One word. Smoothwall. I mentioned in my mammoth post, below, the fuss I'd had trying to get my internet connection back up. The problem was a machine called the firewall - this acts as sentinel and guardian of my home computer network (yeah, geek, home network... whatever). Sadly, the firewall died and I didn't have the time nor the inclination to spend the hours it originally cost me setting it up again. The hardware failure was a dead hard disk. Once I'd replaced this, the software was looking like a lot of effort. So I downloaded Smoothwall. This claims to have you up and running in 10 minutes. It's not kidding. Okay, so I have a fair amount of geek knowledge to help me, but this installation made the task very very easy. It literally took 10 minutes, and most of that was just waiting for it to load off the CD. It worked first time. Brilliant!

The man in the car
Another story that I forgot from the weekend. This one is not a happy tale. I was standing in a bus queue (that's how you spell queue - there's a guy in the sandwich shop below our office who spells it "que" - what a cock!) waiting to come home after my afternoon out on Saturday. While in the bus queue, I got chatting to the person in front of me. He started the conversation which was, I believe, "whither short skirts" - not a bad conversation though he gave it a slightly seedy undertone. No matter. As we were chatting this BMW came cruising past playing some blaring black spoken-word music. Hip hop of some description. I commented that the person in the car did not seem to be the sort of person to whom that music was intended. Indeed, the chap was a middle aged fellow in a suit - he looked more like a solicitor than anything else. I said something like "He hardly looks like he's from da street" and shared a laugh with the person in front and, newly introducing himself to the conversation, the person behind me in the queue (not que - que?).

No sooner had we finished laughing than the man appeared to gain a number of youths from Old Eldon Square, clustered round his car. Indeed, he seemed to be engaging them in some sort of conversation or, dare I say it, transaction. I had to correct myself... "Oh," said I "it would appear that the man's a drug dealer. Perhaps he's wearing the suit after a recent court appearance, or perhaps having attended the funeral of one of his recently demised gangster mates... perhaps he is justified in listening to pimp music...". And then we stood by for about 10 minutes, watching this man, his car festooned with youths, doing whatever it was he was doing. We idly ignored what really did look like illegal substance trading.

I don't know. Maybe this fellow is a parole officer, who happens to have a BMW, who cares for his charges so much that he plays their sort of music. Maybe he's their lawyer and really is down wid da kids. Maybe he's someone's dad and the music just happened to be playing - that might explain the kids clustering round his car - they all knew him. Someone's cool dad. Who sells them drugs. Who knows!?

I got on the bus and pretended I'd seen nothing... until now...