Whoah, a gap, a missed day, an interruption. Oh noes...

But Mat, what happened to yesterday, I can hear literally nobody asking.

Pretty much bugger all happened yesterday. I went to work, I walked home (there's the healthy living blogged, I also walked home today, feel the burn), I ate a microwave meal (we really do need a plasterer now), and I messed around with random crap on my laptop/computer for a few hours.

It's not like I really need to blog every single day anyway, is it? I only did do as a challenge to myself to blog daily throughout October, then found I'd fallen into the habit. Checking back, apart from the last day in September, I only blogged five times since I got the blog up and running again in June, and one of those was a "whoo, hello, the blog exists again" post. Checking back, I did 47 days in a row, between September 30th and November 15th, so I figure I was due a day off anyway.

Anyway, back to finding the coolest shit there is.

And today, I think that this is probably a contender for coolest shit of the decade. Some scientist blokes have engineered a bacteria which glows in the presence of explosives. I'll repeat that. A bacteria which glows in the presence of explosives.If it really works well enough that it can be sprayed over minefields, then these blokes are way more deserving of a Nobel Prize than this years Peace Prize winner.

I've got plenty of other things to be messing around with (this Cisco router won't configure itself), so here are a few links that I've spotted.

SSL Renegotiation Attack Becomes Real. So I guess that means that SSL3 is broken then. So much for safe online banking ;-)
Apple Could Lock Devices with Ads in the OS. Disable my device until I've interacted with an advert on my device? Erm, no, how about I just buy my device from a different company, yup, that works.
Twitter, Facebook, Last.fm and Zune Video on the XBox 360. Facebook and twitter = a pain, but last.fm through the living room sound system might be a go-er. If I had a living room that is.
Adobe flash 10.1 beta brings hardware acceleration. Suddenly that Acer Revo with the dual core atom 330 and the Nvidia ION graphics chip is looking a lot more attractive.
Labour man calls Queen 'vermin'. Actually, I'm going to type up a little bit about this one.

Are we really in a world where the old adage "sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me" has passed from common use? Does anybody out there still believe in the miss-attributed to Voltaire quote of "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."? Is freedom of speech really a concept which is dead to us?

Yes, there are people who say things that are truly repugnant. There are people with some vile, horrible views out there. I'm sure I've said plenty of things that people I call my friend disagree with, but I'm pretty sure that they wouldn't want me to be censured for saying them.

The report on the BBC site there doesn't mention if the "Labour man" (actually, it's Peter White, who is seeking election as a councillor, so not exactly a front bench cabinet member) posted the facebook comment in an official party capacity, so I will hold of commenting on that too much, suffice to say that I am a big fan of the diving line between work time and home time, and if I say or do something that my employers do not like, but I have said or done it in my own time, and haven't inferred that it's anything to do with my employer, then that's just tough.

If you want to see more of the random links I find interesting, they're all in my tumblr, which is currently at matstace.tumblr.com, but I might look into pulling them into a page on my site somewhere.

Now, your impossible challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to watch this video all the way through, without having to pause it, and without dying of embarrassment on behalf of the poor sods who had to do this.