Facebook scam warning

I've never liked the idea of Facebook purely from a security point of view. If you have a FB page or are thinking about getting one, there have always been several things you should be aware of and they've always seemed to me to be very good reasons not to sign up. Now all that paranoia is coming home to roost. If you do FB, I sincerely hope you've not been bitten by this yet. Whether you have or not, I hope you can see the writing is now plainly, er, on the wall.

Like a lot of people, I signed up with its spiritual forerunner, FriendsReunited.co.uk, way back when this kind of networking was a novel idea and despite niggling privacy concerns, because I simply had to know what became of all the nutters I went to school with (they're all either accountants or dropouts now, predictably enough) and signing up was the only way to find out. It actually felt quite "safe", with its double-blind email and school-register-type format. Still, I avoided giving away any real information about myself and I'm glad I did, as it's since been sold to ITV.com and (ab)used for other purposes. Unlike classmates.com, the US site that inspired it, FR never really followed up on its early success. Classmates.com now gives us all a clear indication of what would have happened if it those Other Purposes had been allowed to flourish. Not pretty at all.

Anyway I'll not harp on about it any more. Just be careful what you post up on these sites and be even more careful what you respond to there. Facebook in particular is now so huge it's just begging to be targeted by spammers and scammers who will look to exploit the friendly bonhomie there, first and foremost. When it happens, as with all these things, the more you give away, the more you stand to lose.

[/rant]

Weekend recipes & stuff

Cucumber Raitha by François-Xavier at fxcuisine.com. I tip my hat and dip my naan :)

Just a quickie again: had to share these blogs and their fab recipes. To be honest, I've not tried the Spanish one yet but it all looks dreamily familiar... just looking at the index has me lusting after butifarra, arroz a la cubana and lashings of pimienton picante. The title, Las Recetas de Mama, says what it is: a homesick Cordobese is progressively posting all his mother's recipes for us all to enjoy. Check it out before she cottons on why he's on the phone so much these days and clips his ear for him.

The other one is a bit different, in fact it really is something else... I made this guy's cucumber raitha for a curry night last week and it was sublime. His photographs are very nice too. If you've ever tried to make raitha and come up with something you thought was pretty good, you'll hate him. If you've ever wished you had a ready way of photographing your better culinary creations, you'll want to track him down and kill him. His amazing blog is here. His utterly infuriating About page is here. I'm still trying to find his home address... ;) He merits a permanent place among the Canny Good Links, I think.

Finally, there are some more iPhone moments on the November Picasa page.

Bon profit!

Things not being what they seem

We're both missing the autumn like a weird form of late-onset jetlag. It's getting hotter, not cooler, and the trees are sprouting green rather than glowing red and orange. Christmas decs everywhere look waay out of place. This time next month, when you're all roasting chestnuts on an open fire, we'll be roasting our chestnuts on the open beach. A lovely thought, if not a particularly pleasant image :) It does have a disorienting effect, a sort of dream-like unreality where you're double-taking a lot more than usual.

Kids are good for making you look twice at the best of times but this week's been mad. Imagine your typical house husband's mid-week afternoon: you've done the washing-up and there's a nice half-hour window before you pick up the big one from school. Just enough to leaf through the news with a nice cuppa tea. By the time the kettle's boiled and you slowly become aware of the eery silence it's too late... it's not like you forgot about the little one, he just slipped under your radar long enough to wreak his revenge for not paying him attention. Even before you even raise your head, somehow you just know it's gonna be bad. Well, on this occasion it's the dreaded Felt Pens, today's favourite clearly being a nice big red one. "A tiger," he says, and for once I don't need the hint; I'm actually quite impressed. It's not a bad tiger at all, the stripes up the arms and legs are neatly spaced and his paws are coloured in black, just like a real big cat. As toddlers are naturally ambidextrous, the work is more-or-less symmetrical from a whole-body perspective and stops only where the clothes start. This is impressive toddling, and it's not even the end of the ruse.

I put off washing him cos it's time to get Elly, so I just shove him in the pushcair and leave. We return to afternoon snacks and he's sitting at the breakfast bar with a glass (I know, I know..) of milk when he leans over to reach something and the glass shatters under his hand. It must have been cracked or something. Milk and glass fly everywhere and I instinctively grab his arms above the elbow to staunch the blood from all the cuts... which... aren't... cuts... they're red marker pen! Unconvinced and still shocked, I yell to Elly to get some paper towels while I check again and again each of the hundreds of red stripes all over him, for way longer than it would take for real blood to flow, but due to some kind of miracle he's completely unharmed. The panic over, he finally takes a deep breath, looks up at me and lisps, "ooh, a thcary tiger!"

Once I fully realised his incredible good luck I did the sensible thing and got straight down the shops to get him to pick some Lotto numbers. Which was hopeless of course, as he can't hold a pen properly, and Elly picked them for him. She was pretty good and only spoiled one card, so I didn't have the heart to lecture her on the statistical probability of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 being drawn from the pot, largely because I wasn't sure it was any less likely than a random pick. Nevertheless I checked the results as soon as I got up this morning and guess what? We didn't win, of course, but I got another shock because at first glance I thought we had. The first five numbers, I kid you not, were 12, 23, 34 and 45.

Ok, it's not quite the Twilight Zone but it's enough to make your head spin, it really is.

News at Tin

Actually, it's jast gone siven-thirdy, but what the hick...

Top story: we're in our new place. It feels very, very good. It feels like we finally landed, albeit more like the way a ball lands than a plane... more a sort of bouncing to a halt. If you're a regular Ryanair flyer the analogy might be lost on you, but anyway.. our cases are unpacked, at last, into the wardrobes of our sixth home in as many months, so we can relax at least, even if we can't get too comfy just yet. As the vast majority of our junk is on a cargo ship somewhere off the coast of Somalia (with any luck) it feels airy and spacious in here, even minimalistic, with vast amounts of empty storage space and clean, open work surfaces. It feels good, more than anything, to have our feet on slightly more solid ground; a 12-month lease seems like ages in the light of recent exploits. The fact is though, it's a finite contract; the owners are only renting it out while they take a sabbatical in Adelaide. This time next year we'll be pulling the last of the strawberries and upping sticks once more, and despite what you might think, we both agree it already feels like the right thing to do. Howick is charming and convenient and all the rest of it but it's way too crowded and suburban for our liking. Their house, though, is wonderful.

I think it was built something like 20 years ago, in the garden of a very sweet, flower-bound cottage, a two-storey Dutch-style place with a kind of granny flat off the other side of two garages, leased to a guy who apparently spends around 3 months of the year in it. As this sits between the street-front cottage and our place it's very quiet and the joint garage driveway provides a big, safe courtyard for the kids to adorn with pavement chalk artworks. A narrow but beautifully manicured garden, fragrant with roses, jasmine, orange and honeysuckle, borders the living room at the front and the kitchen down the side. We have a cat that hates kids & hence we never see, but are contractually bound to feed. The interior is very tastefully modern and quite open-plan, making it devilishly hard for the cat to sneak in and eat. Our room looks out over neighbouring gardens, while the kids' has a sea view. It's no grand vista, just a triangular patch of sparkly water between the pitched roofs of the neighbouring holiday chalets, big enough to see if the the tide's in and watch the Auckland ferry cruise past Mount Wellington in the distance. As I quipped to the wife the other day, we should think of it as a downpayment on the proper view we'll have ourselves one day. Anyway, rather than try to describe the layout and whatnot, I made a slightly hamfisted video of it all & posted it on my iDisk. Apologies in advance for the quality, or lack of; like a lot of things in our current pre-shipment, chattels-free state, we're obliged to make use of some slightly unorthodox tools...

Other news: in a report out today scientists claimed the process of migrating from one side of the world to the other might prove quite unsettling to the under-fives... whereas we always assumed it would be hardest on Elly, as she's so much more aware of what's going on I'm beginning to think the last six months has been more upsetting for little Oscar. Daft things like becoming very home-oriented and placing a lot of value on what's "ours" – our house, our car, etc. – even though they've been changed as often as his teeshirts. Possibly because of it, and despite it, he has this amazing ability to pick out "owa car" in a crowded mall carpark, even differentiate between ours and nearby identical cars, which got me wondering if he was actually reading the license plates.

They're all really subtle "symptoms" and it's quite possible that we're looking for a syndrome that doesn't exist, but you have to wonder. He's sitting next to me now with a pencil in his fist, scribbling and singing away to himself, happy as the proverbial pig, not a care in the world. This morning he was a wreck. There are always a few tears starting kindie, plus I guess it's natural to be a little over-protective of your youngest, but leaving him with the lovely nursery teachers seems much tougher than it was with Elly and he's always quite positive he doesn't want to go, crying before we even get there. He wasn't so bad at Play Centre once he realised I wasn't leaving; stuck to me like glue for the first half-hour and then gradually got into it on his own. Groups of little kids don't faze him so much as perhaps represent the loss of his comfort zone.

I dunno. He's two. They're always a bit doolally at that age. Both he and Elly are amazing kids and all this will likely just make them stronger and more resilient. Elly got an award from the principal of her new school last week. I was there for the assembly; it was lovely. Along with a number of other kids she was called to the front, and then stood up on the stage holding a small certificate that commended a "kind and caring student", which, given the lecture I'd given her that very morning about sharing and not being selfish, goes to show exactly how little I know about my own offspring...

Sport and weather: mostly dull and very sunny, respectively. I really can not wait til my bikes arrive.

This just in: I got an iPhone for me birthday, a marvellous toy that happens to have a half-decent camera built in and makes it much easier to spontaneously snap the kids and their zany antics.. a new album on Picassa will catalogue this low-resolution malarky as it unfolds. It was lovely to receive the cards and birthday greetings by the way, it's always nice to know I'm remembered as I embark on this, my forty-ninth year. A big "thankyou" and virtual hug to you both ;)