I got a letter from Norwich Union Direct today saying the following…
Did you know that people in your road are enjoying great Home Insurance from Norwich Union Direct?
It then listed my street. My mum jokingly suggested I should ring them up and ask them who the people were. I decided to take her up on the idea. After all, what’s the point in telling me people in my street have it if they can’t tell me who they are so I can validate that they are telling the truth?
Having the luxary of a microphone and a phone that does speaker phone I took advantage of my right to record the call so you can all have a listen. It takes about 10 seconds to get into it (before you hear anything) as I couldn’t be bothered going back and editing it ;).
Norwich Union Direct call
From the 23rd of July, FilmFour will be free apparently. I’m not sure if it includes FilmFour+1 and FilmFour Weekly as well though I would imagine it does as nobody is going to pay for them when the main channel is free. Importantly, it’s going to be on Freeview so I will be able to get it at uni :).
I had a read of Digital Spy‘s story on it and apparently FilmFour Weekly is going to close. FilmFour should hopefully have some good movies on though, they are launching it with Lost In Translation.
Got down to Labour Ready for 6:45 this morning. Sat around for 2 hours before we were all told there wasn’t going to be anymore work available today. Had to bus it back home at peak time. So not the greatest start to the day.
I did get quite a bit of coding done today, indeed I started writing a new product from scratch and have done probably more than half of it which is a lot of code given I have also been working on other things. But overall it’s not been the greatest day. I’m hoping double South Park followed by double Sugar Rush will pull me out of it. Providing I can get control of the cable box.
And what do I have to look forward to? Getting up at 6 again tomorrow to go down again. And maybe the day after too.
On the flip side, it’s now only 3 days until I go see Billy Talent. My one salvation. Well actually my second after DC though it’s not having such a moral boosting effect as of the past few days.
That or it’s just drowned out by the soul destroying events currently happening. I mean, the stuff I have done today for my script involved piles of AJAX and JavaScript. This is the kind of stuff world leaders like vBulletin are doing. What the hell am I doing in the same place as the rest of the losers at the agency? Have a possible client wanting some development work though so hopefully I will get some joy there.
I was flicking over the Ruby category of Amazon.co.uk’s computer programing languages books and came accross this listing…
Should I tell them? :p.
I actually had the thought to check out the library and see what they had to offer as I really don’t want to be spending money on a book. The answer is they can’t offer anything! EB don’t have one single book on Ruby programming apparently. I wonder if I can request some.
I think Eniac has emptied for the summer, haven’t seen anyone in here the last few times I have been in. Not that I expected to, who is going to come into uni labs over the summer? Well, some people might hit DEC-10, I know Matt did, but that’s DEC-10, everyone except me hates Eniac :p.
I had another early start and finish this morning, I was home before 7:30. I got registered with Labour Ready but he said it wasn’t worth hanging around as he wouldn’t be able to find anything for me today. I did allow me to get some development done though. Although it’s depressing thinking about how work could cut into my development. I don’t want to get home from work and think “I’m just too tired to do anything,” I refuse to be even if it means overdosing on caffine. I don’t actually like coffee so I may just eat the beans raw.
On the up side, it’s now only 4 days until I see Billy Talent! I’ve been playing their new album almost non-stop including all night when I sleep to try and get all the lyrics learnt in time.
Have a read through this BBC News article. I’ll quote…
A Populus poll for The Times newspaper and ITV news suggests 13% of UK Muslims believe the 7/7 bombers should be regarded as martyrs, with the other 87% disagreeing.
I saw worrying not suprising because I’ve seen the figures for an international survey which asked basically the same question. While I hadn’t seen the British figures I could guess from the figures I did see that we would be about that level. But anyway.
13% of Muslims in the UK support what happened on 7/7. That’s in the UK. I’ve seen the worldwide figures and I think it goes without saying that they are a lot higher elsewhere, obviously in the middle east.
Given there are about a billion Muslims, and it averages out to be about 25%, that means 250,000,000, or 4 times the population of the UK are in support of such actions taken on 7/7.
Furthermore, we have 1.5 million Muslims in the UK. That means over 202,000 Muslims in the UK alone support the actions of 7/7. This is not a small minority. This isn’t a bunch of extremists we can dismiss. This is 200,000 people in the UK alone. This should scare the crap out of all of us.
Nooooooooooo! They were so close. It was 0-0 in extra time. Over 28 minutes into the 30 minutes of extra time after which it would go to penalties which Germany would almost certainly win as they have only ever lost once at penalities in the World Cup (they beat Argentina in the last round on them) and Italy have only won once apparently.
Then Italy scored. Germany had a single minute to claw one back and beat them on penalties. Then Italy scored again! This sooo isn’t fair, I ignored the World Cup until last round, then I started to get sucked in. By this round I got myself pyched up enough to be screaming at the TV and then this happens!
If Germany had a chance to win the World Cup this was it. They were in the final in 2002 but Brazil beat them 2-0 and rightfully so, I can’t pretend Brazil didn’t outplay them because they were really on form. But being the host nation is always a massive advantage – look how far South Korea got in 2002. South Korea! So if they had a chance, it was this World Cup while they are the host nation. Guess not though. Despite that, they are a stronger team than they were in 2002 so it seems Klinsmann is bringing them back onto form.
Already back from work. Went down to Labour Ready today at 7, they said they couldn’t register me without a passport or birth cerificate as driving licence isn’t proof of ID (but a non-phone, hand-written birth cerificate is), so I had my dad rush one down, which they couldn’t use because it’s not a full one. So it’s 7:46 and I’m back home. I shouldn’t be up for a good few hours yet, let alone finished my day.
The Federation should have never have agreed to the treaty that prevented them from developing cloaking technology. Especially as, as seen on TNG they had some very powerful cloaking technology secretly developed. I mean, they couldn’t develop it but surely they could use what they have already done right? It’s like when The Doctor on Voyager deleted all that medical information because the doctor who came up with it tested it all on innocent Bajorans. Sure that was wrong but what is done is done and there is no reason to delete it.
Anyway, the point is, it may soon be out of the Trek and into the labs. Two mathematicians have published an article in one of the UK Royal Society’s scientific journals which shows how a cloak could and should work in theory. You can find full details on BBC News.
I randomly changed on TV.com to find them running an article entitled “a tribute to Aaron Spelling.” I decided to check it out and was informed that he passed away last week. It’s a shame as Aaron Spelling is an absolute legend. For those not aware of him, he brought us the following TV shows…
- Charlie’s Angels
- Love Boat
- Starsky and Hutch
- T.J. Hooker
- Beverly Hills, 90210
- Melrose Place
- 7th Heaven
- Charmed
That is of course no where close to a definitive list but it’s the ones I felt people would most recognise. Starsky and Hutch in it’s time was mind-bogglingly successful, 90210 was like the original Dawson’s Creek and Charmed is still going strong to this day (ok it’s ending but that’s amazing, so few TV shows “end” rather than “get cancelled”).