Security people must be hopping.
It's not good, is it really, when some hack from the Daily Mirror claims he could have given the Queen and that Bush fellow a few slugs for breakfast?
A brave chap, Ryan Perry, to give this us world-exclusive-shock-horror scandal (Mirror). He had to spend two months as a palace lackey, which isn't something I'd fancy doing in the name of our bizarre profession.
The Beeb says protecting the president is costing five million quid. The Mirror, of course, doubles that, giving the equivalent of 14.34m euros, which here would be 17.2 million if you added French VAT.
And all that expense and waste for nothing!
The Brits shouldn't have invited Bush on a State visit in the first place; I can't see that they've got anything to be grateful to him for, can you? Really?
But it's now even more pointless since we've been informed he isn't going to do or say anything interesting, and what he will say we've been told in advance on the radio news!
I don't approve of killing heads of state, however little respect I have for them. Such radical methods almost invariably leave a worst mess in their wake than we've got already.
Since he's in London, though, one man and his wife who can wreak as much disruptive havoc as an all-out Tube strike, Bush might have the courtesy and decency to drop in and say a word or two to all those MPs and Lords.
After all, some of them must have kids out there in Iraq like other families.
But it would seem he's scared of Dennis Skinner, who's "unique, part parliamentary court jester, and part leftwing crusader," the Grauniad claims.
 Tucked away in the bowels of my Mac, at the end of a file "path" so long it's almost a blog entry, I found this icon called "angry" (blown up here to three times its real size). What the Apple people stuck it in the system for I've not the foggiest, but no doubt it has its uses.
I also nearly fell into a huge "BlackPit" image and stumbled across this piece of virtual paper, equally bizarre and unexplained:
Not in all the years with OS X has that thing flashed up to remind me that I can put my faith in Steve Jobs & Co., in spite of all the unkind things I say about them sometimes.
I damned well hope I can trust Apple, since last night, rendered twitchy by a whole afternoon of French bureaucracy not worth recounting, I took my mood out on the Mac and crossed the Rubicon with the Panther.
No looking back.
Now I want oodles of spare hard disk room and storage places for the years to come, I definitively wiped all traces of Jaguar and its OS X predecessors into re-usable space. Beyond recovery.
And I even finished tweaking operating system X 10.3.1 into something I'm happy to look and work with.
Those wizards at Unsanity have made tweaking some things less fun but also far less dangerous than total DYI. Yesterday, they released ShapeShifter, another of their brilliant "haxies".
ShapeShifter does "themes".
We're not talking about just desktop backgrounds and icons here, we're talking about everything - the look of windows, menus, buttons, absolutely everything. You don't wear the same clothes everyday, your house doesn't look exactly like your neighbor's - why should the computing interface you use everyday be any different. You personalize your physical workspace to suit your tastes and whims, so why not your Mac?
Since you've got 15 days to see whether you like it before paying for it, I started playing with the couple of themes so far on offer.
The GUiPod one from Swizcore is quite fetching, partly because it's more Mac than Apple's own default Panther look, which has too much in common with Windows XP for me.
I've mentioned this at TS (blogrolled), while at the forums the Unsanity page links to, the safety issues are pretty well covered already.
What I've not started playing with yet is Panther's new FireVault encryption feature, since I read some slightly alarming first reports on it.
Before hiding any of my top secret stuff, I'll look again and make sure it is "safe, secure and speedy".
Some might think a few journalists ought to be locked up, the key thrown into a black pit. But I don't plan on doing that with my data.
1:49:40 PM link 
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