Strangely Perfect

WordPress Comment Spam The plague of all blogs is spam, mainly comment spam, by sheer numerical superiority. Q.  Why Do They Do It? A. As a minimum, they do it to open a back-door into your blog that allows the perpetrator to place reverse linkages to another website to increase that website’s visibility in search [...]

Healthcare Woes Lying sick in bed this morning listening to a Radio 5 phone-in about the “state” of our Accident & Emergency (A&E) healthcare system here in the UK, I was struck by the failure of the radio show’s producers to engender the expected flurry of tales of woe and poor service. Happy and Immaculate [...]

Following a cold, frosty night, when the early morning fog had lifted, I noticed that the air overhead was exceptionally clear, transparent, and un-disturbed.  This is readily apparent with the cropped aeroplane flying at over five miles up, where the engines and red markings on the tail are quite clear. The pictures are taken using [...]

Guillotine and “The Reign of Terror” Funny how I missed this during the summer – I was in hospital, I think. This video is Henry Paulson, stumbling and squirming, as he struggles to evade quite simple questions for someone in his position.  (I talked about his deceit last year here and here, at the start [...]

I remember an old  Tommy Cooper gag that went something like this; I went to the doctor and said,  “Doctor, doctor.  It hurts when I do this”  (Cooper raises his knee upwards to demonstrate) The doctor said, “Well don’t do it, then“ The point is that it’s exactly like our prolific consumption of carbon-based fuels, [...]

Introduction This is a quick test to see if the Windows 7 Live Writer facility works.  There are a host of formatting options, so let’s see what it’s like? The picture is of Blyth Power Station chimneys when they were knocked down. The significance to myself is that it’s where my father was a Charge [...]

Windows 7 Ultimate Install To say that I’m seriously impressed is an understatement! Having an MSDN subscription confers certain benefits, but for most Microsoft stuff that I have to use, it’s usually an exercise in teeth-gritting somewhere from the banal to the infuriating as I plod on through. My personal experience of Vista comes into [...]

A Possible Start to Personal Details Theft? Here’s how it works… Some time ago I made a posting on the odiously chubby internet bankrupteer and millionaire self-publicist Robert Allen (see link here).  As part of this investigation I used the name “Morton” coupled to my spam magnet email address in order to see what would [...]

Assorted pictures taken on my Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ5 yesterday.  All photos are 16:9 wide-screen resolution, batch resized using Irfanview from the initial 3712 x x2088 to a maximum dimension of 1024 pixels and set to 85% jpg compression.  This means they should have a reasonable load time in the browser and display adequately.  Some back-lighting  [...]

Introduction & History Recently, Microsoft has reworked it’s search engine (MSN Live Search) and renamed it Bing.  This was followed even more recently, with a joint venture between itself and former search king Yahoo! into a hazily explained search and advertising combination. Microsoft is well known for wheeling out the lawyers as backup to it’s [...]

Introduction You may not have noticed the co-incidence yesterday, but an Iranian aircraft crashed and the US Space Shuttle took off.  the co-incidence was in  the strange reporting that envelops such events. Iranian Crash This, as air crashes go, was pretty ordinary – something went wrong, it crashed, everyone died.  You’d expect some reasoned discussion, [...]

I’m not an expert on trademarks, but there’s an awful lot of similarity between the logo of the new Bing, Microsoft’s ‘new’ search engine, and Blinkx, the video search engine. Same font, same emphasis on a little dot…? Now, we know that there are only 26 letters in the English alphabet and only a few [...]

I’ve just had a hit from someone looking for Colony Holidays…  Sooo I’d better write this down fast!  I’ve been meaning to do it for a while. Colony Holiday Etc A few years back I fished around on the web to find out what had happened to the CCHS, Council of Colony Holidays for Schoolchildren.  [...]

Initial Test on Bing Search Engine Following the initial release, I demonstrated the new Bing to Alice using this search here: http://www.bing.com/search?q=alice+rees&first=1&FORM=PERE The second result was for a Facebook  entry.  Naturally we had to look….  If you check out the webpage; http://www.facebook.com/people/Alice-Rees/787904218 …you’ll find it’s not our Alice…  but weirdly, the face is like one of [...]