Random Irritations and Joys No 108

Random Irritations of Life: People waffling on when they know they've lost the arguement and won't accept it..... documentaries about airports..... the never ending laundary...... Photoshop playing up..... hearing Ben Stiller and Steve Coogan are doing a movie of The Persuaders.....
Random Joys of Life: The solitude of being the only person on the beach as the sun goes down... realising that there are still parts of this green and pleasant land that are still green and pleasant (but won't be if two jags has his way).....

Mulitple Pics in Blogger....

Blogging tip: If you want to put multiple pics in a blog post....



Hello will allow you to do it.....



and it's easy to do... after the first caption, stick two of these (shift plus the \ key) on the end and publish. The picture will then be queued rather than uploaded. Repeat the process until you have all the pictures you want, then press publish and all the photos will upload at once. Bostin! I've used these photos to demostrate as the Summer Solstice will be soon upon us here. Where has the year gone.... only seems five minutes ago since I was unwrapping me Christmas prezzies!
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Milk in first.....

Want to know what it means to be British? Then the government has the thing for you in the shape of a 120-page A4 book intended for prospective British citizens. Entitled Life in the United Kingdom - A Journey to Citizenship, it is described as "a compendium of information about living in Britain". If you want a taster of what's in the book before splashing out £9.99, take the test here. Some of the answers may surprise you.... Although according to these articles, we may not need to leave home to travel.... (if the title of this post has you baffled, watch the dinner party at the end of Carry On Up The Khyber....)
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Don't be a Phisherman's friend

Scary stuff on the Money Programme tonight. It dealt with hi-tech crime and the various ways computers and the net are being used steal our identities, empty our bank accounts and hold business to ransom. Phishing is as hated and dreaded a word as spam nowadays. But while spam is a nuisance, phishing is far more serious. Emails proporting to be from a bank or other institution ask you to follow a link to a website to verify your details. Those details include things like expiry dates and PIN numbers. These things a bank would never ask for. The Mailfrontier site has a test. Try it and see if you can spot the real emails from the Phishes. Then head over to here to see some more examples. A more insidious method of obtaining details is keylogging. An attachment in a spam message, (usually saying you've won something or involving celebrity nudity it seems) if opened, releases a virus that sits in your computer recording every key pressed. This information is relayed to the hacker without the victim even knowing, who extracts the information he wants. When the hacker has infected a number of computers, which can run into thousands, he has created what's called a bot net. He can then use this army of slave pcs to bombard a website with so many requests - again without the hosts knowledge - that the site slows or crashes. The site is then effectively held to ransom, which is what happened to Blue Square, the company highlighted in the programme. They called in the Hi-Tech police unit, who traced the hijackers to Russia, showing that this is a global problem. Its not all doom and gloom though, and with care these attacks can be avoided. Things to do are:
Never open attachments from people you don't know. Delete them. Even attachments from friends should be virus checked first, as they may not know that the attachment is infected.
Check carefully any emails asking for personal or financial details. View the examples of phishing emails and learn what to look for.
Get protection. There are many good Anti-Virus and Firewall progammes out there, free, shareware and commercial. An anti-spyware prog is an essential nowadays as well. Tap in the terms into a search engine and should find ones to suit you.
When filling in forms, use the drop down menus as much as possible, as these use the mouse and the information is not recorded by keyloggers.
Above all be alert. We need all the lerts we can get.....I know, I know, but I couldn't think of another way to end this post....


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Click here or the piggy gets it....

If there's only one link you click on this site, make it this one, especially if you live in the UK. You may have seen Martin Lewis on Tonight With Trevor McDonald or heard him on the Jeremy Vine Show. If not, go to his website and I'm pretty sure you'll find something that will save you money. He has hundreds of thousands of regular readers and subscribers to his email newsletter, all on the lookout for a bargain or a way cut the household expenses, and who wnat to share those findings with everyone else. Financial apathy is what keeps the fat cats fat. Help them to go on a diet. And if you're tempted by those ads by BT and others that people are returning to them in droves because their rivals are all rubbish read here. It'll give you something to think about on that topic and a range of others....
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Edukashun, Edukation, Education?

In the "you couldn't make it up" column: While those who want to learn are being soundly stung for the privilege, whose who don't are being "bribed" with cash and ipods in an effort to get them back into education. Laudable though it may be, it does seem to send out a confusing message: show willing and you have to pay, be reticient and you end up better off. Also, in a world where communication has never been more important and varid, it seems more and more children are growing up not meeting their proper potential in reading and writing, leading to a call for a review in teaching methods. Is it me? The most I got at school was a gold star, and I didn't know anyone in any of my classes who couldn't read or write to a respectable standard. Fortunately I was taught before those who thought they knew better began tinkering with the system. Then tinkered some more. And some more. And some more, until now teachers and children are seemingly driven by whatever league table or statistical survey is approaching, and choice is an illusion.
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There by the slip of a finger go I....

When coming up with the name aeowolf, I thought I'd found a unique moniker. How naive. I asked a friend to check this site, giving him the address www.aeowolf.blogpsot.com. A few minutes later I got a puzzled reply asking when I'd got religion. A quick check and it turned out that that address is hosts a site called Amazingbiblestudies.com, describing itself as a "SEARCH ENGINE/DIRECTORY—World’s highest hitting English sites in major categories. Also a Mega-site of Bible, Christian & religious information. Nearly everything you wanted to know about THE BIBLE." Not what I had in mind when I started these ramblings. But not as bad as it could be. I know there are cases of slight misspellings of brand names being registered as domains to host porn! So I might let my fingers do a bit of wandering on the keyboard and see if anything else comes up.....

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

Sugar Rush

For as long as I can remember I've been met with looks of disbelief and a "How many?!" when I tell people I have four sugars in my tea. So I guess by the terms of SugarShock.com I'm an addict. I also seem to have all the symptoms they describe, but then I seem to have all the symptoms of most aliment sites I visit. I've switched to Half Spoon to help cut down, but I'll be studying the SugarShock site to see if there's anything else I can do to reduce my sugar cravings...
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In the Dog (cat?) house

These pics are just a fraction of the many that can be found at SillyEnglish..... They have loads of video clips too -- try this one for starters.... If you do visit the rest of the site be careful as it contains nudity and stuff that some could find offensive -- if you're blonde, for instance.....
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Testing Times

Want to know the job you're meant to be doing? Or what kind of dog you are? Perhapes you have a burning desire to discover which Desparate Housewife you are. Maybe you just want to try an old fashioned IQ test. If so, the place to go is Tickle. They have tests for almost anything you can think of to help you uncover your real self. Apparently I'm a Bernese Mountain Dog, a Subtle Flirt and Lynette. Which is a shame, 'cos I wanted to be Bree.... I wonder if they have a test to find out if these tests are addictive.....

The Force is strong with this one.....

I waited for all the hoopla to die down before I saw it, but it was worth it. Of all the prequels, this one felt the most like the original movies. Of course, this probably because it has many more references to the earlier -- or do I mean later -- episodes. After episodes one and two I was willing this one to be good, and though it has its faults, I wasn't disappointed. Anakin's slide into the dark side is well done, showing the reasons for his turning. The fights and battle scenes are up to the standards we expect now, and everthing is set up neatly for A New Hope. As in all his performances, Ian McDiarmid acts everyone off the scene as Palaptine, and gets all the best lines.... when he says "rise" to the new Lord Vader I got goosebumps, just as I got a lump in my throat when Owen and Beru Lars hold Luke upto the twin Tattooine suns, echoing the iconic scene in A New Hope. My only real gripe is we didn't see enough of the Chewie and the rest of the Wookies! (Does Chewie ever tell Luke he's met Yoda? Just a thought....) All in all the film works as bridge between the two sets of films and as a piece in its own right, and I'll be off to see it again in a couple of days. Hopefully I'll spot some more of these, and not notice any of these (I only noticed the marching feet out of sync -- the people on this site are really eagle eyed -- or just seen many, many times.....) Away from the Sith, I do have grumble with Mr Lucas. In a recent interview about the release of an "enhanced" THX1138, he said that any previous versions of that movie and the first three Star Wars would not be released again. I'm disappointed by this, as I don't like having my memories tinkered with. They struck the right balance with the recent releases of the Alien series, having both original and extended versions on the same disc. I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels this way, either.....

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Random Irritations and Joys No 107

Random Irritations of Life: People repeatedly stabbing at lift buttons thinking it will make the thing come quicker.....IT WON'T.... the Toucan adverts on Channel 5..... sealed magazines - I don't buy anything blind.... having so much to do I don't know where to start....
Random joys of Life: Sticking your hands in a warm tea cosy on a cold morning..... getting an unexpected reward at work..... Hugh Laurie in House, almost as much of a hero as Dr Cox from Scrubs......

Bang Bang

After much use and abuse, the power supply on the PC went bang in a big way, giving me a fright and that feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach. Fortunately, though, my fears were unfounded and it hadn't fried anything else with it, and all the drives were ok. But it gave me enough of a scare to start backing up my important stuff again, something I'd been neglecting. In a neat piece of serendipity, I came across Streamload. It's an online storage facility giving people a whopping 10gigs of space! You can upload as much as you want, but if you want to get the info back you have to pay for it. Also, if you have a Gmail or Hotmail account, you can use the space there for more than emails by using Roamdrive to upload files and folders.