Earlier this evening I saw images of Tony Blair talking about how he's not going to step down and blah blah blah.
He was stood behind a lecturn as all politicans do when they're talking in a press conferece type thing. What was written on the lectern disturbed me.
Now, fair does, I'm a geek and also Internet savvy - clearly it's the address of a computer on the Internet. But how many tax paying citizens on the UK will realise this?
I suppose the .gov.uk is a give away (to the vaguely knowledgeable) that's it's something Internet related - a website perhaps - but most people when they visit websites think that there needs to be a www in front of whatever's going on - they think that's the thing that makes it a website address (well that and an http://) - but the 'www' really means that the computer which is called 'www' is cunninly named in such a way to identify it's indended use (a webserver). In this case 'pm' is simply a computer on the .gov.uk top level domain - which just so happens to be running a webserver - but you wouldn't know from looking at his lectern that this would be the case - it could be a mail server or even just a random workstation, hell it could be a toaster in Tony's kitchen if he had an Internet enabled one- you have to make a leap of logic to get this - www.pm.gov.uk does also work - as does www.number-10.gov.uk - all the addresses happen to point to the same computer.
This got me thinking, as did looking at the pictures... maybe pm.gov.uk is the actual Internet address of the Prime Minister and we actually have an Internet enabled digital premier. Is Tony infact a computer!? - the photo could easily be of a computer (with it's name dymo taped to it to help people locate it) and Tony's head is a high quality digital image on it's screen!
Hmmm. Ok, so maybe that's a little far fetched!
Long and short of it is that tax payers probably paid for that lectern and it looks like a pile of wank - no need to have a website address on a lectern which probably doesn't even look like a website address to most people!
As an aside... I've just tried to visit the website on the computer with an IP address one number up from pm.gov.uk - (no it's not www.number-11.gov.uk ;)) but it's passworded... heh if I knew the password I could get level 15 access... no idea what that'd be exactly but it sounds scary whatever it is!
Do you reckon if I guessed right it'd come up with "Greetings Professor Falken, shall we play a game?"?... don't worry though folks if it did I'd choose a nice game of chess over a Global Thermonuclear War anyday. Kudos to those who I've not just lost ;-)