Well Cat fans, disaster has struck. I stacked it pretty badly whilst off piste yesterday and hurt my shoulder. Co-incidentally a friend of mine hurt his head, so the two of us got rides on snow mobiles with Ski Patrol to the mountain clinic. He got stitches, and I got 5 x-rays. Sadly, the Doctor (and radiologist at the local hospital) weren't sure I haven't fractured my shoulder blade. The good news is that it's probably just sprained (so I've got a sling).

All in all, the experience was actually pretty good. Ski Patrol were excellent, very friendly, relaxed etc. The clinic was also excellent, and as an extra bonus was stocked with a couple of absolute beauties. The whole thing cost about $300, so not quite the life-changing medical bills the US is fabled for.

I'll give it a few days and see how I go. I might be back on the slopes (taking it easy, of course) in a few days.

Get me out there! There are no friends on a powder day!

These people have even more time on their hands than I do!

At 13:00, Thursday 22nd March, 2007 Coofer Cat reached 1,500,000 hits, ever (actually, it counts full page impressions, rather than website hits). The counter updates hourly, but incredibly updated to exactly one and a half million! How flukey was that?

The live count is actually now 7,873,738 hits since June 2003.

The BBC is reporting about 10,000 passports that have been issued to fraudlent applicants. Blogdial is predictably all over it almost immediately.

Blogdial's take is that the BBC (and indeed the IPS) is building support for the 69 interrogation centres to be set up around the UK. These centres will ask up to 200 questions to verify the identity of applicants. Given that new applicants may have to travel for two hours round trip to be literally raped of all personal and identifying information is indeed very worrying (remember, they don't just ask - they record your response too!). Especially as there are simpler solutions.

As Blogdial points out, the 10,000 passports are detected, depite what the IPS says. Surely it's relatively trivial to simply blacklist the passport numbers so that anyone using any of them at any time is easily identified and handled appropriately. Since the government has routinely shown itself incapable of operating any system, no matter how simple (or complex!), the IPS could write to all 10,000 applicants and ask them for clarification to avoid any mistakes.

But no: somehow, the solution to this problem is the expense and danger of 69 interrogation centres around Britain. Besides the dehumanising effect of them, they're yet more process and procedure that the government will perform incorrectly. Yet more cracks in the system, yet more ways to defraud, but this time around if you slip through the net you'll be that much harder to convict because of the seemingly irrefutable (and heavily spun up) evidence of your virtue.

We of course can see that the interrogation centres are required for the forthcoming ID card and NIR system. It completely escapes me how anyone can think this is a good idea, given the inability of the government to run simpler services. Does anyone honestly think that the ID/NIR system is somehow going to be miraculosly secure against fraud? If you do, you are a fool.

Remember kids: No2ID

I just received a text message from "2030", saying they're going to send me two messages with settings which I should accept and install (which I received). The thing is, no where did it say who the operator was, or indeed anything that tells me that this is from my service provider.

I didn't accept the messages, as I've got very little interest in WAP and MMS and trust these messages about as far as I can throw them. I strongly suspect this is phishing and intended to get me to use some premium rate WAP/MMS service or subscribe to endless spam or some such. The thing is, this is the method my provider uses to send me things, so I wonder how many people are falling for these things?

The Ferret has a link to instructions on how to use Google Mail as your SMTP server no matter where in the world you are. This is handy if you travel around and use a variety of Internet connections (eg. home broadband, mobile phone, internet cafes etc). Basically, it means you can leave the SMTP setting alone in your mail client (Outlook, Thunderbird etc) no matter where you are. Genius.

Whilst on the prowl for somewhere to meet, I stumbled upon the Night Out Generator at allinlondon. It's pretty nifty, and leaves you with a Google map of all the places you've selected from their suggestions (which in my tests seemed to be in a nice sort of circle, returning roughly to the start point).

Had a spot of downtime on The Cat this morning because Dabs delivered some extra memory for it. It took a little longer than expected because of two things. Firstly, the CPU heatsink popped off because one of it's holders on the motherboard came off (so I had to solder it back on), and then, it sat at the BIOS saying "I've got new memory, press F1 to continue" (which I couldn't see until I got the monitor out of the garage to have a look).

Curiously also, the machine's supposed to take a maximum of 4GB RAM, which has to be in pairs of DIMMs. The fourth slot isn't on the board, so it's got three DIMMs in, and seems to be quite happy at 3GB. Curious how you can only buy these DIMMs in pairs, and how HP themselves say the machine will take 4GB though... Ho hum...

Update 8/3/07: Also I've upgraded Drupal to 5.1 and Fedora to FC 6. Phew - all done. Remarkably easily as it goes though ;-)

I'm throwing myself back into the fray at Ebay with another server. This one is relisted after some dumb idiot wasted my time last time around.

Get in there and get bidding - it's a steal at this price!