anouncement: who's been a naughty boy

Some of you may have wondered why there hasn't been an update in a while, perhaps you've been unable to sleep at night, tossing and turning in your bed as you attempt to come to terms with me no longer brightening up your day.
If this is you then my advise is to end it, perhaps find a bus to step in front of. For the rest of you there is a reasonable explanation for my absence, I've been sued for breach of copyright. Believe it or not I haven't obtained the express consent from copyright owners before posting some images on this site, and some litigious individual has attempted to bring down my musings.

Anyhoo, that's all over now and normal service will be resumed.

daily life: what a façade

I'm certainly no Howard Hughes, but I am reasonably strong on hygiene. You know those little things people expect you to do like wash your hands after going to the toilet, society sure is funny about stuff like that.
Well recently I've been noticing more people who façade hygiene, the people that think running their hands under a tap for 3 seconds is the same as dipping them into a vat of bleach. Because they know people wouldn't go near them if they just walked out of the toilet without washing their hands they just stick them under a tap for 2 Mississippis (thank you spell check).

If you've gone to the trouble of pretending to wash your hands then you might as well wash your hands properly. Or maybe these people are allergic to Carex and I'm being unfairly harsh on them.


Remember, I'm watching you.

daily life: Money Saving Tip #876

I apologise in advance for the seriousness of my post.

It is vitally important to save money where you can, and there is no better way to do this than cashback. If you want to buy something then why not get a little extra back. I'm not talking about saying yes when the checkout assistant asks 'Do you want cashback?', in fact tell that person to go straight to hell. I'm talking about earning as you spend.
Just the other day I got £101 cashback just for signing up to Sky TV, I was already going to do it, so I might as well get some free money for my troubles.
TopCashback and Quidco are both respected and reliable sites for this, and coupled with a Cashback credit card such as the Halifax Reward Clarity, and a current account paying a monthly tax free bonus such as the Halifax Reward you will earn hundreds each year just for doing what you wanted already. Other banks have similar accounts, so check what's available to you.

And if you buy everything on your Credit Card make sure you never, ever keep money in your current account, move it to an instant access e-saver to accrue interest between paying your credit card bills. Halifax have a Web Saver Reward paying 3% just perfect for the job. Why would you give the bank your money for nothing? Stop it now or I'll slap you!

Click through below to sign-up for Quidco and Topcashback and start earning today.

Topcashback

Quidco

food: tumbleweed

For my tea yesterday I purchased an Asda Stuffed Crust Meat Feast Pizza. With the wording Meat Feast I was expecting quite a banquet on my plate. But what I got barely fulfilled the claim of Meat and certainly fell short of being a Feast.

I expected the top of my pizza to be piled high with cow, pig and various other animal innards, but what I instead received were 6 slices of peperoni, 10 squares that I believe were meant to be ham but more closely resemble diced carpet tile, and some brown lumpy pieces that I believe were scrapped from the inside of a McDonald's deep fat fryer but the label on the box purported to be 'Beef'.

By the time I discovered how far I had been deceived by Asda I was starving and ate the sickly tomato monstrosity, but I will be writing to my MP about this I can assure you.

And have you tried that Asda Price Guarantee? I'd like to see a person that has successfully met every criteria laid out in the T&Cs.

technology: landline is king. long live the landline.

Like many of you today I woke up and was unable to make a phone call from my mobile. At first I thought the phone was broken as it has been crashing a bit lately, but after resorting to a landline and then surfing the internet via a landline based ADSL connection I discovered that O2s network for most of the South East of England is down due to an 'equipment theft'.

This is just another reason why being completely reliant on a mobile phone is always going to result in tragedy, and no matter how hard the industry argues, landlines cannot be fully replaced with a 'cellular' network.

So take today as a warning, mobile networks fail, and they fail bad. The landline phone is still king.

daily life: love your neighbour.... not your customers.

Finally an excuse to reference this piece of junk!

Fellow Sky television subscribers will probably have experienced the terrible build quality of Sky Set Top Boxes (STB). Thomson Sky(+) HD boxes are probably the most notorious of these, and very few of the original 2006 boxes are still functioning; the build quality was so bad that Thomson have now lost all Sky contracts.
As a customer of 10years+ I know too well how bad Sky hardware is, and in October the Thomson HD box under my TV that had spent more time being power-cycled than displaying 'quality programming' finally died from tuner failures, and I paid £65 for the privilege of Sky replacing their 5h17 hardware with a refurbished box (a box that had already broken in another persons house and had been repaired).
Well this refurb is a pile of donkey turds, so I fired off an email to Jeremy Darroch the guy in charge of BSkyB (click the link to email a complaint of your own). Often when you contact him somebody sorts everything out for you, but being me the complete opposite happened.

Today I get a call from Sky. I think 'Yay, Sky will give me a shiny new STB that might work for 6months before breaking'. Notice that I didn't expect a STB that works, this is Sky we are talking about, a company that purchased the Amstrad brand to 'improve' quality. How poor does your brand have to be if a rebrand to Amstrad is seen as positive?

Well I was obviously being optimistic because this is not what happened, instead the 'lady' on the phone described her job as 'I'm phoning to defend Sky from you slagging off their boxes'; nice to see impartiality is being taught to Sky's telephone operators. With a job description like that she obviously denies that Sky hardware sucks gonads, tells me I am a liar because I've only had 1 replacement Sky box which means I obviously don't have any problems with their hardware, and finishes off by claiming I threatened her and was abusive. If you've ever had an argument with a call centre you may be aware they are trained to say this when they are 'losing' an argument. By accusing you of threatening them they instantly disarm you, and you become worried that they will report you to somebody; often it is a good sign because it means they are worried that you are making some valid points, but with Sky it means they hang up on you or you hang up on them.

The woman did phone me back to offer a 'free engineer visit'; when Sky hire some engineers they might be able to provide that service, but at the moment they just have installers. An 'engineer visit' is Sky code for replacing your naffed box with somebody-elses naffed box that has been re-jiggered to work long enough to survive the 3month warranty period. So I told them where they could shove that.

So yet another failure of Sky customer service, they managed to tell a 10year+ customer they were a lying aggressive and threatening individual, and made it clear that around £10,000 of subscription and hardware payments does not entitle you to £50 of metal and plastic as a good will gesture.

daily life: campaign to stop identity theft...

... of me!

I have a pretty strong online identity, and people that know me are aware of my username across multiple sites (which I'm not going to post here for obvious reasons).
But many years ago I noticed someperson(s) or organisation trying to steal this identity as a flurry of accounts were opened up with my username and lay dormant for years.
Today I discovered that Twitter joined that list as somebody setup a Twitter account in 2009 with that username and to this date has not made a single tweet or even followed the inane tweeting of Jay-Z or Kanye West.

Fortunately I was able to procure most accounts prior to this process beginning, but I still get annoyed by failing to procure it for GMail even though I was beta testing it at the time.

One day I will track down the individuals responsible for this and punish them accordingly. So I give you fair warning, even though you won't actually find this blog because you stole my gmail account.

Plus, some wang on Xbox Live decided to copy my avatar to, I keep running into the little sod.