Extraordinary - beyond what is ordinary or usual; highly unusual or exceptional or remarkable.
Rendition - a performance of a musical composition or a dramatic role.

Seems harmless enough, right? Extraordinary Rendition sounds nothing more dreadful than a god awful am-dram performance or a dodgy cover version by some teenage band that has been playing their instruments for 2 weeks and thinks they are fucking Nirvana or something. In fact, most of YouTube is an Extraordinary Rendition of something or another.

The US Government seems to have adopted a policy of making up entirely new words for their dubious activities to make them appear less terrible. Take for example the recent bail out of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They call this conservatorship. What the hell does this mean? I’ve being following this shit for years and I’ve never heard that word before. This bail out was not much different to the UK Government bail out of Northern Rock. At least we’ve got the balls to call it what it really is - privatisation. In the US however privatisation is not a palatable concept en mass. The US prides itself as the benchmark of capitalism and free economy. This is the doctrine they are crusading across the world as we speak. For them to admit privatising half their mortgages and turning the country into the largest council estate in the world in not something they can stomach. No bother, just make up a new word, tell the world it’s all good and let the market’s rally. Stalin would be proud.

Extraordinary Rendition, if you are the CIA, is a term used to describe “the apprehension and extrajudicial transfer of a person from one state to another”. Extrajudicial meaning punishment by the state or some other official authority without the permission of a court or legal authority. Not quite my interpretation, but hey, it sounds better than “international illegal kidnapping”. Flying into a country in a private jet, bundling the “baddies” in the back and taking them someplace to torture them is not ok with me. In fact, it’s an Extraordinary Rendition of being a total asshole. This is no more legal than if I drove round to some dodgy estate, bungled some chavs in the back of a van, took them to the moors and kicked the living crap out of them. It’s just not legal, however noble the justification, whatever the cause may be. Why should the state get away with what is illegal and shocking for any individual to do, and who is ultimately responsible?

Our American friends, Impeach Bush. Question the policies of your future leaders, whoever they may be.

“Section 5 - Due Impartiality and Due Accuracy and Undue Prominence of Views and Opinions”

The OFCOM code states that

“This section of the Code does not apply to BBC services funded by the licence fee or grant in aid, which are regulated on these matters by the BBC Governors”.

OK, I see. So who are the BBC Governors? According to Wikipedia (the source of 100% fact) it says the board of Governors were dissolved in 2006. It seems they were replaced with the pancy pants BBC Trust. Surely the OFCOM code should be updated.

I suggest housepricecrash.co.uk for an insightful and entertaining grandstand seat watching Gordon Browns economy fall to pieces.

Update: The original Gordon Brown quote can be found on the BBC Election ‘97 website.

Mr Brown said: “I will not allow house prices to get out of control and put at risk the sustainability of the future.”

The results are interesting. I’ve not performed any third party SEO. I’ve only gone as far as to optimise the mark-up and content in the site itself. According the Analytics, the two most popular organic keyword searches sending traffic to the site are

1. 5x mortgage
2. coop mortgages

Searching for “5x mortgage” in Google brings up whatthemortgage.com 4th from top in the results. This is prime Google real-estate. This demonstrates the one of the keys to SEO success is time. My content wasn’t even original or very high quality.

In the following year I shall start some 3rd party SEO, trying to create more links to the site to improve Google’s PageRank. I shall attempt to re-style the site to make it more appealing (ala web 2.0). A part of the re-style shall be to make room for some affiliate adverts. Can I convert some of the “5x mortgage” searches into hard cash?

I shall report in a year’s time (or maybe sooner)!

Writing a custom trace listener is easy, just derive from System.Diagnostics.ThreadListener and implement the Write() method.

Using the listener the following code will produce the output in the screenshot:


// Trace is System.Diagnostics.Trace

Trace.WriteLine("Trace test comlete");


I know, it’s awesome.

To use this, all you do is add the assemblies IrcTraceListener.dll and Sharkbite.Thresher.dll to your bin folder and register the trace listener in your app.config file as follows (you don’t have to write any code to use this).


<configuration>
<system.diagnostics>
<trace>
<listeners>
<add name="IrcTraceListener" type="IrcTraceListener.IrcTraceListener, IrcTraceListener"
initializeData="irc.hackervoice.co.uk;#test;trace" />
</listeners>
</trace>
</system.diagnostics>
</configuration>


Props to the thresher .NET IRC library, without which I would not have bothered writing this.

Download the source for IRC Trace Listener.

I am a banana!

This is a follow up to my previous rant about Barclays bank customer service.

I ordered my Barclays PIN Sentry card reader over a month ago so I could continue to use my online banking facility. The PIN Sentry card reader it yet to turn up, and Barclays have locked me out of online banking until this turns up. Nice one.

They gave me a special phone number to call, for the PIN Sentry help desk in India or something. Great.

So I call this number, hold for 15 minutes, then get to speak to someone who asks me half a dozen security questions - one of which the lady on the phone claims I got wrong. I know what it was - my mobile phone number - which has changed since I joined Barclays 10 years ago. Well, having realised my error in being honest, I offered to tell her what my old phone number was and correct this error. She refused to let on what question I got wrong (as if my date of birth or mothers maiden name might have changed), she wouldn’t let me tell her the correct answer, and locked me out of further correspondence with Barclays telephone support.

I now have to visit a branch to prove who I claim to be so I can continue to use services which previously worked fine, but they forced me to change - and then failed to process the change. I never actually wanted this PIN Sentry thing.

Barclays if your reading this your customer service fails harder than Northern Rocks balance sheet. You’re going to get dumped. First Direct will offer me £100 to go join them.

Not long after ordering the card reader I recieved a new debit card. Apparantly the old one was not compatible with with new card readers, even though it had a year left on it. This voided a whole load of standing orders I had on the original card.

Now, two months after that I’ve still not recieved my card reader - and now I cannot log in to online banking at all without it! Where the hell is it Barclays? Your customer service is the most dreadful I’ve ever had to endure. Why must you make banking so difficult for me?