Freezing Fog

When you are driving a fog and road spray coloured car, perhaps you would like to put your dipped headlights on, you fucking cretin. Then we might actually be able to see you.

Also, when the fog isn't there any more, and visibility is up to several hundred yards, turn your fucking fog lights off, the conditions even when at their foggiest weren't really bad enough to merit fog lights anyway.

This has been a public service announcement.

Facefriends

So, you apparently have 35 friends in common with me.

Sorry, you're still a cunt, and I wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire.

Prime Mover

What's the point of Amazon Prime?

I had a free trial of Amazon Prime, which is the fast shipping whatsit from amazon.com, not some tribe from South America... I, of course, forgot to cancel the damned thing and have ended up paying for a year of the service. When it kicked off, it was a good idea - I could get stuff couriered to work the following day, and everything was fabulous... When I could no longer get stuff delivered there, I thought, that's fine, I'll have them send stuff to the house...

I've ordered a bunch of stuff which is sent either courier next day, or Royal Mail special delivery - both of which require a signature on delivery, even though I have a perfectly good letter box that wee packets of DVDs and CDs can be put through safely and securely. So I now have two packages being returned to Amazon. Clearly, they're fuck all use being sent back to Amazon, since I am still after the aforesaid items. The one item that arrived safe and sound was an Amazon marketplace purchase, which came first class a day or two after I had ordered it. Clearly, that's the way forward.

In short, Amazon Prime is a waste of money, and I am an idiot for paying for it. I've made sure it's not set to auto-renew though - I'll be damned if I am going to pay for a service that is essentially completely useless unless you're at the delivery address all the time.

Never seen snow before

Here in Scotland we have just uncovered a new concept in rain. It's like rain, but colder. It's not quite as cold as hail. It's a bastard halfway house called snow.

Clearly, we've never seen it before, since when it fell from the sky, the entire city stopped.

Today, I arranged to go for lunch at the society. I walked to the west end to meet my pal, and then find a chariot to take us there... Half way along George Street, I finally found one. In the hackney conveyance all was not rosy, as we braked suddenly on the slippery roads, going down Leith Walk, due to some fucking idiot walking out in front of the cab. Somehow, we didn't slide - I don't really understand why, given the typical grit coverage from the City of Edinburgh Cuntcil.

People seem to lose all sense of physics when snow happens.

One morning last year while I was walking to the station to go to work, I get to the Tollcross junction just as the lights were changing - the driver coming down Lauriston Place was driving as if conditions were perfect. I hated to break it to her, but they were not. I saw that the vehicle was traveling quite fast, and thought to myself - fuck me, I'm going to get killed if I walk across the road in front of that - and so I stood where I was. The driver duly braked when they would have braked when conditions were normal, then she fishtailed all the way down to the lights. The expression on her face was hilarious. "How can the laws of physics let me down in this way" her face said. Bless.

Actually, it was more of a "FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU........slide sideways.......UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!" Which would have concerned me, had I not been stood behind a robust traffic light pole.

Unite says the strike would have been suspended if perks were restored

Oh really?

Oh really?

The perk mentioned by Auntie Beeb is that staff pay 10% of the normal fare. That's 10% of, not 10% off, just to be clear.

Get back to work you shower of workshy gits.

Unite will soon reap what it has sown when BA gets humped by the strikes, the economy and the ash, and sacks the lot of the workshy staff.

Email address pARSErs on web forms

I am fed up with people doing stupid things when checking email addresses on web forms. Apparently other people are too...

The main thing that really gets on my tits is this...
+ is an allowed character in an email address, for example:

bob@example.com (is an email address)
bob+randomthing@example.com (is the same email address with a +randomthing tag which helps people filter their mail appropriately, and saves people creating different email aliases for things.)

Far too many web forms do utterly stupid "sanity" checks on the email addresses entered, and are just wrong.

Stop it you fucking morons, read the RFC. It is the RFC that tells us what makes an email address acceptable or not, not whatever magical idea just popped in to your head. They're called standards for a reason.

Edinburgh council roads survey

Oh go on... Tell them what you think of their services...

Road Services Survey

Give 'em both barrels!

The survey broke a couple of times for me yesterday evening, but eventually it seemed to submit my results (probably to the bit bucket).

Bullshit bingo

The Hootsman tells us a rather amusing story of bullshit bingo throughout the country.

Please remember to play along at your own place of business.

When I was working for a .com in Texas, I recall they had a penchant for using such bullshit as "reduction in force" for sacking people. "going forward" was a particular favourite of the marketroids. We even had a mention of "family jewels" rather than what I hope they meant; "crown jewels".

More recently, I have been exposed to such crap as "webinar", "leverage", and "do the needful".

Tell people at your place of work to say what the fuck it is they mean.