Are we really remembering them?

Yesterday, the Vicar at a Remembrance Sunday service opening words were:

"We gather here today to worship God our Lord"

Now that should be the first indicator that something is wrong.  I go to two or three services each year, being a long standing member of the Air Cadets, I have quite strong links with the annual Poppy Appeal etc, volunteering extra Saturdays to sell Poppy's and raise money for the Royal British Legion.

I am not religious in any way, probably one of the least religious people you could find.  If I wasn't in the cadets, then I probably wouldn't go to church, but I do go with cadets to various acts of remembrance, ATC Sunday, Remembrance Sunday etc.  I do this out of respect for the event in hand, the Church just happens to be the venue.

So why do we gather in Churches?  I guess because of convenience, Britain holding on to the fact that it used to be a Christian Nation, but is far from in now.  He said himself that in 20 years, statistically, no-one would be going to Church any more.  Anyone watching the news over the past few years would have a hard job proving the existence of any God!

Every year I find myself irritated by the Vicars taking the Remembrance service, they are always more bothered about God, than they are about the real reason everyone is there, to remember the dead, to honour the countless men and women who have given their lives for their country.  But the Vicar always talks more about God and what he did and how amazing he is, we sing about him, pray for him.  Less and less are The Fallen even mentioned.

The opening line of this post sums it up, the Vicar had the audacity to say that!  It was not the reason any of us were there at all, the more I think about what he said, the more outrageous it seems.

At another service yesterday, the Vicar said, when talking about The Fallen and God:

"It is more important to glorify God"

What is that even supposed to mean?  It is more important to suck up to "God" than remember our dead soldiers?

Most people probably switch of when listening to the ramblings in church, but actually taking note of what is being said brings out some truly bizarre statements.

I will of course continue going to Church on Remembrance Sunday, for the true reason of being there and I hope everyone else does the same.

Accidentally deleted your Android S2E partition?

Yes, I stupidly did this last night, when upgrading to a larger SD card. I was using Clonezilla to blast one memory card to the other, which failed on the ext4 S2E partition.

I re-ran Clonezilla on just that partition, but got sde1 mixed up with sdb1 and copied the corrupt partition over the good one! Duuuhhhh.

The phone would not boot of course and got stuck on the Cyanogenmod loading screen. Here is how I fixed it, which wasn't as painful as I first thought, but it was essential to have backups.

I run MyBackup Pro and Titanium Backup Pro on schedule every night, these apps are superb, and worth the low cost.

1. Reboot into recovery (hold down volume down button while turning on), restore factory defaults, install latest GApps, reboot.
2. Setup Gmail account on first boot (needed to download from Market).
3. Install Titanium backup, MyBackup and S2E from Market.
4. Setup S2E (so when apps are restored, they go to the correct place) and reboot.
5. Restore all apps from Titanium Backup Pro, reboot.
6. Restore all data from MyBackup Pro (SMS, call log, etc), reboot.
7. Restore widgets to home screens, these did not come back from MyBackup Pro.
8. Setup sync options on Google account, I sync Contacts, Emails and Calendar.
9. Clear Gmail data from Manage Applications, I had sync issues before doing this.
10. Restore background image, this was not restored from MyBackup Pro.
11. Restore MyBackup schedule.
12. Remove old apps restored my Titanium, apps that have been removed previously are still stored by Titanium and therefore restored unless default options are changed.
13. Restore lockscreen gesture, any gesture was allowed when I had restored.

Another thing that I noticed wasn't restored was my wireless connections, which was a little annoying.  Apart from that, all is perfect, so very happy with the restore process.

Duke Nudem Photoshopping!

Played the new flash game "Duke Nudem" last night, quite fun actually.  It's basically a promo for the upcoming Duke Nukem Forever game, you have to shoot targets "against" a skantily clad  lady, is you win, she strips, easy!

The final one was actually quite difficult!  For each one you win, you unlock a wallpaper, you can imagine what is on them!

Anyway, there is one final wallpaper that needs a cheat code to unlock, type "dnitems" on the game screen (where the wallpapers are shown) and a box will pop up as you type, this unlocks the final wallpaper and a gallery link appears.

This contains more photos of the ladies around where the videos were taken, you can download them all.  I spotted two images with similar names, "DSC_0099.jpg" and "DSC_0099 2.jpg", basically, one is a Photoshop of the other, you can see where some "fat" has been cut off, very amusing.

No idea if they left this in on purpose or not, see for yourself.....

25,000 Contacts in Gmail????

OK, I love Gmail, the whole shebang, calendars, contacts, mail, chat etc etc.

Just through on my RSS is this:

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/store-up-to-25000-contacts.html

Gmail used to have a limit of 10,000 contacts. For most of us, this was way more than enough, but we heard from some of you who use Gmail to communicate with more than 10,000 people. We want you to be able to store all of your contacts in a single place, so starting today, we’ve increased the limit for all Gmail users, including all those of you who use Google Apps, to 25,000 contacts.

I can't belive people have this many contacts, pretty insane!  I thought I had a lot at 250!

It goes on to say:

Also, previously an individual contact could be no larger than 32KB — big enough for most people, but not always sufficient for those who like to keep a lot of notes on individual contacts. Now, each contact may be up to 128KB in size, allowing you to store more information in the notes field.

Now that doesn't sound like a lot, but it is.  The old maximum, 10,000 at 32KB each totals 312.5MB, quite a lot really.  The new maximum, 25,000 at 128KB each totals just over 3GB!!!!!!!!

I know that maybe a few people in the world would actually use anything like that, but crazy space Google must have for their free email service, very impressive.

April Fools Round-up 2011

A few things that have made me chuckle today, April Fools Day

The Register - Wank-O-Meter
http://www.reghardware.com/2011/04/01/app_of_the_week_wink_o_meter/

Google - Gmail Motion
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/introducing-gmail-motion.html

Google - Google Docs Motion
http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2011/04/coming-soon-google-docs-motion-beta.html

Maddox - Worth a thousand words
http://maddox.xmission.com/

Gamer Sushi - Sony Drops Lawsuit
http://gamersushi.com/2011/04/01/sony-drops-lawsuit-hires-geohot/

Ebuyer - 3D True Sight
http://www.ebuyer.com/real-d-true-sight

I think Maddox and The Register have to be my favourites, others are fairly meh this year

Radio 1's Longest Show

Radio 1's longest show finished this morning with Chris Moyles and Comedy Dave, I'm kind of sad it's over....

It's been huge fun turning on the Radio for the past few days and those guys being on all of the time, watching it on the Red Button in the morning and in the evening, I miss it now.

I am in serious amazement of everyone at Radio 1 for pulling off an amazing couple of days radio, well done to you all.

Then there's the money, I just can't believe how much money was raised, seriously, just under 2.5 million ££££.  I had a few teary moments listening to the "money raised so far" announcements.

For those that are not in the UK, or did not hear about this, 2 Radio 1 DJs broke the world record for the longest DJ show by staying on for 52 hours straight.  Other DJs came in at their normal times and did the show with them.  There was a ton of celeb guests during the whole thing, it was also videoed and streamed online and on BBC TV.  The whole thing was to raise money for Comic Relief, a UK charity raising money for less fortunate people in the UK and Africa.

Well done guys

What a con

I felt compelled to post this, very annoying indeed.

I use Quidco, it's great, have earnt about £150 in cashback from just buying stuff I would normally over the past 4-5 months!

So one of the things I got cashback on was a free trial to CreditExpert.  Checked out the reviews and found that they are easy to cancel with (if you go over the trial you get charger of course).  So I went ahead and signed up.

A few weeks later, I rang up to cancel, no hassle.  The only bother was that they did not send out the confirmation emaiul to say that your trial has been cancelled, which is reassuring to have!  I even rang up a second time to confirm.

So the trial ran out yesterday, no charges or anything so all is good.  Untill today, when I get an email titled:

"CreditExpert Alert"

Great....

The email then goes on:


"We’ve detected a change to your credit report that you should check. If you weren’t responsible for this change, it could be a possible indicator of identity fraud."

Like hell, the day after my trial ran out?????  To obvious I'm afraid CreditExpert.

So I clicked on to login, just to see what happened, sure enough, I was linked straight through to my saved debit card details, just one click away from paying £7.99 to see the "alert", ha!

I will of course be ignoring the message, very irritating that they would try something on like that though.  Would love to know what fake alert they concoct if you were to pay etc

Steam can be cunts

I was going awat for a few days last week, so was just milling around the house, last minute packing etc.  Had my computer logged on, but wasn't really using it.

Came back to turn it off before I left and found a Steam message on my screen saying my account had been disabled!!!  Nothing to do with VAC as that would have banned me from servers and not disabled my entire account, AFAIK.

Anyway, logged a support call with Steam and left for my holiday.

Luckily, I had my laptop with me so was able to check Steam while I was away, I tried logging in and it worked just fine, I then remoted my home PC, checked it there (on my static IP) and it also worked fine, very odd indeed.

I left the support call open with Steam, as I was curious to know what had happened and why it was disabled in the first place.

I got home this week and Steam still had not replied to my question, so I logged on to check my support account, I found my question hadn't been closed, but just removed completely!  So I logged another one last night, asking the same question.

Checked again this morning and found that one had been deleted also, WTF?

Are Steam trying to cover something up?  Did they have some mass system error?  Not that I have heard of any other folks getting their accounts disabled!

Tempted to log another support call with them, doubt it will get me very far though.

I GOT RICK ROLLED BY RICK ASTLEY!!!!

Yes I did!!!  By the man himself!!

This was of course not a Rick Astley only show I went to see, he was supporting Peter Kay (WTF right??) at the MEN during his "Tour The Doesn't Tour Tour".

I also nearly got thrown out for taking photos of Rick Astley, they only did the "don't take photos" announcement after Rick Astley had finished.

Seriously though, why can't you take photos during gigs and things?  I wasn't using flash, like most of the tards in the arena, so I wasn't distracting the act.  I'm not going to sell them, that same I guess applies to most people there taking photos.  Even if I put them online, it's free publicity right?  No ones going to look at my photos and then decide they have seen enough so won't bother buying tickets!!

The other annoyance from the night was the MEN sound system, which broke during the second half.

It was still outputting sound, but along with it came a high pitched whining noise, it was horrible, really got inside my head.  It was just the right pitch to give you a headache.

I could see the technicians running round at the bottom trying to fix it, but they failed, so the noise remained for the whole second half.  It was obvious that Peter was distracted by it, he stumbled on his words a bit at first, obviously not expecting the noise to stay.  When it did, he just stared talking faster to fill the silence, which certainly helped, so thanks for that Mr Kay!  Boo to the MEN and their crappy technicians.

Anyway, at the Apollo next week for Flight Of The Conchords, can't wait!

Android, First Impressions

Well, at last, I have my shiny HTC Desire running Google Android.  Have had it for a week or so now, this is just a collection of points and stuff from my experience.

My contract with Vodafone ended in November, so been waiting until they had some decent Android phones.  March delivered the goods, with HTC Legend, Desire, Nexus One and SE X10 all coming to Vodafone.  I went for the Desire.

So, I'm reasonably tech savvy, so thought I would get along OK with Android.  As with all new phones, they recommend charging them up before using it, priming the battery and all that.  So as per quick user manual (the only bit of instructions that came with the phone), I stuck my SIM in and then plugged the battery in.

This caused the phone to auto power up!!!  Not ideal at all, wanting to charge the battery fully before using, anyway, turned the phone off and gave it a full charge, only took a couple of hours.

So, getting it all set up was a breeze, opted to setup Gmail and Facebook accounts, won't go into details here, all this stuff has been written about.

The phone is nice though, the screen is crystal, everything is snappy and smooth.  I am in a position where I have no previous Android to compare this with, but would be nice to see just how much more responsive it is with the faster CPU and more RAM etc.  The multitasking is great though.

Here is my gripes though:

Closing Programs

Now this is a bit hard to get used to, but basically, you can't close apps on Android.  You just go back to the menu and stuff stays running.  The manual says nothing about this, or what you should do.  I had previously seen a task killer app for Android rated as a "must have".  I did install it and found that everything it left running in the background, which must be bad right?

Wrong!  The task killer apps are a ball ache to use, opening them, kill the apss, lock the phone.  Horrible habit to have to get into!  To make it worse, the task killer app itself sits running in the background as well, although it can kill itself!

I found a few helpful discussions, (here and here) about why you should not use tak killer apps.  Basically, Android manages its memory just fine and killing apps makes no difference to performance and battery life.  Very good read if you get chance, I haven't used the task killer since and have noticed no difference.

Web Presence

Try searching for "Android" on Google and look at the results that are actually written by Google.  All you get is developer stuff, nothing user based, how to use Android, tips and tricks.  So you are left at the will of the phone manufacturer and how well they describe the phone.  HTCs manual was OK, but stuff was left out!

Alarms (Task Killing Related)

So for the first 2 days of having the phone, my alarm did not go off.  Now it seems obvious now, but this was because of using the task killer app and closing the "clock" application.  Coming from Sony Ericsson, where the clock is just part of the phone OS and you cannot "kill" it, this did not strike me immediately.  All the more reason why it should be described specifically.

HTC Facebook Sync (Friend Stream)

What a dodgey load of crap, does not detail what it is going to do before it does it.  Supposedly, it brings contacts from Facebook and Google to your phone, but instead of having 2 entries for everyone, you link them together on the phone, sounds clever eh?

Actually, it is very crude, it does work quite well, but leaves a big mess behind if you ever want to remove it.

It uses the Notes field in Google Contacts to store a bit of XML which links to the Facebook page, looks like this:

id:123456789/friendof:123456789

My first thought when I noticed this was that it would wipe out any notes currently stored by Google, luckily, it appends this data to the end of any notes already stored.

When I removed this sync, it left all this crap behind in Google, so now I have to go through and remove manually.

The other thing it does badly is the merging of contacts.  If you have a number for someone in Google and that person has also (stupidly) added that number on Facebook, Friend Stream does not merge the numbers, or just hide one of them.  It shows both, so you end up with contacts that have 4 or 5 numbers, some of which are just duplicates.

This information is also synced up to Google Contacts (I think, not 100%) and left behind after using it.

I stopped the sync with Facebook in the end, it is great having all that info and pictures for contacts, but it seems to hammer the battery.  I haven't got around to figuring out sync frequecy and things, so maybe turn it back on in the future.

Desire User Manual

Well basically, finding this is guess work.  It does not come with a printed manual, which is fair enough, it also does not come with a CD with the manual on, which is more common these days.  The manual is actually on the SD card in the phone, but this isn't mentioned anywhere in the info that comes in the box.  I had to rely on Google to tell me where the manual is.

If I missed some bit of paper that said that, then I stand corrected, but it sure ain't obvious!!


Google Map Rotation With Compass

How the hell do you get this working??  I have seen it on the iPhone, is this their special feature??

Random Contacts Showing Up As SMS Senders

This seems to have been solved now, as it hasn't happened for a while.  But messages from Google Calendars and Vodafone showed up as being from a random contact on the phone.  It is possible this is tied to the Facebook that I turned off, so can't confirm this happens to everyone.

Calendar Ownership

The built in calendar is great and syncs perfectly with Google, shows the different colours for the different calnedars and allows you to create appointments in any calendar, not just your personal one, wow!!

The only problem is that if you create an appointment on your phone, when synced to Google, you are not the owner of the appointment, but a guest to it.  I noticed this as it had the whole "are you attending" thing when you click on the detail.  Bit annoying really, not sure if this is a technical limitation with Google or just the way the software works.

Marketplace Issues

This has been widely complained about here and still ignored by Google,  Basically, when a new phone comes out, Google have to add the ROM signature to its database, so that it can download certain apps from the marketplace.  If Google do not sign the ROM, you only get certain apps, still a lot, but not some of the better ones.  Google have only just signed this ROM off as I finish the post, about 1 month after the phone being released and there are still apps missing, such as Google Earth!

Very bad attitude from Google and rubbish desicion to even release the phone before this is sorted.  I am certain a lot of people sent their phones back and went with Apple over is, crappy experience of the "next big thing", really not doing much good for the Android platform.

Overall, pretty happy with my phone and am pretty sure I have only just scratched the surface, still getting used to it all, and have plenty of apps to discover.  But, I have 24 months for that!

Guess what game Steam updated today?

The one I thought would never get an update!!  GTA IV!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Coming up to the release of "Episodes From Liberty City", Rockstar have finally updated GTA IV, bye bye cheating shits!!

GTA multiplayer was terrible, when it should have been so awesome, cheating was rife, no one got banned, it crashed, froze, people got kicked etc etc etc

Hopefully, this will all be solved, not had chance to check it out yet.



http://store.steampowered.com/news/3695/

April Fools Roundup

Just catching up on my RSS feeds this morning, some good April Fools going on!

GamerSushi - Natal Delayed Indefinitely: “Just Not Working”, Says Lead Developer

Money Saving Expert - Have you got a ‘Downturn 50p’ said to be worth £1,000?

Android Guys / Google - Holy Cow! Google Translate for Animals Hits Android Market

Firebox - DIY Carbon Freezing Kit

IWOOT - Ground-Breaking New Exclusives at IWOOT

Google - Our newest Mobile Search feature: Where am I?

The Register - Google to digitize world+dog with People View

The Register - DIMENSIONAL PORTAL INCURSION AT THE LHC!

Team17 - Crawl Of Duty 1, 2, 3, 4

The Register - New Reg comments system ready to launch

Google - Today's vowel outage 

Will update this throughout the day if possible.  It is going to be a bad day, I got rickrolled before 08:30 this morning!  Sigh

Printer drivers, how complicated do they need to be?

Now I have had a lot of issues with printer drivers before, huge bulky packages of shit, just to run a printer.  Most driver downloads from HP for example are in excess of 100MB, combine that with their terrible download speeds and your in for a stressful install.

I have just been installing a HP Officejet 6000, nice cheap network inkjet.  Now, I don't want it running of DHCP, so setting a static IP address should be pretty easy right?

Wrong!!

No printers come with LCD screens these days, so that's the first problem.  Easy configuration out of the window (even on some business level lasers).  They now just have a few lights on the front to show when the ink is ran out, not even the level of ink!!  A little LCD can do that FFS...................

OK, my PC just rebooted itself, you know why?  The HP printer shit that was installing in the background decided it wanted window focus to show a message asking if I wanted to reboot my PC please.  Well, I assume that's what it said, I didn't see it, but that's what it did.  It obviously took any keyboard press as "yes" and went right ahead with it.

Anyway, secondly to now having LCD screens, I would expect that they may have a simple web interface?

Wrong!!

I can sort of understand saving money on hardware, like screens, but web interfaces?  That's easy enough right?  They must spend a hell of a lot of time on bulky driver software and they could do away with most of that if they just had a web interface.

So, no screen, no web interface, the only option is to install the software, just to change the dam IP address.  The network printers here get installed on servers, so this software will never be used again.

I installed the software, eventually managed to get the printer detected in the network discover app, carried on with the install.  It then wanted to apply network changes to my machine???  What the hell does it need to change, it's just a printer for frig sake, non of the Konica lasers need this kind of dicking about, so they just have got it right.  So it applied network settings, then wanted to reboot, the reboot above was the SECOND one.  That's right, two reboots for a printer driver install.

Even after the two reboots, it still doesn't work, the driver software helpfully sent of an error report and in response downloaded some generic Vista troubleshooting document.

I have a feeling that when this is all configured, it still won't work on the server.

Gmail Notifier - https access

Google have announced today that they will be turning https access to Gmail accounts on by default.

While this is great news, I can forsee problems with people who use Gmail Notifier. This is a small taskbar app that shows when you have unread emails in your Gmail account, very handy. It also acts on "mailto" links on the web, opening Gmail in your browser to compose a new email.

Now, this app does not work by default with accounts accessed over https, the app hasn't been updated since 21st March 2006. I am amazed that Google hasn't made a small tweak to it on announcing that they will be switching over to https!! Basically, it will not be able to check for new emails if using https

However, there is an easy registry change to fix the problem, which is provided by Google in their help pages.

1. Download this .zip file.

2. Unzip the contents.

3. Close Gmail Notifier if you have it running.

4. Run the "notifier_https.reg" from the unzipped folder.

5. Allow user account control popup in you are running Vista or Windows 7.

6. Click "Yes" on the Registry Editor window to make the change

If you ever want to turn of https, then you would have to make this change in your Gmail account and then run the other file, "notifier_https_undo.reg". But, I don't recommend you turn this off at all.

I haven't experience any problems with speed or compatibility with other apps while having https turned on, I think I had it turned on from the start.

Failblog retards!

I recently started reading Failblog, it's good fun, there's some funny images/videos in there, so I stuck it in my RSS.

Unfortunately, they haven't managed to get videos working on their feed (others have, so not sure what the problem is), so I have to visit the site to watch the videos.

Now, anyone sane person who has been on Failbog, will have seen the amount of unintellectual drivel that is posted in the comments area. Correct me if I am wrong, but I thought the comments area of any blog or online forum etc, was for comments related to the actual post/picture/video?? Photoshop Disasters blog manages this concept quite well.

Not on Failbog, no, they have their own completely shitty random languiage they talk to each other in. I have no idea if these people are adults, or just babies mashing keyboards across the world. They obviously have nothing to do during the day, no jobs, family, friends to talk to, just 24/7 commenting shit on Failblog.

FAIL!

Take this one for example, 806 comments, with only the first 2 or three actually about the video posted, some example comments:

Yeah, you gotta think of the most retarded response possible and then write it using inane gibberish.

You said it!

I type 80wpm.
.
*sQuEeZe*

Right.....

I need TP for my bunghole!

WTF

I’ve been a bad, bad boy, Mommy!! Are you going to spank me now??

errrmmm

*Brings skewers of marinated lamb, lemon wedges, and cherry tomatoes*
*looks hopeful*

I am now going to hang myself

Epson Wireless Made Easy

I had one of my worst technological experiences last night, trying to setup an Epson wireless printer for a friend. Never in my life have I come across a bigger piece of crap, the software was the most un-intellectual load of shit. How the layman is supposed to pop down to Curry's and pick one up I have no idea, I think it is safe to say that using the provided software, it is impossible to get more than one machine working with the printer:

1. For a start, the software is different to how it is described in the manual.
2. The "Easy" setup and "Advanced" setup are not just different in their skill requirements, but they offer you options you cannot find in the other. For example, to setup a second computer with the printer, you have to go on the easy option, wtf??
3. The easy option does not offer you the option of setting up with a cable, rather than wireless, you have to go on advanced for that.
4. The wireless setup flatly did not work, I took all security off the wireless and it still would not connect.
5. Finding the only option would be to cable the printer in with Ethernet, I managed to get one computer printing OK, for the second I tried the first time setup option, just to see, but it stopped the first one working!! Even if I put the same IP address in etc, it still would not work with both computers, I didn't get what it was changing at all. Thinking back, maybe I should have tried web access to the print server, but not even sure it had web management.
6. The easy install would setup one computer OK, like the advanced install, but setting up the second computer, just stopped the first working again. This remember, is on the easy install, which the average person is going to use. The rest of it worked OK, but it just failed to do the setup properly.
7. The other thing with the easy install, at one point, you have to take the USB cable connecting the printer and the print server and plug the print server end into the computer, I guess so it can install the printer drivers (although you don't have to do that on the advanced install, go figure). This continues the install OK, but a few screens on, it complains that the print server cannot be found properly, NO SHIT, THE USB CABLE IS IN THE COMPUTER. So you have to put it back into the printer to carry on. This is fine, but the wizard does not tell you this. Did a bunch of fucking chimps design this shit? Did they try and follow their own software when they finished it.

Anyway, that's the main points that seriously pissed me off. I was seriously speechless by the end of it. I just felt stupid, surely I was doing something wrong, but I tried so many different ways to get the thing to work, in the end I was just wasting my time, told my friend to take it back, not fit for purpose. I feel sorry for anyone how has bought one of these things.

Digital Britain

"Content owners like the BBC can't expect to continue to get a 'free ride'. They will need to make a fair contribution to the huge costs of bandwidth to deliver their iPlayer programmes,"

So I read that BT expect the BBC to pay for bandwidth costs, wtf? BT has contracts with its customers, not the BBC, or any other content provider for that matter. But BT think that the BBC should foot the bill for their iPlayer service.

This is absolute crap, utter utter shite. BT provide a service to its customers, they offer xMbps and xGB download per month. If a customer decides to use all of that, that is up to them, they could max it out on iPlayer, or anything else for that matter, like porn, FTP whatever, so why should the BBC pay any money over the rest of the web? If I had some images on my blog and they got viewed trillions of times a second, would I have to pay BT for people viewing my content? I don't think so.

This is just typical of ISPs, they sell over the capacity they can provide, so when something like iPlayer comes along, that the layman who normally just downloads a few emails/web pages every day, would actually use, the ISPs shit them selves, they can't provide the capacity THEY have sold, I'm sure you could get sued for that!

This is where contention, limits, throttling and all that shit comes in, the ISPs are selling you a service and them sticking a load of restrictions in, that's just unfair, why should people who use bit-torrent suffer over people who don't. They have paid their fee just like anyone else. The opposite applies to the BBC.

Vista just proved to be mega wank

OK, I've backed up video and video projects, taken on my DV camcorder, since about 2005. I wanted to keep the raw avi video of everything I did, so I always split the video up into 4.7gb chunks and stuck them on DVD. I also backed up my Studio projects etc.

So, I recently thought this may not be the best way to continue, with HDDs coming down in price so much, so got a 1tb HDD to copy it all onto, groovy.

Have been doing this bit by bit for the past few weeks, going fine, organising everything into folders, much easier to get to in the future. Then I noticed that not everything was being copied (after I was on my last case of discs, each holding 48 DVDs). Vista's copy window would start (at which point I didn't watch it and did something else) and would then close, for no reason, wtf?????

I can't see any reason for this, it doesn't seem to like copying folders, so it just closed, no error message, nothing, how the fuck is that helpful?

So now I have to go back thorugh everything, compare folder sizes on the disc and on the HDD, to see if everything is there, seriously annoying.

Oh, for this taks I am now using an Ubuntu live CD, which rapes M$ for copy speeds and for just getting on with the copy job regardless!

Sue! Sue! Sue!

As if the county isn't fucked enough as it is, debt coming out of its area. Not just the people, the government too, organisations struggle for funding etc. But still, people who think they have been ill treated, 50 years ago think they can Gold line their pockets, to the sum of millions!

Just rip the area out of the country why don't you? Have you no consideration outside of your self centered, single purpose lives? This fucks me off so much!

These ex-servicemen, who did what they were told, got on with their jobs, are now applying modern logic and law, to what happened 50 years ago, how does that make any sense? Whats gone has gone, whats now is totally different, you can't compare then two, apply one to the other, its bullcrap.

So, if they succeed, the MOD will WASTE millions paying out these fuckers, money that could be better spent on equipment in Afghanistan maybe? How loyal these guys are to their country, "we did our bit 50 years ago, but fuck them all now, I want a nice retirement and a carriage clock".

another mother passes the buck

There have been a couple of news stories on tanning beds being used by under 18s, they fuck their skin up and the irresponsible mothers then call for action, shut the shop down etc.

This of course, is just to try and move the pointed finger away from the mother being irresponsible. If her girl fell out of a tree is it the Forestry Commission's fault? No, it is hers because she was not providing her child with an adequate amount of supervision, same principle applies to sunbeds.

This is why I am irritated when I read about poor Kelly Thompson, aged 10, yes, that's 10. She burnt herself on a sunbed because she spent to long on it.

She must be ill educated by her mother (Sharon Hannaford, yes, different surnames, I know), because sunbeds should be banned anyway. Even worse for a 10 year old to even know what one was, that just shows what kind of society she has been brought up in. I guess Mummy plops herself on sunbeds whenever her dole rolls in, great example to be setting to young Kelly!

So we continue in this crappy world, where everyone wants to be completely void of all responsibility, non of their actions to be anything to do with them, blameless.

Shitheads