Each year Radio 2 have a Children in Need auction, where people bid for various items you literally could not buy normally. Conduct the BBC symphony orchestra; go shopping with Trinny and Susannah; sing with Elvis’ band; be the groundsman at Old Trafford for a day. Things like that. These tend to be bought by very rich people. The Trinny & Susannah thing went for £8,600, spending new year’s eve in the arctic with Ray Mears cost someone £15,000. The best one, however, came this morning. Recording a song with Pete Waterman was bought for £36,000…Bet it was a Dad Total from the auction came to £199,850, at which point Terry Wogan plus co-host put £75 each in, bring it nicely up to £200,000.

Radio 2 have just started their 24-hour music marathon, in which you can phone in and request whatever song you like, providing you donate something, be it large or small. This is, of course, all leading to the Children in Need spectacular tomorrow evening. I like it. It raises vast amounts of money (£26million last year) and everyone involved has a good time. Yet, as ever, there have to be people who feel the need to be snide about the whole thing. “It’s painful to watch, why do we have to endure this stupidity?” is often followed by “Why can’t we just donate money quietly, without all this fuss?”. This annoys me. A lot. To the latter people I say this: Go get educated. To the former: If you don’t like it, don’t watch! It’s raising money for charity, for crying out loud, what’s the problem? Everyone has fun and lots of people benefit. Enough said.

So, what am I doing to raise money? Well, I’m not dyeing my hair, it didn’t really work that well last time I was going to say I’ll donate a half a penny for every hit on this webpage, but I won’t know the stats until the end of the weekend. So, I’ve hooked up a page with a counter…each hit costs me half a penny! Unless you all manage to do something insane, l’ll pay the full amount This will end at 22:00 tomorrow evening.

So get clicking, COST ME MONEY!

UPDATE: Refresh the page as much as you like btw, I’m not logging IPs or anything

UPDATE 2: Clarification of above comments. I don’t have a problem with people thinking either of the two statements above, and giving their opinion when asked. It’s the people, many of them journalists, who feel the need to complain when nobody has asked them that bugs me.

Rugby is Just Weird. I don’t understand how it’s a sport.

1. It was supposedly invented by someone called “Mr Cheaty-Cheat”, I think, who was playing football, picked up the ball and then threw himself onto the ground over the goal line. What are the odds he was losing at this point?
2. Every time I see a clip the teams are doing exactly the same thing: chucking the ball down a little line of blokes. Neither team seems to realise, however, that this is how it always happens, so it always works. If someone said “waitagoddamnminute! They’re going to chuck the ball down the little line of blokes! I’ll put some of my men in the middle of their little line of blokes!” it might make it more interesting. But they don’t.
3. It seems nobody could agree on a fixed set of rules, so there are two different versions. You have to take great pride in which version you think good and which you think pants, because then you can argue with people and forget how stupid it is there are two different versions in the first place.
4. This is the big one. If someone scores a try, they get 5 points. In any other sport, this would be all that happened. But no, they then get to get 2 more points by kicking the ball between two very wide and very tall posts, with nothing in the way. The other team aren’t allowed to hinder them. This is difficult stuff. They have to be able to kick a ball in a certain direction! It’s their full time job learning how to do this, but that’s ok. The only element of chance when kicking the ball, unobstructed, through two very wide and very tall posts, when it’s their job to do stuff like this, is whether they get nervous in front of a crowd. That’s it. If they manage to get the ball between the two very wide and very tall posts, they get 2 free points. Can you name any other sport in which this happens? I think we should introduce this into athletics. If someone is winning after the first 400m of the 800m, everyone else should be made to stop for 2 seconds, while the winning athlete carries on running, but has to jump over a hurdle or something. No, not a hurdle. A javelin. Lying sideways. That’d be fair. Sounds like this rule was also created by ‘Mr Cheaty-Cheat’, when he realised he was losing a match (again).

I bet you never realised before how silly the whole thing is, did you? Well now you do, and can go about your daily routine unhindered by one more Silly Thing Not Worth Getting Worked Up Over.

You’re welcome.

Spam sucks. I’m fortunate in that I only get ten to twenty per day, but I know people who receive ninety to a hundred, which is a real pain. While you can’t stop spam arriving, there are various approaches to dealing with it before it arrives in your inbox. This is what worked for me.

One program: POPFile.

POPFile is an email classification program. It sits between your email program and the email server and works by analysing the content of emails then placing them into ‘buckets’. ‘Buckets’ are essentially categories for your email. Your email program, for example Outlook Express, can then filter the emails into different folders based on their classification.

1. You open Outlook Express. OE communicates with POPFile, giving it the details of your email server.
2. POPFile downloads your email, classifies it, then changes it in a way of your choosing to indicate the classification. The standard way of doing this is to insert a [<bucket name>] into the subject line of the email.
3. Outlook Express receives the email from POPFile. You can configure OE to filter all emails with, say, [spam] in the subject line, into a separate folder.

The obvious question here is: how does POPFile classify your emails? Well, it’s not an automatic process. Once you’ve configured your ‘buckets’, the very first emails it downloads will not be classified. You need to open up the User Interface and tell POPFile which ‘bucket’ they should go into. From then on, based on the content of the email, POPFile will try to figure it out. When it gets one wrong, you need to go in and change it. It will become more and more accurate. In my case it took about a week before I didn’t have to enter the user interface on a daily basis. Having used it for a month, it gets probably one wrong per week. My current statistics:

Messages classified: 368
Classification errors: 7
Stats reset on October 30th.

A 98.09% accuracy is pretty much all you can ask for

I found the setup guide on the website extremely clear and easy to follow, so haven’t tried to replicate it here. I would offer the following tips:

• For some reason POPFile runs in a console window by default. You can change this in the ‘Configuration’ screen. ‘Show POPFile icon in Windows system tray’ is also a useful option to turn on, as it gives you a shortcut to the User Interface.
• If you run Outlook (not OE) / Eudora / anything that can filter by the email headers, the “X-Text-Classification” header is more transparent than altering the subject line.
• Check for new versions regularly, as they come out fairly frequently.

I thoroughly recommend this program. The last update fixed the only major problem I had with it, which was the extremely slow startup time. As it’s a classification program rather than a purpose-built spam filter it also works for other types of emails you wish to separate, although I use multiple email addresses so don’t really need this. I’ve tried various spam-filters, and this has turned out to be the best. It’s a bit more work than SpamAssassin or Cloudmark, but worth it, in my view. And it’s free

All that remains is for me to point you here, and we’re done.

I think I’ve finally discovered what’s making IE revert to ’smaller’ size text…it’s whenever I lock the computer (Windows Key + L). I haven’t mentioned that particular problem before, so those of you who hang on my every word need not fret.

Huh:

Absynth, responsible for netweaver.com and some linux hosting customers is currently experiencing an abnormally high load causing sites to respond slowly. We are looking into this and hope to have it resolved soon. Sorry for any inconvenience.

You won’t be reading this for a bit then. This means I can write whatever I like! Sadly, I have no dark and mysterious past to reveal in a shock revelation. Were I to be a car, I think I’d be a bubble car. Do you think Calista Flockhart is really a Ford Escort? Never mind. Here’s a report on contortionists that manages to use quite a lot of words to say not a lot. Actually, this reminds me of an event from my dark and mysterious past…I was actually engaged to a contortionist for a time. But she broke it off.

PVP’s take on LOTR

Hungry hungry hungry…food is what I need…some juicy fresh food…food food food…like an apple, or a pizza, or something…must go eat…

Apologies for the lack of post, have been with Kate (and a tiger) for much of the day.

By the way, I heard on the news today that anti-war protesters are planning to erect then tear down a statue of George Bush during his visit next week. I’d like to make it clear that whatever your opinion of the current US President, he is not a murdering psychopath who systematically tortures and murders his citizens, as well as being responsible for the deaths of over a million people. The comparison is insulting, ignorant and dangerous. Get a grip.

There are things in life that are risky, there are things that are downright stupid, and then there’s me. It was Kate’s birthday yesterday and the plan was to get a train home for the weekend, but not until after Friday’s seminar. I decided last night that a cool thing to do would be to go pick her up without telling her. Not wanting to keep you all in suspense, it came out ok in the end. But more through luck than any skill on my part.

I left the house at 9:30, pretending a client had an emergency computer problem, and headed to York. Her seminar finished at 12:15, her train was not until 14:40. I aimed to be waiting outside the classroom, but there was heavy traffic on the M1 and I subsequently arrived at 12:45. Meanwhile, Kate headed for the station and asked if her ticket could be used on an earlier train. Thankfully, it couldn’t. I didn’t know where she was, so under the pretence that a friend was in York and wanted to meet up, discovered her location. She had a heavy bag, however, so didn’t want to wander into town. I said I’d let him know. I only had enough change for a car park on the other side of York, so had to run across the city, hoping she wouldn’t decide to phone the friend, who I stupidly hadn’t primed for the eventuality. Thankfully, she hadn’t yet done so, and I managed to catch her at the station at about 13:15. Phew

The drive home was somewhat wet. It’s very difficult to know what to do on the motorway in such conditions. I tend to stick to the inside lane, but invariably end up following large lorries which kick up vast amounts of spray. Speeding up isn’t an option in that kind of rain/wind, and moving into the middle lane causes problems. It’s tricky. I got back at 18:00, and am exhausted now

Let’s say you’re a man, and you discover that your children are not related to you. What would you assume? Chances are, it would destroy the relationship. What, however, if you discover the same thing, but you’re a woman? This is, in fact, possible. According to this article, a woman can give birth completely naturally to children who are not her own, without using IVF.

The lady in question was a ‘chimera’ - a fusion of two non-identical embryos, i.e. twins. Cells from one twin are dominant in the blood, but in the ovaries cells from each twin co-exist. DNA tests are taken from blood cells, so when a child is conceived, it does not have to use ‘her’ DNA, so it is not in this sense her child. Interesting. While we’re talking about this kind of thing, did you know it’s possible for a woman to have fraternal twins, each fathered by a different man? Or that it’s possible 1 in 8 people start life as a twin?

I’ve just found an interesting overview of some of these topics here.

HAHAHAHA. WE aliens have cracked into your puny earth intarweb and are now in the process of CRASHING all your computers! Why, you ask? Ask away, we’re aliens! We can’t understand you!! HAHAHAHA. What an amazing coincidence it was that we should have developed your programming languages, network technologies and operating system concepts on our own world! We rock! We’re aliens! HAHAHAHA. Your puny electronic condoms are puny pathetic a waste of energy totally useless against our might strength command of commincation and huge alien goodness!!! We are on our way now! Puny little second planet from big pants yellow shiner, YOU’RE ALL GOING TO DIE! We’re aliens! HAHAHAHA!!!

HAHAHAHA. WE aliens have cracked into your puny earth intarweb and are now in the process of CRASHING all your computers! Why, you ask? Ask away, we’re aliens! We can’t understand you!! HAHAHAHA. What an amazing coincidence it was that we should have developed your programming languages, network technologies and operating system concepts on our own world! We rock! We’re aliens! HAHAHAHA. Your puny electronic condoms are puny pathetic a waste of energy totally useless against our might strength command of commincation and huge alien goodness!!! We are on our way now! Puny little second planet from big pants yellow shiner, YOU’RE ALL GOING TO DIE! We’re aliens! HAHAHAHA!!!

HAHAHAHA. WE aliens have cracked into your puny earth intarweb and are now in the process of CRASHING all your computers! Why, you ask? Ask away, we’re aliens! We can’t understand you!! HAHAHAHA. What an amazing coincidence it was that we should have developed your programming languages, network technologies and operating system concepts on our own world! We rock! We’re aliens! HAHAHAHA. Your puny electronic condoms are puny pathetic a waste of energy totally useless against our might strength command of commincation and huge alien goodness!!! We are on our way now! Puny little second planet from big pants yellow shiner, YOU’RE ALL GOING TO DIE! We’re aliens! HAHAHAHA!!!

What in the name of Erich von Däniken is THIS?

Since getting my digital camera in May I’ve taken 2127 pictures, according to the sequential image numbers. At the moment they’re all sitting in date-named folders in the My Pictures directory, which isn’t overly conducive to browsing. At the weekend I discovered ACDSee Version 6. I’ve used version 4 for ages, as it has no equal in the speed at which it opens images, and had a sponsored mode. Version 6 introduces cataloguing, and it’s great It creates a database of all your images. Using this you can go through each one and set categories, ratings, captions and keywords, as well as being able to see all the EXIF data on the technical details of the photos. I’ve gone through all 2000 and assigned categories, so now if I want to see all photos of the dog, for example, I just click the ‘Daisy’ category and they all appear. I’ve created categories based on places, people and various others such as ‘amusing’, ‘work’, ‘arty’ etc. Sadly for the rest of you, this means I have easy access to photos I may otherwise forget about, such as the one on the right (sorry, Ben). There are also rudimentary editing features, though I’ve got Photoshop Elements for that, but the rotating feature works very well and very quickly, so I’ll probably use that rather than wait the age PE takes to load.

Sadly, it’s not a free program. I may have to pay for this one, as it’s looking very useful.

In other news, Lynsey now has a blog. I’ve added her to the “Friend’s Links” section for easy access.

My Mars course arrived today, and I have to say it looks excellent. My last course was revised last February, which seemed pretty impressive to me, but upon opening the new course book the first page has this picture. Bit new, then The course book is laid out in a similar style to the previous one, and the aforementioned book on the Beagle 2 is also of a decent quality (44 days to go until touchdown, by the way). There’s a large topographic map of Mars too. It could just as well be a large green/red jellyfish for the amount of insight I can currently garner from it, but that’s what the course is for

Thanks very much to everyone who’s read my story! I honestly didn’t know what to expect, and was pretty nervous when I uploaded it, but you’ve all been very kind It’s certainly encouraged me to re-draft my current story (which is again coming out too long), as I was getting somewhat despondent.

I installed the Google Deskbar over the weekend. It’s coming in pretty useful, particularly when combined with the ‘define:’ operator. Unfortunately my taskbar, being stuck on only one monitor atm, has hardly any space on it now, but hopefully that’ll be sorted soon.

Finally, my friend Nod shall henceforth be known as ‘the evil one’ for sending me the link to this game. I played it for an hour on sunday. Why? I have no idea. Got to level 12 though.