Life, The Universe and Small Things all covered in one friendly blog.
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30 August, 2009

Stop the broadband pirates. Yeah OK.

The twit now running the country, lord Meddlesome, (yes he is) has decided to do something about pirates. Obviously he won't be given a huge sum of money by the industry to do this will he, and he insists he is doing what is right.

The pirates he is launching an attack upon are those who download music off of the internet without paying for it. He has the solution, block the broadband access of anyone who continues to download after being told off.

A big problem Meddlingson has overlooked, not everyone in the UK lives on their own and has a dedicated broadband connection that only they use.
Perhaps a family of four with son and daughter still at home share the broadband. Both the "children" are over 18 and the son is downloading loads of music, dad has asked him to stop but he wont. So along comes Meddlinggit and cuts off the whole family.

Problem solved, well for an hour while the son goes out and buys a pay as you go dongle.
The same will no doubt happen with anyone who is cut off of a landline broadband, they will head to the shop and buy a wireless one.

So how will the great clean up proposed by Meddlingtwit work. Probably the same way as everything done by the labour government, hype and headlines but no real action.
It was revealed this week that one in 5 young people are driving on the road uninsured and don't care about being caught so will the risk of having to go wireless on the web really deter anyone.

You do have to wonder why his priority is preserving the profits of the music industry. Don't you?

27 August, 2009

Don't always buy whats on offer !

I caught the end of a TV program yesterday, I have no idea what it was called but it was telling people to buy only the food they need and not to throw half of everything away. In the end they cut a families food bill from something like £22k a year down to £10k.

I have no idea how people can waste 50% of their food but apparently it is a common problem, I guess some people are born stupid, me?, I just learned it over the years.

Making the most of your money while shopping is not just about buying the food you actually need, rather than one for you one for the rubbish bin it is also about seeing our way through the maze of cons and misleading displays in the supermarket.

I shop in Sainsbury's, I tried Tesco just not me, Asda way too chav and Waitrose is only for people with too much money, so I go once a week to Sansbury's. They are the master of shelf cons and while I felt sure I had written about this before I can't find it so here goes (again).

Sainsbury's has many ways to catch you out but I will only cover a few. The most simple is the price per Kg and price per 100g. On the same shelf they have several brands, the most expensive will be prices say 57p per 100g and then next to it a cheaper item in bigger bottle/packet/tin so higher item price but actually £3.75 per kg. Its obvious that the £3.75 is the best value but how many people fall for the trick.

This week apples were a good con, last week a bag of 1Kg of apples was £1.48, this week a bag of apples was shown as "now only £1", but wandering to the scales I found that the bag was also "now only" 800g so any thought of saving 48p is gone and you are actually saving just 18p.
At this time of year forget apples at Sainsbury's head off to a local orchard farm shop.

Their next ploy is the "ONLY £1" for the packed meat, yes it might be only £1 but its price by weight is far higher than other similar meats right next to it.

Their most sneaky pricing con at the moment is in the wine section where there are loads of signs for 50/o off, I can't show it here but they have the signs printed so that an eye scanning the shelves reads it as 50% off, by the way they set the % sign. Otherwise who would care that there is 20p off a bottle of wine when others are half price or less.

Although good food may cost less at Sainsbury's if you read the shelf carefully you can save even more, every little helps!
( Please be aware that other supermarkets are available, some store may charge for your visit, cars parked for more than 4 hours will be charged £70, all customers shop at their own risk, no responsibility will be taken by the store for children left in locked cars or pets seated in the shopping trolley.)

18 August, 2009

Don't take the piss!

While in a certain DIY store, oh what the heck I'll name it and hope they are not as childish as Carpetright staff, while in Homebase today I needed to take a pee so sought out the customer lav.
The men's had an "out of order" sign on the door so I reached for the handle of the disabled to hear the little lady who was mopping the corridor yell at me "that's disabled people only".

Yipes, I didn't realise that cleaners doubled up as the toilet police these days. I turned and replied to her. "you are joking aren't you, the men's is out of order so what do you expect me to do" , "Sainsburys is across the road", was her amazing reply. "yes and I am shopping here" .
If it was not for the fact that the lady was obviously a cleaner because a lot of other occupations would have been beyond her capability, I could have happily engaged her in a discussion on how much disabled one has to be to use a homebase disabled toilet, is a slight limp enough, or do you have to have lost a leg maybe, do you have to be in a wheelchair or would they accept crutches. Still as I was, how shall I say, not predisposed to talking too long before I used the facilities I didn't engage her any more than necessary.

"Well as long as I leave them clean does is really matter what toilet I use" , "are you really busting" she asked, one question too far so I opened the disabled and did the necessary.
To have left it clean would have required a few bottles of bleach and a sponge so I left it as I found it.

The cleaners attitude may have scared off other people, who would no doubt have been rushing away to "sainsburys" or the nearest bush, but it raises an interesting issue. Just because some one does not look disabled why has she the right to decide they should not be allowed to use a disabled toilet. There are many conditions where a person might wish to use a disabled toilet simply because there is access to a secluded wash basin, no don't worry I am not about to go into more detail.

Still next time I am in Homebase and need to take a pee maybe I should pop upstairs, they have a whole selection of toilets in the bathroom department.

12 August, 2009

Sexting

Apparently police and child protection agencies are "increasingly concerned" about the number of children who are sexting. What the heck is sexting, well its when you send a mobile phone naked picture or video of yourself, or an intimate part of yourself, to someone. Some survey or another has found that 1 in 4 11 to 18 year olds has received a sext. Um, did I lead a sheltered life, was it just me or when we were kids didn't we just swap picture cards of cars, planes, sportsmen etc.

The article I read went on at length about how the child online exploit agency and the police are worrying, doing this or that, warning, protecting and generally fussing.
Something occurred to me, there was no mention of parents responsibility.
If you have an 11 year old child, and for some obscure reason buy him or her a mobile phone with the capability to send and receive pictures, (why would you) wouldn't you keep an eye on what they are doing, wouldn't you check who they are texting, who they are phoning and especially who they are sending pictures or videos to. And if you don't take just that small bit of interest in your child shouldn't the child protection agency be asking you questions pronto.

I maybe behind the times, I realise that soon a mobile phone will be seen as an acceptable christening gift as long as it is the latest model so perhaps I should chill out a bit on matters such as these.

In fact, yes to show that I can be modern and liberal in my thinking I will join in with all the young people of the world but I will go one step further, instead of a picture of me without any clothes on, here is a picture of my clothes without any me. Enjoy!

02 August, 2009

Points from the news.

Fear will be spreading in the corridors of Westminster again as the Swine flu pandemic loses its front page appeal MP's can become targets once more. Some of the things coming out of that place are positively insane.
One of the latest crackpot ideas is to send graduates on glorified holidays at taxpayers expense, these "gap years" will, they say, help the graduates become more employable and complete holes in their CVs. The sceptics in the country, count me in, see it as a way of keeping them off the dole figures which are already heading skyward. Still at least a lot of young people who have spent the last 4 yrs pissed out out of their heads won't have to worry about sobering up for at another year. I just wish I was "under 24" the criteria for joining this new government holiday scheme.

Moving rapidly on, people in fuel poverty can look forward to a nice government hand out, with new heating systems and environmental projects set to be paid for for them. I wonder if these poor people in fuel poverty are the same ones I see, unwashed t-shirts covering huge beer guts, as they queue for "40 B & H please luv" as I pay for my paper. Has no one told them that £40 a week is £160 a month on cigs, far more than I pay on gas an electricity even in the coldest winters. Fuel poverty, yeah right, these people need a lesson on money management not a government hand out.

And so to the final point in this instalment of ramblings, the next prime minister of the UK David Cameron, who as I am sure you will have also read, dropped himself into some trouble on the radio recently, while talking about Twitter he said "too much Twitter makes you a twat". Seems a quite reasonable comment to me and in actual fact the regulators had not received a single complaint by the time I read about it. David, presumably at the suggestion of his advisers decided to apologise, which simply highlighted the problem in my view, but here is my point, if David has to say sorry for saying twat, shouldn't Gordon say sorry for being one.