Recently in General Category

I had an operation recently for an Inguinal hernia. You can
see on the right the scar.

The scar is between five and six inches long and you can see that there is an opening along the scar. The pale colour in the opening is an infection and it hurts like hell. The area around the scar is numb to the touch. It is an odd sensation to have no sense of feeling when I touch the area with my finger but for it to actually hurt when I move.Not sure if this is because the wound is quite deep or some other reason.

I have been taking Ciprofloxacin to get rid of the infection. It is working because the wound above is a lot better than it was. I am a bit worried that even though I have been on the antibiotics for about a week now the wound has not closed yet.

I was browsing around the net recently and in my travels I came across an estate agent in columbus. I had a look at some of their listings to see what I could get for my money there.

The house on the right is worth £628,587. It has over 22 acres of land, thats over 70 times more than mine.

It has 4 bedrooms, 5 bathrooms, 4.5 garages, and has a lower level with an office and conference room etc. Madness.

To say I am a little envious is an understatement. I couldn't afford it anyway but its  quite obvious you can get a lot for your money in the states.

I noticed this picture on flickr the other day....

Facebook Hell. I know exactly what the guy means. I have been on facebook for a very short space of time, have 3 friends on there and I am already inundated with drivel. I suppose thats why it is not really appealing to the over 25's. The application has taken vitality to a whole new annoyance level. I wonder if Dom Jolly will be doing a comedy sketch on this sort of shit.

I used to go to the roundtable pub in London every Sunday (sometime in the 90's) to see budding comedians strutt their stuff. One of the comedians there was Alfie Joey, he was compere. I got to know him a bit and never tired watching him introduce each comedian to the mic.

Anyway. I was browsing around the internet today and stumbled on Alfie's website purely by accident. I recognised him immediately. If you ever get the opportunity to see this guy in action, do it.

It has been more than three years since I tried to upload UKlug to DMOZ. I submitted UKlug to it again today. I am not expecting much from DMOZ. Is it just me or is DMOZ either dead or dying. I got burned a few times asking people what was going on with my listing but because it is a free service they treat you like the scum of the earth. Not a particularly pleasant experience.

Stick with me I will get to the Yahoo bit in a minute but you need to understand a few things first.

I would say one of my main motivations in life is avoiding boredom. I abhor boredom

From webster: to regard with extreme repugnance

I could not agree more. I loathe it.

There are various reasons for this not least of which is I have absolutely no reason to be bored. There are a million books I haven't read, a thousand technologies I haven't investigated a billions trees I haven't seen, a million paths I haven't trod and 6 billion people I haven't met..... you get the point.

So when I am bored I have got to ask myself if I am really bored or am I just being stupid. That brings me to my other motivation. Eradicating my own ignorance, I do this with extreme prejudice. I do not consider myself stupid or ignorant but if there is one thing I do know I don't know enough.

Now that you understand a bit more about what motivates me you know why I joined Yahoo. As I mentioned in the title working here is like drinking from a fire hose. The amount of stuff going on is staggering and the scale of everything is vast. It's the perfect place for me.

I just found the following website that allows me to generate printable soduku puzzles. You can also buy puzzles in book form.

Download generate soduku puzzles here

Made my first donation to PostgreSQL tonight. Hopefully this will not be the last.

There are a few more organizations that I think deserve donations and hopefully I will be able to send some money their way in the near future.

I seen an advert for Raja fashions ( http://www.raja-fashions.com/ ) in the economist the other week. I could remember someone mentioning that there is a group of tailors from Hong Kong who sometimes com over here to ply their trade so I decided that I would go and have a look to see what sort of outfit they operated.

Alarm bell 1.
They had hired a small room in the Hilton and there was absolutely nothing on display except cuts of material.

Alarm bell 2.
The advertised prices in the Economist advert are complete rubbish and a lot lower than what they offered me.

Alarm bell 3.
Ladies tailoring for a suit adds £100 to the price.

Alarm bell 4.
There was another guy being seen to by the man himself and he seemed to be making some noise about the whole setup ie none of the information he was now being told was on the website etc.

Anyway at this point I decided I would rather not have anything to do with them so promptly left.

Alarm bell 5.
When I left the guy came out and asked me if I wanted a cheap suit. I explained that the way he was pressuring the guy in there put me off and no I was not particularly interested in a cheap suit which is why I was leaving. I sincerely doubt I would be getting anything but a cheap suit from him regardless of price paid hence my quick departure.

I would still love a tailor made suit and a full length trench coat but it looks as if I am going to have to head to Saville row rather than fly by night traveling salesmen.

I was browsing around the web and I came across some quotes from Tombstone the movie. If you haven't seen it then I suggest you go and watch it post haste. Great story and the dialogue is brilliant.

My favourite character was the Doc (Val Kilmer). While watching his character being played out its a good thing to keep in the back of your mind that he knows he's dying. Some of the lines the Doc gets to say are nothing short of brilliant.

This is an interesting read.

Reflections on Brilliant Digital Single Points of Internet 0wnership

I am not sure whether to believe this or not.

I found it on Micro Persuasion while hunting for more information for www.boozled.com

Walken For President

Lets assume it ain't a hoax.

1. He has no experience as a Governor.
--- But he's a professional actor.
--- Remember Reagan (53 movies).

2. His parents were immigrants.
--- Didn't you know America was practically built by them.

3. How will we know when he ain't acting.
--- Ditto George and Co.

I really hope this ain't a hoax. If not we might be in for some razzmatazz in 2008.

Now all we need is Arnold Schwarzenegger running for President as well.

When asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest the climber George Mallory answered,

Because its there

This was a fantastic answer and I wish I had an original one liner to answer the original question. My paltry answer is:

I blog because I blog.

I currently use Google Adsense and was wondering just how many hits a second I would need to be receiving in order to apply for their Premium service

You need to be getting 10 million content views per month. This is not the same as hits because images, spider hits etc don't count.

Last month I got approximately 1020358 hits which sounds impressive but it isn't that great because this only got me 102,636 content views on google adsense as per their own stats. So approximately every ten hits I get 1 content view.

Using some advanced mathematics based on our very accurate assumptions ;) This means I need approximately 100 million hits a month to achieve 10 million content views. This is of course pie in the sky.

This is about 40 hits per second. I doubt very much if my little sever would be able to withstand that kind of usage ;) I suppose if I was getting that many hits per month then I would be able to afford a whole rack full of equipment.

Is it just me or do more emotional entries on blogs get more hits. The reason I ask this is due to an entry I made just recently.

I've had more comments on that one topic than any other. In fact, its been the most popular topic on my blog for a couple of months. Admitedly this is not a huge achievment but I have found the more controversial or emotional the entry the more comments it seems to collect.

Just noticed the following on Jeremy Zawodny's blog. This is a pretty shit way to make money.

Basically moneysupermarket.com have paid the Financial Times (FT) to add some hidden links to their website. Of course when Google finds the link it will assign a hefty amount of PageRank to the page that's linked to (FT has a PageRank of 8). I wonder how much the ask for this type of service.

Google's Quality Guidelines specifically states:

Quality Guidelines - Specific recommendations:

* Avoid hidden text or hidden links.

I wonder what the penalty is (if any) for this sort of search engine spam. I don't do it for fear of loosing what little Ranking I have with Google. I suppose I could report them but I doubt anything would be done to the FT.

Original Story

Having read Bruce's article on Belgium's latest way of trying to reduce counterfeiting I got the impression he's not particularly impressed and I don't blame him.

Professionals will spot the speling mistakes, particularly now that they know they should be looking for them. They might be thinking that several foreign languages might fool the bilingual counterfeiter but its hardly rocket science for the more accomplished crook to refer to bablefish or a foreign dictionary or some other external reference........ oh...oh perhaps a real card!

It would appear that Belgium may be assuming their counterfeit operations are run by a bunch of half wits who only speak "da wocal wanguage", have no access to the internet and are not particularly well educated.

I suppose if every card had a semi-random spelling on it then it might introduce a bit more labour on the part of the counterfeiter but that only works until they figure out how to scan it and of course you're then back to the gimpy race

I would love to see some stats on the success rate of this new idea.

I was bored yesterday.................................. so whats new?

the difference this time was that I decided to do something about it and build yet another website (moan).

The idea!

I like to read certain types of news and for the most part the news I am interested in seems to gravitate towards big companies ie, the A list, more commonly known as the Fortune 500. I am not sure why this is the case because there is plenty of really interesting stuff taking place in small companies but for the most part Google seems to steer me up rather than down. Perhaps I am a headonist (please forgive my humour) and don't know it.

Anyway.

I don't have a blog roll because I don't regularly read any blogs on a regular basis. I think this is because people tend to be either eclectic 1 or eclectic 2:

Eclectic: (from webster)
1 : selecting what appears to be best in various doctrines, methods, or styles
2 : composed of elements drawn from various sources; also : HETEROGENEOUS

neither of which lends towards regular reading. Unfortunately E1 is particularly rife amongst the blogging commnuity so some strong filtering is required. Thankfully E2 is much more readable than E1 if done correctly which for the most part is true but if I am to read something regularly then I would prefer something along the lines of E2 but with a general topic in mind.

So with all the above crap in mind I decided that we all need another website (not) that will take the collective wisdom of the fortune 500 and produce dynamic feeds from it.

Just read a very interesting article on Bruce Schneier's blog.

The most alarming part for me was the following:

Internet attacks have changed over the last couple of years. They're no longer about hackers. They're about criminals. And we should expect to see more of this sort of thing in the future.

Unfortunately the above is only too true and we are going to see a marked increase in cybercrime. When you think about it you can almost take any of our old style crimes and with enough imagination and know how make it work over the wire.

Take blackmail.

Using a similar method you could break into someones PC and look for something the owner would really not want shown in public. The criminal then downloads the files and blackmails the owner. If you don't find anything you might be able to hold his files for ransom anyway.

You could also use it to destroy someones reputation. Lets say John is the CEO of a large corporation with some less than honest competition who would love to see the company damaged in any way possible.

One of the competition hires a cracker to gain access to Johns machine. This would most likely be the home machine since if they managed to break into the work machine then I am sure there are other things that they could do that would cause much more damage.

The cracker then downloads lots of child pornography to Johns machine and makes the logs etc look as if John is a regular child pornographer. Of course the times would need to coincide with John being at home but this sort of information is easily obtained from the machine itself.

The cracker then deletes all trace of him being in and even updates the Virus checker and secures the machine for John so that, when the investigation takes place the police cannot see how the machine could have been cracked.

A phone call to the police on an anonymous line from a child professing that John sexually assaulted them and he would then be under investigation for sexually assaulting a minor. This would lead to confiscation of his machine and of course they are going to find plenty of stuff on it to keep them busy for a while.

Regardless of whether they determine he was set up or not Johns good name is being dragged through the gutter and a certain amount of damage is done.

I am sure that the criminals out there would be able to come up with more imaginative ways than the above to do these sorts of things but as Bruce said we are going to see more of this sort of thing in the future. What frightens me is that we are going to see much more damaging crimes than ransom-ware or identity theft.

As our dependence on computers grow so does our vulnerability and there are criminals with no conscience about what they do or how they do it and I am not including terrorists in this bunch.

My contract here runs out at the end of July and I am now looking for employment. I will be putting an updated CV online soon or at least as soon as I have got it onto a few of the major search engines.

I am also considering putting it on UKlug since it gets a fair few hits and I own the site.

Wish me luck.

I finally got around to getting my PADI Open Water diving qualification while I was on holiday. Its something I have meant to do for a long time.

We decided to go to Key Largo to do it. Jenny made a few phone calls and to be honest the prices where all quite similar, $400 to $450 each. We eventually phoned Pleasure Diver.

Jenny asked them if they could squeeze us in the following day and they said they could, they also offered to lend us their DVD player so that we could watch the PADI DVD's in our room. This extra effort on their part sold them to us and although we did not know it at the time we had really landed on our feet.

What we liked about Don and Janet was the fact that they had paid attention to lots of the details and that they went out of their way to help us. It was a real personal service and judging from what I have heard about larger dive outfits this is quite rare.

Everything was very relaxed and when we went out on the boat if the visibility was bad we would move somewhere else. We could have quite happily have dived in the areas and got the qualification but as far as Don and Janet was concerned getting the qualification should be fun which means you should be able to see wildlife or anything else you wanted to see while doing it.

It was also made interesting each time because instead of going through the motions and coming up we would do some exercises and then go looking at the wildlife and then do some more etc etc. This took the monotony out of the course while consolidating the pool work.

Another thing I didn't expect was to have Chocolate Brownies waiting for us after each dive. They also laid on complimentary refreshments. After breathing all the dry air an ice cold bottle of water and a chocolate Brownie was exactly what the doctor ordered.

We both noticed that a lot of effort was put into customer service. We did not know it at the time but they had owned a B&B in Virginia which meant they really knew there stuff when it came to looking after guests and it showed in everything they did. The fact that they limit passengers to 6 on a 40 foot boat is a good indication that they know what it means to travel in comfort.

We spent 4 days there and I want to go back to dive with them again. For anyone interested in diving and thinking about the Keys then I could not recommend Pleasure Diver enough.

I always wondered what it was like to feel the effects and to be honest I thought that it was a bit of a myth and that people made it out to be worse than it really is. I can confirm that it is every bit as bad as they say it is.

I got back to the UK from Sanford at 5:55am on Sunday and most of the day was spent trying to get to sleep but my body was having none of it. Managed a few hours that night. Monday was spent at work trying to focus on the monitor. Monday night was abysmal, passed out then woke up again at 3am and was unable to get back to sleep. I phoned in sick and then passed out again until 15:30. I am going to try to go to bed at a normal time tonight and see what happens.

It must be pretty bad for those that go to Australia.

I just found a my firstPhoto blog tonight and I have to say I was very impressed with it. They have captured some lovely images.

I have no more gmail accounts to give away.

I have some gmail accounts to give away. If someone wants one email me.

I need your.

First Name.
Last Name.
Email Address.

The main website in the UK where you can get information on UK Spam laws is:

www.informationcommissioner.gov.uk

To have a look at the actual government legislation then the following link is what you are after. (Check Para 22)

Law on UK Spam and Unsolicited Email

For a nice easy to read breakdown on the laws mentioned above have a look at.

December 11 2003 Guide to UK Spam laws

Hypothetically speaking.

If I had a Gmail account to give away would there be anyone interested in it?

I came across an article of sorts detailing what makes a blog successful:

I’ve recently received a few e-mails asking for advice on creating and maintaining a successful blog. I decided to sit down and think about what I felt made a blog (or blogger) successful. It was a bit of a challenge because I’m not sure how to define success in terms of .........................................

I can tell you hear and now what makes a blog successful, the one true fire way to make sure that your blog becomes the next Lawrence Lessig Jihad.....................................

Actually there is no true fire way to anything. Nothing is simple in this life, if you don't believe me, ask me a question?

So, forget about making it popular and write about what interests you. Don't worry about what people say, spelling mistakes or any other sort of crap because everyone is different and you could never accomodate everyone.

I don't have a blog roll or a list of blogs I read (the two might be the same thing, I don't know). I don't read tabloids, peridicals, newspapers or magazines and I am not interested in slashdot, the register or any geek news portals. Neither am I interested in new fangled gadgets, latest trends or famous people so some might say I am quite boring, so what!

Things I like:

1. The BBC:
Why? I grew up with David Attenbourough. In fact the only thing we could watch on a Sunday was his nature programmes. This was quite ironic considering his take on religion etc.

I like BBC Radio 4. It has some of the funniest programs you could imagine and has been the springboard for hundreds of famous acts ie The Goons (Originally started out on BBC Home Service, became R4).

2. Music:
I love music but detest the industry.

3. Food.

I grew up hating it, then after my first 3 months in the Navy eating nothing but chocolate (food was awful at HMS Raleigh) I realised that savoury is better and have not looked back.

4. Google
Gets me what I want, when I want it and has saved me more time than anything I can think of.

5. People.
Far more interesting than some text on a monitor. People are what make the world go round not money.

I came across the following article

This year in Canada exactly two provinces - Alberta and Ontario - will contribute to the federal equalization payment pool, while the other eight provinces and three territories are on the receiving end. Ontario is quickly moving towards becoming a have-not province which will leave only Alberta footing the entire federal equalization bill. According to Stats Canada, Alberta CONTRIBUTES about $3,000 per person per year. Provinces like PEI and New Brunswick RECEIVE $1776 and $1537 per person respectively. This means that a family of four living in Alberta earning $30,000 dollars a year will pay $12,000 to other p! ! rovinces; $3500 will go towards community improvements for a family of two earning $150,000 per year in PEI.

I was quite shocked to learn that certain areas in Canada are funding other less well off areas. This sounds normal ie we all pay our tax and everyone benefits but this is not what is happening. For instance, if you live in one state you pay $3000 a year which gets given to families in another state.

And what are "equalization payments"? Sounds a bit like communism to me.

I received an invite the other day to a Google talk in London. For those that don't know me I am fascinated by search engines, particularly google since there is more online about how they did their stuff than any of the others. You can imagine my enthusiasm at the prospect of going so I registered my interest and decided to go.

I then discovered that the talk has been organized by Pulse Group. From what I can gather they are the recruitment arm of Google for Ireland (wild guess). This rang recruitment company alarm bells for me, (I wrote an entire site to circumvent the need to go through a recruitment company, I don't trust them.)

I am making bets online that it is going to be some corporate nonsense recruitment drive with more emphasis on that than on Googles tech.

I was also disappointed by the website.

1. No document type
2. It is mostly flash so a lot of people cannot see it.
3. Most of the menus are tiny and hard to read.
4. I was unable to resize the text.
5. The text is embedded in flash so it cannot be indexed by Google the people they are representing.
6. Some of the menus are mouse dependent (The mouse must hover over them to view the content)

Its another site designed by managers for managers. I suppose they have a different set of requirements than me.

Anyway I didn't go. I would be interested in hearing from people who did go and what they thought of the talk.............

As a follow up I was correct. A friend of mine went and was quite pissed off because it was a total waste of his time.

Is everywhere.

I just ordered 4 tickets for the Reduced Shakespeare company at the Criterion Theater ( all his plays in 2 hours, bloody fantastic, an hysterical, poignant political masterpiece ;)

Every box office I phoned in the search of a show was run by tickemaster. Is it too late to buy shares?

I be you all though that Star Trek and the Borg was some pipe dream. Well not any more.

I am sure people are wondering why anyone would want to wear such a contraption but surely we would have said that about what is now the humble mobile phone earpiece just a few years ago. Its coming:

RESISTANCE IS FUTILE!!!
YOU WILL BE ASSIMILATED!!!

I seen the blog shares website several months ago before I had a blog and wondered what it was all about. I have just noticed that I have an entry on it

Mad. So what makes my blog worth more money then ;) ?

I got a text message today from someone and the phone number was displayed as

bob7ware or b0b7ware

weird. I can only assume it's spam.

I have been receiving some spam from some dodgy company with a text message saying that someone close to me fancies me dial this number. Why does our government tolerate this type of nonsense. Its harrassment on a global scale and now that its working its way onto the mobile phone we are not going to be able to get away from the crap.

Is over. Thank god I have that out of the way. I now have 3 months before it all starts again and my scheduling is back at the mercy of the Open University.

I am not too sure how I did in the exam. I missed a couple of small bits out and I think I really botched one of the last ten point questions. I know what I needed to do for it but the notation completely escaped me, bollix.

We will see just how I did in a few months time. Now I need to figure out what would be the most beneficial thing to do with all this free time.

We broke the 2000 barrier today and we seem to have gained a new member today MarkF.

We seemed to have gained a little speed just recently which is good because we are now getting close to the more active teams which is were I can see our progress slowing down. What we really need are a few more processors to give us that extra boost so if you would like to joining a friendly bunch of folders then
look no further

I have just watched Raising Arizona for about the 3rd time and its still as funny as ever. All of the following are brilliant in it......

Nicolas Cage .... H.I. McDunnough
Holly Hunter .... Edwina 'Ed' McDonnough
Trey Wilson .... Nathan Arizona (Huffhines) Sr.
John Goodman .... Gale
William Forsythe .... Evelle
Sam McMurray .... Glen
Frances McDormand .... Dot

and of course.

Randall 'Tex' Cobb .... Leonard Smalls

We have now 19 rss jobs feeds in the UKlug database and I want more. Ideally I would like to get as many feeds as possible into the database but without screen scraping this might be difficult. If you know of a feed that I don't already have then please email me the details.