I am not a lawyer but I would have thought that you could only trademark something in reference to a particular aspect of your business. The lastminute website though currently reads :

lastminute.com”, “lastminute” and the colour (block of magenta) colour are all trademarks owned by Last Minute Network Limited and/or its group companies.

Erm wtf. I know the Easy Group will hunt you down if you use easysomething and use a predominantly orange colour scheme but I don’t think even they actually claim they have trademarked orange itself.

If this sort of nonsense carries with other companies some of my more colourful trousers may have so many copyright notices on that they will start resembling a F1 car….

aOne night when I was weary,and the night was cold and dreary
Over the man pages of Vim an Emacs and their cryptic lore
Whilst I slumpt on the mousemat suddenly a polling,
As some client asking for an IP address at my chamber door.
‘Tis some client, I muttered tossing an IP at the door, polling at my chamber door,
only this and nothing more.

Fast forward :>>

And the client always flapping, like the users always weeping
at the network rules of gateway like portal door
and whilst the traffic is archaic and the protocol anarcic
the traffic will fail to flow without this stupid flaw
and my soul was rather lifted but saddened for the afflicted
to know that Vista does not work…

Anymore…..

If you don’t know why this is amusing then you probably are best not knowing

Linky to a picture on a power strip with surge protection that I bought from Sainsburys…

Well we have someone doing PAT tests in the office and I am not sure he is paying attention, sure he refused to test my heavy duty power over Ethernet adapter (16A commando to an RJ45 :):) “er you don’t plug that in do you?!?” ) but he has amusingly signed off something he shouldn’t have

The 3 socket 16A adapter from this story : http://theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=30533 has now got a big shiny PAT test passed sticker on it

I don’t think his heart is really in it

ed: 19/7/07 Someone tipped him off about it and it is now marked failed

I could not resist this you just know that all that bloke is going to be remembered for now is “the bloke that had to deny UK troops were releasing man eating badgers in Iraq”

Actually, I think it looks quite cute