Geeklawyer thinks that, like the Queen, he should review the year. The power to revise it being beyond him, sadly. Deliv­er­ing the Geeklawyer Speech on Box­ing Day may seem like def­er­ence to Lizzy; but Geeklawyer is a Repub­li­can who’d hap­pily tell the Roy­als he’d arranged a blood sports party for them and then, assault rifle in hand, lead them bray­ing into a freez­ing dank deserted echo­ing Russ­ian base­ment cel­lar to par­tic­i­pate in the choir of Dying Screams …

No, his motive is merely the desire to avoid com­pe­ti­tion & to allow the turkey its full moment of fes­tive sea­son honour.

Idle Gos­sip:

Geeklawyer hopes that every­one had a good Xmas; not too much booze drunk, presents were all expen­sive & good (all that “it’s the thought that counts” stuff is bol­locks) and not too many vul­ner­a­ble pupils/trainees were shagged in pho­to­copy­ing rooms.

OK strike the last one. Geeklawyer thinks that one of the few advan­tages of the Bar is the ready avail­abil­ity of intel­li­gent pretty young totty. And hav­ing lost his mis­tress this year there is a vacancy for such a pupilette will­ing to help Geeklawyer with his briefs.

Since Geeklawyer is alone on Box­ing Day, watch­ing crap films on TV while blog­ging, & hav­ing a Mead Moment (the approx­i­mate equiv­a­lent of one of CharonQC’s Rioja Ram­pages) he will be unfor­giv­ably indis­creet and reveal that Ruthie’s love life this year has moved from famine to feast: she is being ardently courted by sev­eral mem­bers of the Bar at once; a High Court judge (“Lady Ruthie”?), a QC and a minor junior as run­ner up. But none, so she says, seems able to give a decent Xmas pressy. Evi­dently Ruthie seems to believe that the cab rank rule applies to suitors!

One sup­poses that she imag­ines that, like buses, there are no lovers for ages and then three cum all at once.

The prob­lem, as Geeklawyer has often observed while watch­ing the bot­tom of his pint glass becom­ing rapidly clearer, with sex at the bar is that one risks the land­lord throw­ing one out. And noth­ing is more embar­rass­ing than pre­ma­ture ejaculation.

Law:

Weeeell, Geeklawyer thinks this will be a short section.

ip/it/ecommerce

Rub­bish. Mostly.

Two cheers for the Gower(s) report: nice to see some­one pro­duc­ing an offi­cial pol­icy review that takes an objec­tive & dis­in­ter­ested view rather than merely regur­gi­tat­ing a music & film indus­try drafted press release for a change. On the basis that every­one is unhappy with bits of it, it is prob­a­bly worth seri­ous con­sid­er­a­tion. Any report advis­ing the intro­duc­tion of a par­ody & sar­casm defence gets Geeklawyer’s vote.

The Open Rights Group got a new Exec­u­tive Direc­tor: Geeklawyer fan-girl, uber sexy Becky ‘1000 IQ’ Hogge.
ORG still seems to be find­ing its feet. That is not crit­i­cism, it does not have the dosh of the con­tent indus­tries to hire in expert PR and lob­by­ing wonks: they are just a bunch of ‘mere’ con­sumers & cit­i­zens learn­ing on the job. Sue Char­man has done a good job so far but Geeklawyer thinks that with a pro­fes­sional jour­nal­ist & egghead at the front they will get much sharper now.

Geeklawyer is para­noid his clients will run the increas­ing risk of extra­di­tion to the Evil Empire merely because some in-bred Mis­sis­sippi DA is run­ning for office & wants to look tough on online crime/gambling/sex/being rude to Bush/spam.

Civil Lib­er­ties

Jeez, where to start? Or fin­ish for that matter.

Neo Labour con­tin­ues destroy­ing civil lib­er­ties in the Mother of all Democ­ra­cies in its pop­ulist ‘race to the bot­tom’; ever desirous as it is of seek­ing re-election, sorry ‘rebal­anc­ing’ the sys­tem in favour of vic­tims, it promises to pro­tect us from the threat of the ter­ror­ism it cre­ated. So;

ID Cards & the sur­veil­lance data­base state, throt­tling legal aid, deten­tion with­out trial, point­less prison pop­u­la­tion increases, ASBOs & any num­ber of other inef­fec­tive ‘head­line for a day’ gim­micks.

Fuck it: fill in your own rant here: .….….….….….….….….….….…

Now, didn’t that feel good?

Geek­ery:

OSs & computers

Geeklawyer thinks that his pur­chase of a 24″ dual screen Apple iMac was favoured by the Gods: pow­er­ful, secure, reli­able, sexy, good look­ing & clev­erer than the Albert Hall filled with the clev­erer mem­bers of Mensa; in short it’s a bit like him­self. It enabled the pod­casts that are a fun fea­ture of this blog (and more stuff in future).

He now intends to get a new Intel Power­book to replace the PPC one he cur­rently has; it’s the dogs dan­glies. He also intends to con­vert Ruthie to the one true Apple OSx faith and away from her ter­ri­ble Microsoft Win­dows paganism.

As with all true geeks, Linux will remain the super­model OS of Geeklawyer’s dreams: ultra desir­able, sexy, hint­ing at unspo­ken unspeak­able dark plea­sures enjoyed dis­cretely behind closed bed­room doors. But at the same time, like dat­ing Winona Ryder, she is psy­chotic mer­cu­r­ial high main­te­nance and not yet at a prac­ti­cal ‘set­tling down’ stage of her life. One day she may mel­low, while still being young & slim, and when that hap­pens we will set­tle down. But until then her sen­si­ble but very attrac­tive sis­ter will do.

Pod­casts

Geeklawyer has enjoyed mak­ing these hugely and they seem to have been rea­son­ably well received. They are not with­out sig­nif­i­cant crit­i­cism how­ever: they lack struc­ture & plan­ning. A col­league, ******* ******, described them as piss poor: from any­one else that would have been sting­ing crit­i­cism but as a Tory self con­fessed pae­dophile humour­less fuck­wit his views mat­ter lit­tle. How­ever there needs to be an improve­ment in con­tent. There also needs to be a rad­i­cal improve­ment in pro­duc­tion val­ues: Geeklawyer might even take a course in pod­cast pro­duc­tion. If Geeklawyer can per­suade Ruthie to buy a Mac­book she may be able to play a greater role in them: whether that is good or wise is unclear!

Geeklawyer intends to write his own con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem in Ruby despite Word­press being entirely ade­quate. Why? it’s a geek thing: always write your own code, never adapt any­one else’s unless unavoid­able, rein­vent­ing the wheel is good. Antic­i­pated pre-alpha release should be April.

2012.

Geeklawyer is intend­ing to write a com­piler for his own lan­guage. He has never writ­ten a com­piler before, or designed a lan­guage; and he did a physics degree not a com­puter sci­ence degree. Nor is he a decent hacker. You can imag­ine there­fore the likely out­come of a bar­ris­ter writ­ing a com­piler: ‘clus­ter fuck’ would be a rea­son­able pre­dic­tion. How­ever being bad at some­thing that’s fun is no rea­son not to do it: for exam­ple Geeklawyer actively encour­aged his last mis­tress’ sick­en­ing sex­ual deviancy to every­ones pleasure.

pro­fes­sional

Geeklawyer was a lit­tle tardy doing his CPD hours this year, but will do them all on time next year, hon­est. And with CharonQC’s excel­lent courses this will even be a viable goal.

Geeklawyer’s ex-mistress made it entirely clear that she was mas­sively unim­pressed with his pro­fes­sional sit­u­a­tion: his cham­bers are mod­est. In some part this may have sig­nif­i­cantly influ­enced her deci­sion to leave him and take up with a much richer lawyer: what’s love when one can have money & power by proxy? Not that Geeklawyer is bit­ter & twisted. Oh no.

Geeklawyer will seek a decent new set to join next year and find a more upmar­ket replace­ment mis­tress. There is even talk of an Amer­i­can heiress with, appar­ently, designs on Geeklawyer. Per­haps he will join the New York Bar & wreak his havoc on the other side of the pond.