August 04, 2005

Hi, I’m back.

I had a unintentional surprise break from the internets courtesy of BT broadband. Somehow or other they couldn’t quite grasp the concept that once you’ve set up a direct debit with them - then it’s up to them to take out their monthly fee - not wait three months not taking their money and then send out two statements telling you you’re in credit(!!!) with them and then unexpectedly cut off the service!*

If BT would actually spend a small fraction of the money - energy and effort they expend in marketing and promoting themselves (which is just in effect legalised lying, ** ) into providing a good sound reliable value-for-money service - then they might get actually somewhere. They also haven’t quite grasped that they’re not a monopoly anymore and simply can’t keep on acting as arrogantly as if they still were. As it is some new ISP is getting the money for my broadband service.

*I’ve a friend where the opposite happened with his ordinary phone line rental where they gleefully took hundreds of pounds out of his account which he didn’t ever owe them, on top of which he was already paying for the free evening and weekends call deal.

**and BT - those stupid sales calls you keep making to me are thoroughly annoying and only put me off you even more.

Posted by groc at 10:06 PM | Comments (2)

February 02, 2005

it's a mystery...

what I want to know is -where do seagulls go to sleep at night? I mean, when they're doing their nesting and bringing up kids thing you do see them stay put in the one place. But where do they go when they're not nesting? It's like they totally disappear of the face of the planet at night...

Posted by groc at 02:15 PM | Comments (3)

February 01, 2005

comment spammer

An interview with a piece of fecal matter.

Don't take it personally? Don't take it personally!
Oh, but I do and if I ever find myself in a position where I can destroy the property of, or hurt, maim or even kill a comments spammer -I wouldn't hesitate. That's how personally I take it.

Grrrrr.

I hope the Register have done the right thing and secretly leaked out his address...

Posted by groc at 08:40 PM | Comments (0)

January 09, 2005

comment spam scum

I'm currently undergoing the tedious chore of trawling through my old archives - the ones contaminated by that piece of slime comments spammer - and I've just happened upon the entry where I mention my mother's boyfriend having suddenly died at Christmas a couple of years ago - and oh yes, that too has had casino ad spam scrawled all over it too. Maybe they'd like to come over to the UK just to shit on his grave too.

Yet another level of contempt and disgust at these people evil shits has hereby been added.

Posted by groc at 06:39 PM | Comments (0)

January 05, 2005

failed birdy rescue

I’m upset.

There I was this afternoon watching my ‘Spaced’ series 2 DVD when I heard a lot of loud chirruping I looked up and there’s a cockatiel bird calling to me outside my window. I tried to coax it in but in trying to get my stupid antiqued window, which was sticking badly, open I managed to frighten it off. Poor thing. It flew across to the next window along but it wasn’t going to come to me calling it. I lost sight of it soon after that. I hope it finds someone else to rescue it - there’s a good chance of it either starving or freezing to death overnight.

It was calling for me to help it and thanks to my stupid dumb crap window I wasn’t able to. Whah. I wouldn’t have minded looking after a pet cockatiel either. I’d have liked the company.

Posted by groc at 06:12 PM | Comments (2)

December 31, 2004

the road to ruin

Why do big companies have to ruin things?

After nearly totally forgetting about it for - oh I don’t know, for ages, I decided to log into my old hotmail account..

Now I vaguely remember the original hotmail - sort of, before it was bought up by Microsoft. It was plain and simple and it worked very well - especially for someone like me at the time who hadn’t got a internet connection.

Then - because it was such a good idea - it got bought up by Microsoft and now look at it. All these ridiculous restrictions - you HAVE to log in at least once a month or all your old mail gets deleted and any msn groups you might have subscribed to. The you have to plough through two pages worth of mindless newsletters that no one in their right mind would subscribe to - not if they wanted to reserve their allocation of mailbox space to, you know, actual mail. Hotmail has always been hot on deleting things for you. It’s so fricking ugly too and all those flashing banner ads. Jesus. MSN just don’t get it - none of this is appealing - none of this is cool, none of this is going to make anyone feel like signing up for one of those lame paid for accounts when the free version is like this. It all screams big ugly greedy corporation that wants to push adverts at you and getting in the way instead of letting you get on with the things you’re actually there to do - which is read and send e-mail on line.

Asses.

Then there’s Yahoo. Oh yes. Yahoo. They were very nearly cool once. Then they too got bloated and big and lost the plot big time.

Once again a long time ago I remember a thing called e-groups - it was like newsgroups on steroids. You could create or join a group and make and receive your own mailing lists and read them on line. You could send attachments and they were shown as little thumbnails within the body of the message and you clicked on it to see or download the larger image. Messages were properly archived so you could go back over time and catch up on things and messages and attachments you’d missed.

It was such a good idea- Yahoo bought them up. Ever since then they’ve undermined and crippled the service into near un-usability. Basically taken away everything that was originally good about the service and created something rather foul and again - heavily polluted by advertising.

First no more thumbnails. Then added in MASSIVE (often animated) adverts in the body of their html mail, and even have with ‘click to continue’ advert pages popping up after you’ve browsed a few archived messages. Later all attachments were removed form the archives - so you have to have mail sent to you if you wanted to see the attachments (and is in the nature of these things - IE newbies (and the just plain ignorant) not understanding proper net etiquette do stupid things like send out the same images over and over (and over and over and over) - which must infuriate people on dial-up. Then they added in a weird - poorly explained and poorly implemented measure to save on bandwidth. If a group has exceeded it’s set bandwidth for that day or that session the user gets presented a with cryptic and scary message that says ‘you are not allowed to access the page with credentials you supplied’. You might have thought an explanation about bandwidth issues might have been more helpful.

You can’t help thinking - if they haven’t the proper resources to run a e-groups style operation - then why did they buy it in the first place.

In short -two great web based ideas where bought up by big companies and messed around with so completely they’re a former shadow of their former selves and bursting at the seams with various adverts.

(At this point some idiot going to pipe up - there’s no such thing as free - which missed the point - if they have to make money on their stuff with advertising - why do they have to be so utterly crass about it? Surely it makes their brand look cheap and tacky. Is that what they want?)

Posted by groc at 12:28 PM | Comments (2)

December 25, 2004

groan

that annoyingly persistant comment spammer is back.
i want their legs broken and for them to be hacked to death with machetes. It's no less than they deserve.

Spam-rage - you saw it here first.

Posted by groc at 05:22 PM | Comments (0)

December 23, 2004

dead Freddy

Whimper. I was the supermarket today - trying to buy foodstuffs but I was being driven to distraction by the shop playing bloody Queen’s “Christmas time“ (or whatever it‘s called). The hyper-extended 3 day long mindlessly repetitive remix version. Having dead Freddy repeatedly singing that 'it’s Christmas time' was driving me totally crazy. ‘Argh! I know. OK. I’ve got the message. Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up! Shut the fuck up!
Shut!
the!
fuck!
up!”

I've never liked Queen at the best of times.

Posted by groc at 10:31 PM | Comments (0)