Posts by BongoJoe 1327 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Apr 2010
I've never understood people who take stuff home in a box. A potted plant, for goodness' sake?
I would simply put what would fit into my pockets and then perhaps consider a small desktop fire for the rest.
Perhaps this may explain why when I was last 'let go' I was told just so over a beer in a remote pub.
My father, back in the sixties, once received a gas bill for £0. 0s 0d and, of course, ignored it.
A reminder letter followed and then a Final Demand. So, he rang up the office to ask how this could be sorted and he was told that the computer needs to see that a payment had been made, so would be kindly send a cheque for no pounds, no shilling and no pennies.
A few days later he received a letter saying that his account was up to date.
Then in the next post a letter from the bank arrived asking him what the hell he was playing at writing cheques for such an amount.
So just because you haven't seen it happen before, doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
No magic, just plain natural science
Not sure of the downvotes. Perhaps those same people who don't know that some water companies in the UK actually employ dowsers.
My father could do it as it happens and he was a straight laced dyed in the wool non-airy-fairy exMod boffin with many an invention to his name.
Without getting into arguments for and against replacing the nuclear deterrent fleet it is worth looking at the figures
One of the arguments that I have against Trident and the ilk is that since Russia and China are owning more and more of the UK where is the milage in them nuking their own property?
"Rather than a full national scheme why not build a short proper proof of concept route."
May I suggest Manchester to Sheffield as an alternative?
The rail system is hopeless and having to go over either Woodhead Pass or Snake Pass to get to the other city is a nighmare especially for the poor sods living in Mottram.
The M25 may be much maligned but it gets people from one to the other rather quickly and there's nothing between these two Northern cities that compare.
And then after the Llyn Celyn reservoir it was decided that it wasn't needed and was an awfully big mistake anyway.
One of the less brilliant decisions by the government, I have to say and, as it happens, I am about five minutes away from it sttting in a motorhome.
is that when a company messes up and offers a refund it always seems to take longer coming back into the account then it does leaving.
There is no reason why the hotel couldn't get someone around to the bank pretty bloody sharpish and deposit a load of notes into her account to pay her back right away.
It's worse, and quite unforgivable, when a company (and I am looking at you here, Eclipse Internet) delays any refunds by sending out a cheque - by second class post.
I hope that the lady in question hauls them over the coals if they don't offer proper compensation and letters of apology for what is effectively fraudulent behaviour.
So if he had married the laptop and in the next Windows 10 update the thing died with a BSOD would Microsoft be up for a murder rap?
Or would the doting husband to be be now unable to remove bits of the machine's hardware because that would be harvesting organs?
All stuff that those crazee Utans need to tell us, I am sure.
Just what I always wanted
To have my packages conveniently delivered onto my roof, or a neighbor's tree!
At least Amazon can't patent that idea because it's already been done...
Wasn't there a case of an executive who was transiting at a US airport. He came in from one country and going out to another, and not passing through US immigration. Yet, once he had disembarked his inbound flight, he was arrested and charged for actions that had happened (and were legal!) in another country.
I believe that he worked for an online betting company. I forget which one now.
When I lived in Antwerp I found that sometimes, when out on a drive along the polders I could cross the border about fifteen times in a morning when pottering around lanes at random just exploring.
As for phone numbers: I can't even remember my current land line number so trying to remember my previous phone numbers for the past fifteen years is a non starter and as my 3 (the network, not the quantity) data SIMs each had a phone number attached and never used as such this is going to be an impossible task.
These are just mind boggling stupid requests and I hate to even think what they consider to be employers and as for the way that I fund my trips...
I don't think that I will attempt to go back there again until sanity is restored.
and that is go and get the stuff for youself. Even go to other supermarkets. It isn't the end of the world.
From here to the nearest Tesco of any size is an a hour and three quarters one way. There's a small ASDA about 40 minutes drive and an Iceland (but they don't deliver as we're too far away). The nearest Waitrose is about twenty minutes further than the Tesco and goodness knows how far the nearest Sainsburys is.
So, yes, we do need to rely on home delivery and the Tesco chaps like coming out here because they have a few drops to make on the same route (and we choose the multi-slot time to make it easier for them) and they enjoy being out here.
When you're living right on the ends of the earth it really is necessary to go for home delivery because otherwise the time spent going to and from the supermarkets, the parking charges if one has to pay them, the fuel costs all add up. Of course we could use the local shops for everything but their range is poor in comparison and, overall, their prices are higher because of convenience. In this sense convenience means a twenty minute drive each way...
As title.
At first glance it could easily be assumed that that Pandora is a part of the PayPal empire. In fact, it would take any amount of digging around to realise that it wasn't.
This, to me, looks a lazy way to take a ride hitching on someone else's coat tails. Now, normally I detest companies who get involved in these legal fisticuffs but, here, PayPal needs to do this.
I don't know which marketing brand twonk was responsible but like all marketing brand twonks they should be placed on the B Ark right now. I think North Korea is making a few at the moment.
The Howay web site is hopeless. One of these bloody trendy responsive sites where the letters are three inches tall and unreadable as the eye has to scale each character one by one...
One thing that I couldn't find in the review or on the site concerns the second SIM. I have one of these dual SIMs in my WhineyFox and in areas where there's not good signal strength (i.e. where folk are blessed by no street lights) the second card is useless.
What's the story with the second SIM on this phone? Does it work in the Real World or do I have to be sitting rubbing shoulders with some twonk with a pork pie hat and beard, drinking a PratteLatte in a metrosexual built up area?
Yours slightly riled up because techical reviews don't seem to be as technical as they used to.
As of next week I am going to live on a motorhome and travelling with a dongle. Good luck to anyone trying to work out my Geo-IP address. One week I could be here, another week I could be abroad in England or even in Scotland.
Sometimes I feel we should be swapping phones and routers with people at random.
Quite.
On one Stevie Wonder track, on a decent rig, one can hear a squeaking bass pedal and on one of my favourite Van Halen tracks, on a similar rig, is utterly spoiled by the fret buzz on Alex' acoustic which isn't audible on other kit.
Sometimes good kit, which need not be expensive, is too good for stuff which was recorded years ago that the engineers then couldn't hear.
- Not following MS' guide lines (e.g. using undocumented APIs, assuming drive letters & folder locations)
I would think that I have got into more compatability issues by coding along to MS' guidelines.
And having looked at some MSDN over the decades I have wondered if they, internally, were following another set of standards, i.e. guidelines, to those that they were giving us developers who were Outside The Asylum.
Because I am a one man company with an application written in Visual Studio 6 which extends to over 130,000 lines of code and I don't have the time to rewrite it for .Net.
And why would I need to rewrite it? Because there seems to be a discrepency between how I and Microsoft define 'compatability' when it comes to backward compatability.
Under the latest operating systems it simply borks loading into the VS compiler. And there was me at the turn of the century choosing that operating system and Microsoft because then back in those heady days things were steady, stable and supported.
So, unless I stop work for a good number of months and recode everything I am stuck with XP. But I would simply just retire first and have done with it all. And if I did move to rewrite everything then it wouldn't be using .Net because I don't trust Microsoft any longer not to change things with .Net.
Which they have done so already.
So, what would you suggest that I do here? Seriously, what is your real world solution? And, oh, in case you ask why I haven't been slowly recoding this over the last fifteen years it's because I have been adding features to the application and things don't stop.
The other day I ordered something over the internet from a largish company. I was waiting for the delivery notification a day or two later when in popped an email from a domain name that could have been a similar sort of company.
It said that the link would give me tracking information for said product. I almost clicked it because I was expecting a product and from a company, as co-incidence would have it, similar in tone to the one purporting to send the message.
I could easily have caused no end of problems here.
I have witnessed people waiting for a delayed DHL delivery click on an 'DHL' email which took days of clearing up. Sensible people too.
4G? I don't even get 3G! I can see the local Vodaphone mast on Mynydd Rhiw from my house which is all of three miles away and, for some reason, it doesn't even carry data.
I think that the nearest proper mast is over in Harlech and that could well be in a completely different time zone as far as we are concerned. Certainly the indication on the 3 Network maps suggest so.
All this crap about 99% of the population being covered is nonsense. Nought percent is covered here.
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