A deal between McDonald’s and Microsoft to produce a branded version of the popular MSN Messenger program containing advertisements for special offers at the hamburger chain has prompted complaints from consumer groups and MPs.
more from the Guardian here.
“Fall Of The Tower Of Convention” |Imaginatrix | Qaballah Steppers
our local domain here is ramtops.org. All the machine and routers and cameras and Things are named after Discworld characters and places – at some point, if anyone cares, I’ll do a (almost certainly non-definitive) list*.
my main machine is Weatherwax, a dual G5 2.5Ghz Mac – her original hard drive is named Cottage. Yesterday perlmonger fitted another 250Gb drive in her, which I’m sorry to relate I named Privy. And this afternoon I moved the iTunes library into the privy.
for some extremely juvenile reason, I find that quite entertaining.
if you’ve never read any Terry Pratchett, none of the above will make any sense whatsoever, so don’t worry your pretty little heads.
*perlmonger informs me that we currently have 44 Discworld names assigned to the LAN. That is *so* depressing …
from the wonderful Tom Lehrer, We Will All Go Together When We Go
better [posted] late than never.
on Friday we set off not quite as bright and early as I’d have liked, but at 11 a.m., which is not bad for us, really, especially as Clients kept phoning. One of them reminded perlmonger quite forcefully of a deadline which had crept up on him for this Thursday …
anyway, off we trundled to Norwich – a journey which we estimated would take us 4.5 hours. No – 5.5 hours. Passing captainblue territory en route, we arrived just in time to check into the hotel* then go straight out for an early supper with kalunina, her other half Stuart, and his children Chris and Ellie, at Captain Americas, a burger bar in central Norwich.
Saturday saw us shopping in Norwich – I bought a Hat (it deserves the capitalisation), Pete got a belt with the shipping forecast areas on it, and we bought kalunina a set of digital scales and some gingerbread cutters – you can tell that she’s spending time with children :) We also picked up the Wallace and Gromit DVDs as a present for the children. Supper was a takeaway from somewhere called Planet Wok, which was very good.
we had to leave fairly promptly on Sunday morning, due to the aforementioned deadline, but it was a very nice weekend, and good to meet Stuart, Chris and Ellie.
*the hotel? Just don’t – *don’t* – ever stay at the “Quality” Hotel in Bowthorpe, Norwich. It’s utterly vile. And as they were foolish enough to send me an e-mailed questionnaire this morning, I’ve told them so. And they wanted *six pounds* for 30 minutes of wireless internet access – FFS …
This is the first of Hilary Mantel’s books that I’ve read, and I just *loved* it. The use of language is superb, and the way that Alison’s memories of her appalling childhood build up over time is beautifully dealt with.
I wish that Colette had been a more rounded character – I found her very unidimensional (is that a word?), and her actions at the end were quite unbelievable.
I understand that many people think that this is one of Mantel’s less good books; in that case, I’m very much looking forward to reading some of her others.
the always interesting George Monbiot has a piece in the Guardian today about the Office of Fair Trading and their approach to supermarkets.
After wriggling its way through every possible excuse for inaction, last week the Office of Fair Trading decided to launch an inquiry into the behaviour of the big grocery chains. It’s about time. But alongside it we need another one: into whether the OFT, like almost everything else in this country, has itself been taken over by the superstores. The problem the competition authorities are investigating – the dominance of companies like Tesco and Wal-Mart – is the result of 25 years of regulatory failure.
more here
http://gethuman.com/uk/ – a list of what buttons to press to get an operator when you’re stuck in call centre hell.
if not, you should.
having cut my teeth on them doing the cookbook lookup on www.nibblous.com, I decided to address the subject of our DVD collection.
so … export the ASINs from DVDPedia, put file into BBEdit, a bit of RegExp search and replace and a mySQL command, and I had a basic list.
about 10 minutes of programming to alter the files from Nibblous to suit DVDs and my site, and then an enjoyable half an hour or so of interrogating Amazon with each ASIN, confirming it was right, and writing data into the database and grabbing their largest image for further manipulation.
tomorrow, I might write the code to actually display it on my site.
I Am Not A Programmer.
honestly.
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