The annual proto-vicar jamboree (also known as the Initial Ministerial Education Residential) begins today so I'll be mostly offline for the next few days. This means that any updates to Planet SUSE will have to wait until I'm back in the connected world. I'll try to read email via my N95 but replying is unlikely so please be patient.

I think a lot of people who read this blog (and I know that's like saying - in the words of Bernard Wooley - "a lot of Radio Three listeners") probably come away with the idea that I'm anti-American. I'm not, what I am is anti-hypocrisy and anti-imperialist. I love the US Constitution (with the notable exception of the Second Amendment) and only wish that the nation that it represents lived by it.

The election on November 4th this year has huge implications, not only for Americans, or indeed for their standing in the world but for the world as a whole and that's why there's a tilt in my posting towards comment on the campaign and situation across the pond. I recently exchanged some messages with a friend of mine who's a Californian but now lives over here. She's trying to figure out who to give her overseas vote to (worth noting that all 55 Electoral College votes from CA are almost certain to go to Obama). She was struggling and I tried to be as impartial as possible in offering her places to go to get to grips with the two candidates positions on the issues (again, I know there are other candidates but until a third-party candidate picks up an EC vote, no-one's really going to care).

That was all a very long preamble so that it's very clear that it is with no glee whatsoever that I provide a link to today's report from Robert Fisk in the Independent: Six years in Guantanamo. "Sami al-Haj, an Al-Jazeera cameraman was beaten, abused and humiliated in the name of the war on terror ... 'We know you are innocent' ... 'All they wanted was for me to be a spy for them.'"

I also provide a link to this post from one of the BBC's reporters in the US, Justin Webb: Nailing a sneezing maverick. A very quick look at how McCain's poll lead has atrophied in the space of a week. September 18th - one week ago - had McCain on 274 EC votes to Obama's 243 (21 ties). That is now Obama 286, McCain 252. Obama's looking more and more presidential with each passing day while McCain seems panicked and unfocused. I know which of those options I would want as Commander-in-Chief.

Via Chris; Andrew; Marco (although I added a step)

1. Take a picture of yourself right now.
2. Don't change your clothes, don't fix your hair ... just take a picture.
3. Resize that picture to be friendly to people's internet connections.
4. Post that picture with NO OTHER editing.
5. Post these instructions with your picture.

For some reason, I decided to record the contents of my day (or at least my morning) today in photos. After a bit of a lie-in (today being my day off), I headed for a Light Therapy session. The hospital where I have this is a former naval hospital and is still linked with a neighbouring base. As a result of this, all visitors and patients are greeting with this sign as they enter:

Nice to see even the NHS getting in on keeping us all nice and scared, the way the government likes us.

I had my light therapy and this is the box I stood in for just over two minutes being bombarded by UVB:

And here's me in the lift on my way back from the Dermatology department:

This insignia is in the floor all over the hospital, a hang-over from its purely naval days:

I then headed back to my car (I promised a photo of it when I bought it after all):

The thing to note is that behind my car - as all around the hospital - is barbed-wire fencing. One can't help but feel a bit twitchy.

I got in the car and drove the 45 minutes or so to Southampton where I headed for the Court Jester public house and drank this Guinness:

I had lunch with this lovely lady:

That's Amanda incidentally, for anyone who doesn't know.

That's the point where I stopped taking photos but there was a moment of excitement just before I headed home. I'd stopped in Starbucks to have a coffee and read the paper and then headed back towards the car park. I called for the lift into the car park and reached into my pocket to have my ticket ready to pay when I got there but it was nowhere to be found. I traced my steps all the way back to where I had been sat in Starbucks (now occupied by another customer) where it was wedged down between the cushion and the arm of the chair. Relief.

BBC News: Where now for capitalism?

Banks going bust overnight, the US government nationalising huge companies, share prices falling through the floor, rescues, refinancing and restructuring. What are we to make of it all?

Strikes me that we are seeing evidence that unrestrained capitalism doesn't work. It certainly doesn't work in terms of a fair society. In a society, the people who find it hardest to make a living ought to be protected and catered for by those who are more well off. The total collapse of Lehman Brothers and the willingness of the financial regulators in the States to allow that to happen demonstrates that this is not the case. I know that a lot of the people affected by this collapse will be previously well-paid brokers but not exclusively and indirectly a lot more people will be affected.

This could also be a time when we're seeing a first seismic shift in the move from the modern economy into the post-modern version. There will be more and it will take time to make that shift but it seems to be happening already.

So, what do we need at this time? We need the most progressive and redistributive tax plan we've ever seen, which is what is on offer from the Liberal Democrats. Read the BBC's report on Nick Clegg's conference speech and watch or read the speech itself.

(I always thought Jupiter was kind of pretty with that spot and all..)

Jakub makes some great points about general usability with Planet SUSE and I'll monkey with the CSS to try and make it clearer. My personal views on this subject are as follows though:

• I've never been a big fan of white space. It can just look like dead space or wasted space.
• Although it's my doing, I'm not a massive fan of a vertical logo either. The thing was that having it horizontally:
  1. Pushed the first bit of actual content down the page even further.
  2. Created even more white space above the first entry.
• I was of the view that the position of the header for each entry - within the same border as the entry itself - made it clear which one it belonged with. Would it be more obvious if the border was perhaps a little thicker (i.e. more visible)?
• The way Planet GNOME is designed means that I almost never get more than a single entry on my screen at once because the div that contains each post has a maximum width. On Planet SUSE, the width of each post is entirely dependent on the browser width and so I rarely only see one post (unless Miguel was the last person to post of course)
• The paragraphs are padded incidentally but again, maybe they could be by more.

Why, in this age of electronic calendaring, do we still say we'll pencil in a tentative appointment?

BBC News: New Hitchhiker's author announced.

Noooo! This is just wrong! How can anyone possibly presume to pick up from Douglas Adams? What will be next? Is Dirk Gently going to be given another mystery to solve using the principle of the fundamental inter-connectedness of all things?

I'll be buying it the day it comes out of course.

Federico: Glad you like the way I've set Planet SUSE up for hiding feeds. It's only fair that I pass the credit on to where it belongs which is to Facebook.

The old version of Facebook had very handy little 'x' icons next to items in your news feed which made it very clear that that was how you knocked off those items (and also adjusted the weightings of different types of stories) and I just nicked the idea.

Sadly, by trying to introduce more user-level control, this has been replaced with a drop-down menu of 'Options' which I've already lost interest in. Perhaps the designers of Facebook could take a leaf out of GNOME's design principles.