ArchivesBy Author: Phil
Talentless mug who ends up writing most of the articles on diaTribe. You can read about Phil in his about page in the Bandanna Club website.
Centrex site nominated for New Statesman award.
Just been told that the Centrex Website has been nominated for a New Statesman Award (Modernising Government category).
Might have meant a bit more to me if the boss had included me in the congrats memo (instead, in typical style the kudos included 2 other managers: one of whom was a permanent project obstacle and the other of whom did sod all!) – oh well – that’s a contractors lot I suppose…
Tony’s To Do List

A page from Tony’s diary
Pacific Tour Notes
Things to Remember:-
- Australia – Give pep talk to Howard’s “blokez” encouranging the Ozzies to stay on in Iraq and Afghanistan.
New eBay category: Labour Peerages
Welcome to eBay!
eBay Account: tonyandhiscronies
Item Number: L4B0URRL14R5
You are bidding on the right to make a substantial, unsecured loan to the UK Labour party, in exchange for nomination as a peer in the house of lords.
This is a rare opportunity to be part of a classic English institution, until death (or a colostomy bag blockage) takes you. Only a limited number of seats in the House of Lords are available*1 so bid now to avoid disappointment.
Rant: Guantanamo Bay – (way past) time to close it!
Here in the UK, at least one senior minister (Peter Hain) has also called for the camp to be closed and has intimated that Downing street is – at the very least – uncomfortable with what is happening in Guantanamo.
For the rest of the thinking population throughout the supposed “free world” Guantanamo has come to symbolise the worst hypocrisy of the current US administration.
Rave: Wire Daisies “Just Another Day”

Photo Credit: by Brian Marks CC-BY-2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Having fallen out of touch with much of the UK music scene in the mid 90′s, (during the period I shudderingly refer to as “Clubbing and Remix Hell”) I’m enormously pleased to see the return of a growing number of original new bands emerging in a renaissance of the UK music industry.
Chief among my favourites has to be the Cornwall-based Wire Daisies. Their debut album “Just another Day” is a milestone in Indie music and rightly went straight into the iTunes charts in September 2004 when it was launched.
Busted! US Congress staff caught polishing Wikipedia Bios.
In the same week that we learned that the Bandanna club website had a link in Wikipedia, I also read an interesting BBC Article about how US Congress staff have been making “Partisan” changes to political biographies.
Using the edit history on Wikipedia, researchers collected the IP numbers of computers linked to the US Senate and tracked the changes made to online pages.
Rave: Diver invents artifical “Gills”
An interesting article on the Beeb’s website today.
Inventor and diving enthusiast Alon Bodner from Israel, has developed a prototype underwater breathing system that extracts oxygen directly from seawater, potentially doing away with the need for compressed air tanks in the future.
The battery-powered artificial gill system, utilises a high-speed centrifuge to lower the pressure of seawater in a small sealed chamber in order to extract the small amount of dissolved air that already exists in water and supply breathable oxygen to scuba divers.



![Lord Ashburton. Photo: By Philip Allfrey (Taken by the author) [CC-BY-SA-2.5], via Wikimedia Commons Lord Ashburton](/images/Blog/lordashburton.jpg)



