A while after Jen got her job at the company she's with now, her laptop upped and died on her and so they gave her a new one without obtaining the old one. Since then just about everyone at the company has been fired or left under a cloud for newer, greener pastures. Which means we think we don't have to return the laptop which means I'll have it to play with which is what I have spent the last couple of days doing.

In my trouble-shooting of the many problems the device has I found this pearl of wisdom from the microsoft website:

When you install Windows XP, you may experience one or more of the following symptoms:

• When you restart your computer, you may be prompted to use the Last Known Good configuration. When you do so, your computer may stop responding (hang) during the restart, and each time you restart thereafter.
  
• You may be prompted to run ScanDisk. When you do so, your computer may stop responding (hang). If you do not run ScanDisk, your computer may start correctly. However you are prompted to run ScanDisk every time you start your computer, and if you do so, your computer may stop responding (hang).
  
• When you restart your computer, your computer may stop responding (hang).
  If you try to restart your computer in Safe mode, your computer may stop responding (hang) when Windows XP tries to load the Agp440.sys service.
  

So I think I'm screwed either way, thanks for the help Bill.

Nothing's happened (especially where computers are concerned), except Easter, which I find very amusing this year.

The irony of celebrating the martyring of an dissident, propgandist and leading thinker on peace in the Middle East while an ultra-conservative "coalition" castigate and patronise those who choose peace over war and seek to have their leaders take responsibility for their arrogant actions is not lost on me.

I read something picked up from the New York Times commenting on a satirical tv show which took this from the Washington Post. So it's gospel truth, right. The coalition of the willing - how do you get into the club? Well, it seems you have to offer something to the war effort...arms, troops, intelligence, spies, archive material or, in the case of Morocco, two-thousand suicide monkeys.

No kidding, Morocco's contribution to the war was two-thousand monkeys which were intended to set off land-mines. And the appalling thing is that Washington and London took them up on the offer. But I don't suppose we'll hear much about that.

Okay, who's up for 24 hour coverage of Operation Chimpan-Freedom?

Been a while, I see.

Mostly that's down to having downloaded Championship Manager 4 and losing hours here and there. Strange.

In the news today, though...

I see that USAID has awarded the Bechtel Corporation the bumper contract for rebuilding Iraq. The what corporation, asks you...

Bechtel. You might know them as the company that built the US nuclear energy program, or maybe the company that New Labour hired to get the tube out to the Milennium Dome in time for it's opening.

Of course, you might know them as the company that privatised Bolivia's water and sewage services, causing civil unrest in Cocachamba.

Or maybe as the company which, when given the task of managing the Dome Rail Link, threatened to blacklist striking engineers. Or as the comapnt which through the 80s routinely fired whistleblowers who threatened to reveal bad business and safety practices in Bechtel's plants.

Or as the company which, when given the opportunity to manage the Eurotunnel Rail Link, loused it up so badly that Chancellor Gordon Brown had to use million of pounds of public money to get the project on track.

Or as the company which supplied many of the "innocent" pieces of machinery Iraq miuraculously fashined into super guns in the late 80s.

Or as the company which was a stepping stone to the government for George Schultz (Reagan's Secretary of State, responsible for weakening environmental protection laws and loosening corporate responsibilites in areas you and I might consider just having good business ethics), Casper Weinberger (Reagan's Secretary of Defense, ably aided by Senior Military Assistant General Colin Powell, both of whom testified to Congress about a covert shipment of US arms to Iran), Philip Habib (Reagan's Special Envoy to the Middle East who brokered a peace - of sorts - in the Beiruit sige of 1982. Which held until peace-keeping troops left the region and then Ariel Sharon went and did exactly as he had said he would from the outset.) , Richard Helms (former Director of the CIA who led plots to kill Castro, spy on Anti-War protestors during Vietnam and to overthrow Salvador Allende's government in Chile. Which had been democratically elected by Chileans. And then he lied about the CIA's involvement in those very same things - he came clean in 1977) and William Casey (who ran Reagan's campaign, ran covert ops and was the CIA's leader in the Iran arms deal). Some of those are, even now, executives on the board of Bechtel.

Oh, and in the first nuclear expansion since Three Mile Island (which, naturally, Bechtel were fined for avoiding safety controls when clearing *that* mess up) it's likely that as the US's premier provider of Nuclear Power, President Bush will likely award the contract for building and maintaining new installations to...yep.

And one more thing...the Bechtel Corporation was responsible for the building of nuclear power plants in North Korea in the 80s (with a little bribing of Korean Electric Company officials, of course).

So, I'm glad that the "Post-Saddam Iraq" is in good hands.

Sweet dreams, everyone.

And the week starts again...

...so I found out that my till was $70 short on Friday and that the money was nowhere to be found...not a small sum to lose and naturally, something for lowly bodies like me to fret for our jobs about.

My manager is a lady called Patty; she's slightly strange, hails from Buffalo and had an anal retentive first husband who was an accountant with no idea about how to balance a household budget, a divorce and a second husband who's Italian-American and a pilot of some kind .

That said, she's pretty good to work for.

She also was caking it at having to call Joe, her manager and my District Manager.

Joe is the progeny of Irish-Italian-American stock, raised in Australia and was once responsible for managing a large chain of hotels. Not a guy to trifle with, even though he's called me up twice at work and pretended to be the INS threatening to deport me. This, though, is getting tired.

Anyway, when Patty calls Joe to find out what to do he tells her not to worry and to tell me not to worry.

This gets me worried.

But anyhow, that's what happened yesterday.

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Did you know that Paul Simon actually wrote Bridge Over Troubled Waters...?

I know, it's strange. It's one of those songs you think has been around forever and that nobody actually *wrote* it, kind of like the Happy Birthday song...

But he did, and it's less than 35 years old.

Can you believe that for many of us our (great) grandparents lived and died without ever knowing any of the words. It's fairly odd whern you think about it. Although 400 years or so ago people had never heard the soliloquies jotted down on a wet Wednesday afternoon by Bill Shakespeare; and that as few as twenty years ago the words "I'll be back" were never muttered with a faux-Austrian accent.

These things, that we take for granted every day, someone was responsible for them; and I, for one, have never mailed a royalty cheque/check out for using them.

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Those of you who watch it will be almost glad to know that BBC's Coupling has been given a pilot episode on NBC which I hope is broadcast soon...

...check IMDB for the details of the casting...

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And one final thing...

...Ben...

...if she's worth thinking about day and night, she's worth taking the risk on being shot down for...