I’d like to think that I’m not particularly motivated by money in order to do my best at work. I’d like to think that working hard brings reward. I’d like to think that being conscientious, dedicated and enthusiastic would mean success.

But I’m realising that just isn’t the case. I’ve just had a long conversation with my younger brother, who, admittedly is smarter than me and has a maths degree from a good university, but, is fundamentally lazy. He is proud of this, so it’s not an insult to recognise it. He acknowledges that he doesn’t have to work particularly hard, and when he goes home, work ends.

Okay, so he does a job I probably wouldn’t do, working for a company I probably wouldn’t work for, on principle. But he is appreciated and paid handsomely for his contribution, such as it is. He doesn’t work in IT.

I’m doing something wrong somewhere, and I’m not sure I like the suspicion that is dawning on me. IT is complicated, right? Thats why you have to be quite smart to do it, right? Except not. Because those that manage IT mostly have a fear of it, just like the users. In fact, at my previous employer, the IT manager is probably much less IT-literate that the majority of the users. It made me sad.

When you don’t have the ability to measure the worth of the tasks that you are asking someone to perform, how do you know what to pay them for doing it? And how do you know when they’ve done it right? It’s a difficult position to be in.

I’ve lumbered myself with a project that would be, in the words of a contractor reviewing my initial design, ‘a job for a team of 20 with a budget of £1 million’. And that was only the first draft; each iteration gets more detailed and more complex as more problems are brought to me. The husband keeps asking me why I took it on. Because I could see they needed it. Because it’s my job. And because I want to make things better. Because I believe there’s a better way. Because I’ll never have an opportunity to do so much good again. If I can only make it to the end, it will make so many things possible.

There’s so much code to write that I’ve got my husband helping me three days a week, and still it’s daunting.

But when I look at what other people do for a similar salary, I can’t helping wondering if I’m just a bit crazy. If money per difficulty of job is a way of keeping score, I lose big-time. And to my baby brother! Damn, that smarts.

We spent intervals of the morning tracing back Phil’s illness as well as we could, as he has a GP appointment this afternoon and tis best to be prepared. It would appear, after much analysis, that it all stems back to the appearance of Random Cat (aka The Stripy). There was certainly a lot of sneezing in the early days, but it seemed that Phil got accustomed to the cat and settled down.
Phil went to the ENT unit at the Royal Berkshire last Monday to have a buildup of earwax removed from his ear. The gentleman performing the task mentioned that there was evidence of a severe allergic reaction and he was wondering how Phil put up with it. So it seems likely that our stripy friend is to blame.
I’m not sure what we will do about this as The Stripy is so bonded to Phil that it would be heartbreaking to separate them, and I’d miss the tabby turnip. He’s such a loving, docile, timid, trusting, fearful bundle of silliness that it’s hard not to adore him. But Phil is in a terrible state and must get better.
We will have to work ultra-hard to keep the house spotless and vacuum the carpets and furniture every day. Possibly an ioniser may help too.
I suspect the hardest part will be trying to tell The Stripy that he can no longer snuzzle on the bed every night. He’s not going to understand that. Not that he understands very much anyway.

I discovered yesterday that some random person is claiming to have ‘completed’ a certain classified ads site.  He worked there for three months at the most, and I know for a fact that it wasn’t him developing the site anyway.

I found myself a tad angered at this, not necessarily on behalf of the classified ads site - they are too apathetic to do anything about it - but because there is no realistic way of preventing this blatant lie from existing.

I have quite a well-developed ‘offense against rightness’ sensitivity, and it agitates me no end to discover that people lie bare-facedly and unashamedly. Admittedly, the Internet makes it very easy to do this in a quasi-anonymous way and not have to face the people you are lying to, but there should be *something* done to defend truth and integrity as valuable character traits. It should most emphatically *not* be rewarding to be a weasel.

Full of righteous rage, I was all set to start up a new blog for outing blatant lies like this, but Phil pointed out, admittedly correctly, that I would, as they say in the vernacular, ‘get my arse sued off’. I could do with less arse, but I need to hold onto the pennies for that house on Mull.. So it stands uncontested, and it riles me.

What would be a more constructive (and less legally risky) way of Putting The World To Rights? People shouldn’t be able to get away with blatant lies like this.

This guy is going to use that ‘achievement’ to blag his way into yet another job where he can provide miniscule input but have another site to put on his portfolio page, repeat ad nauseum.

He’s the kind of person that gives ‘IT people’ a bad name - overstating achievements and underperforming. I remember when you used to have to have some kind of talent to work in IT. Now they let me do it. No, seriously, it used to be a skilled job. Now you just have to know the right words and claim other people’s work and you can get paid silly money as the people employing you haven’t a clue.

The IT infrastructure of just about everywhere is degrading at a frightening rate as we’re all in the hands of people who got ‘into IT’ because it was an easy way to make money as no-one knew if you were making it all up or not.

Large government IT projects are in the hands of muppets (no offense, my puppety friends) because the majority of people don’t understand technical things and are now in charge of them.

Oh it’s all doom, and it’s all caused by bloody liars.

I don’t often feel obliged to comment on the news, or highlight a particular item, but this article about police overreaction made me want to scream.

“Ray Markham said footballs had been flying into his garden for years but when one smashed into his greenhouse last month he refused to return it.

The 68-year-old, who lives next to a policeman in Cubbington, said he was then arrested by four Warwickshire Police officers for theft of the ball.”

Legally the man was probably on shaky ground, for refusing to return the ball. By demonstrating intent to permanently deprive, I guess it was technically stealing. (I sure wish I’d known this as a kid - would’ve saved me a fortune!) I would argue though, that breaking his greenhouse was criminal damage and the ball was evidence. The fact that the ball had been kicked into his garden several times previously showed a certain recklessness as to whether damage to Mr Markham’s property might occur.

Regardless of the legal aspects of this, which I suspect can be argued either way by lawyers, the fact remains that a moral wrong has been committed here. If someone accidentally kicked something through my window and broke it, I would have to cheerfully thank them for doing so and return the item that was accidentally launched through my window. I don’t think so!

As a child, I had a very clear idea that if I broke something, I would have to pay for the damage to be fixed, not go and demand the ball back! Ye gods, what chutzpah that would have demanded!

This example of police heavy-handedness, and, dare I say it, misuse of police time - which is, I believe, an offence in itself, has not endeared the Police to me.

This story would have been equally of note, however, had the neighbour not been a Police officer and simply been an ordinary citizen who called the Police. I suspect though that an ordinary citizen would have been ignored, and not received the attention of four Police officers.

I wish more than anything that I hadn’t tried to take Random Cat to the vet. He escaped from the cat box in the car park, and is now lost and alone in a strange town. Words cannot describe how awful I feel. He’s such a timid cat that even if anyone sees him, he won’t let them near. We have been scouring around the area for the last two hours. The very worst thing is that we didn’t know for sure if he was a stray or not, so I may have just lost someone’s cat.

I wish life came with an ‘undo’ button.

Today, along with most people with email addresses, I received yet another phishing email. It wasn’t a particularly fancy looking email, and it was purportedly from a bank that I don’t even bank with. That’s reassuring in a way, because if I receive spookily targetted phishing emails, I will start to worry. A lot.

It makes me very angry that the banks of this world sit back and let this happen. For example, most of the content of this phishing site was linked directly from the real bank site. Why on earth do the bank sites not validate their referrers? The javascript and stylesheets were both links to the secure site that is actually run by the bank. The banks are making it easy.
Now, what I know and understand about computer security could be written on a whisker, but looking at my webserver logs, my javascript files and css files get called with a referrer of the page that requested them. Surely the banking server could do a simple ‘is this called by me’ thing before serving up the javascript etc?

Okay, so you can reauthor Javascript and CSS, but that involves more of an effort than simply linking them in. Plus, if you host your own javascript/css, you are no longer linking to a nice https site and getting the benefit of the padlock appearing on your own phishy site. Not that it is difficult for scammers to get a valid SSL cert these days..
There are probably darned good reasons why banks don’t do this - I admit I don’t know anything about security. But it angers me that these phishing sites are allowed to piggyback off genuine sites in order to steal money/information.

This particular site actually labels the images shown with the stolen customer details, so the bank will have an exact record in its server logs of the people that were scammed. Which just shows how confident the phishers are that the banks can do nothing to stop it.
It’s all very sophisticated, and all very scary. I feel genuinely sorry for the people that do fall for this evil trick, but hopefully there is enough publicity about Bad People, that even the terminally stupid might think twice before clicking on random links.

I shudder to think what this site would have done to my poor (Windows) computer, had I opened it in a web browser, instead of just inspecting the html - there were some Very Scary Things in it.

From: Kathy Bragg [mailto:kathy@purplekitten.co.uk]
Sent: 05 February 2006 11:37
To: ‘webmaster@********* - better now?’
Subject: From purplekitten.co.uk
Importance: High

Hi *,

Whilst I appreciate your interest in the photographs of my husband, I would appreciate it if you would cease your DoS on my webserver. Your spider is requesting the photographs so fast that our DSL connection is being overwhelmed, resulting in a severe degradation of our service.

You might not have noticed but your requests are now being met with a 403, and will continue to do so, so that we remain connected to the internet. Yes, it was that bad.

I have no objections to people looking at my site, that is what it is there for. But I do object when we get knocked off the internet because some thoughtless spider is downloaded every single picture with barely a space for breath.

I’m sure you understand our point of view on this matter, as you are a Network Manager. I’m sure you wouldn’t like the same thing to be happening to your network.

Please cease and desist this inconsiderate spidering of my site.

Many thanks

Kathy Bragg
Webmistress of purplekitten.co.uk

Sample log provided below:
*.*.*.*- - [05/Feb/2006:11:31:30 +0000] “GET /pictures/phil/2004-06-15%20029.AVI HTTP/1.1″ 403 351 “http://www.purplekitten.co.uk/pictures/phil/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98)”
*.*.*.*- - [05/Feb/2006:11:31:31 +0000] “GET /pictures/phil/2004-06-15%20030.AVI HTTP/1.1″ 403 351 “http://www.purplekitten.co.uk/pictures/phil/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98)”
*.*.*.*- - [05/Feb/2006:11:31:31 +0000] “GET /pictures/phil/imgp0238.jpg HTTP/1.1″ 403 345 “http://www.purplekitten.co.uk/pictures/phil/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98)”
*.*.*.*- - [05/Feb/2006:11:31:32 +0000] “GET /pictures/phil/imgp0239.jpg HTTP/1.1″ 403 345 “http://www.purplekitten.co.uk/pictures/phil/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows 98)”

For reasons that escape me, a Floridian teenager created a myspace account and used my gmail address to do so.

Attempts to get her to rectify this have so far failed. After I grew exasperated and defaced her journal (only mildly, I hasten to add) and left a blog post for her expressing my dissatisfaction, she attempted to change the email address used by the account.

Sure enough, I got yet another email from myspace, this time telling me that I needed to confirm the email address. Unfortunately, when I did so, it told me it was assigned to another user’s account. Gah. By this time, my gmail inbox is literally brimming with the foul excrement of emo teenagerhood.

So, I reasoned thusly: we need another email address here, her AOL (says it all really) address is unsuitable, my email address is MINE, so, I merrily signed her up with a new hotmail address.

Actually I’m reluctant to let this address go..

I’ve left her a blog post to tell her what her new email address is (using the alarmingly-named ‘post new blog’ control), but seeing as myspace uses your email address to log in with…I guess I had better email her aol account as well.

Let this be an end to it, I cry.

For posterity, the (hopefully) final myspace blog post is here

Edit: my inbox in case anyone thinks this may have been extreme

This morning, at around 04:30, I woke up. The room span, my eyes wouldn’t hold still and I couldn’t focus on anything. I felt nauseous. Every slight movement of my head caused me to vomit.

As you can probably imagine, this was pretty terrifying, as I’d never experienced anything like it (when sober). In a panic, I rang NHS direct, as I didn’t want to disturb the local GP unless I needed to. The nurse I spoke to was fantastic. She calmed me down and asked me questions to try and determine what was wrong with the hyperventilating, panicking, croaky female on the other end of her line. At one point she asked me if I had any neck stiffness, and of course I wiggled my neck to test this, and promptly threw up at her. But she was great, and I need to remember to write and tell NHS direct this, as they probably don’t get nearly enough thanks for the job they do.

Anyway, the local GP rang me, and told me that I had vertigo, and that I probably should stay very still for the rest of the day. Given that the slightest movement made me vomit violently, I agreed. Except that I woke up again at about 9am, and could move. So, I went to work.

I think I’m okay now, still a bit dizzy and spinny, and pretty much haven’t left the sofa since I got home, except to make the philb some honey and lemon for his cold.

I shall go to bed now, with all paws crossed that it doesn’t happen again.

How does your cat wake you up? Assuming you have one, of course.

The Mogret has many tactics for awakening us; they vary in intensity and ignorability. Mostly she will start out with the typical greeting blorp, to let us know she has decided that it is Morning. If we fail to respond to this with the required action i.e. leaping out of bed at once to feed her and open the cat flap, she will progress to the next level. This usually involves some sort of physical violence. She punches, she pamples, she divebombs.

If this brute-force approach doesn’t work, it is time for the claws to come into play. Unfortunately she has learned about Under the Duvet, and the fact that a artfully-aimed swipe at the end of the bed will probably result in all sorts of interesting reactions from the taller of the two humans. How grateful I am to be short!

Sometimes, having attempted violence upon us with no results, she will then divert from shredding humans to shredding paper. She will search the house for paper or cardboard, bring it into the bedroom, and shred it loudly. She knows this will seldom fail to provoke a reaction, as one can never be sure exactly what it is that she has chosen to destroy.

If this is ignored, she will start on the non-feet end of the bed and attempt violence on arms or any other available flesh. Such was the impressive reaction she got this morning to a stealth attack on phil, that I fear we have taught her a new trick. Basically, she attempted to shred him, and he leapt upwards, creating enough of a gap under the duvet for an obstinate cat to gain entry. So she did, and sat under the duvet, staring at him.

Unfortunately, at this point he had decided to get up as the tea-indicator was flashing. I do hope there was enough time between the attack and the getting out of bed, for a connection not to have been made in the little cat-brain, but I doubt it.

I do worry that sooner or later she will learn the ultimate way of getting phil out of bed: making tea in the next room, so the smell will set off the tea-indicator and therefore cause the self-launch program to initiate. I do hope she can’t read this.