Neil Hopcroft

I just tried to pay my BT phone bill online. Howcome this is difficult these days? For everyone else I make payments to I just find their sort code and account number and make the payment through my banks online system. Which I use enough that I can remember the password. BT, however, you have to use their site. But I logged in to that once, when I first enabled it three months ago, and haven’t used it since. So I’ve forgotten the password. And the user name. And the email address I gave them. Sure, its probably in an email, somewhere.

This rant has been brought to you courtesy of my lack of foresight in charging my shaver before starting the epic chin hack, I’m now somewhat resembling one of the bad-guys from a western, only more patchily shaved. Good job its not going to take too long to charge again…I was having horrible visions of forgetting and going to an interview half-shaven.

Should I shave the beard for tomorrows interview?

“2 Wheels Good, 4 Wheels Bad“…and other oddities.

“The vulnerable technology is used in more than six million key chain tags used for wireless gasoline purchases and in an estimated 150 million keys for newer vehicles built by at least three leading manufacturers.”

Doomed – “Each box comes with a host of plastic marines and monsters, dice and corridor cards, weapon tokens, wound markers and door boards with which two to four players can act out ultra-violent battles without the… er… violence.”…this looks tempting, as does Warcraft, the boardgame….

“It was hard and now my kidneys and liver hurt. But I’m glad the beer I took on holiday turned out to be useful and I managed to get out of there”
—-
“We don’t know each other, but we are now linked permanently in direct-marketing databases. I hope you are not a terrorist or associate with known terrorists. Otherwise, airplane travel is going to become a major hassle for my family and I.”

…this last one is quite concerning for those of us without credit history, who value our privacy and don’t give out personal information lightly. These records are now being used (or, at least, being proposed to be used) as identification verification, you are nobody unless you get junk mail and credit….”those databases…are inaccurate and that relying on them could lead to trouble for those whose data is outdated or for students or poor people who don’t have much of a “data footprint”.”

Things are progressing with the new box – I’m now in the process of pulling over all of the applications I’d previously had split between the laptop and desktop. Mail is the next one to come over, which is going to involve a catch up on mail thats been hanging around in my mailbox for a few weeks (months, in the worst cases) awaiting response….if you’re expecting a mail and haven’t had one by the end of the week, I’ve lost you somewhere along the way, which means one of (a) I got busy playing Scorched Earth[1], (b) I’ve lost your email address, or (c) I hate you[0].

Beyond that, my first week as a ‘man of leisure’ is starting to look rather busier than any week I’ve had for a while, I must try to remember how to plan.

[0] This isn’t likely unless you’re an agent, in which case I suspect you’re not reading this anyway.
[1] (no) thanks to the marvelousmrchip

“With this document the Mexican government not only has not instructed its citizens to obey immigration law but, in rich detail, it has supplied a manual on how to circumvent U.S. immigration law”

“The researchers found that the business managers scored, on average, more highly on measures of histrionic, narcissistic and compulsive personality than samples of former and current [Broadmoor Hospital] patients.” ….theres hope for me after all…

Straight male seeks Bush supporter for fair, physical fight – m4m

If only all those webcams were like this….
(needs sound to be fully appreciated…thanks analogueheart)

It lives….finally gotten it to boot XP. Turns out it was the SATA/PATA converter I got for the DVD drive. Which was behaving for data transfers but didn’t work particularly well for other things. DVD drive switched onto an old Promise Ultra100 PCI card (along with a couple of disks I found lying around) and everything is alright now. So if anyone has a use for a SATA/PATA converter that might have issues with XP, let me know.