#Rant# No Apology for this one…

Picture the scene…

Visitors on the way, dashing round the house in full ‘panic cleaning’ mode, when an ungodly sound emerges from the living room where my co-skivvy was vacuuming.

What follows is an exercise in the more colourful use of the English language and a very pretty coloured cloud of smoke floating over the now to be known as ex-vacuum.

-1 vacuum in the Rochester household

Visitors enjoy a fun filled time and, despite the initial worries causing the cleaning frenzy, don’t seem to be too perturbed to be sitting in a quagmire morass of filth (this is what I assume my GF sees when looking at a room not immediately available for surgery due to the less than surgical level of cleanliness).

1 cup of tea later and I’m on the web – I’m a wolf searching out the prey of pre Christmas deals for the replacement of the aforementioned ex-vacuum. Seeking out those little known sites where the mythical ‘Bargain Beast’ resides.

Littlewoods – best deal – who’d have believed that!

Ordered – paid – time for the patience of the saints to manifest… ETA 12th December…

Nope

HDNL or as they are now known ‘Yodel’ seem to think that the company of my vacuum is a pleasure to savour. It’s obviously a vacuum of some social standing as they choose to delight in it’s presence for a full 7 days before reluctantly relinquishing the pleasure and dropping it to my home.

Meantime I’m corresponding with Littlewoods – via a system that seems to have an inherent delay longer than that encountered by NASA when speaking to the International Space Station ~ every time I send a reply it takes 2 days to receive a reply!

Now I get to endure the cleansing of the knee-deep banks of dust that have built up in the interim.

So, to recap, this is the delivery procedure from Littlewoods via Yodel

• Order
• Pay
• Wait the 3 days Littlewoods say the deliver will take (track the package online)
• Expect the delivery to be enacted within a day or so of the ‘arrived at depot’ report
• 2 days later spend about 45 minutes trying to converse with a bored employee of the couriers attempting to discover the location and likely ETA
• Send an email to Littlewoods complaining that this is not good enough – Google ‘Worst UK Courier” and experience a sad sinking feeling when multiple results come up with HDNL and/or Yodel
• 2 days later, receive an email asking for account confirmation details for ‘security porpoises’ (spelling intentional!) – reply as soon as possible
• 2 days later receive the stock “sometimes these things happen’ email – reply as soon as possible
• Finally get an update on the tracking system saying the package is on the drivers van
• Receive a package nearly 9 days after ordering it

Sigh…

 

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Online research has smashed the myth of 6 degrees of separation – that is the theory that there is only 6 people between you and any given person on the Earth.

This new research from Facebook shows that there are only 3.74 people between you and anyone else or ”When considering another person in the world, a friend of your friend knows a friend of their friend.”

Personally I think that this is a little misleading; Some people on social networks tend to accept friends from whom ever asks, not people they ‘know’. This must massively skew the statistics as it appears to assume that users know the people in their social networks.

Known as Dunbar’s Number this number is viewed as the theoretical number of people you can have social relationship with – something that should be applied to the Facebook degrees of separation research methinks.

Read the full BBC Article here

 

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  Almost three-quarters of firms and public sector organisations across nine European countries may not fully recover their computer systems or data after an IT failure, a survey suggests.

A survey by IT group EMC asked 1750 bosses if they were “confident they could fully restore their networks” – 74% said “No”!

It also found that 54% had lost data or suffered downtime in the last 12 months. Personally I’m amazed that figure isn’t higher! I guess it depends on what they are classing as ‘Downtime’.

Having been in the business a long time I can tell you that the number of customers I have dealt with on a regular basis, that think about these kinds of things are very few. It is not something that clients worry about. Furthermore, it is a topic that some clients feel that you are using to try to scare them in to buying something!

On the flip side of that coin we have seen several instances where a lack of disaster recovery planning has caused the company irreparable harm, resulting in the closure of the business.

It is not an easy thing to get a solid plan and systems in place, but they may stop the loss of business critical systems data.

Heed the warning – business continuity and disaster recovery should be near the top of any IT project!

Of course you can call us free of charge, for an initial chat about this… 08456 340 599

News article here

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  Research into producing electricity from urine has been carried out by scientists at the University of the West of England (UWE) in Bristol.
- BBC news article

This made me both laugh and think, all at the same time..!

Have a read of this…

Now prepare yourself ~ this is the best excuse I’ve ever had for bombarding you with wee jokes!

Basically, the boffins at Bristol University have managed to create power from urine – this gave me some rather horrific memories of some long car journeys as a child and their inevitable ‘rest stops’.

Once this is in operation I think parents world wide will be plying themselves and their offspring/partners with liquid before the journey – no longer will mother ask if you’ve ‘been before we set off’.

It’s only a start, and only produces little power at the moment, but looks like being a runner for Microbial Fuel Cells (or MFCs as they are known).

Finally we have “Power from the P(eople)” 

 

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For so long Apple owners have grinned in a smug manner at PC users, over the amount of security issues PC owners have to deal with, even though it is a fallacy that Macs are immune to malware; a fallacy that is being exploited more and more as time goes on.

In a blog post by security form Sophos on Monday, it was revealed that a new ‘sophisticated’ malware threat was targeted at Macs and downloaded via a legitimate image manipulation app. from a dodgy source.

This malware, known as ‘DevilRobber or OSXMiner-D’ was designed to steal and ‘mine’ the digital currency known as ‘Bitcoins’.

In addition to Bitcoin mining, OSX/Miner-D also spies on you by taking screen captures and stealing your user names and passwords. More-so it runs a script that copies information to a file called dump.txt regarding truecrypt data, Vidalia (TOR plugin for Firefox), your Safari browsing history, and .bash_history.

The post goes on to say “Clearly, Mac users – like their Windows cousins – should practice safe computing and only download software from official websites and legitimate download services. But, in addition to that, it’s becoming clearer every week that Mac users need to take malware protection more seriously by running anti-virus software.”

This is just another example of the increasingly more sophisticated, Mac assaults. Other malware threat discovered this month targeted at the Apple machines include ‘Tsunami’ and ‘FlashBack’.

The posting ends with “There may be a lot less malware for Mac OS X than there is for Windows, but many Mac users are making themselves an unnecessarily soft target by imagining that they are somehow magically protected from threats.”

We sell the Eset Security products which offer Mac versions – Contact us through the main site here to arrange a free 30 day trial…

 

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