Strangely Perfect

It Was 50 Years Ago, Today …when mankind left the gravitational confines of our Earth. A poor boy from the steppes, Yuri Gagarin, simultaneously became the first man in space and the first man to leave Earth and orbit it completely.  (This is something that took NASA several steps before John Glenn finally emulated the [...]

Introduction I’ve been reading this post on Penny Auction Watch: http://www.pennyauctionwatch.com/2010/11/have-you-bid-on-selloffauctions-com-reviews/ ..and can agree with Amanda that many of the search results are “very interesting“, as she says. The claims from “anonymous” and others really should be chucked out for believability because they are unsubstantiated.  But there still lie many interesting things.  Things like the [...]

What is the Best Backup for Windows in a Small Home or Office? Which Windows Backup?  A History. Over the years I’ve tried many systems for backing up crucial Windows data.  Currently for small-scale backups I use the ubiquitous and almost bullet-proof flash drives, my current one tipping the scales at 8Gb.  But for major [...]

I’ve just found a website that scans all Smash Hits magazines and puts them online in their entirety! Digging through, I found this review notice of the original release of Sex Machine back in 1980… Red Starr (sic) states: …is Crawling Chaos, whose “Sex Machine” is quite the fastest single I’ve heard in a while.  [...]

I’ve just upgraded WP Super Cache. I use WordPress to generate and manage the webpages on this website.  Useful features are that it is flexible with plugins and themes.  You can do what you want. Today came the time to upgrade WP Super Cache. After a niggly start where it popped up a red message [...]

blogtrafficexchange.com I’ve recently had a few web-outages, slow loading pages (especially the admin pages) and a very recent drop in hits to this website.  Being short of time, I’ve let things continue. However, having a longer moment, after disabling the Related Websites plugin from blogtrafficexchange.com, things have speeded up remarkably!  Not surprising really since I [...]

Students die in India as bus plunges into river The above headline is awful enough for the people involved, but in reality, it’s subject, a road crash, is common enough in my own country, the UK. What is really bad is how the BBC is reporting this.  They should know better but essentially, they’ve reported [...]

Alan Johnson Sacks the Messenger This, of course, relates to the recent sackings and supportive resignations of Government Scientific Advisors (see More advisers may go in drugs row) . The home secretary faces the threat of more scientists resigning after sacking his chief drugs adviser Prof David Nutt for his comments about cannabis policy. Two [...]

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, [...]

Continuing on From…  What Killed Flight AF 447 Since the search for the ‘black boxes’ of Flight 447 was abandoned a few days ago (20th Aug 2009 – see news item),  only 3 days later, Nature’s On-line version has published reports of the jet things I was going on about in my first article about [...]

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 [...]

Northumberland Northumberland is a lovely place – cold, sunny, windy, dry, overcast, damp, clear, clean and historic.  But mainly brrr  and wow!  Especially on the coast. It’s quite popular with tourists.  Here’s why I go there… …why do the fuckwits? The historic island of Lindisfarne (Holy Island) is connected to the mainland via a tarmac [...]

New Jaguar XJ In common with most cars like this, it’s a lovely looking machine – a style marvel; sleek and vapid, mercurial. It’s also a waste of space and a waste of effort. It’s two tonnes of mass for a 400kg payload is pants.  An ecological disaster zone. Money for Old Rope Not only [...]

Introduction Many years ago when I was living in France and during a prolonged period of French atomic weapon testing on the Moruroa atoll, the Greenpeace ship, Rainbow Warrior, was blown up in a New Zealand harbour. Initially, it was thought to be an accident. Now, as soon as this happened, I thought “who has [...]