After a couple of weeks of managing some rather good running, I've entered the 2005 Tower Jog. I'll be running the full 10K (although actually you can walk or crawl, and you don't need to do the full distance).

I'd really appreciate some sponsorship if you can spare a couple of quid (it's for the British Heart Foundation).

Thanks very much!

I've talked before about a comment spam attack on GM. I seem to have immunised myself against the "off the shelf" attack, but that doesn't stop the 'bots from trying. I've been seeing a lot of it this month, but from about 8.33am today until now, I've had 216 attempts, all from different IP addresses on different blog entries. I suppose it's only a matter of time until they figure out how to be more successful. Hopefully by then, Tiki will have better anti-spam features too.

I've found evidence of a slug in my kitchen. I had a bit of this last december, and duely dispatched two slugs to the local tip via my wheelie bin. However, their friends have moved in. I've made my kitchen into a slug minefield (by chucking salt around), but the buggers are very clever.

Never fear, this Cat is far cleverer than any slug! Oh yes indeed. I have the Internet at my disposal (I'm pretty sure my slug hasn't been at my computer, so I think I'm safe). Tonight, Mr. Slug, is party night - yes, the beer trap is set. Drunken slug for breakfast then...?

Over a year ago, werk bought a raft of HP kit, for which we duely sent off our Carepak registrations (at the time, the online thingy wasn't working). Last week, a printer gave up the ghost, so I called HP for support. After about 40 minutes of prodding and pulling the printer we started to talk about an engineer visit. Trouble was, our Carepak "wasn't registered", so the fun started...

So here we are a week later, with still no printer. A colleague of mine had been calling, leaving messages and had even managed to register the Carepak! Still no engineer entitlement though.

I called this morning, and after a bit of passing around, found out that in fact, none of our kit has had it's registration sorted out in HP. Great. I did manage to get our poorly printer registered (and an engineer dispatched) though.

So in the end, we've had downtime of over a week all because HP don't process their Carepak registrations (and don't send confirmations either). I think this is all really down to service - although the woman I spoke to today was very helpful, she'd have been a whole lot more helpful if she'd got it registered in the first place (I'm not sure she was anything to do with our original mis-registrations, but you get the idea, right?). Why should we customers have to sort out HP's problems, eh?

The moral of the story: If you've got HP kit and Carepaks, then phone HP and check they're registered. If not, the service desk can give you numbers of people to call to get the job done.

Condi Rice has been slagging the UN. This obvious manouver by the US is both needed and dangerous. I suspect most people think the UN needs to reform (not least Kofi Annan), but the US says the UN needs "US leadership" to achieve that.

Whilst the UN (especially the Security Council) is largely ineffective, allowing the US to do anything would be wholely dangerous. It is, after all, the United Nations, not a branch of the US administration.

The US says the UN should concentrate on Human Rights and International Terror. Hmm... do the US's dirty work for it, perhaps? Of course, the UN won't be allowed to look into the US for those things, so the UN will actually be as ineffective as it is now.

Sorry Coofer Cat has been unavailable for a day or so. At about 10.30am yesterday, BT managed to completely disconnect my phone line (and so the broadband as well). The service at 151 is actually quite good, so I got text message updates. They said it was back up at 8.40am this morning, and phoned to confirm at about 9.10.

I took the opportunity to upgrade the server from Fedora 1 to Fedora 3 though ;-)

Update: I've installed and am running Nagios to tell me what's going on, and to provide some accountability!

Despite the Government dropping ID cards for the time being, we're still getting ID cards. The Guardian is reporting that UK passports will have fingerprint information soon. (found via Blogdial)

The requirement to fingerprint you for your passport is a thorny issue, but this looks to me like blatent abuse of power. This smells of Iraq/Belmarsh etc - "we can't do what we want overtly because it's illegal/wrong/unpopular so we'll sneak it in without consultation".

A long time ago I wrote to Kate Hoey, my MP, with my concerns about ID cards. She responded (late) explaining that she too has similar concerns.

Today, I've just received a letter from her reminding me of her position and also to tell me that, "...I am pleased to be able to tell you that the Government has decided to drop the Bill because there is not enough Parliamentary time for it to pass before the election". She goes on to say that she'll oppose the Bill if it's reintroduced in the future.

Not earth shattering, but nice that she kept in contact on this. Have a gold star, go to the top of the class ;-)

That said, you can bet the Government will re-introduce the Bill, with Dubya style saying "the people have vindicated us because they voted for us, so we must do it (badly)".

/. points us at Hitachi's new hard drive technology, which promises 10 times the capacity of current drives. To explain how it works, they've come up with a little song (needs sound, starts immediately). It's a bit bizarre, but suprisingly catchy (if you're a bit of a geek, I guess ;-)

CD RacksI'm on the prowl for some CD racks. I've got three already (in black, like the right hand one in the picture), and would like a fourth. I originally bought them from Habitat for about £30. All my recent CD buying means I'm out of space, and Habitat don't sell them anymore. T'internet doesn't seem to be giving me much, although I did spot some Ebay activity, although missed out.