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hotchpotch n. medley; dish of many ingredients

. . . and that's what this page is all about. Tell us about anything else at all other than model flight matters - as long as it's decent and inoffensive!

Share something of your other interests and hobbies or those of your family, be they amateur dramatics, arts and crafts, gardening, horse-riding, model railways, pets, photography or whatever. Let's see the new baby, hear about your kids, your spouse, partner or girl/boy friend and their achievements, the new house, etc., etc. From Academic to Zany, it's all welcome on this page (subject to the discretion of the editor)!

In order to do justice to some of the photographs that appear on this page from time to time, some of the images may require scrolling to view them and may also take a little longer to download.

My eldest son, Tim, is a keen modeller of something other than aeroplanes. He loves to produce flat figures, mostly of historic subjects, although the range of subjects available is enormous, if you know where to get them! These 'flats' are something which seem far more popular on the European mainland, although there is a keen Flat Figure Society of devotees in the UK.

The flats come as white metal castings, requiring cleaning up first, followed by the painstaking task of painting them, which is clearly the challenge of the hobby. Indeed, it's more like art than craft, although there are all sorts of tricks to get the quality of finish that really makes these little figures almost three-dimensional. The castings have just a small amount of relief detail and they are actually correctly double-sided, i.e., with different detail on each side. Traditionally, most exhibitors only finish one side because of the way in which they are displayed (see the heading picture which is part of Tim's Charge of the Light Brigade), but Tim always likes to do both. Given the comparatively low cost of the castings and the many, many hours of work that goes into finishing them, this must surely rank as one of the top hobbies in terms of its activity:cost ratio!

I asked Tim if he would let me have a few pictures of some of his finished work - all done with the naked eye and using a fine paintbrush that looks as if it only has one or two hairs! These images are full size, having been produced by scanning them directly on a flat-bed scanner, with Tim having added a little bit of shadow to set them off. Remember, these figures started off as just dull silver metal!

Cardigan

Hussar Trooper

Hussar Officer

Hussar Trumpeter

If you would like to know more, e-mail Tim at tmheath@lineone.net

PC Plague!

Within the five days prior to publishing this issue, I received about a dozen identical e-mails, all from different people. The e-mail was simply headed 'Re:', it contained no text in the message panel but had a file attached. This alone made me deeply suspicious of the e-mails and I guessed each was one of these wretched worm infections that had arrived on the sender's PC and is then spread by automatically forwarding itself to other e-mail addresses. Oddly, though, only one of the suspect messages had come from anyone I knew, so I wondered where they were getting my e-mail address from. Anyway, I did not open any of the e-mails but simply deleted them all.

The next twist (stage 2) was to receive a further e-mail from one of the original senders - and the only one known to me - warning me that he was now aware that he had sent me an infected e-mail and stating where he believed he had got the infection from. Like me, he normally does not open anything suspicious, but in his case the original had come from someone he knew well - his brother, no less - so he innocently opened it! He also provided instructions as to what to do if I had, in fact, opened it. This included going on-line to Microsoft to download a patch and also to edit a couple of .dll files in Windows, full instructions for which were included in the e-mail. Although it did not apply to me, I have to say it looked fine and if I had opened the original file I would have been inclined to follow these instructions.

But then came a further complication - stage 3!

I then received an e-mail from someone who had also received the instructions mentioned above, categorically stating that this itself was a hoax and warning me NOT to follow them as doing so 'will render a Windows system unusable'!

I made contact with the sender of stage 2 and he has assured me of the authenticity of the instructions and which, he is confident, have successfully cleaned up his system. They also appear to be very much in line with Symantec's (Norton Anti-virus vendors) advice on dealing with this bug which is now highly distributed but has a low-damage rating, although it can compromise security settings, apparently. Symantec's technical information on the worm also explains how it gets sent to 'strangers' not in the sender's own address book, most of which I think I now understand!

The more you think about this though, the more cunning the whole thing starts to appear. If the warning given in stage 3 was correct I could have had a disaster on my hands by following the instructions in stage 2, BUT if stage 3 is itself a hoax then to follow that advice and ignore the instructions given in stage 2 would ensure that the infection continues to spread.

I guess the only answer is not to open e-mails from unknown sources and to ensure you have anti-virus software installed, keep it up to date and regularly run a virus check. But what sort of morons get a kick out of deliberately originating this sort of activity? It beats me!