Along with the many other things I’m farking about with at the moment, I tried sorting out online shopping with Tesco last night. No particular reason, just thought it’d be a good idea to get more sorted.
Anyway, registration should’ve been easy, ’til it came time to enter in the Clubcard number. Take out the plastic proper card – embossed with my name – put in the number and the postcode. No, postcode not recognised as the one linked to that card. Um. I tried about four postcodes, just in case I hadn’t got round to registering a new address. (I’d have been surprised, but there we go, it can happen) None of them were right. Oh tits.
So I ended up calling them up on the phone, trying to find out what’s going on. And it turns out that somehow, someone else has now registered their name and address for my clubcard. It’s not even anywhere I’ve lived – the postcode they gave me was IG3, which is Ilford in Essex. Never been there, never wanted to be there. So why my card is registered there, God only knows.
I don’t mind so much – I haven’t been using the card much of late, and it’s no big thing – but it does add some levels of concern about why/how Tesco have allowed a live card to be re-registered to someone else in a completely different area.
Ah well.
Over the last three years, I’ve been using the xMarks service (formerly FoxMarks) to synchronise all my bookmarks between Home PC, Laptop, Work PC, and iPhone. It’s always been a free service – allbeit one I’d have happily paid for – that made life *so* easy when it comes to keeping bookmarks in sync.
So it’s really sad news today that xMarks has 90 days to live. I don’t know of a better service for synchronising bookmarks (and passwords) in the way that xMarks does, and it’s been awesomely useful for a very long time.
For me- and it’s a point they raise in that blog post – I would’ve happily paid for the service. Not loads – but £10 – £25 a year, certainly.
A very sad day.
Lots of stuff changing at the moment chez Lyle, so updates may be a bit thin on the ground.
Watch this space.
One of the more bizarre sights at AdTech this year was this…
Yellow Camouflage, Yellow Shirt, Yellow DM Boots
Very, very yellow – and very odd.
But what is the point of camouflage trousers in bright yellow? The mind boggles – I want to be concealed, fit in with the forest, but also bright yellow. Maybe it’s for hiding in fields of oil-seed rape.
One of the more surprising things about yesterday’s trip to London was the cost of the train ticket to do the journey.
Now I wrote about it last year when National Express East Anglia decided to almost-double the cost of the trainfare overnight from £40 to £74, and ended up with a letter from NEEA telling me that oh yes, it’d been an error, and the prices would drop back down at the next revision.
Looks like that was a lie, too. Indeed, the price has now gone up, so a return ticket with travelcard cost me £80.80 That really takes the piss. I could’ve driven down, parked all day, and driven back for less than half that amount – the only reason I didn’t was that I wasn’t in the mood for navigating London and the M25.
On the (very minor) plus side, the trains are now a lot less busy than they were when I was using them on a daily basis a couple of years back. Of course, that just means that (in theory at least) NEEA will then try and gouge their remaining customers even more in order to maintain the same levels of income.
Today’s been a pretty long day, and I’m fairly thankful that it’s over.
Work had asked me to go up to the AdTech exhibition / conference / thing in London, and today was the day. It meant getting up at 5.30, leaving the house at 6.30, getting the train to London – for £80 return (eighty fucking quid!) – and then to Olympia, hanging round loads of marketing twerds for the day, and then doing the return run. Joys.
What was worse was that (for me) it felt like a pretty wasted day. I didn’t really learn anything new – after all, I already knew that marketing droids are a dull bunch – and didn’t get any new ideas or new contacts that’d be useful.
One thing that did surprise me was how execrably bad a lot of these marketing companies were at marketing themselves – in a marketing conference, no less. So many of the exhibitors had exceedingly minimal stands, no information, nothing. Really very very strange.
Anyway, at least it’s over.
There’s a story on the BBC today about whether it would be better for new drivers to not be allowed to drive at night for a defined period once they’ve first passed their tests.
In some ways I do think this is a good idea – I’ve said before that I like the Australian method, with limitations on night driving, no alcohol level allowed at all, and a limitation on number of similar-aged people in the same car.
However, as the story says, it would also be a nightmare to administrate and enforce.
So perhaps a better idea would be to simply insist that the learner undergoes a certain number of lessons at night, and thus gets used to night-driving in as controlled a way as possible?
