I know women in magazines are 'touched up'. Hell I'm sure the men and cars and chocolate cake is touched up too. But I never realised quite how much they where touched up till a friend of mine sent me to Greg's Digital Retouching Portfolio.

If you look at these two women you can see how reality doesn't sell. All those sexy women in FHM and the like (and I'm assuming sadly Playboy too) obviously have had work done. Although I guess going under the mouse is less painful than going under the scalpel.

I'm not surprised that this is done. I mean we all know it. I am just surprised as to the extent of how much I have come to except the girl on the cover of a magazine as being real, when it is blatant special effects. I have always said anyone (and I hold to this) could look fantastic in a professional photo shoot. This is obviously even more so now with being touched up (after the shoot rather than by the photographer during the shoot)

A picture paints 1000 words they say. The touch up artist twists 1000 words. It's almost quasi 1984 ish were reality truly now is what we define it to be.

As a poster boy for technology, I did a conference call about BBC red button applications on digital cable TV whilst on the number 6 bus from Marble Arch to the Aldwych.

Go me.

Blokish oneupmanship last night at work drinks

Mate 1Your dick's so small you couldn't do an 'e' off it!
Mate 2Please, my cock's so big you could do a line of coke on it.
My comebackMine's so big you can do the line sideways

You have to love being a bloke . . .

From my mate Craig,

Being in I.T. is like ...

Blindfolding yourself and standing in the middle of 6 lanes of highway traffic and really feeling indignant when you get hit

He's had a very poor couple of days,

So I've just had to patch my Exchange server, after rebuilding it for the last two days and recovering from our hacking attempt.

I have installed all the security patches on it. Unfortunately one of the security patches is specifically written for SP4 (which in my view is largely untested). The result being that new clients are unable to connect to it, ever. MS recommend service patching it, to resolve the error caused by their security patch, which was written to patch their poorly written code.

I tell you I need a job there - any organisation that is able to stay afloat despite everything they do, is one that I can learn to blag from.

I know how he feels. Somedays I think it would be nice to be a ice cream man or something.

I'm one of the admins for the DSR's page, so I get emailed when some fills in the help form.

Abdxxxxh Abuxxxxr sent this email to you through Disturbing Search Requests.

hi sup man ithing u dont mind if iwana be u friend and im sorry coz my english is not good i hope u nevar mind plz send me a porno pic plz .bye

Sigh. The sad thing is, this isn't spam. I have a legit reply to email address. I assume it's a student.

Mail deleted.