Firstly there was a seemingly throwaway comment that made me smile on What The Papers Say about the fact that Obama lost thousands of his Twitter followers: “Talk about hitting the President where it will hurt him the least”.

It’s one of the 1st times I have heard somebody in the media actually admit that a whole bunch of virtual Twitter followers are utterly meaningless – it’s almost a brave statement from a journalist who relies on people reading his stuff. But does anyone really care about the drivel people post on Twitter? I’ll leave that conclusion to you.

The other thing I noticed today was that Firefox was using nearly 4GB of memory on my Laptop. That is more crap stored in my working memory than we had long term disk space for the entire University of Leeds in the 1980′s – And I don’t think it’s like we really stored much less useful data.

I wonder how much storage space, air-conditioning, manufacturing, working-electricity etc is being used simply to keep the gazillions of gigabytes of disk farms going just so the worthless opinions about Lady Gaga and Amy Winehouse of a billion Internet users can be preserved for ever more.

I shall shut up now, and not add any more to it.

Of all the people in the world unlikely to lose faith in Britain I would have put myself pretty high on the list; somewhere between Churchill and Thatcher maybe. So why do I want to leave? People keep asking me this so I started thinking of the reasons myself.

It’s not been a sudden decision although the last 10 years has hurried it a lot. So let’s think of some utterly random and disordered thoughts. This will be long, it will ramble, it will be rather typical of my weblog postings. As ever, you don’t have to read it. I am not forcing you to.

I remember cameras being one of the first things that pissed me off. When I was being trained in Surveillance one of the things we had to do was to start to be aware of who was watching us. I learned to look for cameras; this was a mistake. In 2006 there were over 4.2 million surveillance cameras in Britain, that was one for every 14 people. There are no statistics for the current number, but it has certainly increased. A report by Privacy International says that Britain is the worst Western Democracy at protecting individual privacy, in fact, in the world the only two countries worse than Britain are Malaysia and China. The cameras and other means of surveillance are there for various reasons including the often overlooked “US Security Operations”- Yup, the US is monitoring Britain on our own soil. Of course, whilst we are at this I was stopped and searched under the prevention of terrorism act a couple of years ago for taking photographs of Menwith Hill, a US surveillance station in the North of England which used to be a Cold War listening post and now spies on Europe for US commercial means. I should point out that taking photos of this place is not hard, it is visible from miles away, it is enormous and has been growing at a vast rate since the end of the Cold War when everybody assumed it would simply be closed.

They are not the only cameras I have issues with. Speed cameras are now a growing parasite on our roads. These things are operated by local police forces ostensibly as a safety measure but that myth has been debunked so many times that everybody knows it’s not true at all. They don’t add any safety, research shows that they actually have a tendency to make people speed more anyway and all they do is to make the police a fortune in fines. I have heard a theory that the Speed Camera is the single largest thing which has put a barrier between the police and the people in modern Britian. They make everybody a criminal, they make a majority of people hate and distrust the police and they make people subconsciously less willing to co-operate with a police force that seems to concentrate more on getting money from motorists than actually dealing with any crime at all. Of course, the modern British police force seems to be able to get away with shooting an unarmed man 8 times with no comeback on them so maybe it is good that we don’t trust them any more.

So I don’t trust the police… What about the rest of the authorities who run these surveillance operations. New legislation launched under the umbrella of making us safer from terrorists (of which much more later) is now being used by local authorities to spy on the general public for absolutely non terrorist activities. This came to light when Dorset Council admitted to spending more than 2 weeks spying on a family they suspected of lying on a school application form. The new surveillance powers granted by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 give local authorities access to things such as phone records, email information and monitor what web sites somebody is visiting as well as the right to mount on-the-ground physical surveillance against them. Needless to say, this act wasn’t ever created to allow this but what the hell, hey?

All of this makes the fact I do actually trust the British Security Services somewhat a moot point. I just thought since I was ranting about the misuse of such powers I’d actually carry on my fairly consistent defence of that lot. I also still have some respect for the higher judges, unfortunately this isn’t true of the lower court rabble.

Of course, the 2-type legal system is something else that annoys me although this has always been a problem so I can’t claim it to be any particular reason that I am leaving. We have, however, embraced the EU human rights convention and part of this is the right to a fair trial and the assumption that you are innocent until proven guilty. The British Criminal court system does operate on this assumption but the Civil Courts certainly don’t. Anybody can take somebody to Civil Court and it’s up to you to prove that you are innocent. In any case, the chances are you will end up paying a fortune in costs, win or lose.

The monarchy is one of the things often cited as a reason that Britain is so great. The relationship between the Crown and Government is a complicated one and much of it is governed by convention rather than actual laws. Maybe I am made more naive because I have more knowledge of how these conventions work than most but one of the things I always thought would happen when the government started to behave tyrannically and went against the will of the people in an overwhelming way (such as entering into an illegal war) was that the Crown would step in and do something about it. I would think that this is not only the right, but the very raison d’etre of the Queen. This is why we pay for them to live a life of opulence and luxury. When Blair invaded Iraq in 2003 (an act which we now know was based on lies to Parliament) an overwhelming majority of the British people opposed this blatantly illegal act and yet the Queen still allowed her seal to be used to send her armed forces to invade another country. This shouldn’t happen, this shouldn’t happen on so many levels. Of course, to add insult to injury on this matter, Tony Blair has never been taken to account for his various lies and his various crimes. He’s happily swanning around the world making a fortune on the lecture circuit without a care in the world. There are lots of groups trying to have him called to account but frankly, they seem to be pathetic and somewhat shit. If that’s all there is then he doesn’t have much to worry about at all.

Do I even need to talk about the fact that Parliament has now allowed the police to hold terror suspects for 42 days, without charge. The Magna Carta? The Bill of Rights? May as well just sell them all to Americans as pretty things to go into picture frames. Oh sorry, I forgot we already did that. Talking of the Magna Carta I note that the government is still trying to push ahead with its id card scheme. Europeans and Americans don’t really understand my objection to this but it’s quite important in that it does remove a very basic right given to us in the Magna Carta all those hundreds of years ago. We still have a presumption of innocence, we still have the right to be nameless and identyless in general life. If the police want to know who we are, they have to show good reason. An identity card will lose our right to anonymity, it will shift the power slightly further towards a state where we have to show our right to be here rather than the state assuming that right by default. I am ignoring the fact that as soon as we do get an identity card, the security will be cracked, the Russian Mafia will be selling fake ones for a few thousand a piece and the government will lose all the details on a train to Waterloo or post them on a DVD to somebody. We know this will happen, it’s just how these things go. I would start talking about this all being more steps towards Corpus Juris at this point but I don’t want to sound like a nutter from the UK Independence Party, I love Europe still though I am still not sure Britain should be part of it. I just have very different reasons for my beliefs than they do.

And now, we couldn’t avoid it could we. The climate of fear.

I don’t kid myself that I am much more clever than the average Brit and the only advantage I can think of is that my post graduation background was in social psychology with my PhD being in controlling people. Don’t get me wrong, I am as susceptible to control as anybody, I go out and buy Fox’s biscuits every time that damned panda on my TV tells me to. I am an advertisers dream; I fall for all the tricks and it’s made worse by the fact that I know it too. The thing is, I think that deep down most people know they are being manipulated and like me they don’t much care as long as it doesn’t play too much havock with their lives. Unfortunately, the latest big lies seem to be playing havock with mine, and everybody elses.

That odd chap Joseph Goebbels once wrote:

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

And so we come to The War On Terror. My government tells me that we are living in very dangerous times and that my personal rights and liberties should be forfeit little by little to help them fight it.

Bollocks.

My government tells me that this is the most dangerous time ever and my very life and existence and freedom is at stake through the threat of Terrorism.

Bollocks to the first bit. I will concede to the last bit – But the threat is not from Terrorists.

My government tells me that invading Afghanistan and Iraq is something they had to do because we are at war with Terrorists.

What the fuck?

I started to come of political awareness in the early 80′s. I am product of that time. At that time and for the next decade or so, there were lots of bombs all over Britain, planted by the IRA and paid for by the Americans. Do Americans know that as short a time ago as 1996, the IRA bombed England’s biggest skyscrapers? Do most people outside this country know that almost every day in London there were bomb scares, train, bus and tube disruptions and general upheaval because of bombs or the threat of bombs. I don’t know how many people lost their lives through IRA bombs, I don’t know how many bombs there were. The reported numbers almost certainly don’t match the reality because the government and the press rather sensibly co-operated to keep a lot of the incidents quiet so as not to give publicity to terrorists. That is how a country with a lot of experience of terrorists works, they realise that terrorism feeds off publicity and taking that away from them helps to damage its impact. Our new enemy (which apparently now has a name, it is militant Islam) has, in the last few years made what amounts to a pathetically small impact on the country in terms of actual bombs and lives lost and yet we never hear anything else! Liberties are lost every month as we do more and more to fight this new thing, Terrorism. Have I missed something here? New thing? Terrorists in Britain? Get real!

In the early 80′s I didn’t think we’d make it to the year 2000 and I very much doubt I was alone. We were having leaflets posted through the door of every house in the country telling us how to survive in the aftermath of a Nuclear War and it was a time when films like When The Wind Blows and Threads were able to change British public opinion on the whole nuclear warfare issue. We slowly started to realise that we probably wouldn’t survive global nuclear war but these still seemed to be a greater than 50% chance that it would happen. My government tell me that I am at greater risk now from a bunch of disorganised terrorists?

HA FUCKING HA!

The weird thing is that like Goebbels great lies, it doesn’t seem to be global. It seems to be rather restricted to Britain and the USA. Its an excuse to go to war to further commercial interests abroad, it’s an excuse to step closer to that Governmental Holy Grail, a total and legal control of the people.  The two are Hand in hand, this is a dangerous situation for us to be in and I don’t like it. This “war” is costing us hundreds of billions of pounds and although I realise it’s cliche to count this in how many hospitals we could have built with the money it is worth pointing out that Britain’s filthy hospitals and the superbug epidemic are causing far far more deaths in this country than any terrorist activity ever will.

The other great lie is to do with Global Warming. Don’t switch off, don’t sneer at me. I am not saying that Global Warming is a lie, it’s not. There are differences of opinion as to what is causing Global Warming and I doubt you agree with me but even so, Global Warming has become a bandwagon to impose even more taxes and controls on the people and as I have ranted about in the past; the people it is hurting most are the poor. I foresee more and more happening in the name of global warming; I foresee more and more silly laws and restrictions and less and less useful action. Global warming will be used as an excuse to sell more and more protected land to companies to exploit and sell more and more overpriced houses to people. The poor will stay in the lowland floodable areas and will end up uninsurable and like New Orleans but on a grander scale we’ll probably end up with refugees in Mainland Britain in a decade or two. Adding more and more tax to plane travel and fuel isn’t going to help this. Putting some of those billions of pounds we are spending to protect our freedom is. Global Warming is inevitable. Taxes aren’t going to stop it. Preventing it isn’t going to work. We should be doing something about it, and doing something about it now, not later. It’s a big lie. We all know this why aren’t we doing anything about it?

Leigh visited England from Canada a few weeks ago and said that one of the things she noticed most about this country was the press. I have to admit I had barely noticed this but now it’s been pointed out to me I see the point. I am not sure what has happened to it, it’s not a press any more it is just popularist celebrity drivel interspersed with bigoted opinion. I don’t read newspapers any more so I hadn’t really noticed. and whilst I can’t use this as a reason for leaving I can still mourn its passing.

The BBC still sits on the sidelines as the only party of opposition; uncomfortably though it relies on the government for funding so its subversion is probably rather less than one would hope. I view it as some sort of ineffectual superhero that still tries hard. By day, it broadcasts endless mind numbing gobshite devoted to cookery, decorating, selling all your crap to buy new crap and buying new houses – All the things we as new-age sheep seem to like. By night, it allows platform to some quite cutting satire and the occasional excellent documentary that says much the same as I am saying here only in a less self-obsessed way. The other channels generally broadcast cheap and easy to make crap and reality TV. It’s depressing really and if this is the opium of my nation then I demand a new pusher.

And now for the punchline. None of this is why I want to leave…

The country has had messes before, England and Britain have a long history and throughout it, lots of shit has happened. But as I said at the start of this post; I have always felt that behind the scenes there were competent people working to mend things. Of course, the English have a history of being quite pathetic and resistant to change, our history of revolution is pitiful; from the rather pathetic Peasants Revolt which ended with a single blow to the Civil War which simply annoyed a bunch of people before sending everything back to how it was before as soon as the leaders realised they didn’t have anything to do once they’d won. There’s no spirit left in this country any more. Nobody cares; the people aren’t stupid, they know what is happening as well as I do but they don’t seem to care any more. Even the few who do can’t do much. Armed revolution is conveniently illegal and political revolution is, as I see it, impossible. Maybe it has always been that way, maybe this is something I have missed.

The only useful things that the Brits have ever really done to create change is to leave. For the first couple of centuries at least I don’t think we did so badly in America. Australia looks pretty to me and I think we have done pretty well in Canada, all things considered. Maybe it will be interesting to see how the Colonies have fared instead of constantly whining about what the Motherland has become.

Will the last one to leave the country please turn out the lights? Global Warming, don’t you know.

Some links – I didn’t want them in the main text because I am odd that way:

• Britain is ‘surveillance society’
• Police shot Brazilian eight times
• Council Spy Cases hit 1000 a month
• The Magna Carta
• The Bill of Rights
• 42 Days later…
• UKIP on Corpus Juris
• The BBC’s The Power of Nightmares – You really should watch it here.

For a long time, a few people have been reminding me that I promised to write a posting about the top ten ways I have nearly killed myself.  I keep meaning to do this but I am easily distracted by Youtube videos, kittens and dust which makes me a very unreliable narrator.

On the plus side, I am congenitally stupid so I have a wealth of events to chose from; on the down side, I have a crap memory so when it comes to putting them on paper – I simply forget.

I was tempted to do this as a list, you know like that Letterman guy does but then I would have to rank them and that takes real thought. I am also none too happy with the concept of “nearly killed myself” since most of my more amusing (after the event) mishaps would not have involved my death. I rarely get embarrassed so dying of embarrassment would not have been an option.

With this in mind, changing the title to “A random babble about some of the most stupid things I have done, most of which would warrant me inclusion into the Darwin Awards” not only makes it a lot less snappy but also puts less effort onto me to come up with the goods in a concise and easy to read form.

Be warned, this will be a long babble so I am putting one of those click-to-read-more thingumys here now.

I started my career at the age of three when somebody put a teddy-bear I wanted on top of my wardrobe. Being resourceful I built a little tower using a bedside table as a base and scaled the thing. I did reach the teddy before the whole thing collapsed bringing me down on my rear onto a glass which then, quite cruelly decided to break and embed itself into my bum-cheeks. I still have my first scar from that one.

I don’t remember much else over the next few years. I knocked myself out for a few minutes on the Isle of Man docks running across gang-planks, one of which had a plank of wood across it. I rode a bike off a school roof, got stuck up a very large tree, got a knife embedded in my head throwing it at a tree, blinded myself for a couple of days and had a somewhat irresponsible habit of climbing up any scaffolding I ever saw and climbing over people’s houses. Rusty drainpipes have nearly caused me death or serious injury many times. So far, so good as far as injuries go. I have a rather odd scar in my arse, I have a missing front tooth (playground incident), a fingernail that no longer grows properly after chopping the corner of a finger off (dropping a manhole on my hand whilst exploring sewers) and I sometimes have problems using one wrist (jumping from a swing boat onto a bus-shelter roof and accidentally getting my wrist caught in the ropes). Other than those and a few burns, pellet, dart and arrow holes, I was doing pretty well.

This all said, I don’t think I should be held responsible for anything I did before I was 18 so we’ll gloss over all of these. Of course those few years of my late teens had a couple of incidents. I was still climbing more than I should have and I still hadn’t ever heard of ropes. I still say that our poster campaign at Leeds University was the best ever though. Leeds has a long single corridor which goes around the whole main campus at level 10 and often goes over lovely long bridge routes.

People would often put posters for events up on the windows since it is the main route. This was great except the porters would remove the posters overnight and that was a waste. I had the idea that we should put the posters on the outside, facing inwards. Those posters were still there for months after the event had taken place. Many people would argue that this was resourceful as opposed to stupid, and I would agree.

A more stupid event possibly came after being thrown out of a pub when rather drunk and still needing a wee one night. In a temporally premature display of Le Parcours I decided to vault over the fence across the road.  Unfortunately that fence was a motorway bridge leading to a 40 foot drop onto Bradford’s underground ring-road. Ah well. As you can probably guess, I did manage to hang on and hopefully recovered with some dignity intact as well. That last bit, I probably made up.

One of the first major stupid events came in the first year of my 20′s I think. This may have been the first to actually injure me. I shall paste my write up of this one as it stands.

When I was an undergraduate, at Leeds Uni, I ended up by some weird
method working for the Organic Chemistry Unit as a research assistant,
and, because at the time I had nowhere else to live, I moved into
the Chemistry dept, with another person I discovered lived there...
There were 2 of us living in a building that looked like an old
Victorian school - Occasionally hiding from security guards.
I was a programmer working on 3D rotation of molecular structures
for the front end of a drugs design system - I knew nothing at all
about organic chemistry so I would build virtual houses out of
molecules and use them to test my software.  I was sacked in the
end for all sorts of weird things including leaving a pint of cider
inside a computer.; being drunk pretty much all the time and oddly,
writing poetry in the comments sections of all of my code - I think
4 times more comments than actual code was the general observation,
they were just heathens!

We had a few interesting night-time episodes, mostly fueled by the
fact we spent all of our time absolutely drunk and I had made master
keys for the whole building anyway during one of my more sober
periods...

One I remember was trying to light a Bunsen burner, to heat up a
pan of stew... We couldn't find a match or anything anywhere so we
filled a sink with water, put paper towels all around the sink and
floor and were chucking pieces of sodium in hoping we could catch
the paper towels alight... That was not a success... My patent moth
trap was good too... a glass tank of conc. HCL with a lamp underneath
it... The moth went down and "Poof!" no more moth.

That was all fun and games, till the one night we were in a phys.
chem lab turning coins into tinfoil ... You get a beaker of conc
nitric, and you drop a coin into it... You then fish it out with
your fingers (being careful because it gets hot) when it is about
the thickness of foil - They are really cute because the designs
on the coin actually stay so you get these really cute but stupidly
thin real coins - Oh, and brown fingers - Conc nitric isn't bad for
your fingers as such but it does stain. I think I was feeling very
strange that day and decided it would be fun to mix everything
liquid I could find with everything powdery... I asked my colleague
if it would blow up and he said probably not, so I did... I do sort
of remember the clouds of boiling hot sulphuric acid, and I do
remember coughing up tonnes of blood as I was dragged out with him
muttering something about fume cabinets and stupid twats.

Ever since then.. I have been a bit wary of anything to do with
Chemistry, and my lungs have never been terribly good since then
either. Oh and I rarely drink any more much, either... I think my
kidneys suffered those few years.

We’ll gloss over much comment on this one though, I have been told I am an idiot many times in the past so I don’t need to add more. I didn’t document many incidents at this time however, I did set my room on fire as a 1st year undergraduate and had to sleep with my hand in a bucket of water for a week because of the injuries I caused myself dragging the burning piles outside. Fire is often one of the things that causes me problems as can be seen from this little email exchange to the Wiseguys group…

• From: Michael Lawrie
  Subject: Re: Aztec women versus the Ninja slime
  Date: Wed, 1 Apr 92 9:19:25 BST
  
  >   >my thigh, I have never had a bruise that big before! Oh well... I set
  >   >fire to my bedroom shortly after, that wasn't my week...          ^^^
  >    ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  > I have to ask.  I HAVE to ask.
  
  It's not that exciting really, I am used to setting fire to things 'coz me and
  fire don't seem to mix. It all started when my venus fly trap finally died, I
  have this theory with plants that they need a bit of adrenalin to make them grow
  better, so if one fails I line the rest up and let them watch their old friend
  being cremated... I poured the petrol over the fly trap and took out a Zippo,
  it was empty so I had to fill it up, as is usual with zippos I managed to spill
  half the petrol over my hand and arm, and dabbed it off with some tissue which I
  then dropped on the floor.... Anyway, by now in a hurry to get this cremation
  over, I lit the zippo, lit the plant, accidentally lit my arm, somehow managed
  to light the tissue on the floor and eventually threw the whole lot into the
  bin (minus the arm but plus some eyebrows and a lot of hair off the back of my
  hand). This then set fire to the contents of the bin until I put the lid on,
  but that didn't last long since being a plastic bin it melted the bottom. The
  plant sprayer then came in useful for the 1st time ever and saved my carpet
  from too much more damage, if I'd used it on the plant in the 1st place none
  of this would ever have happened I doubt!
  
  You may be thinking "What a plonker" by now, believe me, although on a larger
  scale it doesn't begin to compare with the time I set my terminal on fire
  because I was balancing a lit Zippo on a pork pie... But that's an even more
  convoluted story!
  
  --
  Michael Lawrie, systems group.
  HICOM: Communications and information for the world HCI community.
  
  From: Michael Lawrie
  Subject: pork pie. (fwd)
  Date: Fri, 10 Apr 92 9:28:34 BST
  X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.3 PL0 (LUT)]
  
  I'm afraid you'll get this twice now, coz I screwed up the last one, I
  could have left it as it was but I guess it demands some explanation  
  
  Forwarded message:
  >
  > I was sitting on Cheeseplant's house yesterday, quite happily spodding
  
  (Cheeseplant's house, a UK talk system thing)
  (Spod, to spod is to sit on talk systems or muds wasting time)
  
  > away, and filling my Zippo with petrol. Fine, as usual I wasn't really
  > concentrating so I poured petrol all over my hand and desk. Now I don't
  > like petrol on my hands so, to get it off, I lit it - Fine, it burned
  > off so I shook it out and must have touched the desk top. I was on the
  > phone to Jon too at the time and the desk set alight. I dropped the
  > phone, moaned a bit and put the desk fire out. I thought that was it
  > so I let the Zippo burning balancing on top of my pork pie to burn off
  > the overfill of petrol... Then someone knocked at the door so I had to
  > go and answer it - It was Jayce come to get me to go home, so I started
  > to lock up - Went into the terminal room and turned the photocopier off
  > but accidentally turned the wrong plug and turned Polly (one of the
  > VAX-Stations off instead). Screamed and ranted about this for a couple
  > of seconds and walked back into my office to check the network was
  > still ok, I walked in the door to find my keyboard was on fire in a
  > pretty impressive display of large yellow flames and black thick smoke.
  > Managed to blow this out, sulked a lot about the charred hole in my
  > desk where the Zippo had fallen off the pork pie and finally examined
  > the keyboard (which was still working funnily enough). Anyway, at this
  > point people noticed Polly had gone and came to hassle me about why their
  > edits were failing, so not only had I set fire to my desk I also had an
  > audience of people who wanted to go home, wanted to make sure their day's
  > work wasn't ruined and were witnessing the charred remains of my desk and
  > keyboard.
  >
  > In all, yesterday night was not the best night of my life.
  
  --
  Michael Lawrie, systems group.
  HICOM: Communications and information for the world HCI community.

The next few years was relatively free of any major incidents. In Leicester, I used to cycle home drunk and asleep far too often and would often come around after having crashed into a tree or a parked car. This isn’t quite as bad as it sounds since I would only ever cycle home at about 4am when the streets were more or less deserted.

Diving is a relatively safe hobby these days as long as you follow the rules. Obviously, I don’t but that is another matter. I have enough self-knowledge of my own stupidity not to scuba dive to extremes and this helps. Unfortunately the same isn’t always true for Freediving. I learned to dive when I was 9; I couldn’t swim (and still can’t) but I have no fear of water so I just work out some sort of agreement with the sea where it doesn’t hassle me and I don’t mess it up with my drowned dead body. This has accidentally made me a very good freediver which is odd because the combination of not being able to swim and being shit at holding my breath would seem to be serious downsides to this ability. People ask me how long I can hold my breath; so far my answer has always been “Long enough not to be dead – So far”. I have pushed this to the limits twice now.

The first time was pure stupidity and pride. I was swimming around a group of trainee divers about half a kilometer off the shore and about 60ft down and I cramped. Cramping isn’t cool; when you can’t move your leg, you can’t kick and when you can’t kick you can’t swim to the surface. Oddly, I am not sure whether through inexperience with Scuba or sheer pride (I am tempted to go for the second) my first thought wasn’t just to try and head for a diver and grab their emergency breathy-thingy, my first thought was to stay attempting to look cool and drift behind the reef so that they wouldn’t see me panic and die. Of course, I did manage to get behind the reef where I could use my one good leg and arms to kick off and get to the surface. But I did learn a lot about safety that day which I pretty soon forgot.

A couple of years later, I was doing my Master Freediver training and doing a qualifying dive which has to be constant ballast and over 100ft. At this time a 100ft dive was a walk in the park but I still had to do it to get my certification. Freedivers are generally healthy creatures, they meditate to lower their heartrate, they avoid caffeine and alcohol and foods that are bad for you; they are masters of their own bodies. As a result, they tend to look pretty cool. Before my dive, I had managed to get 2nd degree sunburn over half my body and was on 1200mg of Ibuprofen every couple of hours, I had just gone to Wendys and had a half pound cheeseburger and chips with a pint of diet coke and I had just slipped off to a local shop to have a couple of large cups of coffee. My heartbeat was well into the hundreds and wasn’t going anywhere lower for a long time. In fairness to me, I did my 113ft qualifying dive quite well. The problem was, when I went for a deeper one afterwards. Throwing up at 100ft is not a pleasant experience and not one I would wish on anybody. Not only does it lose you all your air, it also hurts like fuck.I did make it to the surface; I also didn’t do any deep dives again ever after that and I always dive with a tiny emergency tank now. You can’t say I don’t learn my lessons the hard way.

Over the next few years, I have been relatively accident free I think. I blinded myself for 3 days, I accidentally shot myself and then crashed my car later when the concussion hit me, I fainted syphoning petrol with a hose pipe and purely accidentally I nearly broke my back standing on a cat on the stairs during a 5 day power cut (it was dark, the cat is evil, what can I say!). A few people have tried to kill me, mostly deliberately and mostly in an unplanned way (although one did try to electrocute me) but so far they seem to have not managed.

I shall stop here for now; it is 7pm and I need breakfast. Bacon, egg, eausage and chips and maybe even fried bread. I shall carry on killing myself in more conventional and tasty ways.

Keep breathing folks.

As a means of procrastination and to keep myself busy for a while, I thought I would talk about me! I know, it’s something of a digression in this weblog, but it had to happen one day didn’t it?

I am not very good at spelling and I am generally dreadful at punctuating. I don’t have a clue about grammar although I have read every edition of Fowler as though it was talking about some sort of foreign language. But I come across as relatively literate and clever don’t I? Even if I did just start a sentence with “But” – I mean I occasionally write for a living, I should hope that I do.

The problem is in two parts, both somewhat unrelated. Sit back whilst I tell you a story if you are interested. The dates will be screwed up and some things may be in the wrong order but who cares?

I started school at age one and a half. People these days seem to find this somewhat barbaric but I don’t think it was considered particually abnormal then. I was a day-boarder at a small, private boarding school in St Annes. I remember parts of this life; I remember the little red/pink uniforms we had, I remember having to march every morning for half an hour. The boys marched, the girls did ballet practice. I always remember wanting to do ballet too but then I was odd that way. They didn’t have assemblies and there was no concept of religion there. This latter part I feel was a very good thing. I have read some other people’s memories of this school (which is now closed) on friendsreunited and they tally somewhat with mine. I remember liking the school nurse whom the boarders put across as a tyrant though; maybe this is because I never suffered from being forced to wear my soiled bedsheets all day as punishment for wetting a bed. Damn those under fives for their inconsiderate behaviour hey?

They taught me to read and write there pretty much as soon as I started in a curious mixture of phonetics and real language. I remember being taught my alphabet as phonetics and to this day I spell words out when people ask me in this way. Ah, ber, ser, der, eh, eff, gur. I have to translate to normal alphabet in my head later. I can read phonetic books without thinking about it still but then I also remember copying out endless cards saying things like “Mummy, daddy, Bill and Anne, are standing by their caravan”. Why they operated in this mixed way I have no idea. I am tempted to think that they enjoyed screwing with kid’s heads but I enjoyed my time there a lot so I have no complaints at all.

When I was about 7 my family lost a lot of its money when my Grandfather died. I had to move from that school because we moved away and for a few weeks I was put into a state infant school. That was terrifying! It wasn’t terrifying because the kids were bad or anything, they were just all so utterly dense. They couldn’t read, they couldn’t write. I had consumed most of Enid Blyton’s entire output by this time and they were struggling with the fact that Peter liked Jane and the dog had a ball. Luckily, I didn’t stay here for too long and we moved to the Isle of Man where I started in a junior school there. Within about 2 weeks the teachers had complained bitterly about me and they moved me up a couple of years to a class that I may actually get something out of. I was still far too ahead of them but at least there was something that interested me. It is something of a tribute to the Manx school system that they were happy to do this. I don’t know if they still do but I hope so.

Of course… At some point we lost all our remaining money and we moved back to England where I was soon to discover that the English school system lacks a lot in terms of progressieve thinking. I started at a new school and they put me back in the year appropiate to my age. I did the entire year’s maths text book in a lesson, I did the same with every other class. They had no idea what to do with me so they just left me alone. The only lessons I got anything at all out of were History and Religious Education; the former because I had never really studied any British History and the latter because religion was entirely new to me and fascinated (and still fascinates) me in the way that watching Big Brother fascinates me now.

I lost the ability to learn completely. I had nothing to do for a couple of years, I had no challenges and teachers just avoided me. We moved around a lot and I went to a few schools; all with the same issues and all I really learned in the end was to pretend to be like the rest of them so I didn’t have to do any work at all. I managed to miss learning to spell, I managed to miss learning any formal grammar and anything about punctuation. I never did manage to learn to handwrite, I had learned to write in print at age 2 and never learned any different. Teachers would tell me off for printing and not doing joined up writing but none of them ever thought to teach me. I tried to learn from a book once, trust me the results are somewhat amusing. One plus point at this time is that I had been thrown out of games lessons for being a monumental pain in the arse and I had to spend every games lesson playing with computers instead as an alternative. Mostly I spent 1980 and 1981 playing Colossal Cave on a 380Z. It seemed like a good thing to me.

Eventually I think I discovered that during my few years of hiding the world had caught up on me. People around me were being taught stuff I didn’t know and I was falling behind. I was no longer the cleverest person in the school, not by a long way in fact. Of course by this point I was not only behind in a lot of things, I also had no clue how to learn any more and was far happier in the middle classes than in the top ones anyway. I coasted and blagged; I got the smallest amount of O-levels required to get into college after school and then got the absolute minimum qualifications that I needed to get into University. It wasn’t quite all coasting; I enjoyed things like photography and at this point I still wanted to be an Archeologist, something I was never allowed to do in the end because I hadn’t studied classics – In industrial schools in Central Lancashire they don’t tend to study Latin and Greek.

At University I pretty much coasted. I got the worst maths mark ever at the end of my first year. When they made me resit it they kindly told me that I had to double my original 4% to be allowed to come back and just in case I couldn’t work it out, that was 8%. I slept through all my psychology exams (literally) and failed that as well. In my second year I attended just under 20 of the few hundred lectures I was meant to. I had no intention of coming back for a 3rd year by that point but I had to stay till the end so I wouldn’t have to pay my grant back. I had a job to go to, my Supervisor, one of the very few members of staff I liked was about to leave and I had zero respect for most of the members of staff and students on my course. I did no coursework at all and I guess my faculty got sick to death of trying to nag me. I had been suspended more times than I care to think about. They hated me, I hated them. The exams were hilarious because I didn’t have a clue what most of the papers were about but I guess there were some I already knew a lot about so somehow, to my horror, I passed the year. This was a problem now – I didn’t expect to pass, it was never on the cards. The job I was going to take fell through so I decided to take my third year and eventually graduated with a Third which was probably the best I could ever have got at that point really. They did make me do my second year coursework before they awarded me my degree. They really didn’t want to make it easy.
Leaving University with a Third Class Honours degree doesn’t usually allow you to take up a funded postgraduate but I had a friend, David Stretch who was looking for some students to take up a European funded postgraduate in Psychology at Leicester University in the Hospital’s Psychiatry Department. I had nothing else to do so I decided to go. That was when everything changed. I was 21 at this point and although it was a little late, I finally met that “teacher that changes your life”. David didn’t push anything, I don’t think he ever really tried to teach me much but he did suggest things and set seeds of things that interested me and then allowed me the freedom to explore and learn in my own way, with support when I wanted it and without criticism. From then, I went back to my old University to work much to the horror of my former faculty and carried on learning. It’s amusing really, looking back that most of what I have learned academically I learned myself after I was awarded my degree. My writing style I have discovered I owe to Cassandra; I fear he would cringe at how I occasionally butcher it though.

So that’s it. That’s why I can’t spell. Now you know so am I forgiven now?

My problem is that I know more about security than you. I am pretty safe in saying this unless you are one of a handful of people, all of whom I could name and none of which would be reading my weblog. Don’t get me wrong – If you are an expert in Linux, I bet you know tonnes more about Linux security than I do and I know 12 year olds who know more about modern hacking tools and methods than I ever will. The problem is that these specialisms don’t make good all around security experts; experience and exposure does and if nothing else, I have a lot more of that than most.

I got an email from an old adversary of mine today and part of my reply got me thinking about how I view a profession I used to be very much involved with. I quote:

“My former industry is full of self-publicists who are dreadful at
what they do; I care nothing at all for them and their paranoia
fuelled money making machine. I’ll stick with breeding camels and
just drag myself back into security when I need to eat occasionally,
but even so I don’t much think that will last.”

I’d like to write about security. As an odd kid working out better ways of nicking things or how to open locks I wasn’t meant to open, I have always been interested in the topic and I have devoted most of my adult life to it. When I was at school and a teacher of mine suggested that I manage the school computer systems as an alternative to trying to pull them to bits to see how they worked; I had no idea that a few years later I would be in the position to happily ignore fax requests for help from the FBI because they refused to give me a cool baseball cap or getting hate mail for working with the government to get Universities to prosecute hackers under the then new Computer Misuse Act (an action on my part which was  very misunderstood since I was actually more on the side of the students trying to make sure that they received a fair trial where the Rules of Evidence applied). Incidentally, we haven’t even hit the 1990s nor the start of the Internet in the UK yet.

I am not blowing my own trumpet here, I don’t like blatant self publicity and it’s certainly a bad trait in a security person anyway. That said, I am going to talk about me. It’s my weblog and if you don’t like it, then stop reading. I am making a point that I don’t like being told I am wrong by somebody who got a degree in Computer Security from Wigan Polytechnic in 2005 and then spent a few months getting a bunch of commercial “qualifications” consisting of seemingly random letters from computer-equipment manufacturers and then gets employed by some company and given a job title with the word manager, or consultant in it.

In my previous jobs I was surrounded by ‘em. I’d go to meetings to be told I was wrong by people who didn’t  have a clue what they were talking about. I wasn’t wrong, I am rarely wrong about things I profess to know something about. At BT, we had a chap who I will call John (mostly because that is is name). He didn’t go to University, he didn’t have a single security qualification and he knew very little about computers, networks or telephony. He had, however, spent more than 10 years as a soldier in Northern Ireland on constant active duty. I had been told by my colleagues that John was a jobsworth and something of a tosser and although his job was to give security advice for high-profile projects, he shouldn’t be consulted. I ignored them and decided to talk to him one day  about a system I was building for one of the country’s biggest banks. It was a pretty good design and there weren’t too many flaws that I could see but as soon as he saw it, he started asking questions that other people hadn’t thought of and prompted me to make a lot of changes for the better. He didn’t know about anything like as much about technology as the people I was surrounded by but he did have a much better appreciation of security in general and he knew what questions to ask and wasn’t afraid to ask them. Although he doesn’t know it, it was him who prompted me to get more military training to increase my skill set. I would say thanks but he’ll never  read this; I don’t think he knows how to use a web browser.

It’s become an odd industry. We are talking security here and security is meant to be quite important in the modern world. There are billions of pounds flying around the world at any given moment and as you see every time the government accidentally sells a few million people’s personal details at a carboot sale, there are people who actually worry about this sort of thing. Who is protecting all this money? Who’s looking after your personal  details? Generally speaking, it’s the people with the Wigan Poly degree I am afraid. They don’t have a clue what they are doing and in the rare cases where somebody who does have a clue gets to contribute, the babbling rabble who are shouting out “We can do it for you on a Linux box for 50p” will win the day anyway since it all ultimately comes down to money.

I am not going to start a security weblog. I am not sure there is much I could write that hasn’t already been butchered by the Wigan Polytechnic Press. I may still write about security things but I will just do them as normal rants.

Now you know.

Apropos nothing; today I smell of Cherry and Almond and as I was putting this gloop of a shampoo on my hair earlier I started to wonder what had happened to The Body Shop’s dewberry range. Back in the early 90′s, White Musk and Dewberry were the Body Shop’s two original smells and the country stank of them. I am fairly certain that this was the thing that introduced our obsession with smelling like berries but the original source seems to have vanished from our memory altogether.  Bring back dewberry! Just not quite as much as before.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2007/sep/12/genderissues is quite a sweet article on Body Shop dewberries.