To anybody in the IT industry it’s one of those death of JFK/Elvis/Lennon/Diana (delete as applicable) moments.

Words like ‘visionary’ are being bandied around, along with comparisons with both Henry Ford and Thomas Edison all of which are, in my humble opinion, valid.

I’m not an Apple™ fan-boy, but I do have rather more Apple kit than is probably healthy… it works, faultlessly and intuitively and it’s just so darn sexy (I read an article a few months ago that described the ‘swipe’ needed to unlock an iPod or iPhone as ‘digital foreplay’).

Part of that tech-sexiness must be attributed to Jonathan Ives who has steered their design for some years, but also attributed to Steve Jobs’ personal obsessions.

Jobs’ fondness for typefaces and fonts virtually invented the concept of WYSIWYG and ‘desk-top publishing’. And famously his dislike for visible screws means that there are none on the iPad, iPod or iPhone and, if I recall correctly, only about four on the underside of my Macbook Air (see I do have too much Apple kit). Compare and contrast to the back of your average PC which is just plain industrial, and not in a good way.

And two years on, while the Macbook Air is hardly ‘bleeding edge’ it still draws (virtual) gasps when I whip it out from my bag in meetings; when was the last time your Dell or Acer laptop ever did that?

One can only hope that Apple have plans in place to continue in Steve Jobs’ spirit; I’m sure he left them in the best state he could, and the company will continue to develop in his image.

I doubt we will see his like again.

A few weeks ago I thought it might be nice to look for a new cat. We had previously discussed that we might look for a ‘rescue’ cat, and that having enjoyed the company of Gandalf and Merlin – both pedigree Burmese cats, that another Burmese might be nice.

As someone once said, once you’ve shared your home with a Burmese, anything else is just a cat!

So, a trawl through the Cat Protection League websites, and the Burmese Cat Society and I spotted Lyla.

She was described as “a very special 2.5 year old lilac Burmese who has chosen to live on her own after having fallen out with her daughter. She is a sensitive but loving and very affectionate cat who would be best in a single cat household with no children.”

A few ‘phone calls and emails later found us driving up to Nottingham to meet Lyla and her breeder, and a few hours later we were returning with a very nervous, but very beautiful cat on the back seat.

She’s very skittish, and much of the time she appears to be terrified of me. But she’s been with us for a couple of weeks now, and is working hard to ensure that we, her staff are fully trained.

And Layla?

Well neither Val nor I would describe ourselves as Oasis fans (I had no idea that ‘Lyla’ made it to number one), and we sometimes call her Layla by mistake, I think that Layla might stick!

In July 2008 I decided to rejoin (after a few years break) the local Town Council and, prompted by Val, decided to further my political career by making a play to represent my local area at Chelmsford Borough Council. This necessitated my breaking cover and joining a political party, so in 2008 I also joined the Conservatives.

Fast forward to May 2011 and the next Borough Council elections saw me standing as a Conservative Councillor for my local ward – South Woodham Ferrers – Chetwood and Collingwood Ward. The campaign required many afternoons of canvassing and putting leaflets through doors – although I confess we did take a break (to the Caribbean) mid-campaign.

The actual day of the election was long, very long – we started at 6am and I didn’t get back to bed until 4:30am the next day, but it was most rewarding – I personally polled 1,300 votes and was duly returned as a Borough Councillor.

While it would be nice to progress to Westminster, I doubt that that will ever materialise, but for now I am content to have a new challenge, and try and improve things for my constituents – my neighbours and friends.

The doctor’s opinion was that I had a cataract forming.

Fast forward a year and the vision in my left eye was compromised to the point where my optician’s retinal scan machine couldn’t produce an image through my left lens. It was time to take some action.

These things take time to organise, but over the last two weeks I have had the lenses in my eyes replaced with varifocal intra-ocular contact lenses. Each operation took about fifteen minutes under (very) local anaesthetic. The actual experience looked a lot like an Apple screen saver.

After the second lens treatment this week I found that for the first time in over thirty five years I was freed from the need to put my specs on first thing in the morning only to remove them last thing at night.

It’s liberating, I’m able to buy real sunglasses over the counter.

Last evening the BBC carried the Comic Relief appeal, which showed appealed for funds for cataract operations for £35 per adult in Africa.

I reckon that’s a bargain.

I have posted in the past about the tribulations of inviting comments to my posts, a few friends post interesting and worthy responses but the vast majority of comments – over 400 a month – are vaguely complimentary but include links to sites selling dubious pharmaceuticals, videos or get rich quick schemes.

Yesterday I received a comment:

I tried to publish a comment previously, yet it didn’t shown up.
I think your spam filter might be broken?

No I don’t think so, I think it’s working just fine.

And I’m not inviting comments to this post!

I have always been a music junkie, and always steered clear of hi-fi separates; my 18th birthday present was a music centre – everybody had these in the mid seventies, and mine was one of the first with Dolby™ noise reduction.

After Val and I were married I upgraded to a Bang & Olufsen ‘Beocenter’ – this had twin tape decks and a proprietary noise reduction system, oh and a Philips CD Player (a CD104B – the last one with a metal drawer).

The system I’ve just disconnected was a Sony, with twin cassette decks, Dolby™  and a 50 CD ‘toast rack’ jukebox.

My intention was that the Sony would join the B&O and the music centre in the loft, but I figured there was a limit to how much hardware I could archive, so I offered it to my FaceBook ™ friends and it is now enjoying a new lease of life in Saffron Walden.

It occurred to me that with all my music backed onto hard disc and accessed either through my PC (with Bose speakers) or my iPod, I literally couldn’t recall the last time I’d turned the Sony on.

Of course I haven’t turned my back on music,  I have installed an iPod dock… and when I saw it, you can see why I couldn’t resist it!

Sadly, I think we’ve jumped too quickly.

The heavy metals contained in the Compact Fluorescent (CFL) bulbs have the potential for major ecological problems when they are (inevitably) disposed of with the normal rubbish, thus allowing shedloads of Mercury and other unsavoury elements into the water table and thus the food chain.

I suspect that LED technology will be the most effective in the long run, but of course the CFL bulbs have such long lives that it will take longer for LED bulbs to hit the economies of scale that will make them affordable.

Ah well, one step forwards, two steps back.

Okay… so possibly the most unpopular song ever because :

1. it was rubbish  and
2. it kept Ultravox’s ‘Vienna’ off the number one spot back in 1980

Anyway, the reason for this post, for any spammers out there who bother to actually read this site is this. I am regularly getting twenty or thirty ‘comments’ a day from spammers offering great $500 a day deals.

I delete those unwanted comments and a few days later I get “Why have you removed my post? It was very useful information and i assure at least one person found it helpful unlike the rest of the comments on this website.”

I’ll tell you why I removed your post… it’s my website, I pay for the hosting and I’m not interested in subsidising your tawdry business ventures on my dime!

So I will continue to delete this garbage and, just for the hell of it, I’ll report back in due course with the number of spam comments I get despite this particular post.

Update – 360 comments during the month of October, all with the loosest of grasps of English, all flattering to deceive and most trying to promote ‘designer’ watches, pens, handbags and so on.

More bizarrely, twenty of those flattering comments were in response to this very post!

More recently I’ve noticed an increasing number of spams that use social engineering to try and get you to open their spam. They purport to be from Amazon, DHL, an airline or whatever – all inviting you to confirm or query a transaction by opening a zip file.

A zip file that contains some very unpleasant malware – it infects your PC and hold you to ransom to buy a particular ‘cure’ – and the online forums that propose alternate ‘cures’ simply compound the infection.

I know of three people who have fallen foul of this ‘Ransomware’ two had to completely rebuild their computers while a third spent a whole day wrestling with the infection before finally beating it – and he’s a serious geek!

So, while the whole spam, social engineering and malware issue is far from funny, I received an email this morning that caused me to laugh out loud – something that happens a lot less frequently than messenger and text messages would have you believe.

Basically, I received an email – supposedly from Amazon.com – however the spammers have mixed things up. The text of the email reads :

Dear taxpayer,

The Federal income tax is a progressive tax, meaning that the more you earn, the higher your tax rate. Your tax rate depends not just upon your taxable income, but also upon your filing status (single, married filing jointly, etc.).

You’re in a higher tax bracket because:

- your annual income for the last tax year has increased.

Please review your annual tax report immediately at:

(Please find attached file – tax report.zip)

So, Amazon is sending me tax advice now? I don’t think so!

Incidentally, and at the risk of being labelled a geek, SPAM originally had nothing to do with Monty Python. It’s an acronym for Sequentially Processed Automated Mail – okay so I worked in the IT department of a bank for fifteen years – Bank Statements were probably the first SPAM and probably about as popular as the current junk spam.