Representative Expression

April 23, 2008

Happy St. Georges Day

It's a sad fact that more people in England celebrate St. Patrick's Day and even Bonfire Night than they do St Georges Day.

I would also bet, most people don't even know who St. George was and when speaking to someone the other day, they didn't even know what a St. George Flag looked like.

So head on over to the St. Georges Day website and take part in their campaign!

So have a happy St. Georges Day...

God knows what we do to celebrate it though...
So I'm off for a cup of tea, some toasted crumpet and to watch a bit of Morris dancing.
Then I guess it'll be Guinness and a curry tonight (or should it be a kebab).

Category: General, UK, UK News

Posted by Chris Wright at 8:37 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

April 20, 2008

Chris Miller: His story, his words...

A few weeks back now, I made a rather large error in a post I made concerning a guy called Chris Miller and the problems he had with the airline Emirates .

Having emailed Chris a few times, I asked his permission to re-post his account to which he kindly agreed.

"Please think about this before you comment on any story published on a newspaper/tv media site:
Firstly can I start by saying that yes I am the person at the centre of the story. We had a perfect right to ask the airline for compensation based on the whole experience which you can see below. You should realise that going to the media will of course have ended any outside chance we had to get any compensation from the airline so we only went to the media because the attitude of Emirates was so appalling that we wanted to publicise how truly bad they were as a warning to other families.

Continue reading "Chris Miller: His story, his words..."

Category: General

Posted by Chris Wright at 2:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

April 15, 2008

Sad Money Grabbing Airline Company

Updated: 15th April 2008
This is a heavily edited version of the original post I made on the 6th April.
Usually, I don't completely edit a post, but then usually I don't write a post which completely slams someone when I've based the facts on something I read from one single source (in this case the BBC).

To be fair to the BBC, it was probably my interpretation of the article that was skewed in addition to the BBC not giving the 'complete' story.

Normally, this is just a personal blog full of "nothing" that no-one actually reads, it's just somewhere I can "let go", where I don't have to concentrate on as much as my commercial/business blogs.
Somehow I let my guard slip too far. I created this post in a few minutes and published it without due regard for the persons concerned. The person mentioned below has since contacted me and given me the full story. Now I know some of your will say, it's still only his side of the story, but the fact is, I made a rash post without the full facts, and that was entirely wrong for that reason alone.
I will publish his full story (with his approval) and I'll think you'll agree that (1) I was entirely wrong in judging him the way I did and (2) the story as presented by the British media did not give the full picture.

So first and foremost, before I make the edits, I offer my sincere apologies to Chris Miller and for any further problems this may have caused.

Continue reading "Sad Money Grabbing Airline Company"

Category: General, News, UK, UK News

Posted by Chris Wright at 11:10 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack (1)

Clueless about Malware (And probably life too)

Here is an excerpt from a post made to a group that helps/deals with Malware reports on web sites.

I can no longer visit this site through google. "Warning - visiting this web site may harm your computer!" This is just a lie and I think we all know why this site is being persecuted. Keep your personal opinions and the opinions of your investors out of it. The deeper I dig in to the StopBadware.org manifesto the more obtuse your definitions become. A couple clicks and suddenly "Site may harm your computer" turns in to "contains or links to badware or otherwise violates Google's software guidelines." I hope someone sues you silly.

It just goes to show the general level of ignorance out there from people that:

Don't understand the size of the problem with regard to the sheer number of infected web sites.
Don't understand the dangers to there own machines when visiting such sites.

Infected Web Sites

In one case alone last week, 10,000+ sites were hacked and malware placed onto the sites.

In another case, a leading Advertising Agency that supplies adverts to 1000's of sites, unwittingly supplied an advert that carried malware.

And more alarmingly, a well known Anti-Virus/Spyware/Trojan Software manufacturer had it's own website hacked and malware placed on the site.

When Google or StopBadware report that there is malware on the site, you can bet that there is a very high probability that there is (or was at some point). The false positive count is extremely low when you consider the number of sites that are listed.

Continue reading "Clueless about Malware (And probably life too)"

Category: General, Web Stuff, around the web

Posted by Chris Wright at 3:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

April 14, 2008

Am I in Bramley or Texas? | Hail Storm

The sky darkened and suddenly I was reminded of our 3 years in Texas. I looked at my wife and said, "I think there's a storm a coming". One of our friends was visiting and as we all looked out of the window, the first few hail stones began to drop.

Nothing ominous at first. In the last few weeks we've had a few hail/sleet showers, but looking at the sky you could tell this was going to be something a bit more substantial.

Sure enough, there was a crack of thunder immediately following by an increase in the size of the hail. Now it was starting to remind us of Texas. (Although I will add here, the hail today never approached the golf ball sized hail we once had in Fort Worth).

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