drip, drip, drip

I was stood on the back doorstep and noticed a drip that caiught the sun as it formed and fell, "good chance to try my pressie out" I thought.

Here's the results for your delectation and delight :-

Easter Sunday Snow

Well I woke up this morning to scenes of snow, it was a bit of a surprise as we rarely get even semi decent snow here, Leeds seems to be exempt. (click each pic for a bigger version)





Not to be deterred however we still had an Easter egg hunt, first one I've done in snow!







If you're wondering why my DS has his arms like that, he seems to have decided coats should be worn Clint Eastwood poncho style.

Medical Abbreviations

This is quite an old story that popped up on the BBC website while I was browsing.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7171453.stm

All about how medical abbreviations are not "standardised" and can cause confusion.

Now some doctors can try to ignore this, but I worked for a company once who where responsible for transferring doctors notes from which ever doctors computer systems they had into a central database, not being a doctor I ignored most of the abbreviations but sometimes I spotted stuff that was so bizarre I had to comment.

There was one case where the doctor used abbreviations that included / and \ and then select characters to encode details of a patients condition that meant fuck all to even his fellow doctors at the same practise. Because this guy assumed he'd live forever and no other doc would need his notes he justified it simply by saying "I know what it means"

My son was overdosed on antibiotics when he was a baby for similar reasons and I'm sure other people may well have experienced the same sort of thing. (he was supposedly unaffected by it, but now he has dyspraxia)

Why do doctors do this? sometimes I know they abbreviated as they had old crappy computer systems that only allowed a certain amount of characters, sometimes it was laziness, and these days I do suspect they don't have the time as some arsehole beancounter is watching and costing their every working minute.

I just hope me and mine never suffer because some doctor thinks his or her clever abbreviation is "so obvious" and another doc makes a serious, possibly fatal decision based on a wrong interpretation of those "quick ntotes"

Counting on Swaledale

Or rather counting in the Swaledale dialect. as used by Jake Thackray in his song Molly Metcalf

yan tan tether mether pip
azer sezer akker conter dick
yanadick tanadick tetheradick metheradick bumfit
yanabum tanabum tetherabum metherabum jiggit

Different dales had different variations, shows just how little people used to travel if even counting could be so different from dale to dale.

I love it, but I keep forgetting more than the first five, it only went up to 20 then they would transfer a pebble from one pocket to another and start again. I don't know what they did once they'd got up to 20 20's.

Plane being blown about in hamburg

Now this was ALL over then news, but I know a few people haven't seen this rather scary footage

watch closley at 43 seconds (ish) where the left wingtip hits the runway, just before the pilot hits the throttles and pulls away.

scary stuff



if the embedded vid doesn't work click here

Apparently he took 15 minutes to circle round and try again, I reckon he was having a swift whiskey for courage.

Stae of healthcare for the dying

I HAVE to rant

As some of you know my dads friend/partner was diagnosed with cancer on the brain in early January, the 4th to be precise

She was given 6 weeks to live if not treated

She was taken into Shefield Hospital for treatment, but they stopped it after two weeks and said she should be sent home to live out her last days in her own home. This was 5 weeks ago.

Two weeks later the hospital they wanted to transfer her to, which had been saying they had no beds, changed their minds and said they wouldn't take her as she could walk!!!! The Doctors in Sheffield hit the roof.

She was moved somewhere else and social services arsed about and finally arranged a meeting last week.

Now they have an assement meeting in 10 days time to decide if they can move her home and look after her.

She'll probably be dead by then, dying in some crappy hospital bed, maybe even dying alone.

The system doesn't work, the whole fucking system, no one cares and she suffers because of it.

Not a happy bunny, not happy at all

My dads here in tears and I can do FUCK all to help.

Where's the care? tied up in stupid red tape and profit lead healthcare, not a damn about the patients as decisions are made by measly beancounting accountants not the doctors and nurses who have done their utmost to make her time comfortable.

It was that BITCH Thatcher that introduced the idea of the NHS having to be profitable, bollocks, you can't make health care profit lead.

And this current Government has done jot all to change it, bloody Blair, more conservative than the tories

Well fucked off

Thanks for listening, and if ANYONE reads this who works for Barnsley Social Services, please contact me immediately.

update on "Contract"

Well I fnished it today, is it worth a read? yes I'd say so.

Very "scatty" writing, intentionally so, and it does make you feel quite involved with the protagonist.

I enjoyed it, but it can be quite graphically violent and touches on aspects of life some may find a little disturbing.

Try it, you may well enjoy it

Contract - Simon Spurrier

Viral Marketing

Well it worked on me

I got someone called Michael Point wanting to be my "friend" on myspace, his avatar showed a gun and the phrase "I kill people for money"

http://www.myspace.com/michaelpoint

I assumed it was some pub band gimmick and accepted the friend request, then went to look at his myspace page only to find it was actually promoting a book.

My wonderful girlfriend bought it for me for Christmas and I started reading it last night, eventually forced myself to put it down at about 2:30am

It's the self told story of a killer, strictly for the money, with a plan. and I can't wait to get back to reading it once the children are in bed tonight.

If you fancy trying it it's available from amazon here

be warned, it's quite graphically violent.

Stupid Tiscali - Really Dumb

Tiscali seem to have a problem with Opera as for two evenings in a row now on this tiscali account I am using Opera has stopped working. IE, Firefox and everything else still works.

I can even fool whatever primitive filter they are using by asking Opera to "pretend" to be another browser, so whatever they are doing is based on the browser identity string.

My guess is someone at tiscali does NOT know what opera is and they are blocking traffic at peak times from anything most users use.

Just shows up what dumb admin they have, I'll be so glad when I'm back on NTL/Virgin Media, at least they seem to have some degree of technical nous.

I suppose the chances of somone from Tiscali seeing this and getting their act together are slim to FA, but if you are from tiscali STOP BLOCKING MY BROWSER YOU IDIOTS

(written in that cheap Opera copy, firefox, under duress)

Using Google to find music

Nothing original here, just an advanced way to search using google for those directories of music that people upload so they can listen to their music wherever they want.

It's cool, but a bit hit and miss, but always worth a try, enter the following search string.

intitle:"index of" (mp3|avi) song.title -html -htm -php -asp -cf -jsp

where of course song.title is the name of the song you want to search for.

The intitle bit looks for directories (or folders) which are open

(mp3|avi) sets which file extensions you want to look for, so you could also search for videos, or any other form of file you want.

Separate the words with . (full stop) instead of spaces as google uses a . as a wild card so will pick up "song title" "song_title" or "song-title" etc.

The list of -html -htm etc. makes sure (or tries to) to not just find file listings.

It works surprisingly well, but does sometimes pick up spam directories that lead you to mp3 sales sites, you often find empty directories where the files have been removed since google indexed them, and I once found the directory had since been protected as the owner had realised what was going on.

Hope this helps

Sites that caught my eye this week

First off, the Müller-Lyer Illusion, How close can you get? I was pretty acurate at first, but now I come to post, I fail, go figure.

And secondly, for those who wish to rip

KeepVid makes it possible for you to download your favourite YouTube videos to keep.

Useful if you find something you think might be removed for some reason or another.

In other news, the divorce is getting messy, better not put too much detail on here in case it could be used against me :(

Away to Wales for a week

Going to visit my Girlfriend in Brynmawr, who hooo

So before I got I just had a couple of geeky/cool (delete as applicable) things to share.

First off, Lord of the Rings as done if the characters were typical role players!

DM of The Rings

Some of the comments about why he wrote each strip are fantastic, having run role playing games in the past, I know how true they are!

Secondly a strangely addictive thing, not a game as such, sort of a web based executive toy.

Falling Sand Game

You can divert the sand, water, salt and oil with walls you can spot plants then water them and watch them grow, you can burn the oil and wax, all fun. The strange yellow bobble that bounces around grows if watered, shrinks if it contacts salt, I usually turn it off and just play at making interesting patterns.

Have fun while I'm away!

here it is then

the fark headline that had me giggling

A raptorial maw with a pharyngeal jaw; that's a moray

linked to this story which isn't anywhere near as funny as the headline above.

right? left? isn't it all the same between friends

OK so I have extolled the virtues of the Opera browser many times, and at great length, before now.

However, there's one feature I have rambled on about which I realised just now I was a bit confused about, why? you say, well let me explain.

Somewhere between leaving the safe haven of my computer screen and reaching the safe haven of the pub, something traumatic happens to my brain while I'm in that big room with the bright light and the high blue ceiling, and left and right get completely muddled up.

Thing is, Opera has Some rather useful features on the right click menu, select some text and you can copy it, search google (or a selection of other browsers) with it, send it to a dictionary web site to get a definition of the word, try to go to it as if it was a web site, etc.

So when I have been extolling this menu I have forgotten that the OTHER handy feature is that you get the same menu up when you double click on some text (this is where the left right confusion enters my brain) so that's "double click" with the LEFT button, where I have been telling people it's the right button (D'OH)

A double click (left button) selects the word under the cursor and highlights it bring up the "RIGHT CLICK MENU" a further click extends the selected text to the whole sentence, and a third click selects the whole paragraph (it stops there)

So I am terribly sorry to anyone who has listened to my pub based rambling and have been trying to double "right" click to do all these wonderful things.

Great Weekend

Well it was, got back from my travels late Thursday after a 400 mile drive dropping Alison off in Wales then picked my children up Friday.

We made rice crispie buns on Saturday, and honey flapjack, which then got distributed to friends and family on Sunday.

I had Sunday and today to myself as I have quizzes to run so they can't sleep over when I'm going out on the evening, and today I have been washing their clothes and pegging out, does it seem sad that even just doing the washing for them seems really satisfying?

I seem to be really settling in to this single dad life, just got to get my finances sorted out and somewhere more permanent to live and I reckon life is going to get rosier.

Just need my girlfriend to be with me and I will be set up for life.

Somebody to Love

My girlfriend posted this on her blog



(link)


and it turns out it's a cover from 1967, here's Jefferson Airplane doing it in 1969!



(link)

This is of course why my "Whose Song is it Anyway" quiz is so popular! obscure covers that stop and make people think. (oh and Rolf Harris)

Well done and thank you to Jon for taking my concept and making it work week in week out by diligently searching for cover songs for me to use.

The F Word

One of the most interesting words in the english language



linky for if the embdedded version doesn't work!

this is very old, so you've probably seen it before, or heard it at least, but it's a classic I found today stumbling around looking for something else. Still well funny though.

Congratulations Alison

My fantastic girlfriend completed the Race For Life in Cwmbran on Sunday in 46 Minutes in the pouring rain.



Here she is looking well pleased and beautiful, if slightly damp.

it's not too late if you want to donate! (cheeky grin)

All donations through the above site go to Cancer Research UK

New web site launched - Way2paye

I am proud to announce the publishing of our newest web site Way2paye

This is a fully featured content management system for a payroll company specialising in payroll for small businesses and for people employing domestic staff or nannies.

It's also required a new feature, the ability for users of the site to register to gain access to extra information on the site, this is a feature that has been in the planning stage for a while, which we brought forward as this client required it.

The design is by the wonderful Daffodil Design which was then wrapped around our content management system to provide a beautiful looking site utilising TempleDene Technology.

Password Security

I spotted this article in PC World magazine which lists the ten most popular passwords. They are

1. password
2. 123456
3. qwerty
4. abc123
5. letmein
6. monkey
7. myspace1
8. password1
9. link182
10. (your first name)

I would expand this list to include such things as your children's/spouses name, company name and a few other common words I have encountered.

To have a secure password it should be a mix of UPPER and lower case letters and some numbers. To make it REALLY secure use some obscure characters like ^ or # or accented characters such as Ÿ. And make sure it's at least 8 characters or longer. It's easier than you think too make one up, use numbers for letters for instance, so peter becomes p3t3r or bill becomes b1ll, use a car registration plate (no not your current car) or something else you can remember or at least work out.

The reason for this is simple, that top ten list (and I would add several myself to that to make at least a top twenty) is well know to anyone who fancies trying to guess you password. On top of that password breaking software will try one of two methods:-

1. Dictionary Attack
   Where the software literally has a dictionary of words it throws at your password one by one.
2. Brute Force
   Where the software tries combinations of characters sequentially e.g. it tries a b c etc. then aa ab ac until it reaches it's limits.

Now you'd think that second one would guess ANY pasword but it wont, because of the time it takes to process. A simple example would be if it just tried the 26 letters of the alphabet, suppose it takes 1 second to try each combination then after the first pass with a 1 letter password it's taken 26 seconds, to do all the two letter combinations it takes 26 x 26 seconds, or 676 seconds, to do all the three letter combinations it takes 17,576 seconds and so on.

Obviously computers can process far faster than this, but because the time adds up logarithmically this kind of attack limits itself to common letters, numbers and punctuation, and restricts the length of password it can try.

I must admit this is another reason why I think microsoft DON'T GET SECURTIY as when I created a hotmail account a while ago it wouldn't let me use puctuation in my password! so as far as I was concerned the password I created was insecure.

Now you will be asking, huh, well who wants to hack ME, the fact is they don't want to hack YOU, they just pick off the low hanging fruit in the hope it might be worth it. Have you ever sent something private by hotmail? or simply something you wouldn't want making public?

One company I worked at one of the directors thought he was so clever because when I needed his password he said "it's secret" I thought he meant he wouldn't tell me, so began to explain I HAD to know it or I couldn't log in to his computer to fix it, and he stopped me and said "no, it's 'secret' that's my password" the companies financial information, all highly confidential, was secured by an eminently guessable password! Another company used password 5 on the above list for EVERYTHING, again company confidential information was secured with something easily guessable, AND everyone in the office, some 30+ people, knew what it was!

I did point out how insecure this was and I hope they have since taken steps to fix the problem, somehow though, I doubt it.