Hooray - my alarm has gone off for the last time until next Friday! :)

Well, actually, we'll probably need it in order to to make it to the 8am service on Monday morning, which will probably mean leaving the house at the same time. Come to that, I'm sure our little human alarm clock is going to work his magic most mornings. Bosh var.

But ANYWAY, the point is no more work, after today, for a week (and even then it's only a day). Yippee!!

Came across a term in the Metro yesterday that I'd not heard before; Google-stalker. Isn't that a fantastic neologism; you instantly know exactly what it means, but then after a few minutes you think "Hey - I wonder if I'm a Google-stalker when I search for random friends/colleagues." I quite often try to see if any of my friends from PGL or from uni are evident in cyberspace (usually with no success). I guess Friends Reunited and MySpace are other sites which promote this stalkeresque behaviour - at what point does looking up an old friend become an obsession?

The other term was wikipediholics, which again absolutely hits the nail on the head. Had the wikipedia been around when I was younger, I'm absolutely certain I would have absolutely addicted to it, and spent a lot of time and energy creating/correcting entries!

I don't know if you remember the old Zanussi ad?

Zanussi - The Appliance of Science

This always struck me as a very clever slogan, instantly sticks in the mind because of the whole rhyming thing, and always made me think Yes, Zanussi apply cutting edge scientific methods to produce the very best equipment. It was always right up there with For Mash Get Smash.

It was only yesterday, as I looked at our ageing washing machine, I realised that appliance doesn't actually mean "the application of" at all.. it is in fact a noun, meaning (in this context) a machine performing a domestic role. This The appliance of science becomes a description of the machine itself!

I suspect the clever marketing folk at Zanussi fully intended both meanings (or indeed may have even intended the single meaning that it's taken me a good 15 years to grasp, in which case you could say their slogan failed dismally). I guess at one level it's good marketing, in that I still remember the advert... but it hasn't made me any more likely to buy a Zanussi appliance - good old Which helps me out when making those sorts of decisions!

I've started a more structured weight loss program now, partly as an offset against Christmas, which is usually a weight-gain time! Actually no, it's not just for Christmas; I'm trying to reverse the steady increase of the last 5 years!

The particular spur this time is that I went to buy trousers, and my waist size was 4" bigger than the last time I bought trousers. I refused to buy them on principle (I'm such a woman!!), but it did feel like a line had been crossed. The other line that was crossed is that we bought some funky new scales that calculate your BMI (Body Mass Index), and mine was 25.3, which means I'm clinically overweight (the boundary being 25). Of course having an exact figure for overweightness is a nonsense, and I'm not worried from a medical point of view, but I don't like being/feeling flabby.

So my weight then was 80.1kg (although this was with clothes, to be fair) - last night's score was 77.9kg (without clothes), which probably means I've managed to shed 1 kg or so in a week or two, which is probably a bit too fast, actually...

My diet is simply cutting out snacks between meals - my weight shot up when I started my new job, mainly because there's a constant supply of biscuits by the kettle, and a chocolate shop across the road. I walk (fast - enough to build up a sweat a bit) for over an hour a day in total, and might even re-instigate press-ups and crunches if I get really excited.

My theory of dieting is very simple - eat too much and you'll put on weight, eat less and you'll lose it. I've got an active enough life-style to cover the exercise part I reckon, and cutting out the biscuits has already turned gradual weight gain into gradual weight loss. We'll see.

What's gone wrong with James Bond? Firstly let me make it clear I'm not a James Bond purist. I have never read a novel by Ian Flemming, and I fully appreciate that Casino Royale is probably the closest Bond has ever been to Flemming's character. I guess second place goes to Timothy Dalton in something like "Licence to Kill", but - let's face it - he pretty much sucked as James Bond.

What is Bond about? He's the real-man super hero! The man all men wish they were, and all women wish they could be with. He can drink, smoke, fight, get poisoned, and still save the world and get the girl. He can shoot like no-one else, ski, fence, parachute, fly planes, drive anything faster and better than anyone else. Shirley Bassey had it right - "Baby you're the best". Oh yes, and he's suave, sophisticated; never shaken or stirred!

And what is a Bond film about? Crazy "not even close to being believable" stunts, mad chases over air, sea, and land (and space, come to that). Super evil meglomaniac baddies who are going to kill us all. Weird and inventive ways JB is about to be killed before miraculously escaping at the last minute. Amazing gadgets for getting out of any tight squeeze. Let's face it, Austin Powers hit it bang on the nose.

So why are they turning him into an ordinary joe public who happens to be paid by the British government to kill people? "Licence to kill" shouldn't mean you can top anyone you feel like. And it really shouldn't mean you are sent with the sole aim of assassinating some particular person that Tony considers undesirable.

So take Goldeneye. Brosnan's Bond does a great bungee jump off a dam. Get's inside the facility, and finds someone sitting on the loo. What does he do; knock him out with a swift upper cut while hanging from the ceiling. What would Craig's Bond do? Almost certainly shoot him with a silenced gun, just for being in the way. Of course the latter option is the sensible thing to do if you're breaking into a heavily guarded military bunker - Brosnan's guard will wake up sooner or later and raise the alarm. But it's not the Bond thing to do.

It's one thing to shoot someone who's shooting you - kill or be killed - quite another to ask M whether she wants "a clean kill or a warning shot?".

Take the whole premise of the film - in Casino Royale, Bond is basically trying to stop someone who finances terrorism. He'll be on to benefit fraudsters in the next film, I reckon. Or perhaps he'll break a paedophile ring? While these are noble causes, and quite possibly what our Government should be spending time and money trying to sort out, it's not what Her Majesty's Secret Service do. He's 007 for goodness sake, not some PC Plod in Scotland Yard.

What's the most exciting sequence in the film? JB trying to stop someone blowing up an empty prototype place because the terrorist banker will make money on the Stock Exchange if it is blown up. Come on people!

My final complaint is that people really die. Not cartoon deaths, but "head being held in a sink of water until they drown death". Or "falling down 5 storeys and landing on the ground" dying. You actually get the impression JB enjoys killing people. In fact, he's really not that much of a good guy anymore.

I guess this is probably heathly - James Bond has always made espionage and assassination seem glamorous, even desireable. The message is you can drink, smoke, sleep around, and kill people without any side-effects to your physical or mental health. But the whole genre is so clearly over-the-top ridiculous escapism that it doesn't matter so much. But if this is way Bond is going, I'm going to miss him.

Seems to me that it's a very good idea to sort out photo albums in a timely fashion. The two main reasons for this are:

1. You can remember the who/where/when of the photos.
2. You don't post-select the photos based on experiences since then.

For instance, a few years ago I went to a wedding and took lots of piccies on my digital camera. I'm finally getting around to printing out the photos from the computer to go in albums - but sadly in the meantime said couple have split up. This makes for a difficult dilemma... Do I put in photos of "the happy couple" (and they were happy on the day) or not?

To not put them in seems a shame on many fronts. The bride looked absolutely radiant, and I took some stonking photos of her. The wedding itself was a lovely day in a beautiful setting. Everyone had a really good time and that shows in the photos. There's also the whole "documentary" side of life - a photo album is, in same ways, a store of memories, or at least aide-memoirs. Finally, what happens if the circumstances change again? Perhaps they will patch up their marriage, and have the next 50 years together?

On the other hand, it's a shame to put in pictures of the bride and groom looking lovingly at each other when, in retrospect, clearly something was rotten in the state of Denmark. It's like a wedding is a celebration of love and commitment, but if it only lasts a couple of years that's casts a different light on that day. There's also the thing about who else might look at our albums - should they or any of there friends and family come round and look at out photos, the last thing they'd want is to be forceably reminded of what, I'm sure, is a very painful experience.

My resolution is to try and chart a middle course - I wouldn't want to pretend it didn't happen, and all of us there enjoyed the day. But I've also avoided choosing photos of the bride and groom being lovey-dovey. This is actually fairly easy, as you can include the staged shots of various combinations of family. There's a whole philosophical questions here about our response to pain and "darkness", I guess, which is actually one I've been pondering recently... But that's for another day!

I know I'm a bit late in writing about this - been too busy.

So anyway, Sassam Hussein has been given the death penalty in Iraq. No surprise there - the opposite would have been a surprise. But the reactions are still interesting; lots of pictures of people on the streets on Iraq celebrating, for example.

I had it find to see that a death sentence is ever something to celebrate. It's not a victory. It doesn't do anything to right the wrongs that were done. It's not even a particularly good form of revenge, if you're going to be that base. 5 minutes and the jobs done - compared to the lifetime of suffering some of his victims have to face.

The only good reasons I can see for the death penalty are

1. It has a certainty of a 0% reoffending rate
2. It possibly acts as a deterrent
3. It solves the security problems of keeping a high profile dangerous/hated/loved prisoner safe and in custody
4. It stops the criminal being a cause (although it does make them a martyr)
5. It's far more humane than cooping them up in a cell for the next 50 years

The bad reasons:

1. There is no such thing as 100% certainty of guilt
2. It removes any possibility of rehabilitation
3. It's based on revenge/retribution rather than forgiveness
4. It's not a particularly good punishment for the person involved
5. As I understand it, it doesn't particularly act ass a deterrent
6. It decreases the value of human life - if the state can kill people, why shouldn't the citizens?
7. "Justice", i.e. "an eye for an eye". Justice in this way simply doesn't work, in my opinion. Are we saying that Saddam's life has the same value as x million kurds, so killing him will "balance the books"?

Violence has never been the answer to any of the world's problems, and while I would say that it's sometimes necessary (cf the Nazis), it's never a good thing. Similarly, in this country we seem to have lost sight of the point of prison. The reasons (good or bad) I can think of for sending someone to jail are:

• Punishment - restrict their freedom to make the pay for their crime
• Public safety - If someone is going to harm/steal people, the safety of the wider public is more important than their liberty
• Revenge - "an eye for an eye" type affair (see above)
• Rehabilitation - make them come to terms with their actions being A Bad Thing, and come back in society a better person
• Training - criminal masterclasses from the more experienced

Our society today seems to only really be concerned with the first three of these. Lock 'em up and throw away the key. Nicked my stereo? You deserve 2 years in prison son. And I don't think there's any consideration of the rehabilitation element. If I sit my boy on the naughty step for doing something he shouldn't, it's not to punish him per se, and it's certainly not out of anger. It's to give us all a time-out from whatever situation caused the bad behaviour, and give him time to think about the fact he's upset us or done something wrong. It's not a pleasant experience for him, I don't think - but that's to make sure he understands something is unacceptable, not because I want him to suffer! I guess it's the fine line between discipline and punishment. Maybe that line's not even there and I have too many negative vibes with the word "punishment" - but the purpose of the unpleasantness is to drive home the point, not as an end in itself. And the point is to help him be a nicer/better person in the long run.

The difficulty with Saddam is that he would pose a threat and be a de-stablizing influence for the rest of his life, whether behind bars or no. He has made it very clear he sees nothing wrong with his actions while president, and given every reason to believe given half a chance he'd be back in power and doing it all again. And there are people, I'm sure, who would want to see this.

Listening to Paradise City has got me thinking about intros to songs. I would probably back off a bit from saying Paradise City is one of favourite song intros, as there's so many good song intros - but it's definitely an intro I really like to a song I don't particularly like.

It seems to me that it's actually very easy to make a good intro - most songs seem to manage it. Whether it's a long building up/layering approach, which quite a lot of songs do (Layla, Justified and Ancient, Nirvana of course do it) a jump straight in with the words or only a short instrumental that nevertheless represents the instrumentation of the whole song (Beautiful South tend to do this, as does Centrefold), or the plain odd or shock starter (e.g. Batdance by Prince, even Hey Mickey. Possibly even the Shoop shoop song, although this might be a jump straight in). I suppose you could add a fade in too (More than a feeling, by Boston).

Finishing a song seems a lot harder - repeat and fade seems very popular, and the other main one is probably back right off for the last time, quite possibly with a slow down (KT Tunstell, please step forward). A guess the rock ending is to sustain a power chord for a few bars and finish with a big BAM. Occasionally you get endings just to keep DJs on their toes, although I can't think of an example right now. I guess Batdance is a bit like this. Do you get de-layered endings, where the instruments disappear one by one. In fact there's a song tickling the back of my mind that does this, but can't quite remember it.

My conclusion is that, in the main, endings are pretty boring. Intros are many and varied, after all you can choose which instruments to start with when - start with acoustic guitar (Pinball Wizard), leccy guitar (Sweet Child of Mine, Layla, ...), drums or other percussion(Obvious Child, Walk like an Egyptian), bass (lovely day), piano (I can see clearly now). Then choose which are next, and so on.

All this pondering led to me to think about the fact that "spot the track" games are almost always based on Introduction. I guess "Bits and Pieces" on Radio 1 (do they still do it?) is a notable exception, but whenever I've been to a party that's had a music game, it's been based on the intro. The obvious reasons are

1. It's a lot easier to grab the first 5 seconds of a track, then it is to have to listen to the whole track and choose a section.
2. Intros don't usually have words, which makes it harder to identify the artist and title.
3. Intros don't always have an obvious connection to the main body of the song.

These are all good reasons, but I was thinking that if I ever hold a music quiz at a party I'll do it on either the ending or on an instrumental bridge. It would make a change, if nothing else!

I'm slightly ashamed to admit that I just made a discovery about C++ classes that I probably should have realised years ago.

If you have something like

class A {
  public:
    virtual void fn() { cout << "I'm A" << endl;} ;
} ;

class B : public A {
  public:
    void fn() { cout << "I'm B" << endl ;} ;
} ;

void callfn(A a){
  a.fn() ;
}

it doesn't do what I expected at all...

For instance, consider the code

  A a; B b;
  callfn(a) ; callfn (b) ;

This compiles just fine - but the output is

I'm A
I'm A

!!!!

In fact, you need to be using pointers to get the behaviour I was after

void callfn(A *a){
  a->fn() ;
}

 ...

  A a; B b;
  callfn(&a) ; callfn (&b) ;

This exhibits the behaviour I was looking for, namely:

I'm A
I'm B

It's probably very obvious why this is the case, but it stumped me for a bit.

Spooky thing - Guns'n'Roses's Paradise City is quite possibly one of my favourite introductions of all times. I'm not actually wild about the song as a whole, but the first 80 seconds, until the thrashy overdriven bit starts, just hit the spot everytime. Ok, I'm a huge fan of "layering" in almost any song - by which I mean building up layers of music/instrumentation/harmony a bar or stanza at a time. (I guess Kirsty McColl's Days struck me the other day as the example par excellence of layering up an entire song). Still, I love the the sort of clean guitar and high-hat, then on to heavy kick and snare, then vocals, bring in some bass and distort guitar, sounds like some pads going on too. The comes the policeman's whistle, and the song goes downhill for me.

Ok, so nothing too spooky so far (except for the fact that G'n'R are interspersed with The Monkees on my MP3, which is plain odd) - and indeed had it not been for my headphones Paradise City might have passed unnoticed. These are the headphones I bought last year (Shure e2c's, I think) when was putting together an in-ear foldback system, and decided to actually spend more than 5.99 on a pair of naff bud earphones thingy which are tinny and last about 2 days. Anyway it's a world apart - fantastic reproduction, full frequency range. All of which meant I heard something on the intro to Paradise City that I've never heard before.

What is it? Well there's a fourth part singing "Take me down to the paradise city..." in the intro. Right down the bass end, almost below hearing - although he's plain enough when they get to "oh won't you please take me home." Actually I can't decide how many parts there are - might only be three. They're messing around with reverb and panning, and I've never been very good at pulling out parts. Still, his voice is so low it's almost like the bass strumming a single note in time, and I have never noticed it before!!

Now if we're talking Guns and Roses, of course Sweet Child 'o Mine doesn't have any of Paradise's flaws, except for when they cut out the riff between the verses in the single release. I challenge anyone not to succumb to air guitar for Sweet Child. Quite possible air drums and air bass too. It's got everything - instantly recognisable riff, great tune, lyrics, and it just rocks. And it's got surprise too; just as you think you know what the song's doing, along comes a bridge and some thrashy overdrive, and the whole "where do we go" back-off, which isn't really a back off.

Strangely, I hate pretty much every other G'n'R track I've heard. :)