Posted: Tue 19 November, 2002 Filed under: General Leave a comment »
Hmm. Tasty.
Note to self – Having recently drunk coffee strong enough it could be reclassified as an animate lifeform, eating anything with cheese in it is NOT <finish off the sentence>a good idea, and in fact makes everything taste fucking horrible</finish off the sentence>.
Actually, this should form the eleventh commandment.
Posted: Tue 19 November, 2002 Filed under: General Leave a comment »
Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of robbing bastards
And yes, Equitable Life are in the news again.
The story is another long one, so I won’t bother, but they’ve been a crowd of robbing fuckers for years, and all this latest stuff blew up just after I left them (for once there was no connection between the two events, much as I’d like there to have been). So I’ve sat back, watched the website and company go through three rebranding exercises in the last three years, and still come out of it looking like scumbags.
Which is a pretty fair representation, so far as I can tell…
Posted: Mon 18 November, 2002 Filed under: General Leave a comment »
Link and Think
As we come closer and closer to the “joys” of 1st December, World Aids Day, I think that Link and Think is a good idea.
Thanks to Gordon at SomeThing for drawing it more to my attention, and his unwitting reminders that I really should add it to this blog. December 1st is one of the few times I attend memorial services, particularly with certain people in mind, and you can be sure I’ll be there again this year.
Posted: Mon 18 November, 2002 Filed under: General Leave a comment »
And who are you again?
Fairly interesting piece on the BBC news site again today – this time about identity theft. OK, it’s not that big a deal, having your name hijacked on Friends Reunited (yes, I’m on there; yes, you’d have to work bloody hard to find me) but I suppose it’s a starting point. Now, while no-one would really be dull enough to nick my ID for Friends Reunited (see, there’s a bonus to being the school geek/git (depends on perspective, I suppose)) I have experienced ID theft, which involved applying for a passport. This means sending the keffwits a nice big envelope with birth certificate, photos, Application form etc., that the Passport Office then send back in normal post along with your nice new (unsigned) passport. Yes, you can get it done recorded delivery (if you’re likely to be at home on the day it arrives) for about £15 extra. Other than that, lose the info, it’s not the Passport Office’s problem, it’s the Royal Mail’s. But when you complain to Royal Mail, it’s the Passport Office’s fault, not Royal Mail’s. A nice little blame circle-jerk with no-one getting to pay compensation.
Anyway, 9 months later, I got a knock on the door, and opened it to see two hulking great policemen waiting for me. They confirmed who I was, then said they were arresting me for obtaining goods by deception in some bloody place I’d never been. Bizarrely, I’d actually got proof that I hadn’t been where they said I had to have been (which was useful).
In fairness, the police did believe my story (not necessarily a common event) and contacted the company that had made the complaint. Turned out, there was no way it could have been me, because the first thing they said about the person was “Well, he was black…” – the company had taken the passport as ID, and photocopied it, so there was evidence that the person in the photo was absolutely not me.
All the same, it’s a weird experience – over the next year, the person using my passport knocked up debts of about £45,000, all in my name. It took forever to sort out – thankfully, because it was recorded with the police that I was not the person connected to the debt, a lot of potential nastiness was avoided, but it was still no fun at all. Of course, no-one ever decided who was to blame – and when I applied again for a passport, it was all done recorded delivery. The stolen passport’s now expired, thank God, and blacklisted from here to Tibet, but all the same, I sometimes wonder if that person’s not stiull wibbling around, conning more people on false passports.
And of course I moved from that address pretty sharpish, which helped too…
Posted: Mon 18 November, 2002 Filed under: General Leave a comment »
Keffing bloody Nutscrape
One thing I’ve often wondered while using Nutscrape and it’s variants (i.e. Mozilla) is this – why is it that even when I’ve got it set to “blank page” as a home page when I start it, about 50-75% of the time, it still pisses off and drags a homepage from Netscape’s own site (or Mozilla’s, in the case of Mozilla).
It’s always been the thing that put me off Nutscrape in general (Avoiding IE is one of the few scruples I’ve still got left) and explains why I tend to stick with Opera. Pity really, because Nutscrape 7 seems to work pretty well except for that…
Posted: Mon 18 November, 2002 Filed under: General Leave a comment »
Yep, it’s definitely redesign season
Further to the bits a bit further down the page, Anna has just released her site’s redesign on the world, and a right stunner it is too. Truly impressed, I am.
And now I suppose I’m going to have to digit extractum on the stuff for the festering season, aren’t I?
Posted: Sun 17 November, 2002 Filed under: General Leave a comment »
Click that button
Yes, the main event for the day has been – wait for it – redoing the buttons on the site. More accurately, the rollovers. I think they’re a bit clearer now, and nicer to use. Of course, I could be wrong – it’s hardly unknown, after all. But between that and some minor redesign ideas for the forthcoming festering season, it’s kept me fairly busy…
And yes, the redesigned stuff will become evident over the next week or so, as we run headlong towards that joyous month of December, the one beloved of scrooges everywhere…