Despite all the deeper issues it raises and all my complaining the other day, I gotta say I'm a sucker for a funny face and a bit of humour, so separating that out from all the stuff I ranted about the other day, i gotta say I have laughed and smiled and even shed a tear.

Emotive music coupled with emotive imagery have a powerful effect.

Maybe its the two glasses of chardonnay mixed up with visual graphics of pain and suffering blended amongst a well of cheer and hope as a graphic appears announcing 26 million squids raised. I dont know where such monies will go, but going with a belief that some charity somewhere will put it all to good work, using that thing called blind trust to say, 'Uh uh, no way it'll all get used on good stuff'. To be honest I didn't really want to watch it, but I got sucked in; the kids are staying over and they insisted, so I relented.

I still maintain that some of the bigger issues are being missed and that things like this are mere sticking plasters on a recurrent problem caused by the way in which societies are run and economies managed, yet I get too the reasons behind its popularity and pull, I'm not a fucking alien after all, I have feelings, I hurt, I feel pain , I laugh, I cry, just like most people!

People want to feel part of positive things. In many ways we may all to a degree or other feel relatively powerless to make a difference in the world. Perhaps things like this give us that opportunity to feel connected or part of something that is trying to make that difference.

When presented with various anectdotes about heartfelt stories of tragedy or proclaiment, then its natural that a good person would feel warmed and heartened to identify with an idea that suggested that they were making that important difference to those poor peoples lives. If you didn't then you might need to take some kind of rochstadt inkblot test and check the 'I'd like to know If Im a psychopath' box.

We all need to feel we belong. Who wants to be that person alone and isolated? Perhaps its a lack of purpose/identity thing. Perhaps we all need some thing or cause or other to latch on to and feel like we are doing something, feel part of that thing called nation or community even, fuck knows.

I still maintain its important to question and to challenge and say things that aren't popular, because life shouldn't be a popularity contest, it relies on controversary and sparks and contrary viewpoints to keep it all alive and buzzing. There's nothing wrong with those 'ambiguous dichotomous hard to grab hold of and define' counter positions. Life is a mass of contradictions and counter viewpoints.

Buenos Noches

He then proceeds to attack me with his can of red hair spray.."Just doing your grey bits dad" he says...

He is bigger than me now 6ft 1 size 12 feet and still only 14, I was gonna chin him, but decided to spare him cos, actually...

Im off down to the salon in the morning to make it permenant

Hackers have control of a server I use to host a lot of my websites.

Hindsight is marvelous. I wish I'd be a little more sensible and distributed my sites across a greater range of hosts or IP addresses. I didn't, and now I'm paying the price.

It reminds you of how selfish some people can really be. These people, whoever they are just couldn't give a stuff about how their actions affect the lives of others. In their eyes if a door is open then its for them to push and walk in and do as they please.

My provider has had to switch the machine off, as these bastards were using it to send brute force attacks to other servers across the internet. This entails bombarding a server with multiple requests against a users account, often using a dictionary based attack. So, if your account name was fred then the hacker would make repeated http requests starting at aaaaaa and cycling through with aaaaab, aaaaac,e tc up to zzzzzzzz999 for example.

Most webservers protect client accounts from this, by recognising these using logs and rjecting the connection if say a remote request is made more than x amount of times within any given timeframe.

The problem for me however is that, multiple attacks like this not only hog up all available server resources, they also use excessive amounts of bandwidth, which when uncapped, can rise to considerable amounts of money very quickly. This is therefore effectively a DDOS attack aka denial of service.

We all have a propensity to feel like grabbing hold of someone and hitting them very hard.

Hackers are not smart, they are not clever, they are selfish cyber criminals who deserve to have ten tons of shit kicked out of them, just to make them think twice the next time.

I feel similarly about burglars and car thiefs. There really is little difference between the two.

I'm not happy.