My American cousins always used to think that the name of my home town, Leatherhead, was hilarious but not as extremely amusing as nearby Dorking. Now George Clooney has made a film called Leatherheads, it’s about American football. So my home town will be famous as a film title. This is bad news, but it could be worse, I suppose. At least Clooney’s not a complete idiot. At least it’s not a Disney movie.
Monthly Archive for September, 2007
OK. It’s fine for other children’s parents (2 today) to phone up asking me to collect their children, or deliver their children, or whatever, even if the reason is so that they can indulge their seedy money-making enterprises in property ownership and even though I had to skive off work early today just so that I could collect my own children. It’s a bit annoying that they want me to call them back on their mobile phones, at peak rates, to discuss the arrangements. It’s more than annoying when they won’t allow the conversation to end quickly because they feel guilty and want to blather on about this and that to make themselves feel better, at my expense. Flame off.
It is so irritating to read that Northern Rock ‘managers’ are now whining that the government should have done more, earlier, to prevent everyone from taking all their money out. The company’s own response to the problems has been unbelievably useless. On Friday, when I went to their site to see what they had to say about their situation, there was absolutely no mention of any problem at all. I found that very disconcerting so I cycled down to the Maddox Street branch to take my money out before it was too late. There was a queue, in part because only two out of the three counters were open. If there hadn’t been a queue I might have felt reassured, but since there was and since I’m English I obviously had to join it.
Once I’d closed my account I checked the Northern Rock site to see if online customers were having any luck logging in. I couldn’t even get the log-in page to open. It continued to be unavailable every time I checked, over the whole weekend. This must have been unbelievably frustrating for all those customers who had online-only accounts and couldn’t withdraw their money at a branch. By Saturday there was a very small link at the top of the home page leading to a mildly reassuring notice. By Sunday the link had got larger. On Monday they finally got around to replacing their front page with a big apology note. It they had done that on Friday, and if they’d thought to send all available staff to the counters, and if they’d properly managed their online account access then maybe there would have been no queues, no panic and no hours of frustration and stress for all their customers.
I am delighted that I’ve closed my account, it was only paying 4.8% and I would have closed it earlier if I’d noticed, but there must now be thousands of people who’ve got a whole load of money that was in a tax-free ISA and will now have to go into a tax paying account instead. They are victims of a combination of greed and incompetence on the part of the management of Northern Rock and those managers should now be committing Hara-Kiri, not whinging about how the government should have bailed them out sooner.
My iPod has played a track by The Prodigy on every journey I’ve made by bike recently, but never when I’ve been travelling by train. How does it know to do that?
The heavily trailed report to Congress by Gen David Petraeus about how well the ’surge’ is going was given a special 2.5 hour programme on the World Service. This is what happened when the General got up to speak.
Is that hilarious or what?
And now, this advert has appeared in the Washington Post:
Ever since mankind discovered that the Wii remote uses Bluetooth for its wireless connection nerds people have been trying to use it for doing music. There have been some PC based drum instruments and of course the performance artists over at Cycling 74 had someone who was controlling a fancy sample playing looper thingy. I wanted something simpler, as easy to use as the Wii itself, so I wrote a straightforward monophonic string drum playing thing. It’s hard to describe, I’m going to record myself playing it and put it up here later, but to be honest if you’ve got a Mac with Bluetooth it’s probably easier to just download the program and have a go yourself. I’ve given this project its own page (or just click on the KS-3ii link at the top of the blog), with instructions, downloading links and room for your comments and suggestions.
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