The Lord Stevens Enquiry

The Lord Stevens enquiry into bungs in transfer deals in premiership football was announced recently. One of him comments caught my ear.

‘every one of these recomendations must be implemented.’

Erm….in what way is that a ‘recommendation’?

Bloody Slade!

That sodding Christmas song!
You know the one. It’s that one that’s overused by a certain supermarket chain.

It’s getting to the stage that it’s making me physically ill. It doesn’t make me feel warm and Christmassy, it makes me nauseous.

“It’s CHRIIIIIISTMAS!!!”

“Could you pass the sick bag please…”

Old People…

I say that with the same tone that Dark Helmet says ‘Lonestar…’ in Spaceballs.

Why is it that the oldest, slowest and most enfeabled in society have to go first in queues? I’m talking about when the bus or train pulls into the station, and every old person stands up, blocking the way while they put on their jackets, collect their bellongings and attempt to lift their suitcase off the overhead rack.

Why??? They’re slower than glaciers! I know a lot of them fought for our freedom in the war and we should be grateful, but on the flip side of that, they fought through fast action and forward plannning. The train slows down for quite a while. What’s the delay in getting up and ready to go?

Oh God, That Took Forever....

Just finished sorting out my Inbox. God, what a lot of email! Why did I let it get this bad? There’s stuff there that wasn’t relevant when it arrived, let alone six months later!

Phew!

When did the Internet become full of jerks and dickheads?

Time was when you could browse the Internet without having to worry about viruses, spam, hackers or my computer being turned into a zombie. The very first computer I had in my family (well, first PC) connected through a service called CompuServe, and we went online in 1994 without firewall or anti-virus. You didn’t need them unless you were actually downloading dodgy software. And on a 28.8 Kbaud modem, who was going to do that?

But these day spam has overtaken normal email traffic and continues to grow exponentially. It’s so bad that we call normal email traffic ‘non-spam’. Viruses are everywhere. And as soon as your PC goes online, it’s being hacked and pinged and god knows what else.

I’ve just had to reset my firewall’s settings manually to fix an error. As soon as I connected to the net, it was blocking hits from other PCs trying to ping it and intrusion attempts. Who are these people?

To illustrate how dangerous the Internet is for the unprepared, when I worked in Internet support of a large telecomms company, we once, as an experiment, put an unprotected PC on the Internet for the first time.

Within 13 seconds it was infected with the Sasser virus and had reset itself. And without maintennance, it continually shut itself down over and over again. the world record for Sasser infection is about 2 seconds.

And Sasser’s a relatively benign virus. All it does is force the PC to reset itself. In it’s original form, it doesn’t actually damage the PC or corrupt the data.

My question is: When did these bastards hijack the Internet? It’s supposed to be a great place, where people across the globe can communicate, share information, shop, play and connect to people. It still is, but these activities take place amidst a minefield of little gits trying to damage, hijack or destroy our computers, sell us Viagra and convince us that if we help them out of a jam and give them all our bank details, they’ll give us free money!

When the time comes for me to have children, I won’t get stressed about them being out at night, or where they are. I’ll already have had enough practice worrying about taking my computer online.

It's Christmas! It's finally Christmas!!

It finally feels like Christmas.

Not all the Christmas decorations in the shops. They’ve been there since September.

Not all the decorations at work, they’ve been there since November.

And not all the Christmas shopping the TV adverts seem to want us to do, which seem to start earlier and earlier every year.

No.

Today, on my way home from work, I caught my first whiff of pine tree sap!

That’s Christmas for me!

Woo-eee!!!

I Hate SPAM

Now before you start echoing me sentiment, I’m not talking about email SPAM where some idiot is trying to flog you cheap Viagra that’s probably an asprin painted blue.

And I’m not on about that food that claims to be meat, despite all evidence to the contrary in terms of appearance, texture and taste.

No, this is a different sort of SPAM instigated by people who are either ignorant, lazy or arrogant.
I’m talking about job sites.
Not those “Earn £££ from home” ads. Most sensible people know to avoid them. It’s a different kind of SPAM at work here, and no less evil.

Far too often these days, my search for a job is side tracked by these gits.
I put in search terms: IT jobs in Scotland-Edinburgh, or UK-Lothian, or however the site divides up the country.

And what do I find?

Jobs in Liverpool. Jobs in Aberdeen. Jobs in Manchester. Jobs in fucking London!

Why do you think I put in Edinburgh, you idiots?!?

The people posting these job ads seem to just tick every location in the UK that’s allowed, as if this will somehow increase their pool of potential interviewees.

If I wanted a job in London, I’d search for a job in London.

And as if this wasn’t bad enough, they list information such as

Salary: £££ Excellent

If they’re advertising the job, why don’t they know what the salary range will be? They must have a maximum value available to them, and they should know what the minimum expected salary for this job should be.

How do they know what an excellent salary is? £16-18K in Edinburgh for a starter IT job is good. In London, it’s dreadful.

All it tells me, is that the person placing the ad doesn’t know how to advertise a vacancy, doesn’t know how to target the kind of potential employees they are after and doesn’t know how annoying their superfulous adverts are.

Let’s put it this way. Before the filtering system on a certain job site was placed, I once accidentally searched the entire UK for IT jobs with a certain keyword. It returned the same advert placed over and over by the same agency for a London based job. In fact, they took up the first three pages of results!

So in short: Boody Quit-it!

Garnier Fructis Surf Hair

Have you seen that ad? With the guy in sandals on the street with the blonde hair that looks like it’s a cross between Albert Einstein and a guy who’s just had 50,000 volts run through him?

Have hair that looks like you’ve been surfing?

Who the hell wants that?