Ok so I am going to start bloging about the harsh and cruel life of a teenager and how society distorts the actions we have into violence and fear. i may only up date this once a month but i doubt many people will read this so it probably won't matter. I will start tomorrow. See you then.

David Allen Green has written a second column on the FBU dispute in London. It's much better than the first one, being both more concrete and specific, and also much more even-handed in its assessment of the dispute, and the actions of both the FBU and the management of the London Fire Brigade. His conclusion? "If there are abuses of power in this dispute, it is rather hard to see which side is abusing their power more."

I still think he's wrong, but he's less wrong than he was.

The normally excellent Jack of Kent has used a column in the supposedly left-of-centre New Statesman to attack the decision of the FBU to call a strike on November 5th. But rather than just saying that the strike is wrong, he tries to give the whole issue an ethical importance (bordering on the pompous) by asking if "strikes by public service workers can ever be an abuse of power".

"Immigration has become an important issue in this election and it is an issue that says a lot about how we feel about our country and what kind of country we want to live in. I want to play my part in building a Britain where we can all say: There is no more room for intolerance. There is no more room for racism. There is no room for bigotry or zenophobia. But there is more room for people who would like to come and live and work in this country.

 Immigrants have played a vital role in every single stage of the development of this nation: often times it has been immigration generated by the desires of our ruling classes to pull cheap labour from the rest of the world to benefit themselves. Every single step of every change, every progression, every success and every failure has been built with the foundation stones of immigration into these islands. To pretend otherwise is to utterly delude ourselves.

Over on twitter, I received a tweet suggesting that "File-Sharing Tools Could Put Personal Health Data at Risk"- a reasonable statement of fact, possibly, although not exactly an earth-shattering one. File-sharing tools could put any kind of data "at risk" if by at risk you mean available for sharing with other people, since that's kind of the point of them. You might equally write "postage stamps could put personal health data at risk" because if you inadvertently put a postage stamp or two on a repeat prescription form you could, you know, post it to someone. By mistake.

For the last couple of months I've been discovering twitter, more so especially since starting a new job in the world of health research informatics. As well as encountering some rather odd yet friendly individuals (Hi Becky), and getting into political debates with some of my favourite actors (Hi Adam), I have found it incredibly useful.

As an almost random sample, here are ten of the twitter feeds I've been following, from which I've gained ideas, learned news or generally found out stuff I wouldn't otherwise have had access to, and which have therefore made me a much better value employee for the UHL and the Leicester Cardiovascular BRU.

Quite what any self-respecting newspaper thinks they're doing presenting advice from chiropractors I have no idea, but maybe all the real journalists were unable to get in to work at the Sheffield telegraph this week. I know the weather's been bad up there. Not quite "on par with the Arctic" as the article claims, but certainly cold and a bit snowy.

Anyway, whatever the rationale, the paper did indeed publish an article presenting the "top tips on staying safe in icy weather" from the British Chiropractic Association. The BCA, of course, are famous for not taking criticism very well. So I will be careful to only use the words of the actual article in this summary.

Today, I got two emails from Dell, who I bought two computers from on the 2nd December. The emails read...

Dear Customer, Your Dell order [25022564] has been cancelled because { Speaker} is no longer available. If you paid using a credit card any authorization will expire within 28 days. For other payment methods we will arrange a refund within 2 days - however please be aware it may take a few days for your bank to clear the payment. To place a new order, please go to www.dell.co.uk , or call Sales on 0870 906 0010. Thanks, Dell

I can't even remember if we ordered speakers on the two systems we bought from them. I do know that they've taken the money from our credit card, a month ago, meaning that even if they do give us a full discount, the money will go to giving us a credit balance on our card, and not into the bank, where we need it.

You'd have to have been living under a rock to not know that there's a bit of fuss over who should be the Christmas number one, with even Paul McCartney backing RATM to stop the Cowell child from taking top spot this week. I suspect amazon.co.uk don't agree for some reason: searching for Killing in the Name Of... this morning on their site, the second 'featured' search result I was offered was "The Climb - Joe McElderry". Yeah, amazon, that's the one I wanted, I just typed "killing in the name of" into your search bar by mistake.

I've missed most of the furore about Professor David Nutt being sacked, as I've been concentrating on (a) getting and (b) understanding my new job, and also on our attempts to move house, but let me see if I've got this right...

A scientist who is engaged by the Government to advise them on drugs policy does so, whilst at the same time continuing to do what he's previously done - indeed the things which led the Government to appoint him as an advisor in the first place - namely give lectures and write articles on the science related to drugs and drug policy. The Government, having refused to take his advice, then sacks him on the spurious grounds that he has undermined their policy, presumably by not changing his evidence-based policy proposals to bring them into line with the opinion-poll-based ones being put forward by the Government, and when he and his colleagues (actually mostly his colleagues, so far as I can tell, Prof Nutt has mostly maintained a dignified silence on this issue, except when being pressed by journalists, unlike the Home Secretary) object to such treatment, the tabloid newspapers, with the Sun in the front rank, break off from celebrating and fantasising over famous drug-abusing celebrities of all kinds to hunt out some pictures and text suggesting that Professor Nutt's own children are somehow drug-fuelled lunatics, and use those to suggest that Professor Nutt isn't an appropriate person to be advising the Government on drugs.