Category: General

Queen – It’s Late

I had a sparrow-fart start on Monday and I walked out without my camera. These were taken on my Blackberry, so they’re not the best pics I’ve taken. I hope you get the flavour of the place.

Continue reading “Tblisi”

I like long walks, especially when they are taken by people who annoy me.
Noel Coward

Goodnight everyone, sleep well.

I’ve been in Tblisi this last four days, (Pics coming,) with the other senior security managers – so all trained investigators of one background or another – from East Europe. As you might imagine, both the Assange and the Dewani cases came up a couple of times in discussion over a few bottles of absolutely top notch Georgian wine, and champagne, which I can whole-heartedly recommend.

The consensus on the Dewani case was that there is a definite whiff of fish in the air and the husband certainly has some questions to answer.

As far as the Assange case goes, the consensus was that we would treat the allegations by the ladies concerned quite seriously and, given the apparent facts, we would launch an investigation, so we would all be on-side with a decision by the UK courts to extradite him to Sweden.

As far as the leaks are concerned, there was much scoffing at the Septics information security regime. We analysed what had happened as far as we could with the information to hand, and measured how it has apparently been done – how the information was leaked in the first place, that is – against our own information security procedures and rules. We do not believe that any Company employee, even an IT Admin, still less an outside hacker, could get access to such a spread of information in the first place, let alone assemble such an extraordinary amount of classified information spanning such a wide spread of subject matter without tripping alerts in the security admin systems. (As you can imagine, being a tobacco company, it has been tried 🙂
Continue reading “Comment on two cases.”

In Memory

Billy Fury – Halfway to Paradise

This recording of an early hit was made 4 days before he died in 1983.

It’s late Fall, and the Indians on the reservation in Sisseton, South Dakota asked their new chief if the coming winter was going to be cold or mild. Since he was a chief in a modern society, he had never been taught the old secrets. When he looked at the sky, he couldn’t tell what the winter was going to be like.

Nevertheless, to be on the safe side, he told his tribe that the winter was indeed going to be cold and that the members of the village should collect firewood to be prepared. But, being a practical leader, after several days, he got an idea.

He went to the phone booth, called the National Weather Service and asked, ‘Is the coming winter going to be cold?’ ‘It looks like this winter is going to be quite cold,’ the meteorologist at the weather service responded.

The chief went back to his people and told them to collect even more firewood in order to be prepared.

A week later, he called the National Weather Service again. ‘Does it still look like it is going to be a very cold winter?’ ‘Yes,’ the man at National Weather Service again replied, ‘it’s going to be a very cold winter.’

The chief again went back to his people and ordered them to collect every scrap of firewood they could find.

Two weeks later, the chief called the National Weather Service again. ‘Are you absolutely sure that the winter is going to be very cold?’ ‘Absolutely,’ the man replied. ‘It’s looking more and more like it is going to be one of the coldest winters we’ve ever seen.’

‘How can you be so sure?’ the chief asked.

The weatherman replied, ‘The Indians are collecting a shitload of firewood.’

A friend who is staying with us for a couple of nights has told me a tale that I find incredible. Some time ago he decided to apply for a credit card, his first ever. He eventually received a rejection, and telephoned the company to ask why he had been refused. He was told that they had checked his credit rating and found he didn’t have one, so he was classified as a ‘bad risk’. He explained that he wouldn’t have a rating because he never went into debt. Like me, John believes that if he hasn’t got the money, don’t buy.

The company persisted in seeing him as a bad risk, even when he told them that he owned two houses, a hotel and doesn’t owe anyone a penny. Eventually, he was offered a solution. Go out and buy something on credit, pay it off, and obtain a credit rating. He declined to accept their advice.

We have played so well that the guys have really made my job fairly easy.
Ricky Ponting

Goodnight everyone, sleep well.