daily life: flash under the pan

I'm all for technology proliferating into our daily lives, in particular I m still wowed by the keyless entry and ignition on my car. But sometimes needlessly adding flashy features to daily activites just makes them tediously annoying, none more annoying than the 'high tech' electric hobs that seem to be all the rage these days. My flat has one of those flashy glass touch panel doo-hickies without any buttons that morons who don't actually cook but want everybody to know how rich and stylish they are always have despite the fact it doesn't actually work (Yay for run-on sentences).Coupled with the fact that electric hobs just don't fecking work, you either boil over the pan or it just sits there doing nothing like it caught ME, and forget about frying sausages. What idiot decided to integrate an iPhone with my hob, if I want to turn the light up I have to press a 'button' to change mode, and probably press it again because it was in the wrong mode to start with, and then press some more buttons some more times. What was wrong with turning a knob, when I was a lad we didn't have touch buttons, we had to make do with knobs and we were happy to have them.

Driving: stay at pump

I'm sure many of you have been at a petrol station, you've already paid, but you can't leave because the owner of the car in front is still inside the shop. To make it worse, after 10 minutes that feel more like 10 hours, the owner of said car trundles out laden with half-a-dozen shopping bags with content ranging from asbestos through to zebra steaks.

The first fault lies with the petrol station who have failed to understand sticking 2 extra pumps in to 'maximise profits', therefore requiring the pumps to be placed just far enough apart to successfully dispense the delicious petrol, ultimately results in so many queues you halve the amount of customers you can serve in any given period of time.

Secondly the moron that decides to do their weekly shop at the petrol station needs to be locked in a deep dark pit while children point and laugh at them. And why is it always woman? I could understand if it was a single man whose idea of 'Haute Cuisine' is a creme egg served with a 'Frijj' jus, they could therefore shop quite comfortable at the 'Gas 'n' Go', but when you start asking the spotty teen behind the counter where the foie gras is maybe you should change your shopping habits.

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.