Jasp’s Blog

Has anyone else noticed that spammers seem to have adopted a new tactic recently? Rather than obsfusticating the subject line to get it past filters, using random characters, or pulling text from books, it seems that spammers are instead resorting to fake headlines. I have recently recieved spam warning of “Rat poison in water bottles,” [...]

I pre-ordered Mass Effect PC from Amazon, and it was dispatched late Thursday, first class, by Royal Mail. I was a bit leery, as an item had gone missing earlier in the month but my experience has been generally problem free. Our letterbox is too small for even packaged DVDs, but I pass the sorting [...]

Last night I was due to meet some friends in the Smoking Dog in Malmesbury. Unfortunately my usual lifts were unavailable, but I managed to blag a lift from my Dad. (I can’t drive, so couldn’t have driven myself) However about 1/4 pint in to the evening I received a phone call from my brother [...]

On my (one of my) first day(s) at school I arrived to find a new delivery of BBC Micros. The slightly imposing size of the system sat on its trolley obviously impressed a young me, yet what surprised me even more was seeing the system in operation. I was fascinated, and immediately decided it was [...]

I had intended to post this nearer to the date, but it skipped me by, so here it is now.
On August 1st 2007 I reached the tenth anniversary of my first forays onto the internet. Way back in 1997 my family first got on line with an ISP called Zetnet which still seems to be [...]

One of the problems with working in science is explaining what you do. For some people a quick, “I’m a Scientist,” is enough. Science either scares them slightly, or at least confuses them, or perhaps they are just not interested, either way they don’t push the matter any further. However sometimes I find someone whose [...]

More news from the lab and this time its me ranting about the behaviour of my cells.
When investigating the function of a particular gene one tactic geneticists have availible to them is to break the gene and see what happens. One way of achieving this is to ‘knock it out,’ to entirely remove the gene [...]

I had meant to remove the link to my website from the bottom of the E-mail, not because I have anything here that I want to hide, but that it just forms a bit of a strange introduction to myself. Of course it would be slightly silly to try and hide things if you are [...]

Oh dear. I like Wikipedia, its a lot of fun and usually reasonably accurate, but I just stumbled across an article which was almost entirely false. I can understand a few misconceptions sneaking in, but what possesses someone to write about a topic on which they clearly have no idea; especially when its something that [...]

In the past twelve hours I have recieved over two hundered E-mails, the vast majority of which are spam. Many of these were ‘bounced’ messages, that is they were returned to me because they couldn’t reach their destination. So why is this, do I have a virus?
Well no, especially as my computer is currently at [...]