The Thermal Properties of Coke
Posted: Fri 6 July, 2018 Filed under: Cynicism, D4D™, Domestic, Thoughts, Weirdness Leave a comment »In the UK, we’re in the middle of a heatwave. Other countries would absolutely laugh at how crap we are at dealing with heat (and in their eyes, it’s “only” 30° C, after all) but for the UK it’s more than enough. As with snow, we’re a nation of mid-range and changeable weather, so we’ve never had any need to invest in infrastructure to deal with more ‘extreme’ (and again, that’s in the context of our weather, not other places in the world!) temperatures. We generally don’t have air-conditioning in houses and offices by default, nor the stuff for dealing with snow, winds, rain or anything.
Anyway, for us, it’s hot. And every time it’s hot like this, I’m reminded that Cola (whether diet or full-fat) is a strange, strange beast.
Obviously Cola is best drunk cold – as cold as possible. But it’s crap at staying cold. Leave it for ten to fifteen minutes and it’ll be warm.
On the other end of the scale, leave it in a car to get hot, and it’ll stay hot for hours. The full-fat sugary one is the worst for it, but even the diet ones do this, so I don’t think it’s a facet of the sugar content.
There’s no real point to this – I just find it interesting that it’s a liquid/substance whose thermal properties are different according to whether it’s hot or cold.
Yes, I need to get out more.
Sporty
Posted: Mon 2 July, 2018 Filed under: Cynicism, Domestic, Sport, Television 2 Comments »Fuck’s sake.
So not only do we have World Cup kickyball, cricket and rugby gubbins going on, but as of today we’ve got Wimble-bloody-don as well?!?
I give up.
Solsticial
Posted: Thu 21 June, 2018 Filed under: Cynicism, Domestic Leave a comment »So that’s it, the longest day of the year is over.
And from here the nights start to draw in again…
Time To Spare
Posted: Wed 13 June, 2018 Filed under: 1BEM, Car Repairs, Customer Services, Cynicism, Domestic, Getting Organised, Time Leave a comment »I’ve written before about my tendency to be horrifically early for things – I like having time to spare, and I’m happy with being where I’m supposed to be, with a book, phone etc., and can happily while away the time.
It also, on occasion, gives me time to sort things out when I’ve sodded them up – which was the case on Sunday.
The car’s air-conditioning has been noticeably weaker this summer, so I’d decided to have it re-gassed, and see if that made a difference. I booked an appointment with Kwik-Fit to get it done on Sunday morning, and turned up (early) to where I thought I had it booked in.
Only… it wasn’t booked in there. Knackers. I couldn’t find the confirmation email (still no idea what happened to that) so ended up having to call their main customer centre to try and find out. Turned out – either through my own stupidity, or some kind of system glitch – that it was actually booked on the other side of town from where I was. Knackers again.
But because I’d been horrendously early, it meant I still had the time to get across to the correct place in time for my appointment – and even had time to spare!
It all worked out fine in the end – but if I’d been punctual for the first one, I’d have been utterly kippered for getting to the proper place on time!
Moving On
Posted: Sun 20 May, 2018 Filed under: Cynicism, Domestic, Media Leave a comment »Well, thank chuff all that’s over.
No more mentions of either the Royal Wedding, and the FA Cup bullshit can fuck off for a few months as well.
Of course, now we’ll be heading straight to the hype for a summer of Kickyball in Russia and so on, but at least that’s two hypetastic media obsessions out of the way.
Gone Phishing
Posted: Wed 2 May, 2018 Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Domestic, Geeky, Security, Thoughts Leave a comment »One of the things about being a techie is that I own a fair number of web domains. Some I’ve got for things like ongoing projects, business names I like, and a bundle of other stupid shit. A lot are in the “when I get a chance” state of being – the ideas remain, and haven’t been done by anyone else, but for now they’re kind of drifting.
However, one of the other things I do is have a couple of domains that are purely for use when buying stuff. They’re set to forward everything to my home email account, so it means I can set up anything @ the domain and it’ll do what I want. While it sounds a little bit mental, there’s a very good reason for all this.
For the purposes of explanation, let’s say I own a stupid domain, like myemail.com
So – when I buy something from a new company, I register with them using [company_name]@myemail.com . Any mail there will come to me – it’s a legitimate email address, just not one I’ll ever send an email from. (I can if I need to, but that’s a different point) Everyone’s happy.
The key, though, is that if [company] starts spamming me, I can block that specific address, rather than having to do any kind of weird and fragile message rules etc. It’s easy – I just add [company_name]@myemail.com to the ‘bin everything’ list, and there we go, it’s gone.
What I’ve found recently though is another interesting one – I can easily tell when [company] has been hacked, or lost its mailing list somewhere.
This week, I’ve been getting some *very* clever phishing emails (the ones about ‘just log in, give us your details, and we’ll sort this out’) to one particular address. They’re good enough that if they had come direct to my home email, I might’ve clicked on one by mistake. (I haven’t, but I could have) They’re *that* good. But I can see that they’ve come to [company]@myemail.com , so a) I know they’re shit mails, and b) I know that [company]’s mailing list is being used.
I’ve let [company] know, although there’s not much they can do about it now. But at least maybe they can notify their customers that their details have been leaked/stolen.
All told though, it’s another interesting reason to have that particular domain, and to use it in this way to keep my own information as safe as possible.
You Had One Job
Posted: Mon 30 April, 2018 Filed under: 2017/18, Customer Services, Cynicism, Do More, Domestic, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Getting Organised, Thoughts, Travel 3 Comments »[This follows on from a conversation I was having over the weekend, so I thought I’d write a bit more about it here. You lucky people]
This year so far has in many ways been an exercise in frustration. I’ve felt like I’m keeping on having to fight things all the way, just to get people to do their sodding jobs. It’s incredibly annoying, frustrating, and just leaves me tired and pissed off.
I know I’ve written about this kind of thing before – it seems to be a bit of a theme round here. And it’s not even like I expect miracles – all I want is for people to do their fucking jobs right. That’s not too much to ask, surely?
For example, one of the current bugbears has been a particular travel agent, who is supposed to be organising a break. It’s been in the process now for about six months, with the travel happening next month. I’ve given them a decent length of time and space, and absolutely nothing happened. Indeed, the only time anything started happening was once I got in touch with them about six weeks ago, to find out what was going on. All of a sudden the tickets and so on appeared, along with acknowledgement that they’d dropped the ball, that the initial contact had left the company and there’d been no handover or successor assigned to deal with me.
The problem was that the names on all the bookings – flights, hotel and so on – *all* had spelling mistakes. I’ve raised it with them, and they’re “going to deal with it”. But man alive, this is the job they’re supposed to be good at, that they do all day every day, and they still make mistakes like these? I’m honestly not reassured, and won’t be until I’ve arrived at the destination and know that everything has worked out. Which is hardly a relaxing start to a break, it’s fair to say.
The stuff with the bank, the car insurance people, and the windscreen people have also been fine examples. Along with several others I’m not in the mood to add just yet to the list here.
All I want is for people to do their jobs. Why is that so bloody difficult?