I love my car. Really, I do. It’s great, economical, fairly sporty, and has a load of space in the back for Aimee and her copious paraphenalia. It has lots of toys – like parking sensors, dual climate control and loads of three-letter-acronymns that I don’t fully understand (like ABS, EBD, ESP, TCS and so on), it also has a bluetooth mobile phone system, built in. The phone system is one of the reasons I bought the car – what with doing quite a bit of travelling, and the ban on using mobiles in cars. Everything is great in the car, absolutely wonderful German quality – except this phone system.
Firstly, the number of phones it supports is meagre at best – most of which are old and retired now. None of the Nokia E or N-series phones (or indeed, any Series 60 Symbian phones) are supported – though that’s a Nokia issue, rather than an Audi one, which they’ve only just fixed with the E71 and N96.
Secondly, when you have a compatible phone, and you wish to utilize the Audi’s wonderful voice-activated controls, it all turns to goopy shit. To illustrate this, I recorded my attempt this morning at trying to dial my voicemail box using the voice controls. All the car needs to do, is dial ’901′.
Apologies for the quality of the recording, it was done by using another phone’s Voice Recorder and then exporting the audio off.
While I was on the blog-hiatus, I changed my car (though the 306 still lives with me!). I went from the RX8 to a nice, sensible, economical diesel Audi A3. Co-incidentally, the car change happened at the same time as my car insurance was due to renew, so I took it as an opportunity to shop around for a better deal.
Using the myriad comparison websites, I eventually did find a good deal, with Privilege. So good a deal, I opted to pay up-front, instead of by instalments. After a week or two, Privilege wrote to me to ask for me to send them some ‘proof’ of my No Claims Bonus. After enquiring with them, what this boils down to is a piece of paper from your previous insurer which says “Yes, this person has X years no claims bonus”.
So, I ring up my previous insurer, Esure and ask for this piece of paper. They’re very nice and efficient on the phone, and tell me that they’ll send it out and I’ll have it within a few days. Great stuff.
A couple of weeks pass and there’s no paperwork from Esure. There is, however, a stern letter from Privilege saying that if they didn’t get the ‘proof’ soon, they may have to charge me extra. So, I ring up Esure again and ask, again, for my proof of no-claims bonus. They, again, say they will send it, and that it’ll take 3-5 days.
All the online April Fools’ jokes were poor this year. The whole point of them is that they’re supposed to be vaguely plausible – so you’d read/look at them and think that it’s real.
Who’s ever going to believe that Google and Virgin would open a Martian colony? Or that kernel.org.uk, the home of the Linux kernel, was switching to FreeBSD?
Then there’s the jokes that are just designed to get a laugh – like Youtube’s redirection of videos to the Rick Astley classic, “Never Gonna Give You Up”.
Maybe the days have gone where we’d be fooled into thinking spaghetti grew on trees, and we’re all far more ‘informed’, due to the wonderous interweb…
A day spent in the drizzly, cold Docklands. Installed the kit I was in town to sort out and then popped over to Harbour Exchange for my delayed meeting.
The meeting goes well and fairly quickly, and I’m left with three hours to kill before my late train back. I’d much rather get open returns, but one must always count the pennies when dealing with expense claims!
I figure that it wouldn’t be too much of a wait if I made my way over to St Pancras, and sip a couple of quiet ones at the Baby Betjeman, where I could use the wireless and get on with some stuff. So, I make my way back across town and just miss the 5pm mad-dash – which was nice.
However, disaster strikes. The Baby Betjeman is no more. It has ceased to be. Bereft of life, it lies in peace. Well. It’s closed, anyhow. All that’s left is the giant parasol and a chalk noticeboard saying that they’ve closed up because the ‘proper’ Betjeman pub is nearing completion – at the end of April! Bollocks.
The only other option is the on-platform ‘Champagne Bar’, which is entirely as pretentious as it sounds. I find a seat by the bar and order a cup of tea, in true British stiff-upper-lip style. However, tea doesn’t last 2 hours and curiosity gets the better of me, and after supping my (rather bland) tea I take a look at the drinks menu.
So, last night, my blog entry was referring to how I thought my cold was dying off. Well, that was a complete non-starter. Woke up at about half-one this morning with extremely uncomfortable stomach pains and an uncontrollable urge to visit the toilet NOW. A few hours of very broken sleep and three toilet trips later and the sun was coming up. Not good at all.
There’s no way I’d be any use at work, so I call in sick and spend the day alternating between the sofa and the loo. It looks like the illness I’ve been experiencing could well be this Norovirus thing that’s been going around recently.
Regarding the entry the other day – Bad Brother – I read with great interest that the 19 year old “entrepreneur” contestant Liam Young has actually told a few teeny-tiny little porky pies about his allegedly booming business. Namely that…well…there isn’t one. Not really. He’s hired a mailing address and bought some shared webhosting. Sure, he’s registered his company name with Companies House – and, bless, his mum is Company Secretary – but he appears to be living in cloud-cuckoo-land with respect to his claims of being an internet business magnate!
Back to work today with not so much a bump as a gentle coast, which was nice. I guess it’s down to the fact we’ve come back on a Wednesday, and have a nice little half-week to deal with instead of that horrible “Monday morning” feeling. I guess we’ll see on Monday.
My job, managing a team of sysadmins, DBAs and support staff for ‘a large internet retailer’ means that I get to be the lucky punter whose phone number appears on DNS WHOIS records. This is something that Add a comment