NT-motherfucking-L

Dateline : Today. Location : Oldham Shopping Centre.

“Hello Sir, can I interest you in NTL?“
*walking past* No, thanks.
*snide*”Ah well, you’ll never know what a great deal you’ve just walked away from“
*walking back*Care to repeat that?
*not so sure now* “Um, you’ll never know what a great deal you’ve just missed“
Oh, wouldn’t I? What’re you offering? Cheap calls? Whoopee doo. After my last experience with NT-fucking-L, I wouldn’t touch them with someone else’s shitty stick. The customer service sucks, the charges aren’t that cheap, the internet access is balls, NTL can’t bill correctly even with Oftel watching over them, and, frankly, their entire ‘service’ sucks the balls off dead donkeys. I’m on ADSL – can you sell me a phone service from NTL that won’t fuck that up completely?
“um. No.“
Will you refund me for what I’ve already paid on ADSL?
“No“
Do I live in an area where NTLs cable already runs, and is known to work?
“I don’t know“
No, you bloody don’t, do you? I do – they can’t do cable modems in my area, so it’s dial-up or sod all. It’s still old C&W shite, which NTL can’t use all it’s stuff on. So next time before being such a cockhead, why not try either appreciating that someone’s said “no thanks” instead of “fuck off”, don’t be snide, and get your head out of your arse.

I feel SO much better after that…

BM5

Bloody hell, the fifth one already. Yes, while I remember, the 5th Manchester Blogmeet will be happening tomorrow. Any time after 8pm, in Font (just round the corner from Oxford Road station).

It’s obviously the season for meets – as well as one last Saturday in London, there’s another one tonight. And I’m down in the wilds of Berkshire over the weekend at another smaller do – pics will probably be around on Monday of that one, and on Friday of the Manchester BM5. Be afraid…

PhotoBox

At the moment, I’m applying for an “on-the-side” job doing photographs for a rebuilding project. I’ve never done anything like it before, so it’s kind of on a wing and a prayer. I won’t blither on too much about the job itself, as I suspect that the likelihood of getting it is rather less than, say, finding myself on a flight tonight to Outer Mongolia in pursuit of a prehistoric yurt.

Anyway, last night I was burbling round what I needed to put together for this application, and I realised that a small porfolio of stuff I’ve done would be useful. So I’ve assembled 15 shots that I’m particularly proud of, or pleased with, and burned them onto a CD along with a little set of web pages to display the different images etc., all done in one page using PHP. (Yes, I’m that geeky too – sad but true)

Now, I’m slow on the uptake, and it took ’til 1am before I thought “Oh, bollocks. What if they haven’t got a PC? Best do some proper prints too”. Uploaded them to Photobox.co.uk by about 1.30am. And when I got into work this morning, there was a set of emails telling me that not only had the order been received, it had also been processed and despatched. Now that’s what I call efficient.

Garden pt. 2

Following on from Monday’s post about getting rid of greenfly, I ended up getting a completely non-organic way of killing them, and sprayed the patch garden with it yesterday. Only time will tell how ultimately successful this was.

Bon Anniversaire

It’s Anna‘s birthday tomorrow. Be nice to her. *Grin*

Dunham Massey

One thing I’d forgotten to write about from over the weekend was a visit to Dunham Massey – it was a fairly pleasant day, so spending time in gardens/house actually quite appealed, and the friends who were here had been there years before, so off we went.

Typically, for the first time in ages, I forgot to bring a camera. Twonk. One of the first things that we noticed in the grounds was a jay flying past – not overly rare, but still not something I’d seen in quite a few years.

Overall, the house was interesting – unfortunately, we’d come on a weekend when some bunch of local am-drams were attempting to “bring the house to life” via some utterly wanky little production involving costume drama scenes in some of the rooms of the house. Personally, I loathe this type of thing – I know lots of people find them useful for imagining how a house would’ve been, but I prefer to use imagination, rather than letting loose some bunch of barely-able muppets out to bob, curtsey, roll their r’s in a Noel Coward style, and generally be camper than a row of tents. I’m not a fine of these dramatisations even on TV, but when they’re in person I find myself realising why they haven’t staged any scenes in the armoury, or the study where the swords are on display. As it was, the penny-whistle player was offered the opportunity for a trip to the proctologist if he didn’t move himself forthwith. Needless to say, he shifted.

Anyway – the gardens themselves were (for me) the better part of the deal – I love a lot of that kind of thing, although the National Trust seems to have ended up with a job-lot of rhododendrons, and planted them in every NT property in the country. They’re nice, but they do get boring. However, the sheer variety of plants and trees throughout made up for the rhodie-excess. And watching shouty darling little bastards children running after squirrels yelling “Squirl!” is always good for a laugh. Particularly when that child trips on its shoelaces, and face-plants the tree. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t just me that was laughing….

My old man said be a footie fan, I said…

I’m sure there are many great things about having a new Chants Laureate for football. For me, most of them involve the words “fucking”, “stupid”, and “idea”, in some order.

“What we felt we were tapping into was a huge reservoir of folk poetry”

Andrew Motion, poet laureate and panel judge

I think “folk poetry” has some managed to replace the word “bullshit” in that sentence – bloody typesetters.