The way it's done in books.

[reddragdiva]

• The rich are different from you and me — they're even bigger wankers than you thought.

• The Eee of sausage.

Off work today with what feels like more of the virus. Which makes little sense, except arkady appears to have it too. Very tired, muscles aching, going up the stairs kills my thighs. Woken this morning by Freda YELLING YELLING YELLING because she knew Daddy was home so thought he belonged downstairs to play with her. secretlondon came to visit.

Pub on Sunday was lovely. I drank far too much excellent beer and I hope was only slightly an idiot. More workout for the camera. Must put some shots up some time. I owe friend_of_tofu about a year's worth.

Minus point for KDE 4.1: finding a media player that streams from SMB and doesn't suck. Totem is sucking (no way to make the buffer bigger), none of the KDE 4 apps do SMB as yet.

Still posting to Rocknerd (feed: rocknerd_rss) every day, just.

Comments

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

The rich actually do hate the rest of us that much, and they send their darling offspring to my town to get their made-up degrees.

[reddragdiva]

It's not hate so much as ignorant complacence. Much more passive and default rather than active. It's like the difference between trolls and fuckheads; trolls sometimes stop trolling.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

They sat outside the door of one of my students, who is poor, Irish and brilliant, all night, every night he had exams, making a lot of noise. He politely asked them to go away because he had an exam the next day and after ten minutes they came back. He asked again, they came back. He asked the porters to make them go away, they came back. He asked the porters again, they came back. About 3am he lost his temper and they came back after 20 minutes that time. I don't think that is passive.

[reddragdiva]

Yes, that does count as effort.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Though it makes me a peculiar kind of happy that at least some of these rich people will be made rather poorer by the credit crunch, and they have no real life skills at all. I have been getting a lot of mileage out of that as an aid to sleeping at night recently.

[friend-of-tofu.livejournal.com]

I do love Polly Toynbee! Although articles like this do tend to make me feel like abandoning my usual stance of negotiation and empathy in favour of a first-against-the-bloody-wall approach.

It's a shame I'm not a better actor, because to my mind, the only justification I could ever see for pursuing that level of success would be as a fifth-columnist; get in there sneakily and destroy them all!

Interestingly, Tony Young might be a wanker, but he got one thing right. The belief we now have in the existence of a meritocratic system (worse in America) makes the rich even bigger wankers, because they can justify their belief by pointing to their own hard work and brush off any feeling whatsoever of guilt. Because they've earned it.

[utile-et-dulce.livejournal.com]

btw does smb still have a file size limit ? (endless hours of grief that caused me whilst trying to copy 4gb backup files from a crashed server had to use ftp in the end)

[reddragdiva]

Sort of, depending how you do it.

[purplegril.livejournal.com]

I often say the majority of new trainee grads at my work (Top 4 Accountancy Practise) have no damn idea how lucky they are. Most also have parents in similar jobs and I don't think I know anyone else there that doesn't have financially successful parents apart from me. Which is fascinating.

But then I'm quite realistic, and I wouldn't have guessed at £39,000 putting you in the top 10% of earners in the UK. I'd like to see the bell curve of earnings, actually.

And how do you define poverty anyway? I think much below £22,000 for an entire family in London would be living in poverty, although I know perfectly well that that's the average earnings in the UK. And I think the Govt's idea of poverty line is stupidly low.

Hilarious that supposedly intelligent people actually think you can get a lot of money out of benefits, though. HA HA HA! Yeah right.

[hawkeviper.livejournal.com]

KDE 4.1 also sucks due to its complete lack of any laptop tools, or in fact a decent network manager, or a decent irc client, or a decent file browser... hrm, are we seeing a pattern here? It looks pretty, but it has all the functionality of a pickled squid. Good going guys.

[reddragdiva]

I'm finding Dolphin much less sucky on 4.1 than 3.5, though fish:// is still buggy. The laptop tools are carefully hidden away where you won't find them obviously. I've always favoured Xchat for IRC. But yeah, it's not finished and still takes a bit much kicking. That said, I'm not going back.

[hawkeviper.livejournal.com]

"But yeah, it's not finished and still takes a bit much kicking. That said, I'm not going back."

Yep, I agree, and I'm not going back either. I only use it on my desktop, my laptop still runs 3.5, so I don't see all the dirty bad parts.

[davywavy.livejournal.com]

By God, Polly Toynbee doesn't half talk some shite, doesn't she?