It seems…..

…. that that evil bastard Putin and his cronies have hacked the weather, it is unseasonably cold here, with hovering around zero daytime and minus 4 to 5 (Celsius) nights for a few days, so around 10 degrees colder than it should be, perhaps Al Gore should contact Putin because these evil russki hackers have managed to undo 200 years of so called man made global warming overnight…. and then some…

Wassat, it’s not “climate”, it’s “weather”, that’s the same logic as saying it’s not rape, it’s masturbation, and we all know how far that one would fly.

Unlike 99% of the other crap alleged to have come from Russia, this weather has, which is probably why Putin is not getting the blame.

I was reminded last week of a small factoid, from a thulean vidjeo, that the largest mosque in greater europe is in Russia, and Russia, even the “homeland” areas like Moscow, have more than just a tiny minority population of muslims, just to give a little balance and to explain why I myself have not gone full Putin and emigrated to Russia, that and the fucking weather of course… actually it’s probably 99% the weather, like canada, there may be 99 other reasons I could come up with for not emigrating there, but once the weather / climate itself becomes the showstopper, there seems little point digging deeper, so the weather gets 100% of the blame.

It’s an interesting point, it is human nature to ascribe 100% of the reason to a single thing, yeah I bought the new Kawasaki because it is the fastest production bike, and to simply ignore the other 999 reasons that would have been applied otherwise (don’t like cruisers or harleys, had a honda once, didn’t like it, like the kwack green, and so on) had not the first reason been the make or break.

One of my greatest problems lies in the fact that I live debt free, which means my ongoing bank balance is the sum of income minus expenditure, which means expenditure gets closely monitored and curtailed, in and of itself, this isn’t a huge problem, the huge part of the problem comes in when you are one of the vanishingly small minority in a society that lives that way, I was today told that I should quit renting, and I should buy, the thing that I was supposed to buy was allegedly 4 bedrooms, I say allegedly because you’d have to buy 2/4 size furniture and shuffle sideways past the bed, or bend double to dodge the eaves in the attic room, and the entire outside “garden” area is big enough to keep hamsters, or one rabbit, or maybe park two euro size cars, if you could get them in, which you can’t, because the fucking place is mid terrace, but, it’s “cheap”, mainly because it is several miles away in a satellite town, not here in the “big” (pop 110,000) shitty, and the asking price for this marvel?

£280,000, which to me is “OVER A QUARTER OF A FUCKING MILLION QUID!!!!” and for what?

According to Halifax, with a 5% deposit I’d be borrowing £266,000.00 Your monthly payments would be: From: £1,351.00 per month  To: £1,521.00 per month With a loan to value of: 95.00% and this is at historically low low low interest rates, add a few percent and still be below what was literally quote financial suicide unquote 9% 20 years ago and you add nearly 900 quid a month to that bringing your monthly repayments to 2,300-2,500 or so.

Just to put this in perspective, this is a new build piece of shit just waiting to fall apart, cheapest possible materials and construction throughout, and just to put that in perspective, I rent both my home and an industrial unit for less than the lowest of those numbers every month.

The “garden area” out back of my industrial unit is as big as the “garden” in this dump, and out front there is room to turn an arctic, and 6 parking spaces of my own, I can think of few things less attractive to saddle myself with apart from going back to the psycho skank ho ex and marrying the crazy bitch, but, apparently this property is in great demand, and sure to be sold within a couple of weeks.

I dunno, at the old 4.5x annual salary calculation a £280,000 home is 62,222, and in the local man bites dog rage there is an advert that you can get a highly paid job as a social worker and earn up to 35,000 (gross, before tax etc) and the local bus company has adverts on the buses telling me I can be a driver and earn up to 18,000 with overtime… so who the fuck is going to buy this shit apart from a delusional pair of millenials with a liar loan eludes me more than somewhat… and this is supposed to be an affordable bargain.

Meanwhile my email inbox is full of offers of cars on business or private leases, I can have a new mercedes from 299 a month, great, 2 months lease and that is the same money I paid cash for the current volvo diesel shed 2 years ago…. believe it or not is does the exact same job as a brand new leased merc.. it gets me from A to B, with the additional bonus that no newer car wants to play bumper cars with me…

The important thing in all this is the way individuals percieve things, which brings us back to the Florida school shooting, the Vegas shooting, etc etc etc.

Where the fuck is all the CCTV?

It’s trivially easy to doctor it so that someone being shot is blurred out to protect the feelings of the family concerned, or to blur out the faces of bystanders, I can do that shit at home trivially with a copy of corel video studio, 50 buck software, so it isn’t challenging in the least as in you do not have to do it frame by frame, and it doesn’t even take long, my own main PC on a now outdated socket 2011 platform can do it faster than realtime on 1080p video, so “the next morning” it could all be released.

The other thing that troubles me with CCTV is all we ever see is footage shot on ultra cheap crap bought it at wal mart as a kit on offer stuff, friend of mine does alarm systems and cctv and installed my alarm system down at the unit and he is showing me stills taken that have impressively good contrast and range and detail, zoom in on the image and read the slightly blurred branding on the sneakers, faces and hands and stuff are actually very good, certainly as good as anything you see on facetime or whatsapp.

Which sort of brings me back to the comments I used to make all the time about dating / fucking / swinging sites, what the fuck are these wimminz using to take such lousy pictures of themselves, given than even a low end smartphone can take remarkably good photos with even just a little bit of care.

If it is some celebutards cleavage as they get out of a flash car the media can’t resist high def images of them, but when it comes to CCTV, suddenly everything is low res and blurry, and here is the other thing I have noticed, the same thing is true for the stills of the perp.

“From his fuckbook page” we will be told, well, yes, if his fuckbook photos were all shot with a 3 dollar 640 x 480 sensor that used a drop of piss as a lens, and as time goes by and the story becomes accepted, the fidelity of the images of the perp rises.

It all seems remarkably “convenient” shall we say, and absolutely nobody comments on it….. po-po can use speed cameras that can reliably read a licence plate from 1000 metres away on a car doing 80, and in the process get a recognizable shot of the driver behind glass, I have a canon bridge camera with 50x zoom that can perform even more remarkable feats, and to an image specialist or photographer this is all total shit cheap ass crap, certainly not big bucks.

For my sins I have a couple of foscam brand pan and tilt IP cameras, this is serious bargain basement shit and for digital cameras the image quality is piss poor, because the lenses are awful and the sensors are worse, but it still blows away most of the “CCTV” we get treated to in the media.

Until that is they want to run a story as they did last week about insecure school CCTV in the UK being watched by “perverts” anywhere on the globe, suddenly the images shown are far better quality, suddenly we are a million miles away from 1998 Stanford coffee pot cam.

I suspect that 99% of the reason is two fold;

1. you can trim at the beginning and end of a clip, to exclude stuff, to try to frame the dialogue or simply to remove extraneous bits.
2. you can blur selected areas in a capped stream, to frame the dialogue.

But apart from a few filters such as exposure or white balance etc you cannot meaningfully edit the action depicted on the camera, I see this a lot where the events leading up to the clip of B beating the shit out of A are removed, and for my money it looks like what was probably removed was A baiting B for 5 minutes and provoking the beating they got, but whatever clip you eventually decide to show, there isn’t a LOT you can do to edit the action you see on screen.

Now, to be fair, I *have* seen one or two clips, where the clip was an area of the capture field that was zoomed out and expanded, and in both they showed the original and the zoomed area, and that adequately explained the piss poor quality of the zoomed and enhanced bit (CSI zoom and enhance technology aside) but these were both instructional videos of industrial accidents.

But, if you are installing CCTV in a shop or a school or a hotel, YOU DO IT PROPERLY, you’re a fucking CCTV installer for god’s sakes, so like the linked daily fail article above, the CCTV images will capture pretty much everything of interest, and the images will be pretty damn good, sure, not good enough to capture individual cartridges ejecting from that reciever and flying through the air in hi def 3d super slo mo, but more than good enough to see *everything* that anyone would need to see in order to make a determination as to what actually went down.

Nowhere, in any of these “stories” is there anything even approaching the subject of CCTV, where it is, what happened to it, what is shows, what coverage areas there are, what it in theory could catch from those viewpoints and what it could not catch.

The whole subject is simply ignored.

Deliberately.

I, for one, do not need to know anything else, if the stories as presented re Florida and Vegas and many others were even *remotely* factually correct, 300 seconds of CCTV from various cameras as the perp moved through the building and did his thing would back it up 1001%

The CCTV systems exist, and since we are talking schools and hotels and malls and suchlike we know they are all going to be state of the art when it comes to quality at the time they were fitted, yes, the contractor may well have padded a very fat budget, but the actual systems as delivered and installed will blow away anything any private individual or small business could hope to afford.

Since they are commercial systems for evidentiary purposes we also know that each stream will be accurately identified (camera 17) and time stamped sync with net time accurate to tenths of a second, we also know the way the images are recorded to hard disk will be an evidentiary tamper proof system of data writing.

We know all this for a fact.

So where is the fucking CCTV?

I first thought of this when Jean Charles deMenezes was shot in the head 13 times (by mistake) by po-po in a tube carriage in London, because the previous week I had seen CCTV from the london underground used to convict someone of smoking, and the same systems that one week could catch a guy having a swift puff and clearly show the fag in his hand and the glowing end when he had a draw and the smoke, saw absolutely fuck all when 4 guys pile on some innocent brazilian and fill his head full of lead.

Amazing that.

You just wait until computer generated imagery (see the film Simone) get good enough to be indistinguishable from the real thing, the moment that happens we will suddenly start to see CCTV of all these trigger actions.