I would only expect the strangest, most fucked-up of cartoons from the makers of Weebl and Bob, the highly-celebrated Flash animation freaks. I was not disappointed.

Follow Catface around on his latest adventures as he ransacks the kitchen for food. This huge-headed, helium-filled, mutant cat still manages to be cute but don’t let that deceive you.

I am no longer the proud owner of a Nikon D80 camera. It was my pride and joy for a good eleven months, but now, almost certainly, will have been sold on for a fraction of its worth by the local scrotes from Huyton, the once-nice, little village where I grew up. Along with the other items that they stole when they broke into my mum’s house this weekend. My iPod, cash, clothes, my new hockey stick. You can tell it was probably kids – what possible use might they have for a hockey stick? A trophy? A weapon? If they keep it – they’ll get caught, as this was a very unusual piece of kit.

There was a mini-outrage that such a thing could happen in Warwick Close. I don’t recall a single burglary in thirty years, and that’s saying something for an area that’s been sliding inexorably downhill for the past few years. But times change, and standards have slipped. A new, snider generation, more materialistic and submerged in a drink- and drug-fuelled world of their own, roam the streets of the estates where I grew up. The parents have no control; the offspring have no respect. Robbing from their own – this should not be tolerated. And hopefully it won’t, and those fools will be caught, by fair means or foul. Word is out.

I don’t go home very often, and this has left a very sour taste in my mouth. My mum is shaken that someone could get into her own home so effortlessly, and fears for her own and he granddaughter’s safety, now that she realises just how vulnerable she could be.

“Two Dogs” has gone to the dogs.

Do you have a ‘super-fast’ broadband connection but are a bit less than happy with how quickly you are able to navigate the web? It wasn’t until last night when I was almost tearing my hair out in frustration that I sussed out what was going on. I was swearing and cursing at all the other people in the building who were sharing my connection, but didn’t realise that it wasn’t bandwidth that was the problem but my ISP’s DNS servers.

DNS servers serve as the internet’s ‘phone book’. They have to be fast and effective to make your web experience a pleasant one. A typical web page can make hundreds of requests to your ISPs DNS servers each time there is a request for graphics and text.

If your DNS is crap (or becomes so over time) then it’s Bad Times. You should have a DNS response time in tens of milliseconds, not hundreds. For if your pages are graphics intense, for example, you might have to wait several seconds (GASP!) for your page to load.

However, there are free DNS providers out there which can be a damned site better than many ISPs. Good Times! If you know what you are doing, you could consider changing your router’s DNS settings to make use of one of these Third Party DNS solutions.

I am with Be Broadband at home, and have been spoiled by a 24Mbps service for almost a year. But my surfing has started to become noticeably slower these past few weeks and some pages have simply come up with Explorer errors. Not funny when you’re in the middle of a bidding war on eBay! Speaking with other Be users, they’d found out that the ISP’s DNS has become flaky to say the least.

I dipped into my router’s settings and changed the DNS IP addresses to use the OpenDNS service and, all of a sudden, my internet is back to what it was like months ago – i.e. as fast as shit off a shovel!

I highly recommend trying this out. You don’t have to sign up or register even, simply make a note of their server addresses and put them into your router or modem config.