Let's go serfing now

I've developed an unfortunate habit over the last month or two.

It may not make hairs grow where they shouldn't but is sadly compulsive and ultimately very annonying.

It's reading the BBC blogs, in particular Mr. Peston and Ms. Flanders.

I should hasten to add it's not so much the aforementioned who cause my difficulty but the responses to their comments.

Some of the comments are quite enlightening, some are clearly written by political stooges and others by dogmatists. and a few by the plainly deluded.

What is more of a problem is that it is such a pointless exercise on several levels.

At the lowest level it's a waste of time when I could be doing something more useful like checking the fluff in my navel.

It's futile because you're extremely unlikely to change another persons point of view.

It's sad because it would appear that of all the people in the country only an extremely small minority are even interested to comment.

It's dangerous because you are self identifying yourself to the Authorities.

But most of all it's depressing because it brings home to you the realities of the world.

At the top we have the people who do the telling. These can change over time (Monarchs/Religion/Emperors/Bankers) but are essentially the same (money and power)

Then we have the Goverment / Establishment who largely do as they are told.

Then there are the rest of us, the serfs, who just get done.

Nothing changes.

Even if the serfs revolt all we achieve is shuffling around our masters. Strangely we stay serfs.

Which kind of makes the debate a complete and utter waste of time.

(See bankers/bonuses/Government/tax/etc)

Windows Messenger Service (or Not)

For reasons that are too boring to go into I recently needed to have a simple way of sending a message to all the users on a network.



Aha I thought, simples, just use the Windows Messenger Service that uses Mailslots. Dead easy to code, job done....



Nope.



Microsoft in their infinite wisdom removed this from Vista (and presumably Win 7). Buggar. This is not just annoying, it's MS annoying...



Much googling later I've found a free (but you should donate) download for Vista that allows it to receive mailslot (net send) messages.



http://www.winsentmessenger.com/