500 ticks or more: You are living large. Less-infested mortals bow before you and salute your right to say that you owned the weekend.

499-400 ticks: No one can say that you are not going out and getting after it. The Elvis movie "Wild in the Country" should have been about you.

399-300 ticks: No flies on you - just a bunch of bloodsucking parasites. Well done.

299-100 ticks: Not bad. You met the weekend head on, and it tried to bury itself in your soft flesh.

99-50 ticks: Try not to spend so much time indoors.

49-10 ticks: Were you bed-ridden?

9-1 ticks: There's always next weekend.

Zero ticks: Apparently you failed to read the Living in the Spokane Area Lifestyle Contract.

So a quiet day.

keep to the Fen Causeway

Watching Jeremy Hunt's day at the Leveson inquiry, one thought hit me like a hammer: that he looked like the perfect modern politician, and for all the wrong reasons. He seemed shaky, inexperienced and regularly out of his depth. In an office reception, I briefly watched his cross-examination with the sound turned down and, strangely, those qualities were even clearer. Really, what kind of senior minister - tipped for the Tory leadership, to boot - would not understand the meaning of quasi-judicial, or the need to minute all official meetings? Didn't those text messages have a kind of boy-man, David Brent-ish ring to them? Anyone resident in the real world would probably not leave him in charge of a barbecue, let alone a ministry.

Yet this is where politics and power have ended up: in the hands of too many people - men, by and large - who style themselves as expert players of the game, but know far too little about the political fundamentals (Hunt's backstory, involving time in Japan and a successful education business, might seem to set him apart, but he looks and sounds like a risen-without-trace politician straight from central casting).

The prime minister apparently has a poor eye for detail, a weakness for iPad games and no clear idea of where his administration ought to be headed. The Treasury is commanded by George Osborne and Danny Alexander, and look what has happened - not just an economic plan that is failing, but the most abject budget in living memory.

With the addition of Nick Clegg, the average age of the "quad" they make up is 42.75. The Labour frontbench has much the same age profile - indeed, since Ed Miliband began reshuffling his team, the sense of untested youth has only grown greater

In the US, unemployment has rarely been this bad for this long, wages have rarely been this stagnant and corporate profits, as a proportion of GDP, have never been this high. In that context the referendum raises the question: should the burden for the recession, precipitated by a banking crisis, fall on labour or capital?

Conservatives seem to understand this. In a large Tea Party rally of several thousand in Racine on Saturday, speakers railed against "union thugs" "union bullies" and "pinko commies". Walker has been caught on video telling a donor, shortly before he announced the cuts, that he intended to use a strategy of "divide and conquer" to defeat the public sector unions by driving a wedge between them and private sector workers. They also see the broader implications in an election year where the economy will take centre stage. Political and financial support has flooded in from around the country. "We are going to chart the course for the rest of the country," said the state's lieutenant governor, Rebecca Kleefisch, who is also being recalled.

The activists on the ground calling for Walker's recall understand this also. Ask them what's at stake and most will say women's rights, union rights and voters' rights. But the Democratic leadership, both locally and nationally, who have taken over the recall effort, clearly don't. They have run a campaign calling for more consensual governance and less divisive rhetoric and accusing Walker of being corrupt. Bill Clinton, who came to town to stump for Barrett on Friday, called for "creative co-operation", bringing unions and business around the table to discuss common interests. There are times that can work. But not when unions are not allowed through the door, let alone at the table.

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

The phone call came like a bolt out of the blue, so to speak, in January of 2011. On the other end of the line was someone from the National Reconnaissance Office, which operates the nation's fleet of spy satellites. They had some spare unused "hardware" to get rid of. Was NASA interested?

...

For now, the two telescopes and some spare parts are still in their clean room at ITT Exelis, in Rochester. Michael Moore, who, as NASA's acting deputy director for astrophysics, took the original call last year, has been to see them several times. He described their optics as "astounding."

...

The two telescopes have a 94-inch-diameter primary mirror, just like Hubble, but are shorter in focal length, giving them a wider field of view: "Stubby Hubbles," in the words of Matt Mountain, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute, adding, "They were clearly designed to look down."

...

Earlier this spring he asked a small group of astronomers if one of the telescopes could be used to study dark energy.

The answer, he said, was: "Don't change a thing. It's perfect."

...

The telescope's short length means its camera could have the wide field of view necessary to inspect large areas of the sky for supernovae. Even bigger advantages come, astronomers say, from the fact that the telescope's diameter, 94 inches, is twice as big as that contemplated for Wfirst, giving it four times the light-gathering power, from which a whole host of savings cascade. Instead of requiring an expensive launch to a solar orbit, the telescope can operate in geosynchronous Earth orbit, complete its survey of the sky four times faster, and download data to the Earth faster.

...

Dr. Grunsfeld said the repurposing of the telescope for dark energy came at a personal cost. He had long dreamed that the Hubble, which he and the other astronaut-servicing teams had said goodbye to forever in 2009, might be visited again and upgraded one more time to do the dark energy work. That dream, he admitted, was now dead.

About 900 million Windows computers get their updates from Microsoft Update. In addition to the DNS root servers, this update system has always been considered one of the weak points of the net. Antivirus people have nightmares about a variant of malware spoofing the update mechanism and replicating via it.

Turns out, it looks like this has now been done. And not by just any malware, but by Flame.

The full mechanism isn't yet completely analyzed, but Flame has a module which appears to attempt to do a man-in-the-middle attack on the Microsoft Update or Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) system. If successful, the attack drops a file called WUSETUPV.EXE to the target computer.

This file is signed by Microsoft with a certificate that is chained up to Microsoft root.

Parliamentary authorities are now expected to support the calls to rename the Clock Tower as "The Elizabeth Tower" when they meet in a few weeks.

David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband are among senior figures from all three major parties who backed the proposal for Parliament to bestow the tribute to the Monarch.

They are among 331 MPs, from a total of 650, who now support the campaign, which is also understood to have backing from the Cabinet Office and Buckingham Palace.

A further 40 MPs have signed a Commons early day motion calling for the east tower at the Palace of Westminster to be formally named "The Elizabeth Tower".

So we're going to rename a tower in a palace that technically she owns after her.  Dave should have sent Nick to the motorway services for flowers and chocolates instead shouldn't he.

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.

A group of long-term unemployed jobseekers were bussed into London to work as unpaid stewards during the diamond jubilee celebrations and told to sleep under London Bridge before working on the river pageant.

Up to 30 jobseekers and another 50 people on apprentice wages were taken to London by coach from Bristol, Bath and Plymouth as part of the government's Work Programme.

Two jobseekers, who did not want to be identified in case they lost their benefits, said they had to camp under London Bridge the night before the pageant. They told the Guardian they had to change into security gear in public, had no access to toilets for 24 hours, and were taken to a swampy campsite outside London after working a 14-hour shift in the pouring rain on the banks of the Thames on Sunday.

Wrote, QA'ed, and QC'ed a couple hundred lines of code that brought a huge s--t pile of functionality together.

The Emergent Properties of Cybernetic Systems.

I love it.

Ever since I learnt about confirmation bias I've started seeing it everywhere

Leicestershire Police - Latest news - Missing Braunstone man found safe and well

A man who was reported missing from his home on Friday evening has been found safe and well.

Malcolm Hyde (38) of Braunstone, Leicester, was located on Monday June 4 in Cromer.