Friday, January 30, 2009

IS DRC A-OK?

On reading a piece in the Sunday Territorian written by one Peter Murphy, I noticed that it invited readers to view the DRC on the web. What does DRC stand for , may I ask? . It used to mean Darwin Reconstruction Commission which rebuilt Darwin after Cyclone Tracy . I was informed that DRC stands for the Darwin Research Centre , a bit like the right wing Sydney Research Centre conducted by Gerard Henderson, president of the Phillip Adams fan club .

Armed with this info, I decided to look at the DRC website as it would no doubt contain words of wisdom for all right thinking Australians. Alas , when it was Googled, up popped not one but two warnings that connection could damage your computer. My faithful old computer is steam driven , so I am very wary about connecting to URLs which could do it harm , as well as possibly opening the way for annoying SPAM , bulk offers of licorice flavoured Viagra and personal messages from lonely Russian ladies simmering in the tundra.

Puzzled, I asked a prominent journalist what he knew about the DRC site and he warned me that he had once accessed it and his computer had gone haywire. It would seem that the invitation by the newspaper for its valued readers to visit DRC could land it in a massive class action under consumer protection laws when computers all over Darwin erupt like a flummery based IED topped by hundreds and thousands.
Intrigued, I decided to call on the mysterious DRC in the CBD ASAP . Caught in a monsoonal downpour, I arrived at the advertised address of the Darwin Research Centre only to find it was locked up, the lights out, with instructions for couriers to deposit packets ( of what it did not stipulate ) in an adjoining office. As a result of my drenching, I now have the sniffles and could succumb to double pneumonia. Yours for a safer cyberspace and the eradication of viral infections. For obvious reasons , this post is aligned left.