For various reasons, I am in a reflective mood and I finally have a few weeks in which to relax. This creates its own problems in that when I have time to relax, I have time to think and when I have time to think, that’s usually not a good thing.

As a means of procrastination and to keep myself busy for a while, I thought I would talk about me! I know, it’s something of a digression in this weblog, but it had to happen one day didn’t it?

I am not very good at spelling and I am generally dreadful at punctuating. I don’t have a clue about grammar although I have read every edition of Fowler as though it was talking about some sort of foreign language. But I come across as relatively literate and clever don’t I? Even if I did just start a sentence with “But” - I mean I occasionally write for a living, I should hope that I do.

The problem is in two parts, both somewhat unrelated. Sit back whilst I tell you a story if you are interested. The dates will be screwed up and some things may be in the wrong order but who cares?

I started school at age one and a half. People these days seem to find this somewhat barbaric but I don’t think it was considered particually abnormal then. I was a day-boarder at a small, private boarding school in St Annes. I remember parts of this life; I remember the little red/pink uniforms we had, I remember having to march every morning for half an hour. The boys marched, the girls did ballet practice. I always remember wanting to do ballet too but then I was odd that way. They didn’t have assemblies and there was no concept of religion there. This latter part I feel was a very good thing. I have read some other people’s memories of this school (which is now closed) on friendsreunited and they tally somewhat with mine. I remember liking the school nurse whom the boarders put across as a tyrant though; maybe this is because I never suffered from being forced to wear my soiled bedsheets all day as punishment for wetting a bed. Damn those under fives for their inconsiderate behaviour hey?

They taught me to read and write there pretty much as soon as I started in a curious mixture of phonetics and real language. I remember being taught my alphabet as phonetics and to this day I spell words out when people ask me in this way. Ah, ber, ser, der, eh, eff, gur. I have to translate to normal alphabet in my head later. I can read phonetic books without thinking about it still but then I also remember copying out endless cards saying things like “Mummy, daddy, Bill and Anne, are standing by their caravan”. Why they operated in this mixed way I have no idea. I am tempted to think that they enjoyed screwing with kid’s heads but I enjoyed my time there a lot so I have no complaints at all.

When I was about 7 my family lost a lot of its money when my Grandfather died. I had to move from that school because we moved away and for a few weeks I was put into a state infant school. That was terrifying! It wasn’t terrifying because the kids were bad or anything, they were just all so utterly dense. They couldn’t read, they couldn’t write. I had consumed most of Enid Blyton’s entire output by this time and they were struggling with the fact that Peter liked Jane and the dog had a ball. Luckily, I didn’t stay here for too long and we moved to the Isle of Man where I started in a junior school there. Within about 2 weeks the teachers had complained bitterly about me and they moved me up a couple of years to a class that I may actually get something out of. I was still far too ahead of them but at least there was something that interested me. It is something of a tribute to the Manx school system that they were happy to do this. I don’t know if they still do but I hope so.

Of course… At some point we lost all our remaining money and we moved back to England where I was soon to discover that the English school system lacks a lot in terms of progressieve thinking. I started at a new school and they put me back in the year appropiate to my age. I did the entire year’s maths text book in a lesson, I did the same with every other class. They had no idea what to do with me so they just left me alone. The only lessons I got anything at all out of were History and Religious Education; the former because I had never really studied any British History and the latter because religion was entirely new to me and fascinated (and still fascinates) me in the way that watching Big Brother fascinates me now.

I lost the ability to learn completely. I had nothing to do for a couple of years, I had no challenges and teachers just avoided me. We moved around a lot and I went to a few schools; all with the same issues and all I really learned in the end was to pretend to be like the rest of them so I didn’t have to do any work at all. I managed to miss learning to spell, I managed to miss learning any formal grammar and anything about punctuation. I never did manage to learn to handwrite, I had learned to write in print at age 2 and never learned any different. Teachers would tell me off for printing and not doing joined up writing but none of them ever thought to teach me. I tried to learn from a book once, trust me the results are somewhat amusing. One plus point at this time is that I had been thrown out of games lessons for being a monumental pain in the arse and I had to spend every games lesson playing with computers instead as an alternative. Mostly I spent 1980 and 1981 playing Colossal Cave on a 380Z. It seemed like a good thing to me.

Eventually I think I discovered that during my few years of hiding the world had caught up on me. People around me were being taught stuff I didn’t know and I was falling behind. I was no longer the cleverest person in the school, not by a long way in fact. Of course by this point I was not only behind in a lot of things, I also had no clue how to learn any more and was far happier in the middle classes than in the top ones anyway. I coasted and blagged; I got the smallest amount of O-levels required to get into college after school and then got the absolute minimum qualifications that I needed to get into University. It wasn’t quite all coasting; I enjoyed things like photography and at this point I still wanted to be an Archeologist, something I was never allowed to do in the end because I hadn’t studied classics - In industrial schools in Central Lancashire they don’t tend to study Latin and Greek.

At University I pretty much coasted. I got the worst maths mark ever at the end of my first year. When they made me resit it they kindly told me that I had to double my original 4% to be allowed to come back and just in case I couldn’t work it out, that was 8%. I slept through all my psychology exams (literally) and failed that as well. In my second year I attended just under 20 of the few hundred lectures I was meant to. I had no intention of coming back for a 3rd year by that point but I had to stay till the end so I wouldn’t have to pay my grant back. I had a job to go to, my Supervisor, one of the very few members of staff I liked was about to leave and I had zero respect for most of the members of staff and students on my course. I did no coursework at all and I guess my faculty got sick to death of trying to nag me. I had been suspended more times than I care to think about. They hated me, I hated them. The exams were hilarious because I didn’t have a clue what most of the papers were about but I guess there were some I already knew a lot about so somehow, to my horror, I passed the year. This was a problem now - I didn’t expect to pass, it was never on the cards. The job I was going to take fell through so I decided to take my third year and eventually graduated with a Third which was probably the best I could ever have got at that point really. They did make me do my second year coursework before they awarded me my degree. They really didn’t want to make it easy.
Leaving University with a Third Class Honours degree doesn’t usually allow you to take up a funded postgraduate but I had a friend, David Stretch who was looking for some students to take up a European funded postgraduate in Psychology at Leicester University in the Hospital’s Psychiatry Department. I had nothing else to do so I decided to go. That was when everything changed. I was 21 at this point and although it was a little late, I finally met that “teacher that changes your life”. David didn’t push anything, I don’t think he ever really tried to teach me much but he did suggest things and set seeds of things that interested me and then allowed me the freedom to explore and learn in my own way, with support when I wanted it and without criticism. From then, I went back to my old University to work much to the horror of my former faculty and carried on learning. It’s amusing really, looking back that most of what I have learned academically I learned myself after I was awarded my degree. My writing style I have discovered I owe to Cassandra; I fear he would cringe at how I occasionally butcher it though.

So that’s it. That’s why I can’t spell. Now you know so am I forgiven now?

Here’s an interesting new scam I had never heard of before.

The scammer breaks into a hotmail, gmail or other free-email account and then sends the following email out to everybody in their contact list:

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• Hi
  I am in a hurry writing this mail. I had a trip to Nigeria visiting the tinapa opening ceremony. Unfortunately for me all my money got stolen at the hotel where i lodged from the attack of some armed robbers and since then i have been without any money i am even owing the hotel here,So i have only access to emails,my mobile phone  can’t work here so i didnt bring it along.Please can you lend me 1000 pounds so i can return back and settle the hotel bills i would return it back to you as soon as i get home, I am so confused right now.You can have it sent through western union.I have already spoken to the hotel manager, please let me hear from you so i can collect his full name and address where you can send the money tomorrow please or if possible today. I am waiting for your reply.Thank you.
  (Person’s name)

---

It’s an interesting one in that it may actually work (provided the person is usually illiterate anyway). A whole new clever little twist on the traditional 419 scam. I shall watch this one with interest.

A while ago I pondered starting a weblog devoted to security. I occasionally feel the need to write something about this subject and I was worried that my one loyal reader would probably get bored stiff if I wrote too much in amongst my generally pointless rants.

My problem is that I know more about security than you. I am pretty safe in saying this unless you are one of a handful of people, all of whom I could name and none of which would be reading my weblog. Don’t get me wrong - If you are an expert in Linux, I bet you know tonnes more about Linux security than I do and I know 12 year olds who know more about modern hacking tools and methods than I ever will. The problem is that these specialisms don’t make good all around security experts; experience and exposure does and if nothing else, I have a lot more of that than most.

I got an email from an old adversary of mine today and part of my reply got me thinking about how I view a profession I used to be very much involved with. I quote:

“My former industry is full of self-publicists who are dreadful at
what they do; I care nothing at all for them and their paranoia
fuelled money making machine. I’ll stick with breeding camels and
just drag myself back into security when I need to eat occasionally,
but even so I don’t much think that will last.”

I’d like to write about security. As an odd kid working out better ways of nicking things or how to open locks I wasn’t meant to open, I have always been interested in the topic and I have devoted most of my adult life to it. When I was at school and a teacher of mine suggested that I manage the school computer systems as an alternative to trying to pull them to bits to see how they worked; I had no idea that a few years later I would be in the position to happily ignore fax requests for help from the FBI because they refused to give me a cool baseball cap or getting hate mail for working with the government to get Universities to prosecute hackers under the then new Computer Misuse Act (an action on my part which was  very misunderstood since I was actually more on the side of the students trying to make sure that they received a fair trial where the Rules of Evidence applied). Incidentally, we haven’t even hit the 1990s nor the start of the Internet in the UK yet.

I am not blowing my own trumpet here, I don’t like blatant self publicity and it’s certainly a bad trait in a security person anyway. That said, I am going to talk about me. It’s my weblog and if you don’t like it, then stop reading. I am making a point that I don’t like being told I am wrong by somebody who got a degree in Computer Security from Wigan Polytechnic in 2005 and then spent a few months getting a bunch of commercial “qualifications” consisting of seemingly random letters from computer-equipment manufacturers and then gets employed by some company and given a job title with the word manager, or consultant in it.

In my previous jobs I was surrounded by ‘em. I’d go to meetings to be told I was wrong by people who didn’t  have a clue what they were talking about. I wasn’t wrong, I am rarely wrong about things I profess to know something about. At BT, we had a chap who I will call John (mostly because that is is name). He didn’t go to University, he didn’t have a single security qualification and he knew very little about computers, networks or telephony. He had, however, spent more than 10 years as a soldier in Northern Ireland on constant active duty. I had been told by my colleagues that John was a jobsworth and something of a tosser and although his job was to give security advice for high-profile projects, he shouldn’t be consulted. I ignored them and decided to talk to him one day  about a system I was building for one of the country’s biggest banks. It was a pretty good design and there weren’t too many flaws that I could see but as soon as he saw it, he started asking questions that other people hadn’t thought of and prompted me to make a lot of changes for the better. He didn’t know about anything like as much about technology as the people I was surrounded by but he did have a much better appreciation of security in general and he knew what questions to ask and wasn’t afraid to ask them. Although he doesn’t know it, it was him who prompted me to get more military training to increase my skill set. I would say thanks but he’ll never  read this; I don’t think he knows how to use a web browser.

It’s become an odd industry. We are talking security here and security is meant to be quite important in the modern world. There are billions of pounds flying around the world at any given moment and as you see every time the government accidentally sells a few million people’s personal details at a carboot sale, there are people who actually worry about this sort of thing. Who is protecting all this money? Who’s looking after your personal  details? Generally speaking, it’s the people with the Wigan Poly degree I am afraid. They don’t have a clue what they are doing and in the rare cases where somebody who does have a clue gets to contribute, the babbling rabble who are shouting out “We can do it for you on a Linux box for 50p” will win the day anyway since it all ultimately comes down to money.

I am not going to start a security weblog. I am not sure there is much I could write that hasn’t already been butchered by the Wigan Polytechnic Press. I may still write about security things but I will just do them as normal rants.

Now you know.

The pheasant situation is starting to become silly. For those of you lucky enough not to have heard me rant in person; we seem to have a whole colony of pheasants living in the garden. I have nothing against pheasants when they are timid little things that fly away when you approach them - In fact, I think pheasants are very pretty birds generally deserving of not being shot. These ones, on the other hand, are starting to get just a little too comfortable.

For a start, they scare the cats. My cats are not easily scared, they bring me rats, squirrels, small wolves… But the pheasants just completely ignore them, in fact a few days ago, I caught Poggin inside the house, looking out of the patio doors looking oddly uncomfortable. I followed her gaze and there was a huge fat pheasant standing face against the glass, staring back at her and me.  He didn’t go away; in fact when I later returned with a camera, I swear he posed.

The other problem is the noise! Pheasants are noisy little fuckers. As I am typing this, at the opposite side of a large house, all I can hear is that bloody bird squawking about something or other. I suspect the something or other is the fact I haven’t put food out for them. I shall go and check…

Um, no, apparently the squawking was actually squeaking, and it was Tink torturing a mouse. Now I have to deal with that too. I went out to try and record you pheasant noises but I got sidetracked taking pictures of the manhole full of poo.

Anyway, this post was just an excuse to procrastinate a little and to post some pheasant photos, so here you are:

And if you want the rest, then click on the little “Read more” thingumy. Read more »

I am not writing very much at the moment but as an additional aid to my procrastination I have decided to write a few weblog entries. In the public interest I should mention that they will mostly be nothing but self-indulgent, procrastination-fuelled intellectual-masturbation and I will warn you when I have passed this brief phase and return to my normal sardonic ranting. If it helps, I will flag them all with the tag “Masturbation” so you can safely ignore them.

Apropos nothing; today I smell of Cherry and Almond and as I was putting this gloop of a shampoo on my hair earlier I started to wonder what had happened to The Body Shop’s dewberry range. Back in the early 90’s, White Musk and Dewberry were the Body Shop’s two original smells and the country stank of them. I am fairly certain that this was the thing that introduced our obsession with smelling like berries but the original source seems to have vanished from our memory altogether.  Bring back dewberry! Just not quite as much as before.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/sep/12/genderissues is quite a sweet article on Body Shop dewberries.