Oh, I wish it could be Black Friday every day-aayyy, when the wallets start jingling but it's still a week till we're paiii-iid This may come as a total surprise to you but today is Black Friday. Yes! It crept up on us unawares without anyone mentioning it once. Indeed, they mentioned it not once but at least a dozen times – each. But this year's Black Friday has a very different feel to those in recent years, especially here in Britain where it is …
Ah. And a downvote from someone who obviously hasn't got a clue what is happening in this country outside his little bubble.
A lot of the people who are having to use food banks are in work. I know people who work in them, anyone who tells you they are not needed is a liar, or perhaps a Conservative MP - but I repeat myself.
Twinged my back and on pain killers so somewhat spaced.
I bought a Black Friday bargain bluetooth speaker and kept thinking "I know there's some reason I shouldn't have done that.".
Now waiting for it to charge before playing the linked track by steel....and thinking "Steelers Wheel? Steeleye Span? I'm sure I know that wierd looking guy holding the blue knob...".
Sigh.
I am truly astounded that in this age where some snowflake or other will twist the meaning of almost any word in order to claim that it is offensive to some minority group or other, that the mere mention of the words, "Black Friday" does not lead to an immediate teeth-gnashing outcry from "those who know best".
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Not sure how many people in the UK, particularly England, have learned French in recent years. Even the Baby Boomers were only guaranteed such lessons if they passed the 11+. Before 1944 the Junior Technical Schools were specifically barred by law from teaching foreign languages. The few pupils nowadays who do choose Modern Languages seem to prefer Spanish or German.
From my time working in Luxembourg there are a large number of French "comic" books on my shelves - mostly Asterix but also a few of the purely adult ones like Lauzier.
As I reach the end of the comments I get an email trying to sell me crap I do not want.
It's like Booking.com and its belief that because I once stayed in Harrogate I want to stay there every time an hotel there has a vacancy. Yes I did once buy a laptop from you. Six months ago. So why do I want to buy an old model inferior spec laptop from you?
I would be all in favour of creepily intrusive monitoring and AI if it would do a decent job, work out that I never, ever buy stuff from emails, and stopped sending them.
The number of traders who spam everyone whose email address they can get their hands on is very annoying.
I once used an email address to allow a company dealing in bathroom fittings to tell me when they would be ready for collection. They seem to have assumed that I would be refurbishing my bathroom at least three times a week. As soon as the goods were collected, they were added to the Always Block list.
I can count on one finger the number of traders reaching my inbox who get it right.
Having bought something for car restoration from an online trader which was difficult to source elsewhere, they started sending me their circulars, usually once or twice a month. All are about their special offers, are for different types of product, or are pointing me at a video showing their products being used. When I buy more items (about once a year), they recognise that I am already in their list, and don't send me multiple mailshots. When they asked me about GDPR, I happily ticked the box to continue the relationship.
"It's like Booking.com and its belief that because I once stayed in Harrogate I want to stay there every time an hotel there has a vacancy."
The only sensible way to deal with booking.com is to have the email server control open on another tab ready to click to set the email address you gave then to bounce the moment the confirmation email hits your inbox.
You need a holiday on Thursday where you stuff yourself to the gills, watch some football – your kind or ours, it doesn't matter.
Then you'll wake up Friday morning full of energy for shopping.
(And to the nutters that insist on calling us USAians – you know who you are – just stop it. You know the proper word. Just try telling a Canadian that he's an American too and see how far Canadian politeness really goes.)
Correct me if I am wrong but wasnt the tradition of eating turkey at Thanksgiving starteď when the native Americans gifted some turkeys to the first settlers?
I wonder what we'd be eating at Thanksgiving if the gift had been - say - little pussycats
You forgot the Black Friday tradition for idiots waiting for hours in the freezing drizzle outside of Wal-mart or similar at 5AM for the doors to open so the first 50 can grab a child's bicycle or Tickle Me Elmo for half price. There have actually been stores with a police presence outside to maintain order when the doors open.
Now grocery shopping is a different story on Black Friday. Everyone is eating leftovers after the US Thanksgiving holiday, no one wants to face the thought of buying/preparing more food, and all the idiots are Christmas shopping. So there is practically no one in the grocery stores. It's blissful.
"During the meanwhile, LibreOffice is £0. WTF indeed.
(Yes, it DOES work in 99.9999% of all cases ... but I'm certain you can find an really good excuse to be in that 0.0001% of the "Special" people ... )"
The problem is the manager who has managed to produce a Word document which Word allows but which breaks every rule of sane layout and typography, and the helots have to do something with it. Probably even the previous generation of Word won't render it properly, let alone a different office suite.
As that's the intended effect, it's a feature not a bug.
In Brazil, this event is aptly nicknamed Black Fraud day.
Every item that cost 200.00 the week before now has a sale sign "From 500 to 250".
To top it off it doesn't apply JUST to Electronics. Oh no. Supermarkets. Soft drinks. Beer. In stacks that defy gravity and the safety of customers should they collapse. As if I needed a discount to buy Pilsen, Lager or Coca-Cola in large quantities.
Apparently black ballons were on sale too, because they were used for decoration. It looked like a birthday party for Goth children, with mostly black clothing, black nails to match, and purple hair. A complete mockery of what it should have been.
I was going to buy Heineken regardless, not included in the event ---> icon
Don't be silly. Pájaro, translated literally, means bird. The word for wanker in Spain is gilipollas; in much of Latin America it is el pendejo (for boys) or la pendeja (for girls).
Now, colloquialisms and slang can make pretty much any word mean pretty much anything ... and there are a lot of colloquial versions of Spanish around the world.
It's like the old urban myth of the Nova / no-go, which was renamed in South America. (Spain used the Opel Corsa name like the rest of Europe).
Or the actual case of the Toyota MR2, which didn't go down well in French (Merdeux) and was renamed MR-S.
And the Citroen Evasion which was renamed Synergie in the UK, as 'Evasion' tends to mean 'Getting away *with* it' all rather than *from* it all.
The paving slab laptop doesn't sound too bad. Build quality and serviceablity we'll never see again in the name of shaving a few more microns off the thickness.
On other fronts - I was looking for a box to build a new MythTV system. Oh, look here's one in $PopularVendor's list on Black Friday offer. It's the one that takes a full height* optical drive. The options for slim-line and slot-loading are full price. Are they trying to shift old stock.
*For pedants - yes I too remember when that size was called half height. If I put my mind to it I can probably find an original full height, i.e. the same as and 8" drive, 5 3/4" floppy drive in the garage.
I decided at last to get a 1TB £117 SSD on black Friday. Made an order and it was accepted by the usual big retailer. Shortly after I was informed that delivery would be from end of Dec to Feb. Not really miffed since it was for me, not a Christmas present for someone else (the bill would then come much later). Also I had been looking on Currys site at Dyson vacs, but even 10% discount was not enough to tempt me. Next day my web viewing was showing ads from Dyson Direct. Among the offers was an older version (V6) at £180, which I took. How did a Currys view generate a Dyson Direct advert?
My opinion is that older stuff can be better than newer, since manufacturers' research is often directed at product cost cutting rather than improvement. Mr Dyson may be the exception, but improvements are often just tiny increments and not worth the price hike (eg Intel). The gadget Show recently compared old with new and a 12 year old secondhand sound system soundly beat a new one at a higher price. I rest my case.
"My opinion is that older stuff can be better than newer, [...]"
My old dishwasher was advise as uneconomical to repair. The modern one - as advertised - is much quieter. Unfortunately many dishes now need hand washing before a (hopefully) sterilising machine wash.
Ditto the old clothes washing machine. The new one has a special device to stop inlet water leakage into the drum between washes. The old one never had that problem - the new one is often half full of water that has to be emptied before it can be used. To rub salt in the wound the new one is a cold feed only - so cannot use the more economic source of hot water via the gas boiler.
A few years ago one of my colleagues, visiting from the Netherlands but very familiar with this country, said that he was walking along a London street and stopped for a minute to look at an interesting building, considering taking a photo of it. Almost immediately a queue formed behind him, assuming that he was at the front of a queue for some reason.
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