Emrys is currently behind me dressed like the Nihilists from The Big Lebowski dancing to trashy pop music (yeah.. Gaga). Cool Jimmy will be round soon to straighten things out. We will go all Bear Grylls, thrash around in the mud eating grubs and stuff. Our usual Friday.

Itinerary

Yesterday I booked my tickets to the British Isles via Beijing. So for my family, Interpol, kidney dealers (I gladly accept drinks from strangers and still have most of my bits) and any other agencies who have an interest - here is my itinerary:

• Arrive in Londinium: 21 August @1745
• Attending London DrupalCon: 22 August - 26 August
• Seeing my Ma and Pa (Hooray!): 27 August - 7 September
• Leaving Londinium for China: 8 September @2025
• Leaving Beijing for home: 11 September @1600

Security

During my nerdly travels I (or my kidnappers) may find a use for some of these handy tools:

• The PrivacyBox Contact Service provided by the German Privacy Foundation is invaluable for sending and recieving messages without sharing identities.
• Or for a quick and anonymous email I may use one of these remail services:
  • https://www.awxcnx.de/mm-anon-email.htm
  • https://www.cotse.net/cgi-bin/mixmail.cgi

I tried out the Mix Master one last night and recieved my fantastically anonymized email this morning.

Hushmail is an easy option for a secure email service, although they have caved in to the Feds in the past.

A thumbdrive with the Tor bundle will leave me free to peruse all my usual anarchic literature. Last time I looked the MS Windows executable file was here.

Sometimes I may just want to cut and paste a random message on the 1ntehnetZ. Pastebin is the obvious option but I think I would use the OSSBox Secure Pastebin so that I can password protect my posts with full encryption.

If I had to use the Department of Education (DET) network or even the NBN with it's proposed cleanfeed I may have to resort to using one of the many paid VPN services, or being a geek I may just set up my own:

• https://www.cotse.net/vpn.html
• https://www.ipredator.se/?lang=en
• http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2011/02/five-best-vpn-service-providers/

Anyhow enough of my paranoid ramblings, I have to go sort out Em and Jim for a day of feral madness.

In the morning I rode to work as it was national ride to work day and I had promised my pal Cameron I'd keep him company. I actually was not working that day but went along anyway. So instead Dot and I visited the tried and tested Dorrigo rainforest skywalk. We had a stroll through the rainforest and saw lots of little brown birds. My Pa, John, has a name for them, turds or something. If you are reading this John remind me in the comments. I found a rather wussy leech which refused to suckle.

Emrys (age 8) took these pictures of Jimmy and I on the front deck on Monday. We were cleaning it up in preparation for painting. Which I'm just about to start....

Actually we were eating but we did do a bit of cleaning up occasionally.

None of my useless maps show Wedds Road. I know where it is but that's not the point. Anyhow I took my fabulous bike for a ride up into the fire trails between Middle Boambee (Wedds) Road and Englands Road.

Brigid Veale the press officer here at SCU (not the other one) just sent me this pic of me taken down Coffs Beach before I had my weekend swim.
Results just in:
position: 189 / time: 41:43

Cameron kindly assembled the montage of everyone's favourite characters Ponch and Jon. I am looking forward to buying Cameron a choc-top in 2011

oh, and another pic from Sarah as well...

Sliced my finger yesterday, did not mention that in my Coffs Sailing post.
Ev reached 15 and lives.
It is nearly 11pm and I am going to bed.

night.