Tuesday tittle-tattle

Now it seems that ID cards are a dead duck due to Five-a-night’s reduced mandate, I have been doing some digging around on the general idea of digital confidentiality. The apparent ease at which records can be improperly accessed gave me a bit of a scare. And that is before staff mistakes send them to all and sundry anyway. As an old soldier, I have few concerns about my privacy; try living in a room with 24 others and sharing their presence 24 hours a day every day. What does worry me is what some bstard might do with my details once he has got hold of them.

These googlings led me to this site:

http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2005/05/posner_on_priva.html. Yes, I know the clever people manage to do this and just have ‘becker’ highlighted but as I have said, I live to blog and not to do html stuff. Anyways, this guy has a take that I find interesting.

Some of the regular readers – huh, don’t kid yourself, there is only one – will have noticed that there is an illustration to the last post. I’m not driven to have pictures on the blog but was encouraged by gemmak to have a go. (http://www.jmw500.blogspot.com/) Thanks lady, much less painful than I had imagined. Doing it with Picase2 and Hallo meant that I could get the desired result without lots of < > and things. I don’t think that the page will get like Spielberg’s blotter but there are some times – like today – when a picture is truly worth a thousand words. I might add a photo of myself in the profile just to scare small children away.

Another benefit of being here has just shown up. We had a problem with ponding of rainwater at the threshold of the front door. Water was then soaking into the main wall and chunks of plaster were coming away. I finally decided we needed a workman to get it fixed. Checked cards in local newsagents. Found a man. Phoned him last Friday, he came that night and checked what was needed. Yesterday and today he has filled in the dip at the door and dealt with the blown plaster. He did one or two other bits. Cost – about an hour of a motor mechanic’s time dahn sarf. Just try to even find a bloke there would have taken a week and he would not have shown up for Lord knows how much time.