Mark Thomas

Last night I went out with friend Big Pete to see Mark Thomas at the Arts Centre. I felt guilty leaving the dragon alone with the baby for the evening by the way. I owe her an evening out. I told her this last night, but she said she wouldn't want to go out without the baby and me anyway. This made me feel more guilty, but I digress. All you need to know is that I went to the theatre last night.

Mark Thomas is a socialist, comedian, and political activist. I don't agree with the greater part of his socialist ideals, but I have huge respect for the guy who is clearly very clever, and apparently hates Tony Blair, which is common ground between us. His current crusade is against arms dealers. He seems to have researched the subject very thoroughly. I can't check his work, but I have no reason to believe there is anyting wrong with his facts and figures. According to him, the British are the world's second biggest arms dealers. The US is the biggest. The UK arms idustry is subsidised to the tune of £850 million a year with public money. In case you didn't understand that, it means that £850 million pounds in tax payers' money gets given to the arms industry each year. The industry makes about £1.9 billion a year as far as I can tell. And that of course makes me wonder why the subsidy exists.

There was lots of other stuff to think about also. Mark is also currently on a mission to demonstrate how pointless the new legislation banning unlicenced demonstrations is. This legislation only came into existance because the government wanted to stop a guy from protesting about the Iraq war outside parliament. They drafted legislation saying that all protestors needed to be licenced. It didn't work however because they cocked it up. The legislation couldn't be applied to the guy in question because he began his demonstration before the legislation existed. Anyway, Mr Thomas now gathers as many people as he can each month to demonstrate individually about whatever the hell they want. That means that the police have to process a licence for each protestor every month. Quite a laugh really.

I'm going through a quiet period at work at the moment, so I've been taking advantage of the situation and getting myself familiar with Macromedia Authorware. It's quite fun and it is apparently the tool of choice for producing Computer Based Training materials. It has it's limitations, but it can be used to construct large and quite complex training presentations with interaction in a relatively short space of time. You can also publish as an executable file, or html. It's more versatile than ordinary on-line help type applications, and it's miles ahead of things like Powerpoint. I like it, and I'm getting quite good at it. I've been playing with scripting.

Isn't Lily Allen great?