News

Most people know I’m a big rugby fan… My father-in-law sent me this today, it surely has to be one of the best tries ever?

New Yorkers (and visitors to the area who had the foresight to carry things around that irritate them!) have said goodbye to their bad memories from 2009 in a public shredding ceremony in Times Square.

photo credit: Ben Brown

Items that got shredded included:

• Letters from ex-lovers,
• Photos of ex-lovers,
• Redundancy letters,
• and newspaper clippings of bad days for people’s favourite sports teams!

This is the third event of it’s kind!

One “shredder” placed a piece of paper into the shredder that simply said “Writer’s Block” – she hopes to write a musical this year.

For items that could not be shredded, the Times Square Alliance were most helpful in providing a sledgehammer and a large waste-container.

What would we have in the UK, maybe the “Pointless Kitchen Gadgets Destruction Day?” – Let me know in the comments!

I’ve recommended the TV show to a few people now – so I thought I’d drop a blog post about it up here!

There have only been two episodes so far (Wednesday BBC2), but we’ve really enjoyed them and I’ve just found out they do a book…

Two top chefs Allegra McEvedy and Paul Merret have devised the Economy Gastronomy system to aid people in slashing their food bills (never a bad thing in a recession!), whilst eating better than they ever have before!

This covers people who don’t know how to cook, to those that do and don’t have time! Well worth a watch and I suspect the book is just as good.

See the iPlayer here for Episode 1

What did you do while Twitter was out for two hours?
Switch to Facebook?
Was your profile available there?
No?
My goodness Social Media froze and all apparently for one blogger!

An orchestrated attack yesterday on several sites caused a two hour blackout on Twitter and degraded service on Facebook. Even Google was hit, but defended itself and is now assisting other companies to investigate the attack.

It now appears that all of this was to annoy one user, a pro-Georgian activist blogger known as Cyxymu, Cyxymu has previously been critical of the Russian government over the war in the South Ossetia region and their handling of it.

A botnet (networks of home and business computers which have been infected ready to launch such an attack) was directed to request the bloggers profile on multiple sites where he has profiles/a presence. The requests were made so quickly that the sites came to their knees, this is know as a DOS (Denial of Service) attack.

Now whilst this might all sounds like a bunch of IT freaks trying to annoy each other (with huge consequences) to most people, this is where it gets a bit “Cold War” like. The blogger himself blamed Russia in an interview with the Guardian newspaper:

“Maybe it was carried out by ordinary hackers but I’m certain the order came from the Russian government”

So should we be prepared for more outages like this when somebody annoys someone else? Probably, Iis the best answer…

During that time you’ll have to find something to do when all your Social Media platforms grind to a halt… Some Twitter users have posted what they did here, my personal favourites include:

• ForeignRobot #whentwitterwasdown I didn’t know who to tell about the little, insignificant events in my life. It was tragic. (Seriously.)
• JustinSherwood #whentwitterwasdown I went to the beach and there was no one to tweet about it.
• Akiti_littles #whentwitterwasdown i wanted to find the hacker n deal with him myself!
• ElizaBatten #whentwitterwasdown i watched the news all day just to get updates on when it will come back up.. lol
• classic_lbd #whentwitterwasdown

  I sat here and refreshed the page for three hours.

• elefantjon #whentwitterwasdown i thought it was the apocalypse
• SaintEmily #whentwitterwasdown I was shouting at my laptop and decided to use facebook like everyone else causing that to break too

There’s thousands of things people did… What would you do if your favourite website went down?

Personally for me it’s the BBC News first thing in the morning with coffee, if that went down – well… erm… I’d drink my coffee and have to start reading my inbox How about you?

As someone who has had Testicular Cancer I always advise people to check them… And one of the very first posts I made on this blog a couple of years ago was a video that should motivate all men to check them!

Unfortunately the video has moved around a lot, and links have broken etc. But I spotted it today on YouTube so thought I’d repost!

I have more forgetful moments these days, “a sign of age” I joke as my wife extracts yet another white hair from my head (I keep telling her I’m going to go grey gracefully like George Clooney but she’s having none of it!).

Now in a new study by Virginia University it’s announced that it’s all downhill from 27 (and there was me hoping it was plain sailing until I was 40!). So clearly I’m past it already – this news gives me more ammunition for not taking part in my wife’s gardening or decorating schemes I think!

Professor Timothy Salthouse has found that reasoning, speed of thought and spatial visualisation all decline in your late 20′s, fortunately my wife is only 48 hours younger than me so won’t get the chance to wind me up too much about my downhill struggle!

On the other hand my sister should worry – she’s at her mental peak right now..

buy Nothing Like the Holidays

photo credit: Mr.Thomas