Don’t read this! It’s a note to me not to you.

I just wanted somewhere to remind me about things I was going to write in the future. So here it is.

• Yet another Global Warming grumble.
• Judges and their concept of computer evidence.
• Whether I should start a security weblog.
• Michael on Containers.
• An update on TV after my last posting on it.
• The curious incident of the Mouse that died horribly
• The top 10 ways I have nearly killed or maimed myself.
• How to win the Widget game.
• The top 10 reasons to leave this dump of a country.

That’s about it for now, but I will probably edit it. If you did ignore me and actually read this, then you do realise I will probably never write any of this don’t you?

Warning - This is in draft and is hard to read, I will add/remove some punctuation and proper connecting words later.

I don’t write much about me in here so people who don’t know me won’t have been following my year long war with my Landlords and their agents. It started with the landlords coming back from Canada for a visit and wanting to visit the house they have rented to me for 10 years (apparently I am a tourist attraction) and ended a couple of months ago with them having spent a fortune, made zillions of stupid legal mistakes and getting a possession order to get the property back a year after they started when they could have got one months earlier or, just asked me to leave.Part of the collateral of this little battle has been that the Landlord’s letting agents who are the people who look after the property and who were the people who messed up anyway and apparently seem more than happy to lie about it all in court; have stopped talking to me. They don’t acknowledge my mails, and I gave up actually trying to talk to them in person ages ago. This means that they don’t respond to any of my complaints about any of the problems with the house: the fact that power points seem to randomly blow up; the fact the roof lets in water (lots of it), the fact that the oil tank seems to have a dead goat in it (ok, so it’s probably a rat, but you get the idea); the fact that the windows have all started to fall out… They also don’t seem to care that the sewers are blocked - Not just blocked, but blocked badly. They have been like that for about 3 months but are getting worse to the point that the neighbours really must know by now, mostly because every time we flush the toilet, the whole street stinks and their gardens fill with the previous contents of our toilet.

I have told them I am not paying any rent until they fix it, since I will probably need the money for long term medical care for acute Cholera or something but of course, they always pretend never to have received my emails (they claimed this in court when they said I hadn’t sent them anything and couldn’t produce it in discovery - Somebody should probably fix their mail system!) - It doesn’t much matter to me anyway, I am out of here and to the land of Camels soon. I do pity the next tenants here though although supposedly the landlords are actually moving back from Canada to live here. Well I hope they enjoy their 1st job, cleaning out that hole. I suspect it would have been a lot easier for them if they’d done it when we first told them but then, I guess it’s a very good way to get somebody out of your house. Biological Warfare. The Way Forward!

Enjoy the video… I can’t get it to embed in this so apparently I just have to include a link to Youtube. Crappy bloody weblog software. All the cool kids have software that lets them include videos. Grrr. Anyway:

http://www.youtube.com/v/H60UczWBjK0

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Oh one thing - Apparently the video narrative is wrong - The bath was emptied first and then after about 3 minutes, the toilet was flushed. It’s at that point in the video that things turn from unpleasant to fairly revolting. What you also don’t see is another drain behind me which is also blocked up, but not so much, and the downpipe from upstairs to that, which is starting to split and spill its contents everywhere on the way down.

As I said; Biological Warfare shouldn’t really be an option in tenancy disputes but seemingly, it is. The irony is that somehow, I am sure they will twist this so that it’s my fault and probably end up trying to sue me about it or something. They do like wasting their money in court.

No don’t worry, I haven’t gone completely mad. The title was meant to be somewhat sarcastic.

Somebody commented that I didn’t update my weblog very much so I thought I would respond. I don’t update my weblog very much because I don’t really have anything of much interest to babble about that seems to fit into a weblog. I don’t want to go all Stephen Fry and write undoubtedly interesting articles (he calls them blessays I think) which are simply too long to read and I don’t want to write 10 posts a day describing every bowel and bladder movement I have like a lot of other bloggers seem to. After all, I use IRC for that.

Mostly I write something when I feel I have something to say that may interest my regular audience of 3 or 4 readers or the few random people that the search-engines pull in after a few weeks. I don’t write it immediately - I wait a few days and if I haven’t forgotten about it then there is a possibility that it may actually be worth a few minutes writing it down and maybe worth a minute for somebody to read. This isn’t to say that every post will be interesting but hey, I try.

To try and add some value and interest to this post, I think I will add some things that wouldn’t really have warranted a post of their own…

Firstly - I was wrong, and the controller of Radio 2 was right. When he announced that Chris Evans would be taking over the afternoon drive-time slot I was one of those grouchy folks who said that they’d never listen to it again. The controller chap told us to give him a chance and we may be surprised but nooo, I didn’t believe him. In the end, I forgot it was Evans presenting the show and accidentally listened to it and, amazingly, I carried on doing so. I am never going to become a Chris Evans fan but I have to say I don’t hate him and he really does do a very good show.

Oh yea, and since I am babbling - I am reading all these things about Microsoft and Vista’s “Kill Switch” for unlicenced copies with amusement. Every one of my copies of Vista is licenced and legal and this is a novelty to me. It’s almost become a slightly perverse hobby watching people complain at Microsoft getting more and more evil while I sit in my little cloud of smug, legal self-satisfaction at it not being my problem at all. It’s rather nice not having to keep up to date on all the little cracks and workarounds to stop Microsoft breaking my computer any more than they already have.

Right! That’s it… Shoo now, get back to whatever you were doing, don’t let me get in your way.

I don’t see myself as a Luddite but something about the obsession for accuracy these days is starting to piss me off. When I was being educated, on the occasional times I deigned to attend that is, there was always some bright spark who could quote Pi to god knows how many decimal places. To my mind, Pi is generally 3.14 - Usually, I am more than happy with Pi being 3.

Bear with me, this is going somewhere.

It’s all the fault of the sodding electronic calculator. See back when I was younger than I ever really was, there were slide rules, and a slide rule looked like this:

I appreciate that many people reading this won’t have ever used a slide rule in anger, but the principal behind them is that most of the time, you more or less guess the answer, as opposed to have it displayed to 9 decimal places in monocolour LCD lettering. Look up a little from here… See the third scale down? Just to the right of the 3? There’s Pi marked. It’s marked roughly between 3.1 and 3.2 - It’s about 3.15 in fact. If you want to multiply Pi by 3 you pop the two numbers together on the correct scales and read off about 9.45 on the result scale; if you want to multiply it by 30, you multiply that by 10 in your head… If you want to multiply it by 3 million, you do the same only with more zeroes and your error rate has gone up considerably, but it doesn’t matter much really, does it?

Why is this annoying me? Apart from the fact that I want to shoot people who can quote Pi to more than 6 places? Well it’s the post office, that’s what it is. They have digital scales now, and when the parcel you are posting weighs 501 grammes, they charge you for over 500 grammes. Generally speaking by that point, I just rip a corner off and make them re-weigh it but even so, when did we become so obsessed with this “down the nearest gramme” accuracy? I don’t like it. Make them stop. I am not even going to start ranting about their new letter size measurement devices which very much depend on the operator’s skill at getting parcels through a little plastic measuring slot - Well I am not going to rant YET, at any rate.

I want markets back where they plonked stuff on scales and weighed it in pounds. If it was 4.4 pounds, and cost 30p a pound, they’d charge you about £1. 30 because that was roughly what 4.4 * 30 is (a slide rule would confirm this to you, if you were to ask it, especially a W.H.Smiths one with the little clear slider thing missing like most of them are these days). These days they pop things on digital scales, tell the scales that the things you want cost 78p per 100 grammes, and when it weighs 264.5g it prints a label that says £2.08 (yes, the bastards round it up too).

I blame the Common Market.

As an Englishman from the North of the country; I have been raised in the secure knowledge that the pinnacle of human achievement was reached with the invention of the shed. Men need sheds as much as they need air, water and Marmite - It’s as simple as that. A shed gives men independence, freedom, and a place to sit, drink tea and watch the world go round.

Having been raised in this belief, I would consider it sacrilege for somebody to suggest that there may be something better and more practical than the shed. It doesn’t seem possible, does it? Well far be it for me to try and improve on the shed, but I do think I have found a possible contender for the next generation of shed. The Ambulance!

Before you scoff, think about it! It’s a huge shed, with lots of twiddly things in it, loads of cupboards, built in seats, and and and… AN ENGINE AND WHEELS!

You can drive it away and have your shed somewhere else. Think about that! Ok, so now the more naive of you may be asking “Why an Ambulance? Why not just get a camper van?”. Camper vans are gay, that’s why. People who have camper vans are generally utter knobends who should be banned from the road and then shot. Ambulances on the other hand… Well, you can tell people you got it because it’s a big van, whilst secretly dreading the idea of ever actually having to use up all that space in there. When you get really bored, you can hunt for the sirens, and work out how to reconnect the blue lights. You can try and work out what all the data cabling is for, you can even try and work out why the interior lights only work sometimes. AND THERE ARE BUTTONS! LOTS OF BUTTONS!

Trust me on this one any Northern Men out there… Before you go out to the Shed Shop to look for a new hideaway; have a look in Autotrader and see if there are any old ambulances for sale first. You will thank me.

Oh yes. Here’s one I made earlier: http://lorry.org/Misc/Ambulance/

Prometheus’s lesser known little brother stole butter and a frying pan from the Gods. His monumentous achievement was overshadowed by the cheek and audacity of his older sibling’s theft but none the less, was a major milestone in the relationship between man and his Deities.

Apparently, in the spirit of protecting us from a new generation of communicable diseases; O2 have started giving away condoms.

I am not sure I think too much of the jokes, but it’s a nice touch.

As some of you may know, I have been having a bit of a problem with Mark Wahlberg lately. He has managed to get into my house and he is scuttling around and hiding out in the bathroom. Normally, I wouldn’t really mind but I am not sure why he is here, and it’s a little disconcerting seeing him scuttle off, just on the edge of vision every time you get close to finding him. I can feel those little beady Wahlberg eyes staring at me as I sit on the loo reading, and even as I sit here, typing this entry.

I have made up a sign, so that he knows that I am onto him, but it doesn’t seem to have worked. He’s still here.

There is nothing on the Internets about ridding your house of Mark Wahlberg so I am having to somewhat play this by ear. I am not sure what his natural predators are but I know that Bill Hicks is one. Unfortunately he is dead but then I realised I could just disguise somebody else as Bill Hicks and that may well scare him off. Whilst I am at it, I may as well bring in some more troops, so I got together Mark Harmon, Chuck Norris and MacGyver to command an army. Of course, I have to find them an army, but I have something in mind… I shall make them an army of Jungle Animals and Monkeys!

I present to you… My General Staff.

And, their army:

Tonight they will seek out Mark Whalberg and remove him from my house. I am afraid I cannot post any more details, I have been sworn to secrecy. This is, after all… War!

I received the best email in the world yesterday. It was even better than the Mr Chicken email which I lost years ago. This may require a short introduction to give you some context.

I casually collect fountain pens; it’s not a serious collection and I don’t collect old ones. Mostly I just like to try and find ones that I like and am happy using and that’s not an easy task. There is a chap in China called Alan Koo who is a much more serious collector, and seller than I am. He collects and sells all the original, fakes and cloned pens that the Chinese made over the last 50 or so years and his stuff is good and cheap. He sends a newsletter out every couple of weeks, and this email message was one of these.

So, for your delight:

Date: 18th April 2007
From: Alan Koo
Subj: Inside the Mind of a Korean Killer

BLACKSBURG, Va. - Between his first and second bursts of gunfire,
the Virginia Tech gunman mailed a package to NBC News containing
what authorities said were images of him brandishing weapons and a
video of him delivering a diatribe about getting even with rich
people.

Colleges nationwide are reassessing how to alert students during
emergencies, with hundreds of schools seeking advice from campus
safety experts Tuesday, the day after the Virginia Tech shootings.
Private security firms also fielded scores of calls.

Students at Virginia Tech were informed of the violence via a mass
e-mail about two hours after the first shooting, and about 20 minutes
before the second.

Security experts Tuesday urged universities to use a variety of
techniques to reach students. Many already deploy website postings,
voicemail, public address systems, phone trees or even bullhorns.
Some, such as USC, are considering text messages and podcasts.

What happen to the student of these days, willing to buy a gun and
unwilling to spend on a fountain pen. Maybe future fountain pens
can be designed in this way to serve their killer instinct, see
here:

http://www.yichengtrading.com/catalog/item/4299241/4232878.htm

Alan Koo (Dr. China)
Your China Pen King
www.yichengtrading.com

When I was younger, thinner and more photogenic, I came home from a cellphone-free holiday in Scotland to find myself all over the newspapers being dubbed as “The Information Superhighwayman”. This was the start of the Harrods vs. Lawrie case which went on for a long time and due to my refusal to talk to the press, put me in a pretty bad light. It was the first domain-name case outside the US and so it was one that would potentially have far reaching implications. At the time it was only the second case in the world and the first was nothing to do with the people who actually registered the name, just people who bought it from them. I was the world’s first “domain name speculator” and paid a high price for it in the press and in the industry as well, which I guess has long since regretted not being more openly on my side. I have since explained the whole Harrods thing to anyone who wants to listen but most don’t and honestly, it’s in the past and I rather like the title “The Information Superhighwayman”. Oddly, since I was in charge of registering customer domains for British Telecom for a few years, I was far more often on the other side of the domain-name trademark legal-war on my customers’ behalf. One of the strangest things that happened to me in my prosecution-years was having a big domain-name trademark case I prosecuted whilst at BT used in the baa.com case as a precedent against me. That one amused me somewhat, I admit.

When it comes to it, I didn’t register any of the trademarked domains I had back then to sell them, I registered them so we could pitch sites at the companies involved and when we’d convinced them of the wonders of the Internet, we would already have the sitenames to build the site on. Way back then in the early 90’s all but one company said “We’ll never want to be on the Internet, we have no interest, sorry chaps”. A few years on when people did want to be on the Internet, my company lawyers acted badly in my interest and when they were approached started insisting on money changing hands. We did later make a claim against the lawyers for acting without instruction or something but again that’s all forgotten in the mists of time.

Yesterday I registered an Indian domain for a small project I am starting, and I had to search out a suitable one. I noticed that a hell of a lot of the ones I was interested in had already been registered and parked on Sedo (a site that sells domain names). When I registered the one I wanted finally, I was offered the chance to put the domain up for sale on the very site I had used to register the domain. This struck me as very weird and a very odd way for the industry to have gone after all the shit I got in the early days for doing what I did.

I have only ever sold two domain names. I wonder if that is surprising to most people? I sold one years ago because of the afformentioned lawyers (I think I made about $5,000 from it of which I got about $1000), and I sold the other because somebody offered me a lot of money for a generic domain name. I have had a lot stolen from me - In the old days it was a lot easier to fake transfer requests and a lot of people did. After the transfer was done it was nearly impossible to get them back without years in court and a lot of money. I have had a few stolen “at source” too. One of the largest and oldest registries (no names) had staff who were all too willing to simply steal a domain from the owner, and register it to somebody else for a suitable bribe. There was no paperwork in those days and the electronic trail would of course be deleted. This isn’t imagination, I believe a lot of this sort of thing came out into the open in the sex.com court case.

One of my favourite domain names was richersounds.com - Again we originally registered this because we wanted to pitch a site to Richer Sounds, a rather good audio equipment company in England. A few years on the domain was up for renewal (they were free when I started registering them, amazing hey!) and I noticed richersounds.com was about to expire. I like Richer Sounds - They used to give lollipops away in their stores and once in Leeds when they had run out and I jokingly wrote a letter to Julian Richer (the owner), telling him to send the store more lollipops. A week or so later, Julian sent me a whole box of lollies. You can’t beat service like that. When I noticed richersounds.com expiring, I contacted Julian and arranged the domain transfer and everything at no cost; just so that they wouldn’t lose it. I guess they will take my Superhighwayman Hat off me for things like that, won’t they.

As I seem to say a lot these days, it’s odd how the world is changing but whatever happens, the lawyers will get richer off the back of it all. I wonder… Ummm.

bash$ whois richerlawyers.com

No match for “RICHERLAWYERS.COM”.

There you go somebody, I am sure that will make you a few dollars somewhere.