Douglas Adams was right…
Having just wasted almost an hour and a half of my life banging my head against a corrupt data dictionary in the INNODB database engine, a system that’s designed not to crash but in the unlikely event that it does it’ll automagically recover itself, I am very much reminded of this quote from Douglas Adams…
“The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.”
Douglas Adams (1952 – 2001)
SOPA…wtf America, seriously?
Damn fixed width columns…click to view the image so you can see it full size and read the txt, k? Source here btw…
OW Ow ow…Legal advice wanted!
Brief background info: I have Arthritis, particularly affecting my right wrist at the moment (I can’t play golf or lift kettles without serious pain) and I cycle to and from Cambridge station 4 days a week (which also hurts until my painkillers have kicked in).
This morning about half a mile from home a white van started to slowly pull out from where it was parked. I was parked on the opposite side of the road from me but heading in my direction. I assumed, perhaps foolishly, that he was pulling out slowly to wait for me to pass…apparently not.
He continued to pull out whilst gradually speeding up and moving over to my side of the road to the extent that there was no room for me to pass between him and the parked cars on my side of the road. At this point I was forced to make an emergency stop (which hurt) and then in frustration and anger, and a hope to attract the drivers attention and alert him to what he’d done to hopefully make him more attentive in the future, punched the side of the van.
I am now in even more pain than normal and the van didn’t even stop. Aside from the punching I’d estimate that I have what I could describe as ‘near miss’ incidents at least twice a week.
Having seen several videos on youTube I’m left asking a legal question. If I buy one of the helmet, or handlebar, mounted ActionCams would I be able to submit videos of incidents like this mornings to the police and at least get these idiots fined?
Virgin Media are a disgrace
This evening I have wasted around 3 hours dealing with my intermittent (and that’s being nice about it) 50M Broadband service.
I had my 10M connection upgraded to Virgins 50M service last Tuesday. The engineer who installed it said that the Modem took much longer than normal to connect and once he’d left I found that I had to call up and activate it again, despite him having already done this once.
Since then I’ve restarted the modem, so called Super Hub, on an almost daily basis Read more
Is it Live or is it Memorex Crappy CS?
oh dear, another day, another poor online customer service experience . . .
A few days ago (see previous post) I had a poor experience using a companies Live online chat service. The problem there was caused by a lack of information on the part of the operator and, it would seem, their supervisor.
Today I had another question to a different company called Heatmiser Read more
Am I going mad?
I’ve just finished what should have been the answer to a simple question directed at thetrainline.com website
I have their free iPhone application installed which allows you to download a 7 day timetable for a specific journey so that you can access it when you’re out of coverage (say underground?). The problem I have is that I can find no way of updating the timetable, despite the app continually reminding me that it was downloaded on November the 19th.
After several minutes of frustrated clicking around their website I hit the ‘Contact Us’ link Read more
Things that make you go Aaaaarrrrrrgggggghhhhhhhh!
I’m not talking about politics or religion here . . . I can brush those off because a) I don’t believe in either and b) they both work great for individuals but end up as infinitely corrupt for any sort of organisation . . . bah humbug!
No, what I’m talking about here is something that makes everyone’s blood boil . . . traffic.
Almost everyone that uses the public highways and byways is clearly an idiot! Read more
Becoming Irrational . . .
Everyone has mental baggage that jumps up and smacks you without warning don’t they? Be they irrational fears, likes loves or hates. While my move to a job in central London and the accompanying daily hour and a half commute has been going well overall, I have found that it has highlighted some of my seemingly irrational hatreds (either that or I’m just getting old).
Odd that I mention the commute because I’ve just been reminded of this while out buying my lunch . . . what is it with shops insisting on giving out plastic bags for everything? I’ve brought a sandwich and a drink. Do I really need a plastic bag? If you look outside our office near Tower Bridge at lunchtime you will see apparently thousands of people carrying small green plastic bags from Marks & Spencer. I thought they were supposed to be leading the environmental campaign by charging people for bags? No sign of it here. And how much would it take to make you think twice about taking a bag? 5p? 10p? £1?!? All you’re going to do with it is carry your one sandwich about 200 yards back to your office and then throw the things away, ultimately into a landfill . . . aaaaahhhhhhhhhh!!
Ahem. Sorry about that. Should I really get started on the string of smokers camped outside London Bridge Tube station every morning combining with the queue from the London Dungeon and at least 4 newspaper sellers/give-awayers plus fancy-dressed idiots from the London Bridge Experience (wtf!) giving out flyers, all of whom are stopping me from getting home, and in the case of the smokers, all camped about half an inch away from the no smoking area, ganging up to choke me as well!
Yea, probably not today eh.
