Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

I’ve turned into some kind of angry letter-obsessed old man! But to be fair I write these up pretty quickly and don’t bother checking them (there are several purposeful spelling and grammar errors in this – see if you can spot them).

But anyway, there was an advert on ITV1 tonight for Confused.com which claimed the internet was the most important invention of the 21^st century. I know, I know, it hurts on the inside. So I wrote to them about it.

To Whom It May Concern:

I have just been watching ITV1 (it is currently just before 8PM on Thursday 30 September) when I saw an advert for your website.

On the advert, the voice over woman described the internet as “the most important invention of the 21st century.”

As I am sure you will be aware, the internet was in fact not invented in the 21st century. Indeed, it was invented well before the 21st century with its foundations lying as long ago as the 1960’s.

Indeed not only does the internet date back this far but it’s wide spread adoption really occurred in the 1990’s and by the time we reached the end of 2000 the Dot-com bubble had already come and gone.

I therefore believe the claim made on the advert was erroneous.

While you could make the claim that although the internet was invented before the 21st century it is still the most important invention of the 21st century, I do not believe this makes any more sense because if you are opening it up to any invention ever then surely there are more important inventions that proceed the internet – for example the invention of computers to run the internet on, electricity to run the computers on or even the agricultural revolution which first gave us a surplus of time to expand beyond mere hunter gathers. Or going the other way, why not the world wide web which is arguably the real revolution that the internet has enabled?

I believe this kind of erroneous information is a problem for two reasons.
Firstly, it does not fill me with confidence in confused.com as I believe it looks unprofessional. Particularly a site yours, which holds large amounts of my personal data.

Secondly, I believe it could lead to a wide spead misunderstanding of history by the general population on a topic which, as your advert points out, is incredibly important.

Thank you for your time.

Best wishes,
Chris

I decided against making a pun on the idea that they may have been confused. Oh well.

Despite the Coop not getting back to me on my previous complaint about the excessive queuing at my local Coop, I decided to complain once again over the weekend because of another issue I had a bone to pick with them, and because I’m getting old and part of that process is writing angry complaint letters to organisations.

It was a subject close to my own heart as it happens – I was trying to buy a curry but most of the curries available where made of Halal meat and therefore off limits to anyone who a) understands how religiously slaughtered meat is produced and b) who has a conscious. As such I, along with Norm have written to the chief executive of Coop suggesting that as a brand which set them up as an ethical choice should remove all religiously slaughtered meat from their shelving due it’s grossly unethical origin.

Mr Marks

I recently went to the Co-op supermarket on New York Street, Leeds to buy something for dinner and decided on a microwavable curry ready meal. However, when I reached the section these are stocked I found that most of the Coop curries had been replaced by those labelled under the Mumtaz brand. As you may be aware, Mumtaz use exclusively Halal meat.

I consider myself an ethical consumer. Indeed one of the reasons I shop at Co-op is because the company has a long history of offering a selection of ethical products and indeed seems to take pride in doing so.

Halal meat (and Kosher meat also), if you are not already aware, is highly unethical as it causes unnecessary suffering to the animal resulting in the Farm Animal Welfare Council, the government’s independent review board on the subject, to conclude it should be banned immediately (such slaughter methods are actually already illegal, but religious organisations currently hold an exemption). Should you wish to read further, more information can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halal#Animal_welfare

I was therefore shocked, and disappointed, that Co-op had selected to stock Mumtaz’s Halal dishes. I believe that the Coop should continue it’s tradition of providing ethically sourced products by removing any products which contain religiously slaughtered meat. I urge you, as the group chief executive to make enquiries into this distribution policy and act to reverse the decision as soon as possible. Whilst these unethically sourced products remain on your shelves with no clear choice for me as a consumer, then I shall unfortunately not be able to continue my custom with your organisation.

Thank you for your time.

Lets see what they come back to us with.

Having safely returned from our trip across Europe I’ve finally got round to adding all my photos into the photo gallery website I designed while in La Rochelle.

You should be warned now that essentially “this site is best viewed on Chris’s computer.” Ideally you need a Javascript enabled Firefox which you can run full screen on a 22″+ full HD resolution monitor hucked with a reasonably fast broadband connection. You may think to yourself this reasonably poor usability – and you’d be right. But as I have that, my friends at work have that and my parent have that, I don’t really care about anyone else. Well, not that I don’t care about you, I just don’t think it worth my time to make a usable gallery for photos you probably don’t give a crap about.

In any case, you can check out the photo gallery in all it’s beautifully transitioned jquery glory which doesn’t even look good over the internet because it takes so long to load everything and is therefore only good when viewed on a local machine anyway, but again, see above, here.

As you probably know, atheists are currently celebrating Stephen Hawking announcing there is officially no god.

I was on BBC Radio Leeds talking about it earlier. It went pretty badly, to be honest, I could have spoken a lot better and we ended up discussing what evidence I would require to believe in god rather than talking about Hawking’s new book. Never the less it’s always an experience and it’s great to get a mixture of view points on the show which BBC Leeds are always really good at.

You can listen again for seven days on the BBC website, it’s about 38 minutes in.

Last night was the best Wendy I have had in a long time. And it’s always good so that is quite impressive. The broad range of characters turning up really helped the situation I think, it felt so old school with so many people back there. Indeed in total we managed 18 people making us easily the biggest circle on the dance floor. Who says we’re too old to party 😉 .

We got in this morning to find that one of the server’s external connections was down. Upon further investigation I found that the internet was in fact working fine, we just had a different IP address which is why the network monitoring was reporting that the server wasn’t responding.

I phoned up Opal, a part of TalkTalk, who have apparently taken over from Pipex – they didn’t tell us or anything, I just headed over to the Pipex Business website and found it was now an Opal website. I tried logging in to see our customer details but it didn’t accept my username or password and I couldn’t reset my password because I didn’t have an Opal customer number.

I phoned them up and sat in a queue for 10 minutes before getting through to someone who told me I was through to the wrong department. She informed me our line had a block on it and then put me through to the “other” technical department at which point I sat in another phone queue for 10 minutes before finally getting through to the right person.

I asked about the block and he informed me that they had cut us off because we hadn’t paid. This is because none of the credit or debit card payments transferred over when Pipex customers were moved over to Opal – only direct debit customers were safe and we’re not a direct debit customer because they messed that up recently and so we had to pay via credit card instead.

As a result they had cut our internet off – except in a moment of sheer incompetence they haven’t actually cut us off, they just think they have – I can actually access the internet fine. If it wasn’t for the fact that I needed our IP address back I would have just ignored them as the fools they are.

He informed me that if I made a payment they could re-activate my account. But he couldn’t take that payment or put me through – I had to phone back on a different number. I then asked about the fact I couldn’t log in and he said I would need to speak to Pipex, providing a third separate number I would need to phone to get that sorted out.

Fun times.

Beginning the ground work for our trip to Monte Carlo next month, we hit Grosvenor Casino recently to get some practice in (because everyone knows the more you practice at games of chance, the luckier you get).

It was an interesting contrast to Alea which is a bit more up market but as a consequence the food and drink is a bit pricer, as are the minimum stakes.

Grosvenor was instead a little more cheap and cheerful but never the less had some great views and friendlier croupiers, even if some of them did struggle a little with the whole adding up on black jack.

Plus Norm managed to walk with with more than double his stake I can only came away £4 down so on balance it was a really good night. Unfortunately things didn’t go quite so well for George.

Because I don’t yet have a partner to send individual congratulation cards with both our names on it, I thought I would just give a shout of congratulations to all those who have recently graduated.

Most notably my sister who recently received a 2i in Theatre Costume Design. Of course, it’s not quite as good as having a degree from a Russell Group university such as the University of Leeds, but it’s very good none the less and that’s the perfect amount for remaining on good terms with me.

Also congratulations to Kat, Sarah, Charlotte (kind of), James and anyone else who has graduated recently who I genuinely do care about, just not enough to remember you’ve just graduated.

I finally got to see Gijsbert’s new house yesterday. It’s very nice indeed! Located in Adel, the street could easily be confused for a JCT600 showroom with lines of Mercedes, BMWs and and Audis. Detached and everything.

It was quite a nice garden at the back too – you could even describe it as being very appropriate for humanist summer BBQs similar to those held by the North Yorkshire Humanist Group which I attended last summer.

Michelle dropped by last week in between her many travels.

We went to Blackhouse, the steak house in the city centre now located where Est Est Est used to be which I really, really recommend! I’m not convinced it was better than River Plate but certainly matches it and River Plate was amazing in itself. Cannot recommend it enough.

Afterwards we headed up to The Hedley Verity which is the new Lloyds No. 1 bar (essentially, a Wetherspoon’s with disco lights). That is located where Baja Beach Club used to be. I can’t say I spent much time in Baja because I didn’t start really going out and getting drunk until I was 18 and was therefore already three years too old to be hanging out in Baja.

What struck me though was how easily we all quickly slipped back into old times, arguing over socialist vs conversative politics and getting drunk. Good times.