I’m a very big fan of the UK version of Take Me Out (the Australian equivalent “Taken Out” is booorrringgggg). I’ve seen each of the 22 episodes at least three times, I think it’s funny and the host Paddy McGuiness is hilarious. No likey, no lighty!

The way it works is that a guy is brought out in front of thirty girls, each of the girls is behind a podium with a light on, and if they don’t like the guy, they turn their light out. After we see a video of the guy in his daily life, and a demonstration of a “special talent”, if any of the girls still has her light on, the guy picks one and they go on a date to the “Isle of Fernandos”, in Tenerife, Spain.

I was at Waterloo station on Wednesday, and I was standing on the platform for ages because there were severe delays. And I saw what I thought was a familiar face. It didn’t take me long to work out that it was John from Bournemouth, from Take Me Out’s very last episode (season 2 episode 14). This guy:

I really wanted to go and talk to him and I’d had a few drinks so that helped. I did go over and had a chat – I figure that anybody that’s been on TV is fair game to talk to in public places.

He said that he got noticed a lot at first when the show aired (which was around February sometime) but it’s died down a bit now. We talked about his date with Holly, he seemed genuinely surprised that I could remember the name of the girl he went on a date with (like I said, I’m a BIG fan). He was a really nice guy.

His special talent was making noises to the Blue Danube orchestral piece, specifically armpit noises, and noises from other parts of his body – it was very bizarre. I mean this in the nicest possible way, but if he wasn’t the penultimate guy of the entire series, I’m not so sure that he would have gotten a date

I’m happy because I haven’t seen anybody off the TV for a long time, and not sure I’ve ever talked to anyone off TV!

I haven’t been past Cotall St since I wrote this post – the most commented on post on my blog by far, that was over 18 months ago. But I went past there last week… and everything’s gone.

I’ve just moved to Commercial Road. I haven’t been here long, but already I’ve seen two “incidents”! The first one was a guy getting arrested right out Limehouse Station, which is very close to my house. It’s not clear what it was for, but I took a photo with my phone, which doesn’t have the highest resolution – but you can click the photo to see more.

Then, a week later, I went to the Costcutter which is on the next block, and it was sealed off. The cashier in there had blood running all down his face, it was like he’d been hit with a bottle. I didn’t take a photo of him directly, the police were telling people to go away.

Luckily I don’t spend much time on Commercial Road – it’s all Chicken places and dodgy restaurants (actually, the New Garden Thai is really nice). But still a bit scary. I make sure my door is locked at night. The area north of Commercial Road is Stepney – I’ve mentioned the area before in this post. I live in an area called Ratcliffe… bordering Stepney.

At last!

First off, sorry to those of you who have known me since 2005 and still use the same email address as back then. You might have received spam from me from my old Yahoo email account. Most of it seemed to have consisted of just a link to some site.

I know because I got lots of “undeliverable emails” for emails that I’d never sent, and they were all to people in my Yahoo contacts, so someone somewhere got my Yahoo contact list. Luckily, it’s a very old email account of mine and I stopped using the contact list around 2005.

I’m not sure how it happened, whether it was someone “brute force” guessing my password (trying all possible passwords using a computer program), but I think it was more likely to be Open ID. I signed up to stackexchange.com to ask about some programming questions, and to do that, rather than use a new user account, I used Open ID to save time, and used my Yahoo ID as my Open ID. I had to give my Yahoo password to this site.

Now, this site may have passed my password on to another site, or they may have logged onto my Yahoo mail after I gave them my password. I have no proof of this, but I’ve had this email address for over 10 years without a problem and it seems a bit of a coincidence that less than a week after I sign up to Open ID, my account is compromised.

So, when I log onto my blog to blog about this, I see that my most recent post has been marked as private, and someone’s put ads all over it! Uhoh, I thought, this is not good. So I looked further, and it showed a revision by someone called pandona. So I looked at my WordPress users, and this user had administration rights, meaning that they could do anything they wanted! Ouch!!!

And, to make things worse, they’d set it so that anyone that signs up to my blog automatically gets administrator rights! Fortunately, he or she also had the decency to disable user signups – if they didn’t, anyone could have done anything. This user also changed my time zone to the middle east, and changed a couple of other settings.

I have no idea how they did this, but since my WordPress version is two years old they probably used some obscure vulnerability which is freely available on the web. So, I’ve upgraded my wordpress to the most recent version, and changed the password on both my Yahoo email and my blog. Hopefully that will be the end of my problems!