Now I remember why I don't watch prime time BBC One on a Sturday night. Reruns of Only Fools and Horses, followed by the National Lottery. After reviving a reason to watch BBC One on a saturday for a few short weeks with Doctor Who, the BBC are back to the same drudge scheduling that stopped me watching it in the first place.
This was going to be titled BBC One(K), but it didn't look right.
Great, I got shafted by someone on Ebay and paid though paypal. Now paylap say, oh sorry, we can't get your money back for you.
---
Dear xxx,
After careful review, we have concluded our investigation of the Buyer
Complaint described below.
We have decided in your favour, however, we were unable to recover any funds from the seller's account. As stated in the PayPal User Agreement, recovery of funds associated with a Buyer Complaint cannot be guaranteed.
We will make our best effort to recover the funds in question if they become available in the seller's account in the future. Please be assured that we will also take appropriate action against the seller's account, which may include limitation of the seller's account privileges.
---
Some safe service that is. They agree you've been shafted, but that's it. I paid by credit card, can't that just be disputed? oh no, because the payment was to paypal and if you cancel that they will f**k you over big style.
Colin Powell is allegedly tipped for the Nobel Peace prize. So, its supposed to be for his work in the Sudan. Aren't more recent actions taken into account, like war mongering across half the planet. Such as this story: "US Secretary of State Colin Powell has admitted that evidence he submitted to the United Nations to justify war on Iraq may have been wrong."
People have a fucked up concept of peace...
Title says it all. In metro this morning there were large adverts for AOL, wannadoo and tiscali. "Unlimited Broadband, £15.99" (up to 256kbps, pah!) pronounced the joyful woman's head via a speech bubble. Then you read the small print in grey on a dark grey background with a point size rendering 3mm high letters, "2GB limit per month".
It's criminal I tell ya, I feel like forwarding the whole thing to the office of fair trading or ofcom, but there is probably some lovely loophole that lets them do it. It not right though, they shouldn't be allowed to give false impressions like that and get away with it !!
p.s. page 11 if you're interested.
UPDATE 24/02/05 - saw another one yesterday and they've removed the 'unlimited' claim.
Ok its a good idea, and to start with helped me remove lots of nasty spyware... but now its just annoying. It says it has removed something (BrilliantDigital??) and then I scan again and it hasn't, and I tell it to ignore something else (RealVNC) and it just brings it up every time it runs a scan, then complains that I haven't dealt with it if I don't say to ignore it again... typical of microsoft though, annoying software...
Quite a few unfortunately, I'm hoping its not going to detract too much from being here at ApacheCon, I'm sure it wont. Its only the tutorial days to start with but already I'm happy with the way the conference is panning out.
So, I get here and the place is a building site, as talked about the apachCon grande chief thing whatsit ken coar on his blog.
Well to start with they put me in a room right at the back of the complex (literaly, like the last corner room of the area), but they were nice enough to move me to somewhere closer to the front of the hotel, but its a smoking room (which does smell of smoke), smaller room, with a smaller bed, and a shower not a bath.
Breakfast, which is advertised as a buffet is now restricted to an 'a la carte' items menu as blogged by Rich Bowen. which would have been much more expensive if I'd eaten as much as I'd wanted to first morning, but then I wouldn't have been able to expense that.
Seems that the DNS here at the hotel is pretty flakey. Randomly. you're just surfing about, and then it starts telling you that the document contains no data, then that httpd.apache.org is not available... pfft oh well...
In converation with some of the Apache-rati I was told that the reason they use this place is because it has no gambling on site, meaning something about minors being allowed in. Although also it was suggested that if they had known this rennovation was going on they would not have come here. Maybe next year ehh...
So Firefox 1.0 is released. Well its good. And it works to standards, by why has the Default skin got to look like IE6 :-(
I mean I think I know why, its so the funkyness won't alienate newbies or those people who can only really handle MS products; but some of the good features could have been a bit more obvious. I take for example one conversation I had with one of the programmers I had here. "It looks like IE, IE works on the sites I read, why would I change"
At least with mozilla they include the modern skin and you don't need to go though a, frankly, silightly alienating theme picking process. (alienating for newbies that is, but not entirely easy for those who aren't )
Yes Yes, I know I'm a day late, but I aint "fan-boy-ing" I'm commenting on issues post release.
Ok, according toForeign & Commonwealth Office Travel Advice page, I'm pretty lucky I can go to ApacheCon 2004 on friday;
lucky they repealed their requirement for Biometric Passports for all British vistitors until next year. I'd rant, but I'm still in shock of almost not being able to go cos I didn't read the 'fine print'. Apparently :
"From 26 October 2004, all British passport holders, including children, travelling to the USA under the VWP will need their own machine-readable passports (MRP). From 26 October 2004, anyone without a MRP, including children who are currently on a parent's passport, will need a visa to travel to the USA. See paragraph below on UK passports to find out if you hold a MRP. If, after 26 October, a Visa Waiver Programme national presents him or herself for admission to the United States without a machine-readable passport or non-immigrant visa, US Customs and Border Protection officers may grant a one-time exemption to admit the traveller to the United States. The traveller will be issued a letter explaining the US entry requirements and his or her passport will be annotated that a one-time exemption has been granted. However, entry is not guaranteed, and travellers without a MRP should apply for a new passport or a US visa well before travelling, if at all possible.
The US Government has agreed to extend to 26 October 2005 the date by which eligible travellers from VWP countries must have biometrically-enabled machine readable passports if they wish to enter the country without a visa. In the first instance, biometric passports will contain data about the holder's face, this could be followed by other unique personal information such as fingerprints or iris details. The UK is working on its programme to introduce biometric passports, but it will not be fully ready in time for the new US deadline. British Citizens who would normally travel under the VWP may therefore require a visa, which will include biometric data, to enter the US on or after 26 October 2005."
Well it took them long enough, but now Odeon have not so much seen the error of their ways, but obviously been threatened with being sued so they've put up a text only film times site aka "accesibility ghetto", where all the people who don't have IE with Flash installed can actually get film times.
So, they don't have the information about the films, the trailers, or much of the other useful stuff people may want to see.
Interestingly given the 1st of October deadline for accessibility via the web to advertising jobs (here on the 'inaccessible 'site) they don't supply the information on the text only version. So legally I'm guessing they are very much NOT out of the woods.
Laughabley they have a nive seal at the bottom of the page saying "inverstors in people". Should of course read "investors in people as long as you are not in any way disabled, or dislike multinationals like macromedia or microsoft)."
Their answer to this will of course be "Oh, phone our internet helpline on 0800 xxx xxxx", but
"come on, just cos you were inept in securing a web developer with any morals 3 years ago shouldnt mean people should still be suffering, or did you blow crap loads of cash on a crap system and if you admit you were wrong the cretin that did it may have to get a job he's capable of, like sitting on the dole"
Frankly their accesibilty information is missing the whole point, big white text message, whoop whoop, but their page isn't even valid html..., so how all these screen readers are supposed to cope is going to be a nice adventure... missing a doctype is one thing, but body tags missing??? /html missing?? they really have been taken for a ride by some developer cowboys.
I don't believe it, some american casino website has spammed benjamin's blog in the comments - Benjamin: First post.
update - now they've spammed 'spareparts' too - first post
I'll keep it short... well try to.
SkyPlus, always breaking down, I'm on my 4th box now i think in, 7 months. And so before long it will be out of waranty and still breaking down. And even when it does do crappy stuff like locking up, you phone them and they have you whipe the whole hard disk on at least two instances before booking for anyone to come round and swap the box, even though its blatantly the same crap problems each time (oh except the time the hard disk completely crashed).
...and while we're on it, why are the hard disks so small, I mean 20GB; they released a v2 of the player with the same size disk... crikey join this century, I'm not sure you can even still buy less than a 60GB disk this day, and 160GB disks only cost £60 !! And yet, sky don't do upgrades, and if you try to do it yourself you invalidate the waranty.
...and why?? because they have the only PVR on the market .
CRAP, CRAP, CRAP, CRAP !!!
Ok so movabletype.org has moved on to version 3.0, well that seems nice, but then I find out that now it costs $69.95. Then I notice, ok, so it still does a free version, but one of the stipulations is that you only get a max of one author and 3 weblogs. Well I guess that would have worked for me when I started all this blogging malarkey, but now I have 4 users and 3 blogs already, so I guess I can't upgrade without paying. Well, no big deal I'll stay on 2.661. Ok so how do I use this thing properly again? no... they'vce removed all the documentation for 2.661, well that's so nice, make it so its harder for people not to upgrade... that kind of policy smacks of 'microshaft'... Well I figure, maybe I can just use the info for 3.0, oh no, they changed all the template commands, so they don't work with the old templates... Fine !! I'll manage on my own...
So anyways I'm going through a 're-invigoration' of my skillset recently re page building. Finally coming to the solution of accessibility vs usability vs old browsers.
And generally, old browsers can 'bite me', if they can't deal with markup without coming out in boils and craping all over the page then tough... If they dont get the styles, then the users can just turn them off, because they have pre 5 browsers anyways.
And IE can sod off too, with its inconssitent renderings, I don't care if 90% of people use it, they can just have slightly suspect looking pages... not like anything I design is going to be anything fancy anyways.
Opera, well, I'm not going to make a big deal of supporting it, because I shouldn't have to, it should just work. Although it's quite fun to see opera users wound up, ha !!
And Mozilla users, if you're pre 1.0 you can 'bite me' too, its a beta browser, get over it and upgrade !!