AMLinington

I found a reference to this site that suggests it some sort of psycho-social 'art' experiment 'net art' or something...

Aww it's down :-(

I think I may have just lost the ability to see in more than 16 colours...

My poor boyfriend has this problem with me... Shiny gadgets. "Are you SURE you don't want me to just configure it and get it set up for you honey?"

Oh dear, full password reset. I hate having to do that - I've got so many accounts I lose track of them, a full password reset usually takes several days for me :-S I wonder how long it will be before we can start suing institutions for loss of personal fidelity based on their poor security (although before other users start flaming me and telling me it's impossible, I AM aware that there are usually disclaimers and 'Insitution X is not responsible for loss of data when using our WiFi system' blah blah blah blah) but with the increase in use of smart phones and tablet devices and the amount of data we use/store/transmit, the provider of the WiFi service must start to take steps to ensure the safety of that data. I was at a hotel this weekend in the middle of nowhere with no 3G signal and barely enough signal to make a phone call, had the hotel WiFi actually supported my smartphone instead of repeatedly redirecting me to their venues advert I would have had no choice but to send work-related data over their WiFi (had I in fact been staying there as a consequence of work, which I wasn't, so I turned WiFi off and waited until I got home to check my Facebook account and look at the pictures of my friends wedding). If you don't mind my asking, which hotels were you staying in as I think we'd all be interested to know whether compromised WiFi might affect one of us at some point?

Wow! Is it wrong that I'm really excited about that! Brand new, dissassembled Spitfires in boxes - I wonder what condition they are in - surely having been buried in original factory packaging they must have been reasonably protected from the more serious ravages of time?

[paranoia][pedant]I am more concerned with the possibility of data on my phone being stolen. Since I have the WoW Armory App, if I were to use the Authenticator, it would mean my WoW login details and authenticator details are contained on the same device. I consider this insecure. I also consider the possibility of the authenticator algorithm being replicated a higher risk with a 'software' version than the hardware version. With the hardware version, in order to replicate it a potential account-thief would have to have access to the physical device, but that device does not contain account details so it would be hard to match it against my account. Yes, potentially given enough computing power they could brute force the algorithm replication but that would be more hassle than it was worth. My saying that IMO the software authenticator is less secure is based on the ease-of-theft of the data and the fact that my account details for my WoW account would be contained on a single device via the authenticator and armory app, NOT that the authenticator algorithm is different or less effective. Perhaps I should have clarified my view...[/pedant][/paranoia]

See I always wonder how they know what address to use. I keep getting phishing scams to my 'junk' account saying that my WoW account is being suspended due to illegal activity unless I visit what is clearly a phishing URL and enter my details to 'answer the charges'. Funny, I don't HAVE a WoW account on that address.... Interestingly, I've never had one of these to the account I actually use for my WoW account...

If you were hacked before, how come you didn't put the authenticator on it then? Our guild went through a spate of attempted and successful hackings (it seemed a certain guild was being targetted or a set of guilds on our realm). I bought an authenticator (this was before I had a smartphone) and have never had a single issue. I've had emails telling me people have been trying to reset my password but they always fail at the hardware authenticator (I am certain the keyring authenticators are more secure than the app ones). I've invested far too much time and love into my WoW account to let some s**t-smeared little scrote get all my gold and epics. Across my toons on a single realm I don't even break the 50k gold mark so it's hardly a worthy hack. Our Guild master got done 3 or 4 times because of his access to the guild bank and all the thousands of gold sitting in it...

What would be MORE awesome would be a 3G version so you could connect and get 'live streaming' of cat location. Provided you can stop the cat throwing itself around the floor trying to rid itself of the cumbersome and bulky camera... Before our Black and White cat was elderly and senile she used to go missing a lot so this would have been really helpful.

Friday 13th didn't go so well in our Office either - there was a Coffee-related disaster in our little kitchenette. Since we have ground coffee it was very very messy...

I love this! I, too, enjoy cross-stitch and would love to stitch this. Did you pattern it up yourself or do you have a pattern/colourchart you could point me at? (Although I am certain it wouldn't be too hard to approximate this from a screen grab). I want a Nyan-cat X-stitch in my life <3 A.

I could not have said it better myself. You are absolutely right. The only reason I haven't ditched the Vectra is that replacing it would cost me more than it saves. Even taking into account my terrible 28MPG consumption rate on it. Say I bought an Astra for £2000 off death row (partner works in motor industry, first pick of part exed cars at cost price + a bit), the finance I'd need to buy the thing (since unsurprisingly I don't have £2000 floating around) would cost me around £110 a month (lets also take into account the interest I'd pay on top of the original amount borrowed causing said car to actually cost more overall), thats £1320 a year. Lets say it only costs £70 to tax, insurance is STILL £600 for me and I don't know why!!!! (I did a quote on Le Boyfriends Astra to test this theory - I don't know why my insurance is so damn high!!!! I've never had an accident and have over 9 years of No claims bonus and held my licence for over 10 years!). So even without MOT and service costs (which would be roughly the same as I'm paying for the Vectra), buying a new car would cost me £1990 a year (more or less) as opposed to the £670 the Vectra costs me. So buying a new car is false economy. Tyres and brake pads are consumable and I'll still have to pay for them whatever I do and the cost difference will be negligable between a Vectra and an Astra or Focus, expensive stuff like exhaust systems are expensive across the board too so really, I genuinely can't afford to replace the car. When it eventually dies an unrecoverably expensive death I don't know what I'm going to do! Re: Economical - Isn't there some old airfield somewhere covered with part-exed old cars no-one wants. The only thing green about that is the weeds growing up through the asphalt...

FTR, just did a quote on Octagon and they were worse than my renewal quote with Direct Line. Cheapest quote I've had is Swiftcover :-S Re: Adding others to the policy, if I add Le Boyfriend it halves the policy for no apparent reason, but if I add my Mum or Dad it doubles the policy again!!! Craziness!!!

Eurgh, don't talk to me about the cost of motoring generally! Several years ago I was more-or-less offered a job involving a significant motorway commute. My car was old and unreliable so I bought a Vauxhall Vectra (known at the time as a great 'commuting' car). When I heard nothing back about the job and subsequently chased it, I found that they'd decided not to recruit after all and not bothered to tell me. Long story short, several years on I have a Y reg Vectra I can't afford to replace that costs me £270 a year in Road tax and when my insurance renewal came through they want £825 to insure me!!!! I have over 9 years of no claims bonus, I'm 29 years old and have never (touch wood) so far had a motoring conviction or accident or claim of any kind!!! The insurance is more than the car is worth!!! The whole thing is daylight robbery but they have you over a barrel, and if, like me, you can't afford to replace the car it's even worse. What I'd save in tax I'd MORE than spend in the payments on the car and the additional cost of insurance so it's not even worth it! My insurance is due at the end of this month and quite frankly I feel sick.

Since Smoothwall Guardian runs Squid too, and ellisteph is reporting issues with her smoothwall installation, squid might not prove to provide the funcationality needed. When you say your smoothwall refuses to work in what way is it broken? Have our support department had a crack at resolving it for you or are you looking for functionality we don't currently offer? It is probably worth saying that Squid and Dansguardian together are simply an opensource version of Smoothwall with less functionality. Dansguardian IS Smoothwall Guardian. Or, rather, it is the foundation upon which Guardian has been built - Guardian functionality is greater than its opensource origins.

I heard something recently like this where a collegue of my dads had his own domain (he runs shop off his hobby in his spare time) and an american company contacted him wanting to buy the domain. They offered him 12,000 euros. I think he took it in the end and registered hisnamehobbyshop.co.uk or something. Find out what sort of company they are - if they are a large company ask for £15,000 and see where you get. If it is another person wanting a monopoly on his name tell him to jog on...

I'd love to see a road bike trip a speed camera. Sods law says I'd get done for it though simply by virtue of being in the picture. I'm also pretty sure road bikes can't trip the cameras. Something about them not being large enough for the camera to 'see' or something. It's probably guff though.

You know you're a geek when you watch a film and rage about how the commands the actors used on a command line don't result in a task being completed, merely pages of text to spin across the screen looking impressive.

I was vaguely aware that their in-house bar was preferential (Edrador distillery in Scotland makes a bespoke Whiskey specifically for the House of Lords and the only place you can buy it is in Westminster or Edrador directly), I suppose I should not be surprised therefore that an increase on duty for booze and fags will obviously not affect the politicians. Re: Ed Miliband, I agree, he was just the first name that came into my head that I recognised as New Labour I like the idea of a second government, but I thought that was the whole point of the House of Lords/House of Commons thing, although it must be said that telling the difference between the two is getting harder since owning a vast pile in the country and a Sir or Lordship title is no longer the preserve of blooded gentry. I think allowing the government to set their own wages is like asking a child to distribute sweets to his classmates with no restrictions on who gets what amount - the child will of COURSE give themselves the most, then their friends will be the next most generously blessed, and the smelly kid in the corner no-one likes will get nothing 'Oh, sorry, the money has run out'. Sorry, did I say money, I mean't sweets, got my analogy confused with reality there for a moment... Personally, with the improvements in communications technologies, all this guff about transport costs is rubbish. I also don't believe for a second that such massive salaries attracts the best candidates or the most qualified or skilled. I've lost count of the number of companies that have suffered under poor executive leadership. Someone recently pointed me towards the most accurate thing I have ever read, and since it is on Wikipedia that's saying something: The Peter Principle In short, this states that in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. Meaning that people do good work and so are continually promoted up to the point at which they are so incompetent that they perform their job role at its most basic level. Therefore they do not proceed further, nor are they demoted, but it means that all management and leadership positions are held by those utterly incapable of performing the role effectively. Obviously holding a referendum on every decision the government has to make is impractical, but I hope that in the future with the advances in personal technologies, there may be a greater opportunity for every single individual to contribute to the governence of the country. This is probably a Blue-skies idea, but still... Indeed, I always do it the wrong way around too :-S

See, this proves my point that this argument is a pointless cycle of finger-pointing. ALL goverments are just as bad as all the others, just in different ways. Blah blah Tories were bad, Labour was great, blah blah no you're a troll, you're wrong, labour were bad, tories are pure as the driven snow, etc etc RAGE RAGE RAGE FLAME FLAME FLAME. I'm getting dizzy. They are ALL in it for what they can get. When we're hovering between the £18k and £25k mark in IT support forgive me for not going all warm and gooey over the 6 figure salaries paid to numtpy muppets who don't have to worry about how to pay their mortgage, or how they can afford to have children, or how they're getting to work in the morning as it's all funded by big fat expenses accounts and inflated salaries. I bet Francis Maude didn't queue for 40 minutes to fill his petrol tank with Supreme Unleaded and spend 60% of his monthly food budget on it. I imagine his driver had that dubious honour... Why is the job they do worth £130,000 a year? Why is what they do any more or less important than anyone else? And before you start flaming me for dangerously communist talk, I am simply trying to understand why people whose jobs ALSO keep this country running are worth less than politicians? We ALL keep the country running just in different ways. Why can they not do their jobs for £50,000 a year? That is enough to pay a mortgage and bills and to fund their commute to work. My god, if I earned £50k a year I'd be laughing! I might even be able to afford a detatched house where my neighbours DON'T wake me at 3am!!! Why should we pay to commute to work when politicians get their transport costs covered by their employer? When I asked my employer to buy me fuel and pay my travel expenses he laughed in my face and said 'Nice try.' lol. So then I asked him to fund some living accomodations closer to work that I could stay at during the week. I got patted on the head and told the men in white coats would arrive to assess me shortly... So trying a different tactic, I asked if my employer would pay my mortgage instead or contribute to it. They told me they already did - my wages. So how come people in government get a salary PLUS all these additional expenses? Why can't their 'home districts' have a house owned by the local council that is loaned to the party member in government at the time. Much like 10 Downing Street? It might provide some motivation for the district politician if said house was in an area representative of the economic prosperity of the district. If they were constantly boarding up broken windows and having to put in insurance claims for damage to their cars they might decide that local police are a higher priority after all.... If lorry drivers didn't deliver food to supermarkets we wouldn't eat. If Farmers didn't GROW the produce, there would be no foodstuffs. If IT support workers didn't fix computers, people would struggle to communicate. If communications break down, the country ceases to function. How are we any less important? If Miners and Rig workers didn't process fossil fuels we'd have little or very expensive electricity and no gas at all (apart from the methane produced in cow fart farms ofc...)... See what I'm getting at? Everyone has a different opinion and some people think the sun shines out of Ed Miliband's rear oriface, and others think David Cameron is the mutts nuts, others feel Nick Clegg is a misunderstood and bamboozled soul. Whatever you think, don't forget that when you are juggling your food budget to put fuel in your car and deciding that really, pasta and rice 5 nights a week isn't so bad after all and if you're lucky you might be able to afford half a sausage on a wednesday, and if you cut back on the number of sheets of toilet paper you use you might just manage to get an extra 2 journeys-worth of fuel into your car, these political gods are looking at their 6 figure paypackets with glee and getting into their government-funded chauffeur-driven mercs for a comfortable drive home to their detatched pile in the countryside where they get into their beds and sleep soundly bothered only by the gentle hoot of an owl, not the screams of yobbish teenagers telling each other to F*** OFF C***, or the rumble of buses, or the sound of their neighbours going to the toilet at 3am... Considering I had 3 hours sleep last night, I am not in the best of moods today, and since I had to wait until payday to fill my petrol tank which resulted in my having to spend my food budget on b****y fuel, I am afraid I am not terribly forgiving or loving towards our illustrious leaders.

I fail to understand how rotting corpses can see, hear and smell - they are rotting. We already know that they are zombified by a brain infection. By nature the hearing functionalities of the host corpse are reliant on a) the ability of the brain to process sounds that are collected by the ear, b) the ability of the ear to collect sound. Since the corpses are rotting, it is reasonable to assume that the tiny bones of the inner ear and more crucially the ear drum are irrepairably compromised. Similarly, rotten or missing eyes cannot see and the brain cannot interpret what the glazed over or missing eyes are seeing anyway. So how can the zombies 'see'? Since the original deaths followed a long period of snotty horrible infection, it is reasonable to assume the mucous membranes were compromised by the infection. Therefore how does the zombie smell??? Since many also seem to be missing their lower jaws or half the face, again I don't understand how the body can function in a way the host organism can use. Lets not get me started on why they are eating - what is the point on eating human/animal gizzards (and they seem to focus on the intestines a lot) when the rotting corpse stomachs and intestinal tract no longer function? What purpose does it serve? That said, redneck with the crossbow is by far the best and most sensible character. Which begs the question of why he is hanging around with a bunch of people that are proven more of a liability and risk than travelling alone? I think I might have overthought the whole 'zombie' thing in this context lol. Pfft, suspend disbelief? Me? Noooo...

I, like DT2 usually steer well clear of politics but the whole argument drives me up the wall. Ultimately, every party is just as bad as every other party just in different ways. The labour tolerance for spongers and wasters and their ever-spiralling borrowing to fund the 'living-off-the-social' lifestyle at the expense of anyone NOT living off the social has had a knockon effect. It is about time the level of benefit handouts is capped. But, like everything else the governements (generally) do, it will have no effect on the REAL spongers and wasters and only serve to hurt the very people it pretends to be helping. We received a letter addressed to the previous owner of the house we bought, lacking a return address or other details, I opened it - it was a bill from a nursery for a single child for the month of December - £890!!!!!! I couldn't believe it. The cost of living in this country and the legacy of poor governance has led to a situation where no individual on low to middling income (IT supporters for example rarely break the £25k mark) can afford to pay his or her mortgage and all the bills AND support their family whilst one spouse stays at home to look after the children, but in forcing that spouse out to work, child care costs of £900 a month render the entire exercise almost pointless!!! THEN when grandparents become involved, social services poke their pointless noses into the lives of decent, hardworking people with generous parents and start dictating that the grandparents can't look after the children. It is my opinion (and before I get flamed, note that I said it was MY opinion) that social services persecute the innocent families because they are too afraid to actually get involved in the environments and communities that really ARE perpetrating atoricities on children! That is not to say that child abuse only occurs in poor economic areas or certain community types, but I can't help but feel that it is easier to 'get the numbers up' by hassling innocent families. A friend of mine is now 'known to social services' because her son fell over in the back garden and a teacher saw his bruise. I mean SERIOUSLY? Children will be children, they will fall over, they will scrape their knees, they will get cuts and bruises. That is part of growing up. Now we have to stop children doing anything lest social services get wind of a bruise or scrape! Parents are too afraid to take their children to the doctors in case that little graze they got riding their bike is interpreted as child abuse! It's ludicrous! I shant bother to vote at the next election as they are all as bad as each other and we'll get shafted whichever way we look at it. The Tories and Lib Dems are screwing us into the ground, and Labour were burdening us with unsustainable debt. We can't win either way. The tories and lib dems claim to be making changes for the good of all, but so far everything they have done has caused myself and my partner, my parents (who are near to retiring), my colleagues friends and family nothing but anguish and additional expense. LeBoyfriend and I barely break even every month as it is, how am I going to afford to have children? I don't have much time left on the old bio clock so I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't... People like to point fingers and place blame, but quite honestly there is no one single 'root cause' of any problem. It is a combination of factors and the only way to address it is to wipe out each factor at a time. But this will never be done and it is probably impossible, so we will limp on as we are with rising living costs and more and more interference from the nanny state until such time as we are either mindless drones or we snap and rebel and Nostradamus is proved right again...

I'm with you on the TV-front - it's been terrible up until recently but now I am having to Sky+ the repeats of stuff just to fit them all into the recording schedule! We are currently really into: 1. Suits - I am loving this! 2. Spartacus: Vengence - I miss Andy Whitfield though :-( RIP - his screen presence was awesome. 3. Grimm 4. Touched - I couldn't tear my eyes away from the first episode, it surprised me as I'm not massively into Keifer Sutherland 5. Fringe 6. Sanctuary 7. Alcatraz (although I am wavering on this a bit as I can't say I've been massively overwhelmed by the first two episodes tbh) 8. The Walking Dead (although season 2 has now finished) I am also really really excited about the new season of Game of Thrones! A.

I agree - the prices in the store are ridiculous and for pre-owned games too!! I would only buy a pre-owned game if the price was £5 or less tbh. Having said that, don't expect much from the fire sale - considering how Game has not been allowed to order stock from certain game manufacturers, it is likely that chart and new stock will be withdrawn by the distributor and resold elsewhere because if they operate anything like the company I used to rep for, the game manufacturer distributes to a third party such as EUK who then sell to stores - excess stock is returned to the distributor and the store is 'refunded', what the distributer then does with the stock is between them and the game manufacturer. The sale will likely consist largely of the massive catalogue of pre-owned games as well as non-returnable titles and backstock. Even then, the administrators will need to wring every penny out of what stock is left to pay creditors so I doubt we will see much in the way of fabulous reductions - especially on consoles etc as the supplier will simply recall the stock. Anything that is left was sold outright to Game and will not be eligable for return which is usually older models sold off at a discount before new releases. I bet actual monies that you will see some REALLY old XBox consoles and PS2s coming out of the Game store rooms before the end...