• Realising that the bloke I just passed in the street who I couldn’t quite place is the MP for Henley. #
• @minifig Indeed. The current one is rather anonymous. #
• Having a rant about the de Menezes inquest: http://tinyurl.com/4z9a3d #
• @secretlondon Does your mom install ask you for Positioning positions every few seconds if you use GPX? #
• @secretlondon Ah, excellent, thanks. #
• @reyes Hehehe 🙂 #
• Think I’m going to have do some serialize/unserialize stuff with this code. New skillz. #

Some shocking quotes have come out of the Jean Charles de Menezes inquest as police chiefs attempted to pass the blame for his shooting from themselves to the victim.

There were two particularly worrying comments mentioned in the BBC’s coverage. Firstly:

Last week Det Ch Supt Jon Boutcher told the inquest jury: “I cannot see anything we could have done that would have changed the course of the tragedy of Mr de Menezes.”

He also admitted he could not rule out someone being killed in a similar situation again.

If one of the web applications I support at work went wrong, I’d be expected to find the cause and make sure the same problem didn’t arise again. Apparently in matters of life and death, no such corrective action is considered necessary by the Metropolitan Police. It’s lazy, complacent and worrying.

Far more offensive, though, was the evidence from Deputy Assistant Comissioner Cressida Dick:

“He was extremely unfortunate to live in the same block as Hussain Osman, desperately unfortunate to look very like Hussain Osman, and the things he did in all innocence, the way he behaved getting on and off the bus, contributed to our assessment – my assessment – of him as a bomber.

“But if you are asking me did we do anything wrong or unreasonable, then I don’t think we did.”

To summarise her comments:

People who deserve no blame for the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes: The police

People who deserve some blame for the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes: Jean Charles de Menezes

So what can we extrapolate from these two testimonies? That the Metropolitan Police accept no culpability for the shooting and therefore see no need to take any action to stop a similar horrific cock-up from happening again, and that changing your travel plans on the London transport system is considered evidence of being a terrorist.

We should all be afraid.

• My train is late and I can see my breath. Hello, autumn. #
• Coach load of middle-aged people and pensioners being dropped off at Parliament. Is this the House of Lords school bus? #
• Trying out TweetDeck. #
• @stephmog Did you manage to get her to read out “I’m a patronising, talentless waste of the broadcast spectrum”? If so, well done. #
• @secretlondon Now installing mom… #
• Outside Parliament. Bizarre mix of church wedding bells and drumming and shouting protesters in Parliament Square. #
• I can accept tourists blocking other pedestrians by walking three wide – it’s a fact of life. PCSOs should know better. Grumble grumble. #
• Reading the BBC’s coverage of evidence to the de Menezes and literally stunned by the police chiefs’ complacency and insensitivity. #
• Banged my head cooking my first chicken chausseur. Ow. And by “my”, I obviously mean the sauce is from a packet. #
• @HelenDuffett @alexfoster Thanks. Hit it hard on the side of a door. No blood, just pain and a bump. Chicken was tasty though 🙂 #

• Slept for nearly 12 hours. Should go to Croydon today despite the rain… #
• Updating the XFN in my blog links in light of a couple of presentations yesterday. #
• @girlonetrack I go 3.5G yesterday after O2 sent me a 3G SIM. All working great now. My N95 doesn’t have Pacman though 🙁 #
• @plasticbagUK It was a talk at SocialMediaCampLondon about connections between people online. #
• Enjoyed rewatching The Work Outing ep of The I.T. Crowd. Possibly the best? #
• Writing MySQL queries while watching Ugly Betty. #
• @artesea Excellent, playing with it now. #