Strangely Perfect

Introduction Spring, last year, was when I first stumbled upon Pacific WebWorks (PWW) and their nefarious schemes.  That was when I happened upon Google Treasure Chest, one of their many scams. This then ballooned into a miasma of a web of crime which frankly astonished me. Then, across the globe, many people fought against the [...]

Problem With Pretty Permalinks. Following on from the recent WordPress update to 2.7, I’ve had the weird effect of first a single post losing the pretty permalinks, then two, then all of them, then I had a big twiddle, (this involved a lot of forum work.  This question from Storax I thought nearly had it [...]

Many moons ago I read the short story with the above title. Although not one of Pohl’s best works, it has nevertheless left an obviously lasting impression on me. Written in the mid-fifties, it’s a future tale of consumerism gone mad. In the tale, it’s illegal not to consume as much as possible.  The hero [...]

The latest news from HSBC (Warning as HSBC profits fall 28%), looks pretty dire, (“oh no!  28% down, jump from the windows“), so I’ll be closing my account then, should I? Lets put it in context…. Last year, some chickens came home to roost for people who’d over-leveraged their investments to bolster their lifestyles – [...]

I had two interesting calls yesterday from foreign gentlemen. Their basic call went thus: “Hello, is that Mr Rees?”    Hmm I replied. “Hi, I’m Simon from LHR. Someone, either you or someone from your address has made an insurance claim from your address recently…”   “Who exactly are you?” I said. He then repeated the first [...]