Not O blast, try saying ob-last, preferrably with a Russian accent. Oblasts are provinces or administrative districts in Russia; there are 46 of them. This is a fairly useless bit of information, even for playing Scrabble, as who would want to squander two S tiles.
I think it is natural when writing a blog to wonder if anybody is reading it and a free tool, Google Analytics, is just the job for this. It provides more information than I expected. Two visitors from the US: one in New York using a server with the name of her bank, one in Arlington, Virginia, with a server name that means nothing to me. Exciting to be visited by the CIA and I hope GCHQ will leave a footprint in the virtual Visitors’ Book too. I wonder if the word “explosives” in the Woolshit post made them want to check me out? Actually, I have spun off into fantasy. Bloomberg news has their server in Arlington and my visitor is a friend working in Bloomberg’s London office.
Two Russian visitors and both from the same place; Samara Oblast. It seems Samara Oblast leads the world in hacking websites. There are many refences to this, often from people with new websites, like me, where the Russian intrusion stands out. The motivation is not clear but it seems they are able to either post referral links on the website (not this one, thanks to the vigilance of WordPress) or maybe send spam e mails to visitors to the site. If it is the latter it would explain where all that spam comes from. There is a lot of information and speculation about this and one person said that he sold his product to one of these people in Samara Oblast and it was paid for and delivered to a UK address. But maybe he was making this up? There seems to be a lot of smoke and mirrors out there in cyber-space.
Continuing yesterday’s post, Friday, the front page of the Weekend FT this morning reports;
“Plans to steal the Shard’s crown and build the City’s tallest tower……were submitted yesterday. ….a 62-storey, 278m-high huge glass block that will radically alter the City skyline.What was a scattering of individual towers – including the Gherkin, the Cheese-grater and original skyscraper Tower 42 – will be transformed by the new tower into a clump of steel and glass.”
I can just about understand laymen in the Corporation of London being bamboozled into destroying the City of London. What I cannot understand is why at a national level there is not intervention. A clump of steel and glass towers would not look out of place in Docklands or, better still, build it in the Northern Power House and call the tallest tower the Osborne Obelisk.