This is Omar’s blog

When did postage charges on eBay go mental?? Browsing for one of those fm illegal transmitter things /me coughs and looks sideways (not from November apparently) and the postages range from £4 (i can deal with that) to £15!!! Jeez, £15 to ship in the UK, that’s ridiculous. The whole cheapest overall seems to be the theme… i always thought that postage was secondary. The price of the item was the important and thing and then the seller added an appropriate postage to it. Not any more it seems.

Government plans to exclude details of celebrities’ children from a new national child database were today seized on as evidence that the system may pose a safety risk to those it is supposed to protect.

The Department for Education and Skills (DfES) today confirmed that the telephone numbers and addresses of children with famous parents would not be added to the £224m child index.

The contact details of children with violent parents will also be excluded from the database, a DfES spokesman added.

The index, due to be introduced in 2008, will link sensitive information about England’s 11 million children and their families in one database accessible to hundreds of thousands of officials.

Don’t know why but this really bothers me, how the hell is can the information on the database be considered safe when some childrens people isn’t kept there. It’s just stupid.
What next, politicians and ‘celebrities’ having details kept of the ID card database?? Now that i think about it…

A similar article from the Telegraph.

Update:

Office staff are hacking into the department’s computers, putting at risk the privacy of 40million people in Britain. The revelation undermines Government claims that sensitive information being collected for its controversial ID Cards scheme could not fall into criminal hands. The security breaches occurred at the Identity and Passport Service, which is setting up the National Identity Register to provide access to individuals’ health, financial and police records as part of the £8billion ID card scheme scheduled to begin in 2008.

Nice.

So, i finally put some photos up from Mauritius up today. Between my brother and i, with some help, over the 40 or so days we took just over 3000 photos and because i took my laptop they have all been saved. It’s strange though, they aren’t all great, a few maybe, but i still can’t bring myself to delete them. They form an almost complete account of our time there - there aren’t many things we did that there aren’t pictures of. I kind of like it, even if they are numerous and bulky.

What are you doing?

What should you be doing?

What do you want to be doing?

What do you wish you’d done today (yesterday/tomorrow/next week..)?

I did my first dive today. I started diving today. Sooooooo it was ok, i didn’t drown or anything. Though the whole communication under water thing isn’t great. I don’t know what you mean?! And i haven’t got neutral buoyancy going on yet really but i can clear my mask so it’s not all lost.

edit: Well, that didn’t work out. It was a lot of time and though after i had some sort of minor panic (!) when i got in the second time i still went down and the whole view at 5m below sea level is pretty cool. You spend most of the time going, woaah look at that and that and taking bread down was good. It was just a little too stressful for me, still not put me off doing it again at some point…

Ha do ken!!

Originally uploaded by OmarC.

Don’t mess with my fighting skills, :)