Valuable help

A US carrier battle group of five ships centered on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, and a Marine assault group of seven ships centered on the helicopter carrier Bonhomme Richard are heading for the Indian Ocean disaster area.

With a total of 37 helicopters between them and each ship capable of producing 90,000 gallons of fresh water each day their potential contribution to the relief effort will be invaluable.

I was surprised to discover that Indonesia is the largest Muslim country in the world with a population of 239 million four times greater than the population of the UK, and the world's fourth most populous country after China, India and the USA.

Map of Indonesia

Currently Listening to: Be True by Bruce Springsteen

Indian Ocean Tsunami

Here are a few links to Charities where you can make a donation, as it seems our governments pathetic efforts aren't going to stretch very far.

The Disasters Emergency Committee - is an umbrella group of UK aid organisations - including ActionAid, British Red Cross, Oxfam - working to provide clean water, food and shelter to thousands. To call from the UK dial 0870 60 60 900.
(I've just tried to donate using this site and the web interface is poor so it isn't clear if my transaction went through - I haven't had a confirmation email either.)

The United Nations World Food Programme - is seeking donations to feed victims of the earthquake.

Medecins Sans Frontieres - is sending aid workers to the region, focusing on medical care for survivors and displaced people after the rescue operations.

Islamic Relief - has also launched an appeal to provide medical supplies, tents and sanitation facilities for those affected.

The United Nations Children's Fund, Unicef - is working to meet the "urgent needs of hundreds of thousands of people" affected by the tsunami disaster.

The UN refugee agency, UNHCR - which has been helping victims of conflicts in Indonesia and Sri Lanka, is delivering relief supplies to tsunami survivors in both countries.

Save the Children - has already flown a plane out to Sri Lanka carrying plastic sheeting for temporary shelter, tents to run children's services from, and essentials such as clothing and cooking utensils.

Anti-poverty organisation Care International - has already provided food for thousands of affected people in Sri Lanka.

Cough up Tony

Apparently the UK Homeland Security Budget will be £2.1 billion in 2006 (this is the money the government uses to scare us into believing in their leadership), and the commitment so far in Tsunami aid is £15 million - before you reach for a calculator that's 0.7%.

Tony, you should be embarrassed.

22 Minutes

Christmas lasted just 22 minutes, which was much shorter than I had expected after all of the build up.

A film I watched on Christmas afternoon lasted much longer - well over two hours and it felt like four because it was so dull and slow. Some time should have been spent in the editing suite shortening it - dramatically.

How do you measure how long Christmas had taken?

A Sky+ box is the answer. I had paused my Christmas morning viewing - can't remember whether it was Soccer AM, or a program about the building of the Hoover Dam - to open my pressies. When I returned to my program I noticed it had been paused 22 minutes. So that was it - I'm led to believe even sex can lost longer than Christmas.

Incidentally one of my pressies is a book entitled "How to Spot a Complete Bastard by his Star Sign" - do you think someone is trying to tell me something.

The dull film was Paris, Texas, - friends had recommended it very enthusiastically one drunken evening, so trusting their judgment I gave it a try. I've recommended films myself I raved about High Fidelity to a friend who popped off to the local cinema to watch it and didn't enjoy it at all, I'm not sure she even got to the end without falling asleep.

By the way the book was a gift from my parents!

Currently listening to: Barely Legal by The Strokes

Seasons Greetings

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all my readers, of which, accordingly to my logs, there are very few, apart from search bots, who wont understand the sentiment of this message unless the have become sentient.

Currently listening to: Broken Stones by Paul Weller

Page Rank

Milt has been concerned that his blog isn't showing up on Google, so I suggested he needs some inbound links to improve his Page Rank. So here you go Milt.

Milt’s Muse
Confused
Crocodile Stuffing
Three Wise Men!
Stating the Obvious
Don’t Bonk a Brit

By the way, if you want to see the page rank of each web page that you view install this extension into your copy of FireFox.

Saturday Worship

Had to visit London on Friday to go out and get drunk with some clients - what a hardship!

Whilst there I decided to visit the new Apple store on Regents Street and worship at the altar of quality computing.

I've been an enthusiastic Macintosh user since my first Mac back in 1984. It ran at 8Mhz, had 128k of memory and a 400k floppy drive. Constant nagging of my boss eventually got it upgraded to a massive 1mb of RAM and dual 800k floppy drive. If memory serves me correctly I think this upgrade was £1,000!

I used it to run the production load for a continuous stationery company. All done in a linked Excel spreadsheets - Excel existed on the Mac a couple of years before it arrived on Windows, so to did Word and many, many graphics packages.

Back to the Apple store - very impressive, lots of space, lots of staff, lots of polished wood and LOTS of glass including a fantastic glass staircase - which is a bit unnerving when you first step on.

I'm kind of in the market for a new laptop, and was quite tempted as a result of being able to touch and feel, but the rumour mill suggests revisions to the PowerBook are due with a faster chip (as always) and larger cache and maybe even dual cores. So I think I'll wait for a while...

Seems people are waking up - finally

More good news on the web browser front. It seems this university would rather you didn't use Microsoft Internet Explorer. I wonder why!

Currently listensing to: Done by Deep Blue Something.

Price List

The price of a few items you might come across during your day:

Airbus A300 (for your weekend in Spain) £30 million
Jumbo Jet (for your trip to Oz or Disney) £120 million
Power station (for half a million homes) £300 million
Cross channel ferry (2,800 passengers) £115 million
Hospital (900 beds) £190 million
Supermarket £5-25 million
NHS new computer system £6,200 million

Yes, that is the correct number of zeros. Well apart from the zeroes who are dishing out this contract.

Somebody is pulling my plonker...

I have moved.

I have moved the blog!

It is now at Merls own place: http://blog.merls.co.uk/ therefore please amend your bookmark.

Thanks


Currently listening to: Don't Stop by Fleetwood Mac

If we're going to fight a war

It seems that Lycos have switched off their Make Love Not Spam system that was hitting back at the spammers, I guess they fear they could be accused of organising a DDOS - Distributed Denial of Services attack on the spammers web servers.

Although I can appreciate that a DDOS attack is essentially wrong, it was really satisfying to see the spammers taking it from behind for a change. If we are engaged in a war with spammers then surely we need to use the same weapons they are using - you wouldn't expect an army to sit there and let itself be shelled out of existence without firing back.

Hopefully, with the idea of hitting the spammer back in this way out in the open, some enterprising programmer will write some code to do what Lycos have done and distribute it "open source" on the net.

Imagine visiting www.shareware.com or www.versiontracker.com and being able to choose from 40 different screens savers that do to the spammers what they've been doing to us for years.

Screw the spamming bastards

Fancy getting back at the spammers who fill you in box with their junk email every day?

Lycos have developed a screen saver that hits the spammer's website slowing down their servers with all the traffic it generates and costing the spammer in extra bandwidth charges.

More on the story at the Beeb.

To download a copy of the screensaver go here - they even have a Mac version. Nice one guys.