Grombles

Yesterday I attended the annual conference of the National Secular Society in London. Richard Dawkins was the keynote speaker. Clearly, if you'll forgive my rather inappropriate choice of words, he was preaching to the converted (or unconverted if you get my drift). So his language was rather more vitriolic and 'to the point' than you might have previously witnessed on TV or in a public forum. He was amongst friends - although I didn't particularly like the way people queued to worship at the alter of Dawkins. A touch of ring-kissing seemed ever so slightly ironic. Anyhow, after every speaker the moderator, an executive from the NSS board, asked for questions. Previously he had attempted to elicit questions from different parts of the auditorium. "We've not had questions from people at the back right".. etc. Odd, I thought, to feel the need to exclude questioners because they had accidentally sat somewhere near another questioner. However, after Dawkins

Why would you want to follow an omnipotent superbeing who gets annoyed about a badly made Youtube video? (If he lived in a Surrey village, he couldn't watch it anyway). In fact he's so upset he commands his followers to kill the ambassador of the very country who launched rockets to kill soldiers who were trying to stop his followers from taking over a country that was merrily going about its business until some jerks in Washington and London decided that a word called democracy would bring order to a country of tribes wanting to kill each other over which book their prophet would have liked best if a) he could read, and b) he had lived at least another 50 years to have read them. Hasn't their god got a galaxy or two to collide together (wiping out aliens who no doubt deserved to be wiped out - more shitty videos probably), or another Higgs Boson or two to squeeze into an atom somewhere, without getting his divine knickers in a twist about this video - that nobody's act

I subscribe to the fastest broadband my home is capable of receiving. I've got 35GB of pictures that I want to protect offsite, so I've subscribed to the excellent Dropbox service which I already use for smaller documents. My pictures are now 'syncing' with Dropbox. It will, according to my computer, take another 14 days for all of them to be safely delivered into my Dropbox account . But that's if I leave it chugging away 24/7, which I won't. I turn the back-up sync on at night when no-one is using the internet, so it's only working for a maximum of 8 hours a day (assuming I remember to turn it on). So that's 52 days it's going to take to load my pictures., and it's costing me $99 a year for my 100GB of extra Dropbox space (you get 2GB free). Alternatively I could have burned some DVDs and put them in the garden shed. Under the circumstances this would have been far faster and less expensive.Walking to my shed takes about 30 seconds. That'