Compare and contrast:

1.

2.

 “Oops”

Went fishing today. Some more pics at the other place.

It is with great sadness that the Ministry of Defence must confirm the death of Trooper Robert Pearson from the Queen’s Royal Lancers Regiment in Afghanistan yesterday, Monday 21 April 2008.

For over a year now the F1s have been using the old strawberry-coloured iMac. I set them up with a shared account, and a password that we all knew. That’s bad of me, but as secure as was needed in this environment.

This week Sophie (8) has been bugging me to set up separate accounts for them. They want some privacy, and don’t want the other reading their email. Fair enough. So yesterday I created new users, moved their separate mail into the right places, set up their iTunes library in the ‘Shared’ account, blah blah. I let Sophie set herself a password, and this morning Rachel (11) asks me if she can change her password?

Of course.

“I want to change it to <object>,” she said.

She hasn’t got quite got the hang of this. “Don’t tell me your password! Don’t tell anyone your password.”

“But you’re my Dad,” she says, innocently.

“It’s all right,” I said, “I have ultimate power over that computer.”

One of these days I will teach them about secure passwords, password security, and the concept of root accounts. But not yet: Rachel asked how to make the change, and before I could move Sophie had nipped in, <clickety click>, and shown her.

I will watch her career with great interest.

It is with great sadness that the Ministry of Defence must confirm the deaths of Senior Aircraftman Graham Livingstone of the Royal Air Force Regiment and Senior Aircraftman Gary Thompson of the Royal Auxiliary Air Force Regiment on Sunday 13 April 2008 in Afghanistan.

Conversation at dinner this evening moved on to the Olympics, and Tibet, and things. We tried to remember where the Olympics were held in 2004. Sophie (8 and a quarter!) informed us it was Athens, and we all chorussed “Two thousand was Sydney!”.

Sophie put her hand on her forehead and said,
“I predict 2012 will be in … London!”

Then,

“I’m a fortune-teller!” We all laughed, but corpsed completely when she followed up with,

“Naw, I googled it.”

The House of Lords has a weblog. How perfectly wonderful.

My first email address was something memorable like lady0266@ermine.ox.ac.uk. Then, when I started my DPhil, I managed to grab rpgrant@molbiol.ox.ac.uk. Not very cool, but much more memorable.

On leaving Oxford I was saddled with a ‘professional’ email address of rgrant@cmtech.co.uk, which I never liked (I rapidly went off the management in that company too, so was only stuck with it for two years). About that time I registered a yahoo.co.uk, with username rpg14. That still works, although I seldom check it. When I left ‘cmtech’ and went to work at the MRC-LMB I was fortunate enough to obtain ‘rpg’ as my username. ‘@mrc-lmb.cam.ac.uk’ was still rather a mouthful, but at least ‘rpg’ was pretty memorable.

I went through quite a few ISP-based email addresses at that time, Tesco, Waitrose, Flyer, NTL . . . before bothering to register rg-d.com. Naturally, ‘rpg’ at that works, although I’ve switched off the ‘catch-all’ facility because it gets spammed to buggery. I also got an invite to gmail.com (thanks CK!); and although ‘rpg’ was taken, ‘rpgrant’ was free. I belatedly realized I should have tagged ‘rpgmail’, so missed out on some coolness there.

On arrival at Sydney Uni, changing my login ID from rgra3423 or whatever it was became a priority, and I was able to reserve ‘rpg’. rpg at usyd . edu . au thus became the coolest email address I’ve ever had, if not the shortest (rpg at rg-d . com is short, but not incredibly memorable. rpg.com is taken, of course). rpgrant @ my Australian ISP is also mine.

But two weeks ago I found out that the University of Sydney have pulled a real swifty, and created a memorable alias (that is bound to piss off the Yanks, but hey; .edu, as .com and .org, should never have been country-specific).

Ladles and gentlespoons, short and sweet:

It is with deep sadness that the Ministry of Defence must confirm the deaths of Lieutenant John Thornton and Marine David Marsh, both of 40 Commando Royal Marines, in southern Afghanistan on Sunday 30 March 2008.