Making yesterday seem like tomorrow since 2001.

If you’re planning to go out and vote in the Scottish Parliamentary Elections tomorrow, here’s something to look out for:

When you take your voting card along to the polling station, you’re asked to hand it over to the polling officer, whereupon the information about you (your name, address etc.) on the card are matched against your entry in the voter’s register, and your intention to vote is noted against the entry.

The polling officer then writes your voter number on the counterfoil of each voting slip, punches a series of holes in the slip, before tearing it from the book and handing it over to you.

You then go and vote in the polling booth, then post your ballot in the appropriate box.

So, you ask yourself, what does all this mean?

Well, for a start, the slip that you cast your vote on has a serial number on it at the bottom which matches the counterfoil.

The counterfoil has your voter number written on it.

If the government want to know what you voted in any election, all they have to do is find your voter number on those counterfoils, match the serial numbers – and bingo.

For anyone interested in setting up their own weblog, in addition to the various services already available, I’ve just found Blosxom, which looks very nice indeed.

Carey Young is on track to win the £20,000 Beck’s Futures Prize, but get this for a laugh: her work isn’t on display due to a clause she introduced into her contract with the comissioners.

Instead, the legal document is on display.

Jack Schofield of The Guardian puts an end to the ridiculous myth that Betamax was ever superior to VHS.

A fact supported on the Urban Legends website with substantial research.

The concept of the ‘whole product’ could be easily applied to the Mac vs PC debate too.

Found on Raelity Bytes.

Blogger have launched their beta version of the ‘new’ Googlified Blogger, at new.blogger.com, called Dano.

I can’t say I’m impressed, yet.

So far, only invited users can test Dano, and The Copydesk isn’t one of them.

By the sounds of things, most of the changes are technical, behind-the-scenes stuff – which is obviously important to make sure Blogger functions better in future, but there doesn’t seem to be any sign of new features, such as a flexible comments system, an individualised site-based blog search, trackback, and individualised indexed-publishing of team member’s articles, individual blog entry archiving (instead of putting all of the entries from one particular day in the same individual archive).

It doesn’t take an idiot to see that services like TypePad are going to wipe the floor with anything Blogger currently has to offer, and unless Pyra/Google move fast, big hitters like Yahoo, AOL and MSN are going to be next out of the starting blocks.

Found on PlasticBag.

‘Gorgeous’ George Galloway, MP for Kelvinside in Glasgow has managed to let the media turn him into a raving looney over the past few weeks with his staunch support for Saddam Hussein and the former regime in Iraq.

Despite this, he’s a good MP and popular with his constituents, but it does not surprise me in the least to learn that he is now slap-bang in the middle of allegations that he accepted contributions from the Iraqi government for his anti-war charity.

According to reports in today’s Telegraph, Galloway is implicated by documents found on the first floor of the Iraqi Foreign Ministry by a British journalist, following the liberation of Baghdad.

Of course, Gorgeous denies the claims as a conspiracy, and I think I believe him.

Quote from David Blair, the Telegraph journalist who ‘found’ the documents:

The idea someone would have forged this document, bound it in a pale blue folder, buried it beneath lots of other folders in a blackened room in the first floor of the Iraqi Foreign Ministry on the off-chance that a British journalist might go there and might search through it and might find it and then might translate it, strikes me as so wildly improbable as to be virtually inconceivable.

Funny, it seems a perfectly simple way of stitching up a very prominent, thorny, anti-war MP to me, and relatively easy to implement given the right resources.

The idea of such a plan being ‘virtually inconceivable’ would normally be enough to convince ordinary people of its ligitimacy.

I watched the ‘Major Fraud‘ documentary tonight on ITV1, which explored Charles and Diana Ingram’s attempts to cheat their way to £1million on the UK version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, allegedly aided by the improbably-named Tecwen Whittock sitting in the audience coughing along to indicate the correct answers.

The similarities of this case and the movie Quiz Show are astounding.

Quiz Show was based around the real-life ’21 Scandal’ in the USA during the 1950s, where producers of the programme gave contestants the questions in advance of filming in order to boost the ratings.

A US Senate hearing concluded that the producers were entirely innocent of any wrong-doing (come on folks, it was all entertainment and no-one was harmed) whilst the contestant at the centre of the scandal, Charles van Doren, was branded a cheat and ruined for life.

However, when I saw how obvious the Millionare scam was – especially as the prize money neared the £1million mark – I really couldn’t sympathise with the Ingrams.

The whole thing has been a television-produced farce from start to finish – and it’s no coincidence that the first two adverts at the end of part one were for cough medicine and Airwaves chewing gum.

Talk about cynical exploitation.

Despite this, I felt that ITV were leading the viewer up the garden path a little, and I’d be interested to see a more impartial version of events. I certainly don’t believe all of the accounts given by Celador production staff, who claim to remember everything from that evening so vividly.

It’s a bit like the events on September 11 2001; most people claim to have watched the second plane hit the World Trade Center live on television, when in fact, they probably didn’t – they only think they watched it live because it was continually repeated to them throughout the day when they finally got to a television.

I’d like to hear from the Ingrams, without any coughing from Mr Whittock, of course.

Seeing as it’s Easter, here’s some good Easter Egg websites:

Eeggs.com

Egg Heaven 2000

Egg Central

DVD Easter Eggs