January 23, 2010 – 9:00 pm
Finally, I’m up and running with Virgin Media broadband at home. They give you a free wireless router, but all the setup instructions and the setup cd’s are for Windows. The bloke who installed the cabling suggested I rung the £80,000 a minute phone line. Panic not people, follow these instructions…
With everything turned off…
Follow setup instructions as per Windows (eg. log into it via pointing your browser to http://192.168.1.1/
Why these noddy instructions, well… If you plug the modem into your computer directly it will work BUT the modem will remember your MAC address of the computer and not talk to the router (until you turn everything odd). If you start the router without the modem having establish an external connection it fails to find the external IP address (dodgy Virgin firmware doesn’t pick up the connection unless it’s established before the router kicks up).
Really shouldn’t be as hard as it was, there was nothing to it, but it still took me a day.
Posted in interweb, technology Comments (0)
January 13, 2010 – 7:09 pm
I received a very wierd email today. Somebody has signed up to the Barbie website, and given my email address as their parent (which I hopefully am not, or at least nobody got round to telling me). The site has then email me, giving their username. They’ve also included lots of helpful links which I can access and then told me not to email them with any problems but to ring them on the phone. Which is great except a)It’s a US number and b)surely than not half as secure as it could be done online.
Here’s the email, with a few redactions…
Dear Parent,
We just wanted to let you know that your daughter registered at BarbieGirls.com under this anonymous screen name:
[redacted]Barbie Girls™ is a fun & fabulous virtual community where girls can play, learn and interact with friends.
At BarbieGirls.com, your daughter can create an online character, design her own room, earn virtual “money,” play games, and chat with other girls in a safe, controlled environment.
Please review this email carefully to learn about our site, our privacy and safety features, our community rules, and more.
Privacy
Your daughter’s privacy and safety are very important to us. We don’t ask girls to provide any personal information at our site apart from your email address. The BarbieGirls.com experience is intended to be anonymous, and girls are not allowed to share or exchange personal information with any third parties online. Please take a moment to review our Privacy Policy.
Parents’ Place
We believe that you, the parent, should be aware and approve of your child’s online activities. That is why we’ve created a special section called Parents’ Place, just for you. You can update your daughter’s account at any time if you create a Parents’ Place account. [redacted Join now! link]
Online Safety
Please also read our Message to Parents, including information about safety features at BarbieGirls.com.
For more Internet Safety Tips, check out http://www.barbiegirls.com/legal/internetsafety.html
Because we want the BarbieGirls.com community to be a fun and enjoyable place for girls, we also ask them to agree to our Rules, which you can view here.
Chat
We’ve taken lots of steps to make chatting a fun and safe experience at BarbieGirls.com.
B Chat™ is our standard chat feature that allows girls to communicate by choosing phrases from pull-down menus that we’ve created and approved. Girls cannot create their own messages using B Chat™. Your daughter currently has access to this chat level.
Super B Chat™ is available only to girls whose parents have created a parental account on BarbieGirls.com and granted permission to access this chat level. Super BChat™ allows users to type their own messages, but only using words that we’ve approved and compiled in our database. Our word-filtering system is designed to block all other words and inappropriate combinations of otherwise acceptable words, prevent the exchange of personal information, and to help keep chat safe, friendly, and fun.
We hope you’ll agree that BarbieGirls.com is a great online venue for your daughter and that you find this notice and these links helpful.
If you prefer that your daughter not play on BarbieGirls.com, please [redacted] to opt her out of accessing the site. (If clicking doesn’t work, copy and paste this entire address into your website browser line [redacted - username in url, token passed in plain txt]
Sincerely,
Your friends at BarbieGirls.comP.S. Your email address is used only to send this message and will not be stored or shared for marketing purposes without your consent. Please do not reply to this email. If you need to contact us, you can call Customer Service at 877-3BARBIE (877-322-7243).
Are you people fucking idiots? What are you doing?
Posted in rant, technology Comments (1)
January 5, 2010 – 9:18 pm
Food however, continues to loop round the inside of my head, and last night was not exception. I thought about pate. Can you flour it and flash brown the outside in a frying pan, service it crisp on the outside and melting on the inside with a sour cranberry sauce?
Maybe you can wrap little cubes of pate in filo pastry and bake it in the oven, making crisp little packets of hot finger food? If that works, corn beef might be good too, I sometimes add a bit of beef bolognase where it breaks down and adds back to the meaty velvet of the ragu.
I’ve a love of salt and pepper chicken (there’s a great set of photos about it), especially the softened onions and chillis that come with it. If I piled those up on top of the corn beef inside the filo, the spicy inside surely be great.
Finger foods are taken my interest of late too. After a new years eve party where everything was small enough to be eaten off a teaspoon. I’d love to try and do a whole dinner party of small foods, people tucking in to 20 dishes, a bit like some Chinese food.
Baked little packets of filo filled with tasty goodness, pickling onions browned and glazed with a reduced red wine, baked blobs of mashed potato with cubes of blue cheese, chicken nuggets made of boned and rolled chicken theis injected with pesto, inch long slices of spare ribs cooked over night, baked red cabbage with apple and balsamic vinegar, baby onion bajis the size of golf balls, shot glasses full of rich beef consume with a single crouton on top and others full of green pea soup, blue cheese and sour cream blended and piped onto Ritz crackers, crystalised ginger slices half dipped in dark chocolate and indevidual piles of sticky cold rissotto.
As fun as these things are, I’d still love to slow roast a chunk of brisket, browning the outside first and then ripping it apart with forks. Add a crisp fine slices coleslaw and pile into folded warm flatbreads, serve with friends and cold beer.
There are so many wonderful food blogs but Smitten Kitchen is just fabulous.
Posted in food Comments (0)
December 26, 2009 – 10:28 pm
I do enjoy poking through the books I’ve read each year, its a good indicator of what sort of year it has been. Thanks for the magic power of LibraryThing, it’s easy to find them all too. So in reverse order, and with the odd note *d…
It would have appeared to have been a year I re-read lots of books I have read before, a year that I have read a huge amount of American crime trash, and no technical books. Interesting to compare it to 2007. Sadly I didn’t do one for 2008.
Posted in life Comments (0)
December 24, 2009 – 10:40 pm
Whilst I was down in London a few weeks ago, I drunkenly set about re-skinning coldclimate. Since I moved to Wordpress a few years ago I’d used the Ocadia theme, and very nice it was too. However, lots of people use it, so it was time to make something of my own.
I’m no designer. Never have been, never will be, can’t spot a pretty site from a shitey one, so I’m not about to attempt to design something. Instead I’ve gone completely the other way.
I’m married Sandbox with BluePrint. Nothing big, nothing clever, but ever page to be valid (I’ve spent this evening chopping out div’s and classes and ids) and with a little bit more work, hopefully pleasing to the eye.
You never know, if I keep this up a bit longer, I might even get the hang of it. Not half as pleasing as hacking about on the command line mind.
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Build on wordpress, drunkenly styled by hacking together blueprint.css and sandbox via the magic of vi