Too much security? I’m always complaining about it - however unless my wife has really spent £160 on XBox games like Metal Gear Solid (or something like that) then I may have to slightly change that to - Too little security, I’ve always said so.

It would be typical if if my wife’s card had been cloned / abused / whatever (what do I mean “if”, do I really think she’s got an Xbox stashed in the wardrobe? All those shoes are just a false lid to her gaming haven?) as she is always shredding innocent details (I keep saying “your name & address is in the phone book”, “yes it’s a receipt that has 4 digits of your card on but no one can use it”) and warning her aged P’s to look after their details. In fact we spent last night shredding years worth of her mum’s financial records. She still leaves a check on the step for the milkman though - name, address, bank details!

Anyway looks like we’ve got to spend hours on the phone getting it sorted

I’ve got to decide what outcome I want here, do I want it to be stolen card details? Hmm, which is going to be cheaper - a ripped off credit card or marriage counselling and gaming addiction counselling?

http://www.itpro.co.uk/news/192123/infosec-08-virtual-desktop-on-a-flash-drive.html

This is brilliant. Everybody (who is anybody?)  has a PC or access to one. Using virtualization and this you could carry “your” pc on your keyring then slap it into your home desktop / laptop / friends PC / the machine in your holiday home / flat / hotel…

I used to use Tanden removable drive PC’s when I first worked from home. I just took the disk into the office & booted what looked like my PC. 

Imagine never being more than a fiddly bootup away from your PC - hot desking worldwide! 

Apparently! A colleague has just changed to BT broadband and his intelligent, fault sensing modem dropped down to 500K as the optimal fault free speed. He was not impressed as he was getting around 2M from his previous ISP. However some googling around led him to the “bell wire fix”. Although your signal travels down miles of carefully twisted and balanced pair around the house it runs adjacent to the “bell wire”, an extra cable designed to provide power to electro-mechanical bells on half hundred weight bakelite telephones. This acts as an aerial and… let’s stop pretending I understand RF and just say it generally messes up your nice twisted pair of data lines.

I’m having the building work done so I can start my working from home. It’s so scary for a ditherer like me to commit to where the sockets should be & I’m trying to get it right (after having to crawl under my desk to turn the mains off for years last time I set up an office at home!).

I’ve got that far but I’m desperately trying to install enough cables before the plaster board goes on - two phone lines, cat 5 in & out (a feed from my router & a spare as I guess I’ll need a hub on my desk so I can take an out to feed the kitchen), speaker cables from the lounge stereo (I could do with screened lead going back to feed the stereo from the desktop but at a pinch I could use the speaker leads?) and last (and least flexible) coax from the video for a TV. I already had speakers & coax running through to the kitchen but I’m bringing them out to wall box so I can break in if I need to.

It’s the “now’s the time” pressure. I can run cables later but if I do it now it’s so much neater… Oh well, it’s what makes me (I hope) a good software engineer. When I’m laying the foundations I like to keep all the options open. It may be good software design but in building terms it’s stressing me out - what will I need next week? What if decide the desk should be the other side of the room? Which is exactly what happened to this office, where I now have to crawl under the desk to turn the mains off…

The old joke about lost screws and dad spending Christmas morning assembling the kids toys is getting a bit  out dated. These days it’s installing and configuring the kids (and grandparents and neighbours and uncle Tom Cobly’s (who happens to have rung to wish me a Happy Christmas & while I’m on the phone do I know anything about digital cameras / MP3 players / networking Vista…)) IT kit.

 I know it’ll happen because I’ve bought various bits that will take some setting up myself (can’t say what in case my family break the rule of a life time & read this); so I’ve made a rod for my own back even if no one else has. Hopefully there’s enough other stuff to keep them occupied so that I won’t have to Google instructions until after lunch.

Anyway, let me wish you a very Merry & IT Support Free Christmas!