Bugfood
Posted: Tue 13 May, 2008 Filed under: Cynicism, Domestic, Green Garden Leave a comment »One of the things I hate about summer is that I turn into a buffet bar for mosquitos. (and other bugs as well, but mainly mosquitos) There’s something about me that obviously tastes good to the little bloodsucking fuckers, and they just dive in for a chomp.
After having a meal outside on Sunday evening, I’ve got no less than five bites on my legs already, three of which have swollen up unpleasantly.
We’ve got a mosquito-repellent in the bedroom which seems to work OK, and we’ve got a UV anti-bug lamp, although I really need to sort that out and put it somewhere so it’ll actually do something to the little vampiric bastards. However, the UV thing can’t really go outside (not long-term, anyway) so I’m also considering an outdoor version like this one which might help zap the buzzing little tossers.
Ah, the joys of summer.
Summer Of ‘Fun’
Posted: Tue 13 May, 2008 Filed under: Cynicism, Domestic 3 Comments »Oh dear god, it’s one of those years (also known as “Leap Years”) again this summer.
All through the summer, the TV is going to be filled with Euro 2008 football, (despite there not being any part of the United Kingdom that’s got through to the final competition, it’s still going to dominate both BBC and ITV while it’s on) then the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and at the same time the eighth ninth series of Big Brother on Channel 4. Whoopee-doo.
I guess I’m going to be either doing a lot of writing, and/or watching DVDs instead…
[Edited : Bloody BBC story about Big Brother got it wrong, and claimed the ’07 series was the seventh, when in fact it was the eighth. They’ve changed it now, but all the same, oops.
Memory Loss
Posted: Thu 8 May, 2008 Filed under: Cynicism, Geeky 2 Comments »Yesterday evening, I was working on fixing a problem by using a small bit of javascript, and I couldn’t get it to work. Annoying, but them’s the breaks.
Finally, I realised why I couldn’t get the thing to work on a browser, when I was sure I’d written it correctly – and double checked it when it didn’t work first time.
I’d turned javascript off in the browser to do something else, and hadn’t reactivated it yet.
[Edit : I forgot to add the thought in the next par when writing the post initially]
It’s the only time I’ve found so far where tabbed browsing is inferior to separate browser windows – if you turn it off in one place, you turn it off in all of them, which doesn’t happen (as easily) with multiple windows.
Grrr, twenty minutes of debugging and re-reading code – and all because sometimes I’ve got the memory span of a goldfish.
XKCD
Posted: Wed 7 May, 2008 Filed under: Cynicism, Geeky Leave a comment »I’m just loving today’s XKCD comic.
Sometimes they’re a bit hit-and-miss, but this one’s worth the effort.
Mains Restored?
Posted: Tue 6 May, 2008 Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Domestic, Health, Thoughts 2 Comments »It’s possible that today we will be finally re-allowed to use mains water for drinking and cooking. It’s not certain yet, because they’re doing ‘final’ tests today to decide. (Of course, if we still can’t, it won’t be final tests, but there we go)
We’ve been on bottled water since 17th April.
In that time, we’ve had a dropped off leaflet about why we couldn’t drink the water, and one letter – addressed to the previous occupants, who moved out at least eighteen months ago. And that’s it. It really hasn’t been Anglian Water‘s finest hour (three-and-a-half weeks. Whatever) in terms of customer service.
Any information that’s been acquired has been gained by us calling them. In fact, we wouldn’t know about today’s tests if I hadn’t spoken to Anglian Water‘s customer services people on Friday. And because they couldn’t be bothered to tell us, it would’ve meant that all the access to the back of the house (where there’s an outside tap they could use to test the water) would have been locked, so they couldn’t test our place.
We also took the opportunity to get them to deliver more bottled water to everyone on the road, as on Friday there were two six-packs of bottled water left on the pallet dumped on the roadside a couple of weeks ago. For a bank holiday weekend. As it is, I’ve been dropping off some of those six-packs of water to the older people on the road (and bear in mind that a good 50% of the people on our road are at least sixty) rather than them having to try lugging bloody heavy loads of water back to the house.
All told, it’s been a total farce from start to finish. And once we’re actually back on the mains service I’m going to be having a serious conversation with Anglian Water about why the hell it’s been such a fuckup. That’ll be a fun conversation, for sure.
Election Losses
Posted: Sat 3 May, 2008 Filed under: Cynicism, News, Thoughts 2 Comments »“Gordon Brown says it has been a “bad and disappointing” election for Labour“
In light of the recent governmentary cockups – 10% tax rate, house prices going down, oil (and just about every other) price going up, fuel price exploding, multiple strikes etc. – is it really any surprise to see that people are finally getting sick of Labour?
And when we then get told that £50bn of our money is going to help out the banks (and is thus at risk of being lost, if those banks collapse in the credit crunch) while the 10% tax rate is abolished (as Ian Hislop put it on Have I Got News For You, “the government has taken from the poor and given to the rich”) it’s just another nail in the coffin of Labour.
A “bad and disappointing” election? Only to the people in Labour. Most of the people with any common sense see it as the beginning of a very well deserved end…