MYWAY

A couple of years ago the UK was sold on the idea of Chip And Pin for their credit and debit cards. We were all told the inconvenience was worth it to significantly cut fraudulent use of our debit and credit cards. As usual there were some valid arguments against the chip and pin, which the card issuers assured everybody were invalid, and chip and pin would stop card fraud.

Now the BBC news site reports a ” 25% rise in the fraudulent use of UK credit and debit cards” Yep the same cards now protected with chip and pin are being used fraudulently.

A lot of the fraud is carried out overseas where there is no chip and pin, or in online and telephone sales. Strangely one of the arguments against chip and pin was the fact that unless it was worldwide it wouldn’t be as secure as we were told. Score one for the naysayers, who also pointed out the online insecurity at the time.

It looks as if someone has the opportunity to give out a big “told you so” to the chip and pin companies.

Just one last thought from me, if they were so wrong about chip and pin stopping card fraud, what makes the UK government so sure that the proposed ID cards will really stop ID theft, terrorism, and illegal immigration?
ID cards have been proven not to work elsewhere in the world but when did that matter as long as you can convince the people otherwise, like was done with chip and pin.

As I sometimes do, I was browsing http://www.funforever.net which has some terrific posts on it. Spookily this week we had been making a cake for my daughters 5th birthday, and one of the latest posts on forever.net showed some incredible cake “sculptures” Including the following examples….

A laptop cake for the pc lover in your life.

This one is ideal for the old time music lover. Just look at the tremendous detail in that iced confection, sweet music to the tastebuds and the eyes.

You can gamble on this being a tasty treat too, the odds are in your favour here.

23 Red is the winning number, on more gambling inspired delights.

Just when everything seems to be going well, there always seems to be something to jump up and bite you on the arse. For me this week it was my PC. This is always bad news for my family as I’m an addict. I use my PC every day for emails, blogging and just avoiding real life really.

So on Tuesday when the hard drive failed to whirr, and the PC sat looking back at me displaying a black screen with just the words “Non System Disk or Boot Disk Error, Insert bootable Disk Then Press Enter” needless to say I was not a happy bunny. It wasn’t for lack of trying that it wouldn’t boot, oh no. 27 resets, and a few swift slaps to the side of the case, hard drive removal, gentle coaxing, and even violent shaking of the errant hard drive were attempted.

YES I knew I was wasting my time, it was an ex hard drive, it had turned its last revolution and was in technical terms, knackered. But that didn’t stop me from trying to force it to work to get my hands on all the data it contained which I hadn’t backed up the last time I did a back up (ie never before).

My hard drive crashed and burned, with all my passwords, and website backups, and blog posts, some pics (I did back those up regularly thankfully or my wife would have sent me to the same place as the hard drive, only much more painfully). Luckily I had a spare hard drive, which has got me back online with minimal downtime, but still I’m annoyed.

The hard drive failed at 18 months old, for which I could blame the manufacturer. But worst of all is the loss of my data, and for that I have nobody to blame but myself, and that’s really made me angry.