Far be it for me to seem like a crusty old colonel complaining at the state of the world while sipping at his glass of Vintage Port by the fire (but I have been known to do the latter), but BBC Radio 4 did a piece on the Apostrophe Protection Society yesterday.

Bad use of the apostrophe is one of my pet hates, because, unlike bad spelling, it can change the whole sense of the sentence. It’s also dead easy to get right; one of the clearest and simplest rules of English grammar.

So I’m going to send an e-mail to its chairman, John Richards, to see how I can join.

Another thank you to Paul Makepeace, the host for this blog, and now provider of our business Web space and e-mail facilities, for his help and responsiveness to my sometimes peculiar demands(!) over the past few weeks.

It’s wonderful to have all the important stuff hosted by a small organisation once more – Paul has the almost heretical view that he’ll try to set up precisely the facilities we require (within certain Open Source restraints, of course!). That means I now have TLS/SSL secure POP3 and SMTP for protect my passwords when I’m using public Wi-Fi, a facility that’s very difficult to come by elsewhere.

It’s all at no extra cost, too (I’m more than happy to help out researching some of the dustier corners of Windows to make it all work from my end – Paul is an out-and-out Open Source fiend).

If you don’t feel comfortable with the off-the-shelf solutions offered by your ISP, drop Paul an e-mail and see if what he’s providing feels right for you.

If you should find yourself in Sussex tomorrow evening (19th August), please come along to Sussex Downs Ecademists’ informal networking at the historic White Hart Hotel, in Lewes High Street.

Full details are here

Canned food was invented in 1812.

Can openers didn’t get thought of until fifty years later.

From Kickstart Daily.

This is cool. I just wish it was available for Firebird.

My-eNotes.com

From about midnight Friday until around 11:30pm last night, NTL seemed to have lost Port 25, so I couldn’t send any e-mail from my laptop to any of the three SMTP servers I have access to.

Whether this was just part of the chaos caused by MSBlast, or a deliberate ploy, I don’t know.

Thank goodness for Web-based e-mail!

From the Brighton New Media list, earlier today:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=1%2B1&btnG=Google+Search

and

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&safe=off&q=G+*+mass+of+earth+%2F+%28radius+of+earth%29+squared+in+cubits+per+millennium+per+microsecond

and

http://www.google.com/search?q=answer+to+life+the+universe+and+everything

Happy Anniversary, Mum & Dad!

Happy birthday, Dad!

(not that he’s likely to read Dangerous Thinking)

I may have mentioned this on Dangerous Thinking before – I’ve certainly bored friends and associates stiff with my whingeing that Windows XP on my laptop is flaky. Windows 2000 machines I have access to are rock solid; my laptop with XP isn’t.

The basic problem is the damned thing just seizes perhaps twice a day, and I have to turn the laptop over and insert a pen into its navel to reboot.

Well, I think all this may just be in the past tense. It’s over a week since it played its old trick.

Why? Well, about two weeks ago, my virus checker found a trojan in XP’s System Restore facility, and couldn’t get rid of it. As an aside, I couldn’t find any reference to this particular beast anywhere on the Internet, so I guess this may have been a false positive of some kind, but puzzling nonetheless.

After a bit of digging I found out that I had to Turn Off Restore Settings and flush out all the information XP uses to track changes. That removed the trojan or FP, or whatever it was. For a few days, the machine didn’t seize up. Then it started again – once every other day.

Then I found a reference – I can’t remember where, unfortunately – to some software called jv16 Power Tools, which, the poster said was the thing to keep XP running without a glitch.

Having cleaned out literally hundreds of lines of rubbish from the registry, the exercise delivered the final 20% of reliability I was looking for.

As I said, it’s around about eight days since the last seizure, and I’m really hopeful that XP is at least delivering the goods in terms of stability that I believe it should do. The only fly in the ointment is that W2K never needed all this faffing about to make it deliver the goods.