Having recently read and very much enjoyed The Grapes of Graph (perhaps I should say “was moved by” rather than “enjoyed”), it is isn’t interesting to see the parallels between the harsh times experienced in the Great Depression and the not as bad but still regrettable plight of many of our own members of society.
In the book, Ma Joad says something along the lines of “the thing I’m learning more. If you’re in trouble or hurt or need—go to poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help —the only ones.”
This is a phenomenon that can be often seen throughout society. For example, my father, who is a gas engineer, once told me that poor people are far more likely to tip than wealthy people are – perhaps because they are more aware of financial pressures and the had work people do.
This can also be seen in the homeless world as well. Last night we met three people with dogs and all of them told us the same thing – the dog eats before I do. You can tell – all of the dogs looked well fed, their fur was in good condition and most of them were wrapped up in nice coats, one was even in a hoodie.
To matter how down on their luck people get, most never stop caring about others. Indeed, it may even be a prerequisite.
Tonight wasn’t the best night we’ve ever had at the Humanist Action Group. We judge that by the amount of people we find – on a good night, everyone will have found shelter and there will be nobody on the streets. Tonight, we got about 100m from our door before we had run out of coffee and had to go back to make more.
One of the people we chatted to gave us an insight into how much money you can make begging. It’s significantly less than you can earn in a minimum wage job. If anyone ever tells you they make loads of money – tell them to stop voting Tory and pull their head out of their ass.
Here is what you might expect to make in a week…
- Monday – Wednesday: £10-15 per night
- Thursday: £20 per night
- Friday: £25-30 per night
- Saturday: If the weather is good, maybe £35
- Sunday: Nothing, there is nobody in town on a Sunday
Not a great way to scratch a living.
One of my friends recently started a new blog on the origins of Islam. It challenges the claim that is sometimes made by Islam itself that its origins are factual – as the blog goes on to explain, this simply isn’t the case. Read all about it.
I’ve been reading Philip Pullman’s trilogy, His Dark Materials, starting with book one for obvious reasons – Northern Lights.
I enjoyed it, but it felt very much like a children’s book. Obviously that is because it is, but if you take the example of a series like Harry Potter, that has caught the imagination of many adults too, and I don’t feel Northern Lights has the same power.
The Cheltenham Festival is the biggest event in the racing calendar. Only the Grand National can top it for prize money, and none can top the Gold Cup for prestige. Having spent the past four years in the gaming industry, it’s always a big week.
Most of the betting companies had a smooth week technical wise. Corals had some real problems with their website, and Bet Victor and Paddy Power had some big outages too – but everyone else came through it rather smoothly.
I made the mistake of following the tips from the racing team – and ended the week rather down. But it’s all in good fun, and I did manage three winners, just not particularly well priced ones.
We live in an age where scumbags often try to rip you off. Paying with basically any method costs you extra money with RyanAir, even though they’ve been told they have to change it by the authorities. So it takes something special to cause outrage these days.
But Leeds Arena and their ticket partner Eventim have somehow managed it. I’ve just booked to go see Nickelback and tickets are at a fairly average £37.00 each.
But then there is a booking fee of £6.30 – per ticket! Presumably, this is to cover the cost of processing the payment, though I notice they don’t even take my American Express.
Then comes delivery – this is £7.50! Of course, I can opt to collect the tickets from the venue itself, in this case, I would have to shell out £2.50! Just to collect the tickets myself! And there is no print them at home option.
That means for £74.00 worth of tickets, I’m paying £20.10 in service charges – making up 21% of the entire cost.
Of course, you can argue that Eventim is just a company and therefore driven to make money, and having a natural monopoly they can just rip people off (we’re just doing our jobs – like the Nazi soldiers who worked in the death camps). But surely at a certain point, the authorities have to step in and say “look, you’re just lying about your ticket prices”, just like they did with the airlines.
If you find your screen resolution suddenly drops too 800×600 on Ubuntu 12.04, the following set of commands may help you resolve it. First, stop the graphical environment.
sudo service lightdm stop
Now remove all the Nvidia packages and reboot the system.
sudo apt-get purge nvidia*
sudo reboot
This will reset you to the default video driver. You now need to reinstall the Nvidia driver, which you can do by going to System settings > Additional Drivers and selecting the top option with the following name.
NVIDIA binary Xorg driver, kernal module and VPDAU library
Select this and click activate. Now reboot your system again and the Nvidia drivers will be re-installed and hopefully working again.
