Blocked Roads and SatNav
Posted: Mon 1 September, 2008 Filed under: Cynicism, Travel, Weirdness 6 Comments »Another day, another pig of a drive in to the office.
Today, two trucks had collided, with one spewing its load of 10T of steel all over the road. Luckily (in some perspectives) I knew about this one before leaving home, so I’d also brought the SatNav with me.
By the time I got to the A11/A14 junction, the police had completely closed off the A14, and were sending people down to the M11 to come back up the A505 – both of which were by now also completely rigid with traffic.
I set TomTom to know that there’d been a roadblock on the A14, and at first thought I’d let it take me where it wanted. Until it kept insisting I turn round and go back to the A14. Stupid piece-of-shit satnav. So in the end, I used my knowledge instead, and got through the middle of Cambridge instead, with TomTom repeatedly insisting “No, you need to go back to the A14, you need to go back.” and then eventually “Oh, hang on, yeah, you’re right, you can go this way, and you know what? It’ll take you right to the office.” The undertone of “I’m great, aren’t I? How would you have managed without TomTom” is probably just me disliking the poxy thing.
Actually, I’d have done pretty well even without TomTom. I was 90% sure of where I was going, and where I needed to be. I might have made one mistake, but that would’ve been it.
Also, I want to check this on the way home, but I’m sure it’s pointing right to go West on the compass setting. Any time I noticed it today, it was doing so. All told, that’s a bit of a worry…
Intent
Posted: Tue 19 August, 2008 Filed under: Cynicism, Thoughts, Weirdness Leave a comment »I still really don’t understand how someone can be found guilty of posessing documents that promote terrorism. It’s almost as dodgy (in my opinion) as being found guilty of “planning a terrorist attack”. (i.e. it was talked about/thought about, but nothing actually happened)
In this case, the person was “found to have a book on how to make napalm” in his posession. I can think of two or three books just off the top of my head that explain how to make napalm – or at least the basic concepts.
To me, this is the same as saying “Well, you’ve got lots of murder-mystery books, so you must be planning to kill someone”. Hell, I’ve got at least two books that go through the intimate details of shooting heroin. So that must mean I’m planning to take it myself, right?
Stopping Cycles
Posted: Tue 22 July, 2008 Filed under: Cynicism, Weirdness Leave a comment »What’s wrong with this picture?
Yep, a barrier to stop people cycling – right next to a wide-open space, with nothing to stop people just cycling onto that instead.
Genius.
Extreme Kayaking
Posted: Thu 3 July, 2008 Filed under: Cynicism, Weirdness 1 Comment »Taking a kayak down a 120ft waterfall?
I’ll pass, thanks.
Neat(ish) New Spam
Posted: Wed 2 July, 2008 Filed under: Cynicism, Thoughts, Weirdness 1 Comment »Now that my email server is back in the land of the living, I’ve received a bundle of delayed emails, which included two copies of a neat new “phishing” spam email. Not a banking one for once, but instead they’re doing some social engineering stuff, and it looks like this…
Tax Refund: You are eligible to receive a tax refund of È252.80
After the last annual calculations of your fiscal activity we have determined that you are eligible to receive a tax refund of È252.80.
Please submit the tax refund request and allow us 15-30 days in order to process it.ATENTION: Insufficient or incorrect information may lenghten the whole process. Usually does not take more than one week from the date you have provided us with your details. In some cases (especially submitted by those without permanent National Insurance Number) this may take considerably longer.
You have 48 hours to complete your tax refund claim. To access the secure form for your tax refund, please click here [link deleted, for obvious reasons]
The link address is to some ropy domain callled mail.betreuungsverein-aachen.de which kind of gives the game away (if the J instead of a £ character, and mis-spelling of ‘ATTENTION’ hadn’t flagged it up already) but I can imagine that a fair number of idiots will click on the link for the prize of £250ish. Idiot Tax ahoy!
Bad Timing
Posted: Tue 24 June, 2008 Filed under: Domestic, Health, Travel, Weirdness 3 Comments »I’ve decided that I hate my body clock. Or my body clock hates me – I’m not quite sure which, yet.
Last night, at about 7pm I was exhausted, and had totally hit the barrier. I was speaking to Herself, and must’ve sounded like a stunned monkey, really not with it at all. At that time, I was all set for an earlyish night, as it’d been a fairly hectic day.
That’s not what my body clock wanted though. Come ten pm, my brain went *ping!* and I was wide awake again. No caffeine, no sugar, nothing to stimulate it at all, but just *ping!*.
It didn’t slow down again ’til gone 1am. And I was awake again at about half six.
Bastard.
In On Time
Posted: Mon 23 June, 2008 Filed under: Driving, Travel, Weirdness 6 Comments »I forgot to post (due to spending time sorting out and cleaning up the PC I’ve been given for this assignment, so it now runs slightly quicker than the average tortoise) but I got in to the new contract on-time.
Not, however, for want of trying on the part of other road users. It just seems to have been one of those days where simple tasks like merging or changing lanes became a bit of a challenge for people, which led to one part of the journey taking nearly half an hour longer than it should have done.
The prime example of this was the section of the A11 that goes from dual-carriageway to single just after a roundabout. For some reason this morning it was block-full of bell-ends who couldn’t merge lanes. The queue went for a mile, then round the roundabout (exceptionally dodgy) and into the lane merge section. Once you’d got through that, it was plain sailing the rest of the way through the single-carriageway section, and the delay was just caused by fuckwit bastards who couldn’t cope with merging lanes. Unsurprisingly, the word “cunt” sprang forth from my lips on a couple of occasions.
The A14 and M11 were no better – on both, the outside lane came to emergency stops a couple of times for no good reason except people being incapable of the necessary multi-tasking required for a) indicating and b) changing lane.
But all told, I’d timed it so that the journey got me in to the office for 9:02am. Which wasn’t bad, considering the state of the driving that was going on around me…