In Sewer Ants

I wish I could remember what book that title came from.

But anyway, I digress. This time next week I’ll be flying off to Iceland for a four-day weekend – with the parents, no less. It’s the first time I’ve been off with the family for a break since I was thirteen. That makes it – oooh, shit, shouldn’t have done the maths – nineteen years ago. Nineteen and a half, if we’re being picky. Scary.

Anyway, I finally got through the travel insurance stuff from my bank – it’s all part of the current account I’ve got, which makes life a lot easier. But having read through the document last night, it’s really pretty comprehensive – and it’s valid all year, and doesn’t care how many times I go away. Happy day.

Breakthrough

So, there’s a thing called the Breakthrough Generations study. They need over 100,000 women to join their study about lifestyle and breat cancer. Any women over the age of 18 can take part.

You can find out more about the study here – go on, sign up, do your bit.

Going Postal

Out of interest, did you know that if you send something by Recorded Delivery, it actually doesn’t get any kind of special treatment at all, and just goes in with normal post? If you want something to get there for the next day, or whatever, then it needs to go by “Special Delivery” instead.

So really, it seems like Recorded Delivery is more useful as a “this way you know it hasn’t been received” than as any kind of relevant guarantee. It’s no wonder Royal Snail missed all 15 of its performance targets recently. Useless bunch of chuffers.

Feeling Fruity

Ah, excellent. A selection of god-botherers has decided to complain about the drawings on a new range of Haribo sweets. Supposedly they show the fruits enjoying various types of sex. The progress of porn is an endless thing – and particularly in the minds of certain prudes.

“If pornography is available on any street corner for $5, isn’t that too high a price to pay for freedom of speech?”
“No. On the other hand, $5 is too high a price to pay for pornography.”

© West Wing Series 1 Episode 1

CPA

Currently the council I work with is expecting to start a CPA and panic is everywhere. God knows why, because the CPA is basically the same as a visit from the MD – everyone knows about it months in advance, so all should be perfect for the visit. Of course, that still means we’re likely to fail it, same as last year.

As it is, the Chief Exec pledged that this year the CPA would be far better, and the council would get at least a “satisfactory” grade. In the meantime, nothing’s really been done to improve the performance or organisation, but hey, we’ve hired some git who got another council through their CPA, and we’re currently sandblasting the front of the offices, making them look all clean and nice. Which, of course, is a great point-scorer when it comes to corporate performance.

As always, it looks like we’ll be going the “no idea what we’re doing, but doing it in a pretty way” gambit. And we know how successful that can be, don’t we, Tony?

M$ Publisher

Dear God I hate this software evil sack of shit. Thankfully I don’t have much cause to use it, except when some chutney-monkey decides that it’s a great piece of software for producing an Annual Report, or a couple of demos for a website.

Yesterday provided a different type of challenge though. An old Publisher document – knowing I use Publisher (when I have to, and never out of choice), can I open it up, and save it to something useful (or just print it out and fax it). “No problem”, quoth I, knowing fuck-all.

Turns out, I use Publisher from Office 2000. The old document was in Publisher ’97 or somesuch. Now yes, it’s the same piece of software, just an upgrade. Shouldn’t be a problem, should it?

Oh Bill Gates you utter, utter cunt, what the blue blazing fiddly fuck were you thinking? Instead of having any form of backwards compatibility whatsoever, it turns out that Publisher 2000 simply refuses to open any documents from earlier versions. Not even an “I’ll open it in a basic format, because 2000 has more stuff than ’97” – just “Publisher cannot open documents from earlier versions”. You fucking whoreson’s ringburned bumdonkey piece of software – what the frig is that about? It’s not even about upgrading from one version to another – because the upgrade still won’t read the old docs.

I despair. Cock-knocking bumnuggets, the lot of ’em.

About bloody time

As of today, the main shopping centre in Oldham has gone non-smoking – although I’m willing to bet that it’ll be a struggle for the first couple of months getting people to realise it.