Internet Under Surveillance - United Kingdom. Did you know that 50% of the UK population have internet access?

We are the google generation.

From The Spam Files

Dear Sir/Madam,

We owe your esteemed company to the web-site, knowing you are well-known trading company in food section. Our company has been engaged in the production of edible oil(peanut oil, rapeseeds oil etc...) for more than 15 years,ranking No.3 in production capacity in China.

Henan Xinghe Oil & Fat Co.,Ltd

Google-power tells me there is no Henan Xinghe Oil & Fat Co, but there is a Henan Xinghe Green Food Company. So what's the deal? They're not (surely, not) doing genuine marketing? Because I'm not in the oil business, as far as I know. WTF, as they say? (although not, clearly, in Cheadle).

(posted by Mike)

Friday night in us Country Pile. K is preparing a fish recipe from the marvellous Claudia Roden Italian cookery book which Sasha gave us a few weeks ago. He's chopping basil; I'm watching telly in the front room.

The calm is abruptly punctured by an extended string of the sort of Words which I am not about to inflict upon the residents of Cheadle. Delivered not with the noisy theatricality which normally accompanies his foul-mouthed cadenzas (some people might call this "showing off to get attention"), but with a kind of whispered, winded urgency. Proper swearing.

(Aside: maybe those of us who routinely pepper our daily discourse with "Language" have devalued its power to such an extent that, when we really need to swear, we have to resort to inventing new tones of voice.)

Scuttling into the kitchen, I find K doubled up in agony. Colour is visibly draining from his face, and heading straight for the tip of his finger. Sometimes, those Zwilling Henckels can be a wee bit too efficacious for comfort.

Between gasps, he forces out a request. Could I sift through the chopped basil, and remove any chunks of flesh which I might find?

Gives a whole new meaning to the term "finger food", doesn't it?

Ka-tish. I'm here all week.

(posted by Mike)

"I work as an IT consultant, mostly on the mainframe side, mostly for a well known car company." (see below)

Because, obviously, there are all these obscure little indie car companies out there, who never get the recognition?

We just do what we do, and if anybody else happens to like it, then that's a bonus. (*)

Told you I don't know jack about vroom-vrooms.

(*) Actually, that's Morgan, right?
[proudly rubs right forefinger back and forth across left lapel]

Belated welcome to Mike from Troubled Diva (his blog is down, I won't link). Would you like a cup of tea?

(posted by Mike)

I never introduced myself, did I? How rude.

My name is Mike. (In the Blogosphere, the M is mostly de-capitalised, due to lazy-fingeredness in comments boxes. So feel free to call me mike, if you prefer.) I have a weblog of my own, called troubled diva, which I shan't link to, as it's currently unavailable.

Born in Doncaster, brought up in North Nottinghamshire, schooled in Cambridge, degreed in Nottingham - where I live to this day with K, my partner of the past 19 years. (Except at weekends, which are spent in us Country Pile, a few miles north of Ashbourne in the Derbyshire Peak District.) I work as an IT consultant, mostly on the mainframe side, mostly for a well known car company. Which is ironic, as I don't drive, and have zero interest in all matters automotive. I like to pretend that this brings a certain useful objectivity to my work.

(I'm a class Lady Muck act in the passenger seat, though. My signature piece: the Sideways Headflick Of Haughty Disdain, when passing other cars on single-track lanes.)

By nature, I'm an under-achiever. My Comfort Zone is well-appointed, richly furnished, and enjoys a pleasant aspect at all times. In this respect, think of my weblog as the glass-topped ormolu coffee table in the drawing room, upon which a choice selection of Art Books has been faux-casually tossed. Think of me as reclining in front of it, turbanned and kaftanned, dry Martini in hand, wryly stirring my olive with a hand-blown Kostaboda swizzle-stick.

Except that, with the bloody bailiffs having repossessed the furniture and tossed me out into the street, I am now to be found reclining in front of Sasha's sleek, modernist coffee table, her Troubled Diva coffee mug in my hand, a borrowed sweater slung over my shoulders, making patently insincere offers to do the hoovering and cook dinner.

Now, how does the remote work? Does she have Sky Digital?

(posted by Mike)

...and no Post Titles! I am already finding this immensely liberating.

(I now have a boring question about how this affects RSS feeds, but I'm going to swallow it.)

(posted by Mike)

*looks down*

Oo-er, timestamps.
This is my coffee break, actually.

(posted by Mike)

So, yeah... while I'm temporarily homeless (thanks to the incompetence, spite and dodgy business practices of The Hosting Company From Hell), I'll be squatting here for a bit. My warmest thanks to Sasha for the invite.

While I'm here, I'll be abiding by House Rules. Short, snappy, frequent. Plus the occasional extended blather when I feel like it.

Oh, and since I know that Sasha's mum reads this, I'd better, like, mind my f***ing language.

Esther Dyson on weapons of mail destruction. Which is frankly how I feel: m-a-i-l--d-e-s-t-r-u-c-ti-o-n. Weep, I tell ya. Weep. There's no answer.

The crucial difference between the twentieth and twenty-first century is this: in the twentieth century women largely wore their clothes around their waist. In the twenty-first century it's around their hips. The rest is commentary.

I need to lose weight before I can even think of going on a diet.

* * *

Y'know, like when you tidy up before your cleaner comes? Or get a nose-job before going on a big date?

Who Are We?

We are the google generation. We are the people who can find things out. Anything. Watch us discover where you work and what you thought about Outlook 98 in a long forgotten newsgroup. More scarily, watch us find out your "fun and pleasure" MSN ID and see what chatrooms you go to. Watch us deconstruct the headers in your email. Watch us see who you're linked to, and who you hang out with, and what you think. We don't go to a meeting without seeking the holy google first.

We are the 192.com generation. We can find out where you live, if we want to. We can find out who your neighbours are, if we pay for premium service. Watch us see if you're registered on the electoral roll. Watch us multimap.com your address and see your local park.

We are the global-is-local generation: we loved upmystreet.com, and we can find out anything on scoot.co.uk and yell.com. Give us a couple of seconds, honest.

We are the mailinglist generation: if we don't know something, we know a mailing list that does.

We are the detail generation. We used to just know something vaguely: we read it in the paper once, we saw it on the news. Now we have a separate linklog of everything that interests us, and we can find it, like, in the nanosecond it took me to type "like". We don't have good memories - there's too much to know - but we have a lot of RAM.

We are the everything-is-published generation. We know that every little email we write, or comment on a blog, or anything at all is out there in a big way, in the big cache up in the sky, and we can't get it back. We're having our open sources lives in the open, and there aren't any secrets, any more.

We are speed, we are now, we are searching, we are finding.

Of course every watcher is also a watchee: except I don't live anywhere near a park. But once my information is out there, it's o-u-t-t-h-e-r-e.

Watch us and weep. You can't hide (but then neither can I). And you can't even run, now. Unless, of course, you're on some special running mailing list.

So I've got a googlewhack (just don't call me Danny-cashing-in-on-it-for-the-money):"nazi handbag". Cool, or what?

Barefoot FAQ #22.. because what you've always wanted is to look like you're wearing sandals, when in fact you're not. From the Society of Barefoot Living. Ingenious, eh? [via Z, my source of all things interesting and weird]

Call *That* Customer Service?

Here's what the (I imagine the soon-to-be-disappeared) receptionist in my optician said to me when I called up to order a three month supply of daily disposable contact lenses:

Her: You have to have an eye test before we can dispense lenses, we can't do it without a prescription. Those are the rules; otherwise something might happen
Me: Oh, OK
Her: When did you last have an eye test?
Me: I don't know - you're my optician, and I call up every three months to get new lenses. Do you have a record?
Her: Yes, it was two and a half years ago. We can't sell you lenses without a test
Me: But you've been doing it for 18 months - you've never mentioned that to me before
Her: Well, everything could look fine, but you could have an infection in your eye, and something terribly damaging could be happening without you even realising. If we sell you the lenses and you damage your eye, you could come back and sue us
Me: Fine, well, why don't I make an appointment (appointment duly made..) Out of interest, do you say that to everyone?
Her: What?
Me: That I should worry about my eyes because something tragic could be happening without me even realising
Her: No, well, it's just a worst-case scenario. We have to protect ourselves.

Time to look for a new optician?

The weather forecast for the next few days is showers, followed by baths.

Now is such a great time to go home, seeing as I don't "do" football. The office has been empty since 5pm, and I heard just heard an uproarious cheer, but then I am round the corner from the Swiss Centre, so it could have gone either way.

D'you reckon the tubes are emtpy? Hope so.

So I'm at day four of being-practically-locked-in-someone's office, and I can tell you, it doesn't suit me. It's bad for my skin.

No, really, it's bad for my skin, the airconditioning is playing havoc with my lenses, and when it doesn't work, it's shvitzing. I have taken to carrying a fan (old fashioned paper type) in my handbag, a hangover from my Singaporean days (look out for my new bestseller, Tales from Singapore).

The IT people don't like me because I'm a freelancer, so it's not worth fixing stuff for me. So, boring, I know, but because this is a regular client, I have an old email address from their old system, and a new email address they gave me on Monday. My old email address is in the address book, so everyone who emailed me for two days, it just went to the ether, and I spent all my time calling up people internally and saying "sorry to bother you, did you send me mail?" which is not a great way to start a project. Then I diagnose the problem, asked the IT bloked to forward old mail to new mail, and he sets it up with a typo, so it still doesn't work. I ask him again, he gets me a print out to show me the "user error". It takes me another day to persuade him the user error might be his.

Sheesh. This is work in the twentyfirst century. It's all about being nice to the people with the real power, because they decide how easy it is to do your job.

The project? It's great. I'm loving it. The commuting? I could live without.