Return

Note to self : Never trust people who use a bus service. When they say “Oh, don’t worry, the last one leaves at seven o’clock on a Sunday”, this (naturally) means that the last one runs at six, and you’re then stuck in the arse of beyond ’til morning. Hence a disappearing Lyle. And even with a 3G phone, it’s still hard to blog when you don’t know the web-address for a mobile-compatible blogging service. *Sigh*

I’ll figure out all this extra tech soon, I’m sure.

100,000

I hadn’t looked at the log-file analysis for a while – since moving in fact – so when I looked at the comprehensive report I was pretty surprised to find that d4d™ is now coming close to it’s 100,000th page impression. By my reckoning, it’ll happen within the next week or so.

3G

More and more I’m sure that I really shouldn’t be let out on my own. After a farcical search that will probably end up being detailed in a mini-rant sometime over the weekend, I finally sorted myself out with a new mobile phone. I can semi-justify it (if I wanted to) because the battery life on the old one was steadily getting worse and worse, to the extent of needing to be charged every day.

I’d managed to avoid most of the hype about 2.5G phones, the camera ones and so on – I wasn’t that bothered, and for me the cons far outweighed the pros. Oddly enough, while I’m pretty geeky, I don’t feel a burning desire to own every piece of new technology as soon as it comes out. However, when I do buy stuff, it’s normally current new/cutting-edge stuff. And so of course with the new phone, it had to be 3G on the Three network. The network has had it’s problems on start-up, including some deeply shonky phones <mutter>NEC 606</mutter> but now the next selection of phones has come out, and they’re a lot better.

I’ve ended up with a techie special, the Motorola A920. If (like me) you’ve only dealt with Motorola’s ultra-nasty flip-phones and clamshell designs, then this one has some major surprises up it’s sleeve. The touchscreen interface is – gasp! – actually usable, instinctive, and comfortable to use. I’m still learning the speed stuff, like handwriting recognition, but it’s pretty good. On the geeky side, it’s got fun stuff like built-in GPS, so you can pull up a map of where you are, and it’ll include nearest restaurants, pubs etc. The built-in camera seems good, and will be acid-tested in the next couple of weeks, I’m sure.

All told, first impressions of it are pretty good. We’ll just have to see what time brings.

As predicted

Yes, it’s true, I didn’t go to see Skin. Such is life. Instead I’ve managed to get tickets to see Donna Tartt doing a reading next week from her novel “The Secret Little Friend” (thanks dvd for pointing out that I’m a twat and mixed up the two titles), and Neal Stephenson in a couple of week’s time for a reading from his new novel, “Quicksilver”. That’ll do me.

Current Thoughts

I’ve just added a new piece to the thoughts section – and in fact a new sub-section too – about the start of SAD. It’s something I suspect I’ll be writing more about over the next few months, I can already feel the curls of it’s tendrils (and yes, I do think that part of that is the reason for the post below) so we’ll just have to see where it goes…

Gig Apathy

I’m supposed to be going to see Skin (ex of Skunk Anansie) tonight, and at the moment I’m really not sure that I can be bothered. I’ve slept badly for the last three nights, and feel shit. Hardly the best mood to go to a gig. I’m trying to keep an open mind, see how I feel later, but at the moment I keep coming back to “I really don’t feel like it”. Getting the ticket was a spur-of-the-moment thing, before I’d heard the album. I know if I don’t go it’ll turn out to have been a sensational concert. But will I care?

Responsibility

At the Guardian, there’s a feature about a study that blames TV adverts for a rise in junk-food consumption. Of course, it’s worth bearing in mind that the report was funded by the Food Standards Agency, so it’s hardly a shocking revelation at the best of times. Their own report on it is here, if you’re interested.

The report says that children are influenced by advertising for junk food, and proposes putting health warnings on junk food. <sarcasm>Well, it’s worked SO well on cigarettes, so why not?</sarcasm> Some of this report seems all too willing to lay blame anywhere it can, although I do agree that the manufacturers should take some (but not all) responsibility for producing complete junk food.

I’ve ranted about this before, but surely more “blame” should be allocated to the people who choose to be bone-fucking-idle and not cook, who think a Big Mac qualifies as a well balanced meal, who buy everything pre-prepared, and who think that food only comes in a plastic carton that can be nuked for ten minutes “because they’re too busy to do anything properly”. As with so many things, personal responsibility comes into this – people choose to buy quick easy things, they’re not forced to do so at gunpoint. (Although maybe that’ll be the next advertising “concept”) Perhaps more food and nutrition information should be available in school, in doctor’s surgeries, in supermarkets – and that should be the Food Standards Agency’s next step, to start thinking about how things can be improved not by slapping a health warning on a pack of chips, but by educating people about what’s good and bad for them.

Stop the World, I wanna get off

via Sapientum, a collection of optical illusions. Be warned, if you’re feeling slightly unwell, don’t look at them – some of them are quite disorientating, and appear to move. My eyes are now thinking “what the fuck was that all about?”, and to be honest, I don’t know what to tell them. I dread to imagine how the artist must have felt while drawing them – to be that close to the image must be weird in the extreme.

Memetic Dining

Further to the post below, I spot a bandwagon to jump on. About a year ago, I did the dinner party list of people, rather than bloggers, and now it’s time for the bloggers one. As I haven’t yet knowingly met any bloggers, that part of the equation isn’t a problem, but I will extend it by saying that I wouldn’t re-invite people that I’d already “met” at other dinners. Variety being the spice of life, and all that.

So, the people that would be invited to mine would be :

• Peter from Naked Blog
• The inevitable ScaryDuck
• bsag from But She’s A Girl
• The (happily now back to blogging) Pogo of Dearie Me

and

• Jane from iCandy

Make of that little lot what you will. And yes, I nearly ended up with eight instead of five – apologies to the nameless ones who got dropped at the last moment. I blame the size of the dining table: that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

Social Life Explodo

Over at ‘My Boyfriend is a Twat” (note to self – must remember to add that one to the blogroll), Zoe is talking about which bloggers she’d have to a dinner party, and it seems to have struck a chord with other bloggers. Meme-tastic, as Mike would probably say.

Anyway, it looks like yours truly is getting to be popular (or maybe it’s just to see what table manners an ill- trained monkey possesses), as I’m on Gert’s list of guests, and also on Karen’s list of suspects (although Pete doesn’t appear to have had much say in it, and I’m on instructions to be nice to Americans) so I must be doing something right. Hopefully someone will soon tell me what.

At the same time, there’s been initial discussions on Lori’s site about the potential for a Mancunian blog-meet before the Festering Season™ takes hold – which’ll be interesting. So far, Fab Café is looking like a favoured venue, but time will tell…

Marketing in Action

I’d forgotten I’d taken this photo – it was while I was out in the city over the weekend, and these two girls were running around the Urbis gardens yelling “Got your number!”

A while ago, Meg commented about shirts with 118 on them – I’ve no idea where these two got them from, but they were certainly getting their money’s worth out of them.

Lest ye Be Judged

For sheer light relief, the tale of the pissed Judge attempting to mediate a fight in a Scarborough kebab shop – of all places – is utterly brilliant.

[The judge said] “What proof have you got that you are police officers?” Mr Newbury said: “This rather went to confirm their assessment of him, as both officers were in full police uniform and had a fully marked police car outside the door.”

“Deputy district judge David Messenger called two officers “arseholes”, tried to wheedle favours from a desk sergeant, broke a police station alarm bell and refused to stop banging on his cell door on the grounds that he was “a drummer and enjoyed drumming”.”

I haven’t laughed so much in ages.

Oops

Reading through the current Corporate Communications Plan for the place I’m currently working in, an error has been spotted by myself. It concerns all corporate communications to the outside world, and I quote

All communications should be plain and clear, written using 12pt Anal font.

Obviously they’ve been typed from bad handwiritng – but all the same, I dread to imagine what the O character would look like in that particular font…

Google special

Well, according to Mike’s comprehensive searching of google (and Mike, you really DO need to get out more. *grin*) yours truly comes up seventh in Google. I’m preceded by people like Mr Julia Roberts Lyle Lovett, and – um – Cook with Lyle the Lion, as well as the wonderfully named Lyle H Ungar. Considering Tate and Lyle are at #1, I think they’re a bit out of my league, but it’ll be interesting to see if my ranking goes any higher than 7th.

Gawd, and I said Mike needs to get out more? Ha.

Stable Door – Locked

From today’s news, I find it amazing to hear that Microsoft will be closing all it’s MSN chatrooms in Europe from October 15th. (There’s also an editorial in the Guardian about the same subject) Of course, it’s The Paedophile Threat that’s being named as the excuse, and while I can see some of the reasons behind it, there’s a lot more that just seems to be a knee-jerk “make sure we can’t get sued” reaction.

I’m sure it has happened – people being ‘groomed’ by paedophiles and similar – through MSN chat but mainly it seems that it’s still part of the current demonisation of the internet by the media. According to the Guardian’s story on the same subject,

There have been at least 26 court cases in Britain involving child abuse which have been directly linked to chatrooms.

Now yes, that’s “a lot” of cases – but bear in mind these rooms are used by tens of thousands of people worldwide every day. Suddenly, the figures, the percentages don’t look so high, do they? Ideally, we would have a world where paedophilia didn’t exist, where no-one got abused or abducted – but that’s not reality. Is it fair though that 1% of users should keff the system for the other 99%? And what happens when the first ‘blame everyone but myself‘ paedophile says “well, I used to do all this via Chat, as a fantasy to keep my own urges under control, but when they cancelled chat, I had to go out and do it in reality instead”? The same piece quotes,

Gillian Kent, director of MSN UK, said: “Ninety-nine per cent of chat has been used appropriately by people. It is only a small number of people who abuse the service – but it is really serious abuse.

She said one in five people in chat rooms were spammers and there were a smaller number of paedophiles.

Frankly, that’s bollocks. I’ve used chat for about three years now, and a figure of 20% spammers and even 5 or 10% paedophiles is WAY out of proportion. Maybe MSN’s user-profile is different to the services that I’ve used – but I doubt it’s all that different.

There’s instantly more hysteria when anything involves “the internet” – whether it’s children being abducted, spouses leaving to be with someone on the other side of the world, people re-tracing their first loves through school reunion sites, if it mentions the internet, and can be used in a bad light, then it’s media-worthy.

Every form of communication has it’s bad side, it’s anti-use, if you will. Mobile phones can be abused – for instance bullying by text nessage (for which I still envisage “c u ltr 4 a bting” – but I shouldn’t be flippant) and can be used for terrorist purposes due to anonymity, particularly on pay-as-you-go devices. Telephones can be abused – menacing phone calls, or plunging people into debt through premium rate calls. The post can be abused – death threats, love letters, whatever. Even meeting people face to face can be abused – it’s no less likely that meeting one’s “first love” in a supermarket won’t have exactly the same effect as meeting them via a website.

But it’s the internet that gets the bad press at the moment. It’s made communication more instantaneous, and it’s global in reach – maybe that’s why the media doesn’t like it. Yes, because of it’s global nature it is harder to police – but doesn’t some of that come down to personal responsibility anyway?

*Expletive Deleted*

Still in the Guardian, I’ve had to laugh at the “let’s see how many times we can say ‘fuck” piece regarding the decision of various newspapers to quote fully Alastair Campbell’s diary, saying

I want to expose David Kelly in order to “fuck Andrew Gilligan”.

Of course, the Daily Mail chose to use ‘****’ instead, although I notice that on Sunday they were quite happy to use “Paki” as part of their headline (now there’s a shock – hypocrisy at the Mail).

However, the piece that made me laugh the most was (I hope) unintentional. The paragraph explained the Financial Times’ first use of “fuck” on the front page, explaining

“The Bush team’s strategy reflects the closeness of a campaign that the latest polls show as a statistical dead heat. They call it their DIFU strategy – Don’t Fuck It Up.”

I sincerely hope that the Bush administration didn’t call it DIFU, and actually called it DFIU. But I don’t know.

In a sort-of-linked way, I’d also like to say that I think the Sun’s incredibly offensive, insulting and bigoted ‘headline’ about Frank Bruno having to be changed is fantastic. The initial headline would have been a disgrace to The Sport, let alone to anything regarding itself as a newspaper – I’m not going to even give it the credit of webspace, or a link. Every time I think that piece of suppurating shit rag can’t get any worse, they prove me wrong. Long may their readership fall.

Taking the Piss

In comparison to the post below, the Guardian also has a piece on the deterioration of the UK sewer system. The infrastructure is generally reckoned to be at (pardon the image) bursting point already, with little or no investment in improving the current system.

This is one of the areas where privatising the water companies has been at fault – the companies haven’t invested in the systems, because it won’t show a profit to the shareholders. That’s blinkered thinking, based primarily on the “safety’s important, greed is good, but profits and dividends overtake all else” concept that seems to have fuelled a huge number of companies since the 80s. Personally, I can’t see those self-same shareholders being overly impressed when their gardens are covered in shit raw sewage, nor when their expected dividends fail to appear because the water companies are all suddenly having to deal with immense sewage bursts, and have to spend the money all at once in order to ensure that there aren’t outbreaks of rat infestation, typhoid and cholera (to name but a few) because of the fallout from the sewage bursts.

Baby Boom

I can all too easily imagine Green Fairy (nice site redesign, by the way) either frothing at the mouth, or simply despairing (more than normal) of the Tories saying that more babies are the key to solving the looming pensions crisis and to helping economic growth over the next 50 years. I’m not quite sure of the maths involved, being neither a mathematician nor a fuckwit politician, but I can’t quite get the theory to add up.

Of course, on a cynical basis, it has got the Tory party back into the news. I’m sure the Daily fascist Mail will approve of the plan.

Geeky Ego

I wonder, is it sad to be rather smug and chuffed when I’ve managed to get something working on the first go? Especially when it’s something that other people in the department have been working on for a month, and failing to be even slightly successful?

The sad thing is, it’s not even rocket-science stuff. Simply getting stuff on a webpage to appear/disappear at the click of a link – and they hadn’t been able to do it. I despair. Anyway, it’s done, worked first time, and yes, I’m feeling slightly smug and ner-ne-ner-ner, but also pleased that I can still get things to work properly.

Here endeth the session of own-trumpet blowing.

Who needs sleep?

Sometimes I wish I could have an out-of-body experience while sleeping, if only so I could see the position in which I sleep. Also, on days like today, it would be useful to know what sleeping position I’d used that’s making my entire left shoulder feel like someone dislocated it in the night, poured sand into the socket, then relocated the joint.

In short, it’s very very fucking sore. And I’ve no idea why, other than a nagging suspicion that when I finally got to sleep last night, it was with my left arm in a strange and potentially uncomfortable position. Any other information would be mere speculation.

The Festering Season™ starts early

I’d attempted to erase forgotten this from yesterday, but while I was out, I saw that Marks and Spencer have already started displaying their stocks of Festive Festering wrapping paper and so on. Their website has a section on preparing for the festering season. It’s not even bastard October. I could cry.

Decision

For those of you who still haven’t altered your bookmarks and blogrolls, I’m just going to say here (and probably remind on Friday) that I’ve made the decision that the original domain for d4d™, destruction for dummies, is NOT going to be renewed, and so it will be dying as of sometime around Saturday. Of course, because it’s on EasySpace they’ll probably take a few days to take it offline, but I just wanted to point out that at that time the original domain will be dead, deceased, and no more. Which, as a final convincing factor for me, will also immediately halve my daily spam count.

Underworld

Most reviewers have been saying that Underworld is a waste of celluloid – but all the same, I still wanted to see it. The trailers had looked good and the premise of the storyline – vampire vs werewolf (well, called Lycan in the film, but that sounds more like a brand of cling-film) – was something that appealed to me. So yes, I went to see it

And yes, it really is complete bollocks. Absolute utter 100% bollocks. And yet I thoroughly enjoyed it all the same. The storyline is – well, clichéd would be complimentary – and I found myself predicting at least quarter of the lines. The acting is, for the most part, the dictionary definition of risible. Visually, it’s an absolute stunner, which helps a lot – and the soundtrack is pretty damn good too, although the costumes owe one hell of a lot to the Matrix. Some of the effects (particularly one in the finale) are abysmal, while most are good. It’s a film that could’ve been SO much more than it’s turned out to be, and yet I still like it, and will almost certainly end up with it on DVD when it comes out too – although it’ll be loud enough to upset the neighbours when I do.

So – completely undecided about the film – but I’ll look forward still to seeing Van Helsing and LXG.

Helpful

One thing I find I get more and more ratty about now is the way “customer service” and being “helpful” now seems to get in the way of actually facilitating customer’s requirements. Mainly, this is down to getting through the tills. Now OK, I understand that most people are completely thick bastards, and simply don’t read the stuff on the shelves about “buy one, get one free” and so on, but so far as I’m concerned, that’s their problem – no-one else’s.

So – is it actually helpful to say to a customer “Oh, there’s a buy one get one free offer on this, I’ll just get someone to get you the other one” when there’s a queue of ten people waiting to be served. It just means you end up with ten very fucked off people who’ve also had to wait for the fucktard sales assistant to come over to the till, then try and find wherever the item on offer is, and then slop back to the tills with the extra product. In fact, it seems a pretty good way to lose ten customers in the name of keeping one. I will definitely think twice about using that shop again.

Matrix Reloaded – On IMAX

Yeah, I know, Matrix Reloaded as a film is pretty shonky. It’s not the best, and it’s a bit wiffly in places. There’s holes the size of canyons in the plot, and a couple of the effects definitely fell off the back of a lorry. However, for all that I still didn’t mind it at the cinema when it was first released- hell, even for all it’s shortcomings, I enjoyed it. So when I knew it was being released on IMAX format, well, there was no doubt – I was going to be there.

And the verdict? Well first of all, as always with Imax films, the brains just screams “Fucking hell, that thing’s HUGE!” – it brings everything up in more clarity, and that’s a double edged sword with Matrix Reloaded. I loved it, but sometimes the Imax format shows too much detail – the effects are easier to spot, in a way that’s sometimes almost distracting. But it also increases the canvas that the film is made from, brings it back to the total absorption that’s required by the Matrix – and for that, Imax just can’t be faulted. Some of the scenes actually feel to be in 3d because the field of view is so huge, and so clear – you feel you’re floating through the Matrix.

Overall, Reloaded is still a flawed film – Imax shows some of them more, and hides others. It’s interesting – I know I’ll be seeing it again, as other friends want to see it in the same format. A hardship I know, but I’ll live with it – however, I may just end up timing it so I can go to the bog during Morpheus’ speech in Zion – five minutes that really deserved cutting.

Problem with the Equation

The BBC has a piece about the amount of packaging that’s around our shopping, and what can be done to improve our recycling abilities.

The amounts of packaging are actually quite surprising – I knew we were packaging mad, but I hadn’t realised how far the insanity went.

Um – coincidence?

Maybe I should start worrying. The same day I post about Toyota using d4d™ as a description, and should I send them a letter, I get a visit to d4d™ from these people:

Exceptional search

Sometimes, you catch sight of a search request and just have to think “what the hell?”. Today’s example of this is the wonderful

I have no further words to describe that one.

Ha-haa, Scupper yer Landlubbers

Yes, it’s Friday, which means that as well as the standard Friday Farce Five today is also International Talk Like A Pirate Day, which seems appropriate, considering the nefarious brand-stealing piracy detailed below. Avast, ye scurvy dogs, what a rum excuse to be a daft bugger. *Grin*

Trademark Infringement

Oh, sweet irony. Toyota have rebranded their range of diesel engines. The branding for them is – wait for it – d4d. Now, following on from all that shite with Wiley’s, should d4d™ write a snotty letter to Toyota, requesting that they cease and desist from using my brand-name on their engines? Or should I (for once) just keep my head down and not piss people off?

From their site (so yes, it’s ©Toyota)

D-4D actually stands for direct Injection 4 Cylinder Common Rail Diesel Engine.

Surely if it stood for that, it’d be “dI4CCRDE” – what a load of old marketing bollocks.

However, we then get

“What D-4Ds are noteworthy for is their unusually high power outputs, equivalent to that of many competitors’ similarly-sized petrol engines. The D-4D’s rev range is also usefully wider than normal, further enhancing the driving experience.“

I can’t deny d4d™’s unusually high power outputs, but I’m refusing to comment on my range being usefully wider than normal.

Talking with Fucktards, Part 1

Of all the things involved with moving house, I have to say that it’s the utilities companies that make life harder than anyone else. Well, that’s my consistent experience, anyway. In fairness, BT have been fairly efficient this time, and my number moved across to the new house with only one brief problem (which still meant I had to call them and sort it out, but at least it was done immediately) that wasn’t of utter urgency. All the same, it’s a simple process and shouldn’t involve even one small cock-up.

Energy suppliers are a different matter. I’d recently swapped suppliers at the old place, from TXU Powergen (*Spits*) to British Gas. OK, so I want the same supplier at the new place, let’s simply swap suppliers. I’ve given them two weeks notice of the moving date – surely it won’t take that long? Guess again. In fact, I’m still with the old suppliers of gas/electric to the house – it’ll take at least six weeks to move the account over to British Gas. Efficiency at it’s best. For now, it’s with NPower, God help me. I rang them up to give them the new meter readings, so we can start the account from the day I moved in (being honest, for once).

Yes, Hello, I’d like to give you the meter readings for the property I’ve just moved into.
What’s your account number?
No idea – I’ve just moved into the property. There was a letter here saying to call you and register the readings
Oh, well we really need the account number, sir.
Well, I haven’t got one. Can’t you check via the address, and work it that way?
*Sigh* Oh, I suppose so…

After five minutes of huffing and puffing, we get it sorted.

OK, I’ll just put you through to the electricity meter department so you can give them the reading.
…
Hello, Gas Meter department…

Talking with Fucktards, Part 2

Then we went on to my old friends, United Fucking Useless Utilities. Again, I’d called them two weeks ago to inform them of the new address, and the date I’d be moving. I’d had to call them, because their poxy bastard online piece-of-shit form for “helping” to make moving house less stressful won’t accept dates in the future. So instead I have to call them, and tell them I’m moving. Another quarter of an hour on the phone. Competence just doesn’t come into it with utilities companies.

Anyway, I get to the new house, and lo and behold, they’ve managed to do it right. A bill for a small outstanding amount – the difference between places because of different rateable values, or somesuch. It’s less than a tenner, that’s fine – about what I’d expected.

Last night, however, I get home to another bill from UU, this time addressed to “the occupier”. Dated four days after the correct bill I got sent out, and for the full amount of a year’s water rates. So, check the account number – What the fuck?!?, it’s the same account number as the one they’ve sent out in my name. Yup, it’s time for another phone call, find out what the feck they’re playing at – last time there was a cock-up like this, it took me 2½ years to sort out – I’m not going through that shit again

Yes, Hello, I’m calling because I’ve received two bills on the same property, on the same account number, and I’m just trying to find out what’s going on.
*bored voice*OK, when did you move in?
12th September
Well, the two must’ve got crossed in the post.
But the one to “occupier” was sent four days after the correct one
Yeah, they must’ve got crossed in the system. It wouldn’t have known you were there yet, would it?
*deep breath*No, the correct one was sent out before the incorrect one. So you’d got my account details, and then another bill’s been sent out on the same customer reference
Yeah, they must’ve crossed in the system. (And I must be in a fucking timewarp) So one’s got your name on it, and the other one hasn’t, right?
Yes
Well, there you go then. No worries.*Click*

NOT the most helpful fuckhead on Earth – I called them back, and finally ended up speaking to someone who understood. The problem’s now been dealt with, and hopefully the little gimp will be getting a bollocking for being useless, rude, and a complete cunt. I doubt it though – with an attitude like that, he’ll probably be getting promoted to manager within the month.

Pre-Raphaelite

Somehow, it doesn’t come as a particular shock to know that Lord Lloyd-Webber collects Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite paintings, some of which are currently on loan as part of an exhibition. Personally, I’ve always loathed these horrendously sentimental and twee paintings – the subject matter is enough to induce mass vomiting, although I can’t help but admire the technique, the accuracy with which the non-human pieces of each painting are portrayed.

If you want a look at some of the collection, it’s visible here. Just remember to pack a puke bucket first.

Nominate your local grot-hole

I suspect that they could end up being busy, but according to this piece in the Guardian there is now a search going on for the most wasted piece of space/ground in the UK.

Wastedspace.org.uk is the place to go to place your nominations (and I don’t think they’ll accept “Coventry” or “Milton Keynes” as an example of wasted space, but hell, it’s worth a go) and to get more information. Oh, and someone’s already nominated the Millenium Dome. *Grin*

Broadband

Having moved, I’ve been back on the joys of a 56k dial-up for internet access, instead of the ADSL I’ve been used to for the last 18 months. It’s quite a shock to the system, and in honesty I hadn’t appreciated how much I’d got used to broadband until it was no longer there. Anyway, I’ve now sorted out getting the ADSL installed again at the new address, and it’ll be done by the end of the month. (I could have done it faster, but I need the account from the old place to be uninstalled from my phone line first, or something) Already I’m counting the days. Sad, isn’t it?

Updates

No, my missive to el Presidente Blair hasn’t been put up on FuckThankyoutony.com – now there’s a shocker.

However, the cheque I wrote out to “The extortionists at Manchester Glass” has been cashed with no problem whatsoever. And D4D™ is now 32nd(ish) in Google for the search phrase “Manchester Glass”. With luck that’ll just keep on going up – when it’s in the top ten I’ll be happy.

Read the License

Via Cryptogram comes an interesting piece about the License Agreements Dell put on their computers. You have to press a key to say you’ve read the license agreement, but there are no available copies to read. Admittedly, most people just click ‘OK’ and get past it – but then you’ve legally accpeted responsibility for whatever’s in the agreement that you haven’t read.

The better agreements are inside the software packs, and once the seal has been broken on the packaging, you’re deemed to have read the license that’s – um – inside the packaging. Don’t you just love lawyers and their language?

Matrix IMAX

Further to comments here about Friday being “International ‘Talk Like A Pirate’ Day“, I suspect I may have a couple of problems with it. The main one being that on that day I’m off to see Matrix Reloaded on the IMAX screen at Manchester’s Filmworks. A combination of Neo and piracy may be a very bad combination for the world around me. *Grin*

Restoration

I didn’t catch most of the BBC’s “Restoration” programme – but I did watch the final. I’m really pleased that Victoria Baths in Manchester won the final prize, and I’ll look forward to seeing the final restored result. While I’ve never been – they’ve been closed longer than I’ve been in Manchester, and I was kind of busy during the open day over the weekend- iCandy went for a visit, and also took some photos. The restoration will be an interesting project – I would just hope now that the other finalists will also get funding from other sources, now that their profile has been made a lot higher in the public eye.

And also this weekend, the (equally Mancunian) John Rylands Library closed for two years rebuilding and restoration work. Again, this is somewhere I’ve kept on meaning to go, and simply never got round to. I will when it re-opens in 2005.

Frankly, my dear

So, according to (among many others) the Guardian, Ben Affleck’s dumped J-Lo. Frankly, who cares? Yet it’s the headline on the Sun (I should point out I only know this because the nork in front of me was reading the rag story.), and I assume it’s been the headline on other papers too.

Of course, the irony is that one of the speculated reasons for this “split” is the excessive journalism around their lives and wedding. (Well shit, what did they expect when they became well-known?) And so now the “split” is in every bloody paper. But I still don’t care whether they’re together, single, or even living or dead. And I wonder how many people actually do care, or believe it’s relevant.

Hell is other people

Why is it that when people move house, they turn into people who make Scrooge look like the soul of generosity? When I’ve moved into houses previously, I’ve found that the previous occupants have taken light-bulbs, light-switches – well, electric points in general – and even plumbing sections (i.e. for the washing-machine’s drain-tube). All of which are a pain in the arse. But the ultimate one for pettiness has to be what I discovered in the new place.

The previous occupants had removed – if you’re not sat down, I’d advise doing so now – the co-ax plug from the end of the TV aerial cable. Cost? Less than 50p. What the fuck is the point of that?

Anyway, it’s all fixed now – and no, I won’t be taking it with me when I leave.

Day One

A first day in the new place, and most of it’s been good. I hadn’t realised how constantly stressed I was in the old place, but now those levels have gone. In some ways it’s been draining, or at least the changes have left me feeling drained.

Today’s been a manic day, but in a relaxing way. It sounds paradoxical – hell, it is paradoxical – but while I’ve been bombing round sorting out the alarm system in the old house, doing domestic stuff like shopping, and sorting out things in town. However, at the same time I also was able to take time out, and ended up going to the cinema to (finally) see “Pirates of the Caribbean“. Amazingly dumb film, but I enjoyed it hugely. Every so often, it’s necessary to just sit and be entertained – and I was. No high art – although some stunning effects – a semi-decent storyline, and even *gasp* some decent acting. Oh, and a completely over-the-top set of fights – it was wonderful.

All things considered, I’m happier. There’s a lot of stuff still due to be happening, changes in the pipeline, and still some of a house to be sorted. But yes, I’m happier, and for now that’ll do.

A Moving Experience

And there it was, done. The mad packing of boxes, the hyper-squirrel moments working out how best to get as many things a s possible into boxes and hiding places, and figuring out where it was all going to go in the new place. Done.

Yes, I’m all moved and sorted. In a particularly genius piece of planning I’m off out in an hour to celebrate a friends birthday. I can’t think of a better way to end a moving day – food and booze, and not having to wash it up afterwards.

Always the techie, the laptop is set up and working (No Shit, Sherlock) and the main PC is just about ready to go back into operation. For the moment I’m back on a 56K dial-up connection, although the ADSL is ordered and waiting on lead-times. The plants are out of their boxes and settling into new homes, the beds are re-assembled, although not yet made. The living room might as well be a shanty town, the number of boxes that are still in there, but at the same time the sofas are sorted, and the TV is in place. Tomorrow all the other bits and pieces, the Tivo, the video, the onDigital ITV Digital Freeview box, and the stereo will all be unboxed and set up. But all of it pales into insignificance (well, almost) in comparison to one simple fact – I’m no longer in the house that was burgled twice, broken into by the same little bastard.

The noise levels are different here – it’s a busier road, instead of a purely residential street. I don’t mind traffic noise, in fact I find it almost soothing, the constant influx of white noise, rather than the harsh instrusions of people, scrotty little sods on illegal scooters, and wheel-spinning teenage poseurs in their GTis. It’s a different place, and it feels good to be here – I’ve worked my bits off in the last month to get here, but it seems worthwhile. Already I can feel myself relaxing, settling.

Suddenly, the future seems a lot brighter than it did even a week ago.

Bet it doesn’t get displayed

Over at the inexecrably unpleasant and sycophantic Thank You, Tony, there’s a page for “send your thanks to Tony Blair”. In typical Lyle fashion, this is what has been sent :

Dear Tony,

Thanks for helping your best mate George to kill innocent people in the name of fighting a terrorist enemy in a completely different country.

Your efforts towards stopping the terrorism by getting rid of a dictator who was a thorn in your side, but keff all to do with the perpetrators of 9/11 makes you deserving of many, many awards. Some of the acronyms might even be printable. I would like to personally put you forward for the Congressional Uninational Nominated Treasure award. I’ll let you work out what letters that’d mean you can put after your name.
Sincerely
Lyle

Any money it doesn’t get added to the list – but if it does, you can be sure I’ll tell all. *Grin*

Twunt

Over at Scaryduck, the merchandising bug has hit. Scaryduck mugs are being considered, with a design similar to this:

(Click on the image for a full-size rendition)

I think that every workplace should be introduced to the word Twunt, and as such I’ve also knocked up a simpler, more minimalist design for scary to consider.

If you’re wanting to order them, or even just like the idea, head on over to Scary’s place, and let him know.

Ooops

Sometimes you just have to despair, don’t you? Following all the stories of the London Blackout last month, National Grid Transco has revealed what caused the power outage. Someone had replaced a 5amp fuse with a 1amp fuse – which then blew.

Admittedly, I’m quite intrigued as to what would a 5amp fuse would be used for in a fecking huge power supply main – but as I’m not an electrician, let alone someone who’d know about power supply mains, I suppose it’s not unfeasible that I wouldn’t have a clue.

Blogger Bits

Oooh – I bet that there’s a few Blogger Pro people who aren’t overly amused today. Blogger Pro ceased to exist yesterday, and most of the features are now available to us miserly Blogger users. I wonder how long it’ll be before there’s a small subscription charge for Blogger use?

Moose-Box

I know, I know, I said I wouldn’t post anything else about moving/packing. I lied. Actually, it’s only a small post, because I’d forgotten I’d taken a photo of the mooses (Meese? Moose?) in their packing box, and I found it again while sorting out other stuff last night. So here you go…

(The purple bits are candles, Anony hasn’t suddenly grown purple pop-eyes)

UPDATED : Following on from the comments below, I suppose it’s possible that some of the meese are actually reindeer. However, as there’s no genetic test to ascertain the parentage of fluffy toys, I’m going to stick with referring to them all as moose. For some reason “reindeer” just aren’t as cool/funny as moose/meese. So there.

The first post of the Festering Season

Regular readers will already know my general loathing of the Festering Season™, and in particular the way it’s now seemingly held hostage by retailers and materialists. Anyway, today’s Guardian has a story about the Crhistian advertising group. (and there was me thinking that Ad execs were strictly Satan’s property, along with lawyers and estate agents) You may recall their other effort, portraying Jesus in a similar pose to Che Guevara.

Well, this year they’ve gone one better, and instead have come up with a portrayal of the birth of Jesus, with the baby dressed up as Santa. (A larger version of the ad on it’s own can be seen here Will it be successful? I have no idea – but anything that puts the idea forward that Christmas isn’t all about materialism can’t be all bad.

I am so proud

I’ve just been looking at search referrals (and no, I haven’t mentioned anything about them for a while now – I’ll do a bigger selection soon, promise) and it turns out I’m now #1 in Google for “kenny everett bomb the bastards“.

*proud – sad, but proud*

Techie humour

Today’s User Friendly sums up the techie attitude to so many of life’s essentials. Practical. *Grin*

Pub(l)ic Transport

I have to say, I really don’t find the news that nearly a third of all motorists wouldn’t give up their car and use public transport instead to be all that surprising. Nor do I find it surprising that 1 in 10 drivers have no idea how they’d even use public transport – i.e. what bus route they’d need, that kind of thing. I’m actually far more surprised that the figures weren’t higher.

What organisations like TravelWise (who are organising TravelWise week, a project to get people out of their cars and onto public transport) always forget – and so do the Government when they release all the plans and so on to get more people onto public transport – is that public transport is a pain in the arse. And bear in mind, I use it every day, so I know all too well.

First of all, most people are fucking lazy. It’s easier to “leave the house, get into a car, drive to work, get out in the works car park, and be at work”. Public transport involves “leave the house, walk to the bus-stop/train-station, *wait*, travel, possibly *wait for next connection*, travel, get out, walk from nearest station/bus-stop to get to work” When the weather’s crap, it’s even worse. When it’s winter, it’s worse again. If public transport were to go door to door, people would use it. Possibly.

Second, it’s not reliable. Stuff all the garbage spouted about “investment in infrastructure” – make everything run on time. Not just the oft-maligned (and normally maligned by me, I admit) trains, but the bus system as well. My journey to work involves two bus journeys, and can take anything from 40 minutes to an hour and a half. It all depends on how the buses are running. Some days (as today) I get to the bus-stop and the bus is there. Other days I can get to the stop at the exact same time (or even earlier) and wait 20 minutes for one to appear. The second service is even worse, and the only thing I can guarantee about the “high frequency” service that runs “at least once ever ten minutes” will (probably) provide a bus within half an hour. If the services were reliable, and ran to their timetable, more people might use them.

Third, and perhaps crucially, public transport involves having to deal with other people. For a large number of people, the drive to work is really the only quiet time they get, the only real time to themselves. So why would they want to spend it in the company of yelling schoolkids, screaming babies, and – well – just people in general? I don’t think that one can be sorted out. Just look at the number of people who drive to work in their cars without no passengers, and you’ll see why.

So – is there hope for public transport as an alternative to cars? No, probably not. It’s an essential for those of us who (like me) don’t drive, but getting drivers onto public transport? I doubt it’ll happen, and definitely not in any significant numbers. It’s like smoking – the government can tax it, initiate toll roads and so on, but people will still drive to work. Simple as that.

Insurance

In my junk mail this morning I got a letter from Lloyds Bank’s home insurance people. They were offering me up to £100 if their quote couldn’t beat my current insurance premium. “Aye right”, thought I. And gave them a call.

For one third of the cover, the best that they could come up with was £700. At that point, they explained the small print – to get the £100 back, I’d have to sign up for their insurance first. Frankly, keff that – far more hassle than it’s worth, even neglecting the fact it’d be costing me more than twice as much. Pure comedy.

I hear you called back

The useless bugger called back – maybe he’s not so useless after all. Oh no, he’s telling me that Zero7 have postponed their tour from October this year to March 2004, due to “recording schedule problems”. With luck that means there’ll be a new album sometime in 2004 too. Still, it’s all OK, because the tickets will be valid for the new date anyway.

However he couldn’t provide me with any decent reasons for a) why he didn’t leave a message on the voice-mail and save himself a second call, and b) why it’s taken four weeks since the date was advertised as changing before they’ve started calling the people who’d bought tickets.

I hear you calling

Why is it that so many companies (and individuals, I should add) are completely fucking useless at leaving a message on an answerphone?

I had a call while in a meeting today – obviously couldn’t pick it up, but after four rings it goes automatically to the voice messaging anyway, so no worries. I’ve got Caller ID, so I can call them back, find out what’s going on. Only it turns out it’s the company I use for booking concert tickets, and they’ve feck all idea what anyone within the call-centre might have been calling to tell me. And I’ve no idea, because the gormless cunt couldn’t be bothered to leave a message. Frustrating, to say the least.

Red Sky at Night

I couldn’t resist it – had to take photos of the sky tonight, it was such a stunning colour.

  

And so it starts

Following on from the post below about DNA Testing, the Guardian also reveals that the Government has now announced that it wants to give children ID numbers from birth. (UPDATED : I’ve changed the link on the story (the old one is here if anyone cares) to a better piece by the Grauniad) Seems to me that it’s yet another way – admittedly a long-term plan, but still – to end up with everyone in the country given an identity number.

I wonder how they’ll end up making sure people (particularly children) keep their ID numbers. Tattooed barcodes at birth?

DNA Testing for all

Both the BBC and the Guardian have features on the story about every inhabitant of the UK potentially being required to give a DNA sample. In honesty, I’m not sure how I feel about this. The first reaction is a knee-jerk “No way do I want that” – there are lots of privacy issues to look at, for instance. But if I’m not going to be breaking any laws (by which I’m referring to ones where DNA would be left at the scene) then why would I worry?

I suppose that it’s the extrapolations that are the real concern – if there’s a record of every person’s DNA on record, what’s to stop analysis on that DNA, trying to find “genes of criminality” (for example) and then flagging up the new DNA records that contain those genes? Philip Kerr envisaged a similar scenario in his novel “A Philosophical Investigation“. What else could be done? Would it increase the capture rate for rapists, murderers and the like, or would it spawn a new criminal activity, messign with genetics and genetic records in order to obfuscate identities again?

My first reaction is that if such a scheme came into law, I’d probably leave the country. Not because I’ve anything to hide, but because I don’t like the idea of an omnipresent State, and I like even less the idea of politicians being in charge of such a scheme.

But then I also find myself looking at the potential benefits – the same thing, more murderers, rapists etc would be caught. Also, it would enable (in theory) more genetic research, looking for the genes that are related to cancer, birth defects of all types, and diseases such as Polio and other gene-based complaints. Of course, the flip-side of that is the concept (and I hesitate to use the word, after last time’s furore) of Eugenics, of controlling what type of child is born through genetic manipulation – a scheme which is much in keeping with the kind of totalitarian state that would encourage such a wholesale thing as a genetic database for all in the first place. Such a database would also mean that when bodies are found, beyond all recognition (and also in disaster scenarios) there would be a higher rate of identification.

So – good or bad? As with all things, both options are open. Personally, even with the extra thought, I think it would be a bad thing – the cons far outweight the pros.

That plant is proscribed

Ah, the joys of bureaucracy. Those pen-pushing self-justifying bean-counters lovely essential people at the DTI have now released a 2,000 word set of guidelines on office plants. In older offices, such as the one I currently work in, staff would be entitled to “one display of plants per 120 square metres of ‘useable floor space'”. Who the hell cares?

It also doesn’t seem to take into account things like Sick Building Syndrome, although as it says there is still a provision that

“Staff may continue to provide their own plants, providing they are maintained by their owners and disposed of in an environmentally friendly manner and not a) intrusive or b) a nuisance to others.”

I despair. Are we now really so nannified that we need guidelines on office plants? God help me if the DTI ever look at my “home office” set-up. There’s plants everywhere, and always will be.

Blind Spot

OK, I’m not going to let this turn into a diary on house moving. It’s tedious to read. Even I’ve lost the will to live on it. Suffice it to say that everything’s going on, and will keep on doing so for the rest of this week. And that’s all I’ll (probably) say on the subject now until Friday, at which point a “woo-hoo – new home!” post is to be expected.

Packing – Day 2

Considering how much stuff I thought I’d got, it’s going into a worryingly small number of boxes. Then again, I know I can pack like a professional, so each box is probably pretty much at it’s capacity limit. When d4d’s letting me upload stuff to it again (God knows what’s going on there, but it’s been playing silly knackers all day) I’ll shove up some photos to display the packing levels.

Right now I’m just hoping I haven’t forgotten that someone/anyone’s coming round this week. I think I’m fairly safe on that one – but if anyone does, they’ll have to live with the state of the place – and the fact that all the glassware is now packed, plus half the kitchen. All the mooses (moose?) are in a box too, and the place is beginning to look a bit empty. The fact is, most of the stuff I own is furniture rather than ornamental, so the place will only look really empty once all that’s gone too. The kitchen’s the biggest victim currently on the “looking a lot barer than it did this morning” stakes, as most of the smaller bits of kitchen stuff are also now ensconced in boxes.

Upgrades

Note to self : Hoovering up shards of glass with a hoover that needs a bag is not a good idea. I’ve had to buy a new one, because from the look of it the glass shards whacked straight through the bag and into the fiulter/motor of the hoover. Ooops. From the grinding noise it now makes, and the fact it’s got less suction than an exceptionally non-sucky thing, I’m working on the assumption that it’s knackered.

So there’s a new hoover, and this time it’s bagless. We’ll see what I can do to knacker it…

Preparation

I suspect there might not be a lot of updates this weekend. First of all, Blogger‘s been down all day – piece of shite. Second I’ve been packing – horrendously productive, all the books, CDs, Videos and software stuff is now packed. The removals company dropped off the boxes, packing tape and paper last night – 50 boxes, all told. Still loads to do, but a significant dent in the workload has been made.

At some point this weekend, I’ll also be setting up the new wireless network. I’ve got the router and the laptop card, but the PCI card for the main PC won’t arrive ’til Wednesday (piece of shit places with no stock). So all things considered, I may just be pretty busy…

Extortion – Part 2

Further to the comments earlier this week about Manchester Glass, having checked my bank account online, the cheque cleared today. So that episode is all done, and the point is well made. Now, I wonder if I can cancel the cheque, as it was made out to Extortionists?

It’s also a very handy Googlewhack with only the one answer for that particular search. Now, I wonder how I can build it up to be higher in the normal search?

CO₂ disposal

According to the Guardian, UK MPs are considering a plan to deposit CO₂ (Carbon Dioxide) in what amount to a big cave in the North Sea. Considering that CO₂ is the gas used to make sparkling mineral water sparkle, does that mean we’ll soon be getting Bottled North Sea™, or will it add a different meaning to “North Sea Gas”?

It’s not April 1st, is it?

Security – American Style

Luckily, it’s not just the Aussies who are having problems. Over in South Korea, it’s been discovered that some enterprising naughty people dug a 20metre (66 feet, for those of an imperial persuasion) tunnel into a US base in order to steal beer and wine. To me, that’s brilliant – the world’s superpower can’t even detect a tunnel going into the base – let alone the £1.2million of beer and wine that got stolen. No fucking about, they reckon that they lost 58,000 crates of beer, and 4,000 boxes of wine. You’d have thought someone would notice, wouldn’t you?

Security – Australian Style

It must be hugely embarassing for all involved, but I’ve had to laugh at the story of the Australian security services having had two mainframe computers stolen from their main office. Apparently, the thieves just walked in, provided false signatures and addresses, and walked out with the computers on trolleys – straight past the security desk.

It’s what I’ve always said – if you look like you fit in, no-one will stop you.

For sale: 8 years work

While helping to confirm the theory that the UK has more than it’s fair share of eccentrics, the story today of the man selling his house complete with model railway in the back garden is quite impressive. 600ft of track, tunnels, platforms and sidings – all in the back garden of a normal domestic house. Quite mad, and so very eccentrically British. *Grin*

Geekery

As Peter has pointed out today, those nice people at Blogger have been twonking about again. However, whatever they’ve done has also fixed the problem I blethered about last week, and Blogger now works happily with Mozilla Firebird again. So yes, I’m a happy camper – returning to IE to write d4d™ was a traumatic experience (No tabbed browsing? No geeky toolbars for checking the code? Aaargh, the speed tortoise-like rendering of pages!) that I’m happy to lose again.

In other doses of geekyness, Neil Gaiman and DC Comics have released “Endless Nights“, the first new Sandman material for seven years. While I’ve kind of stopped reading comics again (or graphic novels, if you prefer), I’ll make an effort to get hold of these. The Sandman stuff has always been stunning and thought provoking, so I’m interested to know what Gaiman’s come up with this time…

Battle Cry

If I’d known this earlier, I’d have used it while speaking (and, more amazingly, holding in the temptation to say “For fuck’s sake! Your website’s shite, I’ve got to fucking call you up now to do something that should take 30 seconds online, and you’re insisting on making me hold this call while you type my details into a fucking computer – slowly – and tell me every so often ‘this won’t take a moment’. You’re fucking right, it’s not taking a moment, I’ve been on the bloody phone for ten minutes already – is there any point to this, or are you just an incompetent fucktard with the IQ of a wart?“)

Striding amidst the candy store, carrying a reflective halberd, cometh Lyle! And he gives a mighty scream:

“Blood and souls for my dark lord! I shall paint the town a sanguine shade of doom!”

(The table stuff utterly fucked up on a CSS based page like this, so the link for the battle-cry generator is Here. Enjoy)

Surely some mistake

Looking through the last ten visitors to d4d, the following appears…

I think someone should tell them about the spelling mistake, don’t you? (Of course, there’s also that nagging thing of “Scottish Council? Looking here?”)

Googlism

BT called back – and near enough on-time for it to be a bit of a shock. The move of phone number to the new place is now sorted, although (as expected) ADSL is going to be a total bastard, and there’ll be a break in service. Oh goody – dial-up. <sarcasm>Woo-hoo, just what I wanted.</sarcasm>

Anyway, in the meantime, some definitions of Lyle, thanks to Googlism.

Online Services

There are times where I just want to scream. While preparing for the move next week, I wanted to get a couple of things sorted out with two companies, BT and United Utilities, my lovely incompetent provider of water.

BT, in all their ineffable wisdom, have a service for sorting out getting ADSL installed. I already have ADSL at the current address, but will want it to be installed at the new place, and ideally don’t want to spend a month pissing about with waiting to get it done. When I try organising it online, I have to enter the phone number I want the service to be on, and the system says “you’ve already got it”. It doesn’t even give me a chance to go through wanting it at a new address. I’m now waiting for them to give me a call back, and deal with it that way. I’m not holding out much hope…

United Utilities have the supposedly helpful idea of a “moving house?” form, so that (and I quote) “f you have just moved into a new address or are about to do so, please fill in this form”. Only when you enter a moving date in the future, it responds with “Please enter a valid date of occupancy“. So – that’s fucking useless too, and ensues another bastard phone call.

Online Services like these are supposed to be a) simple, b) useful, and c) convenient. So why are they none of these things, and instead just frustrating, unhelpful, and ultimately apparently designed to piss people off?

Moving

Well, I’m now sorted and booked to move on the 12th Sept. The removal company is going to cost me £300, which strikes me as pretty good – but then, I’ve never used a removals company before. So – what are other people’s feelings about it? Is it a reasonable amount, or am I being ripped off?

UPDATED : I should point out that this isn’t a long-distance move – although it is the full contents of a two-bedroom house.

Brought by the letter “V”

The BBC has a piece that (I suspect) Green Fairy will be frothing about later. It’s explaining how Sesame Street is being used to promote “American values” to other countries – God help us.

One revelation that I didn’t know is that the US Army actually part sponsors the makers of Sesame Street, Childrens Television Workshop – who needs conspiracy theories when reality contains gems like that?

Abduction

There seems to be a theme developing in the media at the moment – and again it’s based around The Paedophile Menace. (with apologies to George Lucas) Today’s Grauniad is reporting that David Milner has been in court charged with “abducting” the 14 year old Stacey Champ. (The BBC’s reportage of the court appearance is here.) Following on from all the gubbins about Shevaun Pennington and the ex-marine Toby Studebaker who has also recently appeared in court on the same charge.

To my knowledge, in neither of these cases were the girls actually abducted – to all appearances they were both willing partners to that extent, and neither have seemed to be exactly traumatised by the entire chain of events. The Pennington girl took her passport with her to meet Studebaker – hardly the act of someone who’s been abducted. She knew she was planning to travel – so how is it “abduction”? In the Guardian’s article about the discovery/capture of Milner and Champ, a witness says

“They looked quite shocked. As soon as he got taken out of the car she became very upset and was crying. He wasn’t upset or angry, he seemed resigned to being caught,” he added.”

The same article reports that

Stacey was “giggling” and seemed “quite lovestruck”, she said.

– again, hardly the actions of someone who’s been abducted and is supposedly in danger.

Maybe it’s just me, but I find the charge of “abduction” in relation to either of these cases to be a difficult one to swallow. Yes, perhaps the girls have both been stupid – if that were a crimnal offence, 80% of the UK population would be in jail – but they’ve not been kidnapped and forced to do anything. (Proviso – it hasn’t been reported that they were forced to travel) But at the moment it seems that “abduction” is the only offence they can try and prove – and I wonder what will happen if the cases get kicked out of court. For one thing it’s going to be exceptionally difficult to find a jury of twelve people who haven’t heard about these stories…

Fiscally Unsound

I wish I could say that the story about a quarter of people with a credit-card or loan have no real idea of the amount they owe shocked me, or even surprised me, but it doesn’t. There’s a combination of things on this one – and one is “what was the question that was asked to get this answer?“. For example, I probably wouldn’t know the exact amount I still had left to repay – but I’d know it started off at (for example) £5,000 and was steadily coming down.

The figure I do find scary is that one in five people (20%) have to borrow money to cover their general household bills. I know that some of the blame for this kind of debt-laden society can eb laid at the door of credit-cards and loan companies who always push credit/debt as a lifestyle choice, and some can be laid at the door of an education system that still teaches absolutely nothing about APRs, interest rates, or how to manage finances. But there’s also an awfully large amount of the blame that can be laid directly at the door of the borrowers themselves – the people who don’t understand what they’re paying, who really don’t even have a comprehension that all this credit has to be paid back, and who can’t even balance their incomings against their outgoings.

I’m no angel on this score – I’ve been deeply in debt myself, but am now out of it. I’ve got one outstanding debt of just over £1000, but other than that, I’m currently debt-free, and actually in credit at the bank. (Oh no, I lie – I’m in the overdraft at the moment, because of the shedload I had to shell out on Friday for a months rent plus a month’s rent as deposit on the new house) I don’t have any intentions of going back into the debt cycle – it’s too much hassle, for one thing – although at some point next year I’m also going to be shoving myself into the joys of heavy debt via a mortgage. But the basic idea is to keep myself in credit now, if I can possibly manage it. I don’t want to be part of the majority, one of the people who think it’s an easy life to be in debt all the time.

Armageddon Outta Here

According to both the Grauniad (here) and the BBC (here) are reporting a story of a potential asteroid impact on Earth in 2014. The odds are still listed as 1 in 909,000 – it’s lucky that it’s only 909,000 because as everyone knows, one in a million chances happen nine times out of ten.

A Question

Is it just me who wonders what it would sound like to kick a bagpipe player right in the plums while he’s busy (pardon the phrase) strangling his instrument? I find myself thinking about this every time I go past the scunner in central Manchester.

Club Reps

I seem to recall saying this a while back, so it’s hardly a shock to see that TV is being blamed for a lot of the yobs going off to Faliraki on holidays. The TV Comapny has responded by saying

“Club Reps is a documentary series and as such its content has been wholly factual.

The programme-makers filmed what they saw, and the programmes that were broadcast were simply a reflection of what was already commonplace in the resort.”

So of course they’re not responsible for advertising the place as a destination for those who want to go off and get pissed, fight, fuck, and think that makes a great holiday.

Extortion

Lyle’s Amazing Facts #1 – the first in an occasional series

Maybe I’m naïve, but did you know that if your house is broken into and the police call out a boarding-up service (no matter how shonky the service) then you’re financially responsible for the fees from that service? I didn’t.

After the break-in a month ago, the police called out a bunch of cowboys called Manchester Glass, who boarded up the broken window.
Materials – a sheet of chipboard, and eight screws (at least two of which didn’t even bite into the wood of the windowframe)
Cost to me? £70.50. Bearing in mind that the new window cost me only £50, I reckon that’s a bit of a piss-take, particularly considering that I didn’t even request the service.

Over the weekend, I got a snotty letter from Manchester Glass, saying that if I didn’t pay the amount, they’d take me to County Court. (Quite how they’d manage this without even knowing my name is a seperate question) I spoke to an exceptionally officious member of their staff today, enquiring how I can be financially responsible for a service I didn’t request, and whether a County Court would accept this as a reason for not paying. The answers, in order, were

“You’ll have to talk to the police about that, I wouldn’t know”
and
“we’ve been to court on lots of occasions, and we’ve never lost a case yet”

In the causes of an easy life, and because I can’t be arsed with the stress, I’ve sent them a cheque – recorded delivery – today. Perfectly legal – it’s got a payee in the correct name and everything. Whether they cash it or not is an entirely different matter – it’s made out to “The Extortionists at Manchester Glass“.

Biometrics

On the BBC, there’s a story about how scientists have created a way for computers to detect the way you use your mouse to “sign” your signature, and use it as a method of online ID verification. Already I can spot a couple of potential problems with it – for example, what if a person is using a laptop, with either the touchpad or the “nipple” touchpoint instead of a “proper” mouse? What if (like me on occasion) they use a trackball?

I’m always interested in biometrics, and how they can be used to verify identity and so on, but more and more I find myself believing they should be used as an extra layer of confirmation, rather than an absolute form of identification. Fingerprints are uniquely identifiable, so is DNA (and once we get round to a security system that can sample one’s DNA from skin cells then we’ll be into a whole different world of security, identity theft, and the like), but I’m pretty certain that the way I use a mouse isn’t unique. Maybe I’m wrong – but I’d have to see some pretty conclusive proof before I believed it.

I may cry

It’s been productive again – out of the 20 items I’ve got on the list of people who need to know I’m changing address, and things that need doing (mail redirection etc.), I’ve now got four left to sort out. All of the remaining ones are items that can’t be crossed off until I’ve sorted an exact moving date, so there’s keff all I can do with them until I’ve seen the removals people. I’m talking to most of those tomorrow, getting some quotes ASAP. I must be barmy…

Cornwall photos

Ooops, knew there was something I’d forgotten to do, what with everything else that was going on this week. I’d forgotten to post the photos from the weekend in Cornwall, and particularly the Lost Gardens of Heligan. So enjoy. I knew I’d remember to do them in the end…

Sunday shopping

There’s an expression that seems to work very well when surrounded by screaming brats on a Sunday in the middle of Tesco. That expression is

“If you don’t house-train your hellspawn, I’ll train them for you”

Bureaucracy

Ye Gods, I’d forgotten the amount of paperwork involved in changing addresses. I’ve made a list, and it’s got about fifteen different things on it just for changing details. Nightmare. Still, in a pretty productive day I’ve managed to change address details at the bank, the (lovely lovely) insurance people, the two book clubs I belong to, Companies House (for the two limited companies I’m director of, as well as moving the registered office of the main one to my new address), and effing Britannia – who I’d love to abandon, but they’re like Reader’s Digest, and just keep coming after you. In addition, I’ve spoken to two removals companies, and they’ll be giving me quotes early next week.

Two more gigs

The rest of the year is beginning to look like Concert Central now. I’ve just also managed to get tickets to see Good Charlotte and Evanescence later this year. Currently, it’s now looking like I’ll have been able to get out of every single “family” Festering Season™ type thing in December, as I’ve got a concert every weekend ’til Christmas.

Not that it was planned like that – honest. *Ahem*

Pros and cons

Well, I now have the keys to the new house, which is a major step in the right direction. I’m happy to be sorted – or at least on the way there. Now comes all the gubbins of changing address on everything known to man – and I know I’ll forget a couple of things, so I’m also setting up mail redirections. I love the “belt and braces” approach to this sort of stuff.

On the plus side, I’ve spoken to my (increasingly lovely) insurance company, told them I’m moving, and because of the change in postcode, the premiums have now halved. Blinkin’ flip, said I.

On the negative side, I’ve discovered that I have absolutely NO idea who recently became my supplier of gas and electricity. I need to find out, so I can move the account – but I’ve less than no clue who I swapped to. It used to be TXU Energy, now Powergen, but they can’t/won’t tell me who I changed to either. Fuckers.

UPDATED : Ah – found out – it’s British Gas who supply both gas and electric. I love ringing up and looking like a tit by saying “Do I have an account with you?“. *Grin*

Weasel-boy has left the building

I know it’s schadenfreude at it’s best, but I have to admit that the news that Alastair Campbell has announced his resignation from No. 10 has put a real smile on my face. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer sleazebag…

Concerts (and link-fest)

I don’t know what hit me yesterday (other than the nagging feeling that I really hadn’t sorted out much stuff to do over the next few months) but a quick trip to the ticket office soon had me sorted out again. So I now have tickets to see (in no particular order) :

• Skin (ex-singer from Skunk Anansie)
• Kosheen
• Michael Franti & Spearhead
• Linkin Park

and

• The Levellers

I’m sure there will be others that get bought as the year goes on, but it’s already looking like another fairly busy few months.

BBC

Over at The Register, there’s a piece about BBC Online, and the recent media hype about whether the Tories want to shut down the BBC News site. It makes for interesting reading – and has some facts I didn’t know at all, both regarding the way the BBC works and is financed, and also some statistics about the news site. 660 million page impressions per month – now that’s what I call a success story.

And they’re off (again)

Amazingly, the infamous Naked Rambler has been arrested again – and this time he’s going to court.

I’m sure there are other people who’ll know far more on the subject, but doesn’t Scotland have some wonderful laws? Naked Rambler is being accused of “being obsessive and self-indulgent” in his pursuit of the right to walk bollock-naked from Land’s End to John O’ Groats. In a different (and far nastier) story of a mother who simply dumped her murdered daughter’s body in a canal, the charge is “attempting to defeat the ends of justice“.

The latter story, I must admit, leaves me cold – she’d seen her partner kill her daughter, having beaten her up and thrown her down the stairs. She then helped her partner put the body in a weighted suitcase, and thrown it in the canal. She’s already pleased guilty to her charge, and the story is in relation to the reports on her before sentencing.

Missed Appointment

In the news today, it’s been saying that GP’s support ‘fines’ for people who miss appointments. Personally, I can’t believe it’s taken this long to happen – there are so many people who seem to book appointments then just not bother turning up because they feel better or whatever, and it’s just a complete waste of time for all involved.

I’ve never understood the attitude though – so far as I’m concerned, if I’m going to the doctors, it’s for something important. Otherwise I tend to avoid them at all costs. But I wouldn’t make appointments then simply not turn up. I hope that the fines do get introduced – but at the same time I wonder how many surgery receptionists will end up taking more flak from stroppy arseholes who miss appointments and don’t see why they should pay for the privilege of missing them.

UPDATED : Following Gert’s point in the comments box, I realise I did miss a point – as she says, there are people who make appointments for whom chaos and unpredictability are part of the issues which they’re seeking medical help for. I should have said that the fines should be introduced for either persistent missers of appointments, or perhaps if there’s no valid excuse. Yes, if someone’s suffering from depression, addiction, or similar, then appointments would be understandably missed. And then there’d be the accusations of “two-tier systems” and so on. Hmmm…

Postcodes

Finally, I get to do all the stuff with signing tenancy agreements and so on tomorrow. It’s taken long enough to happen, and I’ve gone through more hoops than the average circus pony, but it’s finally getting confirmed and signed for. I need to go to the head office for the letting agents in order to sign everything and hand over a wad of cash – so I try finding their postcode in order to look on MultiMap or wherever in order to know where the feck I’m going.

“And what’s your postcode, so I can find you on an online map?“
(mumbled) “*blah* 2DF“
“That’s 2 D-for-Dog F-for-Foxtrot, yeah?“
“Yeah“

But of course it’s not – it’s 2DS, as I found out after looking at four other sites in order to get the right postcode. Oh, and Royal Mail, your postcode finder’s shit.

It just goes on and on

Following on from the *cough* cheating case regarding “Who Wants to be a Millionaire”, the BBC’s today reporting that Tecwen *cough* Whittock has patented his name in order to stop a company using Tecwen as a brand for cough-medicine. Maybe I’m wrong, but I didn’t think you could patent a name – surely it’s a trademark?

Of course, it wouldn’t be the first time our Tecwen has got his basic facts wrong – the Patent Office’s “newcomer’s guide” might help him out here. Assuming I’ve answered the questions correctly, it certainly looks like it’s a Trade Mark™ that he should have got. Pillock.

Filing

As stated below, I wanted to get the album by Martina Topley-Bird today, an album by the name of Quixotic. Now, note Martina’s double-barrelled name.

Into HMV to look for the album. Look under “T” for Topley-Bird. Nothing. Realise that HMV are cretins, and look under “M” for Martina. Nothing. Decide that maybe it’s not listed under “Pop” (christ only knows why), look in “Urban” (which appears to be the new name for “Rap”) under “T” and “M”. Nothing. Look in “Dance” – again, nothing under “T” or “M”. Inspiration (and cynicism about the intelligence of HMV Staff) strikes – ah, here it is : under “B” for Bird. *Sigh*

Synopsis of a weekend

Utterly manic, yet somehow quite relaxed at the same time. The weekend went (roughly) thus:

• Friday 5pm – Manchester to Reading by train.
• Friday 11pm – Reading to Penzance by car
• Saturday 4am-ish – Arrival in Penzance.
• Saturday – Lands End *shudder*, Minack theatre, back to Penzance and some shopping (including another bloody phone charger!), and a meal in Penzance in the evening.
• Sunday – Lost Gardens of Heligan, back to Penzance, wander around, and meal in the evening with work colleagues of friends.
• Monday 10am – Penzance to Bristol by car
• Monday 1pm – Arrival in Bristol
• Monday 2pm – 11pm – Open Air Concert, see below
• Monday 11pm-ish – Bristol to Reading by car
• Tuesday 1am-ish – Arrival in Reading
• Tuesday 10am – Reading to Manchester by train

All told, about 1,000 miles of travel over four days. Not bad at all.

Arse

After all my banging on about Firebird being able to render Blogger properly, something’s changed on Blogger which now means it looks like shit in Firebird. Fuck it.

Home again

Finally, I’m home. 1,000 miles travelled, minimal levels of sleep, and The World’s Most Uncomfortable Futons™, and a bloody good concert, as well as some gorgeous scenery and so on. But for now, mental collapse is imminent. More later.

Flying tonight

In many ways it’s quite amazing about the blind guy who’s flown across the English Channel in a microlight, and Im impressed that it’s been done, the phrase that keeps coming into my head is of him saying “are we nearly there yet?“

Eeek

Bloody hell – that’s quite a list of places to brand. I’ll need some thinking time – and time to do some research on the buggers – so bear with me. Besides, it’s too nice here to bother with things like work. So sod it – it’ll give me something to do at work…

In other news, there’s a new rant (warning, it’s train-based) sitting over here for your delectation. It’s been a while since a decent one got written, and there’ll likely be another couple of non-train-based ones written on the way home too. As well as photos and the like from the weekend. You lucky people…

Heligan

Yes, the Lost Gardens of Heligan. Absolutely fantastic – I’d never been before, and it’s wonderful. Of course, if it had rained I’d probably not have appreicated it quite so much – but it’s blazingly hot, so all’s well. If I’m not careful I’m going to be a very brown person by the end of tomorrow. No day is wasted…

There will be photos of this little expedition once I get home – but there’s still Massive Attack tomorrow in Bristol to go, so don’t hold your breath.

Lands End

Well, a visit to Lands End – never been before, won’t ever go again. Nice rock formations and so on, but other than that it’s just tourist ripoff central. Vile. Ah well. On the way back, we dropped in on the Minack theatre – an amphitheatre carved into the cliffside. Absolutely wonderful.

There were a bunch rehearsing for the next play to be held there, so we got to watch that too, and all in all it was a thoroughly enjoyable afternoon. Photos will follow when I get home and sorted out.

4am Saturday

Penzance at last. It’s been foggy for the last hour of the journey through Cornwall. I’ve been travelling since 5pm -with a couple of hours in Reading in the middle, but all the same. “Cream-crackered” is not the word. “Fucked” might be.

So here we are, in the last town in England. (or, to paraphrase Blue Juice, “Penzance ain’t the last town in England, boy, it’s the first”) God knows what the rest of the weekend holds. Goodnight.

The d4d™ branding studio

Following on from the Brum Brand, Lori suggests I should do some for other places. She’s come up with a pretty respectable list – but the next stage is this :

Which places do you want to see branded? You give me the names, and I’ll see what I can come up with.

Hallelujah

Finally, I’ve had confirmation through the letting agents that I’ve got the tenancy on the new place – the one I saw and applied for about a month ago. All of the delay has been because of the credit-checking people, who decided (as is their wont) to be complete paper-pushing bureaucratic fuckheads, and make life as awkward as possible. In the end I had to meet up with the actual landlord, talk to him so he could decide whether I was OK or not (and God help him, he decided I was!) and go from there rather than keeping on waiting for the paper-pushers to shove up the next hurdle.

So I sign the paperwork next week, and then it’ll be hey ho, off to new place I go. Along with all the places where I’ve got to change my address details, sort out moving/installing ADSL, deal with business gubbins and so on – that’ll be fun.

Unsearchable 80’s

Following on from a post at Jannism about the 80’s band “The The”, I had a quick footle round Amazon, and found that relatively recently an album featuring a compilation of singles by The The had been released. And so I bought it – not through Amazon – and ripped it last night. I’ve got it on the MP3 player now, and all I can say is “Yay”.

It’s a real joy – I used to have the albums on cassette, and got Mind Bomb on CD too, as it’s probably my favourite, but now I think I need to get the rest of them again. Sad, but true – I’d forgotten just how much I love the lyrics, the music, and Matt Johnson’s voice in general. There’s an official site for The The, including some samples from the singles album. I’d recommend it whole-heartedly.

The only problem though, is the band’s name. Try using Amazon’s search facility for “the the” and it can’t find anything – you have to know the name of the albums. *Grin*

Presentations

Over on Dearie Me, Pogo has been speculating about the corporate presentation he missed through illness. *WARNING* Do not read this link if you’re eating or drinking anything.

I was eating breakfast while reading it, and now have pieces of cornflake trapped in my nasal passage. Thankfully, Pogo knows he’s a bastard, but I should learn not to eat and read at the same time.

Branding Birmingham

Over at The Register, they’re talking about the new brand for Birmingham. It’s shockingly unimaginative, so far as I can see, but I’m not a “creative”. Instead, I had a play with a different kind of “concept” to come up with an identity for Brum, and this is the result. I may do some more work on it, but for me it pretty much sums up the city centre anyway.

At any rate, it’s better than some shonky lower-case B with the name of the city inside it – although at least it’s slightly less ephemeral than some of the logos of late…

Shoes revisited

Thankfully, my parents don’t read d4d™. They know it exists (kind of – I’ve told them about it, anyway) but they’ve never been given the complete URL. Maybe they do visit, and simply keep quiet on it. I don’t know.

Anyway, I sent my father the photo of the mismatched shoes from the other day, and his sole comment was :

“That’s funny, I bet you had another pair exactly the same at home”

*Sigh*

No, I said take off his spectacles

Even though it’s decidedly black humour, I love the tale on the BBC today of the Brazilian man with earache who ended up with a vasectomy. Because of his muffled hearing, he misheard the name being called for the Snip, and didn’t say a word while they prepared an area entirely unrelated to the ears…

Speaking later (in a high-pitched voice, one assumes) he said “I just assumed that the infection had spread”. Pure class.

The fat lady sings

Over at Fuddland, dvd has been observing how many companies don’t make their websites viewable in all browsers. It’s something I’ve banged on about previously, and will almost certainly do so again. Live with it.

Out of choice, my main browsers are Opera and Mozilla’s Firebird. For the most part, they’re pretty interchangeable – both have tabbed browsing, seem to be very quick to render web pages and so on, and comply with pretty much all the standards that are thrown at them, which is more than can be said for some browsers. *cough*IE*cough* (Oh, and on a tangent from *cough*, it’s the cheating coughing Major’s last day in the army today)

Firebird has it’s uses in some areas though – this post is being written on Firebird, which still appears to be the only other browser to give me a decent screen size for typing stuff into Blogger (and also the little buttons for links and text formatting) – Opera still throws a wobbly of epic proportions.

Actually, IE only now gets used for two things – testing to make sure everything I do works on IE as well, and for internet banking. My infamously shonky bank will only use IE or Nutscrape Netscape, and they won’t let me use any of the decent versions of Nutscrape, preferring instead the “security” of a browser with more security holes than a sieve.

I’m 101, you know!

According to the BBC, there’s now a new longest lived member of the Royal Family. What I find odd is that I didn’t actually know anything about her, and even the name doesn’t ring any bells. So – is it just me that’s been out of touch?

Holiday Crackdown

I must admit, I’m not surprised that after last week’s incident with a man on Faliraki getting stabbed to death the Greek police are cracking down hugely on pissed fuckheads British holidaymakers. The only thing that surprises me is that this didn’t all happen a couple of years ago. Since the incident, they’ve arrested a woman with her tits out (classy), holiday reps organising yet more drinking sprees and some twat who decided to show his arse to the world. The holiday companies are supposed to be having a summit to sort out what can be done to curb the excesses of the holidaying chuffwits (update : it’s been postponed) and quite honestly the first thing I’d say is to stop doing “documentaries” on how great it is to go to the island for a week/fortnight of excess.

At the end of the day, the tour companies are reaping what they’ve sown – the “documentaries” have been nothing more than advertising puff pieces for the holiday companies, and it’s been a media-fuelled frenzy. I’m sure that the holiday companies pissed themselves laughing to know that ITV and SkyOne would pay them to advertise their holidays for 10 hours of TV every summer – it must have been like a gift from the gods. But now we’re in a position where the morons holidaymakers think it’s what they have to do if they go to Faliraki – maybe it is, I don’t know. As holidays, they appeal to me about as much as syphilis.

Is there anything that can be done to stop the excesses? No, I don’t think so – the most that can be done is to stop using Faliraki as a destination, but then the excesses will just go somewhere else, the same as they did with Ibiza and Ayia Napa before. And there’ll be new TV shows to tell them where to go – the cycle will begin again.

Missing

LOST
A complete set of IQ points, approximately 150 all-told. Owner very worried about them – they’re not used to being out on their own. If found, please return them to Lyle, c/o D4D™

Should’ve stayed in bed

Have you ever noticed that there are some days that can be described as “Oh, it’s been one of those…”? Here on Lyle-world, today is one of them. It started off badly, when my body finally decided to get some proper sleep. After the alarm had gone off. Forty-Five minutes later, waking up was accompanied with the phrase “Oh fuck!” – it was like the start of Four Weddings and a Funeral.

It’s only now, four hours later, that I’ve realised a couple of things.
1. My shirt has been buttoned incorrectly. All morning – including the commute to work on two buses.
2. I then look further down, and discover that not only am I wearing mis-matched socks, I’m also wearing mis-matched shoes. They’re not even the same colour, or style. One’s a black slip-on thing, the other’s a blue trainer.
3. Basically, I look like the sort of person people cross the road to avoid. So that’s a plus point.

When I get home, I’ll take a picture of the shoes. My self-pride is shot away today, so I may as well have evidence of it being a truly shonky day. In fact, one of those days…

Time flies

Looking at the BBC’s “On this day in history” page, I hadn’t realised that it’s now 16 years today since the shootings in Hungerford. It’s also 12 years since Mikhail Gorbachev was ousted. Isn’t it scary, the way time just disappears?

They’re back

Many happy returns (and pardon the pun) to Sarah at NYTOO and Anna at Little Red Boat after breaks that have felt too very flippin’ long indeed.

Doctor Acronyms

There’s a wonderful piece on the BBC about the acronyms doctors use to describe patients. Maybe I’m just sleep-deprived, but the DBI (Dirt Bag Index) certainly made me laugh. Take the number of tattoos, multiply by number of teeth missing, and get a rough indication of how many days since the patient last washed. Other joys are “handbag positive” and “pumpkin positive” – you’ll have to read the article to find out the definitions…

Shattered – revisited

Yes, the weekend was great. I’m still knackered, having had a lousy night as well, so my grand total of hours asleep since 6am Friday morning comes to… Six. At most. Needless to say, I feel lousy and caffeine of industrial levels is being inflicted on my body.

The absolute killer of yesterday was – of course – the trains. On Sundays, the service between Nottingham and Manchester is – theoretically at least – an hourly one. Fair enough, that’s not too bad, and is in general fairly acceptable. What isn’t acceptable is having two trains cancelled, with no reasons given, so that some poor bastards had been waiting in the station since half past four for the train that finally left at half seven. (On this one, I’ll note that I’d only missed the half-six train, and reports of earlier ones being cancelled was reportage from other travellers)

So of course it was utterly rigid for most of the journey. It’s times like that when a little MP3 player is an absolute god-send.

Shattered

Note to self : when out for a weekend with friends, getting three hours sleep in three days is not a good idea. In fact, it leaves one unable to type anything of consequence. So I’ll write more tomorrow…

Routine, part 2

Another facet of routine (in my current workplace anyway) is the locks on the external doors. They all have a keypad and a number code – until recently, the code for them was based on a formula so it was easily memorable. For example one was 3618 ( 3 x 6 = 18 ) – but in the last week they’ve changed, and no longer run to this kind of formula.

It’s caused real hassle – people just don’t seem to be able to remember the new code. I’ve seen so many of them with it written down or having to keep on talking to their colleagues about it (including while they’re outside tyring to type it in) and so on. Utterly farcical. And is it a difficult number to remember? Hell no. It’s along similar lines to remembering 9876 (obviously it’s not that, but it’s equally easy to memorise).

Now, I acknowledge that I’m a techie, and thus possibly more disposed to remembering PIN numbers etc., but surely remembering a new code isn’t that difficult? I realise I’m probably a rairty in that I’ve got different PIN numbers for everything, and also tend to remember my customer nuumbers, Internet banking log-ins, passwords, and all manner of other gubbins, but is it really all that hard to just remember a new four-digit number? And what do these people do when they get a new bank ATM card or whatever, and have to memorise a new PIN? Oh yeah, they write it down in their diary or wherever. *Sigh*

Death where is thy sting?

As my father used to say, “Life has a way of letting you know when your time is up“. Being crushed by a car falling on you while sunbathing isn’t just “time’s up”, but also forms a pretty good indication that St. Peter is going to be pissing himself laughing when you get to the Pearly Gates.

Word “HTML”

Argh. God preserve me from fucking idiots who insist on using MS Word to produce HTML. Contrary to their belief, it does NOT make my life easier. There is a major set of differences (not least being file-size and readability) between the Word example of

<p class=MsoNormal style=’mso-pagination:widow-orphan’><span
style=’font-size:12.0pt;mso-bidi-font-size:10.0pt’>blah blah blah<o:p></o:p></span></p>

and the version I want, which is

<p>blah blah blah</p>

Whichever moron wrote the methods for Word to convert stuff to HTML should be dragged out against a wall, shot, reincarnated, tortured, killed, and then buried at a crossroads.

Routine

I realise that this one is utterly trivial, but it sometimes amazes me the routines people get stuck in. One of the people I currently work with (God help me) has just broken the mug he always uses for his coffee. Half the office is now saying about how he’ll have to get a replacement (no, really?) and that it won’t taste the same in a new mug. He’s had this mug – in this office – for 24 years. Twenty-fucking-four-years. Of always drinking from the same mug. OK, it was a wedding present and blah blah blah, but ye gods, I can’t imagine staying in one job consistently for 24 months, let alone years.

Downtime

Yes, yesterday was a down-day. I don’t know why, there were no identifiable causes, but the brain didn’t activate at all, and the mood was simply not conducive to posting. But I seem to be out of the dip again today – and that’s something I always find reassuring.

Five years ago, “down-time” would have been a week, or even a month, or more. If the depression did attack me, it was a big thing, and it lasted. While it wasn’t “manic” depression, it’s always had a distinctly cyclical nature – I suspect it does for most sufferers, but I don’t have any empirical knowledge on that one – and when the troughs came, they were on a real “Perfect Storm” level, with the gravity of depression ensuring that it was nigh on impossible to stop the slide until I’d hit the bottom of the trough.

Now, for whatever reasons, it’s easier to handle. The troughs aren’t anywhere near as deep- but by contrast, nor are the peaks. Sometimes I miss the extremes, even though the smoother journey is normally preferable. The peaks were amazing, the troughs were disgraceful – now it’s all far more level. However, in general I’ll take the current way of life, where the depression hits for a day of downtime, and then bounces back. So normal service will be resumed today.

Lost : One Will to Live

I don’t know why, but today is a very groggy day. I swear my body’s not designed to sleep – I always feel like crap the day afterwards. So instead for now I’m going to bung up a few links and comments, and write more when I’m in the mood for it. Probably later.

• While I think it’s sad about the lad getting stabbed to death in Faliraki, it’s hardly a shock. Men, unlimited booze, and a culture that encourages the aggression and drinking – there was always going to be fallout.
• I wish I could bring myself to care about the report that security was shit at the birthday party of Prince William. Like, nice work, Holmes.
• Equally, I couldn’t give a toss that the new head of the CPS was charged with possession of cannabis 31 years ago – instead I think it’s far more worrying that he has hardly done any criminal prosecutions, and is also possibly in the position because of his links with Presidente Blair and his troll wife.

And that’ll do for now.

Cack-handed

I didn’t know it, but apparently today is National Left-Handers Day. Being left-handed myself, I can appreciate a lot of the things that are written about here. Lefties get quite a lot of stick for things like having the mouse on the “wrong” side of the keyboard and so on. (and in honour of being awkward, my mouse is on the left of the keyboard, but the buttons are still configured for a right-hander – it invariably confuses people!)

Would I rather be right-handed? Hell no. For me the benefits of being more creative, better at lateral thought and problem-solving, and all that gubbins more than make up for the few occurrences where being a leftie is bloody awkward.

Happy Left-Handed Day!

We have lift-off

The camera’s been getting it’s test-drive. There’ll be photos of my working environment later (i.e. when I get home and get them uploaded). On them, a new PC-variant will be visible that’s been placed on my desk today. It’s a nice bit of kit, all flat TFT monitor, all the hardware running behind the screen in one built-in unit. All very attractive, even when the keyboard and mouse are attached via cables that slightly detract from the aesthetics.

But there’s one thing that’s a complete turn-off, and has made me rethink ever having something like this. And that’s the fucking noise of it. The fan’s banging away nineteen to the dozen, I can hear it over the personal stereo (which is admittedly on quietly), and it’s actually a noise that’s distracting. I’m going to batter the fucking thing soon…

UPDATED : The link within the post now goes to a photo of the piece of shit nice new computer.

Black

In the news today is that the widow of Oswald Mosley has died. He was the founder of the British Fascists, AKA the Blackshirts.

Anyone want to bet what the de rigeur colour will be at the funeral? *Grin*

Camera

One half of the insurance settlement came through yesterday – the voucher for the replacement of the laptop, to be exact. I’d already decided that at the moment a replacement laptop wasn’t essential (the stolen one was also the old one, a positively archaic beast of an IBM) so it was going to be used in part for a replacement camera. It’s the thing I’d missed most from the first break-in, so it was time to replace it.

So now I have a new toy. The Fuji M603. It’s not perfect – I’d have preferred to have more optical zoom than it’s got, for example – but it seems like a good camera already. One strange thing (for me) is that it doesn’t have a viewfinder – instead it’s all done via the comparatively huge 2.5″ LCD. The manual mode isn’t as good as the last camera, but I rarely used it in anything other than automatic anyway.

As it is, I’m still getting to grips with some of the stuff – in some ways it’s very non-camera, the shutter button is in a different position to usual, for example. But by the weekend there’ll be some shots with it, and I’ll be able to do a better comparison then. And there’ll be plenty of space on it too – I got a 256Mb card to go with it, and it can also take up to a 1Gb Microdrive…

Abusive

While I can kind of understand the newsworthiness of the story about the charming individual now barred via an ASBO from using one particular abusive term, it does also appear to have given every single paper and news website the ability to use that word.

So – is it valid for them to use it, because it’s “newsworthy”? Or is it still just as abusive, and they’re as guilty as anyone else for using it?

GF Asks

In a worthy bit of memery (is that a word?), started off here on Green Fairy’s site (although it does originally hail from elsewhere), GF asks me five questions…

1. What qualities do toy moose have that say, cuddly antelope do not?
  If I knew why I prefer toy moose to any other forms of furry toy, I’d probably be a lot saner than I am. I suppose some of it comes from the sheer ability to pun names based on “moose”, plus there’s the sound of the word, which is infinitely preferable to the sound of “antelope”. Moose, reindeer, elk – they’re all a bit quirky really, aren’t they? On the same kind of vein, I could probably have ended up collecting cuddly fish, or even cows – except cows are cliched.
2. What’s your very first memory?
  For some reason(s) (some of which I know, and others which continue to confuddle me) I have very few memories from before the age of about 10. However, the first clear memory I have is of starting primary school. I’ve always said it was the first day there, but I doubt that’s true – whatever, it was close to the start. By this time I’d been able to read for about 12 to 18 months, thanks to literate parents – but that also made me rather more “advanced” than the rest of the class. So when the teacher told us to get books to start learning to read, she meant Roderick the Red Pirate, not for me to wander over to the other bookshelf, find a Roald Dahl book I hadn’t read before, and get stuck into it. The memory of being forced to prove I could a) read and b) comprehend the book I’d chosen still rankles, and remains in memory.
3. What things do you consider to be overrated?
  How long have you got? From my own perspective, I feel the entire scoped-out timetabled existence of “proper job, marriage, career, house, mortgage, family” is hugely over-rated. That’s probably the biggest one, combined with “having to be in a relationship”. Peter recently said that he felt some people are designed to be single, and I have to admit that I wonder if I’m not one of them. Only time will tell. But the people who look at me in shock to realise I’m happy to be buying ONE ticket to go to a concert, or a film, or whatever, I think their attitude is over-rated, that the innate need some people have to always be in a couple is over-rated.
  I should point out at this juncture that there are probably hundreds of other things I feel are equally over-rated, but I just can’t think of them at the moment. It’s a pretty all-encompassing question, GF!
4. Kindly complete this sentence: “I would rather have my innards scooped out and replaced by earwigs than __________________”
  The first response that sprang to mind was the word “moths” – with spiders coming a close second. Earwigs don’t bother me, spiders I’m not keen on, Moths I’m full-blown phobic about. You want comedy? Stick me in a room with a couple of the flapping hairy bastards, and lock the door.
  Other than that though, I’d rather go through the innard-scoooping than participate in a war (particularly one whose cause I didn’t believe in), live in central London, travelling economy-class to Australia, get married, or go through phobia-based aversion-therapy. As with 3., there’s probably a whole load more answers still floating in the ether to that one too.
5. Do you believe your personality is a product of biology or your environment?
  Um, Yes. I believe it comes from both – there are bits of my personality (as well as body-type, appearance etc.) that are absolutely a product of my parents. There are plenty of others that come from friends, and life experience. It’s quite spooky when I see my father, our mannerisms and personalitys definitely have parts that have been inherited. However, there are other parts that are probably as alien to him as, say, Neptune would be. If pushed, I would probably say that there are basic personality traits that are genetically hard-wired, that are an absolute swine to change or alter, but that the great majority of what makes us individual is based on our own lives, and thus down to environment and experience.

Want to be interviewed?

1. If you want to participate, leave a comment saying “interview me.”
2. I will respond by asking you five questions – each person’s will be different.
3. You will update your journal with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview others in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

UPDATED : Pogo and Dragon, your questions are now in the comments box…

Vanity, vanity, all is vanity

I know that yesterday there were a few comments on the idiocy of people undergoing foot surgery in order to wear “sexy” pointy shoes (see GreenFairy, Dragon and Into the Wild for more information) and I must admit, while I agree that people who undergo this treatment are inherently shallow and (quite probably) madder than a bathful of hippos, at the end of the day it’s their own stupidity and thus they pay for the service.

In contrast, the BBC’s report that millions of people never get their eyesight checked, even when they know their vision isn’t as good as it was seems far more upsetting and stupid. I suppose it’s down to the fact that there’s a greater chance of harming others through poor eyesight – I’ve never had a problem per se with fuckheads, so long as they only harm themselves, it’s when they also can harm others that I start having a problem with it. As an example, people only need a basic sight-test before passing their driving test (by which I mean “read that numberplate 50 feet away”) and that’s it. There’s no need for another sight check while driving. A good percentage of these people (the story says 65%) who know that their sight is going to shit and never get it checked are also drivers.

As with the feet/shoes story, vanity is cited as a reason for not getting a sight check. To quote paraphrase from the article, “73% thought they would find them irritating to wear, while 52% did not like the way spectacles made them look. 78% of people cited discomfort as a reason why they would not wear contact lenses, while 67% thought they would be a hassle and 60% believed they would pose a risk to their eyes. Asked about laser eye surgery, 73% said it was too expensive, 37% thought it was too risky and 52% said they did not like the idea of surgery on their eyes.” So – they’d rather not have a brief period of irritation, or not have to look slightly different than run the risk of killing or harming someone while driving. I can understand some of the concerns about laser surgery – I’ve enquired about it, but my eyes are bad enough that even post-surgery I’d still have to wear glasses, albeit ones of a lighter prescription. Contact lenses don’t work for me, although I know several people for whom they’re ideal. But that’s the thing – experimentation, finding out what works and is best for each person.

Personally I’d rather wear glasses than be thinking for the rest of my life about the person I ran over because I didn’t see them.

Light and Tunnels

Well, the letting agents have contacted me, and all’s well so far – the credit check’s been sent off today, so I’m crossing my fingers that everything goes OK. With luck, I should know by the end of the week.

Also, the bank finally confirmed the overdraft I’d requested, which will make doubly sure that everything’s OK for clearing the deposit and first month’s rent – the finances are there, but it’s better to have some form of fiscal padding too. The new house isn’t quite confirmed yet, but there’s definitely light at the end of the tunnel – I just hope that it’s not a freight-train coming the other way…

Comments

Yes, at the moment the commenting system is down. Joy. I know, I know, I really do need to sort out MT, and get that side of things done. The basics are installed, I just need to do the template etc., and move the archives over. “Just”. Ha.

Exams

While I agree to some extent that there are pupils for whom skipping GCSEs to go straight to AS-levels might be a good idea (I should point out that I was one of them, and would have stayed with academic learning far longer if I hadn’t spent 14-16 bored to tears and not giving a shit about staying in school – if I’d taken the GCSEs at 14, I’d have done fine, and been able to go on to A-levels there and then) I’m equally unconvinced that assessing the relevance of GCSEs is going to be of much use either.

Now, assessing the relevance of the syllabus – that might actually be useful. I’ve never had to solve a quadratic equation outside the confines of a classroom, but understanding how the APR works on credit cards would have been invaluable. I’ve never felt the need to make another metal coathook since leaving metalwork classes, but cookery and simple home economics would seem like a good thing to have in the brain. Making the courses relevant to life, not just to fit the confines of the current outmoded and ineffective syllabus – now that would be a real advance.

Page alterations

Following on from Saturday’s birthday, there’s been an addition to the index page for the site, as well as alterations and updates to the about d4d™ page detailing some ideas for the future and so on. I’ll be adding more to the pages over the next couple of days as well, and also probably writing some more stuff in other sections, but I’ll detail those later.

In the meantime, thunder’s rattling around the building I’m working in, and I’m hoping for a really decent downpour. Actually, a drop of about 10°C would be nice too. Today’s the day for refuse collection where I live, and the miasma of smells and stench from the bins was like wading through a marsh this morning. Utterly vile.

Rain – pt. 2

Sometimes I wonder if it’s me that’s barmy or the rest of the world. It’s still raining here, and I’ve walked down to the supermarket to do the shopping. It’s still bakingly hot, yet people are out fully covered up in waterproofs – it must be like cataracts of sweat inside there. Why do people worry so much about getting wet?

At the end of the day, we’re all human, our skins are inherently waterproof – we dry off. So when the weather’s so warm that we just broil inside waterproof clothing, why are we so obsessed with staying dry? I know I came home soaked, and about ten degrees cooler than anyone else who’d been out – thoroughly enjoyed it.

So – who’s barmy? Me or everyone else?

Rain

Ah, that was nice. Woke up to the sound of thunder, and it’s just absolutely pissed down for an hour. And yes, I went out to get my paper while it was raining – it brought the temperature down nicely. *Grin*

Of course, now it’s stopped, and the temperature is ramping up again nicely. But at least the thunder’s cleared the air a bit.

Skipton

I don’t know why, but over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been getting a shedload of search requests for “Skipton Building Society”, and then also getting connections from some poor gonk who actually works for them. So – what’s the deal? I’m intrigued to know…

Happy Birthday to me

Yes, amazingly d4d™ is now 1 year old. The presents haven’t been up to much, but hopefully the party with jelly and ice-cream later will go down well. A couple of friends have been invited, but really a first birthday party is more for the parents. So I’m going to get pissed.

It’s not bad really – 79,500 page impressions in a year. Not bad for a little baby site. I’m sure I’ll add more here later today, but for now…

Happy birthday to me,
Happy birthday to me,
Happy birthday dear d4dddddddddddddddd,
Happy birthday to me. :¬)
*Blows out the candle*

Knew I’d forgotten something

When this site changed from destruction for dummies to d4d, I knew I’d forgotten something. I’d changed the addresses in all the comments boxes and so on, and it finally occurred to me today what I’d neglected to do. So the Contacts page has now been amended, and also (ahem) added to the list on the index page. *Oops*

Yick

While I’ve no problem with nature red in tooth and claw, sometimes there really is such a thing as “too much information”. This BBC piece about the reasons for penis shape definitely comes into that sector.

“Thanks” to Gordon, for the link.

Ah, blessed irony

OK, in a vain effort to steer away from stuff about Nazis, hatred, and discrimination, I’ve just spoken to the letting agents for the house I saw last Saturday, and filled in the forms for.

I was trying for an update, to let me know where things stand and if there were any problems. However, the letting agents themselves were broken into last night, so the office is chaos today. They should be able to give me an update by the end of the day though – the files are still there, just the computers got nicked.

Comments

I must admit, following Peter’s comment here about my comment regarding Eugenics, I find myself quite stumped really. Maybe I made out I was some form of a fan of programmes involving creating a master race – which I’m emphatically not. If such a programme existed, I’d never have been let through the net, nor would most of the people I know and care most about in the world.

However, when temperatures rise and IQs fall, I do despair of people in general, and that leaves me wondering about what else could be done. As an intellectual exercise, things like Eugenics are fascinating – how would it be administrated and administered, what would the criteria be, who would get to chose, that kind of thing. It’s an abhorrent exercise – I’m firmly retro and not even convinced about the necessity of choosing the sex of one’s child, let alone whether it should fulfil some kind of specification for Aryan perfection.

I’m actually quite hurt in some ways that Peter would think I’d consider Nazi-esque pogroms, let alone be an enthusiast of them – but at the end of the day, there’s very little I can do to change his perspective, nor that of anyone else. As for no longer wanting to read a site because of one post – I find that equally hard to understand. Over the last year I’ve seen many viewpoints I dislike, or even disagree with intensely – but that doesn’t stop me reading the site. In the example used here, if I were reading a site that constantly put out hatred of others, bigotry, racism and generally Nazi-esque viewpoints then yes, I’d stop reading it. If it were a one-off mention – and even then not one that was particularly enthusiastic about the subject, just using it as an illustration – then I think benefit of the doubt could be applied.

At the end of the day, I suppose I keep coming back to an ethos my father drilled into both myself and my brother : “I may not like what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.“

Pewari Says…

Via Pat BlogsLife, she mentions Pewari’s post saying that people can easily list ten things they dislike, but take much longer to list ten things they’re happy about – which seems like a challenge to me. So…

10 things I’m happy about
1. d4d™ – I know it’s sad and self-referential, but yeah, d4d makes me happy – I’m proud of it, and the fact it’s been running for a year now.
2. The fact I’ll be moving soon – that makes me happy (and stressed, but that’s another story)
3. The way life‘s slowly shaping up – work, money, life in general
4. The friends I’ve got who’ve come through in times of need, and who have offered help when it wasn’t expected
5. The way the future looks (no, not Orange) and the potential events of the next couple of years
6. Good food – and good drink – but the occasions when I go out with friends in general
7. going to concerts – particularly seeing favourite bands, but most gigs make me happy
8. Producing decent websites that clients like – again, sad but true
9. Feeling my age-old depression lifting, feeling optimistic about the future – just having that newer viewpoint makes me happy
10. Possibly linked to the previous item, but also feeling the desire to write more again – that’s a very good feeling, like welcoming back an old friend

Jane Says…

While Gert apparently has the theme tune from Knots Landing going through her head today, I’ve instead been blessed with a variety of sound-bites from Jane’s Addiction. It doesn’t cause me a problem – I’ve always liked them anyway – but going through the town centre with the lyric “Some people should die – and that’s just unconscious knowledge!” rattling around inside the brain is possibly not the best idea.

Ah well.

Nicked with his boots on

Further to my earlier comments about naked hikers, it turns out that the police have arrested the man trying to hike naked from Lands End to John O’Groats and returned him to Cornwall where he started off. However, as no-one had actually complained about him (and quite right too – let the daft sod get on with it, so far as I’m concerned) they’re going to let him off with a warning, rather than being charged with anything.

I suppose that all comments about “being picked up by the fuzz” would be completely inappropriate. *Grin*

An actor after all the clowns

I suppose it’s true that Californian’s never learn. I know we’ll have to wait ’til the elections to know for sure, but the fact that Arnold Schwarzenegger is standing for the position of Governor in California would surely be enough to scare most people comatose.

However, looking at some of the other people who may be candidates, Arnie actually seems like a sensible choice. There’s Gary Coleman (the height-challenged one from Diff’rent Strokes, also an ex-convict), Larry Flynt (Publisher of the Hustler porn magazines, among other things), Leo Gallagher (a comedian so funny I’ve never heard of him) and a porn star called Mary Carey. Hardly the most reassuring bunch of proto-politicians.

And you just know that if/when the Schwarzenegger campaign fails this time, his official statement will be “I’ll be back”.

Colour coding

In a fit of heat-induced boredom, I went over to do a test on “what colour are you“? I think the result may be quite revelatory…

Genocide is painless

When the weather gets warm, what is it that makes peoples IQs drop so significantly? I’ve just been out, and the quota of braindeads is even more than usual. Maybe the sun just brings them out of the woodwork or something – from the sheer lack of brains I’ve witnessed so far though, I’d be surprised that they can manage to negotiate complex activities like opening doors, or walking and breathing at the same time.

I think the first thing that must get melted out of the brain is the decision-making section. Everyone seems to be so aimless, wandering around with even less clue than usual, displaying all the IQ and personality of a road-kill walrus. The really worrying thing is that most of these keff-wits are also breeding – all of them were either pregnant, or dragging/pushing (depending on the ownership of pushchair/buggy) round some snotty wailing brat. I know that they say there’s a partner for everyone, but sometimes I do start considering whether a programme of eugenics wouldn’t be the way to go.

Actually, eugenics and birth-control would only hit the tip of the iceberg. But the concept of genocide opens up a whole world of opportunity…

The truth will out

Ah well, it had to be proved at some point. First I’m geeky enough to take The Geek Test, and then to reveal that I scored 44.18146% – which makes me a Major Geek. Apparently. *coughs* Of course, anyone who knows me would be amazed that the score was that low. *Grin*

Heatwave

I don’t want to be overly British and go stating the obvious by saying “Bloody Hell it’s hot today“. So instead I’m going to comment about another phenomenon from heatwaves, and basically whenever the temperature goes above about 15°C (60°F, for anyone outside the UK) – the fact that some people really fucking stink.

(as an aside here, I should point out that yes, I do know I’ve ranted about this subject before)

I don’t know what it is about this country, but it certainly seems that there’s a facet of the nation that simply don’t wash or use deodorant (I’m going to stick with an Americanised spelling on that one, because deodourant still doesn’t look right) – I know there are some facets who won’t use it for religious reasons etc., and fair enough, I’m not going to aim this at them. But the others, the offensively smelly fuckers, deserve to be shot. How can they not realise how bad it is? And even how antisocial? In fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s just fucking vile.

In the office where I’m currently working, there’s one person who obviously suffers from this condition (known in medical circles as “stinkyfuckeritis”) to an epic degree. It’s hard to be subtle about it – the temptation to walk over and tell him he stinks is getting more tempting by the minute, and I don’t even sit near him. I pity the poor sods who sit opposite, because every time he walks past me, the smell is enough to pole-axe a mastodon. It seems to carry a physical force to it, because wherever he walks, people are reeling afterwards.

There’s not even any real escape at lunchtime – walking into town there were at least two others suffering the same problem, and it’s exceptionally difficult to walk uphill without inhaling at some point. The town is full of scrots in tracksuit bottoms, who seem to feel that these temperatures are a grand excuse to strip off and show how amazingly shonky their cheap nasty tatoos are, and how well they’ve already faded. Oh, and how well dodgy gold necklaces go with pasty scally skin.

Personally, I’ll be glad when the clouds come over again, and the temperature drops. Now, has anyone got some horse-shit so I can tone down the smelly bastard?

Look out for thistles

The concept of “boots-only” hiking (that’s hiking in the nude, for those who care about such things) conjures up a whole range of images – very few of them particularly pleasant. In weather like today, I imagine that sunburn is a pretty relevant issue – and considering that half the vegetation on hiking routes is either Gorse (fucking prickly) or Heather (bloody abrasive) I would think there’s a fairly good risk of ending up scratched all over. Which is enough to make most people wimper a bit.

However, the random sightings of two naked men hiking The Pennine Way made me smile, another sign of the eccentricity for which we’re world renowned. Particularly with the female witness who “absent-mindedly” bumped into one of the men – I wonder what she was paying attention to? *Grin*

Uneventful

So far, it’s been a fairly quiet day. It won’t last, I’m sure. In the meantime, I’d just like to say that converting Adobe PDFs so that they can be filled in on-line is a task of utter wankdom, and not one I enjoy. So of course that’s what I’ll be doing for most of today. *Sigh*

Lame Academy

Please God, we’re beginning to see the end of the “reality” game-show. The BBC’s Lame Academy has managed to lose one million viewers in a week. 50% more people watched Grease on ITV than watched Lame Academy – now that’s really rubbing it in. This Saturday, ITV’s Flop Idol is back (again) – let’s hope it crashes and burns like most of the audtionees do.

Return to normality

Since the swap of domain names for d4d™, there’s been a bit of a dip in the regular hits from search engines. In some ways this has been no bad thing at all, as it’s allowed me to drop a couple of very old bits that I no longer wanted on d4d™ without too many hassles. And now I’m starting to get search hits from Google again, so it looks like the resumption of normal service is continuing apace.

And I really must get my finger out on some of the stuff I want to play with on d4d™ after the first birthday is out of the way. With all the other stuff that’s been going on, it now might not happen in time for Friday (ye gods, a year already – how did that happen?) but it’s in the process of happening.

Grass is always greener

Well, having read this story about a Californian family who got their entire house stolen, I have to admit that I do realise I could have been a whole lot worse off than I am/was. *Grin* I think it’s the fact that they even took the (just under) 10,000 litre water-tank that really adds insult to injury. But it’s definitely one of the more impressive accounts of house-theft.

Not quite so busy

The parental units have vacated the premises, and made their way down to the sunny South. It’s been a pretty good weekend, all things considered – spent yesterday looking at the (*hopefully*) new house and sorting out the initial paperwork for it, then went off into the Peak District, lunch at the Yorkshire Bridge by Derwent Water, back through some of the more hair-raising roads through the Peaks, out again in the evening to one of the the local pubs – which was bloody good.

Today has been inherently lazy. Cooked a full-on roast for lunch, and the parents disappeared at about half five. Since then I’ve done close to naff all – the brain has had some much-needed down-time. Normal service will be resumed tomorrow. In the meantime, I’m just going to keep my fingers crossed that everything comes through for the house.

Busy

Well, there’s been a visitation from the parents, so don’t expect too many updates today or til tomorrow afternoon-ish.

The house viewing went fine, and the application process has been started, so it’s a matter of waiting for references and credit-checks to come back. Let’s hope it happens smoothly and quickly.

The new place is a bit bigger, in a lot better area, and costing a third as much again as where I am. But it’s worth it. Fingers crossed.

Paranoia

I just received a call on my mobile – number withheld – where no-one said anything, and the only noise in the call sounded like the beep the new alarm system at home makes. Straight away, paranoia kicks in – would it have been possible for the scrots to get my number(s) while in the house last time? Imagine how great it would be to call the person who lives in the house while you’re inside it, going through things again. What a laugh.

I called up the neighbourhood wardens (the people who actually discovered the last break-in), explained I was almost certainly being daft, but could they possibly have a look at the house, make sure it was OK? No problem, we’ll call you back. And they just have – the house is fine, it’s just me being paranoid. I can’t wait to move on.

Riding on the Sardine Bus

Earlier this week, Meg (and welcome back, by the way) was saying about the problems experienced by tall people on public transport. On the way to work today I’ve been wedged into seats on both buses – the ones run by First Bus in particular are abysmal, designed for people of about 5’6″ at most, and the seats have this awful moulding on the back that projects out into where your knees should be. This means you either sit with legs either side of the mouldings, which takes up part of the legroom of the person sat beside you, or with your legs jammed together between the mouldings.

Considering all the reports that our average height and size/weight is increasing, what on earth causes the “wisdom” of ramming the seats ever closer together on public transport?

Nine days to go

Bloody hell, it’s AUGUST! How the hell did that happen? Where’s the year gone? It doesn’t seem like all that long ago that the joys of the Festering Season™ were upon us – and yet now we’re two-thirds of the way through the year.

And yes, in nine day’s time, d4d™ will have been going for a year. In some ways that’s even scarier…

Wishful thinking

The last four times I’ve looked at the BBC News website, I’ve misread the title of this story as “Leslie’s sex change ‘hell'” – it should read charge. I worry about my brain sometimes.

Images

Yes, as suspected, two new graphics have made their way onto the site. as d4d™ is now really dummies-for-destruction, well, it seemed apt to lose the pointy man for a while, and get rid of the “under new management” sign. More changes will be slowly percolating through the site. Then again, as yet I haven’t changed everything to the CSS sheet either. It will all happen though.

Insurance

I spoke to the claims advisor on the insurance yesterday – looks like things will go smoothly, and the list of stolen DVDs to be replaced went in the post to them today. The DVDs will be replaced, and delivered to my parent’s house – until I’ve moved, I’m not going to be replacing any of the missing items, as I don’t see the point in doing it just to get them nicked again. The thing I’ve discovered I miss having most of all is the digital camera – among other things, it’s meant I’ve missed out on the 26 things photographic scavenger hunt, along with several other opportunities for decent shots. Once I’m moved, it’ll be high on the priority list.

As for the laptop, they’ll send me vouchers, I assume to the original purchase price. So, that’ll be playtime when they arrive – the only disadvantage being that they’re supposedly only spendable in places like *shudder* Dixons. All the same, I’m sure I’ll find something I like – even if it does have a touchpad. But we’ll see what’s around once the vouchers arrive.

All in all, I’ve been hugely impressed with MoreTh>n, my insurers. It’s a week today since the break-in, and it looks like the insurance claim is pretty much sorted out, along with their paying for the replacement window that my cuntish landlords insisted I pay for. They’ve managed to do everything on the timescale that was promised when I first called, and so far they haven’t messed me about at all. I just hope that the payout and delivery of replacement items runs as smoothly.

Firebird

I’ve been playing versus various web browsers for a while now (sorry, bsag, but still Windows only) but it’s only in the last 48 hours that I’ve really got into the Firebird browser from Mozilla. My problem with Mozilla itself (an open-source offshoot of Netscape) was that it was – frankly – fucking slow. You know something’s slow when you go back to IE and think “flippin’ ‘eck that’s fast!”

So it was with some trepidation I finally got round to downloading Firebird, the newer, more experimental, shitload-faster-than-Moz browser. And I like it. Lots.

I’m posting this through Firebird – it’s the only browser other than IE that I’ve so far found which works with Blogger’s extra buttons, and renders it properly. Just that is enough to convince me. It means I don’t have to use IE for anything other than my internet banking now (in a fit of “security” the bank that daren’t mention it’s name still only supports IE or Nutscrape 4.7 (not even the latest version)) – and that’s always likely to win me over.

Robbing bastards

No, for once not the little sods that broke into the house. Instead, this is about the other people involved the break-in. I got an invoice this morning from the company that the police called out to board/secure the window that got broken – note, not my request to get it done, but the police’s. But the invoice arrived this morning, to “the occupier”

£60 to board up and “make secure” (we’ll ignore for the moment that half the screws weren’t in properly, and it was a pretty shonky job all round) and another £10.50 in VAT. So it’s cost me more to have the window boarded up than it did to have it replaced. I’m sure there’s a logic there, fighting to get out.

Hiatus

Over at Naked Blog, Peter has announced he’s taking a post-hissy-fit (his words, not mine) break. I can understand his point, wanting to see people commenting on his thoughts, and I certainly hope he’ll return (at the moment it’s in doubt). It’s a blog I read daily, and have always thought was a damn good one (and not just for the support over the Wiley’s farce).

But at the same time I’m as guilty as others – I don’t always leave comments, even when it’s a point I agree or disagree with strongly. Sometimes I simply forget to do so (or, as yesterday, think I’ve commented and then discover I haven’t) and other times I just don’t want to be overly contentious.

Anyway, I hope Peter will return soon. He’ll be much missed while away.

More phone idiots

“Hello, IT department, Lyle speaking“
“Hello, is that Nigel?“
It just went downhill from there…

Twenty-Two Years Ago

Looks like the Grauniad is having a good day. As displayed by the following:

Although it does seem hard to believe that it’s 22 years since the wedding. Time flies when you’re having fun.

Vile Image

Sometimes, I love the Guardian, and particularly their headline writers. Although I hope it’s not just me that gets a vile mental image to accompany the line “Police probe body in suitcase“. It’s a pretty grim story anyway – although finding the body of a man stuffed inside a suitcase being defined as “suspicious circumstances” strikes me very much in the vein of “No shit, Sherlock.”

Aye, that’ll be right

The Grauniad (and many others) are carrying a story that the new laws that allow Peers (Lords) to be barred from the House of Lords after they’ve been jailed for more than 12 months are “not being vindictive towards Lord Jeffrey Archer, but are merely a way of restoring the balance between the Houses of Lords and Commons.“

Not vindictive? To consider this law the week after Archer was released? To use a classic phrase, “Pull the other one, it’s got bells on it“.

Cold calling

I’ve just had a call from Victim Support, wanting to know if I needed to talk. No thanks, I’m at work. Fact is, I’m sure there are plenty of other people far more in need of the services of Victim Support than myself. (For instance the little fuckers that broke in, if I ever get hold of ’em) It’s not my kind of thing at all, and really I don’t feel traumatised by the entire set of events in the same way that some people seem to.

I’m not going to be derogatory about VS – I’m sure it provides a good service, and one that’s hugely appreciated by a lot of people. It’s just not for me. Thanks for calling though.

Anti-climax

No, not another dose of spam involving “how to perform better for your partner”, or whatever – but Something trivial or commonplace that concludes a series of significant events.

In this case, it regards the Tabard Square dig in London, where a 2,000 year old sealed capsule had been found, and was due to be opened today. No-one knew what was in it, but already various other artefacts have been found, including a life-size bronze casting of a foot, and the oldest known signage including the name London. Speculation was rife about the contents of the capsule.

And what was inside when it was opened? Some type of make-up cream, they think. Anti-climax indeed. Or even just a very elaborate, extremely well executed hoax.

Be still, my bleeding heart

Well, it’s Monday, and after a hectic weekend of self-centred posting, I’m going to try and get back to normal. Who knows, it might even happen.

In the meantime, I’m definitely pleased to see that The Ginger Twat™ is having to pay £7m to the owners of Virgin radio in relation to his failed case. At best, Chris Evans is a brat, and a dummy-chucker extraordinaire, and for once it’s good to see him getting what he deserves.

Other activities

It’s been a busy – and productive – weekend. A friend came up to help with the alarm etc., and we also spent some time forming up the company he wants to get started. So the alarm’s in, the company’s formed, the domain names are reserved, the web hosting is sorted, and we’ve done a load of research into what similar companies are charging, and so on.

Not bad really, for getting done in a period of 24 hours. It always amazes me when people seem to take forever to get things like domain names, or company formations. I can’t believe I’m that much more efficient or organised than anyone else. But hey ho.

Sorting Out – Part 2

Ah well, the next step was a burglar alarm. So I’ve got one. All the entry points are protected. It’s a pretty good bit of kit, seems to work well. Still waiting for a call from the claims wonk, so that’ll happen during this next week. As for everything else, we’ll see. I’m still going to be looking for a new place to live – and yes, I can move the alarm system too. I just wish it didn’t feel like running away.

Sorting out

I’ve had the kitchen window replaced – the landlords have said they won’t pay for it, because they’re cunts. Luckily, the insurance people seem to have come up trumps and have said they’ll pay for it. As it is, I found a local company that replaced it – and did a proper job rather than the shonky effort of the cowboys my landlords employed last time – for the princely sum of £50. Not bad at all.

Do I? Don’t I?

Following on from all the shite with Wiley, I got a beautifully timed reminder to day that the original d4d domain comes up for renewal in September.

Now, do I give it up, or do I renew it for another two years, just to upset Wiley’s even more? I wonder… *Grin*

Nabbed

I’ve just had another visit from the police – looks like they’ve nicked the little bastard for something else, and will be interviewing him about the break-ins as well, in addition to other stuff, and also searching his house. They’ll let me know if they find anything, although he’s apparently likely to have got rid of it already, and to let me know what happens.

Shocking revelations

I don’t quite know whether people in New Zealand are different to the rest of the world, but is the “revelation” that Young men download the most porn really all that surprising?

Burglary – Update

I’m sorry if this seems horrendously self-referential for once, but well, it’s personal publishing, and this has happened. So live with it. If it’s boring, just go to one of the other blogs on the right. (Scaryduck is particularly good today, and delivered a couple of much needed laughs. “Bang” indeed…)

SOCO’s been, turns out that this time the little bastards look to have worn gloves. Landlords are still being fuckers, so it looks like a move is on the cards. I didn’t really want to do that, but the joys of being inveigled in the world of little-fucker-dom seem to have put the mockers on it. I’ll still rent for the time being – but not from these landlords. Keff that.

I wish I could even explain how I feel – “numb” is the word that springs to mind, but “flat” is possibly more descriptive. I’ve never caused hassle, never been snotty or anything to the neighbours, never drawn attention. Now I seem to be the target for some little cunt who’s decided “He’s got it, I want it.” And it’s making me move – I feel let-down, like I’m giving in, and I think the simple fact of it is that it’s so faceless. He doesn’t know me – maybe by sight, I don’t know – I don’t know him. I could walk past the little shit tomorrow, and I wouldn’t even know it. I can’t even be angry – there’s no visible target for it, and I’ve never gone for the aimless hatred school of thought.

More than anything else, I’m tired though. I’m tired of being a target – always someone to aim at, to be seen as different. More reasons than I can shake a stick at, but for the moment it seems to be that I’m a “Have”, not a “Have Not”. As reasons go, it’s no better and no worse than many of the other bigotrys and biases, but at the end of the day they’re all so pointless.

Anyway, I’m going to see what happens over the weekend, and work on things from there.

Burglary – Part Two

Well, much as I hate to say “told you so”, I did. Came home from work today to find that I’d been broken into again. I’m sure it’s the same little cunt that did it – the footprints on the worktop were exactly the same as last time, and they came through the same window.

This time they had a bit more time, obviously – every drawer has been opened, every cupboard gone through. They didn’t get away with much – an old laptop and about 50 DVDs – there’s probably other things too, but I haven’t found out what yet.

The house is a mess – but could be worse. It’s just been searched, they didn’t take a shit on the carpet or anything. The big stuff is still safe – because I always keep all the house keys with me, they could only take out stuff that fit through the window. PC and stereo were unplugged, but obviously wouldn’t fit. The kitchen’s a fucking mess, but again, it could’ve been so much worse. Everything’s been looked through, and yet the dozy little bastards have missed stuff that (to my amateur ideas) would be better to nick – the vodkas and booze weren’t touched, the (easily floggable) concert tickets didn’t even move. Even the DECT (digital cordless) phones stayed. I wish I knew why.

You’re from who?

I don’t know what it is with job agencies, particularly IT ones, but they really do seem to be populated with idiot smegheads. I’ve had a call today, no number showing up on the CLI, that went as follows :

Me : “Hello?“
Muppet : “ohhithisisjulianfrombrs”
Me : “You’re who from what?“
Muppet : “This is Julian from BRS”
Me : “OK, and who are BRS?“
Muppet : “Oh, I thought you’d know. We’re an IT agency, you spoke to us about a year ago, and applied for two contracts.”
Me : (thinks) “Oh, and I’d know every agency I’m listed with, and would remember the snerks from a year ago”
Me : (says) “Ah, I’m in a contract now until December“
Muppet : “OK, bye then.”
*click*

Charming. In fact, if it were to come down to it, I now probably wouldn’t speak to BRS again, purely because of Julian’s attitude.

Terms of Endearment

This week’s favoured term of semi-abuse can now officially be revealed as “Oy, Genius!” Of course, a lot depends on context, vocal tone, and sarcasm, but it seems to attract the required amount of genius, particularly when used in phrases such as “Oy, Genius! Go to the other till.” So far it hasn’t resulted in a smack in the mouth either – which is always a bonus. *Grin*

Told you so

If you’re feeling at all fragile today, don’t read this story. Basically, the people who maintain train-tracks are suddenly realising (Gawd bless ’em, it appears to have only just occurred to them) that certain of the UK’s train rolling stock have toilets that just dump their contents on the tracks when flushed. Hence the warning signs about “don’t flush while waiting at a station” – although apparently people still do. (I assume the people who do this are the same fucktards who always push a door marked “Pull”, and who always got caught by the auto-closing doors on trains) I wonder when the excuse will arise that “the train is late because of the wrong kind of shit on the track“.

In the meantime, it appears that Network Rail are hopeless inefficient (Nice work, Holmes – how did you ever figure that out?) and need to save £2Bn a year. Perhaps they should collect the waste on the track and flog it off as “organic manure”.
Still, it goes to prove that people are right when they say the train lines in this country are totally shite.

Style sheets and the like

Yes, I know there’s a couple of keff-ups with things like the style-sheet and so on. That’s because I’m a twat, and didn’t keep everything in just one place. So it’ll be fixed once I go in to work tomorrow, but for now, well, live with it.

UPDATED : There – all sorted again. Must remember to sort out everything so it’s all stored in one place in the future. And then back it up. I’ll do that tonight.

Overkill

OK, so the sons of Saddam Hussein are dead. I wonder if el Presidente’s apparent joy that they’re dead is more a case of being relieved to have something to take attention away from David Kelly’s death.

However, I do think that using 10 anti-tank missiles to do the deed is possibly slightly more than “reasonable force”.

Dangling chuffnuts

Hmmm, looks like the original d4d™ is back online – I now have no farking clue what’s going on. Hopefully easyspace will have sent a mail to explain, and I’ll have that when I get home. However, I’m going to continue with the move, and just use the old d4d™ to push people here calmly, rather than in a mad rush with the site-closure.

d4d™ is dead – long dive d4d™

Well, it looks like Wiley has decided to get Easyspace to pull the original d4d™ (as in destruction “for dummies”(™)) offline – no notice from either company to me, the domain holder, so I think there’ll be some shitty letters flying around tonight/tomorrow.

But this is the new home anyway – nice and un-pullable. I’ll change the pointy man on the right again at some point in the next couple of days, and then let ’em say anything at all.

Evil

All I can say is that I wholeheartedly apologise to Hoegaarden. It’s not the beer that’s evil – it’s the Raspberry Stoli that represents the root of all evil in the world. And bloody good it is too. Personally, I blame the ice that went in it, not the vodka itself. And that’s that.

Headline of the day

I suspect that someone was playing “let’s see what we can get past the sub-editors” when they came up with the headline to this story.

…leave it to the professionals

And while we’re on the subject of fraud etc. (OK, it was perjury he got jailed for – but close enough), I’m quite amazed that the Tories have said there’s no place for Jeffrey Archer in their party any more. OK, he’s been convicted and served a jail sentence for telling lies to a court. To my mind that makes him an ideal candidate for the Tories again.

Except that he got caught, whereas most politicians seem to do exactly the same and prefer to say “it wasn’t me, it was him“. UK Politics and the art of “Another boy did it and ran away. Honest sir.“

If you’re going to do something well…

Reading The Register today, it struck me as quite amusing that a company called Vogon tried to defraud the Serious Fraud Office by overcharging them.

I’m not sure which would have caused more hassle – overcharging them and being taken to court, or overcharging them and getting away with it…

Tiger teasing

I’ve decided, I’m bored with the complete lack of action when it comes to Wileys etc. No word from any legal beagles or anything.

So today I’m going to be drafting up another email to send to Kirky. Nothing offensive – more of an “I’m still here, and still waiting for a response”. When it’s written/sent, it’ll also be posted here – just for clarity and continuity purposes, of course.

Legal stuff

I’ve no idea (yet) if it’s related to the entire Wiley’s thing or not, but d4d™ has had several visits today from Clifford Chance, a UK legal firm that likes to say it’s “A global law firm”. I’m wondering if I’ll find out more when I get home, possibly an email from them or Wileys.

As Peter says today, it’s all gone a bit quiet with regard to the For Dummies™ thing, although most of that is due to me waiting for the other shoe to drop. Maybe it’s finally done so…

Dentists – the finale

Yes, after six months of intermittent pissing and moaning, I’ve finally had my last piece of work with the dentists. It feels odd, having teeth where there’ve been gaps – my lip and tongue keep having odd panic attacks of “Oh, bloody hell, something’s changed! What’s going on? Help! Flippin’ ‘eck!” and having a quick investigate, but all’s well, it’s just not what they’re used to.

But yes, I’m pleased with the work. It’s been a long fight to get here, but in the end it’s been worth it. The next piece of the saga is to make an appointment with the hygienist, and work from there.