Paul Smith's Blog

From Venezuelanalysis.com: The Venezuelan government made the agreement with London Mayor Ken Livingstone last February after Venezuelan President Chavez suggested the idea during a visit to London in 2006. The deal will provide London buses with a 20% discount on fuel from Venezuela. At the same time, London will open an office in Caracas to provide Venezuela with advice and technical expertise on tourism, public transport, urban-planning, and the protection of the environment, fields in which London is a world leader....

Check this guy out.....

Seems like somebody at Sony's Liverpool studios couldn't resist making some modifications to the Halo 3 entry on Wikipedia. Seems they wanted to include an extra little bit onto... Halo 3, the third game in the best-selling Xbox game franchise, is a highly anticipated first person shooter video game under development by Bungie Studios for the Xbox 360 and is expected to "set a new high water mark" for next generation games, Although it wont look any better than Halo 2....

Two hours and three minutes is the time it takes a train to go from Paris to London, two hours fifteen minutes is the expected time when the new service to St Pancras starts in November. So why does it take me the same amount of time to go from Yeovil to Newport? Well in France, the railway lines and the trains are publically owned. When the French government spent the billions of pounds on modernising the French railway network about a decade ago, the money got put to work....

It only took a few brief seconds hearing Prince William reading from St Paul's letter to the Ephesians at Princess Diana's memorial thing to remember why Britain should become a republic. I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name. I pray that, according to the riches of His glory, He may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through His Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love....

Check out this nonsense. Only Gutmann comes close to spreading this number of lies and FUD. Upgrading to Windows Vista has been banned by the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), technology giant Texas Instruments and other corporations and government agencies False. They said they would not be upgrading to Windows Vista for X number of months. I notice you used and underlined the word banned, indicating to me that you're lying....

The prison workers are today out on strike. Most of the press are blasting the strike action as being illegal, and will cause chaos in the prison system. Why are the prison workers on strike? Because 9 out of 10 members of the Prison Officers Association voted to strike, they're being run into the ground like so many other public service workers, privatisation looms on the horizon, this year they were given a pitiful 1....

I checked my feeds this morning to see that Steven Novella posted the sad news about the loss of Perry DeAngelis. Perry's popularity was easy to understand – Perry had presence. The power of his personality went into everything he did, and every relationship he had. He made his opinions known and actually delighted in not sugar-coating them. Truth and reason were very important to him, so much so that he felt the truth had to be brutal....

So this error message has been doing the rounds lately. This application has failed to start because d3dx9_32.dll was not found. Or other error messages around d3dx9.dll, dxdx9d.dll, d3dx10.dll, xinput.dll, xact.dll, d3dx10_33.dll, d3dx9_40.dll and other variations being missing, not being found or installed. These are all optional components to DirectX that may not be installed with the version of DirectX you already have on your system. Typically these will be installed when the game installs DirectX, however for historical reasons a lot of gamers, knowing they had the latest version of DirectX didn't bother (I never do either)....

My one off MVP of the week award has just gone to Richard Urban, I was just about to go to bed but just thought I'd check the Microsoft newsgroups for a few minutes. Richard Urban was replying to this post: I have a brand new notebook with a dual core 2.2GHz processor, 2G of memory and a 160G hard drive. It's an HP Pavillion. I turn it on. It takes 45 seconds to display the login prompt....