Penniless

Christmas Shopping in Aberdeen

Tis' the season to be fleeced, tralalallalala! Spent the best part of the day In Aberdeen, primarily to meet our daughter returning from Napier for the holidays, but also meeting up with our son who is at RGU. Lunch followed by some Christmas shopping for our two darling children, with the highlight probably; watching these motor-biking Santas revving loudly and doing burn-outs up Union Street.

Festive

The Desolation of Bilbo

I guess I can finally feel the festive spirit, with only a week let to work before commencing a fortnight's break and in the full knowledge that over the consequence of that period of time, there is every likelihood my cat Bilbo will destroy the Christmas tree. Day and night this a task he is hell-bent on fulfilling. The climbing in itself is somewhat destructive, but not satisfied with that he must systematically remove the decorations, particularly at his chosen ingress and egress points. Furthermore, he attempts to tear branches off with his teeth. But look at those big eyes, he's only playing!!!!

Codified

Java Program

I teach Java programming, but that by no means makes me a great programmer. I teach so many different things that it prevents me from specialising in any one particular area, as I have to concentrate on whatever I'm teaching at the time. I do like programming though and this week had a particularly difficult dilemma to solve for a task I was setting, involving writing Arraylists of strings of varying length to file and then reading them back in again and reassigning to an Arraylist. Not even Google could help me with this one. I sussed out a neat little way of handling it by myself and I'm fairly pleased with the results (not shown ;).

Fitter

Ben Rinnes

Had a wee wander up Ben Rinnes this afternoon. First time since March and bearing in mind I've lost almost two stone since the Summer, I was hoping I'd feel fitter and would be able to tackle it well. It was good, as out of the 10 times or so we've been up there, this was definitely our fastest time up an down and physically I feel much better. All I've really done is cut out bread. I have porridge for breakfast, a salad for lunch and a normal evening meal. I even allow myself a snack and a drink at the weekend. I wouldn't eat salad before, so feel kind of foolish having discovered that a little French dressing makes it entirely edible!

Crazy

Alice In Chains - Check My Brain

You can't work in education and not be a bit mad, if not to start with then soon enough and I'm sure I'm no exception. So here is the delightful Check My Brain by Alice In Chains, to mark Black Friday and the start of the weekend. I don't get why suddenly this year Black Friday is a thing here in the UK. It's clearly a ploy to get the Christmas shopping ball rolling earlier than usual and of course the sheeple go 'baa' as normal. I was lucky enough to see Alice In Chains supporting Megadeth at Edinburgh Playhouse on 30th March 1991. I wasn't much interested in Megadeth and went purely to see Alice In Chains, who were great. This is probably the only track I really like from them recently. Pretty much sums up how I feel right now though!

Taxed

Annual Tax Summary 2013-14

Very nice of our government to send me my first ever Annual Tax Summary, showing how my Tax and National Insurance contributions have been spent. Of course, these are not actual figures, just a rough breakdown. Nevertheless, I thought it necessary to determine what each of the sectors listed actually represents.  I have added my interpretation to the image in red text. I think it's fair to say that probably 50% of the spending could have been saved were it not for incompetence, bureaucracy and fraud. While I can accept these as part and parcel of government, I do object to contributing any of my earnings towards killing innocent civilians. Thank You Tony... recent worthy recipient of an award from Save the Children!

Doubting

Montsegur

I'm firmly of the belief that things are seldom what they seem. Some might call me a conspiracy theorist, but if overwhelming evidence points to something not being true, then how can it be a conspiracy? It's clearly a lie! We're lied to all the time, by our colleagues, bosses, friends, why not our governments, especially our governments. They are masters of deceit, yet people buy their daily news propaganda without even a thought. Sheeple is an appropriate nickname for them. In 2009, I was lucky enough to visit Montsegur in Southern France, the last bastion of the Cathar faith, crushed for questioning the virtues of Catholicism. A dark chapter in human history, that continued for many hundreds of years and to some extents still does. The truth must die so that lies can live!