So, we had a small titter of celebration here at Humpy Towers when my facebook friend count hit 800.  A bit later when it hit 900, I was further surprised but quite chuffed: it’s nice to know there’s so many people around from years gone by who, if they don’t currently keep in regular contact, are at least receptive to the idea, and who can remember you from the sea of faces that pass in a lifetime.
The obvious question, however, arose about how best to celebrate hitting the milestone of …

Every now and again a weekend comes up which culminates in an almost shellshocked feeling of “Wow, how lucky am I?!”.  And the 15th was the beginning of just such a weekend, because it started with a chance to see marathon-talking & epically curious global documenter Henry Rollins at Royal Festival Hall.

I’ve been lucky enough to catch Rollins’ spoken word shows a couple of times in the past, and this time was every bit as engaging & inspiring.  He’s famous for being a hard punk powerhouse, but as he’s aged, …

In late 2004 in an effort to prove that you can get anything on eBay I purchased an A-Team coat hanger – it had a likeness of Colonel John “Hannibal” Smith, portrayed memorably by George Peppard. Documentation on the exact date is sketchy, however in early 2005 I came into possession of the BA Baracus one, featuring a 2-dimensional facsimile of Mr T.
Later, in 2008, my collection grew with the acquisition of the Dwight Schultz cartoon-bearing coat hanger of Captain “Howling Mad” Murdock.
And now – in January 2010 – I’m proud …

Just a quick bit of morning incredulousness today – whilst half-listening to the radio (Five Live, for reasons to be explained separately) an ad came on featuring a made-up scene where one man is describing to his friend the benefits of owning the new Volkswagen Transporter.  One of the supposed benefits of the new model, the man explains, is that it has a lower maintenance cost than the previous model and, by implication, other vehicles in its class.
Leaving aside for now the question of why anyone would be influenced in …

We have an arrangement set up here in our office so that in order to work from home we connect to the corporate network using the Cisco VPN (Virtual Private Network) Client – a little bit of software that burrows through the Intertubes and joins up to some servers in the rack/farm so that our home computer now appears to be a node on the corporate network.  The way we set this up is to install the Cisco VPN Client on the machine, then run a little application which sets …