Okay its not really a cat tracking device its my newest toy called the Loc8tor. Its basically a mini tracking device which comes complete with two tracking tags the size of a paper clip (well a thick paper clip as you can see on Willows collar) which I purchased from Amazon for £59.99. Its actually intended as a personal tracking device to keep track of things you might loose such as keys, wallets, mobile phones or cats, okay not cats but that didn't stop me from trying it out on two of our troublesome moggy's Willow and Lucy. They have a habit of disappearing  and this little device makes it all the easier to find them when they go missing. You'll be amazed to find out where cats go and do with their time beside the usual finding a warm car bonnet to sit on in the mornings.

The device reminds me of an episode of aliens as the alien gets closer the louder and louder it beeped. The Loc8tor is exactly the same and allows you to have up to 24 tags registered per tracking device, you know your getting closer by the audible beep and a little beep given off by the tags themselves. You can also choose which tags you wish to track with this little gadget and give each of the tags a name. How cool is that!

Target driven government is a concept we are all familiar with where government sets departments targets or quotas to meet by what ever means necessary if they do not meet it thy re penalized. I thought I would come up with a fun story to try and explain where it goes wrong.

Jingles was king of the monkeys who lived in the jungle, he wasn't really king anymore since he had declared himself prime leader. He had recently come to power and on the promise of far more food through the winters months, which the monkeys usually ran out of. He decided the best way to get enough food collected was to split the large groups of monkeys into smaller groups to start collecting the food. So he split them up into two groups the monkeys who collected bananas and those that collected nuts. He wanted to motivate the monkeys that collected the nuts and bananas and knew there wasn't any real motivation for them so he set them targets which were quotas for each monkey. If the group that were collecting bananas collected a hundred banana's each they would have met their quota however if they did not meet their quota they would not get any nuts. He did the same to the monkeys who collected nuts and told them they would not get any bananas if they did not meet their quota.

The monkeys tried hard to meet their targets which they were allowed to achieve by any means possible as long as they met them. The monkeys that were collecting the nuts were not doing too good and started to be penalized, the monkey in charge of the ones collecting the bananas noticed this and didn't want his monkeys to go without nuts. So he started devising schemes such as counting bananas twice or getting monkeys to repack the bananas and then counting them again when they did. Jingles was amazed by how well the monkeys collecting the bananas publicly announced how great they were and how his new form of governing the monkeys was working. They monkeys who were collecting the nuts felt very depressed and were told if they did not improve more of them would be removed and set to collecting bananas instead. The head of the monkeys collecting nuts complained that it was not possible to collect enough nuts but Jingles only pointed to the head of the monkeys collecting bananas as an example. Winter soon came and the monkeys started to run out of food. Jingles wanted to know why there were less bananas in the store rooms than there were accounted for and uncovered what the monkeys collecting bananas had done. Jingles realized that he had probably set targets that could not be achieved and that what ever you set people will find ways around the system.

Iran has denied the UK embassy in Iran access to the detained UK servicemen in an article here on the BBC website.

I had said previously in my blog entry yesterday I believe the Iranians will be milking this incident for all its worth. It looks as though there have even been calls to put the servicemen on trial, I am guessing this will probably be for spying. Iran off course knows how to play its own public and how to breed an atmosphere of contempt for the west its been doing so for many years now. My guess is that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who hasn't been doing himself any favors on how he has let the Iranian economy slip will probably seize on this opportunity to distract people from this. His nuclear ambitions has also been a distraction point for his people, the sanctions it will bring to his country could be quite crippling we all saw the effects the sanctions had on Iraq when Sadam was still in power.

The only peaceful use of nuclear power is for electric power generation which for an oil rich state is not a high priority in my opinion unless Iran has suddenly developed a new zero emission policy to help curb global warming?

I am pretty sure many have seen the news about the 15 Royal Navy servicemen captured by Iranian forces and can't help but feel the whole incident is smeared in politics with our poor UK servicemen caught right in the middle. I think its rather bad manners for Iran to act in the way it has, if it want's to start being treated as a fair country of this world it has really got to stop pulling off these shenanigans, what's more disconcerting is the fact Iran has done this once before when they captured 6 UK service men who were patrolling the Shatt al-Arab waterway on behalf of the Iraqi government. Even if the UK servicemen were in the wrong (and I am not saying they were) it was totally against the Geneva convention for them to be paraded on Iranian TV blind folded and then made to believe that they were going to be assassinated.

No doubt the Iranian government will play this incident for all it is worth. If anything's to go by they will force the UK servicemen to admit they were in Iranian waters (because forcing someone to say something means it actually happened), they will probably parade them on Iranian TV and then secretly talking to US and UK diplomats hint that it would also be nice if those sanctions the UN wanted to impose on Iran for their nuclear program suddenly went away.

Iran really hasn't done it self any favors and is probably quite aware that America has Iran next in its spotlight especially now that evidence has been released showing that Tehran has been engineering a lot of the insurgency near Basra. Iran's seizure of the UK servicemen is probably what it sees as a carefully constructed move, it will want to play very carefully in order to get some concessions out of US and the UK around it nuclear program. Iran could get its way because the UK public is keen on getting the servicemen returned promptly or the move could backfire horribly on Iran and it that case they may just blame an Iranian figure lower down the food chain for the incident. It is also quite easy to see how carefully it was organized by the Iranians who swooped on the UK servicemen with not 2 but six boats surely those boats would have been pulled in from other patrol areas?

Tags: iran iraq UK servicemen

If you read my blog you may have remembered the post I did about Backing up to hard disk in response to my friend Owens blog about the risks of tape backup. And it appears as Owen mentioned it in his blog the worst case scenario happened to an IT staff member in the Alaska Revenue Department accidentally formatted the wrong hard disk, the backup hard disk and what was more the tape backups they discovered were unreadable! His little error wiped out an account worth $38 billion!

This has got to be one of the worst case scenarios I have ever heard of. However luckily enough they still had their vast paper archives they had scanned everything into the system from and would need to start again from scratch scanning in 800,000 records! Good old paper hey? It doesn't matter if its slightly wrong on the paper, the papers crumpled or torn you can still read it :)

I bet that IT department will be doing a serious review of their backup strategy.

Well the PS3 Launched but the reaction seemed a bit mixed and Microsoft rained on the parade with quotes such as "Sony.....you're late!". The biggest launch was in London however over the rest of Europe in some cases the press outnumbered people purchasing the consoles. I was just wondering if the price was what was putting people off the console? I'd really like to own a PS3 but will probably have to wait until they became a bit more affordable. I was hoping Microsoft may have brought the price of the XBOX down but sadly that didn't happen yesterday.

I have just been looking at the Apple TV which is available here in the UK now. I think its a brilliant idea, the only problem I have with it is there is absolutely no TV series or main stream movies available for download from iTunes in the UK which is how the Apple TV box gets its content. I can see it making much more sense in the US where you can download episodes of popular shows such as Battle Star Galactica for a couple of dollars.but nothing like that exists for the UK iTunes market. The only video content they seem to have is music videos and I wouldn't purchase this device just to watch music videos I can do that on MTV. Unless you start ripping your own movies to play on the Apple TV box I can't really see much point in its launch over here yet.

I think Apple need to do some serious investing into on demand TV content, they have the hardware all they need now is the content. On demand TV is set to be rather big, Virgin Media and BT has already released a set-top box's that provide on demand TV however BT doesn't seem to be very good at promoting it as half of the people I speak to about it did have a clue it was out there. Come on Apple where's the content?

Messenger programs have started to become a part of daily life ever since the early use of ICQ, AOL Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger and Google Talk. ICQ was the program in my opinion that really got the ball rolling (for me anyway). Without thinking about it we log onto one or more of these messenger programs every time we turn our machines on. I have about 4 on my machine that advertise to all my contacts that I am online. It has become such a routine that when friends don't see you singing in they start to panic and here are some of the hilarious comments I an friends have made.

• "I haven't seen <name> online is he still alive?"
• "I haven't seen <name> online has he been hit by a bus?"
• "I thought you were kidnapped or something"
• "Did your broadband go down?"
• "Is your computer broken?"
• "I thought I would call because you haven't been online in a while and I wondered if you were ok"

And the list goes on. Isn't it funny that our messenger programs have started to become a heart beat for all our friends to see that tells them we are still around? I'm pretty sure some enterprising person could make a program that monitors your messenger etc you add MSNAlive as a contact to your MSN and it notices when you haven't been online in a while and notifies someone it could be useful for people who travel a lot (like back packers) checking their email intermittently which usually logs into a messenger program. Neat idea hu?

Interesting article on The Independent website about Sky's grip on Pay TV. We all know how much control Sky has over the latest imported TV episodes, Sports and even pay per view movies and in its latest move withdrawing its popular TV channels from Virgin Media. They also took an 18% share in ITV in what some saw as a deliberate attempt to stop Virgin Media buying it and making it their flagship channel. Sky have made a lot of noise in the industry especially with it wanting to start taking up pay per view slots on Top Up TV. I was wondering how long Sky Three would last on freeview, or would they be placing Sky One on Pay per View on the platform again like it was in the old days of ITV Digital?

My wife has recently started doing blogging tutorials about Quark if you need some pointers on how to do some tricky Quark functionality with bullets and tables etc take a look

I am a huge fan of the Playstation ever since I got my Playstation 2 I have had hours of entertainment playing games on this console. However I noticed after a while I was buying PS2 games played them once or twice and then they stayed on the shelf collecting dust. Playing games started to become a bit of a task they weren't the type of games you used to play on the old Atari consoles where you could have a quick game of pong or space invaders. Each game has an intro and loads a bit like a movie its a great experience for those ultimate games but it gets a bit annoying each time you load the game. But none the less I still loved the console it provided a great Karaoke machine and it was my first DVD player (a darn cheap one at the time). My natural thought was to go onto the PS3 when it came out over Christmas 2006, but then it didn't turn up in the UK. The only console available was the Wii, I had heard little about the console until I started seeing people playing on it on TV and in shops, what a cool idea! Why hadn't anyone else thought of a such a cool way to play computer games. The Wii was a great console for playing fun games and it had made me forget about getting my hands on the PS3 it was a console that allowed all your friends to join in your games instead of waiting one at a time and then trying to figure out all the different combo's.

Now that I have a Wii console I want a more serious console for playing serious games and when I looked at the XBox 360 I was amazed by the game Gears of War there was nothing that seemed close to it on either of the other consoles and I am considering buying the console just because of the game. Also the fact that the PS3 will cost £429 from Amazon and the XBOX 360 is £269 and I have heard a rumor that the XBOX 360 may come down by £50-£80 in price when the PS3 launches. I am wondering who will pay £429 for a games console you can buy a plasma TV for that price in some places.  So what game will convince me to buy the PS3 or shell out so much cash, the truth is there isn't on at the moment and the console is much to expensive. I just hope Sony hasn't overstretched itself a bit too much trying to bring out the PS3 which could probably make or break Sony as the leader in the games console market.