James arrives from Futon World and delivers are guest bed for the front room.
Peter from Burford’s puts a high-spec mortice lock on the door. The mickey mouse one could have been raided by a credit card shoved down it and window locks all round. Window locks apparently reduce burglary by windows in the UK to 0.6% of attempted break ins!
Day ends with crappy non-conclusive work meeting which pissed me off.
“Computers are really hard to use, they’re not intuitive. they’re not obvious, they complicated and clunky and tend to do the wrong things at the wrong time,” said new media consultant Bill Thompson.
Bollocks
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1502000/1502820.stm
Some people have just decided they like getting OLD. Well *uck you out there, I’m going to hang on to my youth as long as possible.
I believe age is just a STATE of mind.
Monday, popped into work to set up a cron jobs I urgently need the results on, plus I want to take some time out of work Tuesday, so I thought a bit of time shifting was in order.
There was a bit of a rumble in Camp Cross today, so I just bundled all my hifi into the car.
Grandma was apparently very upset, tuff, I didn’t start the shit this morning.
Flat duty brought clean bottom cupboards. Kitchen stuff for 907 slowing going in. (907 was Py’s old Uni room number.) The top of the cupboards still need cleaning, but I needed to get the pots and pans inside. The tops I don’t think have been cleaned since the flats were rebuilt from what I can suss.
I’ve discovered the only way to crack the tops will be Jif cleaner (Unilever product) and a pan scourer.
ALL My finger tips are now sore!
Saturday, we took “Brummer” to the crap yard.
MX, HW, Leona, Fred and Ros.
My mechanic very kindly lent me a fixed bar, but sadly Helga wasn’t up to it, so we used Fred’s Cavilier, Ros towed with HW driving and Ros did a cracking job.
The brakes on the Brummer went at Totnes Cross on the way to Nick Wayes. Good job it was a fixed towing bar.
Steam Packet for lunch - photos here.
4pm back home, changed, started the day in jeans and then roasted.
6pm back at the flat, cleaned the bedroom cupboards, 3 Jay clothes later. Clean and smelling good.
It took till 23:30 to do this operation. “major” Tim visited me from next door and he’s a little chatty. More on the major another time I guess.
Sunday, mowed all the lawns, strimmed the back banks.
3:30 leave for the council rubbish tip to drop the garden rubbish off. Going through town, steam out of bonnet, it had been raining, so I thought some that just dropped on to the radiator. hmm temperature needle isn’t moving down. Dump rubbish, bonnet up - oh shit, plug (temperature sensor) jump out of the cooling system. Water drained out of system. Pooh.
4:30 call AA, 5:15 “Steve” up, looks like O ring perished, unfortunately I didn’t loose a clip, but I did loose a washer which I suspect was knackered. Get it back to my mechanics, AA guy traveling behind. Someone who works there is working on their own car, raid the place for a washer, temporary fix till after the Bank Holiday.
6ish back at the flat, unpack all Py’s clothes.
Start on the kitchen cupboards….
10pm leave for late dinner - achievement, all the top cupboards are clean inside now. Bottom ones tommorrow.
There seem to be more strange flash files turning up in the blogging community. The story of the Rabit who had a gun :
http://www.yomgaille.com/bordel/un_lapin.html
I’m just squeezing in some tech light reading Database Nation in between the Nancy Kress Beggars in Spain trilogy.
I have learnt, that in the US, if you default on any sort of loan / credit card is the IRS screw up and even if it’s there fault it stays on file. It only goes off file after 7 years because of the Fair Credit Reporting Act of 1971. In some cases, people get refuse a mortgage and jobs because of their credit status, but the real problem is that as at time of the books writing, once in the system, the three main credit agency sub-sell their data to 117 other companies down the food chain.
The book narrates a real life horror story where one couple were reduced to one credit card company because of moving house twice, paying their IRS billing, the next two IRS offices loosing track of this. IRS serve $10,000 lien (reposs order), the renting tennant of one property is in shit with the IRS, so he’s doesn’t forward the letter. Next Position please, credit rating shafted and nobody actually calls and speaks to the people involved - they were abroad, they paid their tax, the IRS received it, the IRS had fucked up. Family doesn’t get to buy a new house for seven years. It could have cost them their jobs!
When the seven years were up the credit card offers came through like confetti.
They only seem to pass laws when a US politicans get there personal data abused. Example given Judge Bork, because a journalist got hold of Blockbuster records, but he didn’t find him renting any porn - so he was quite disappointed the judge was clean! So when somebody important gets shat on - que the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988.
Other than that, carry on allowing credit card companies to send out pre-approved credit cards. It all seems a good money making racquet to cc companies, but the misery identity theft is causing there by their completely half baked dependence on the SSN number. Social Security number - completely beggars common sense.
I’ve learnt that DNA matching is only a science - it is not fact, we all share 99% of the same genome. The data set frequencies which determine a false positive could still be in dispute.
1% of the population share exactly the same DNA - identical twins. And in the US, that’s 1 million people. (In year 2000).
Fingerprints are good. So are Iris prints, they are fixed in utero.
Retina prints suck - for women they vary with pregnancy. New arteries and veins branch out.
Why is British Telecom in joint venture with IriScan, who have developed an iris scanner which can “capture an iris print of a person in a car driving at 50 miles per hour”?
Presumably this was pre-privatisation and done on behalf of DERA / GCHQ? I mean, it’s got shed loads to do with making telephone calls hasn’t it!
I’m a quarter way through - but I’ve got a feeling that the mobile phone is going to be the cool state tracking device.
60% of all phones sold in the US by 2001 have to give 911 a position accurate to 150 metres. So if you are Nokia and Motorola, you’re hardly like to leave this out of the chip set and Iraq, China and those other nice friendly regimes will want’em down 1 metre not 150!
It’s easy to work out A to B. And the world ahead looks grim.
Although Simon’s Garfinkel’s book is excellent it is very US, but with not enough rest of the world observations, I had the UK’s one and only photograph encapuslated credit card issued by the National and Provision Building Society. He seemed to think this would help with fraud, the Abbey National purchased the N&P then stopped the scheme, I wrote complaining, they said that credit card fraud represented so little lossage - the photo card wasn’t worth it. This is because in Britain we have a radio based system which distubutes stolen card information on a 3 minute turnaround, even my local petrol (gas) station has one.
I am greating looking forward to the other three quarters to go, because it looks like Britain has been too state regulated to make the same mistakes with it’s citizens data. Or a least just doesn’t flog it off to the private sector for direct mail profiling. Anti-terrorism and fraud I can cope with, but state organisations flogging the data to private companies is just plain bollocks.
In Februrary 1999 the South Carolina Public Safety Department (like DVLC in the UK) sold it’s entire 3.5 million photograph database to Image Data LLC Nashua, New Hampshire. For … $5,000.
The Washington Post subsequently discovered that Image Data LLC had received a $1.46M grant and technical assistance from the US Secret Service in 1998.
They appear not to have been the only other state to have done this either.
In you are into information security and social hacking/engineering - READ THIS BOOK!
Useless Facts, Strange Facts, Weird Facts, Bizarre Facts, Brain Teasers, Stupid People Stories, Greeting Cards,
http://www.uselessfacts.net/
halfbakery.com - Communal database of original, fictitious inventions
http://www.halfbakery.com/
Digital Librarian: a librarian’s choice of the best of the Web
Yahoo without the advertising - how it used to be?
http://www.halfbakery.com/
Powered by WordPress
