Facts About London During Wikipedia Blackout
You don’t need Wikipedia. Just look here.
Wikipedia Goes Black
Wikipedia is off line today and already I have wanted to use it twice and couldn’t. It’s all because of the SOPA and PIPA acts in the US Congress. Read about the reasons here.
I actually don’t see what these Acts have to do with the UK.
HMRC Scams
I am very lucky in that I can afford an accountant to do my tax returns, so I know that if I get an e-mail from HMRC, it’s a scam.
I’ve had three in the last few days.
This page on the HMRC web site gives details on how to recognise them.
i forward all mine to phishing@hmrc.gsi.gov.uk. This is indicated on this page.
One of the interesting things about these e-mails, is that they were all to an old e-mail address that I don’t use now. I do monitor it, in case one of my old friends hasn’t got my new one.
For financial transactions, I always use a particular e-mail that is not used elsewhere. That means that if I get an e-mail to that address, I check it thoroughly and if say it’s selling me a holiday, I then know that my bank or other financial institution might have been compromised.
The Problem With My Kindle
I was given a Kindle for Christmas and I like it and usually have it in the pocket of my jacket, when I’m travelling.
It does have one serious problem and that is, I tend to be so engrossed in what I’m reading, that I sometimes miss my stop on the bus or train.
What Do You Call Someone Who Makes An Inappropriate or Stupid Tweet?
The obvious answer is probably a twit, as that isn’t a particularly rude word and people have been known to say they’ve been a twit, when they’ve done something silly.
There are three today.
Ed Milliband tweeted this on the death of Bob Holness.
Sad to hear that Bob Holness has died. A generation will remember him fondly from Blackbusters.
Ed or his Tweetmaster General must have had something from yesterday on their mind.
And talking of yesterday, Diane Abbott got out a shovel and started digging.
Dubious of black people claiming they’ve never experienced racism. Ever tried hailing a taxi I always wonder?
As you can imagine you don’t annoy London’s black cab drivers. My address does, as it contains the name of one of Arsenal’s rivals and most black cab drivers in this area support the boys in red. I’ve now had three refuse to take me with a smle on their face and then of course they have. One was a white man, another was a white woman and the other was a black man in an Arsenal bobble-hat. It probably proves that London taxi-driver humour is rather universal.
And then there was racing commentator, Jason Hall, who tweeted this to racegoers at Plumpton racecourse.
I want your hot body tonight babe.
I suppose he should be the Twit of the Day. Especially, as it was at Plumpton. Or is that Fat Twit of the Day?
Interesting Comments On North Korea
Some wag has posted this as a comment to this article on The Times website.
What next? Simple. Send an X Box, PS3 and Iphone 4 to the young Kim with all the games available. Like any other Korean kid he will get addicted and leave the North Koreans alone. £2000 well spent.
He’d obviously need to be supplied with a decent broadband connection, but the South has some of the best in the world and I’m sure they could find a solution.
And here’s another one.
” I told you I was Kim Jong Il.”
(Apologies to the late, great Spike Milligan.)
There are lots more.
Am I Lucky Or Does The Devil Look After Me?
Throughout my life, I’ve often been described as lucky and several times, positive things seem to happen to me by chance.
For instance, I met my late wife at Liverpool University, when I manipulated a scheme for students to get partners for one of the guild balls.
I ended up in Metier, after a chance meeting outside an opticians on Great Portland Street.
I’ve also been mentored well, by a lot of friends, who would never be described as conventional. Some sadly are no longer with us.
and I could give lots more examples.
Even on Monday, when I had the tooth exorcised from my body, I did the right thing, as it needed three hours and three dentists.
So is it luck or do some quickly weigh up the chances and make the right decision? I do know that my late wife would never describe me as boring and is that because I never throw any possibly useful information away from my brain. Since the stroke, I have lost some memory, like knowledge of who did this or that. But there is always Wikipedia!
As I don’t believe in any religion and believe organised religion is just another way to screw wealth out of the poor, then I can’t think that a devil exists either. Although after my last few years, it is more likely there is a devil, than a loving and peaceful god.
But then I’m a London mongrel! And they have more fight than a wagon-load of pit-bulls.
Six Arrests in Phishing Scam
I was pleased to see this article on the BBC web site.
I suspect it might have been the result of one of the two phishing scams aimed at students, that I flagged up earlier in the year.
Both were fairly well designed scams and the success, shows how people are vulnerable, when they are embarking on a new phase in their life.
The perpetrators were caught this time, and hopefully new students will be more careful next year.
30 Pieces of Spam
This morning the blog had thirty inappropriate comments, that all linked to stes, I would only endorse with large amounts of crinkly blue notes in a brown paper parcel.
As ever the WordPress spam filter trapped them all. And I have just despatched them to cyber-oblivion.
Technology Means It Would Be Easier to Leave the Euro Than It Was To Join
When I wrote the piece about Michael Spencer’s thoughts on the drachma, I didn’t think the whole thing through. I didn’t think about all the new notes that would need to be printed and the conversion of cash machines.
But this article sets it all out. It also contains this interesting paragraph.
“It also rather depends on how individual institutions adapted their systems to the original change-over to the euro,” says Lewis. “My guess is that many organisations in Greece might simply have put a converter around their existing systems, rather as some UK companies did when we went decimal in 1971 – we discovered in the run-up to the year 2000 that at least one major insurance company’s accounts were still running in pounds, shillings and pence!”
So we were still using £sd in 2000. I’ll also admit that in some of the systems I’ve programmed, where we displayed data in Iranian dates or Korean currency, what went on underneath wasn’t pretty. But it worked!
So how did I find the article. A friend told me that De La Rue were printing drachma notes. So I used Google and found that Greece would probably use its own security printer.
Although the De La Rue share price was up by one percent today.
The Anonymous Widower 