My Auntie Ellie

Ellie looking very 'movie starish' during her 20's

Sadly, a few weeks ago (on my birthday of all days) I received a call from my closest aunt wishing me a happy birthday, oh, then telling me she had cancer and would probably never see me again.
Wonderful call to get on your birthday I think you'd agree.
Anyway, she seemed pretty upbeat about the whole thing, basically acknowledging that there wasn't a whole lot she could do about it and she'd let the doctors do whatever they could. All in all a pretty good attitude to have really.

Well since then things seem to have gotten really bad really quickly. I found out a couple of days ago that some radical surgery had to be performed, and my dear auntie Ellie is in very bad shape. But I'll try to deal with it the same way she was, by accepting that there is absolutely nothing I can do, and leave it up to the powers that be to do what needs to be done.
So my fingers are crossed, but I fear for the worst.

Copyright Infringement Warning?! WTF!

Hmmm, I just got a lovely little email from some jackass company proporting to represent Microsoft and claiming that I had downloaded Microsoft Office over the bittorrent filesharing system.
Seriously, what a bunch of utter pricks.

Here is a small snippet of the email containing their 'proof' of my evil wrongdoings:

Evidentiary Information:
Notice ID: *******
Asset: Microsoft Office
Protocol: BitTorrent
IP Address: **.**.**.***
DNS:*** .**.**.**.**********.com.au
File Name: Microsoft Office 2007 Enterprise & Office 2003 Genuine Advantage Cracked
File Size: 1607964
Timestamp: 19 Apr 2009 **:**:** GMT

Now I'd very much like to actually see a copy of MS Office get crammed into 1.6Mb (though Word 2.0 could fit on 2 floppy disks) so its pretty obvious that these inept jokers are relying completely on the torrent's file name to match up downloads with their client's records.
There is of course, one pretty large problem with doing this as almost anybody could easily see.
I'd have probably got the same stupid notice if I'd have been downloading something titled "MS Office 2007 clip art pack" because, well, the first couple of words match so that means we can ignore the rest because we have ourselves a dirty stinking pirate.

What a bunch of complete tossers.

Now before anyone asks what I was doing downloading an activation crack for Office let me explain. Last year I sold a computer (with proper legal OEM copies of both MS Windows and MS Office 2007) to a business client. About 2 weeks ago this client started getting the dreaded "This copy of MS Office is illegal" message, even though I had supplied them with a complete shrinkwrapped copy of the professional edition complete with COA.
However, as is rumored to occur 20% of the time, Miscrosoft's auto update had gone off to the internet and installed Windows/Office Genuine Advantage software which had then incorrectly identified the client's copy of Office to be illegal.
So the crack was to let them continue using their LEGAL copy of Office that Microsoft had screwed up when verifying its authenticity.

Needless to say I wrote to these idiots, a company called BayTSP telling them in no uncertain terms that they were irretreivable idiots and to get their filtering/matching system an overhaul.

So far, no reply. Figures.

TreeStyle Tab Firefox Addon

This is a great adon for firefox if you tend to use lots of tabs like I do.
Instead of them being displayed at the top and as soon as you have more than a couple of tabs open the names get truncated, TreeStyle Tab opens a nested tree view of any tabs at the left hand side of the browser window, so you can not only have many more tabs showing, but also their 'parent' pages for a nice easy to see guide of which page/site you opened them up from to begin with.

Well worth a look

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890

New book

Well I'm about to start on a new book, its been far too long since the last one went out and I need a valid excuse to 'break in' my shiny glowy new Logitech G15 keyboard that doesn't involve shooting Koreans in video games.

Not sure of a title yet, but I quite like "Mostly Nothing" in reference to the fact that everything we see and touch is mostly made up of the vast empty spaces inside the atoms which make up our world.