Tuesday 28 June 2005

The Penguin Classics Library Complete Collection

All 1,082 books are available from Amazon for $8,000. A snip. And free delivery too.

Monday 27 June 2005

Sunday 26 June 2005

Monday 20 June 2005

Sunday 19 June 2005

Jools Holland

I often watch Later with Jools Holland on a Friday night. I don't like the guy, and the program's format is awful, but he has lots of interesting guests on the show. I've been introduced to a few new bands thanks to the programme.

Friday's show had The Magic Numbers and Antony and the Johnsons. I was already listening to The Magic Numbers album, but hadn't heard of Anthony & the Johnsons. They played Hope there's someone on the show which I liked so I got hold of their album (I am a bird now).

Wednesday 15 June 2005

Monday 13 June 2005

Can Blair survive this?

"When the Prime Minister discussed Iraq with President Bush at Crawford in April he said that the UK would support military action to bring about regime change [my emphasis], provided that certain conditions were met: efforts had been made to construct a coalition/shape public opinion, the Israel-Palestine Crisis was quiescent, and the options for action to eliminate Iraq's WMD through the UN weapons inspectors had been exhausted."

A couple of weeks ago, The Sunday Times published a Cabinet Office memo from July 2002, from which the above excerpt was taken. Initially ignored by the media, the story is slowly beginning to gain momentum. There is now a website dedicated to the memo. Yesterday's Sunday Times carried another story about it.

When Saddam didn't rise to the bait, we dropped more bombs on him.

This war will not go away. I think that Blair will go first, followed by Bush. Not tomorrow. But eventually.

Sunday 12 June 2005

Changing the name - keeping the history

Bobby,

I think what needs to happen is that you tell me when to delete last-post.blogspot.com. You then grab it.

Note that the-last-post.blogspot.com has already been taken. I have last-post.blogspot.com

This help file then explains about linking sites which means you should retain the history.

Do you think this will work? You must have gone through a similar exercise when moving from The News Today to May22.

Let me know when you want me to delete Last-Post.blogspot.com.

Diggy.

Thursday 9 June 2005

Secretary who stole millions

BBC showed a programme last night called The secretary who stole four milllion pounds about a woman who stole money from her employer. Joyti De-Laurey was a PA at Goldman Sachs. Over a couple of years she forged cheques amounting to $7½M. She was jailed for seven years, along with her husband, a taxi driver, who was jailed for 1½ years because "he probably knew that the money was stolen". At the time of her trial, the media were not sympathetic to her.

The interesting part of the programme was the insight into the lives of Goldman Sach's executives. They thought nothing of running up a $30,000 wine bill. Joyti was the person responsible for paying the bills so had a unique insight into the incredible life-style of these people.

She was also treated like a slave. She was on-call 24/7 (in spite of having a husband and child) and was responsible for organising the business and personal lives of her bosses - including covering for her boss when he sneaked away in the middle of the day for sexual liaisons.

De-Laurey started small, signing cheques for small amounts of money to pay for her debts. But she grew in confidence when she got away with signing hundreds of cheques - for increasing amounts of money. Eventually her audacity and greed got the better of her and she was caught cashing a cheque for $3½M to pay for a house in Cyprus.

It's hard to believe that you could fail to spot millions of dollars going missing but when you earn $100M a year, I guess a few million here or there are easy to miss. As a former director of Golden Sachs said: When you're making £60m a year, a few million missing is like a regular person not remembering the last penny on their account.

Saturday 4 June 2005