the sun is shining… the sheep are grazing in the fields…. and the first song you hear on the radio is the Jam’s Beat Surrender

Got this little quizlet from our friends at Robot Shuffle. What’s your ecological footprint?.

Apparantly mine is 30 acres which, if everyone was as greedy as me, would require 6.7 planets to keep us all going. It says the average for the US is 24 acres per person and I tend to think of myself as pretty eco-friendly, especially compared to most. So I’m not sure why I came out so bad. And now if you’ll excuse me I have some forest I need to burn down…

Every year at the Infosecurity Europe conference, the organisers try to get the pulse of the local population by seeing how easy it is to coax their secret password information from them. Previous years had 70% of the respondents giving up their information for chocolate, this year it was theatre tickets.

Of 200 people who were surveyed in London on their thoughts about theatre:

• 100% provided their names upon request
• 94% provided pet’s names (common passwords) and their mother’s maiden name (common second form of authentication) when told actors frequently use both to create stage names
• 98% gave their address in order to receive a winning voucher.
• 96% divulged the name of their first school.
• 92% provided their date of birth and the same number supplied their home phone number

What good is spending $thousands on security when people give it up this easily!

The lowlight of the week must be tonight’s American rewrite of The Office. Now I haven’t seen it but every British sitcom that’s been adapted to the US screen has been a complete disaster; Coupling and Men Behaving Badly to name just two.

The highlight has to be the new Dr Who episode this weekend. All over the UK people will be watching from behind their sofa just as we used to as kids.

Bummer of the week has to be that I’ll be here in the US unable to watch it. Hopefully someone will DVR it and push it out for us to download. Not that I condone such illegal activities of course!

Back from my trip home, had a very good stay with my family and especially my mother. Out of hospital only 4 days after surgery, she is almost as if she had never had any symptoms. And we almost had to tie her down to stop her from running around the house. It was great to see her back to her old self after the previous visit. Hopefully she will be able to keep the previous symptoms away for a long time; she’s a fighter.

Coming back into San Diego late last night I enjoyed the first uncomfortable landing (outside of my own!) in a long time. High winds, low cloud and heavy rain made it for a bumpy last 20 minutes. Much to my delight we flew over the airport (not that we could see it) and did a 180-turn to land to the east. I could feel the cross wind pushing us north and we made a great crosswind landing. Now, some time I want an east bound takeoff so that we takeoff over the city, I think that would be a trip.