In recent weeks, I have been peppered with increasing amounts of spam to my Blueyonder account despite the fact that I rarely use or divulge this email address. I guess I have become spoiled by Akismet and Gmail which both do such a sterling job of automatically detecting spam. Anyway, it turns out Blueyonder do have a spam filtering capability. If you log onto Webmail, under Options, there is a section called ‘Anti-spam and Antivirus Preferences’....
Yesterday afternoon at 16:09, in Surrey, a sales rep in a red Vauxhall Vectra shunted a plumber driving a white van on the middle lane of the M25. Twenty years ago, the following cars would have quickly stopped to allow the protagonists to pull over to the hard shoulder. Twenty years ago, a heated exchange would ensue. Then both parties would calm down and exchange insurance details. Twenty years ago, the white van driver would resume his journey while the Vectra owner waited for a tow from The AA to a local garage to replace his pierced radiator....
Student fined £80 for making a 4 foot penis in the snow.
Despite a scattering of snow in London that normally brings the country to a complete halt, my return flight from Copenhagen was on time and blissfully uneventful. Unusually, I was hoping for lengthy queues at passport control in T3. I was praying for four flights to land simultaneously and for the resulting queues to snake around the corner and past the toilets. Why ? Because today it is finally going to happen....
Blueyonder Webmail is down which is unusual. Welcome to the brand new, exciting world of Virgin Media. Still, at least they have a nice friendly, Web 2.0 style apology. The marketeers must be busy planning the launch party and deciding which dress Richard Branson will wear.
I was vaguely aware that NTL merged with Telewest last year but a glossy black/red envelope, announcing the brave new world of ‘Virgin Media’, took me a little off guard this morning. I sincerely hope that my existing Telewest service is not affected by NTL’s recent acquisition of Virgin Mobile. My Telewest broadband service works fine (apart from the occasional self-inflicted glitch with my wireless router). My Telewest email works fine (apart from a recent problem where the POP3 server times out on the first connection and works perfectly thereafter)....
I was intrigued by the detailed infrastructure and sophisticated AI techniques powering the ‘world-wide computer network’ that was supposedly hunting down my lost bag. I had a persistent mental image of a person sitting in a dingy, dark corner office buried in the dungeons at Heathrow airport, lazily typing into an old-fashioned, amber, VT220 terminal: Bag Reference: ‘AHL LHRBD70414’ BRU-LHR: Confirm : ‘Yes’ Is the bag at BRU ? : ‘No’...
27 years ago, in an fruitless attempt to save money, my wife and I hired a function room above a pub to celebrate our joint 40th birthday. With a free bar. We invited friends (both of them), members of the book club and close family, blew up our own red and white balloons, paid extortionate prices for prawn volavons and, in an extravagant measure, even hired a DJ with a Karaoke machine....
The United States of America proudly presents the candidates for Big Brother (World Series SmackDown) [Via Marshall Kirkpatrick]
I am not overly surprised the Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan educates people about how to assemble explosive devices and avoid detection by security forces in addition to tips on identifying soft targets. The hands-on lab exercises (days 4-5) will undoubtedly assist with providing riveting content for suicide notes and how to get the soft lighting right for your exit video. All of this hard work will be ultimately worthwhile because there is the promise of eternal martyrdom and 99 vestal virgins dressed in white lingerie....