Recently in Rant Category

I just received a credit card offer from Capital One in the post today. They offered me a credit card with a 34.94% APR. Yes, thats right, 34.94%. Lets put this in perspective.

Lets say on your 18th Birthday your parents give you £100. Being sensible you invest this in a pension scheme which of course saves you tax etc. Over the next 45 years the pension scheme earns 34.94% interest annually. Guess how much you would be worth when you reach 65 years of age.

£670 Million

Lets say mum and dad could afford to give you £5000 pounds and you did the same with this. How much would you be worth at retirement.

£33.5 Billion

For our American cousins thats

$65.3 Billion

You'd be the richest person on the planet by a long margin. Bill Gates would be asking you to dinner.

To say I was dumb struck is an understatement. I had a look on their website and they are offering credit cards for 9.9% APR. So if you take their mail offer up they charging you 3.5 times more than on line customers. What customers are unlikely to check on line? Yes, the elderly and low income.

I don't know about anyone else but charging 34.94% interest seems morally wrong to me. I recently read the book Super Crunchers and to be honest I am pretty sure that I am just one of a random selection of customers they have sent offers to.

Capital One have been pioneering the use of random statistical tests to see where customer pain points are. It works like this.

100,000 customers get offered credit cards (the numbers following are just examples). The customers are broke up into random segments where

25% get offered the credit cards at 34.94%
25% get offered the credit cards at 24.94%
25% get offered the credit cards at 14.94%
25% get offered the credit cards at 9.94%

They then count how many people in each segment take the offer up. Capital One can then work out where the maximum profit point is. This sort of thing is going on all the time so I shouldn't be that annoyed about it but I just cannot help feeling it's wrong.

Note: For these people who scoff at me not including inflation try the calculation where we assume our enterprising little investor saves the same amount each year plus another 10%.

I complained recently to Virgin Media about problems with my account. Well, it gets better. Have a look at the following two numbers, numbers are in bits per second:

1. 56000      This is the theoretical speed of an ordinary dial up.
   
2. 147456    This is currently the average speed of my connection

Not bad.  Virgin Media is 3 times faster than a dial up. Wow, slow down. The really shitty part is that I am paying for the following speed.

1. 2000000

If we apply some simple maths to this we get:

2000000 / 147456 == 13.5

This means that my Virgin media bandwidth is 13.5 slower than what I'm paying for. At the current rate I would have to pay about £250 to get a real 2Mbit connection. Should I complain again...... Whats the point, I get through to someone who can only check the cable modem. You spend ages on the phone and they tell you nothing is wrong.

I hate changing services but this is becoming insane.

I was recently approached by a member of the St. Nicholas (East Dereham, Image on the right taken from Simon at the Norfolk Churches website) committee and was asked to go over a proposal from Daniel Gibbins. This committee member had some misgivings about the whole thing hence contacting me. He assumed that because I work for Yahoo! and bore him half to tears about websites a lot I might know a bit about websites, he was right.

Anyway, it took me about five minutes to realize that Daniel Gibbins is a novice posing as a professional. Professional web anything and Daniel should not be mentioned in the same sentence. This is not a particularly uncommon thing. For instance:

• Honest Tradseman or Cowboy.
• Car Dealer or Wheeler Dealer.

Sometimes people are just misguided, they have done a two month DIY course and they consider themselves plumbers, brickies or joiners. It's an ongoing war professionals in any trade or profession have.

The story gets better though.

I decided that rather than let Daniel take the money from the church I'd be prepared to do the thing for cost price (not charge for my time) which would be cheaper. I would also go through a proper requirements gathering process etc and provide them with a much more tailored solution. I am not normally that charitable, it just happens that the committee member that approached me is my future father in law and of course this makes his daughter my bosswife to be.

The problem I had though is, how do I tell the church committee that Daniel Gibbins might be a conman without sounding like a tosser.

I could tell them that his DNS servers are running on the same class C network, not necessarily a bad thing for toy websites but not exactly something you should be selling in a commercial package. Or I could list evidence pointing to him being a reseller for Heart Internet. I could list some severe flaws on his websites, tell them that I don't believe the guy is a Christian, at least by my definition, or that most of the websites he has done are awful. His content is mostly vapour. Most of this they would not understand. For instance if you do not understand what dynamic content is how am I meant to explain DNS and why you need two servers.

After a lot of discussion with the committee member it was agree that I would meet with some of the committee to go over some ideas etc. I walked them through some bits and bobs and the whole thing took a couple of hours. This was mostly to show them possibilities for the website and to try and show them just how much more could easily be provided over and above Daniels proposal. I was asked some very pertinent questions and a lot of good ideas came out of the meeting. I was also asked some questions about what I thought of Daniels proposal and I answered them honestly, I only wish I had not been so damned politically correct. A couple of the committee members gave me the impression they had some concern about Daniel but I got the distinct feeling that the whole meeting had been a waste of time and that the decision had already been made by a higher authority.

Shortly afterwards the committee met with Daniel, and as I suspected "they" (I am not sure if the committee was actually involved in the decision or not hence the quotes) decided to go with him.

When I think about it why believe me

• I don't go to church and Daniel says he does.
  
• I don't claim to be a Christian Daniel does.
  
• I didn't wear a suit, Daniel did.
• I didn't wear a cross on my lapel apparently Daniel did.

I knew something was fishy and I am pretty sure more than one member of the committee suspected something was wrong. I decided at that point to count myself lucky I had not been asked to do the site and not to push any further with it or it might be a bit embarrassing for some people. Besides, shit has a tendency to float so I decided to keep an eye on Google and wait for Daniel to cock things up. Well, I didn't have to wait very long. I searched Google for Daniel Gibbins today and the first entry read Daniel Gibbins LIAR. For those wondering the image on the right is Daniel Gibbins (Image taken from ezinearticles.com where Daniel has created an expert Bio by stealing copying content from books)
 

I searched further down the results for entries about Daniel Gibbins and a lot of people have been giving him quite a pasting. Now, we all make mistakes, I'm as likely as the next person to cock something but what a pasting.

The basic story is this:

Daniel Gibbins Stole Content from other peoples books and sold this as his own. Is this dishonest? Hell yes, it's illegal. Daniel has infringed various copyright laws and in more than one country. He has been selling these articles to make himself look like a professional web designer. Of course this is not all he has been up to.

Off the back of his new found web professional status he sets up two companies/websites

• cortinawebsolutions.co.uk
• churchwebsitedesign.org.uk
  

Of course he's a Christian so the next logical step is to help the church, so he starts canvassing them for business. Now at this point we might think that Daniel is not very clever. But, if we dig deeper we would find that the price Daniel is offering for his services is suspiciously close to an amount each diocese was offered to build themselves a website. I can hear people saying that this is just being enterprising. I also found it odd that he offered huge reductions to get close to this price. Is he doing this genuinely because it's the church or has it more to do with thats all the church could spend.

In Daniels case I personally believe that this can only be attributed to one of two things.

• Daniel Gibbins is a Conman.
  
• He's not very net savvy and does not realize the severity of what he has done (hence Gibbon in the title).  

Now. If he is a professional web designer then he fully understands what he has done. This is schoolboy error stuff i.e. only someone under 12 might be able to claim it was a mistake. Even so, most schoolboys understand what plagiarism is. In either case this is not someone you want to be running your website for you.

My advice to Daniel:

First off, make a public apology. Especially to Rich. He should then start taking down all the copyright infringed content. I would also recommend he find suitable homes for websites he has already done on the back of a lie. I don't doubt that the other sites will learn soon enough about what has happened and the fall out could be quite bad. You don't want the church publicly blacklisting you or your business online.

My advice to the Owners of websites hosted by Daniel.

Get out before the shit hits the fan. Download all your content from the website and get it hosted somewhere sensible. Here are a few key points to get you started.

1. Don't confront him till you have all your content and control of your domain.

I am not suggesting he would take your site down but....

2. Get control of the domain name.

If you don't have the admin password to control the domain you need to get it and then change it. This is really important. You must have this to control your website.

3. Backup your website to your PC.

To do this you need to save each page or run a tool that will mirror the website. If you do not know how to do this let me know the website and I will download it for you and send you a zipped up file. Make sure you get all the images etc.

4. Find another hosting provider.

Hosting a website is cheap. You should not really be paying any more than £10 a month for a static website. You can get cheaper deals but if it's over a tenner they might be selling you a big white elephant. If you have a dynamic site (most of Daniels sites are static) then the hosting might cost more. For instance a wordpress blog. Again it still won't be very expensive. You can get reasonably reliable small hosting deals for £3 per month so shop around.

5. If you know other site owners using Daniel help them.

6. Put something on your website saying you are no longer associated with the church web design project otherwise he will be able to con more unsuspecting victims into giving Daniel their money.

Another thing for Daniel to bear in mind is that employers, particular in the technical area use Google and Yahoo! to research people so a job change might be a good idea.

I might add I am not a web designer myself. I'm a web developer, this means I tend to work at the back end of websites, this is part of what I do at Yahoo! If I have ever called myself a professional web designer, I meant professional web developer. Yes, there is a difference and I am sometimes guilty of using one when I should be using the other ;)

NTL hell is now Virgin Media Hell. I have had a fault on my broadband for over a week now. It's Christmas and I am not using my broadband much so I have not been overly bothered about it. I made the stupid assumption that Virgin Media would be hot on the heels of any faults.

How wrong was I!

I checked on their website to see if there is a local fault and according to Virgin Media there is no faults in my area. I decided to report a fault....

Virgin Media, in their wisdom have introduced a charge to call their technical support line. Basically to report a fault I need to pay them 25p per minute. Yes, you heard that correctly! I spoke to a different helpline on the local rate and was told that I would be refunded if it was a genuine fault so this leaves me in a bit of a dilemma.

You see, I remember spending in excess of 40 minutes on the old NTL technical support lines and eventually hanging up. So is Virgin Media different Do I risk spending £10 waiting for them to answer my call? I wonder if they have seen a drop in fault reports since introducing the charge.

I decided to call and see how long it takes to get through because with no Internet connection I cannot work. So the story goes like this.

I called them at 12:39:10

and I let it ring until 12:41 (I was surprised I didn't get music)

Got someone at 12:41:20

and left the phone at 12:50

so the call came to over £2 but I was told I would get a refund. I was also told that there is no problem with the cable modem and that if an engineer comes out they will run the exact same tests and if there is no fault they will bill me £25. I decided against calling out an engineer.

Now. I have checked all my gear, it works fine. I have connected to two different servers in two different countries to make sure it is not the ISP the server resides with. Same problem, intermittent connection. So the lowest common denominator is Virgin Media. Unfortunately Virgin Media technical support are unable to diagnose faults unless it's the cable modem. So this leave me with a severe problem.

The Internet is where I make my living. if I can't work the mortgage won't get paid. So! Do I stay with Virgin Media or do I go with BT?

I am sure BT has it's own problems but they might be able to diagnose faults and therefore fix problems better than Virgin Media.

Has anyone else switched from Virgin Media to BT?

The title is not a spelling mistake.

This is worth a read. Its fairly tongue in cheek but good fun.

The Last Language War / Language Trolling Post You'll Ever Need To Read (Hopefully)

The comments are a testament to how dumb some people are. Bits like:

"Oh.... Why didn't you include my language".
"I cannot believe you didn't include the language X"
"Language X would have been the cool kid, splurgh"
"Blah blah blah"

Why are developers so petty, why do they not get sarcasm. I have heard developers, between bouts of mental wanking, talk about "Fashion Victims" as if these people had some sort of disease. Wake up, we're all susceptible to fashion. You might be fashion conscious about:

Clothes.
Programming Languages.
Cars.
Gadgets.
Processors.
Pets.

Yours might not be on the list but I am sure that between us we could find something. Does this make us all fashcists?

Mike Willis are a bunch of cowboys. We used them to rent a flat for us. I have never dealt with a firm that lied through thier teeth as much as these guys. Here is a list of some of their failings:

1. Failure to pass on money from the tenant on more than one occasion
3. Failure to carry out spot checks on the property as agreed.
4. Failure to advise us that there was a problem with the washing machine for over 4 weeks.
5. Failure to arrange an electrician to complete works on the property.

Do not use Mike Willis for anything, they are by far the most unprofessional firm we have ever dealt with.

I recently came across this article.

Making that vital development decision

please don't go off and read it. I was looking forward to reading it until I read the first paragraph.

I believe that within five years, all software development will be based on one of two virtual-machine technologies: Sun’s J2EE, which is based on its JVM (Java Virtual Machine), and Microsoft’s .NET Framework, which is based on the CLR (Common Language Runtime).

I made the interesting parts bold.

This article was written in "Jun 13, 2002". What this means is that in a couple of weeks time 80% of all development work on the planet will cease. No more work will be carried out on Linux, Windows, macintosh, not to mention more than 80% of all dynamic websites.

After reading that sentence I was unable to continue. Anyone who believes something like that or expects me to is hardly qualified to make a rational judgement about J2EE or .NET.

I just noticed that if you click on iGoogle from that point forward if you go to the normal google page it redirects you to iGoogle. What were they thinking.

I belive one of Google's core values is "Do No Evil".

I have just watched "Lord of War" and from it I got the impression that some peoples definition of evil are very different than others. I think the same can be said about Google in as much as that their definition may be a bit different than mine.

I have spent the last two months worried sick that I have been shunned by Google for some unknown transgression with regards spamming their search engine which is something I go out of my way not to do. I have hunted a fair bit online to find out why my website has take such a massive hit in earings and today I think I found it.

Google has been releasing a software update called "BigDaddy", I have no idea what this is going to do for Google but according to some blogs I have read in particular Matts this new update will pave the way for expansion etc of Google blah blah.

Meanwhile I wait in the background wondering if this is the cause of my dilema. I read the forums, search Google for Google related information (Ironic isn't it) and generally worry myself sick thinking I have done something wrong and have been penalised.

I don't know about you but if Google could do something about my distress but chooses not too then surely this could be construed as being a little bit evil. On the other hand if releasing some bulletin etc impacted the masses more than us web masters then that could also be construed as being a little bit evil as well, probably more so. It's certainly a sticky situation to be in regardless of what side of the fence you are on. However they did say "Do No Evil". If you have read "Built to Last" it would appear that Google has not yet seen the Genuis of the AND" and would appear to still side on the "The Tyranny of the Or".

Why can they not keep us informed of these impacts and make massive changes. Would it affect share price that much, is their share price more important to them than their users?

I have no idea what has happened over that last few months (which is the biggest problem) but whatever they have done I appear to be on the wrong end of it and have never felt as let down by them as I do now. It is small comfort to know that this happens fairly regulary and given enough time it will all sort itself out.

I really hope it does.

NTL are really crap. If you have a choice between NTL and someone else check the competition out because they would be hard pushed to be as bad as NTL.

I have been complaining for over a month now that my connection is very slow in the evenings and every time I phone up I end up taking to someone in india who insists that we go through the same script every time.

It goes roughly as follows:

I supply a postcode and they are unable to find it on their system. I have told them repeatedly that the post code they have on their system for us is wrong. I give them the one they have on the sytem for us but we have moved from theh script a little bit. They inform me they still cannot find the post code (or cannot be bothered looking) so they ask me to get the mac address of the modem. I get the distinct feeling its easier for them to have the mac address.

Once armed with this they seem to find some details that could be ours. They then ask to speak to Jenny. I explain that I have been on the account for a long time now and they still insist that Jenny must come to the phone. They still don't recognise my name on the account and insist that Jenny confirms I am who I say I am, utter shambles. Not only are they wasting my time they are wasting Jenny's. What's really frustrating is that we go through this EVERY time we have a problem which is failry frequently. Jenny tells them that I am authorized to be on the account so we continue (at this poing I know they have not updated any account details to reflect what they have learnt ie they have a bad postcode on their system and that I am an account holder).

I am then asked what firewalls, virus software etc I am using. If I tell them that I have anything running I will be asked to turn it off. They then ask me if I run any filesharing software, err no. I am then asked if I have a router connected to the modem, at this poing if you say yes you are in unknown territory because they won't support that configuration (Their highly trained operatives are not highly trained in IT, they are highly trained in call handling times which means following a script). After some more questions which I have answered on several occassions dotted over the last month I eventually get the opportunity to get an engineer to come out.

Some people would be glad they got through etc but we have had an engineer out who changed our modem. I could have told them then what the problem is. The problem is as follows.

During the evenings our bandwidth drops to dial up speeds. It does not take a rocket scientist to realise that more people are coming on line in the evenings and NTL are not able to cope with the bandwidth.

My next port of call will be trading standards because we are paying for a 2Mb connection and its taking google.com up to 20 seconds to load. We are not getting what we are paying for by a longshot.

getting the following sort of speeds:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/robin.d.h.walker/speedtest.html?1139855238265

Mon, 13 Feb 2006 18:27:48 GMT
1st 128K took 563 ms = 232810 Bytes/sec = approx 1937 kbits/sec
2nd 128K took 531 ms = 246840 Bytes/sec = approx 2054 kbits/sec
3rd 128K took 531 ms = 246840 Bytes/sec = approx 2054 kbits/sec
4th 128K took 547 ms = 239620 Bytes/sec = approx 1994 kbits/sec

less that 3kbps.

If I were to ask you what the most fundamental things a bank must never do I am sure there are a few who would pick the following answer.

Loose your money

To open an abbey business account you need to deposit £50+ worth of cash. I opened an account with £120 and guess what? The account opened but the money was missing.

I have spent several weeks trying to get through to someone on the phone about this matter. I spoke to someone a few weeks ago at the weekend and was told I had to call them during the week but they would get someone to call me. Guess what, no call.

I went with this Business Account because it looked like a good deal but I am slowly realizing that it might not have been a good idea, their customer service is severely limited. Every time I phone during the week I get held up in queues for twenty minutes.

As an update: It took me two years to get the money. Yes, they kept the money for 24 months. If I was to withhold money from any company that long I would end up in court. However, I was warned that if I tried to take them to court that I might not get the full amount back especially if I did not put in enough effort to get it. It seems crazy that a company can hold your money and then you need to work to get it back out of them.

Abbey never apologized or gave me any interest on this money. Surely there must be some law in the UK to protect people against this sort of behaviour?

I have just been combing through the logs because I have been getting hit quite hard recently and was wondering who by and I noticed the strangest thing.

I noticed the following IP address was cropping up under different referrers.

216.32.75.122

I also found the following blog entry about Layered Tech supporting referrer spam

So far I have noticed them masquerading as the following referrers.

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; FunWebProducts-MyTotalSearch; SV1)" 1 www.uklug.co.uk
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)" 0 www.uklug.co.uk
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)" 0 www.uklug.co.uk
Mozilla/2.0 (compatible; Ask Jeeves/Teoma; +http://sp.ask.com/docs/about/tech_crawling.html)" 0 www.uklug.co.uk
Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; BecomeBot/2.3; MSIE 6.0 compatible; +http://www.become.com/site_owners.html)" 0 www.uklug.co.uk
aipbot/1.0 (aipbot; http://www.aipbot.com; aipbot@aipbot.com)" 0 www.uklug.co.uk

I noticed tonight that the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is being replaced by www.webster.com.

How do I know this? Well, have a look for

ClAMOUR

what on earth do they mean chiefly British variant of CLAMOR

BOLLIX. What they should really mean is

CLAMOUR
proper spelling of our americanised terrible spelling of CLAMOR

All jokes aside I use webster.com almost religiously and have even adopted color over colour. Having looked at the OED website it's little wonder why people are now using the webster.com dictionary over the OED. The OED has pushed a small search box over to the right hand side corner and filled the screen with:

1: A word of the day

If I wanted a word of the day I would go looking for it. Its a bit daft to place this "nice feature" above the dictionary.

2: A quote From.

I own the "Oxford Dictionary of Quotations" and if I am after a quote I am not looking for a Dictionary.

3, A word From (some foreign language).

Who cares how the French say "shit", wheres the ENGLISH dictionary .....(I o)

I think the OED is selling itself short. I know that for some people Webster is the be all and end all but I am still a believer in the OED. I would like the OED to retain the definitive English dictionary crown but judging from their website this looks unlikely. They should really place more emphasis on it than they do or they risk becoming runner up to webster.com or some other more techno savvy company.

I just noticed the following in an article on the BBC. I admit the article was written quite a while ago but it still struck me as stating the bloody obvious.

Youngsters in Luton can now get a fix of heroin delivered faster than a pizza, a community drugs project has warned.

so whats new. I was under the impression that it pretty much the same everywhere. Only just yesterday I saw a drug deal take place on the way home from work. I regularly smell "Grass" when walking through Luton town center, particularly at night.

The articles also goes on to say

drugs use was on the rise among Asian communities in the UK.

Again, whats new. Its on the increase everywhere. To top it off though I also liked the following statement.

They also warned that drug dealers were seen by teenagers as role models.

Do I have to ask "whats new" again. Why should teenagers not look up to people who drive around in brand new BMW's and Merc's. When 'Dad' says

"Son, drugs are bad! Don't do them and don't sell them!"

'Son' then sees dad catch the bus to work while Mr drug dealer sales past with the roof down in a BMW convertible.

What message are we sending to the kids when this happens.

"Thats society won't tolerate drugs."

Errrrrrrrr, wrong answer!

As far as most kids are concerned they see flash cars and bling on the drug dealer, looking at his dad he sees sweat on his brow and a worn out suit on his back.

We are not sending the right message to the teenagers by allowing drug dealers to walk the streets. Lock them up and throw away the key. Of course it costs a lot of money to put people in prison so we tend towards leniency. God forbid we would be too harsh on our criminals and cost the taxpayer more money!

I ordered a set of Non Dell rails from Dell 7 days ago and they where ready to be delivered to me on the Thursday. I though this was great. I got a call on Thursday from Walsh Western saying that they had tried to deliver the rails. I found this very odd because Jenny was in the house. They said they left a card saying they had been there. I phoned Jenny and she had a look for the card. It wasn't there.

Friday: Same thing. They say they left a card and Jenny was off work the whole day but we received no card and have not heard anything from them at all.

Saturday: I called them to ask what the hell was going on and they told me that it would be delivered on Monday.

Monday: No rails, No card, No phone call, Sweet FA. I tried to phone but they all close at 17:30.

TO BE CONTINUED

This is just a bit pathetic although not as pathetic as my recent encounter with Midland Mainline.

The university above is completely fictitious. They have copied Leeds Uni. Compare the following 2 sites

Leeds University

http://www.edenvaleuniversity.net/

They have even left references in the source code of the page to Leeds university. They are selling qualifications. It would appear that some people are using them

http://www.quivivre.com/datadean/ddcv-txt.txt

After reading this guys CV I noticed what appears to be another dodgy site

http://www.wwdlc.net/

I have not seen this "Body" mentioned anywhere else yet they have listed Edenvale as one of their universities.

I just came across www.lamicrogroup.co.uk tonight and had a look their prices and its more expensive to buy from them than it is to go buy from the dell outlet.

Much to my astonishment I then came across www.lamicrogroup.com which has the exact same products and the exact same website except the prices are in dollars. What knocked me for six is that all the servers are half the price of the uk models.

This begs the question, are they ripping off uk customers? It certainly looks like it to me.

We got a delivery from a Chinese restaurant tonight:

The Oriental
2A Granville Road
Luton
Beds
LU1 1PA

When we actually got the meal it we found that there was raw chicken in it. I got a refund and reported them to the local council. I have no idea what else we can do about it. I think they shouldn't be trading if they can't be bothered to cook the food properly. It'll be the last time we order anything from them.

Last year I was looking for work so I registered with gojobsite.co.uk and stuck my CV up their. I actaully did get some leads from it but nothing substantial.

Anyway I seem to get random emails from recruiters that are completely irrelevant. I don't get them often but I do get them and I know that its a bulk mailing system they are using. They have not even looked at the details they just do a mix and match hodge podge and come up with a list, the more the merrier because they know there are plenty of dumb ass people who forward job offers emails all over the place. If you think there is nothing wrong with this then have a read of Sharp Practices.

Anyway I got another one today and I politely asked them to take me off the mailing list. The reply was as follows

The email was sent through an internet candidate database. Your details have come up in a search of keywords from your CV.

Inevitably, there are mistakes made with this type of search, meaning
job descriptions may not be perfectly suited to your profile.

However, we invite candidates to send their CV so that we can update
their profile accordingly on our in-house database

If you no longer wish to receive emails through internet databases,
then this point needs to be raised with any Recruitment websites you are
subscribed to.

If you wish to be included on our in-house database, please reply with
your most up-to-date CV, detailing your ideal position in the body of
the email. We will then call, or email you with details of more suitable
positions

Any questions, do not hesitate in contacting me directly

If I had registered with several recruitment sites how am I meant to tell which one I am to go back to and change. The other thing is, I might be very happy with the other companies that send me job advertisements except his and no internet recruitment company I have come across allows you to selectively choose which "Partners" of theirs are allowed to send you emails.

I know that the laws changed on December 11 2003 so I decided to go looking to see if there was anything I could do about it.

This is what I found

I have asked them to take me off their email list and they have failed to comply. I have replied with pointers to the appropriate materials online and I am awaiting a reply to that. If I get no joy then I will report them.

The music industry is quite crazy. For years they have been milking us like cattle. They continually tout illegal ripping of CD's as the main reason for their high price. This seems like a nice cop out. Its in their interests to keep the price high because there is always a base of people who buy CD's regardless of how easy they are to copy.

There are 3 types of people.

1. People who buy CD's
2. People who buy CD's and also accept illegal copies.
3. People who deal mainly with illegal copies

I am one of those Tyoe 1 suckers. People of Type 2 would be more likely to become Type 1 if prices where lower. The people of Type 3 are unlikely to mend their ways unless prices drop significantly but there will always be a pirate market its the size of it that matters.

I like to own the originals but prices are extortionate and illegal copies are looking very tempting. I buy a CD every couple of weeks and always look for the bargains, rarely will I ever buy a CD that costs me more than £8 (still expensive). One exception was a Metallica's Black album that cost a wopping £15. I really wanted it so I had to take another shafting up the arse from the industry to buy it.

When I come home I burn the CD then put it back in its case for safe keeping. I need to do this because CD's are so bloody expensive and CD's get scratched. I also like to have them on my mp3 player for the train journey to work.

We now have Copyright protected CD's which means I am not able to make copies of them. I know I can copy them but its against the law to make a copy for my own use, this is a pile of crap. I for one will not be buying any Copyright protected CD's. In the age of MP3's there is really not much point in owning a CD that you cannot copy so why buy it. Then of course some players won't actually play these CD's.

I think the music industry are hanging themeselves. They are making it harder and harder for people to use the music the way they want it and more an more people are sick to death of paying high prices for it. They need to make the prices low enough so that its not worth the effort of burning them when you can get them for next to nothing.

There will be a loser in this war and I can guarantee that it will not be the public. Music is getting easier and easier to get hold of or copy and prices are not going down so its only going to get worse. Its about time the music industry realised that you can only shaft Joe public for so long before it all goes horribly wrong.

I bought two of these as Christmas presents ie one for me ;) and one for Jenny. I am not really a gadget person but I knew I wanted plenty of storage and the H320 has 20Gb which should keep me happy.

What I didn't know is that iRiver released an American version that has had the hardware castrated by removing USB TO GO (USBTG). This was the facility to plug another USB device into the other and copy files between them in particular cameras. From what I understand hardly any hardware was supported but it still seemed to be a daft decision. I got both the units in Manhattan so I have the American version, bollix.

For the low down on the USBTG issue visit www.misticriver.net

My initial impressions were very good, it looks sleek enough and although there are plenty of complaints about it being a bit big I like the size of it. I have also read a lot of complaints about usability and I for one am getting along fine with it. Of course, I read the instructions which some people seem to miss and assume that it should just do it the way their last one did or the same way an iPod works. It is easy to figure out an like most new bits of tech with a lot of feature it takes a wee bit of getting used to.

I plugged it into the PC and after a while (it needs some charge before it will work on the PC) I tried to write some files to it. This was a pain in the ass because the device is unable to be charged and do this stuff at the same time so I had to wait a while before I could switch data mode and move some files on.

First off it does not tell me in the manual which port I am meant to use to transfer files, I guessed data and managed to get it to work but being curious I tried to see what would happen if I plugged in the media port. On the manual the media port is meant to show up as a device the same way the data port did but it kept asking me for a driver so I can only assume there is something very wrong there since it is touted as plug and play with no need for drivers unless you are using Win98. This annoyed me because now I have a port on the unit and I have no idea what it is for.

Earphones: I have no idea why they supplied these because they are complete shit. They don't fit and keep falling out but then they all do in my ears but what makes these crap is that as the volume goes up I start to get all sort of crap coming through them. I am assuming they are faulty because they shouldn't sound that bad out of the box. I have tried them on several different songs using different bit rates etc and they are still crap.

Case: This is OK. Its sturdy and will save the unit from some damage but I have to ask why they blocked the view of the screen. I suppose they want you to purchase the remote control or buy a better case.

Radio: I am unable to get more than three stations and this is in the center of London so I think the radio is a bit crap as well. I will keep trying because this is one feature I really need, I like Radio 2 and Radio 4 so if I cannot get these I will be sending them back. (I know about the European setting on the radio)

Would I buy the iRiver again?

Not at UK prices, its a rip off. I also need to spend more money getting headphones which is another pain. My advice is if you can get either the HI120 or the H140 it would be money better spent. There is just too many little things that tell me that the H320 is a half arsed attempt at an update for the H100 series.

As a first impression with the company I am disappointed so will be purchasing somewhere else in future.

I am currently trying to get the H320 to work in Linux but more in that in another post.

I heard a great saying today.

"do not cast your pearls in front of swine"

This is so true. The context I had heard it is was in reference to people who would not accept Open Source as an alternative to proprietary systems ie you try and convince someone that there is a tool that will do the job and it is free but they insist on spending money on a closed system because free stuff can't possibly be as good, or maybe thats what they know and they don't want to change.

Don't bother with them, let them spend their money and go use your time on someone who deserves and appreciates it. Unfortunately some people are like horses and require their blinkers in order to work otherwise they get spooked.

For those interested in where the saying comes from its the Bible. The original King James says.

"Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you."
(Matt. 7:6).

The first thing I would like to make quite clear is that we cannot proceed on banning fox hunting because its unnecessary. A lot of friends who want the ban argue that it is unnecessary so it should be banned. This argument is rubbish because we all do quite unnecessary things every day just because we want to. There are thousands of sports fisherman and recreational hunters in the UK and it's quite unnecessary that they do it yet we are not about to ban them.

I intend to proceed on the basis of fox hunting being unnecessarily cruel. This is very apparent to me and anyone with a pair of working eyes.

Fox's have been portrayed by the hunters as a farmers worst nightmare and that this little demon kills everything on site and thus the less of them the better in their book. There is some truth in this (see "surplus killing" on Google), fox's are not angels but then neither are domestic cats. Having been raised in a village that loved pigeon racing it was very apparent to us that the cute little kitty cat next door wanted to kill every single bird in the shed and would do so without remorse. What did we do? We made sure that they could not get into the shed. We didn't chase them around the neighborhood with 50 dogs.

Anywhere someone makes a living from the land we will always have a conflict between the farmer and the predator. A farmer has every right to protect his animals from these marauders. However, this does not give anyone the right to be cruel to an animal and most farmers respect this.

Fox hunting is unnecessary because it is actually easier to shoot a fox than it is to gather together a team of hunters with their dogs and chase it across the country. This is the point that I stated earlier that was an insufficient argument to ban fox hunting. What is sufficient is the fact that it's cruel.

The fox is chased down by a team of dogs and then killed. The actual death of the fox may not actually be that pleasant either. Unfortunately a lot of hunters would like you to believe that the fox is killed quickly. This is the biggest lie they seem to push because they know beyond all shadow of a doubt that the fox does not die quickly. It is quite easy to get your hands on a video where you will see a fox being disemboweled and it will still continue to fight until the end. These are the lucky ones......

They unlucky ones are the ones that are smart and go to ground. The fox knows it's being hunted so it determines that if it goes deep enough no natural predator would be getting to it. What the fox doesn't factor in is the human with the shovel (the spade brigade) who is prepared to dig the fox out and let the dogs rip it to shreds.

What we don't hear about are the terrier men who send terriers down after the fox either of which may die from their injuries. There are recorded videos of terrier men digging down to a fox and then setting teams of terriers on the animal until it is killed. The so called men claim that this is not cruel yet it can go on for up to half an hour. It is illegal to dig a badger from its hole. Why then should we not extend the same courtesy to the fox who might happen to have went down a badger sett.

Sending terriers down after a fox is the closest thing these terrier men can get to a dog fight with little or no fear of a prosecution if caught in the act, or even with a video of the act which has happened in the past.

My argument above is weak at best so I will leave you with a much better argument against fox hunting... the facts... Pack of lies

First let me break with the traditional cry about jobs being lost or income or industry being affected in any way etc and that these sorts of things are a good reason to hunt foxes, bollocks. I do not believe that jobs should be kept safe or that we should furnish an industry if this means we would infringe on an animals rights ie cruelty to an animal is just not an option in my book. I also do not believe in some of the practices employed by various hunts to train their dogs etc. Its these things that need to be banned not fox hunting itself, but I digress. I just think that the points above need to be clarified from the outset. i also do not agree with digging a fox out or using terriers to go down after them.

Let me shed some light on some items:

1. Fox hunting is not as cruel as slaughtering animals to put meat on your table.
2. Misinformation and propaganda are the primary weapon of the activist.

Let me deal with point 1.

I was a poultry butcher for a year and we slaughtered in excess of 30,000 animals every day. I know most people assume that animals that go to the slaughter house are treated humanely. I disagree and I can speak from first hand experience. As an example; when the chickens struggled during capture it was not uncommon to break their legs in order to stop them from pecking the hands of the catchers. Its a bit of a shock to hear this isn't it?

Let me give another example.

Pigs. These animals are, on average, more intelligent than dogs, but we slaughter thousands every day for our bacon butties yet we abhor the thought of some culture eating a dog. Even the dumbest animal is able to associate the smell of blood with danger yet we cram pigs etc into slaughter houses where the stench of blood etc is overwhelming. This is the reason pigs become very agitated before they are slaughtered, they know they are about to be killed yet we ignore this and label it as humane.

Last year approximately 14000 foxes where killed due to fox hunting. Over 2.5 million animals where slaughtered today in the UK via various methods from local farmers cutting the throat of an animal to mass slaughter via, so called, humane methods. Believe me that killing a pig in the methods currently employed is not as humane as you would like to think.

The items above may have shed some light on No 2 ie propaganda. For some reason fox hunting has become the No 1 crime in the UK. This is due to political activism, propaganda and the sad fact that a good majority of political activists seek the limelight over what might actually be the correct thing to do. Rather than focusing on the big issues facing our animals and their welfare various sectors have chosen to chase the headlines while millions of animals suffer every day.

This is the ultimate in hypocrisy and anyone worth their salt who is willing to do a little investigation will see this.

But I digress we must of course forget the plight of the dumb pig and follow the media in the plight of the cute little fox.

Foxes are a problem in the UK and farmers lose thousands of animals every year. In fact more farm animals are killed by foxes than are killed by fox hunters after foxes.

If farmers are forced to hunt foxes using guns the odds of a fox surviving reduce dramtically. When a hunt takes place with dogs there is a good chance the fox will get away. If you use a gun there is little chance the fox will survive. In fact Scotland has seen more fox's killed since the ban than before because they are now using guns to kill them. This is another statistic people like to forget.

Now back to the point of fox hunting being cruel.

If you had a choice of the following.

1. You are chased for 20 minutes by someone with a Bow and Arrow and they have evey intention of killing you with it.
2. Someone has made a point of going out with a shotgun with every intention of killing you on sight.

I know which one I would go for.

The sad but immutable fact is that bannig fox hunting is not going to save the fox from some ghastly death which for the most part is a figment of the activists imagination. Humans on the whole have been able to invent much ghastlier ways of killing things than any hound ever will. I have seen plenty of animals take some buck shot from a shotgun and get away. God only knows what happens to this animal if we don't hit it first time. It probably lies injured somewhere and could die from anything as bad as maggots in the wound, to infection. This is of course much more humane.........

Remember that a hound weighs in on average at 60lbs and a fox at 14lbs, so this fabrication that a fox gets eaten alive or torn limb from limb is a bit of an exageration. The first hound to get the fox is more than capable and likely to kill it instantly in a single bite. Activists love to dwell on the dramatisation of "tearing to shreds" which they do do, but by this point the animal is already dead. I am quite capable of tearing any dead animal to pieces which is an unpleasant thought, but the fact remains that the animal is already dead and I am hardly being cruel to it.

It would appear to me that a ban on fox hunting is just replacing one recognised method of killing an animal with a more efficient method with no regard for how cruel or not either method happens to be. What we have is a bunch of headline chasers who are after the limelight this issue seems to shed on them and not much else.

I have read a lot over the last few weeks about fox hunting and have been hearing loads of it over the last year. I love to play devils advocate when people get on their high horse about something so I have decided to set myself a little challenge.

Give an argument for and against Fox Hunting. Links to the entries can be found below.

Some background.

I was raised in Northern Ireland and am not adverse to hunting having shot many a rat, rabbit, crow, pigeon, hare etc. In fact I would have shot pretty much anything that moved for the first 17 years of my life. This was in part due to my father being of a similar ilk ie if it moves its edible, not entirely true. I also went fishing a lot. This is not to say that I was cruel but more on that some other time. I am telling everyone this in order to get everything out in the open before I start each of the entries. I am going to find it hard to give a good argument for one of them but I will leave it a while before I express which one I believe in.

Please note that I will be employing every tactic in the book to convince you one way or the other. People with open minds will love this sort of thing, zealots from both sides of the fence can go fsck themselves. I don't agree with the currrent trend of violent activism that seems to be the trend today. We all have the vote!

Let me also say that I disagree with the parliament act being invoked to settle this affair. I don't think railroading an act through parliamanent is a good idea. However if both the Lords and Commons sees fit to ban or not ban fox hunting then I would abide by their decision. I am a beliver in the ballot box.

NOT FINISHED YET

For Fox Hunting
Against Fox Hunting

Before I start I just need to say that I am an advocate of standards but I am not a religious bigot about them.

My problem has never been the technicalities of CSS or HTML, lets face it if you have figured out Perl to a reasonable degree and know your way around half a dozen programming languages then adding some markup etc to your toolbox is hardly going to kill you. Or at least you wouldn't think so?

Unlike programming languages and their platform specific problems, browsers display your work as they see fit. The user at the other end may see a work of art or a bloody debauchery and judge you and your ability accordingly.

The browser doesn't even have the common decency to open a window informing the user that it's made some complete horlicks in rendering our page, nor should it! It's our problem! if we want people to read the stuff the least we can do is make it as legible as possible for them, its not their fault the browser has a few quirks.

The internet, for all intents and purposes is a new method of communication and like all previous methods of communication it comes with its fair share of problems ie its new, its evolving, it hasn't reached any form of maturity yet. As an analogy:

Have you ever phoned someone and had a "BAD LINE". This prompts you into very articulated speech were all the words are formed "just so" and you might even talk a bit louder. Mean while, in the back of your mind you are cursing the weather or your blaming the old exchange down the road for the bad reception.

Without even realising it you will be compensating for the deficiencies of the system you are using with your loud speech and long drawn out words. You might not like it but its an accepted part of the system and out of your control so you just get on with it and do your best. Web Development (Development in general) is like this.

I am all up for standards but I am not one to take a pop at something because it has not been done "Just So". Implementing standards is a process and there is no need get all religious about it.

For just over two years we have always bought McCain's oven chips. They are low in fat and as far as we were concerned very nice.

This all changed about 3 weeks ago when we cooked some chips and they came out smelling like pig manure, I kid you not, I have worked in a cattle market and I know what pigs smell like and this was exactly the whiff I was getting. The first thing we thought was that the freezer was playing up and that somehow the chips had defrosted and gone off or some such nonsense. We checked the rest of the stuff in the freezer and everything was fine, I know this because we always keep Vodka in the freezer and it was as syrupy as usual which indicated to me that the freezer was very cold.

Anyway, we bought another bag (previous bag from Tesco's) from Asda's several days later under the assumption that we had just got a dodgy bag, perhaps it had lay on the floor somewhere too long or defrosted and been refrozen once too often. Same bloody problem. You can imagine our consternation, we had been using this product religiously for two years. We then decided to clean the oven completely even thought it was fine.

Most people would just try and change brands at this point but we wanted to know exactly what was causing that pig shit smell so we went off to Iceland (the frozen food mecca of the UK) and got a bag out of their freezer. We came straight home and bunged a batch in the Oven. You'll never guess what. PIG SHIT all over again. So there we have it.

McCains Oven Chips stink of pig manure, or at least the ones we have used recently do. We wrote a letter to them detailing our discovery a few days ago. We are awaiting a reply................. to be continued..........................