Typically it rained the whole time I was down in Devon as you can see from the photo! I spent most of the time indoors watching the Olympics, or in restaurants eating. Still it was good to have a break from work.
Luckily the weather did improve for the Reading Festival, apart from around the toilet area it was mud free… I wouldn’t have thought it was my thing, but I actually really enjoyed it and am looking forward to going again next year. Can’t say I bumped into any famous people backstage, unless you consider Warren Swaine famous!
I’ve had a number of people mention to me that the music was a lot quieter this year. I thought so as well, had to move quite far in to hear The Killers well enough. Turns out the reason was “atmospheric conditions“.
Reading Borough Council have stepped in to save Sunday journeys on the number 9 bus route. This will come as a welcome relief to many residents of Caversham and beyond.
The route may still be split up, however Reading Buses have extended public consultation until the end of September 2008, you can see the plans here.
A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to be invited to a thank you party for Conservative Future members that helped on the London Mayor campaign. I designed the ‘Back Boris’ Facebook application (which I’ve now switched off), which became part of the official campaign in early March.
Quite an experience meeting him, he came for a flying visit straight from a reception at City Hall and before he went for a meal with George Osborne.
He gave a rousing speech outlining a some of the things he had already done, and some of the policies that he is implementing at the moment - including combating knife crime and of course the abolition of bendy buses.
At Christmas in 2006, I was chatting to relatives about how easy it would be to clone passport data off the newly introduced passports - I personally thought around £150 for a RFID (Radio-frequency identification) reader, a laptop and proficient programmer for a day would be it all it would take (before you wonder, I wasn’t going to attempt it!). Turns out things have got cheaper as The Times revealed today, just £40 for a RFID reader, £10 for two RFID chips and an hour’s time for a proficient programmer.
The RFID chips are indeed encrypted to a very high standard using the encryption algorithm 3DES (three times higher than the military standard in the US), but if you know where to look the key to decrypt it is publicly available. To anyone who knows about encryption the golden rule is not to share the key that it has been encrypted with, it’s the equivalent of putting a key under your door mat.
This story has come hot on the heels of the London Oyster card being cracked.
I wonder how long it will take the ill-conceived ID card scheme to be cracked once introduced and forgeries start appearing. Not long is my guess…
I managed to inadvertently break the admin side of my blog, hence no posts recently, but I’ve fixed it now. That’s one of the problems of hosting it myself! Normal service is resuming…
I’ve been asked if I designed this website: http://theeppsfiles.blogspot.com/. I would like to categorically say that I haven’t. I’m steering clear on personal insults on my blog, they tend to backfire…
During the election campaign, and quite a few times since, I’ve been asked about Councillors expenses - “I’m not voting for anyone - you guys all make a fortune out of us!”. Correctly this isn’t the case.
We get allowances paid monthly, the value of which is published on the Council website in the Constitution and varies depending on any positions you hold. We can claim for travel expenses, and have to declare these and any gifts we receive. So far I’ve racked up a huge £0.00 on travel expenses, and have received the grand total of £0.00 worth of gifts (my parents did send me a good luck card for the election though!).
In Parliament I’m glad to see, despite a few well publicised bumps along the way, the Conservatives have taken the lead on this by publishing staff, office running costs and expenses claimed for second homes of all the front bench team. This is in addition to the new requirement that all family members employed by MPs have to be declared and placed on the parliament.gov.uk website. Despite looking, I couldn’t find anything shocking, seems that percentages of MPs employing family members across the three main parties are pretty much the same.
Typically it rained the whole time I was down in Devon as you can see from the photo! I spent most of the time indoors watching the Olympics, or in restaurants eating. Still it was good to have a break from work.
