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South Oxfordshire District Council – what a bunch of jobsworths.
Last Friday, I took the Shelbinator out for a walk when I got in – as Jenny has gym club. We plodded along Crisp Road and were approaching Hop Gardens when, bowling towards us, came a bloody great stray Bull Terrier. Well, Shelby being fearless launched into her usual attack routine and began to bite the dog- despite it being five times her size. Problem was, though, that Bull Terriers have the hide of a Rhino and the brains of an amoeba, so he just thought Shelby was having a game.
Down Crisp road it followed us – bouncing into me, hassling Shelbs and generally being a nightmare. Back along Luker Avenue and, for half an hour, I tried in vain to shake it off – even aiming the odd shoe in it’s direction. No use – everything and anything just bounced off his thick skull.
We finally got home and, with one hand holding the now ludicrously enraged Shelby and the other trying to hold back the stray, managed to bundle Shelby indoors. I put Shelby’s lead on the stray and dragged him up the road to let him go. Lovely. Back home, indoors and CRASH! Dork dog is now trying to break-in.
Back out, lead back on and tie him up to the Landrover.
I called the non-emergency police line and explained that I had a stray Bull Terrier that was trying to do an SPG job on the back-door. The nice copper gave me three numbers for South Oxforshire District Council (SODC) dog catcher and away he went.
First number – sorry we’re not in now.
Second number – “Tinkerbell” the speaking clock.
Third number – some poor soul who hadn’t got a clue what was going on.
Eventually said poor soul got me the number for SODC and I gave them a ring. Much pressing of buttons later, I’m through to their emergency number. When the dappy mare on the other end had finished laughing at a colleagues joke, she deigned to speak to me and I explained my predicament.
“Where do you live?”
“Henley-on-Thames.”
“Ah! Oh! Ah – that’s SOUTH Oxfordshire”
“I know, that’s why I’ve called SODC”
Well, get this. In SODC, you have to take the stray to the dog catcher – in Abingdon. Bloody easy dog catching job that must be then. I explained that we were dealing with half a ton of barking mad Bull Terrier and got the “It’s company policy” line. So I asked what I should do if it started attacking people.
“Well, then it’s a dangerous dog and you can call the police.”
“So I just have to sit here waiting for it to attack someone then do I?”
Companypolicycompanypolicycompanypolicy ……………..
“Do you want to come over and help me try and get this thing into a car and then drive it to the other side of Oxford?”
“If you want to complain, I suggest you call your district councillor on Monday.”
“And in the meantime, watch the dog demolish my house?”
Companypolicycompa…….SOD OFF
What a bunch of tossers.
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Sunday night and time for Shelby’s last stroll – and a chance to have my weekly chat with Mum. We wandered along Crisp Road, down Hop Gardens, along West Street and through the grounds of the hospital. No cats to chase and no dogs to attack – lovley.
Then down York Road and along Kings Road. As we crossed over Clarence Road there was an almighty explosion from behind us. I spun round expecting to see the remains of a house following a gas explosion in time to see a cloud of bricks and a solid iron inspection cover sailing into the night sky. Smoke billowed from a hole in the ground and subsequent explosions carried on. The road was also rather dark. I shone my torch at the crater and edged a bit closer (I never listened to the “ensure the area is safe” bit in the Emergency Responder course) to have a look in. Well blow me down if it isn’t the main electricity junction for the road – looking much worse for wear – and making noises as though it’s building up for an encore.
When the fire brigade arrived, the first word the chap uttered was “Fark!”
Ten seconds sooner and Shelby and I would have been stood on that and – at best – missing our limbs. Funny old thing life isn’t it.
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Here’e the deal – seventeen miles and nearly seven hundred metres of climb. Not only, but also, an average speed of nearly six mph. Click on the “View Larger Map” link to see the whole route. (I’ve just sussed that you can page through the steps of the route using the usual Google navigation.
View Larger Map
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Shelby, Shelby, Shelby – you little sod.
As you can probably guess from the image, Shelby has been in the dog-house this week. Utilising the cat-flap to the best of her ability, the neighbours phoned up lunchtime mid-week to let us know that she was sitting in the middle of the pavement contemplating the world and then, the next day, whilst Jules was in the kitchen, the Shelberator decided that she’d pop down the local park by herself.
Never fear though! I have employed an Enterprise solution to customise the cat-flap and all appears to be well for the moment.
Other than that, the site is now listed upon Stumbleupon and is really banging traffic in now – lovely, thank you.
It’s been a busy week – hence the update today and not more recently. I will, however, bung some more Ubuntu tips up in the next day or so – as the CTRL+ALT+DEL page is proving an absolute winner.
Not only, but also – for no particular reason – I’m going to add a to-do/to-want page for Atomic and, get this, I’m going to get my hair cut. Fantastic! I’m looking too much like cousin Devon at the moment.
Catch you soon!
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Ξ November 7th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Site |
I made Clustermaps user of the month!
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Ξ November 6th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Work |
… cos Don “Booty” Minnick is in town
(And if YouTube is playing up, grab the video here)
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Ξ November 6th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Life |
When I was a nipper, the two in charge used to bark at me if I ever showed any slight sign of walking pigeon toed.
Maybe it’s down to Primark and Priceless Shoes. Maybe it’s the diet of pizza and pop. Maybe it’s that they spend most of their lives with their feet up watching TV, but I can’t help but notice that loads of the yoof of today totter about with at least one pigeon toed foot.
Am I right or am I wrong?
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Ξ November 5th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Site |
I’m getting quite alot of traffic now and the – superb and reliable Feedjit – only records the last one hundred visitors.
Clustermaps records them forever – which is nice.
ps. (Feedjit is live – Clustermaps is only processed once a day)
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Ξ November 4th, 2008 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Work |
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There comes a time in everyone’s life when you “want to be alone”. Maybe you’re surfing t’internet at home and don’t want the man to track your every move. Maybe you’re stuck in China and don’t want to end up in the slammer. What ever the reason, being able to effectively access the web without leaving a trace is pretty useful. To this end tor is a superbly effective application. You can read about it’s principles and practices all over the place but in essence, when fired up, your first internet hop is an SSH tunnel into a cloud of thousands of anonymous onion servers. You are then bounced randomly through that until you emerge at the other end – with a new identity. Follow the instruction below to get it installed and try for yourself;
Open up a terminal window and install the tor package;
sudo apt-get install tor
Next step is if you are behind a firewall. For example, at work or univeristy or something. If you are at home with a direct internet connection, you can skip these steps and go to the privoxy bit. You will need to know the name and port of your corporate proxy server. If you don’t know this then, assuming your inflicted OS of “choice” is Windows something or other fire up internet explorer and have a look at the network options. There will either be a hardcoded proxy and port or a link to a configuration script. If it’s the latter copy and paste the address into your browser address box and choose to save the file locally. Open it in Wordpad and you will see the address and port number of your proxy towards the end of the file.
Armed with this information, you will need to point tor out through the corporate proxy. Iin your terminal type;
gksudo nautilus
Nautilus file manager will open in super-user mode. Now navigate to /etc/tor where you should find a torrc file. Open the file and add ;
HttpProxy my.proxy.server.com:portno
(replacing the values above with your own). I put this line after the first set of comments in the file. Save the file. Now close Nautilus.
Now we’re going to install privoxy. This isn’t strictly necessary, but it adds a wonderful layer of control to your anonymous session;
sudo apt-get install privoxy
The way that this is going to work, is that Firefox is going to use your privoxy session as a proxy server. The privoxy session will be routed out through your tor daemon. The tor daemon – as mentioned – is an SSH session to a random ball of string.
The install of Privoxy will ask you a few questions – one of them being whether you are using tor. Yes, to that and accept the defaults.
If you want to, you can edit the config file for Privoxy in /etc/privoxy – I do this to comment out the logging options. After all, there isn’t alot of point in being anonymous and then logging everything you do to your local machine.
Next, search for the line that contains forward-socks4a / 127.0.0.1:9050 and uncomment it.
Nearly there now. We just need to install a firefox extension. Point your browser to here ;
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2464
and install the foxyproxy plug-in. Once you have re-started firefox, you will see a status box in the bottom left of the bowser window. Left-click the box and a list of configured proxies will appear. Click “Add new proxy” and enter the following information ;
Under General;
Enabled: Tick
Proxy Name: Privoxy
Animate ….: Tick
Include …..: Tick
Under Proxy Details;
Manual Proxy …. : Tick
Host Name: 127.0.0.1 Port: 8118
SOCKS proxy? : UnTick
Under URL Patterns;
(If it doesn’t exist already)
Add new pattern;
Enabled: Tick
Pattern name: All
URL pattern: *
Whitelist: Tick
Wildcards: Tick
Then OK out of the dialogues.
Now we need to start the two daemons. From your terminal window;
sudo /etc/init.d/tor restart
sudo /etc/init.d/privoxy start
You’re now ready to give it a try:-
Open up firefox and go to the following address;
http://whatismyip.com
Note the IP address.
Right-click the FoxyProxy status box in your browser and select the Privoxy menu item.
Refresh the browser and note the entirely new IP address! Note: The onion network is a “cloud” of privately operated machines all over the world, all sharing their bandwidth freely. Sometimes it may run very slowly, sometimes it may run quickly. Live with it. As it is, your tor daemon will swap routers every ten minutes anyway – so you won’t have to live with it for ever.
If you’re at work and want further proof. Try activating privoxy and browsing to a file-sharing or torrent site – most will be blocked, but you’ll find that you can access any site quite happily.
Caveat time: You now have the ability to browse any web-site you want. Please don’t be a dick and do anything illegal. Don’t abuse the ability and don’t think that you’re some kind of 3li7e hAxor
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