Offmessage

Really interesting article on Security Focus about worms. The new vulnerabilities in Windows and Cisco kit announced last week leave us ready for a new spate of highly destructive worm action. I can’t wait! For God’s sake please please please patch your kit. Now. Please.

Steve Wozniak has had the same idea as my girlfriend! Claire’s company is doing location aware technology as is Wheels of Zeus. Great minds think alike and all that! There are differences - Claire’s uses RFID or 802.11 rather than a custom GPS tag - clearly woz has spent some time on the underlying tech and found it wanting. woz.com still looks pretty vapourware though - Pepik has a demo of customer tracking already up…

It would appear that I’m not the only one to have noticed the not inconsiderable talents of Channel 4’s Zora Suleman…

Making mornings bearable

No, seriously:

A new craze is sweeping through America’s paintballing fraternity - hunting nude women.

The hunters pay �3,000-a-day to pursue the naked targets across the desert before shooting and ‘mounting’ them.

http://www.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30200-12376169,00.html

It really probably isn’t a conspiracy theory, but it sure as hell looks like one… Dr David Kelly was apparently the MoD ‘mole’ that gave BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan the “45 minute” information that lead to the row between the BBC and the Government. He was pushed forward a few weeks ago, we suppose in a move to try and defuse the row from the Government’s side and make the BBC look daft. As a result of this Dr Kelly was asked to give evidence to the Select Committee investigation last Tuesday. He did, but he didn’t look comfortable doing it… Thursday he goes missing. And today he is found dead near his home.

Now… This really raises some issues. We have to assume that it was suicide (and I really am truly sorry if it wasn’t). If it was, why? We knew something fishy was going on, but now we really know that something fishy has been going on. Dr Kelly was (by all accounts I’ve read so far) a well respected man, happy in his lot. Clearly the events of the past weeks have upset him, but what was his role in all of this and how did he become so distressed that he ended up taking his own life? All very odd… Unless of course he fell on an MI5 bullet…

Just to lighten the mood, the first gag relating to this story I’ve seen…

Were you caught up in the hype surrounding White Teeth? Fair
enough, I was. I enjoyed that book. It was (as all the critics said) fresh, a new voice for
multicultural Britain, all those things. It dealt with the some of the same issues as the
hideously pompous and contrived Black Album in an entertaining way and it touched on many
others at the time. It was an East-is-East/Black Album/Miguel Street
for the 21st century, and it even adapted beautifully for TV. So… We all awaited Ms Smith’s
next novel with baited breath… In our heart of hearts we knew that White Teeth probably wasn’t
as good as it looked at the time, but it was her first book, and we’d bigged her up pretty big,
so we were more than willing to see what she could do second time around… And The Autograph
Man was what she did.

Alex Li-Tandem is a Jewish kid of half-British, half-Chinese descent with a very confusing
life. He’s an Autograph Man, buying and selling autographs of the rich and famous, and obsessed
by the holy grail of autograph hunters, one Kitty Alexander, an ageing film star. His social
life is a mixture of overtly Jewish childhood friends and weird drunken autograph friends. The
book begins with him coming down from a 3 day acid high which he can’t remember (one wonders
exactly what acid he’d been taking but I digress) but in which he appears to have crashed his
car, pissed off his girlfriend and friends, and forged a Kitty autograph. The rest of the book
is a chaotic run through the aftermath of these events.

I have to say that I really didn’t like this book. I didn’t hate it. It wasn’t too dense or
too clever or even too simplistic. It was just dull. I couldn’t give a monkeys about any of the
characters, half of them were really poorly formed and in the end I just didn’t understand the
point of the plot.

I actually worry about this reaction. I liked White Teeth. I know it probably won’t be a
classic in a few years, but it was the book of the year in 2000. Why then was I so bored by this
one?

Fundamentally the answer to that is, I’m afraid, that it’s shit. Oh well.

Apparently the Australians have discovered that masturbation cuts the risk of prostate cancer. Good news all round, although one does wonder if the Aussies were just looking for an excuse…

The story of M, the minotaur of Greek legend.
Turns out he didn’t get stomped by Theseus as we were originally told, but in fact paid him off and snuck off
into the world to live a new life. This debut novel by Steven Sherrill takes this twist to its conclusion and
finds M as a short order cook in a diner somewhere in the South East of the US 5,000 years on.

Lucky for M he can’t remember much of his past life, so the vague stirrings of long lost memories don’t
disturb him too much - nowadays he’s more bothered about skin care, finding clothes that fit and making sure
he doesn’t get in anyone’s way. Slowly he’s drifted to the margins of society yet again, skirting the main
stream and finding a place for himself amongst life’s flotsam and jetsam in trailer parks, scrap yards,
logging teams and out of town strips.

M is the quintessential outsider. He’s lived everywhere in the world at least once, yet he’s never
fully mastered any of the languages and has never found himself a home. The sense of loneliness, of
wanting to belong, is palpable. M has a genuine desire just to get along - something he’s never allowed
to do, even though both he and the people around him have long forgotten the legends that created him.

The sense of detail in this novel is fantastic - M’s life and actions are described in minute detail,
bringing M more and more to life as the book goes on. Given I’m a sucker for novels with this level of
detail and also for the intense magical realism of books like this and The Bear Comes Home you
can understand why I loved this book.

Not only do you believe in M, you really feel for him. Throughout the book Sherrill builds the depth
of the characters in parallel with a plot that while seeming to meander in fact consistently builds
tension to an unforeseen and ultimately heartwarming climax. All in all you find yourself dragged in
and dragged along by the story, by the detail, by the characters.

If I was to have any criticism for the book it would have to be that this is Sherrill’s first
novel, yet he’s been teaching creative writing for a long time. I only found this out after I’d
finished the book, and suddenly a few things snapped into place. Here, clearly, is a man who feels
forced to practice what he preaches, and I’m afraid that you can tell. Having said that, mind, if
any of his students turned out work half as good as this I’m sure they too would be successful.

This is a quality book - one I was sad to finish. Do yourselves two favours - buy this book direct from the publisher, and at the same
time sign up to their mailing list. Both
acts will bring you joy.

Ah, the Onion - again.

A nice cup of tea and a… drug fueled rampage