I think I may be the victim of a “phone scam”. This morning two lasses came round claiming to be students just moved into the house a couple of doors a way. The said they were trying to set up their internet connection  but they needed a corded phone to check the line - of course they all had mobiles but not much use! In the spirit of kindness I lent them a phone, but it hasn’t some back.

I’ve read about phone scams but didn’t really know what one was until now. I expect the guys from the real hustle are explaining what you can do with four thousand used land line phones…

Update! They just brought it back, with thanks and cake (students feeding me? isn’t it supposed to happen the other way round?).  People being nice to each other, I’m sure this is more frequent occurrence than The Daily Mail would have us believe but they make their money out of worrying the worried with “news” of real scams. If we weren’t worried we wouldn’t buy the rag so they have keep up worry levels to keep up sales.

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?

My daughter had a phone call the other night (no surprises so far) from the mother of a friend (more surprising) who was at the hospital with said friend who was having their stomach pumped (not totally surprising but fortunately not a frequent occurrence). Apparently the friend had got so paralytic they couldn’t even remember who they had been out with & the mother was trying random friends trying to see who had dumped him at casualty.The phone call scenario may not happen often in our house but teenagers getting the stomachs pumped is a regular pay off of our binge drinking teen culture. The huge waste of my money on policing & NHS plus the effects of “antisocial behaviour” gives me the right to complain before I begin to worry what these people are doing to their own bodies.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7209276.stm

McDonald’s has won approval to offer courses which could form part of a qualification at the standard of A-levels or advanced Diplomas.

…

Universities secretary John Denham said it was an important step towards ending the old divisions between company training schemes and national qualifications.

Yeah, obviously if you want to up the status of work based qualifications you choose McDonalds to be a flagship. You think they’d start with a respected name like… OK we don’t respect any businesses much these days but at least someone like Microsoft, HSBC, The BBC isn’t actually a byword for a lack of intellectual ability.

Who do you think might be able to give the scheme a better image?

Another laptop stolen with unencrypted data on.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7197045.stm

Hopefully it’s been formatted and is running some naff games but maybe it has passed a whole load of personal info on to criminals or worse to terrorist who are very interested in soldiers home addresses, parents, spouses, …

There really is no excuse, yes stuff can get nicked however careful you intend to be but windows has it’s own directory encryption options - right click in explorer, properties, encrypt. Not that I’d recommend it. I did that but various exe’s wouldn’t run from it and then I couldn’t unencrypt it. I managed by copying the data out into another directory, deleting the original and renaming the copy back to the original.

These days I use true crypt which has all sorts of sneakies. Not only does it do serious encryption it can hide the data your encrypting so no one knows it’s there and so can’t force you to reveal the password.

http://www.truecrypt.org/

My main complaint with it is it is another of those invisible apps. Maybe the version I have is for windows 3.11 but it doesn’t appear on the task bar & I forget I haven’t entered the password and get all confused when the encrypted drives aren’t there.

And… both options are free, so where is the excuse?

Is your data encrypted? Is your personal data at home encrypted? Is your personal data at work encrypted? You could hide your cv & mp3’s!

The latest insanities of my new big company employer may amuse you - they would make me laugh if I wasn’t crying…

Problem one, because we don’t have a support contract on it they are removing our phone system and giving us mobile phones. When I say “giving” I mean allowing us to order them on the super duper intranet. The “super duper intranet” won’t let us order them until “sometime in January” - the phones are being taken out “sometime in January”. It will be interesting to see which “sometime” comes first.

Problem two, and this is very catch 22, we can’t travel without a form signed by our manager. My manager is in the US, I’ll just pop over and get his signature so I can travel to see him to get his signature to allow me to travel…
Stack Crash…

It has long been a Dilbert type theory that half of the IT department is there to make work for the other half thus keeping both halves in lucrative employment. Given my experience yesterday I might have to agree.

You may remember I spent an hour on the phone to report a problem so that I had access the support system to report a failed link to a training site which might just help with a failed order.

What I didn’t mention yesterday was that to underline the full circularity of the system my time on the phone was primarily caused by my attempt to order - can you guess? Oh yes, a phone.

I went away for the weekend and stayed in a rather nice hotel. This is a major rarity for me as for holidays we usually camp or for short breaks stay in Travel Lodge type family rooms. I’ve always rated breakfast as the best meal of the day (indeed the only one we Brits are rated for) and prefer a big breakfast and light lunch (tho’ I will do big breakfast and big lunch if pushed to it). I also don’t really believe in “life before breakfast” and find the whole concept of showering and shaving before eating a major evil of being away from home.

Now normally the only time I’m in half way posh places is with business with everything on expenses and it therefore came as a bit of a shock when I was expected to reach into my own pocket at hotel prices. Having said I eat a big breakfast I would expect more than the human frame can contain for the £15 the they were charging. I made do with a piece of fruit until I’d walked into town where I had a seriously good meal for seriously less money.

My point is (yes there is one - of a sort) is that travel not only gives you a chance to try different things it sometimes forces different things onto you which can be good. Leaving the house without a major calorie intake is not something I would ever have done un-coerced and I actually found it quite helpful. Keeping a balanced energy level through the day is a problem to me (just read some code I churn out during a low blood sugar phase) and maybe my eat lots approach is not helping.

So there we are - problems are just new opportunities when we think outside of the box (which is the correct font for irony?Arial BS?).

Guitarists today don’t know they’re born! Not only can you buy pretty good instruments for £100 or so you can get digital effects that are stupidly cheap for what they do and most importantly of all - tuners. What would I have given for something to help me tune the damn thing 30 years ago?!

On top of all that there’s tutorial DVD’s and online stuff. With the
publicity about the Led Zep re-union I dug out my Led Zeppelin songbook I had for Christmas back in the 70’s. Some of the stuff was in tab (written to show where to fret each string etc), some was just in standard lines and dots. Black Dog was not only in lines and dots the guitar part was in the bass clef. If you not familiar with musical notation let me explain the lines indicate the pitch of the note, bottom line E, space F, next line G etc. That’s for the treble clef, for the bass clef there’s still 5 lines but they mean different things - bottom line is G or something. Why is it different? To make life difficult is the only reason I can think of.

Anyway, I struggled for years trying to play the thing as a kid then the other day I thought I’d have another go and see if there was some online tab (huge web sites are devoted to showing tablature diagrams of how to play popular songs). A quick google showed better than that. UTube has a whole raft of people playing it in slow motion. It might not sound as good as Jimmy but at least people can now figure out what it is I’m trying to play!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRpj5VmyS6E
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Te2U-BO2YYY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSwZeAjghHk&feature=related

So if you’re buying someone a guitar first for Christmas :

a) buy them a tuner / effect unit with built in tuner (it should be illegal to seller starter guitars without a tuner)

b) get them online to find some lessons