The RANT thread (often contains fruity language)

[Cudzoziemiec]

Is the day after this weekend Blue Monday?

[Kim]

Is the day after this weekend Blue Monday?

I think it's officially "Cyber Monday".  Commemorating the hoards of USAnians who, in a post-thanksgiving stupor and with unmetered dial-up, would jump on IRC and pester anyone with a plausibly female username with "A/S/L?" requests^[1].


_{[1] This statement may contain lies or traces of lies.}

[Cudzoziemiec]

And between now and then we've got Black Sabbath and Gloomy Sunday!

[fuzzy]

And between now and then we've got Black Sabbath and Gloomy Sunday!

All overseen by Deacon Blue

[Paul]

Ruby Tuesday, aka: curry night.

[CAMRAMan]

Royal Fail, you steaming pile of shite: So I get a customs charge payable notice. That was unexpected. Anyhoo, it's for a present, so I have to pay it. £4.58 customs charge/£8.00 handling charge - bastards. Still, it has to be paid. So I enter all my details and use PayPal to pay, except you tell me the transaction's failed. Bollocks. So, I go through the rigmarole again and use a debit card, except you tell me it's failed - again. Bollocks. Only the PayPal transaction didn't fail, according to PayPal. At least they've taken the money from me. I've yet to check whether the bank has also coughed up, but I am far from impressed, to say the least.

[arabella]

Dear charities.  I'd be more inclided to donate to you if I didn't think it would result in you wasting my and your time/effort/etc by sending me a load of unwanted stuff.
Just put a flipping anonymous donation will you - a one off charge where you don't keep my details.  If some on line retailers can manage this why can't you?

And greater anglia, your delay repay site is a load of ****, you force me to give you card details else I can't get the refund (I do NOT want a paypal credit nor argos vouchers and certainly not amazon vouchers a they are a much bigger pile of ****), then make it impossible to log into my account.  If I'm lucky I may accidentally have found a magic delete details button but since you insisted I needed to provide them twice I'm not convinced.  Short version is that the customer experience was rubbish.

[Cudzoziemiec]

The few times I've travelled with Greater Anglia I've found the trains worse than Cross Country. That should be a clue.

[T42]

Then there's our bloody bank that saw fit to withdraw on-line purchasing privileges from one of my Visa cards over the weekend without telling me. Natch, it's the card I have registered with Adobe, Paypal, Amazon & god knows who else. Not just that, but being closed from Saturday pm until Tuesday I couldn't get hold of them to find out why, so I was in a muck sweat thinking that I'd been hacked, or that Adobe had been hacked yet again and my card details were now being used by Nork teenagers to log into porn sites or buy coke or nukes.  OK, my accounts didn't show anything, but that was only half reassuring because some postings don't appear until the bank reopens on Tuesday.

Anyway, after ruining my digestion & sleep for two nights it turned out that that card's attributes had been based on our owning a company, and some dickless wonder at central office had just realized on Friday that we closed it in 2016, so he, she or it pulled the plug, with never a by-your-leave or pardon, and that just before they went incommunicado for the weekend. Considerate service, that.

Then in Monday's post there's a new Mastercard - I like to have both because not everywhere in Germany takes Visa - so when I'm in the bank on Tuesday I try to activate it at their ATM, only to find my PIN refused. I remember a PIN I had for an older Mastercard and try that, but it's refused too so I ask the biddy at the counter to trigger a PIN request.  That comes through this lunchtime: she's sent me the PIN for my Visa cards.  Of course, it could be that the Visa PIN now applies on the Mastercard as well, by why should it?

Heigh ho.

[chrisbainbridge]

for 25 years i have been exchanging reports with colleagues by email using Word with "track changes" turned on.

today i get asked for a copy with just the changes highlighted!!  why cannot people learn to use the software they own and the normal methods of doing things!!!

IDIOTS

[barakta]

You can get just the changes if you know how to use track changes properly.

UGH

Lazy technophobes!

[TheLurker]

...why cannot people learn to use the software they own...

(i) Laziness or ...

(ii) They learnt how do to something using V1 of the tool, relearnt how to do it for V2 when the marketroids had it moved elsewhere and subtly changed how it worked, then again for versions 3, 4, 4c, and 5 and now they've just given up trying to keep up with the pointless fucking changes to what was once a perfectly servicable tool.

[T42]

...why cannot people learn to use the software they own...

(i) Laziness or ...

(ii) They learnt how do to something using V1 of the tool, relearnt how to do it for V2 when the marketroids had it moved elsewhere and subtly changed how it worked, then again for versions 3, 4, 4c, and 5 and now they've just given up trying to keep up with the pointless fucking changes to what was once a perfectly servicable tool.

That. Plus my argument that I write software, I don't have to be a slavish user as well.  And anyway, this Excel rubbish will never catch on.

[ian]

To be fair, like the rest of Word, the UI for track changes is overcomplex and vexatious. Is it on, is it off, what is being tracked, why is that in margin, oh god, what if I send this to the client with the rude comments in, what do you mean these don't work in Word 2, why are you using Word 2, blah blah.

[Jaded]

Golden rule of Track Changes is only ever send the Word document out as a pdf...

[T42]

Found myself writing this in a Facebook post before realizing that some of the perpetrators are also on FB. Didn't want to waste it, so:

Oh aye, we also received a surfeit of nature documentaries which had the missus going "ah!" and me going "oh God". Not to mention several large hardback books of the type that people buy because they have to buy you something but can't think what.  Very often they're UK TV tie-ins, about as interesting as dry shit on a blanket if you haven't seen the original and wouldn't have watched it anyway.  I used to leaf through such tomes out of a sense of duty but for the last few years I just set them aside with a "yes, well".

[Mrs Pingu]

My pizza stone spontaneously broke in the oven  and both the pizzas I've cooked so far have been shite. 

Having a pause before I try doing battle with the final two. 

[ian]

I've decided that all pizzas made without the benefits of a proper pizza oven, small under-shielded nuclear reactor core, or temperamental volcano are forever destined to be drizzled with a vague sense of disappointment.

I love making pizza but I've never managed to get our oven hot enough to really do it justice. As for store-bought pizza, they're not just drizzled with vague disappointment, it's a crust of discontent topped with regret. Of course, it's safer than going to Pizza Express and risking an encounter with Prince Andrew who might just compliment your daughter with 'my, how you've grown!'

[TheLurker]

I should be angry, but somehow it all seems so inevitable.  Today I bought a cork message board for the express purpose of taking it apart for the cork.  When I take it apart what do I find?  A piece of corrugated cardboard sandwiched between two layers of cork and my what substantial layers of cork they are. Why they must easily be 5 thou. 

[Mrs Pingu]

Could you not have bought some cork trivet/place mats?

[Mrs Pingu]

I've decided that all pizzas made without the benefits of a proper pizza oven, small under-shielded nuclear reactor core, or temperamental volcano are forever destined to be drizzled with a vague sense of disappointment.

My pizzas are usually fine but the first 2 were terrible. The 3rd & 4th were less bad. Sad about the stone tho.

[TheLurker]

Could you not have bought some cork trivet/place mats?

Cork message boards are usually a reliable source of largish uniformly flat sheets of cork.  Well, they have been in the past.  I haven't seen cork table mats on sale hereabouts for a very long time and the last lot I saw were round and only about 10" in diameter which is NBG for what I want.

[ian]

I like my homemade pizza very much but they're just not, well, entirely there. They need that elemental charing and underlying crispness that can't be simulated in any oven we've owned (not even when I turn all the dials to 11 and concentrate really hard). There's a bit of firey alchemy that's always destined to be missing from home pizza efforts. That said, I often follow people who've bought supermarket pizza in into the car park and murder them, because it's better that way.

That said, I find a lot of pizza restaurants disappointing. Pizza Express, other than the incidental ennobled pervs (oh, I live in the wrong half of Surrey for that nonce-sense), isn't actually that bad. The insistence of the horrid middle-classes on Franco Manco (called Manky Franco in my house), on the other hand, distresses me because it's like they make the dough and forget the topping. In Naples (or the better parts of NYC and NJ), it would be all juicy cheesy tomato-geddon and a deliciously charred roof to your mouth (that for once you won't regret, not even the next morning when the skin falls off). In Manky Franco, you've basically got a lot of chewing to look forward to. Great if you like chewing, less so if you like good pizza.

[Mrs Pingu]

I had never even heard of Franco Manco. Apptly our nearest one is in Embra. The best ones you can smell the burning wood anyway.

[Feanor]

Here in Feanor Outposts in Embra, I have just gorged on a delivery from la favourita just along the road.
I've been there plenty often enough at the restaurant, and at Oregano across the street.
But this is the first time I've tried the delivery.

As delivery pizza goes, it's the best I've had.

https://www.lafavoritadelivered.com/