Coming home to roost?

Last week I watched that wonderful documentary programme called Top Gear. Dr Clarkson (I believe he has an honorary doctorate from the University of Anglia Caravan touring club) was remarking on how global warming (for what I understand he gained his doctorate) had increased the size of bird droppings.

Well what a coincidence! A day or so later, as I was driving just south of the river, past where the BSkyB headquarters are, a bird, which I identified as a Roc flew over the BskyB building.

A Roc is seldom seen in the UK outside climatically controlled buildings.  A Roc’s home environment is hot and steamy. This is very close to habitat found (I am told) in the UK only in Cannabis farms.

The bird, must have escaped from some nearby head office where it had been kept without seeing the light of day for (judging by it size) 5 to 10 years. It flew low over the BskyB headquarters. Its aim was uncanny. Fortunately I was able to take a picture before the torrential rain of the past couple of days deleted the evidence from the company hard drives – sorry washed it off.

I hope you like the sediments...

Of Lions, Bears and an “Italian” meal

This story goes back some time. I’ve been lucky enough to go trekking in the Canadian Rockies. It has to be said it was a few years ago now. I still have very fond memories of my one and only experience of horse riding. Once one has sampled a gentile trot, occasional gallop and a bit of grazing in the foothills of the Rockies, repeating the exercise elsewhere seems mundane to the point of ...well pointlessness.

A piece of Rocky granite now sits on a shelf on the other side of the room. If some future geologist or archaeologist ever finds it, they may be puzzled how a piece of the Canadian Rockies came to rest close by the river Thames on a completely different continental plate. The Rockies were, and with dedicated Canadian care and attention still are, a beautiful and serene place. It was my one experience of horse riding. I’ve never really felt that I wanted to dilute that equine relationship.

Whist driving back from the horse ridding camp, we spotted a brown Bear was exploring the side of the road. We stopped an watched from a safe distance. Evolution has trained Bears that, it if comes to a fight , they simply take a swipe at your head. They are easily strong enough: your body will stay in one place and your head will do a passable impression of a tennis ball served by Rafa Nadal. It’s true to say that everyone and indeed every animal works better when their head is firmly attached. Bears have, it seems, an innate knowledge of this. No messing, they go for your second favourite organ and play pate-cake.

A little further south, in Yellowstone national park Bears compete with Wolves as the top predator. Since Bears hibernate for the winter, the Wolf packs have it all their own way during this snow laden, freezing period. It seems that a twenty years ago, the park was in quite a stressed state. The Elks were destroying the trees by over grazing and north of the park was turning into a barren wilderness. Man had wiped out the Wolf population 70 years earlier. Wolves were reintroduced and started cutting the grazing population, which actually became more healthy because the wolves inherently knew how to spot the weaker members of the herd and naturally singled them out for attack. The biologists discovered this from analysis of the remaining bones. Simply, Wolf packs chose the easier prey to catch. In much the same way as Bears have evolved to know that a quick decapitation stings the prey. They use decapitation quite a lot and solve the food supply problem in one single easy to use process. A sort of built in Ursine swipe card for easy shopping.

But what of the Wolves I hear you ask? Well by common acclaim they performed their task of top predator with astounding success. The grazing Elk population was cut by 10%, bushes and willow saplings started grow, reaching a couple of meters after previously being gnawed off at nearly ground level. This in turn allowed the Beaver to bounce back (and who does not approve of a bouncing Beaver?). Numbers increasing 10 fold. Streams became much slower as the dams built by the Beavers created large pools and meandering brooks as opposed to fast flowing torrents. Associated fauna and flora transformed the landscape. Fish stocks recovered in the larger and more varied waters created by the Beavers. More...

Further south, emboldened by the unusual success of this manmade intervention in restoring bio diversity, a similar exercise has been carried out in the retirement state of Florida. Here the top predator was a big cat. The panther to be precice. This animal whist not extinct, had sufficiently small numbers that its gene pool was too limited. Pumas from Texas which are closley related to Panthers were intoduced to improve genetic diversity.  Rather than the caldera of Yellowstone national park, naturally restricted by surrounding high terrain: in Florida the reintroduction was in grass and swamp land adjacent to actually quite sizable populations. I think we can all agree this is a much more exiting prospect. How much has been accomplished in weeding out the old, overweight, infirmed and more vulnerable of Florida’s residents is at this point uncertain.

What is known is that a similar experiment in Italy has met with significant opposition when Bears (preferring more substantial German cuisine to an Italian meal) hopped across into Austria and were promptly dispatched by the somewhat upset Bergermeisters.

Of scams and scammers.

I must admit that if I get a scam call, if I have the time, I will often do what I consider is a civic duty and keep them talking for as long as possible. At least they will not be calling my Mum or indeed any other person who gets easily confused when it comes to technical matters (viruses on PCs), fitted kitchens, changing electricity supplier etc...

The other day, at the end of a long day I got a cold call....

With low cost phone calling cold calls have escalated.
I’ve kept a transcript of the call and thought it would be nice to translate the scam claims into non technical terms.

"Hello Mr Beetmain" (sic), we are monitoring your PC have received an alarm. Yes?

Translation: We have got your name from a telephone book and if you haven’t got a computer you are going to tell me now. If you haven’t, this call is going to be short.

We are monitoring computers in the Henley on Thames area.

Translation: We are on the Henley page of the telephone book.

Your PC has been running slow and our technicians can help you.

Translation: At some time your computer has run slowly and I’m prompting you to remember. I'm not going to talk about price because later we are going to stiff you for all we can get.

Your computer is infected with viruses Yes?

Translation: There is no way I can tell that your computer is infected. I can’t connect to it (yet). However, the odds are that you don’t know this, nor do you know how to tell if your computer is infected either. You probably dont understnd that the most popular forms of antivirus software start running by themesleves and can slow your computer down when they are giving your computer a full check up. There is no way I’m going to tell you helpful things like that.

We know that in the area of Henley on Thames there are "huge amount of infections"

Translation: It’s a racing certainty that there are some computers in Henley that have viruses; I’m going to try to scare you now. By the same logic: if you live in Henley, its very probable that you have walked down Henley High Street.

I decided to string this guy along. My good deed for the day: whist he was talking to me he was not calling some poor sole who would be taken in by his alarmist spiel.

"Your ip address is blinking in red."

Translation: The sky is blue, the sun is bright, and my front door is white, but red sounds more dangerous.

So I asked: where is it blinking in red?

"On the main server"

Translation: This sap I’m talking to has to know there are computers called servers. Techies often refer to “the main server” in films and on TV. In the same vein Scotty says to Captain Kirk, “The Dylithium crystals are exhausted, she cannie take it any more Captain.” Don’t know what this means but it sure sounds good and helps the action along.

“What main server?”

No answer....

Translation: This must be a different episode of Star Trek. Thinks... back to script. To be honest I did not actually hear him turning the pages, but there was a long pause and a change of gears.

"We are the people who look after all the computers in USA and Canada and UK"

Translation: Need to say something sounding authorative here to regain control. There must be some organisation that controls computers (mustn't there?) so he might as well claim to be a member of it.

"We are authorised multinational company"

Translation: The boss told him (authorised) him to do the scam and is boss is one nationality and he is another.

"These infections the red errors are boneaires, yellow warnings are virus infections"

Translation: Oh well try as I might there is no such word "boneaires" he spelt it out. It is in the same category as "contrafibularities" from Black Adder 3 - simply made up to annoy Dr Samuel Johnson when he delivered his first dictionary to the Prince Regent.

Are you in front of your computer?

Translation: Are you in front of your computer?

You need to restart your computer: go to the windows button and press restart.

Translation: You don’t need to restart you computer, but if you do, from what you tell me, I’ll determine if the computer is a Mac or a PC and you are gullible enough to do this you’ll probably do silly things I ask later.

I was guided to a thing called the application log: this is (if you don't know) a diary that the computer keeps. If there is a real problem, then a well written program will report issues either back to the developers, record them in the transaction log, or both. On the other had Viruses work by stealth and will not usually lead to recording anything in this log if they can avoid it.

"Yellow warning are viruses" in the transaction log.

Translation: Yellow traffic lights mean you are going to crash into a house by the side of the road.

"Don't click on any of the information entries: it will cause your machine to crash"

Translation: Don’t click on any of the information entries, you might get a message which show I’m talking utter rubbish.

Tell me what CPU usage is reading over the next 30 seconds: what was the last reading? That's the important one.

Translation: This sounds quite knowledgeable. If I was really trying to help, we would look on the next tab to find which programs (possibly your antivirus) were using the CPU. Thank goodness I didn’t slip up and say “CP three 0” out of Star Wars instead of CPU like I did last week.

We are "ClickToFix"

Translation: We might be “ClickToFix”. Whoever we are, we are certainly trying to scare you into some outrageous support charges for support you almost certainly don’t need.

They gave their phone number as 02088199744

Translation: more here

Happy New Year