Author: Richard

More Tea, Vicar?

| Richard

OK, maybe not tea, but coffee.

Something that I find bewildering is the need by many office workers in London – and I assume this isn’t just confined to London – to wander around before and after work clutching cardboard cups filled with expensive coffee from all those coffee shop chains.

Why?

OK, as anyone who knows me knows, I’m a bit of an addict when it comes to caffeine and I do appreciate being able to grab a cup and sit at one of their tables and watch the world go by when I have time to kill before visiting a Client. But why would I want to buy an expensive – and let’s face it, not really all that good – cup of coffee on my way to the office I work at, when I can (and do) make myself one in the office kitchen when I arrive?

Maybe I just don’t get the whole yuppie fashion thing?

ORLY?

| Richard

And the award for Most Pointless Text Message today goes to Vodafone:

“We continually invest in our network to provide a reliable service & you’ll be pleased to know we’ve now improved coverage in an area where you use your mobile.”

Excellent! Which area is that? Given that I live in South-East London during the week, work in South London, visit clients in Central London twice a week and travel home to Norfolk each weekend, wouldn’t it have been an idea to tell me which area had been improved?

British Gas

| Richard

A little bit of fun and games today thanks to the British Gas web site. I wanted to change my log-in details as a usual security update so I logged in and accessed my account. I chose a new password and submitted it and an error was thrown up: basically the chosen password was too short.

So I went back in again and tried once more with a much longer password. This time, it failed again as the password has to include at least one number.

So I tried again.

Now wouldn’t it be good if they could have told me that the password had to be between x and y characters long and include at least one number and one letter in the same error message? Sloppy coding, boys…

Air Miles

| Richard

So it seems as though Gary Glitter has decided that after being in one place for a few years, he’d better start earning some more air miles by travelling around from location to location in the Far East.

If that is the case, then he’d be well-served by not returning to the UK as there are plans afoot to slap a Foreign Travel Order on him which would prevent him travelling abroad from here. That would scupper any plans he might have to get access to decent airport lounges in the future by upgrading from blue to gold or platinum frequent flyer programmes.

So Long, iCards

| Richard

I found out very recently that possibly my favourite free service on the Internet is no more. It’s a sad loss.

A friend was celebrating their birthday, so as usual I decided to go to Apple’s iCard site to send them an iCard. These were electronic greeting cards: you selected the image you wanted, selected the typeface, wrote your greeting, added the recipient’s e-mail address and clicked the send button. The recipient would then receive an e-mail from you with the card as a JPEG attachment. Simple, elegant and spam-free.

For some reason, it was a service that Apple provided free of charge despite being at least nominally part of their .Mac package – I had this for a while but decided it wasn’t worth the money to me as I had more than enough provision elsewhere.

And It Just Worked.

But now Apple has rolled out its MobileMe service and has confirmed that the iCards service is no longer available. Their suggested solution?

“If you do not use Mac OS X v10.5, there are many third-party greeting card services that are available online that can easily be located using your favorite Internet search engine.”

That’s as may be, but without exception – in my experience – they’re all shite and/or look like Spam/dodgy sites. Another blogger, Thomas Fitzgerald, puts it very well:

“Most e-card sites and services offer either advertising riddled flash cards or ridiculous website hoop jumping for the recipient to receive their card. Many offer poor quality animation and annoying sound in something that looks more like spam than a greeting card. Apple’s solution on the other hand was incredibly simple. They licensed some high quality artwork and photography and made it super simple to both send and receive. For the sender, you simply select an image, add your message, select the recipient and click send. On the receiver’s end they simply got an email with a jpeg of the card and message attached to the email. No jumping through hoops, no clicking through websites, no barrage of advertising. Simple, effective, elegant, and unfortunately, soon to be gone.”

Amen to that.

Internet Exploder

| Richard

You know I am starting to get more than a little ticked off with Internet Explorer 7 on Tablet PCs. It seems to be incapable of coping with the closure of a tab when that tab (or maybe the next ‘live’ tab) is showing anything modern like a web 2.0 site or some such social networking site. What happens is simply that the program stops working and sometimes allows itself to be closed with the X but more often than not requires the task manager to close it.

Quote of the Day

| Richard

When Internet Explorer died again as I had the audacity to close a tab, I was amused at the suggestion it came up with to help:

Problem caused by Windows

This problem was caused by Windows, which was created by Microsoft Corporation. Currently, there is no solution for the problem that you reported.

{roffle}