Author: Richard

Damn You Google!

| Richard

{shakes fist}

The other day, I turned up in Birmingham and realised I hadn’t packed a tie, so I needed to wander off and find one. Not knowing the area, but having found a likely shopping centre on Google Maps, I decided to fire up Nokia Maps on my Nokia N95-8GB and use its built-in GPS to give myself walking directions. I had been using this application quite a lot since the start of the year whilst wandering around Birmingham staying in different hotels and having to find my way on foot to a Client’s offices.

So I was disappointed to realise that my subscription to the navigation element of the app. had expired, so I reluctantly renewed it at the cost – whatever it was – and used it to find me way there and back.

Now I prefer the Google Mobile Maps application to Nokia Maps, but that only had driving directions and public transport … except that a couple of days after renewing, I saw an article which mentioned the directions on foot facility in the latest version of the software. Now downloaded to my mobile and yes, indeed it does have foot navigation. And it’s free…

Bugger!

Neighbours…

| Richard

So a new neighbour has moved in opposite and below. He seemed OK when I spoke to him in the garage.

Except…

…he clearly likes a ciggy. How do I know? Well when I come in from work, all you smell in the hallway is ashtrays and there’s even more than a hint of it inside my closed front door!

Grr!

The Latest Bandwagon

| Richard

So the BBC’s Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson is in trouble for calling our glorious leader, Gormless Brown, a “one-eyed, Scottish idiot.”

All sorts of people with their own agendas such as Labour MPs (especially Scottish ones…) and disability activists are hopping onto this latest bandwagon to denounce him and demand that the BBC acts to punish him.

Why?

El Gordo is indeed one-eyed. Fact.

He is Scottish. Fact.

He is an idiot. Opinion.

And?

For what it’s worth, I think Jeremy Clarkson is a twat. That’s my opinion. But frankly the bigger twats are these complete and utter wankers who want political correctness to ruin our society. Fuck the lot of them!

Spam Statistics 2008

| Richard

Here are my numbers for 2008 (2007 stats. in square brackets) broken into two parts:

First half of 2008 (up to 30 June 2008):

227659 e-mails received (plus the GMail ones).

211699 spams filtered by MailWasher Pro.

93% spam.

Second half of 2008 (up to 30 December 2008):

62,319 e-mails received (plus the GMail ones).

41,672 spams filtered by MailWasher Pro.

66% spam.

Combined

289,978 e-mails received (plus the GMail ones) [356,032 so minus 19%] .

253,371 spams filtered by MailWasher Pro [319,499 - minus 21%].

87% spam then.

Commentary

The headline figures look good, but that split is what’s important. Basically in June 2008 with my spam stats. looking like heading for another record, I decided to kill my “catch-all” e-mail set-ups and painstakingly create all legitmate mailboxes and aliases. And with that, the spam stats. have come down dramatically.

I Fought The Law

| Richard

So then. Not a lot of good press for the boys in blue recently.

Despite being stopped from delivering an Unlawful Killing verdict, the jury in the Jean Charles de Menezes inquest chose not to believe the evidence from the police – none of whom are being charged with anything, by the way – that they had shouted warnings before shooting an innocent man, choosing instead to believe the evidence of all the other passengers who heard and saw the whole things and were unanimous in saying that no such warning was given by anyone. So an Open Verdict was the ‘best’ they were allowed to reach.

That they may have lied about it to protect themselves when taken with the appallingly incompetent way in which the whole thing was mishandled is a pretty big indictment on how the police see themselves as being well above the laws they are supposed to enforce.

Of course, it always looks bad when people like Police minister Vernon Coaker has to apologise for telling Parliament that 70 officers were injured dealing with protests at Kingsnorth power station. Why?

“According to information obtained by the Liberal Democrats, Kent Police officers and staff suffered only 12 reportable injuries, four of which involved direct contact with another person.

“The Lib Dems said the eight other injuries included being “stung on finger by possible wasp”, “officer injured sitting in car” and “officer succumbed to sun and heat”.

“Kent Police confirmed that 12 officers were required to retire from duty because of their injuries.”

But of course the reports of all those “injuries” was used to justify the heavy-handed policing and stop and search tactics employed by the police.

On which subject, I should add that I saw on the local BBC News that plans were in place for people to be stopped and searched for drugs and knives when boarding Thames dinner cruise boats this Christmas: we’ll see, because one of the places they mentioned such searches would be taking place is where I’ll be going this week.

I suppose it makes a change for them to stop and search a white, middle-aged professional. A few weeks back, I was travelling through Leytonstone tube station where a large police presence were carrying out a stop and search on black males whilst I walked straight through. Maybe a white, middle-aged professional type in a suit and carrying a laptop case isn’t likely to be committing a crime?

Or perhaps they do. But on a much, much larger scale…

Fail: iTunes Gift Cards

| Richard

“And best of all, iTunes gift cards are convenient and fast. You can buy them online or in hundreds of stores nationwide, email them, print them out or gift select items directly to someone special.”

Well you can … if you have iTunes installed on the machine you are at when you want to make a purchase.

I decided that buying an iTunes gift card might be an option for my niece and when I received an e-mail from Apple advertising them, I clicked on the link.

The landing page, however, looks for iTunes on the machine and if you don’t have it installed – as is the case on my work laptop – then that’s it. No purchase is possible.

iTunes Fail

Fail!

Nokia N95 8GB and Exchange

| Richard

I have resisted buying a BlackBerry – or strictly speaking having one bought for me by the company I work for – for the following reasons:

  1. If I want a phone, I’ll use a phone – the smaller the better, so it fits in my pocket.
  2. If I want to check or send an e-mail then I’ll fire up a laptop and do it on proper hardware.
  3. I don’t want “Sent from my BlackBerry” added to my e-mails!
  4. My Nokia N95 8GB does everything I want: camera, phone, texts, e-mail (I have a special e-mail account set up to be checked on it) and satellite navigation using Co-Pilot software.

But when BlackBerry introduced their Storm, I thought “at last, a BlackBerry that might fit my requirements!” So I spoke to the MD and he said I should go right ahead and get a BlackBerry. I dug a little deeper and found that Orange - who we are switching to – don’t offer the Storm: it’s Vodafone only. And besides, the BlackBerry Storm on Vodafone may not work with Exchange (or it possibly might … for an extra £26 a month on top of your price plan!).

Now as our company e-mail runs on Microsoft Exchange, that rather means that the Storm is as useful to me as a chocolate teapot. And it was slowly becoming apparent that being able to access my e-mail or be advised that e-mail has arrived on the go without needing to fire up a laptop with the Orange 3G dongle was becoming more and more of a requirement, it seemed I was stuffed.

So back to square one. I thought. I asked the IT bods to set up mail forwarding for me, so that incoming e-mail would go to my Exchange account and a copy would be forwarded to an e-mail address I had set up especially for this. I had set up my Nokia N95 8GB to fetch e-mails every 30 minutes and it worked.

Except that replies would appear to come from my own address and wouldn’t be properly synchronised with my work e-mails. So I Googled for “Nokia S60 exchange mail” and found this link to Nokia’s Mail For Exchange.

Downloaded, sent to the phone, installed and set up in a few minutes. Then a few more minutes tweaking the settings so it worked and voila! My Outlook Calendar and Exchange e-mails were sync’d to my phone. I’ve set it up to be connected during my working hours (8.00am to 6.00pm Monday to Friday) and then outside those working periods every four hours – I could have made it more frequently, but one last check at 10.00pm and then once every four hours over the weekend is more than adequate.

And It Just Works!

So I now have my Nokia doing what I want as I want it done.

2008 Motorcycle Show, NEC Birmingham

| Richard

So I went along to see the show on trade day and took my trusty camera with me to take a few snaps.

The show was actually quite disappointing and for the first time in a number of years, Kawasaki did not have a ZRX anywhere to be seen.

I do fancy a Triumph Street Triple R for town use – not to replace the ZRX but just for twatting about on in London.

Anyway, photos are here:

That 1.5% Base Rate Cut and Those Banks

| Richard

So the Bank of England yesterday cut base rates by 1.5% to their lowest level since the 50s.

Now bearing in mind we as taxpayers have pumped billions of pounds into the banking sector after they proved they were all so incompetent to have got themselves into this mess, how do you think they have reacted? Have they passed it on to us to say ‘thank you’ and to help us out of the situation they have put us in?

No. They blame the LIBOR and claim that that is stopping them from passing on the base rate cut. Erm… Sorry, who sets the interbank offered rate? That would be … the banks…