Where shall I begin to tell the story

More than one person's eyes have begun to glaze over as I started to tell them the story of how the relatively simple task of changing internet providers (rofl) dragged on for over ten days (nearly a fortnight in fact), then Sunday a phone call from India to say that the internet would be being connected on Monday.

Having destroyed contact with our previous provider - Big Pond- it was high time, and we were all getting a little tetchy. Sure enough yesterday someone rang at 12.20 p.m. to say that internet would happen soon.

We were out for three hours, but not surprised to see that there was a still a red light on the modem ...indicating that there "was a birth certainly"...but not quite there yet.

I optimistically thought it would simply (again rofl) be a matter of putting in new accounts and new passwords. At 12.25 a.m. (two phone calls to India later) I decided that I couldn't do this all; night...and grabbed my eye mask and went to bed. OOOh my head ached..and I slept poorly.

Finally at 5.30 a.m. I risked getting up, and rang India again. This time Said fixed the problem in 10 minutes. It is both a question of what and who you know obviously.

This all begs the question of why this didn't take 10 minutes 24 hours, or 7 days ago!

Oh you look a bit bored!!!

Facing the Book

The other day there was a special Facebook  event, called a "Day without Facebook".
It is an interesting concept, what is of particular interest to me is that our youngest daughter was the one who was keenest on it. She explained to me the reasons for ti as she had discovered them...that Facebook collects information about its users, that it then uses it to target advertise.....so she will always have lots of things about High School Musical and the Jonas Bros. To my mind this is not so invidious but she understood something of its significance...what we don't know can in fact be rather suspicious, may in fact be malicious and is almost certainly something more than we bargained for.
I rather think this is the nature of the world we live in, and has ever been so, it is called propaganda. It is not necessarily a bad thing. But we are right to be suspicious.
Dear old S did, I think, have a day without Facebook,  she spent it on My Space instead!

Blogged with the Flock Browser

good, better, best

Ruth Gledhill has a naughty article with a little web poll...Who is the better Christian? McCain, Obama, Palin or Biden
I have mused before (here) about the inadequacy of phone in and online polls since they are uncontrolled exercises and there is no way of stopping interested parties from trying to skew the results, and when we neutralise them by making them into percentages they all look the same (50% of 2500 is 1250, but 50% of 12 is 6...there is a lot of difference between over 1000 people who bother to ring in and a handful... you know lies, lies and damn statistics)
So the issue might not be...are the results meaningful? But is the question meaningful?
I indeed rankled, because there is much in Christian teaching that goes against this sort of religious self-promotion (you know the first shall be last), and some of Ruth's commentators rightly asked what does better mean. The usual suspects immediately jump on to the pro-life issues, but I want to hear what they say about caring for the poor and the broken, about the sick and the enslaved...it seems to me that there is more of Jesus' teaching about this than about anything else.
Of course it is an amusing bit of fluff!

What price election freedom?

We were struck when we visited the UK earlier this year about he number of security cameras you see [watchers of The Bill will observe that almost every crime can be solved by finding the CCTV (closed circuit TV?) footage which seems to cover 99.9% of the country...even out in rural areas we noticed!]
The security against terrorism issues is a big attention grabber if not necessarily a vote winner (which it may be)
So it was not a surprise to see the re-emergence of the 'dob your neighbour in' adverts last night.I imagine we will see them increasingly between now and election day. The incumbent Government are clearly under the (mis?) apprehension that Australia feels more secure with wee Johnny than with Mandarin speaking Kev.
The Washington Post has a couple of interesting security posts. One which reveals how easily telcoms can 'cooperate' to give access to to the email system...(I really wonder if we would even begin to tolerate interference with snail mail in the same way) (see here)
The other, (here) a perhaps darker story, about the extent of Yahoo's cooperation with the Chinese government with regard to access to internet records.
Eric Blair (here) was perhaps thirty years out with his timing for the absolute intrusion of the State into the very fabric of everyone's lives. But we are well and truly within the era now.

And a reminder that in his literature the plain truth as spoken by our masters is almost the reverse of the real truth. I think we are living in that era now!