You’re boring <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n In other words, none of us is perfect and if you are, good luck to you, but I’ll skip that fun night out with you if you don’t mind.<\/p>\n
No, this blog is about some of the minor insanities contained in the recently-introduced anti-smoking legislation in Scotland. Before I point one out, I should also point out that I don’t typically rage against bureaucracy or so-called political correctness. As for fuel price protests – I just find it sad that the British can mobilise themselves in such a self-interested way when all of that pent-up protest power could be directed towards people with real problems.<\/p>\n
In other words, I’m not usually Mr. Personal-liberty-at-all-costs. I happen to think ‘Society’ is a wonderful thing.<\/p>\n
Okay, enough ranting – down to the fun.<\/p>\n
Whilst standing in a designated glass smoking shelter (that’s nice – don’t have to get too wet) outside my work-place last week, two of our maintenance men turned up. The shelter has three fully-enclosed sides and the other side is about 50% full of glass. That lets people enter and exit the shelter, but keeps some of the Scottish wind outside. Unfortunately, the maintenance men had been instructed to knock out the 50% panel because it has become illegal to smoke in any enclosed public space. So, let’s make sure I’ve got this right. Not content with making us smoke outside (entirely reasonable), we have to have a more open smoking shelter in case a non-smoking member of the public wants to stand in it.<\/p>\n
I was all for the ban. Smoking must be horrible if you don’t and you shouldn’t have to breathe other people’s smoke. However, when the rule starts to be punitive rather than protective, I’m afraid that I start to believe that anti-smokers should extract the rod that’s been carefully inserted up their back and get over themselves. I’m interested in why there should be *no* smoking pubs. Even specially-licensed ones with big – ‘Warning – there are bad people in here’ signs on the outside?<\/p>\n
Maybe I want to see a ban on alcohol introduced. Some weekends I have to listen to drunken idiots walk down my city centre street shouting at the top of their voices. I find them terribly annoying and they occasionally disturb my sleep, which I need to stay healthy. I’m sure some of them also go fighting with bottles and fists, injuring others in the process. People who wouldn’t do that if they didn’t drink. Any chance of limiting the sale of alcohol or even banning it completely? Thought not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This blog is not about the fact that I smoke and so there’ll be no self-flagellation. I’ve done enough of that over the years but recent events have made me sick of being apologetic. I’m killing me, I do my best not to kill anyone else and I don’t talk to you if You’re overweight… Continue reading I’m so proud of our Scottish Parliament<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-823","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":840,"url":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/2006\/03\/08\/how-many-slaves\/","url_meta":{"origin":823,"position":0},"title":"How Many Slaves?","date":"March 8, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Parallel Execution and the Magic of 2That's my second presentation, at 2:15 today. I've thought long and hard about this one and hope I've made the right decision. I was concerned about how to encapsulate a 50+ page paper into a one hour slot. I hate presentations which are full\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 5 comments","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1611,"url":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/2010\/09\/05\/swing\/","url_meta":{"origin":823,"position":1},"title":"Swing!","date":"September 5, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Wow - almost 4 months since my last post that could be described as vaguely technical. It's amazing how time flies when you're having fun. (Although there may be a hint of irony in that statement.)Work has been insane for various reasons and personal life has been unusually involved too\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 2 comments","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1071,"url":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/2006\/08\/30\/the-devaluation-of-training\/","url_meta":{"origin":823,"position":2},"title":"The Devaluation of Training","date":"August 30, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Howard Rogers has an interesting post on his blog at the moment that is particularly timely from my perspective and that I agree with whole-heartedly. Companies seem increasingly loathe to commit adequate funds and, probably more significantly, staff time to training (although that could be my imagination).Having said that, a\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 20 comments","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1296,"url":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/2007\/07\/16\/fork-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":823,"position":3},"title":"fork (2)","date":"July 16, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"I don't know how this will go and it could be a bad idea, but I've been thinking about it recently. I've decided to fork the blog. Why?Well, I'm aware that a lot of what I write is just gossip, rants and nonsense, basically. Part of me understands that can\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 29 comments","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":895,"url":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/2005\/12\/07\/oracle-enterprise-manager-10gr2\/","url_meta":{"origin":823,"position":4},"title":"Oracle Enterprise Manager 10gR2","date":"December 7, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"First of all, let me be clear that I'm not a fan of GUI tools. That's not based on a misguided macho opinion that somehow you need to be able to struggle with a command line interface to prove that you're a good DBA but because :- I'm a contractor\u2026","rel":"","context":"With 9 comments","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":898,"url":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/2005\/11\/28\/orion-numbers-and-other-bits-and-pieces\/","url_meta":{"origin":823,"position":5},"title":"Orion Numbers and other bits and pieces","date":"November 28, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Prompted by Jeff Moss' blog, I've been trying out Orion on a couple of servers. I've blogged about it over on the ISP4400 blog. (Actually, I've only just realised that hosting the blog html myself probably means I can't use permalinks to individual blog entries. Hopefully the ISP4400 blog has\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/823","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=823"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/823\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/orcldoug.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}