Another one of those posts that I’ve really been meaning to do but other things have got in the way.

A little while back Toshiba loaned me a Tecra A8 to do an appraisal of for their TalkToshiba site. Incidentally, it’s a very good idea from Toshiba in terms of getting exposure and feedback from bloggers and if anyone else would like to send me something to trial, I’m more than happy, although things of a technical nature are preferred.

I will declare an interest. Up until then I had only ever actually purchased one laptop in my life and it was a Toshiba (Pentium MMX with 64Mb Ram if memory serves me correctly) and I loved it until the motherboard eventually gave up but I couldn’t complain, it had been everywhere with me and I’d used it constantly.

So with that in mind and fond memories I was looking forward to the Tecra. It was on paper a great spec. I nice little Dual Core Intel processor. A gig of ram, a 256mb ATI graphics card and I was up for putting it through its paces.

On looks:

Well, it’s a laptop, it’s black and there’s not much more to say. I appreciate that Mac has done well in stylising it’s laptops and if that’s your cup of tea then good on you but the vast majority of laptops are black or grey slabs and that’s what the Tecra A8 is. That isn’t a criticism because, at least from my perspective it’s performance, what the machine can do and functionality that’s important.

On performance:

With anticipation of playing around with a computer with a specification that blows all my other machines out of the water I eagerly booted it up, incidentally it came pre-installed with Windows XP. Now I am going to state that yes I do know there are much more accurate ways to bench test hardware but I thought a more layman’s perspective would be better because after all that’s what your end user notices so I decided to test performance through boot-up times/shut down times and graphics through games.

The first thing that struck me when I booted the machine was how slow it was. In terms of boot-up to usable desktop, my Celeron D 3.4Ghz with 256Mb of Ram outperformed it. It also only marginally outperformed my ancient Packard Bell laptop P3 800Mhz with 128Mb of Ram. However, once up and running it was decidedly faster and graphics wise was very good. I might note that the slowness of booting, because it really did under-perform could well have been due to a poorly installed OS because there really shouldn’t be any reason for the slowness I encountered.

With this in mind I decided to cross compare it with a Linux OS. My personal choice was Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn and the performance at boot time was staggering in comparison. It easily out-performed everything else I’ve got and despite ATI graphics cards sometimes being a bit of a pain on Linux due to unavailable proprietary drivers I had a 3D Beryl cube desktop up and running in minutes. It also performed well running games graphics wise even through Wine which is a Windows emulator for Linux. It did however have a problem rendering video while spinning the cube desktop which my other PC with a very old Nvidia card in has no problems doing. I will however put this down to the drivers and not the actual hardware.

All in all it was quite impressive. I personally liked the robust nature of the design, it felt strong and well built with good segmentation of hardware for upgrade and maintenance. I know it’s only a small touch but I really liked the volume switch which simply moved the volume up or down by pushing it one way or the other, none of this trying to scroll it round like mad. However I didn’t like the touchpad. Not out of any kind of unresponsiveness but more that the edged were raised by about 1.5mm above the pad and I kept hitting my finger on them and losing the cursors position.

Would I buy one?

Well, much as I really liked the build quality and I really appreciate well built things, I’d have to say no. The touchpad would drive me mad after a while and user functionality is very important to me. Although the model is discontinued I did look over the price range of what you get from Toshiba for your money and for an independent who has to buy things directly out of what he earns then I felt them to be a little pricey. I could get better spec for less money if I hunted around a bit but it’s obvious that I’m not the core focus of Toshiba.

I also couldn’t get the speakers working with Linux, headphones were fine, just no speaker sound. I’m sure I could have come up with a fix but I was too busy and after all it was just a loaned laptop, if it had been mine then I’d have put in the extra effort. This of course does highlight one important factor. Dell in many ways have stolen a march on other PC manufacturers in that they’ve started selling PC’s with Linux pre-installed. Not that I’d buy one because for some strange reason it costs more, but it does tell me as a Linux user that I could buy their machine and know my OS definitely works with all the hardware which is something I couldn’t be sure of with other makes.

Who’s this laptop for?

Well, it’s a workhorse. It’s not pretty but it’s well built and designed for people on the move. It’s a salesmans/company execs laptop and these are usually purchased in bulk by organisations or companies where price is not necessarily the determining factor. For that market it’s perfect but for the independent and Linux user such as myself, price factors and compatibility are of greater importance so unfortunately it wouldn’t be my first choice for a laptop.

There may well be a few more posts cropping up on this issue when I get the time to put various bits of information together but I thought I’d point you in the direction of Westmonster who has picked up on the angle of the value of gifts that if they exceed £1,000 should be registered with the Electoral Commission. Incidentally I’ve been meaning to mention how good a site Westmonster is for a couple of weeks and has definitely joined my daily read list and will go on the blogroll when I get a moment.

What she does raise though is an important question. Did Flying Lion Limited actually fly various senior Tories including David Cameron in their own plane or simply pay the cost with another carrier? I feel I should point out that in my last post on Flying Lion Limited that perhaps I could have given the impression they’d used their Dassault Falcon 900EX executive jet to do the flying around for which I didn’t have any specific proof of.

On that note I’d just like to point readers in the direction of a little something that cropped up in a search this evening. Realising that it could be distinctly likely that Flying Lion Limited simply paid for flights with other carriers I decided to see if I could track down their only registered plane’s movements.

I would like to say at this juncture that I have over the last hour or so become distinctly impressed by plane spotters. They’re great people who diligently keep records of planes flying this way and that for the sheer love of it and good on them.

I say that because thanks to them, I came up with this little log from Luton Airport for November 2006. Yes, I know it’s a really big text file but the bit you’re looking for is:

2006/2201 VP-BMS F900EX LTN-KRT

Just to decode it a bit. the 2006/2201 from looking at other records appear to be time of departure, if there are two numbers then it’s the difference between expected and actual so it looks like the flight left at 22.01. VP-BMS is obviously the registration number of Con Air 1, followed by the plane model number Falcon 900EX. The LTN-KRT bit is the most important because that’s the airport codes. LTN obviously being Luton but what is KRT?

Well, quite simply, KRT is Khartoum, Sudan and looking at Davey Boys register of interests he flew to Khartoum with Flying Lion between 20-21 November 2006. Now this record is for 19 November but as Dave registered the interest in advance, things could well have altered slightly or simply because the flight was so last he could have been confused, who knows but that plane definitely flew from Luton to Khartoum and interestingly returned on 21 November 2006 which is when Davey boy says he came back although interestingly it seems to have been via Paris.

There’s also an interesting account from another plane spotter based in Blackpool who clocked Con Air 1 at Blackpool airport on 29th September 2007. Remind me again where and when the Tory conference was this year? I’ll be keeping a close eye on those register of interests in future.

Final little ditty. For anyone wishing to fly with the Tories favourite airline, here’s something sobering to think about from the Air Accidents Investigation Branch. Mind you, didn’t stop Michael Ancram being gifted flights by Flying Lion only 4 days later, not to mention rather a few others in 2003.

The other day Tom Watson posed the question who are Flying Lion Limited? Always up for a bit of an investigative challenge I decided to have a little look around to see what was about and there’s a few interesting things that cropped up.

First off, they crop up rather often in senior Conservative MP’s lists of members interests. Here’s a few of them:

Michael Ancram, 13-14 December 2006, return flight to Damascus paid for by Flying Lion Limited.

David Cameron, 22 March 2006 return flight to Prague (Czech Republic) (please no Dominic Fisher insinuations, purely coincidental) traveling with Flying Lion Limited but being a bit tardy on registering this interest, leaving it till 22 May 2006.

David Cameron, 20-21 November 2006 t Khartoum Sudan again provided by Flying Lion Limited.

William Hague, 22 March 2006 same flight as Davey boy to Prague presumably.

William Hague, 3-4 April 2006 to Sudan, obviously provided by Flying Lion Limited.

William Hague, 15-17 May 2006 to Israel and Jordan with Flying Lion Limited.

William Hague, 6-7 December 2006 to Pakistan provided by Flying Lion Limited.

William Hague, 8-10 December 2006 flying on from Pakistan to Bahrain again with Flying Lion Limited.

Andrew Mitchell, 22-25 January 2006 flights to and from Rwanda with Flying Lion Limited.

Andrew Mitchell, 3-4 April 2006 flights to the Sudan, yep you guessed it, with Flying Lion Limited.

Andrew Mitchell, 17-18 July 2006 to Bangladesh flying with the Tories favourite airline.

Andrew Mitchell, 20-21 November 2006 off to Sudan with Davey boy’s flight with Flying Lion Limited.

Andrew Mitchell, 28 February - 4 March 2007 off for a week in Burma courtesy of Flying Lion Limited.

OK, that’s the MP’s. In addition to this a number of Parliamentary Researchers/Assistants were also entertained with freebie flights by Flying Lion Limited including Edward Llewellyn who works for, wait for it, Davey boy himself and Ben Pratt who works for Michael Ancram.

So there we have it, a little shufty down the list of members interests reveals that various high level (you don’t get much higher than the leader after all) Conservative MP’s and their staff have all been given free flights by Flying Lion Limited to ferry them to various parts of the world.

However, as with all members interests, it’s important to actually know who we’re dealing with here. Who exactly are Flying Lion Limited? David, the first commentator to Tom’s post brings up an excellent suggestion in contacting Companies House to find out information. This would be a very useful method were Flying Lion Limited a UK registered company which they’re not. To be more precise, they’re registered in the well known tax haven of Bermuda at this address:

CEDAR HOUSE
41 CEDAR AVENUE
HAMILTON HM 12
BERMUDA

Incidentally, Cedar House must be an absolutely massive building because during my little dig for information I came up with so many different companies registered at that one address that I’d really hate to be their postman.

So we know who they are, where they are but what kind of a company are they? Well, surprise surprise, they’re not exactly BA with a nice open online booking system servicing hundreds of destinations around the world on a daily basis. In fact, according the the registrar of aircraft in Bermuda, they are the owners of a sole Dassault Falcon 900EX, registration VP-BMS. For those not of an aeronautical nature, that’s one of those executive type planes, not exactly a Leer jet but you get the idea, not a big high volume passenger jobbie.

I’ve never been a plane spotter, but I understand it holds a fascination for some people and for all our benefit, some of those nice people with a predisposition for snapping pictures of planes some actually put them up on the net. I’d love to drop an image here but all of the sites I came across had specific copyright notices so if you’re interested, this is Con Air 1.

Nice little plane and I’m sure a thrill for any senior Tory to be chauffeured around in, saves mixing with all the riff raff on standard air carrier’s flights although I’m not exactly sure where this leaves Dave and his Eco-Warrior comrades on the old environmental credentials. Something doesn’t quite match between proposing eco-taxes on airlines that ferry the average Joe public off on holiday while themselves jetting off on private executive jets. Perhaps companies registered in Bermuda will be exempt, who knows?

Anyway, I digress. So we know who’s been getting free flights, we can presumably know what plane they’ve been flying on as it’s the only one registered to Flying Lion Limited but why should a company registered in Bermuda seem so predisposed to ferrying senior Tories about?

Well, Unity picks up on an article from a few years back in the Times which is semi-accurate. Flying Lion Limited was at one time part of ADT. For those who don’t follow business takeovers, mergers and acquisitions, ADT used to be run by a certain Michael Ashcroft, better known as Lord Ashcroft, big rich geezer who throws lots of money at key marginals for the Tories. However, ADT itself was aquired by Tyco back in 1997 and Lord Ashcroft did indeed serve on its board of directors. However on 18 November 2002 he and another board member resigned.

So why is Flying Lion Limited ferrying around senior Tories? Does it look good for a party that’s banging on about the environment to be nipping to various destinations on a private executive jet? Does it do much for openness and transparency in politics that senior Tories, including their leader of course, are receiving gifts in the form of flights from some company registered in Bermuda who just happens to be part of the former company of their single biggest donor? I leave people to decide that for themselves.

Incidentally. Does anyone have any friends who are lawyers in the US? Flying Lion Limited were involved in a court case in Florida a few years back regarding Freedom of Information and I’d love to know what that was all about.

Lately the Express&Star newspaper has been writing articles on the basis of research undertaken by the Taxpayers Alliance. It’s curious how there are an increasing number of pseudo academic research bodies emerging, being used as valid sources of information by right-wing crap newspapers when all they amount to is front operations for the vested interests of the Tory Party.

Just a thought. Oh, and while we’re on crap journalism as the Express&Star excels at that. Did anyone else notice the article about some Tory Councillor up in Tettenhall winging about closing their local fire station. Maybe I’m just a tad cynical but this whole services are being cut, taxes are rising line being perpetuated by the Tories is a bit rich. Perhaps someone should have told him instead of making stupid statements to the press, and the press being stupid enough to print them, that if he was really concerned about cuts in fire service provision then he’d be better off talking to his fellow Tories on the West Midland Fire Authority. They do after all have the majority so presumably they’re the buggers who could actually do something about it.

Just on the off chance I get accused of being an evil leftie comment blocker I thought I’d share this curious comment that just came in. I’m not going to allow it forward but reproduce the content here and leave people to decide for themselves because it has perplexed me somewhat.

Author : Tory (IP: 147.32.114.186 , kelo.sh.cvut.cz)
E-mail : iuwqsmi@usa.net
Comment:
Best site!
Fabulous Website!
It’s vonderful.

On the outset it looks like an obvious bit of spam. All bloggers have had them, usually along the lines of ‘great site’ please allow my little link to a Viagra ad onto your site. This one however is strange.

I’ve checked the e-mail address, it’s got form for spamming, the URI which I’ve removed points to an advert for some drugs but interestingly embedded into a legit and respectable website. On that basis I’d discount it as spam but there are three things that don’t make sense.

Firstly, the name given, ‘Tory’ seems far too specific given the political context. Secondly, the origin of the comment is the Prague Technical University. Now before anyone jumps to conclusions or makes assumptions, the origin being in Prague is of complete coincidence and should not in any way whatsoever be interpreted as inferring anything at all in the slightest possible sense to do with Prattory OK?

It’s strange because most spam originates from hijacked machines, botnets and dodgy servers usually in the US, Russia or China (at least in my personal experience). I wouldn’t envisage a technical academic institution to be so lax about security that their system might get hijacked.

Thirdly, at least from my experience, most spam I’ve had has originated from unsecured dodgy old Window NT servers but this one checks out as having come from a Windows XP machine running Internet Explorer 6 (further note, do not draw conclusions just because Prattory uses a Windows XP machine with Internet Explorer 6).

Anyway, those are the details. If it is a genuine comment then it’s a bit weird but I genuinely apologise if the author is miffed about it not appearing. If it is spam, then it’s arguably the second most sophisticated I’ve ever seen.

Final note. NO NOT DOMINIC FISHER OK!?!(done in caps for the hard of reading).

Unless I’ve completely missed something and the West Midlands County has been abolished then can someone tell me who at the Sun newspaper (I use the term guardedly) thinks that Sandwell is in Worcestershire?

Either that or they’re working on very old maps down there.

I have a bit of a love hate relationship with the Internet. Sometimes I’m amazed by simply how much information is out there and other times I can’t bear the sight of it and deliberately take a few days away from it.

That said, with the power of a search engine like Google, it’s amazing what answers to questions you can find on almost any topic.

When I have a few moments I also like to have a little look through my statistics to see what search phrases have been used by people to find my website.

I’ve had a few strange ones in the past. Some that have made me giggle and others which are a little disturbing but I couldn’t resist sharing this one with you.

Earlier this afternoon, someone found me via Google with the search term:

“best household items for me to do my self up the arse with?”

I’m ranked fourth on Google for that btw. The mind truly boggles sometimes.

I’m not sure if it’s something to do with fatherhood, work, or that we usually only watch German TV at home but this is the first Rugby World that I haven’t watched a single match.

That said I caught the last couple of minutes of the England-France semi-final and all I can say, is come on England, I may well even break a habit and go down the same pub I watched England win the last world cup to watch it if Mrs Penguin lets me out.

I had a hard time coming up with the title for this post. So many different angles ran through my mind as to how to approach this issue however I’ve settled on a simple list of facts with additional extended explanations for the hard of reading.

Here’s how it started:

Labour Blogger, that’s me, Political Penguin to most people, Gareth Williams to others wrote this post. In it I said exactly these words (note, unlike some bloggers I do not retro-edit my posts, delete or amend them to get me out of trouble, I stand by what I say). Also note that it contains a little bit of swearing which I do on the whole tend not to do on my blog but I thought it justified.

“This is for the miserable little Prick from Prague in the Czech Republic who yesterday had a bash at trying to crack my site. Yes I do know who you are so piss off and don’t come back.”

So there we go. Some miserable little so-and-so from Prague in the Czech Republic had a go at cracking my site. For future reference please note two things. Firstly they ‘had a bash at trying’ they did not succeed and at no point in the post do I name anyone specifically.

Then a few comments come in from Dave Hartley in which he states ‘Dominic can’t help it’ which one could assume that he believed that the culprit behind the attempted cracking was Dominic Fisher, well known Tory blogger who resides in Prague.

You will also note that my response to David Hartley is ‘Don’t be presumptuous Dave’. Now unless I’m mistaken I told Dave to not to be unduly confident in his assumption that the person who attempted to crack my site was Dominic Fisher and just so we absolutely get everything clear, yes I do know who it was, yes they are located in Prague in the Czech Republic and NO it was not Dominic Fisher aka Prattory.

By his own admission Dominic is a technical idiot not interested in computers, IT, gadgets and the like and I have no reason to doubt his word on that. The person who attempted to crack my site had some hacking knowledge but was by no means an expert as they failed miserably.

Now as far as I was concerned that was that. The expression of some annoyance as to someone wanting to try such a thing, end of matter.

Then I came home today to find this comment from that thread waiting for me in moderation (contains explicit language):

Rory Says:
October 9th, 2007 at 4:02 pm

“Its not hard to hack a shitty blog like this when you use free third party software to run it. You cheap fuck.”

To say I was a little taken aback is to put it mildly. I’ve had a few people try to play silly buggers with me on my site but this is the first outright openly hostile comment I’ve received in almost a year of blogging.

Being the curious person that I was, I had to see who and where this person came from.

This is him:

Author : Rory (IP: 88.146.60.193 , a40-prg1-11-193.static.adsl.vol.cz)
E-mail : rawtothecore@hotmail.com

Now the ‘.cz’ bit really interested me. I’d thought for some reason that I might have offended someone in Prague and they’d taken it personally which would never be my intention to slur an entire nation or city’s populace so I had a little look at my analytics for the site and something struck me, well two things to be precise.

Firstly, there was no referrer. Most people end up at my site by way of Google. It far outranks all my other referrals but nothing for how this person got to the site. OK, there’s a couple of options, Rory could be using referral blocking but why would he do that? He could have simply typed in my URL by accident and came across something he didn’t like or perhaps have received the link on an e-mail or had been told to key in the URL.

Now on to the second thing. Rory dropped by at 15.12 on October 9th to leave his little comment. Strangely enough though, and as you can imagine I don’t tend to get inundated with readers from the Czech Republic, there was another IP address (80.250.1.180) from the Czech Republic that had visited the site at 14.58. Now for those who have not had the pleasure of a visit from dear Dominic Fisher, that is his main IP address. He uses a few others from time to time but when he’s knocking about the blogs, that’s the one he’s usually on. So was it him? Well, there is no proof apart from he happened to be around at Tom Watson’s site an hour prior to then dropping his usual insightful comments.

Of course, could be just a coincidence as is that Dominic runs Windows XP on his computer and uses Internet Explorer 6. Note to Dominic, dude, if you’re really going to use such a rubbish browser then do yourself a favour and upgrade to IE7, 6 is so full of holes and I’d hate to think you’d get a virus or something on your computer.

Then of course these same two IP addresses drop back later in the day presumably to see if I’ve responded to Rory’s lovely comment while monitoring using Bloglines (which incidentally is what Prattory uses).

OK, that’s the conspiracy theory side of things which is where we get to an interesting twist. I’d hazard a guess that if me and Dominic ever met up, we probably wouldn’t agree on much but there is one thing, neither of us subscribe to conspiracy theories as he outlines here.

Incidentally, I’m curious, is this Dominic’s new blog? Has he picked up the keyboard in anger again? I’m sure I remember him saying he was going to stop, I think we should be told.

So here we are, two rather cynical old sods who don’t subscribe to conspiracy theories apart from one thing. Who’s this RAW guy commenting on the post? Here’s what he had to say:

RAW said…

“Gareth Williams seems like a right nutter. The old ‘he tried to hack my site’ routine is so dumb its so Labour. Not that I support any UK political party, in fact one reason why I left that country was partly due to the politics. I tried to leave a comment on his blog about this issue but he seems not to be open to the concepts of free speech and censored my comment. Typical New Labour for you.”

Now that’s strange but first let’s just have a little laugh. Apparently I seem like a right nutter which is nice to know. Why is it that people who suddenly start to criticise Labour preempt their argument by saying something like ‘I’m not political but’ or ‘I’m not a member of a party but’? Nevermind, lets get down to the two really funny bits.

I’m not quite sure that the ‘he tried to hack my site’ routine is much of an oldie nor indeed ’so Labour’. Happy to be proved wrong on this one but the only recent recollection I have of someone in UK politics claiming they’d been hacked was Grant Shapps who during the Ealing Southall by-election claimed to have had his YouTube account hacked. Note to Rory/RAW, he’s a Tory and obviously an idiot if his password was 1234. So there we go, an inability to qualify a statement with any actual evidence seems to be the order of the day but lets move on to his allegation that I ‘censored’ his comment.

Well, it’s there and completely unaltered from what he wrote as offensive as it is. I was aware of the comment earlier in the day but decided to mull on the idea of releasing it primarily for two reasons. Firstly I did state way back in the first post I ever wrote for this blog a rudimentary terms of use:

“Terms of use are simple, you are free to post anything that you want as long as it is not offensive for the purpose of purely causing offence. I welcome well thought-through comments even if you fundamentally disagree with my views and I’m happy to discuss with you. Political point scoring designed to boost the ego of the comment’s author will be treated with the respect for which it deserves and be ignored.”

I would have normally put this particular comment into the category of causing offense purely for causing offense and deleted it but as it forms a thread of these events then I finally, after doing much more important (sorry but in the scale of things, my family and other duties come a lot higher in my list of priorities than OK’ing comments by offensive people like Rory/RAW) things.

There’s two things that are strange here. Firstly Rory/RAW as it is the same person (I’m sure Liverpool misses him madly now he’s left the country) has sought to criticise me for censoring his comment. That’s strange because looking at the page on Prattory’s new site there’s the little giveaway that RAW’s previous comment has been removed by the author yet for some strange reason he doesn’t claim that it is a typical Tory anti-freedom of speech action, very strange that, could almost make you think their mates or something.

I’m just going to flit back to Rory/RAWS original comment on my site, the offensive one.

Rory Says:
October 9th, 2007 at 4:02 pm

“Its not hard to hack a shitty blog like this when you use free third party software to run it. You cheap fuck.”

OK, yes, everything used on my site to build it is free and Open Source with the exception of the odd embedded YouTube clip which is Flash. That would be because I work using Free Open Source Software (FOSS). Partly for practicality (it is a superior development methodology) and partly ideologically that I believe openness and sharing is preferable to closed proprietary systems.

However for some strange reason he doesn’t seem to level the same criticism at Dominic, after all he’s using free software as is virtually every blogger out there. Whether it be Wordpress, Blogger.com, B2Evolution, Movable Type, it’s all free so what’s the criticism here about? (note, there is actually a commercial as well as a free version of Movable Type). I would give Rory/RAW a little history lesson in where half the software on his Mac running Safari comes from but I fear it would go over his head.

Final bit about that comment. Rory/RAW says it’s not hard to hack my ’shitty little blog’ so here we go. If it’s not hard, go on, I dare you to. I’ve place a small bit of coding deep inside my site that describes something about Prague. Find it and you get not only the pleasure of proving me wrong and elevating yourself to the status whereby I might respect your techie ability, I’ll even buy you a pint the next time you’re in the UK. Deal? Just one thing though, just to make sure you don’t cheat and get a much cleverer mate to do it for you, you’ve got to do it from the same IP address that you made the comment from OK?

Now on to Dominic. I’ve been quite fair so far and I’m more inclined to simply pose a few questions. Dominic wasn’t the person trying to hack my site unless he’s got a really clever mate to do it for him but I don’t think that likely, there is no real motive and as much as I don’t care for him and he probably feels the same about me I would hazard a guess he wouldn’t be bothered to go to those kind of lengths.

What does bother me though is that he read the article and immediately took it to mean that I meant him. I know he went to school during the time the Tories were in power but so did I and I did manage to gain the ability to read and understand things. Whether he has jumped to a conclusion or is simply paranoid I have no idea but he has, true to form played the victim of which there is no accusation to start with and his reference to an adherent to the theory was in fact someone assuming something that wasn’t true and me putting them straight on the matter.

Yes, this is politics, Dominic’s tried in the past to misrepresent what I’ve said and yes, he’s got form for using sock puppets, retro-comment moderation, retro-editing, deleting posts that might prove embarrassing and the like but why he has seen fit to accuse me of accusing him of something when I firstly said no such thing and secondly when someone else jumped to the wrong conclusion I put them straight, I have no idea.

If it were anyone else I’d ask for an apology or a correction in light of the facts but somehow I doubt I’d get one. What also surprises me is that assuming Dominic picked up on this story early on the 9th of October and thought I meant him then instead of what looks like putting his mate up to knocking out an offensive comment, he didn’t just simply contact me. I’m a very reasonable person, there’s a contact section on the site, it’s only a few clicks away. If he had some problem with the post or took it the wrong way then instead of going down the sock puppet and play the victim approach, if he was mature enough he could just have said ‘I think some people might think you mean me by that post can you change it?’ and I’d have said yes and at his request put in a specific disclaimer that it definitely wasn’t Dominic Fisher who attempted to hack my site but he didn’t.

So there you go, you’ve got a long list of the events of what is now yesterday. I won’t propose any ideas for fear of being labeled a conspiracy theory nutcase by people who don’t know me, you can make up your own mind whether you think there’s anything going on. My own personal belief is that Dominic instead of doing the mature thing and simply contact me has concocted a ham-fisted attempt and sock puppetry which is so blatantly obvious it’s laughable.

Final note to Dominic. Change the timestamps on your new blog, they’re running on US time and it makes it look like Rory/RAW is complaining I censored his comment before he even posted it. Oh, and a thank you. As it seems that some people believe I should respond to them instantly I’ll finally get round to doing a proper site policy section so everyone knows where they stand in future and certain people don’t get upset and jump up and down.

[Update] Dom has obviously finally noticed that he got my name wrong and in true Prattory style has retro-edited his post so as not to look like a twonk. Note to Dom, it’s good blogging practice to put a note at the end of your post highlighting any changes, never mind, wouldn’t expect anything more.

Here he is the little blighter. Been scurrying around the house for the past few weeks. We hadn’t heard anything from him for ages until Mrs Penguin sent me a text, a matter of less than an hour ago informing me there was a mouse in the bedroom.

So strategically I wedged blankets under the door to the living room and bathroom to cut off his likely escape route meaning that at worst he’d have to hop down the stairs where I’d have the opportunity to flush him out one of the doors.

I proceeded into the bedroom where I spotted him dash under the bed. Heading over to the other side of the room so as to flush him out into the direction of the landing I started moving all the assorted crap from under the bed until he legged it.

I cornered him on the landing and almost had him till he hopped off down the stair and into the kitchen. Somehow I managed to catch him between my feet while I was kneeling down which is probably better than the way I caught the last one (it ran up my trouser leg and I had to catch him on my back).

Finally I managed to get hold of him and drop him in a plastic tub with a sealed lid. Air holes punched I took him off to a bit of local wasteland to let him go free.

I know it’s not exactly hunting down a mamouth or a wild boar but some primeval hunting instinct seems to have been satisfied and I’m feeling rather pleased with myself.