I would like to wish you all happy New Year (especially for when it actually happens).
As you may or may not know 2016 is a leap year. The reason for the leap year is that the Gregorian calendar has a year of 365 days but in actuality the time it takes the Earth to orbit around the Sun is 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds.
The reality is that the real New Year is later tonight.
 If you're up to it, I suggest you PARTY ON.

The Art of the Fart

Creating a smell

Is all very well

But there is an art

To the fart

When alone

You’ll squeeze a tone

From daybreak to well past noon

But when an Audience is there

You do not dare

So hold it you will

Till your colon doth fill

Only then can you play a whole tune

Taken from the ebook of the same name

How Not to Sell - Part One

Retailer: Jewsons Kitchen and Bathroom Centre.

The conversation literally started in this manner.

Me: I'm looking for a corner toilet.
Salesman: you don't want one of them they're rubbish.
Me: Why?
Salesman: They don't save any space to know.

Already I was thinking what a twat. This is not a good start and this 'salesman' made me feel annoyed and patronised at the same time. When I politely explained the constraining space considerations and that this was the best solution to where I needed a downstairs sanitary room built, he had to concede, that from a practical design point of view, this was the best solution.

However, he was still incredibly negative about the the whole idea mentioned on three more occasions that he hated corner toilets. He offered two choices but said categorically not to buy one manufacturer as it was incredibly expensive and not worth the money. That left me a choice of one.

Where this vitriol against a design concept came from my do not know or do not care.

I left the premises and went online and found exactly what I wanted, at half the price and delivered directly to my door.

Jewsons did not only lose a one-off sale but also the opportunity of selling me all the other bits I needed his particular project.

Thank God the Internet

Going Around in Circles

I was kicking back and watching a repeat episode of MythBusters where Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman were experimenting swimming, walking and driving while blindfolded. 

In all these experiments they discovered that, without visual clues, they continually went round in circles almost ending back at the same spot they started.

At the end of this particular feature, Adam and Jamie discussed the results but could not determine any reason why this happens.

I do not have a definitive answer but it got me thinking. I wonder if we have a predilection for this from a time we are very young, particularly at the early crawling stages?

Could we have this tendency as an inherent internal safety feature to make sure that we do not stray too far from an original spot so that we can be found easily by adults if we get lost? 

Just a thought.

Did You Know That Lemonade Has Lemon in It

It was a lovely warm day and I was sitting drinking a glass of generic brand diet lemonade. My mind started to wander, as it does, and my eyes happened to rest upon the bottle sitting on the table. I notice the label that said "Diet Lemonade” with a subtext, “Made with Lemon Juice.”

I wondered why such a statement should need to have been made. What would you expect to have been a drink that was called lemonade? Chocolate bananas? Aardvark mucus? ‘Come on guys,’ I said to myself, ‘why would you feel it necessary to qualify fact that lemonade has lemon in it?

The label, therefore, warranted closer inspection.

This 'Lemonade' contained:

Carbonated water

Lemon juice from concentrate (1%)

Citric Acid

Flavouring

Acidity Regulator (Sodium Citrates)

Preservatives (Sodium Benzoate, Potassium Sorbate)

Sweeteners (Aspartame Sodium Saccharine)

This had a final sub note of “Contains a source of Phenylalanine.”

Gee, what ARE all these chemicals? Man, this made it feel like a really healthy drink. So the manufacturer found it necessary to mention that there was Lemon juice in it, even though it constituted only 1%.

 Of course, the label had the traffic light system.

It was less than 1% calories (green), trace fat(green), trace saturates(green), less than 1 gram salt (green), and less than 1% trace sugars (green).

So the green ‘traffic lights’ across-the-board on the label made it look healthy.

But it also should have included another element in the traffic light system.

The one red light at the bottom of the list meaning “no nutritional value or any fucking flavour whatsoever.”

Funny True Story 3 - Canal Boat Holiday.

There was a guy I used to work with called Des. I don’t know whether it was short for Desmond or desperate. But that is only slightly relevant to the story. Des lived with his wife and his mother-in-law. Besides all the obvious and usual jokes, this was not an ideal situation for Des. He did not get on with his mother-in-law all that well and each day he used to come into work with various stories and horrors of his life at home.

Most of the time we took these with a pinch of salt but there is one happenstance I know to be true and maybe is indicative of life that Des had to live.

One day Des came into work and he actually looked happy for once. The reason for this sudden onset of enjoyment was that he had managed to book a holiday. OK, as well as for him and his wife, it also included his mother-in-law, being the only way to persuade his wife to allow him to book it. It was a bit of a victory for him as it was difficult and almost impossible to get his mother-in-law to go anywhere, let alone on a holiday.

He had booked a canal boat holiday on a traditional narrowboat. A real traditional narrowboat, as it was not diesel powered but horse-drawn in the same manner as when the canals were first built. A week of quiet meandering through the countryside just watching the world go silently by.

As the months turned to weeks Des’s anticipation remained constantly buoyant. His whole being, it seemed, was focused on this one single marvellous event in his life.

Then one day, a couple of weeks before the holiday was due to commence, he came into work with such a manner of sadness and anger it was a shock, even to us. Apparently, unbeknownst to him his mother-in-law had cancelled the holiday. The reason she gave was cruelty to animals. Apparently, she had failed to grasp what a going on a horse-drawn narrowboat entailed.

She thought it was cruel to make a horse swim and tow boats as well.

You couldn’t make this up.

How to EASILY create and remember secure passwords

Nearly every day someone on the media is banging on about insecure passwords and how the some reason it is OUR fault that the Internet is so insecure. Anyway, that seems to be the situation and the more and more sites demand us to make create more secure passwords. The trouble is, how to remember them?  Here are a few ideas which will help you make your passwords more secure and even better give you the tools to remember them.  Jak1234 is a poor password - I have seen worse, someone I knew had the password bobbydog named a dog they had pictures of on Facebook. No Really!

  Ibi!!atGr8woC is a good password as it had letters both uppercase and lowercase numbers and symbols. If you read this blog to the end you will be able to create and remember it.

But first some 'do's.'

Longer passwords are more secure than shorter ones. Most websites have a minimum and maximum length always aim more towards maximum.

Use different passwords on different systems- you can even customise the level of security depending on what application you're using if you want.

Change your passwords as often as you can. The ideal would be every month but we live in the real world and I know it can be a hassle to do this but I know some people have the same password for years. The longer it is in existence the greater the chance of it being hacked.

Use a combination of numbers, letters and if possible special characters. Note: you might need to check with various websites which characters are allowed and excluded. This is why  Ibi!!atGr8woC is such a good password as it uses all of the elements.

Over the years I have used and seen different techniques for remembering passwords. One method is to remember a combination from childhood that for some reason had got stuck in your memory. An old car registration number or place and telephone number for instance. I remembered the car registration of my grandfather's car was 1527pp, so GF1527pp was quite a good password as it is easy to remember. The prefix GF by the way stood the grandfather.

Another method is keyboard shapes. I am a visual person and I found this quite useful in the past. There are some obvious shapes and combinations. Avoid qwerty for obvious reasons. The same also applies for azerty which is the same thing but on a French keyboard.  Doing diagonals from a start letter is a possibility. For instance, something based on grncy which is a cross shape from the letter G as a starting point. Look at your keyboard and you'll see what I mean. Then add a numerical value  (I have used the year of the moon landing) and a capital to become Grncy69 or grncY69. This is not a bad choice and certainly better than using bobbydog!  Actually, when working with someone with learning difficulties I created a cardboard template that was placed over the keyboard to visibly give them shape to follow.

In the end, most of us find the use of mnemonics as a memory aid as one of the most useful tools. This is how I would remember the password.  Ibi!!atGr8woC.

What is it stand for?

I became ill at the great wall of China.

To make it more difficult I changed it to I became ill at the Gr8 wall of China.

This translated to (I) ( b)ecame ( ill)  (a)t ( t)he ( Gr8) ( W)all of (C)hina.

The final twist was to transpose the letter L in the word ill for two exclamation marks. This gives the password all the elements of a seemingly random sequence, a mix of upper and lowercase letters as well as special characters.

Try it. Make up a phrase that you can remember and manipulated in a similar manner. When you create it for yourself you will be surprised how easy it is to remember. In the end, you can never be 100% secure but adopting these good practices will certainly minimise the risk.

Keep safe.