This is a test post , the idea is to verify that I have configured Windows Live Writer correctly to access and post to my blog.
You too can do this if you have Windows Live installed on your PC, I have been using it for some time however when my old laptop blew up , died a death and became defunct I lost this functionality until now that is. Unfortunately all my drafts etc are now on the old laptop,.. anyone know how to get the hard drive out of a busted lappie and recover the data ? LOL
I recently heard about another website that has been stolen from under the noses of its developers, which happens more often than you might think these days. Good ideas are at a premium and if your idea takes off online you are at considerable risk from unscrupulous internet 'persons'.
When a 'lay' person gets an idea for a website they usually go to a 'friend' who knows about these things to get it going, often that 'friend' is not a real life friend at all but rather an 'online' acquaintance with expertise and possibly contacts that the lay person lacks. This is a really good way to get ripped off!
The first thing to remember when developing a website is that without control of the Domain Name you have or own nothing! Register the domain name you intend to use with an independent registrar, DO NOT register your domain name with the hosting company or 'person' as this will leave them in control of it. The second most important thing you need to do is to keep an up to date copy of all code and data that the site consists of. You must have FTP access to the hosting server and update your backup every time a major change is made to the site, any reputable host will have staff that can help you with this. You should also choose a hosting company that is In Your Country of Residence because as a last resort you may need to go to court to establish your ownership of the site.
Be careful who you grant access to! how well do you know the person or persons who are working on your website? If you meet them socially in real life you retain the option to smack them on the nose but if you grant access to an online acquaintance you have no real proof as to who or where they are, and hence NO recourse if they screw you over. The sort of things that they can do to you are possibly; insertion of 'phishing' holes in your site and other unauthorised code. Theft of your data including credit card info, email addresses and IP addresses of your members and visitors. Note that any website is valued depending on the number of members it has and the number of page hits it gets, if your website takes off you could be sitting on a membership/email list some company's will pay a fortune for! And ultimately they could steal the entire site and deny you any further access to it. You are particularly at risk from this type of theft if your host is an online 'friend' and they control the host server, which is why it is always best to go with reputable hosting company in your own country even if this means that you have to comply with restrictive laws and legislation.
Finally: A 'Gentleman's Agreement' is worth only the paper its printed on, i.e. nothing at all. Get written contracts for expensive development work, transfers of ownership of sites and or domain names and know that the most important page on your website is the 'Terms of service' page, get this wrong and you could loose your shirt.
Ian Duncan Smith (Tory) has been put in charge of sorting out the benefits fiasco which affects an estimated 5.9 Million people in the UK including me, I suggest we all get our rotten eggs ready in case Mr Smith gets it wrong!
The important thing to realise here is that people on benefits are living on a knife edge, one miscalculation can ruin the family budget and leave you eating mush and smoking ‘dimps’ for a couple of weeks, or worse in hoc to a loan shark. Most people on benefits would like to work if it were financially practical to do so, unfortunately in most cases it’s simply NOT practical and taking what work is available would leave them even worse off. For example a person on Job seeker's allowance cannot take part time work for the simple reason that they are only allowed to keep £5 per week of earned income while claiming, this in most cases will not even pay their bus fares to their job. So its full time permanent employment for them or nothing.
A similar situation exists for those of us on Incapacity Benefit, we are allowed to keep £12 per week of what we can earn part time. However for the vast majority of Incapacity Benefit claimants full time permanent employment is physically impossible.
Clearly New Labours approach, i.e. bullying claimants into taking whatever work is offered even if it makes their situation worse rather than better is not acceptable, but considering the huge deficit which is New Labours legacy to the UK what can Mr Smith do that will not hurt claimants, the sick, disabled and impoverished?
So we have a hung parliament here in the UK as a result of Thursdays general election. Its now been 5 days and negotiations between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats are still underway however talks between Labour and the Liberals have clearly failed.
Personally I have been waiting for this particular circumstance to come about for over 20 years, in fact ever since I became old enough to vote. As a life long Liberal I have always know that this is THE chance for liberals to make a lasting impact in British politics. I am keeping my fingers crossed right now in the sincere hope that this chance is NOT wasted. It has to be the case that Proportional Representation has to be the price for Liberal cooperation in any coalition government, anything less would be a betrayal of the 23% of our population who voted Liberal.
Gordon Brown must go! Mr Brown was not elected to be the British PM, he got in by default when Tony Blair left, and in this General Election the British people have decidedly NOT voted for Gordon Brown to continue running this country. In my view there is no circumstance where Gordon Brown remaining PM could be acceptable to the British People. Even if talk between the conservative and liberal parties should fail Gordon Brown personally has lost the mandate to govern, in fact he never had any such mandate from the people of this country.
So we are living in interesting times, the Conservatives look set to lead the next government, whether in a full coalition with the Liberal Democrats or as a minority government remains to be seen. At present there is still much horse trading being done behind closed doors and hopefully the long term result will not only be electoral reform but also long term stable consensus government of this country.
Just sent the following email, and copy here for your information :
To whom it may concern;
I have just had one of your 'san Marco deep pan pepperoni' pizzas
ref : APR 2010 A 9107 10:11
To say that the thing was vile is the understatement of the century, your 'cheese analogue' is positively disgusting, it made me want to vomit. How on earth you manage to earn a living producing such garbage is beyond understanding. I will NEVER AGAIN purchase ANY san marco product no matter how attractively packaged.
You don't even care enough about your product to put real cheese and tomato on it, I simply can't be bothered packaging the remains and sending it to you for a refund, instead I SHOULD be sending it to environmental health to have it checked for contaminants and to see if it actually contains anything of real food value.
I had to eat 2 oz of REAL cheese just to get the vile taste of your foul product out of my mouth.
Yours disgustedly
a very unhappy customer
I recently installed the current free version of ZoneAlarm, which is for those of you who don’t know a personal firewall application. I had used older versions some time ago and though it could help me resolve current problems,..
The problem I was having was that FireFox was hanging while I was playing Zynga poker, causing me to loose a shit load of play money. Now I was planning to try real money online poker so you can see that I was majorly concerned. Loosing $5000 play money is nothing but when your playing for real money you do not want this to happen.
So I figured that one possibility was that I was being pinged to death, ( Ping flooding in order to deny me the service, see DOS attacks) and decided to use ZoneAlarm to detect and block this.
Sure enough I was getting unsolicited pings etc but no more than the usual background noise one expects these days, however that was just the start of my problems. ZoneAlarm itself became a problem! First of all there’s the usual malarkey in-re configuring the damn thing, then it starts messing with Global hosts, preventing SpybotSD from doing a full immunisation,1078 global hosts could not be immunised until after ZA was removed. Then it hogs my CPU resources using on average 25% of available threads, which led me on to the REAL problem: Spybot’s TeaTimer (resident protection from malware and spyware) was working overtime and chewing vast amounts of memory, why? Because I had too many damn applications running; Messenger, Iplayer, Skype etc. With ZoneAlarm running as well 100% of my available resources were being used!
So I fixed that, but then Windows Live Messenger would NOT connect. I ran a diagnostic, no connection problems. I ran the trouble shooter and it detected a problem with the hosts file but would NOT complete, it hung at ‘key ports’ preventing the fix, more ZoneAlarm interference I expect because again after removing ZoneAlarm the problem magically resolved itself. BUT That not the end of it,..
As a parting present from ZA a windows application window opens on my desktop on reboot after removal, ‘cpes_clean_launcher.exe’ scaring the shit out of me. I googled it and found a guy who couldn’t get rid of it, others who feared it was a trojan dropper but no definitive article. Not even on ZoneAlarm’s own website! Anyways my system scanned clean and ‘cpes_clean_launcher.exe’ did not reappear on reboot so all is well. But its a big thumbs down for ZoneAlarm from me, more trouble than its worth!
I’ve just watched two police officers clamp a strange object to the lamp post at the bottom of my street, which is a busy ‘T’ junction in a medium size town. This object then proceeded to climb the pole under their direction, then after it had reached a point not far from the top it turned its eye up our street and then down the cross street while the two officers observed from their riot protected van. Clearly it is a surveillance camera, but what the HELL is it doing on our street?
I’m not a criminal, my neighbours are not criminals, not so far as I know anyway, though that bloke at number 159 looks a bit shifty to me. Yet this THING will see me every time I leave my house, and observe everyone who comes to my house. I ask you is this really necessary? Who authorised this invasion of my privacy? And why were we, the residents of this area not informed or consulted?
Some years ago a young black poet asked us ‘Is Britain becoming a Fascist state,..’ and at the time I laughed. Then came Margaret Thatcher and the police beat the living shit out of the miners at her direction, and I wondered. Some time later we got Tony Blair and no one really hated him because he never really did much, then Tony Blair handed the country over to Gordon Brown the penny pincher without a fight. All the time the numbers of cameras on our roads have continued to grow, the numbers of police helicopters in our skies have continued to grow and Gordon Browns management of our economy has led to a worse recession and more unemployment than Margaret Thatcher was ever responsible for. What will it be next, remote operated camera drones peaking in our windows? Gestapo at the bus and rail stations checking our ID passes? Already there are moves to require that we all carry biometric ID cards.
And Gordon Brown sits there unopposed, as everyone knows the Tory wimp doesn’t stand a chance and after Thatcher we don’t want him anyway. Nobody believes the Third Party has a chance either but Liberal Democracy may be our only way out of this mess if only we could see it. But no, our government swings from left to right to left and so called ‘New Labour’ has turned out to be more conservative than even Thatcher. All the time the numbers of surveillance cameras grow and no one , NO ONE complains!
So it’s nearly Christmas right? And money, as usual is tight. So tight that you are looking at any and all ‘special offers’ in order to get the best value for money you can find. Well watch out because many of these ‘Special Offers’ have a sting in the tail!
I was playing this game on Facebook called Mafia Wars, a cool game but it uses a system of ‘reward points’ which make the game easier if you buy stuff they advertise or sign up for ‘special offers’. So inevitably I find myself needing some reward points, well one of the ‘free’ offers was for ‘The Complete Road Dahl children’s Collection’ £4.95 and was worth 100 reward points. I have a niece and this I thought would be an ideal gift. So I clicked.
I was taken to a webpage and I duly entered my details, there was a terms and conditions PDF which I downloaded and a text box with a shipload of text crammed into it which I couldn’t be bothered reading. Gave ‘em my Card details and in short order I had my 100 reward points. A few days later the books arrived and they were as advertised, so I figured I had got a damn good deal,..
Then I started getting emails from ‘Books for Children’ saying I had agreed to take another 4 books and that their ‘editors choice’ would be sent automatically if I didn’t order anything else and on further investigation I discovered that in order to cancel I would have to pay £10 for each book I did not take. The ‘editors choice’ arrived a few weeks later and it was a piece of crap with an invoice for £16.95. I think you can now see where this is going, I phoned them to cancel and had to pay £46.95 in order to do so. To sum up those 100 reward points have cost me ( inc postage and packing ) approximately £60!
I’ve complained to Zynga the makers of Mafia Wars about this so called ‘free’ offer and the advert is no longer there, but when I complained to Trading Standards there was bugger all they could do. Why? Because I hadn’t read the terms and conditions, hadn’t read the crap in their little text box and the webpage I’d signed up on was no longer there! I’d been clobbered by your classic BookClub scam.
They hook you in with an offer that is too good to be true, and in the fine print claw back the real cost of the initial offer by forcing you to take over priced crap you don’t want, and there is bugger all Trading Standards can do about it because ‘The information needed to make an informed decision was all there’.
Well in my book this amounts to ‘Theft by Deception’ but I seriously doubt that a court would agree with me, so next time you are thinking about clicking on a ‘special offer’ remember this : CAVEAT EMPTOR , which is Latin for ‘Let the buyer beware’.
Have you seen the images that now disgrace all cigarette packaging here in the UK ?
Under a British Government sponsored initiative the manufacturers of cigarettes and tobacco supplying the UK market are obliged to place some of the most horrendous images I have ever seen on all packaging. The images used include babies in incubators but mainly feature the most ghastly and grotesquely untreated tumours they could apparently find. No British doctor would ever permit such tumours to go untreated to this extent and therefore one must assume that these images where collected from abroad.
It’s Fucking Obscene ! If a private individual published such images in anything other than a medical text book they would be prosecuted and jailed, the offending material being immediately removed from sale and display. Yet the British Government believes that offending the sensibilities of every British and visiting smoker to the UK is justified because of the statistical correlation between smoking and such diseases. Now I am NOT about to argue the case here as to whether or not smoking causes cancer, anyone who smokes is well enough aware that what they are doing is bad for them. What has pissed me off is that the British Government is gratuitously subjecting a very large segment of its population to these obscene images when there is no proof that causing serious offense to smokers will have ANY affect on their consumption of tobacco. The stuff is after all Addictive.
Considering that cigarettes and tobacco are in fact addictive, if the British Government did actually have the courage of its convictions surly the thing to do is to make them illegal? Rather than subject us to disgustingly obscene images every time we reach for one. It occurs to me that the true fact is most likely that, since the British Government is heavily dependant upon the insanely huge tax revenue from tobacco and prohibition would pump these billions of pounds into the hands of organised crime, these horrendous images they have caused to be placed on tobacco packaging are a sop to the anti smoking lobby in the hope that they will shut the fuck up, if only for a while. Meanwhile organised crime is already taking advantage of the huge taxation imposed on tobacco products and looks set to reap even greater profits in the future.
The British Governments’ hypocrisy not withstanding does any government have the right to legislate that obscene material must be published where it can be viewed by minors? Finally it is my considered opinion that causing and giving offense is no way to resolve the problem of smoking.
Sometimes you pickup a book at the book store on the off-chance, in the hopes that it will at least be entertaining enough that you feel you got your money’s worth. Sometime you are disappointed, sometimes you are reasonably happy and rarely, so rarely are you totally blown away.
So it was with Ill Wind by Rachel Caine . I bought the book on impulse, taking a chance on an author I’d never read before, something I rarely do these days, preferring, usually to stick with authors who have become like old friends. To say I was pleasantly surprised by this book is an understatement, ILL WIND literally blew me away. It sat on my coffee table for several days while I consumed ‘Paul of Dune’ by Herbert and Anderson, which left a bitter taste in my mouth because while that novel was sufficiently entertaining that I did NOT rush back to the book shop demanding a refund it still felt like a cynical milking of Herbert Senior’s reputation. ILL WIND washed the bitter taste away almost from the first page, gripped me in its vortex, and took me on the wildest ride imaginable. The book is about a ‘weather warden’ in fact its subtitled ‘Weather Warden book one’ which bodes well for more of the same or better, basically the heroine is a girl that can control the weather. A reasonably good idea for a novel, any half way decent writer could run with it. Rachel Caine didn’t just run with it though, she had a ball and though I know it sounds cliché I could not put the book down. Some books are suitable for winding your mind down sufficiently to get a good nights sleep, a few pages or maybe a chapter before you turn out the light, and some books you have to devour from cover to cover in one sitting, ILL WIND is the latter type.
yourContactsHandle says:These messages have appeared in various languages (usually the home language of the contact) and the website content has varied from a very genuine looking site for said berries to blatant activeX exploits designed to infect your system.
Tony and Julie told me today about this amazing new product called bugger berries, I tried them and they are great, you really should have a look at their website http://www.buggerberries.com/
