• The dear old granny who lives in a creepy old house and likes to give candy to young children is almost always a monster.
• What ever it is. Its always behind you
• Even the most "un-scary" moment in a film can be made scary with the right sound.
• Almost all girls in horror films go into the basement or run outside into the dark
• Caller ID doesn't seem to work in tracing nuisance callers in horror films.
• The lights will always go out when you are about to be stabbed
• The weapon of choice for most psychos is a knife
• Cell phones never seem to have enough battery time when you need to make an emergency call
• If your cat, ferret, dog or hamster acts weirdly, there is a demon, ghost, killer or monster in your house.
• If you killed one of the monsters there is always another one.
• The monster or alien always leaves eggs behind for the sequel
• When you look up its always too late. That's when the monster jumps down on you.
• When staying at a remote farm house never ever offer to go for help, you will die..
• Make sure the home you are interested in buying has not been built on ancient Indian burial ground (or get them to drop the price)
• If you are lost in the woods and someone is after you never split up, you will die
• If you heard a strange sound outside its probably the wild wielding axe murderer, do not investigate.

If you have anymore to add please let me know! :)

I found it quite interesting how so much has changed since Chip and Pin was introduced. The most interesting fact is that the crime just changed, chip and pin in most cases appeared to be un cracked but it made getting to another form of data a lot easier.

Imagine this, you enter a shop that has just set up for a while in your town and decide to buy a few of the cheap products on sale. You put your card into the chip and pin terminal and enter your pin for the transaction of say £10 and don't think anything more of it. However what you didn't realize was that the chip and pin machine they were using had a magnetic card reader as well as a chip reader (your card has a magnetic strip and chip). When you entered your pin the details were being stored or were being recorded in some way. Because the magnetic strip on your card was scanned it can easily be cloned and now that they have your pin they are able to withdraw money from your account using your pin.

So what just happened there? Well chip and pin worked and it was secure however the method you used to pay for a chip and pin transaction helped fraudsters get hold of the good old magnetic strip still used by cash machines and terminals you might using when going abroad.

Now the above is just one of the many ways I have heard of fraudsters circumventing the system. I am sure there are several other tricks out there. Remember when you use you card:

• Make sure no one can see you enter your pin number
• Does the Chip and Pin terminal look suspect?
• Are you familiar with the store you are using your card in? How long has it been there?
• If in doubt use good old fashioned cash

I've traveled past this famous land mark quite a number of times while on my way to Street in Somerset and have seen many tourists groups gathering around it every time.

Its quite amazing all the ideas people come up with on why these bunch of rocks are here which apparently came all the way from Wales. They have ranged from

• A landing platform for alien space craft
• A sacrificial alter (not sure for what)
• A place for druids to celebrate special events
• Some special energy creation platform that draws its energy out of the median or energy lines in the ground.

I just wondered think about the idea people came up with, if some ancient king or emperor suddenly thought "You know there are going to be people wondering what the past was like wouldn't it be nice to confuse them?"
"How you're grace?"
"Well remember those stones we saw in Wales the other day?"
"yes?"
"Lets bring them here and put them in a circle!"

You could even imagine people doing that now, imagine creating a massive mound of Earth and putting a statue pumpkin inside. Man that would confuse future generations :)

Some interesting things I have thought about in the Star Trek Universe.

• No one ever needs to use the toilet
• No matter how advanced their computers are in the future the holo decks safety will always fail taking the crew on some new wacky adventure.
• They are so advanced in the future that you can actually hear sound in space when shooting a photon torpedo at a ship.
• On all federation ships the phaser banks are connected directly to the main computer system to enable the ship you are shooting at to send a "hacking tachion pulse" back up the phaser beam to take all the data from your databanks.
• When a ship is attacked all control panels will explode killing all ensigns no one has seen before who are dressed in red.
• Scotty always has something to complain about
• No one ever gets one of the crew on their communicators when their busy taking a slash. "Oh hang on a moment bridge I'm a bit busy at the moment"
• Even the smallest shuttles have gravity
• If you leave a holo deck on long enough the characters will become sentient.
• Ships always need two helmsmen to navigate them One for left and one for right?
• Every time a new person beams down with them to a planet they are likely to be killed.
• Any medical condition can be cured with a "torch"
• When ever there is a disaster on the ship with many wounded people the ships doctor McCoy will always go with the captain on an away mission.
• On a dangerous away mission the captain will always go down leaving the crew at the mercy of the second in command in The Old Generation.
• All Klingon ships are filled with steam
• Anyone can go back in the future by flying around the sun
• Why doesn't the federation create a holographic army?
• What will Spock do if you stamp on his foot really hard?

Just reading the following blogpost from my friend Owen's blog about how easy it is to crack WEP wireless encryption. As Owen says its better to have encryption than non at all, if you are unable to use WPA you can also lock down your wireless router by MAC Address. Now every Network card has a unique address which is called a MAC Address you can tell your router only to accept traffic from the MAC address's of the computers on your network.

Now the above is far from foolproof as it is possible to spoof a MAC address using certain Olicom cards and special software. But the hacker will need to scan a lot more traffic to pickup the MAC address of one of the computers on your network and is more likely to move to a network which does not do MAC address filtering. Another trick is to not broadcast your SSID, all networks have an identifier called an SSID if you stop your network advertising itself it will be harder for hackers to find it.

This show is quite funny although you can't help but feel that the people they have selected on this show have been selected with certain tendencies such as he ability not to get on with each other. What ever the criteria it makes very entertaining viewing.

Some of the things I find the most entertaining is sometimes they will send out a research group to find out some market research about what they are doing and then the leader of the team will come up with an idea all by himself. Even if the market research showed that his or her idea would fail he will still go through with the idea and fail. Its unbelievably funny viewing and what is so funny is I have sometimes seen this approach in companies before. They will go through a vendor selection process for a product find a really great product that fits the task and then someone on the board will say we will choose product X instead of Y because we really like the company that makes it rather that if product X is the better product. 

Yep the French have set a new land speed record on their trains at 574.8 km/h, that's fast, very fast...

Now why can't we get some nice fast trains here in the UK? Apparently the French don't just have fast trains their trains actually run on time, what a concept...

We all take it for granted at work, we have email access and Internet access. Some of us however have more Internet access than others based on the corporate policies of the organizations we may work for. We use our computers for word processing, we save the documents we have created on the network for future use some of us may even have version control repositories for our documents and occasionally we print them out to read or hand over to clients or colleagues. But I was surprised and shocked to find out how computers are used at a small law firm I discovered they have some pretty cool multimedia machines with state of the art applications on them and all the machines were being used as were as glorified word processors. The secretaries would type up all the letters on the computers in MS Word, then they would print the letters out and occasionally the secretaries would exchange letters on floppy disks between each other and after they had printed two copies of the letter out and filed one copy they would delete the copy from their floppy disks to free up space! The machines they were using also had underused 60gig hard disks! What I found even funnier was that if they needed to do another copy of a letter or alter it they would end up typing it in the letter again from the paper copy! What was even more surprising was that they were not the only company doing this. If you've seen IT being under used in such a way I would love to hear from you, it would be interesting to find out why.

The situation regarding our 15 UK servicemen has raised a lot of questions primarily "Where was HMS Cornwall" and "Didn't HMS Cornwall see the Iranians approaching?". There is an interesting article found here which examines the incident.

One thing I found interesting and also disheartening was the amount of defense cuts Brown has been imposing on our Naval forces (maybe they are not "meeting their targets") :

• Navy to cut fleet by half  05/01/2007
• 20,000 posts go in defense cuts 21/07/2004
• Half of Royal Navy's ships in mothballs 31/12/2006
• UK Royal Navy faces potential front line cuts 12/12/2006

I can understand defense cuts, but only if we reduce our commitments to operations such as those in Iraq, Afghanistan, NATO and the Balkans.

Yep I tried making toad in the hole last night and I quite simply ruined it. It has got to be one of the worst cooking disasters I have ever had along with using raspberry petit filous instead of creme fraiche for a chicken recipe. Okay I had forgotten the creme fraiche and thought I could use it as a substitute, yeah I know it seemed okay at the time. This toad in the hole the batter was dreadful looks like it got soaked in too much of the fat from the sausages and some sunflower oil (why oh I don't know). Anyway if you have a better recipe for Toad in the hole please let me know or if you think you know what went wrong I'd love to hear from you (I think:)). Anyway don't you just love pizza home delivery?

Today has been filled with April fools day jokes from friends. Even larger companies such as Google have got into the act with Google TiSP a free broadband service available from Google which you receive by lowering a fibre optic cable down your toilet - class! Think Geek also had a load of funny trick products on their site such as the WiiHelm which was suppose to enable you to play Wii games by just nodding your head. The Joke Shop Shop also had people going, by thinking they were giving away free PS3's, when clicking on the link you got the "Gotcha! April Fools!" message.

Oh well I'm glad its all over now (safe!) I still haven't discovered what the BBC's April fools day joke was though.