Barclaycard expects customers to ignore sensible practices

I forgot to pay my Barclaycard bill this month. The amount I forgot to pay was massive. Absolutely huge. Yes, the balance from my statement last month was a staggering £21.28. Okay, that small amount of sarcasm aside (almost as small as the amount in question), at the end of the day the payment was due and I forgot to make it. It was my mistake, so let’s just get on to the point of this:

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The curious coincidence of ‘Carriers’ and ‘The Crazies’

Okay, it’s not that interesting – in fact pretty boring – but when it happened, the absolutely amazing alliteration advanced itself into my mind and I just wanted to use it. Basically, the  complete non-story is that when I gave my nephew a lift somewhere yesterday, he commented that he’d been to the cinema the night before and seen a trailer for a film that was about some kind of virus, but it made him think of zombies due to the what happens to the infected, the way they behaved.…

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I appear to have shamed my local paper into censoring me

It was only a really, really trivial thing – but that’s what it looks like: My local paper have removed a comment I made on their website, and I can only imagine that it was removed because I shamed them. The news report I commented on is this story about the son of a recent lottery winner. When I read it I noticed the comment that the chap in question wasn’t happy that his “personal life had come out” – the fifth paragraph in the article, which reveals where he…

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Some thoughts on munged email addresses

Note: This post is actually an article I’ve had on a couple of websites for a number of years, originally written shortly after softrock.co.uk became the victim of a very deliberate use of email addresses at that domain in the headers of UCE (aka a “Joe Job”). Now that this blog is up and running, it’s the ideal place for such material – so one quick re-read, check and update later, here it is. Introduction Right at the start I should state that I am very strongly opposed to the…

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Spoiler space on usenet and mailing lists

Firstly, what actually is a spoiler? It’s where a plot detail in a film, book, TV show or whatever, is revealed to people before they are able to see the film/show, read the book, etc for themselves. Sometimes a spoiler can be fairly mild, revealing nothing more than the name of a new character, but they can also be very severe, revealing a significant plot point, and spoiling the viewer’s enjoyment if they know what’s coming (hence “spoiler”). So, then, what’s spoiler space? Well, a long standing convention on Usenet…

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How to prolong a customer survey

Yesterday morning I received a telephone call from a company acting on behalf of my bank, asking if I would take part in a customer survey – i.e., would I be willing to answer a few questions over the ‘phone? Normally, I’d say “no” to such things, but for various reasons which I won’t go into here, I chose to say “yes” on this occasion. So the girl at the company undertaking the survey, who was a very polite, friendly young lady, started asking questions – but there was a…

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