides the football club Borussia Dortmund which is probably the biggest club in Germany and the Flying Rhino that made it to the fifth floor, you might just ask what I was doing in Dortmund.

However, if there be a local who has much to say about the Mythical City of Dortmund – I am all ears, but I would not be bowing down to this, Golden Rhino.

View the complete Flying Rhino Collection here.

Exasperation - an anger fuelled emotion

Swing low, swing moodily

After the project I am currently on, I do wonder if I would have to take an Anger Management course or Exasperation Curtailment Therapy. Because in the past few weeks, my moods have swung between anger and exasperation, in some cases, I expressed both emotions simultaneously that the pain of it all leads to almost hysterical laughter.

If things could get worse, this project has the propensity to plumb the depths of of everything bad about project management.

Microsoft Church

Yesterday, I took the day off to attend a Microsoft jaunt, basically, every April; highly technical people meet at some expensive hotel somewhere in America for the Microsoft Management Summit (MMS) which could pass for a big-time religious camp-meeting.

There, Technical Evangelists prognosticate and almost outdo Nostradamus about where we are at, what is being planned and what to expect. These meetings afford the opportunity to engage the people who know about the problems we know and seeking radical thinking for effective solutions.

Six months after that camp-meeting, Microsoft sends out a couple of missionaries with the precious bread-crumbs and news of those events, only this time, we are much more closer to the timelines that were first mooted in April.

Besides, we have what they call Technical Drilldowns which are talks and demonstrations which make complicated things look easy; we are more than an appreciative audience when these super-gurus visit us.

Breadcrumbs worth gold dust

So, this was my second Best of MMS Roadshow which took place just outside Amsterdam – we get invited and it is free – a day of just catching up with what is going on and after the one last year, it is the most valuable knowledge enhancement activity you can participate in, if you manage systems with Microsoft products.

One of the highlights of the day was when we were told that application dependency chains have been improved upon in a product I have worked with for the past 10 years.

Application dependency which is the way you install applications in a pre-determined sequence has been hellish to-date – you had to make changes to each application in the chain to create the desired sequence. In one of my projects, the chain was 24 applications deep; it got me thinking seriously about what could be done about it.

For years, experts in Microsoft Systems Management Server soon to be called System Center could wager that the product was developed by hired hands that had no concept of the way Microsoft did things – the interface was both stodgy and lacked intuitiveness.

Anyway, I fired off a wish list to Microsoft about Application dependency, combining ideas of different technologies that Microsoft would be aware of; well, just as I was preparing a question to ask the speaker about it, he launched into this new feature that could be found in System Center – my wish had been granted and the implementation so well thought through, it was like 3 wishes in one humongous delivery.

Rotten act after class act

The day drew to a close with a delivery from one of the local partners which was not just appalling it was outrageously lack-lustre, I scored the presenters 1 on a scale of 1 to 10 where excellent was 10 and believe me, that was generous.

How could they unleash on us such tripe after 6 hours of listening to other exciting people speak about interesting things a sloth’s equivalent of a car race?

At the Q&A session, my question just like last year, won me this time, a pair of System Center headphones and a 512MB USB flash drive, previously, I had won a pair of noise reduction headphones.

Just a little issue

The day closed with a call from work that the desktop prototype we were about to launch had an application which should not have been installed as part of the core list of applications.

Well, I would not go through the whole story of how I tried to get the people in charge to make up their minds about what applications should be where – that is however not the painful part – it is the fact that this prototype was the 17^th and people have been testing this things for almost 2 weeks, online for some Smart Alec to find this issue now.

No, I did not go into apoplectic rage, I was more reserved in the I upbraided all involved; when I tried to remove the application, I found that it had been so messed up with, I decided it would have to stay in the prototype.

Basically, if the people I work for cannot be decisive or make decisions that would help experts like me achieve the goals I have been hired for, well, I would make those decisions and those decisions would be the prevailing decisions.

Somehow, one just has to take the bull by the horns and wrestle to the ground and subdue it completely – where resolution is lacking, the hired hand gains ascendancy – that is the law of the technical jungle to put it blandly.

Breeding 101 for coat check assistants

Well, really, my job as an expert is to bring it all to a head and deliver a solution.

It was time to go home and I went to the coat check to collect my things – bag was fine, umbrella was dry, overcoat was OK, and where was my hat? Tucked into the sleeve of my overcoat. Sacrilege!!!

I understand that not everyone wears hats, in fact, I have only seen a few places where the concierge knows what to do with a coat, a hat and a cane – my own personally designed hat ruined by some uncultured cretin of a coat check assistant – I was livid, but for the quality of the material, I would have had the manager of the hotel ordering a new one from my milliner’s in Cologne. Struth!

Page turning and sick making

Of children and young men

As the scandal of emails and instant messages threatens to engulf the Republican campaign to great detriment, I begin to wonder what the facts are and how they are being portrayed.

In a question directed to the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the interviewer starts with – “This 16-year old boy who is the young man affected …” the Speaker answers with – “The young man …”

Herein, is the confusion, is the person a child, a boy, a youth, a young man or a man? He is all of that and more.

My voice breaks

There is no doubt that he is an adolescent, which does not make him an adult, he is a teenager and definitely a child of someone – I think it all now depends on the way you look at it.

In terms of criminal responsibility, he is not a child, in terms of sexual development he can father a child, in the scheme of things, he is a boy, as a page, he is a youth, in terms of prospects, he is a young man and when grouped he is a teenager.

In terms of the relationship, he was abused by reason of the exchange between a man of authority and responsibility, had the messages been exchanged between peers, it would have been without event apart from a frank exchange of views involving the headmaster.

At 16, I would have taken offence if anyone had referred to me as a boy or a child, I was already out of secondary school and in polytechnic, though, I had to show my birth certificate because they did not believe I was that young, normally people finished secondary school at 18, my sister finished at 14.

Adults of shame

Anyway, the sad thing developing out of this sad saga of predatory acts against boys, children or young men is the squabble between National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) which has released an amended statement on Mark Foley’s resignation and the National Law Center for Children and Families (NLC) over which organisation is too tightly linked with Congress and who came up with the best ideas for finding missing children.

There is the quality of life of a boy at stake here and the adults of responsibility either in offence or defence are scoring political points against each other – that, I must say is childish. It is all becoming sick-making – I need to see all that food and drink again – Urrggh!

Back to the child, I just hope he is well and well left alone with the support he needs to get on with his life.

Mark Foley on Bill Clinton

Finally, is this the same Mark Foley who said 8 years ago of Bill Clinton during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal “It's vile, it's more sad than anything else, to see someone with such potential throw it all down the drain because of a sexual addiction.”?

Glass houses and stones seem to have met with a resounding clatter and shatter – how are the mighty fallen. ‘Nuff said.

References

Report: Foley allegedly tried to meet page

Foley's Behaviour No Secret on Capitol Hill

American Congress failing the American People

Red face from reps page

Three pieces of news coming out of America appear to show how so different that land is and it so fills me with amazement that people find such comfort in that place.

Probably 10 years ago, the by-line would have been – Rep pages page’s pager … or something along those lines if the tabloids ever got into the salacious side of a sad story of child sexual abuse.

Apparently, for a few years, a Republican Congressman has found the pastime of sending sexually explicit messages to pages – students who get the opportunity to walk the corridors of power as messengers and assistants.

The youngest of who might have been 16, now, for a man in power and authority having membership of the caucus on missing and exploited children it was wrong to abuse his position in that way and it was wrong to subject the young men to such illicit and lewd communication.

Culpability in inaction

If Congressman Foley considered his actions a form of mentoring young men into understanding sex, well, one can only speculate; however, the Republican leadership of the Congress who appeared to have known about this for a while now seem to be feigning innocence as the whole affair has suddenly consumed the fire of their campaign hardly six weeks to the mid-term elections.

It reminds one of the inaction that accompanied sexual abuse claims within the Catholic Church, alas, lessons are not being learnt.

The converse of this is, the young man was 16, quite well past puberty and in Europe would have been more sexually aware, intelligent or active rather than being utterly sexually naïve as one can almost expect of Americans of that age.

There would be some mileage in this thing before the elections turf out a few more Republicans, meanwhile, Mr Foley has demonstrated a classic, accepted guilt, gone for rehabilitation for alcoholism and behavioural problems – it is unlikely the birch would be introduced to teach bad boy – Mr Foley – a useful lesson.

Sadly, the abused child might only be able to afford a comforting ice-cream from mummy and daddy before the media circus helps to ruin the young man’s self esteem for life.

Gambling on a fools gambit

Then, as usually, the warped argument about online gambling leading to addiction, debt and enticement of children has lead to a bad law being promulgated to ban financial institutions like banks and credit card companies from processing payments for participating in online gambling.

This is America where gambling is extremely big business Las Vegas is the bastion of wanton decadence and gambling like no other place on earth and somehow people who go there cannot play the same games from home. Absurd.

Well, the greater reason is, the clout of these casinos as lobbyists and sponsors of politicians has prevent Internet upstarts from establishing online gambling businesses, it is also amusing that having raped indigenous American Indians of wealth and land, they are allowed to build humongous gambling empires in their reservations as a sop for past injustices, part of what lead to the Abramoff scandal.

It is the taxes, stupid

More so, Americans being able to gamble in a global market from the comfort of their homes in a $12 billion business registered offshore, the federal and state governments get not taxes or revenues from these organisations lodged in tax havens all around the world.

No online gambling dollars lining the campaign funds or hospitality troughs of politicians is a cause to fight for and nip the financial transactions in the bud and let it all get more sinister, go underground and less regulated – because the American Congress has been elected to protect the American People from things they as adults should have the sense to know to want to do or abstain from.

The thing about children getting addicted to gambling does not wash, you need a credit card to join an online gambling facility and you can only get a credit card at a certain age – the same credit card can be used to register on porn sites, but I see no Congressman seeking to ban financial transactions to porn sites except those of the fundamentalist and Puritan kind.

Those who want to gamble would gamble in anyway they want; regulation is the better use of law not prohibition, just as drug addicts or alcoholics cannot be legislated out of existence. This is one rather bad law, it might hurt the online gambling businesses for a while, but it would not cure the 50% trade that comes from America from their addiction if they are already hooked.

Suicide gunners and schools

Utterly depressed, repressed or disturbed people with access to guns and ammunition that have been seized from the cold dead hands of Charles Heston have visited schools and shot people, already, thrice this week in America.

OK! We did have one occasion in Dunblane in Scotland where a crazed loner shot 16 children with their teacher before killing himself, one well-adjusted and successful kid from that school is Andrew Murray the rising tennis star – thank God for that – I could almost assume such a recovery might be difficult in America, but that would be both facetious and cynical.

However, it appears people do not want to singularly and quietly commit suicide anymore because their insignificant and uneventful lives might not even make the village rag, so they walk off into a nearby school, take children hostage, run the airwaves for a few hours, appear to negotiate and then shoot up innocent people and then themselves.

I am tempted to say that suicide bombers have a cause and these people have no cause, no purpose and no souls – why use innocent blood to give some publicity or credence to your suicide? This applies to all “suiciders” (a Bushism) all around the world.

A gun law is needed

If there is a case of the Congress to settle on, it is the getting of guns off the streets and reducing the availability of guns to just anyone, the warped interpretation of the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is a problem.

It is still my belief that what it means is; the right to bear arms is only justified as part of a well regulated militia – basically, if you are not in the forces, that right does not exist except when you can called up to defend the state – it does not say you cannot own a gun, but it is not a right to hold one, just as you can own a car, but that does not become a right to have a car.

If there is any need for a new study too, it is that about finding out why these people choose vulnerable people to experience their gruesome deaths when they could find an isolated barn and do the deed if they so wish to end their lives.

How many more headline grabbing shootouts of kids in schools like Columbine do we need before the guns are grabbed out of living and dead hands and burnt out of existence?

Do you read this, the way I do?

“A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” Second Amendment

Air data going nowhere

Information overload

Sometimes I wonder where all that accumulation of information goes apart from feeding the voyeuristic and controlling tendencies of the state and its apparatus in the pretence of fighting the war on terror.

Months ago when the highest European Court declared the data exchange, or rather the whole scale one-way data transfer of confidential data of European citizens who deign to travel to America illegal, that was triumph to be celebrated by all liberty seeking persons who do not want to sacrifice their freedom for temporary safety.

It so happens that the court asked that a better arrangement with legal grounding be negotiated between Europe and American authorities.

A bloody inconvenience

That negotiation seems to have broken down, and so it should, there is no valid reason for sending all that confidential information to America within 15 minutes of take-off only to find that more than halfway into the flight, the airplane has to be turned back because the computers throw up some innocuous and suspicious information which ends being a red herring.

Having never been to America, it does not really bother me, but, I have a newfound interest to visit and tour kindled by the arrival of this month’s National Geographic which had a foldout with a large map of the United States of America.

Extradition on a whim

The next thing to be resolved is that rotten extradition treaty that lets countries throw their citizens to American “justice” and sometimes gallows without court-tested evidence and with nothing of reciprocal equivalence from America.

The whole concept should be declared, unfair, unjust and illegal, the treaties should be annulled and made of non effect.

The poorest standard

The question is why America’s paranoia should become the poor standard of protecting our freedoms, that we end up serving America’s security ends at the expense of protecting and enforcing the rights of our own citizens.

It should not be so; the reciprocation of bad treaties is not the solution, rather the principles of justice, fairness, liberty, freedom and democracy that respects our privacy and protects our confidentiality grounded in good laws and enforce by good government globally is the way to go.

I do not want to know anything about American private lives; neither do I want Americans brought over to Europe on a whim without adequate legal and due process to determining proper cause.