PC Magazine has published a rather self-righteous rant about "sites that have sold out". Their basic premise is that if the website is making a profit as well as being "mainstream" and legal then that qualifies them for the "sold out" label.

Since when has becoming legal and profitable been a bad thing? Out of the ten sites mentioned, I only use three - Google, YouTube and Last FM. It is my considered opinion that those three sites have improved by leaps and bounds over the years.

PC Magazine obviously seems to think that websites are only cool if they are breaking the law and losing money but instead I would say that is the fastest way to go out of business.

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Anyone that knows me well enough knows that I am a paranoid sort of fellow when it comes to personal security and protecting myself from identity theft. I'm the guy that doesn't throw away old bank statements in the bin intact - I'm the kind of guy that shreds them, shreds the shredded pieces, shreds them again - then sets light to them before flushing the ashes down the sink. You can't be too careful these days.

So I have always been on the lookout for a good secure deletion tool for the computer. As anyone with PC knowledge knows, when you delete a file, it's not really deleted. The computer tells you it's deleted by freeing up the hard-drive space so you can download more photos of Halle Berry in a bikini. But anyone with the right knowledge can easily undo the delete function and restore your files. This can be anyone from law-enforcement to the guy who bought your old hard-drive on eBay. So if something sensitive or embarrassing needs to be deleted, you need to be sure that it stays deleted forever and that it can't be restored later.

I think I may have found a good secure deletion tool with a very simple name - Eraser. When you download this, a system reboot is required and when you reboot, you'll see that Eraser has attached itself to your Windows Explorer right-click menu. So if you want to securely delete a file, right-click on it, choose "Erase" and then it will be gone forever - poof! It will bypass the trash bin and be deleted by Eraser in a matter of seconds, being re-written over and over again until it is totally unrecoverable.

To make sure it really was gone, I then used a deleted file recovery program called Restoration which you can use to easily restore those deleted files you thought were long gone. I typed in the name of a file that I had just deleted (using Eraser) and Restoration told me there was no trace of it on the system. So it looks like Eraser is a very efficient tool at making files permanently disappear!

I then tried using Restoration on a file that I deleted normally via the Trash bin and it instantly recovered the Word document and a PDF file. However, when I tried to restore a MP3 file and an "avi" file, I was only able to get a partial file back. It seems that Windows starts to over-write audio and video files first.

One of the good things about Restoration is that it requires no installation on your computer. It runs as a stand-alone "exe" program. So you can put it on your flash USB stick and carry it around with you.

So it seems that if you want something to be gone from your computer forever, use Eraser. Otherwise a tool like Restoration can easily bring it back. Only use the Windows trash bin for stuff you don't mind people trying to restore later.

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Moving away for a moment from computer-related issues, I wanted to share a couple of classic Scottish songs with you, courtesy of YouTube users with a good taste in music (!). The first one is Dougie McLean's "Caledonia" and the second is The Corries' "Flower of Scotland" (watch out for the matching yellow shirts and tasteful black leather vests!) :

I have always wanted to podcast this blog as people tell me that my Scottish accent is one of my assets. Here in Germany, everybody loves the accent and I have always been one of those bloggers who think that adding a human voice to your blog does wonders. In an internet full of anonymous blogs, it helps sometimes to put a bit of a "human face" on what is written by adding a bit of sound. Plus doing it in a nice Scottish accent is just a big bonus!

I downloaded the open-source recording software Audacity months ago but I couldn't really use it as my headset & microphone combo were slowly dying. The sound quality through the microphone sounded like someone farting in a tunnel and I knew that I needed both a new headset and a serious look at my PC's audio controls, before I could consider starting podcasting. Today I finally got round to buying the headset and when I got home, I started looking at the audio controls on the computer (accessible via the Start Menu then the Control Panel). Several hours later, after lots of fiddling around, I finally got crystal-clear audio quality and I started recording!

If you look to your right (underneath my photo), you'll see an audio welcome message from wee me. Plus from now on, I will be podcasting all of my blog posts which you can listen to here on the blog or you can download the MP3 file to your own computer to listen to later. OK, I don't delude myself into thinking that everything I say is that interesting but to me, the fun is in the doing. I like doing experiments like this and seeing through personal projects. If people listen to the mp3's then that's great. But if not then I will still have fun doing them nevertheless.

"Audacity" really is a powerful recording tool. Not only can you record audio but you can also edit existing audio files, convert audio files from one format to another (say a "wmv" file to a "mp3" file) and lots more that I haven't even begun to try out yet. I've only scratched the surface with this amazing program. I'm going to look into the possibility of perhaps composing a radio-like "jingle" for my podcasting audio files.

When I can finally get the webcam working, the next stage in the development of this blog will be video entries, playable via YouTube and embedded here on the blog. But I was looking at webcams today and the cheapest one (which isn't total crap) had my blood pressure racing. So I guess that will have to wait for a while!

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Following on from the previous post on Gmail labels, I have come across a problem and I am wondering if anyone can help.

Every day, I have a lot of stuff automatically emailed to me as backup copies - backups of my blog posts, copies of news stories, photo backups, and so on. When these arrive in my Gmail account, I have a filter set up to automatically divert this stuff from appearing in the inbox, as they don't need to be seen right away. They are automatically archived with an appropriate label so I can find them again later if need be.

But what really irritates me is that these emails are archived as "unread" which means I have to find these emails on a daily basis, tick them, mark them as "read" and untick them. OK, it only takes a few minutes but it gets really tedious after a while.

From what I can see, there's no option in the filter set-up to have the email automatically marked as "read" before it is archived. So I am wondering if anyone has a hack / workaround solution to this problem. How can I tell Gmail to automatically mark certain emails as "read" before they are archived?

First one to give me a good answer gets the first prize of "my eternal gratitude". I'll also make sure your place in heaven is guaranteed.

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It always amuses me when I read yet another online rant about Gmail abandoning the folder structure in their email application, in favour of labels. Whenever Gmail asks their users what features they would like to see, one of them is always "give us folders!". But answer me this - what precisely is the difference between a folder and a label? Answer : absolutely nothing at all.

A folder is basically a place-holder for you to find something again when you need it. A label performs the same function. By labelling something in Gmail, you are assigning it to a certain area of your email app and if you need the email again, you will just click on the label name and up pops the email in question. A folder does exactly the same thing.

So to all the anti-Gmail whiners that ridicule Google's decision to employ labels instead of folders, why don't you tell me precisely how a folder differs from a label?

I bet you can't.

I have been spending the last few days reading the excellent book "Lifehacker - 88 tech tricks to turbocharge your day" and it has a big email section. One of the things the book advocates is an empty inbox and immediately assigning each incoming email to a certain label or action. Unimportant low priority mails get archived with a label to be read later while highly important emails immediately arrive in the inbox to be dealt with.

It's reading this book that has given me so much insight and appreciation to the labelling and filtering system that Gmail offers. Thanks to the new filters that I put in place yesterday, I haven't been interrupted by a single email all afternoon today. This has allowed me to get some tasks finished which have been sitting around idle for days and even weeks. Absolute bliss.

I've just had to spend the last hour changing all my passwords and encrypting them into my TrueCrypt vault, after multiple attempts were made by persons unknown to gain access to my email account, my bank account and my web hosting account. I've also had to stop using my public email address for all the various online services that I use, since using my public email address for signing in gives a potential hacker one foot in the door. If they know the email address then all they need is the password. But if I keep the sign-in email address secret then they have to find that out too which makes things a lot harder for them. Not impossible of course but one extra hoop for them to jump through.

I found out about the hacking attempts this evening when I logged onto my email and discovered emails from the various services saying there had been unsuccessful log-on attempts. Paypal in particular is very good about sending out these kinds of notifications. Knowing that I didn't have any password problems (plus I had been out of the house for the previous couple of hours), I knew that I had been the target of a hacker, or as I call them, "password sniffers". I also have other names for them but I'm trying to keep this blog suitable for all ages.

So the first thing I did was review my passwords and looking at them, I realised that they weren't really that secure. OK, I'm not stupid enough to use "PASSWORD" or "MARK" but at the same time, a determined dictionary brute-force attack would have got the passwords in the end. That's when I realised that I needed to secure the various online services with long unbreakable password strings. This includes :

• Letters - both upper-case and lower-case
• Numbers
• Special characters such as @ ! " # + ?
• A minimum 20 characters long but if you must make it shorter than that, no less than 15 characters long.
• No connection whatsoever to any personal detail of your life - so no birthdays, pet names, street names, names of your first sweetheart, anything like that. Keep the password totally impersonal.
• Changing the passwords every 30 days.
  

So a good password would be something like !$!@yStP5x@u1P!QD2!5

If you have to type the passwords in a text file or word document then make sure you have some kind of encryption scheme in place so the password file can't be cracked. Truecrypt is excellent but a more simple solution would be Locknote.

If anybody hacks a password like !$!@yStP5x@u1P!QD2!5 then they deserve a job at the National Security Agency.

I am one very happy chappie today after I learned that Paul Potts won "Britain's Got Talent". As far as I am concerned, he is an amazingly talented singer and I for one will be buying his debut album as soon as it comes out.

Here's his winning act :



And here's where he finds out he has won :




I have always supported people whom society considers to be "the underdog". Paul doesn't have David Beckham looks or riches (although he won't be short of cash from now on!) and he has hit a few speed-bumps in his life. When he revealed that he had been bullied at school, my girlfriend saw me instantly tense up. This is because I was severely bullied at school and I still bear the mental scars to this day. So Paul is someone who I instantly identify with - he and I are people who people routinely underestimate, ridicule, put down, write off, whatever. So last night, Paul scored one for the Underdog Team and I'll be having a few beers tonight to celebrate.

Congratulations Paul. You truly deserve all the good things that are coming to you.

One of my friends sent me a very interesting news article on the future of Joost and this reminded me that I still haven't posted a review of Joost here on the blog yet.

I currently have Joost installed on my computer but at the moment, the number of channels is very limited and not that exciting (but they do have the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit channel!) and truth be told, the whole program is rather unstable (hence the "beta" label). The program sometimes freezes for no reason and when you want to flip channels, it takes forever to get the channel list up on the screen and then takes a lifetime to get the channel to change. Joost also has a bad habit of slowing the computer down with the CPU usage often hitting 100%. This means that watching Joost is a really big effort and you can't really do anything else on the computer while you watch - to make it run properly, I have found that I have to shut down all non-essential PC programs. Forget surfing the net while watching Joost. Forget doing anything period!

For the record, I have a broadband DSL connection so my internet connection is not the problem here. If you have a dial-up connection, definately forget trying to run Joost!

If they can get the stability issue sorted out and get the channels to easily and immediately come up then they have an absolute winner on their hands. But right now, it's a huge turkey on the computer and as such, I rarely open it. Today, it took 20 minutes for the update server to update my version of Joost and a further 15 minutes to get the channel list up. Finally, it crashed and I had to use the Windows Task Manager to shut it down.

Despite all that, if you'd like an email invite to assess it for yourself, let me know (by email) and I'll send you one. But in my opinion, it'll be a while before Joost performs to an acceptable standard. When it does, I'll review Joost again and I will then probably try to start using it more often.

The audio files that come with Skype to make its sound effects are not too bad (better than Yahoo Messenger's anyway with that really irritating "YYYAAAHHHHOOOO!" rodeo sound) but still I wanted to change my Skype sounds a little. I wanted a more normal sounding ringtone plus I wanted a few catchy sounds for incoming chat messages, failed file transfers and so on.

I came across this site today and it has a selection of interesting sounds in "wmv" format which you can use for Skype. I now have a flushing toilet noise for anything that goes wrong (failed file transfers for example), I have a sci-fi "ka-pow!" noise for incoming messages and I have the trumpets playing for when I log on and off.

If you don't like what's on offer on that page, you can also just Google what you are looking for. So if you are looking for say a dog barking, you can search for something like "bark.wmv". A duck quacking might be found as "duck.wmv" or "quack.wmv". Normally you can easily find free audio files via Google as there are a lot of websites which are basically just huge online warehouses of free audio files in both "wmv" format and "mp3" format. Fan sites such as South Park Studios have their own downloadable South Park sounds section (I used to have Cartman screaming at me when someone called me on Skype!) and many other TV programmes also have fan websites with free sounds you can use for Skype.

It's easy to change your sounds on your Skype program. Just go to your options panel and choose "notifications" then the "sounds" sub-tab. Then at the bottom, it says "import your own sounds". Click on that and upload the relevant sound file from your computer. Then go to the panel above that, choose the action you want to change (such as "ring-tone") and if you drop down the menu to the right, you should see the sound file you just uploaded. Choose that file with your mouse then press "save". Before saving, you can preview the sound to make sure it works properly.

I am thinking of using Audacity and a microphone to make my own personal sounds. I'll keep you updated on that little project if I ever get it going.

On my trip to Scotland in April, I wanted to take Skype along with me so I could check voicemail & chat messages while surfing the net on my dad's laptop. Since there is no official portable USB version of Skype, anyone wishing to carry "Skype On A Stick" needs to make a few tweaks here and there. The good news is that it is easier than you might think to achieve this. In fact, it's child's play which is really good news for a techno doof like me.

First, go into the Skype folder on your computer and look for skype.exe. Normally it is in the "phone" folder. Now right-click on that skype.exe file and copy it to a folder on your USB stick (you can create a directory folder called "SkypeUSB" or something similar). Note, I said "copy" and not "move"! You have to keep the original "skype.exe" file in its usual place for Skype to work normally on your computer.

Now within the SkypeUSB folder on your USB stick (next to your copied skype.exe), create another directory folder called "data" (without the speech marks). Next, using Microsoft Notepad, open a new text file and name it "skype.bat" (again, without the speech marks). Inside this text file, write the following line and then save the document : skype.exe /datapath:"Data" /removable . Once saved, place this text file inside the "data" folder you just created. And then you're done.

Clicking on skype.exe on your USB flash-drive will now run Skype portably without the need to properly install it on the computer you are using. You can log on, make phone calls, start chats, etc just as you would with any regular Skype installation. Even if the computer you're using already has Skype installed and running under another username, you can still run your USB version without the two programs conflicting with one another.

This portable method of Skype works perfectly for me. I plugged the USB stick into an internet cafe computer (despite the cafe owner looking at me worriedly) and Skype instantly booted up.

Just remember to pack your Skype phone or headset and you can make calls at will!

I just have to give a honourable mention to Unlocker, a freeware software program that really is indispensable. Many is the time when I was ready to smash the computer in frustration but then Unlocker the Cavalry came riding to the rescue in the nick of time.

Basically when you open a file, whether it be an image, a document, whatever, many computer processes will be used to open that file, run it, and do whatever you need to do to it. When you close that file, those computer processes may still be running and so you will be unable to delete, move or rename the file until those processes have been shut down. This is where Unlocker comes to the rescue because by this point your blood pressure is starting to rise and you're giving serious thought to starting a new career as a serial killer.

If you get the above error message, then just right-click on the file and choose the "Unlocker" option. You will then get a pop-up window giving you details of the processes holding the file in place and an option to kill those processes. If you decide to kill the processes, you can do so at the click of a button and the file will instantly be free so you can delete, rename or move it. What a lifesaver!

As well as a writer, editor and computer / internet geek, I also occasionally do English teaching to Germans (preferably blue-eyed blondes with pigtails called Heidi but beggars can't be choosers!). But for some reason, I am averse to having people come round to my place and this causes problems when you're trying to build a private tuition empire. They want to come round to your place because they don't want you to know where they live (you never know, I might be the mad homicidal axe-man teacher!) and they don't want to meet in cafes because it is noisy, crowded and they end up with the coffee bill.

But the problem is I don't want them to come round to my place either. First of all, I am extremely protective of my "private space". Second, the flat is normally a messy unorganised place with stacks of books, papers, unorganised stamp collections, remains of lunch sitting in the kitchen area and I am not an enthusiast of dusting the shelves on a regular basis. Oh and let's not forget that in the summer it's not really professional to meet students while I am wearing very little clothing and drinking a cool beer! So if someone was coming around here for English lessons, I would have to get dressed properly, perhaps have a shave, clean the flat up, move the Playboy magazines and the beer.......as you can imagine, I am not really inclined to do that too often.

So for over a year, I did another job and I thought my teaching days were over. But then I realised that with the internet, students don't have to come around here and I don't have to go to them. They can be taught online. I sit in my messy hovel and they sit in theirs and never the twain shall meet. Hell, we don't even have to be in the same country.

I am a huge enthusiast of Skype and I try to use it as often as possible for my phone calls. Skype also has a built-in chat function. So that got me thinking. I could advertise to non-native speakers all over the world and if they download Skype, I could teach them over the Skype lines. So I advertised online for some experimental lab-rats and within 24 hours, I had my first students - one from Switzerland, one from Italy and another from Brazil. Payments can be made by EU bank transfer or Paypal, payable before the lesson starts. Any worksheets necessary for the lesson can be scanned into an Adobe PDF file and emailed to the student, who can then print it out at their end.

If you're looking presentable and you both have webcams, you can also switch on the cams and turn the lesson into a live video-conferencing lesson. If the student doesn't understand a word or would like you to write out a phrase for them, you can use Skype's chat function to type it out for them.

So far, things have been a success and I have interest from other people in other countries. I would say the only negative aspect to it is that in many countries, people can't afford to pay too much as their standard of living is lower and their salary is lower. Plus if they pay by Paypal, you have to take those fees into account. My normal fee is 20 Euros a hour (app. $25) but in many cases, I have had to take a pay-cut in order to get some extra work and to also test this online experiment.

I also like the Skype teaching idea because I don't have to travel anywhere to meet the student. So this saves me travelling expenses and travelling time. I can just sit in front of the computer, do one Skype lesson, hang up after 45 minutes, then the next student calls, then the next one......I don't even have to move at all!

I do have a problem which perhaps someone could help me out with. I am going to scan some flashcards into a Powerpoint presentation and I am looking for a way to share that presentation online with the student in real-time. So when we are both on Skype and the lesson starts, I would open the Powerpoint presentation and it opens at the same time at the student's end. They see what I see. Anyone have any idea how I could go about that?

Oh and if anyone wants English lessons over Skype, please let me know! We can begin negotiating!

Someone passed along to me a link to a new Digg tool called "Diggwatcher". It enables you to monitor a particular story and the page refreshes itself every 60 seconds to show the current number of diggs for that story as well as the number of comments people have left. It's a web-based tool so there's no need to download anything.

It was the comments that really put me off Digg. I've tried to get into the "Digg atmosphere" and be part of the Web 2.0 group but I very quickly realised that the people who rate and comment on Digg are immature idiots who are ready to flame anyone whom they deem to be not worthy of being there. Some of them are also rather cruel - someone once posted a story on the site about a dead body being found in an apartment and all the commenters on Digg could do was make very distasteful and unsensitive remarks. When I angrily told them that they were being rather tactless, I was hounded off the site.

I still occasionally check the site to see if I can find any good weblinks but on the whole I tend to avoid the place. Nevertheless, Digg Watcher is a neat looking tool and worth a mention.

Another tool which I have been playing around with over the weekend is WinPatrol. This is a nifty little robust program which basically monitors your Windows operating system and you'll soon realise that it is totally invaluable.

When you install a software program on your computer, more often than not, it gets added to your start-up menu. This means that when you boot up your computer in the future, that new program is going to load as well and so the more programs you've got in your start-up menu, the longer it's going to take for your computer to boot up properly. So it pays to keep your start-up programs to a minimum. So one of WinPatrol's biggest assets is that it gives you a complete list of what programs start up when you boot up your computer and it gives you the option to easily disable that program by clicking on them. This right away made my day because Apple Quicktime was constantly starting up even though I had constantly disabled it through "msconfig". But it only took one click on WinPatrol to disable that Quicktime icon from constantly popping up. I also disabled about half a dozen other useless system processes which were totally unnecessary and which were slowing the computer down. End result? When I booted up the computer this morning, it started up so fast I thought it was on steroids.

WinPatrol also acts as a kind of firewall, letting you know in a pop-up window when websites and software are trying to covertly install software on your PC, when a program is covertly trying to get into your start-up menu and it gives you the option of either granting or denying access to that program.

WinPatrol has so many features that I haven't even scratched the surface of yet. One of them is the ability to view and delete individual cookies on your computer. Another shows you the list of currently running programs and processes on your PC so you can disable or delete if you so wish. Anothet tells you what program is associated with a particular file type (so "doc" will be opened by Microsoft Word, "mp3" will be opened by Winamp, that sort of thing). You can even see files which are supposed to remain hidden on your system (mostly Microsoft files which help to run Windows).

In a nutshell, WinPatrol is ideal for cleaning all the crap which naturally accumulates in a computer over time and as a result, your computer will work faster and more efficiently.

The program even has a little Scotty dog icon which "woofs" at you when you open it. What more could you ask for?!

For the past few days, I have been playing around with a piece of encryption software. I have been looking for a reliable encryption tool for quite some time (as I am completely paranoid about hackers and other shady characters!) but I was always concerned that if I chose the wrong tool, then it would irretrievably ruin my hard-drive with an unbreakable, unmovable encrypted file. I mean, once you start messing around with encrypted partitions attached to one of your drives then you could be letting yourself in for a whole host of problems if you set it up the wrong way or if the software malfunctions or even something as basic as forgetting the password. Not to mention the mess of losing the files which are being held inside - some of which may be irreplaceable. So I have been procrastinating about this for a while.

The computer program I found a couple of days ago was TrueCrypt and so far, it seems to be working well. It was recommended by PC Magazine and I have always trusted their recommendations. I was particularly struck with how simple it was to set up. You get a PDF user manual in the software download and if you follow the manual's instructions to the letter then setting up your encrypted folders is mere childs play.

How it works basically boils down to this - you create a folder on your "C" drive, just a normal regular folder. You give it a name - let's just say for the purposes of this discussion that it's called FORT KNOX. This folder is where the encrypted files will be stored. You then assign a drive number to your folder and it in this drive that the TrueCrypt software will be installed and ultimately live in your computer. You then move the FORT KNOX to the TrueCrypt drive which is protected by a master password. Using the password, you can then "decrypt" your files and access them. When you don't need the files, just remove the FORT KNOX folder from TrueCrypt. The folder is then instantly encrypted again and totally unbreakable (or so the company claims). I would be interested to see how TrueCrypt's algorithims hold up against a determined brute-force attack.

But if you're just looking for basic no-frills security and a way to deter people from casually snooping on your files then TrueCrypt seems to be able to do the job properly. I can't begin to list all the possible uses for such a program. At the very least, you should have an encrypted drive on your PC for personal information such as bank statements, receipts, invoices, passwords, tax paperwork, address books, calendars.....sometimes it pays to be paranoid. Sometimes they really are out to get you.

I've been following with some fascination the story of whether a serial killer is posting messages on a blog, which is discussing the unsolved "Claremont Murders" back in the mid-1990's.

There is a school of thought that says that the commenter "Dr Phibes" may be the elusive killer, trying to get the authorities back into the case again. If true, this would be eeringly similar to the also-unsolved Zodiac killings where the killer taunted the police through the newspapers.

What has made people suspicious this time around is that "Dr Phibes" seems to be leaving clues to the whereabouts of two missing girls :

"I believe Sarah Spiers is in water either in Ankatel (south)or north of Wanneroo.And Sarah Mc Mahon is near Mundaring Wier.Just a feeling i get."

A true-crime enthusiast or the real killer? Now that someone has been suspected of the killings, it will be interesting to see if "Dr Phibes" makes any more blog comments.

One of the things that has annoyed me about Windows is the music it plays when the system is booting up or shutting down. But I have found a way to disable those sounds.

To mute Windows’ startup and shutdown sounds, click the Start menu and scroll to Settings then Control Panel. Then choose Sounds and Audio Devices, and click the Sounds tab.

The Sounds tab is where you can activate and disable all the sounds on the Windows Operating system. To turn off the startup and shutdown sounds, just scroll through the list under Program
events, select Exit Windows, and choose (None) in the Sounds drop-down menu. Do the same for Start Windows, and click Apply. Then click OK and you're done.

One other irritating Windows feature is when you delete something and you get the box asking you "if you're sure". Of course I am bloody sure! To turn off that annoying nag box, just right-click on your desktop trash bin, choose settings and disable the nag box.

I am finally getting Windows the way I want it!

I've spent a lot of time getting my Firefox browser just the way I want it. The last time my browser crashed and I had to re-install it, it took me months to find all my extensions again on the web. So for quite some time, I have been looking for some kind of a back-up tool to make a security copy of my Firefox profile. Today I found it.

The Firefox Extension Backup Extension (FEBE) will make a copy of your entire Firefox profile and will store it locally on your hard-drive. You can set the extension to update itself either daily, weekly or monthly at a certain day and time.

Then if the worst should ever happen, and you have to re-install Firefox (or even if you just buy a new computer) then you can load the FEBE and your Firefox profile will be re-loaded in a snap.

Perfect.

Jean Mercier over at Skype Numerology blogtagged me. So now I have to tell five things about myself that are not known to others....hmmm.....what can I say that won't bore the pants off you?!

1. Before I was diagnosed with epilepsy, I was all set to join the Royal Air Force as a fighter pilot. The epilepsy obviously put an end to that (no-one wants an epileptic pilot in the cockpit of an expensive plane with missiles attached!). After that, it was my ambition to join the BBC as a television reporter, either covering foreign affairs or covering political events at 10 Downing Street. I didn't manage that either unfortunately. Too much competition for too few jobs. I had this glamorous dream of either interviewing the British Prime Minister or reporting on a war by riding in a tank wearing a bullet-proof vest. Instead I was reporting on groundbreaking history-altering events such as a senior citizen's enormous pumpkin in a gardening competition for the local newspaper. Oh well!

2. In my time as a newspaper journalist (this was in the 1990's), I met and interviewed people such as Harrods owner Mohammed Al-Fayed, former US Beirut hostage Tom Sutherland, then-Scottish Secretary of State Ian Lang & British TV host Chris Evans. While interviewing then-BBC Radio One presenter Nicky Campbell, he suddenly dragged me onto a live radio show and I was so nervous that I stammered "hello hello hello". For ages afterwards, I was the butt of all the jokes in the office, being called the "Hello Hello Hello Man". One of my biggest regrets was missing out by 10 minutes a long-standing pre-arranged interview with the then-British Prime Minister John Major. It was all arranged through his press office but he had to rush off suddenly so his press spokesman cancelled on me. Australian actor & TV presenter Mark Little also cancelled on me. Then there was the 2 year campaign I waged to persuade the Queen to give her first ever interview to a journalist (me being young and very naive, perhaps a little too arrogant).

3. After journalism, I worked for the Scottish Executive as a civil servant. I had the privilege of meeting two Scottish First Ministers, Donald Dewar and one of his successors Jack McConnell. Both really nice guys. When Donald Dewar died suddenly in 2000, I broke down in tears.

4. I've worked as an English teacher in Poland, a bulb packer in the Netherlands, a dish washer in Paris (doing the George Orwell routine), a kitchen helper in Adolf Hitler's former Alpine retreat in Germany, a debt collector in the UK and an office clerk for the US Army in Germany.

5. I have a big weakness for Scottish bagpipe music and German folk music. If you want to torture me, just nail my feet to the floor and play "Scotland the Brave".


Now normally at this point, I should blogtag others to keep this going but I'm not sure who I will nominate right now. So I will think about it and when I know some people, I will amend this blog post - if I remember!