Clive’s Twin Brother

Seperated at birth, two hearts divided between two continents. Born of the same mother, but thrown into obscurity – these two creatures led very similar lives in very distant lands. They battle against the odds to find a place they can call home, and perhaps one day meet again, or at the hope, get a message passed against all odds to tell the tale of their lost brotherhood.

There should be no doubt in your mind that I am of course talking about Clive. And there should also be no doubt that you cannot talk about Clive without the thought of his twin brother Colin in your deepest thoughts.

This is Colin’s story…

He’s a camel, we don’t know if he’s related to Clive, but he does look extremely similar in a way that only camels can. And today, we took a camel ride across the dunes, or rather, around them. And it was great! 🙂 It’s difficult to describe the sensation even with hand movements, as I tried to do earlier. “Do you remember earlier, when we on the camel going like this?” I asked Ali, rolling my hand in a circular motion. “Yeah, and we were like this”, Ali replied, flailing her arms in the air and rolling side to side.

So, riding a camel is a lot like being on the set of thunderbirds, while journeying 10,000 leagues under the sea. Amazing what early afternoon Sunday television can teach you.

We called our Camel, Collin, as you might have guessed and he led the way in the group of three camels on our small trekking party around the dunes. I presumed that meant he was one of the coolest of all the camels. Which was evident because; everyone followed him; when he stopped to see what some plants smelt like, we all stopped; if he wanted to send Ali into the bushes, well he just had to move a bit to the right; and if at the end, he wanted to sit down and not wait for the other camels or the humans to say “you can sit now” – well he was damn well going to sit down.

The camel safari is proudly stated as “The most hilarious excursion in Gran Canaria”. And they’re not wrong, even if I do suspect they just have crap translators. “Uhhhh, Dave, did you send those leaflets out to the printers yet? I think we have a typo”. And it was without a doubt hilarious, and a definate plus on the things to do front.

We left the camel place and argued over what was better. The lizards that live in the Barranco de Maspalomas, or the camels. I still say the camels are better, as I left the camel place quickly forgetting the glee I had at staring at the lizards earlier on in the day. “No, we should love Gran Canaria as a whole, not forget the old toys because a new one has come along”, says Ali. I agreed – but silently, and between you and me….the camels ARE better 🙂

So tonight we’re going to go and visit Terry Bull at the bar. He’s the guy who was singing to himself in the empty bar on our first night. Well, it’s only fair that since we laughed at him every day – we go and laugh in his face. Which reminds me, that bar has a job opening at the moment. Ladies wanted, Must be Flexible. If you’re interested 🙂

And then tomorrow, it’s off to Palmitos Park, so we can go and laugh at some more animals – including their new Komodo Dragon. I’m also on the lookout for Conejo, or Rabbit. Because the wildlife reserve says they have them – but all I saw were birds and lizards. So maybe the park will also give a big check mark there too 🙂

Happy Mothers Day

Just an update on the asda cards, the latest series of smartprice cards available is the Mothers Day. So, Happy Mother’s Day, mum – this one’s for you 🙂

Happy Value Valentines!

Not too many years ago, a friend of mine (Ben) was heading out to America for a year at a University where he could learn a few things more than Hertfordshire would provide. Important Computer Science courses such as The History of Communism. Part of the move held the obligatory leaving drinks, for which myself and three other friends clubbed together to buy him 4 cans of Tesco Value Bitter, for the bargain basement price of 99p. To cut a long story short, the drinks were a hit and we were all four heralded as the best friends you could ever ask for.

Feeding off of the success of Tesco Value Bitter, Asda have come up with the perfect card of choice for this year. So if you’re worried about how to tell that special someone how you feel about them on the 14th, but still keep to your budget this year – take a trip down to your local store today! Be warned, you’re still going to have to save money on those roses and chocolates somewhere, because the card is still going to set you back 8p.

Cyrus Certificate Authentication

This is probably of no interest to anyone whatsoever. Except me, in a few months time when I try and configure another mail server – and can’t remember how to generate certificates for Windows.

So first off, create the certificates for your Cyrus IMAP server (you’ve already set all that up, right?)

openssl req -new -nodes -out req.pem -keyout key.pem
openssl rsa -in key.pem -out new.key.pem
openssl x509 -in req.pem -out ca-cert -req \
-signkey new.key.pem -days 999
mkdir /var/imap
cp new.key.pem /var/imap/server.pem
rm new.key.pem
cat ca-cert >> /var/imap/server.pem
chown cyrus:mail /var/imap/server.pem
chmod 600 /var/imap/server.pem # Your key should be protected
echo tls_ca_file: /var/imap/server.pem >> /etc/imapd.conf
echo tls_cert_file: /var/imap/server.pem >> /etc/imapd.conf
echo tls_key_file: /var/imap/server.pem >> /etc/imapd.conf

Then generate the certificate for the client.

openssl pkcs12 -export -in server.pem -inkey server.pem -out iestuff.p12

You’ll need to add that iestuff to your trusted certificates – but that’s pretty much it 🙂 No more annoying messages from Outlook.

Hemel Hempstead Explosion

December 11th 2005. Today is the day that will be remembered across the world as the explosion that rocked England. A 6.03 this morning, an explosion at the Buncefield fuel depot, near Hemel Hempstead (7 miles from us in Watford) was heard on the south coast, as far as Hastings.

I Live 10 miles from the blast, the shockwave was so powerful when I woke up my house was facing the other way!

Said Daniel from Hemel (source: BBC News).

Personally, I slept through the whole thing. Ali woke me around 8 o’clock, “you know that explosion this morning?”, “Huh?” “It was a big petrol explosion in Hemel. It woke me up!!” “Huh?”

I feel that some of the mass hysteria fuelled by the press is slightly exagerrated, now that the dust is beginning to settle. It’s pretty bad, sure – a number of people close to the explosion were probably very scared to be woken up by this first thing in the morning. Reducing fuel emissions may well be affected, and I have no doubt it’s cost a lot of people a lot of money. However, I’m glad I didn’t rush out and buy as much petrol as I can for the car I don’t have – just in case the countries supplies are all used up. Why didn’t someone flag down that plane that was flying overhead – think of the devastation that could have been stopped by prevention of this obviously terrorist attack on our country. Oh wait, it’s quite near an airport isn’t it, that’s why it was aviation fuel that went up?

This would never have happened if we hadn’t gone into Iraq for all that oil in the first place, would it?

Are we all hoping for a disaster this much – that when something big does happen – everyone feels the need jump on the “the explosion ruined my life” bandwagon? I can’t wait for the public inquest, and the damage cheques to be handed out.