A Christian Response

Last Friday the Register drew my attention to a post by Australian Christians regarding their find of a "witch's sacrificial stone" covered in "blood". I left a comment pointing out that there is no such thing as witches and that the "blood" was far more likely to be paint or rust, being as it was, on some sort of construction site. Today I received this reply by email, in red ironically enough. (I would like to point out that I am not Australian.)

May the one true living God bless you Jamie and all Australians with His Saving Truth and Everlasting Love! (John 3:16-21)

We at Catch the Fire Ministries will keep praying for you Jamie and all Australians to believe the Bible (Word of God) as the mighty Voice from Heaven that calls, “I died on the cross for you and rose from the dead to save you from eternal death, hell and destruction! Repent of your unbelief / doubt and surrender your life (past, present and future) to Jesus Christ as your personal Savior and Lord before it is too late!”

Time is running out as we will soon stand before Him face to face as our Final Judge! (Revelation 20:11-15)

Say, 'Yes to Jesus, Yes to Heaven Forever!'

Say, 'No to Jesus, Yes to Hell Forever!'

Make the Right Choice Australia, Your Eternal Future Depends On It!

I was slightly economical with the truth in my reply.

I am a Christian, and I do believe the word of the bible, but the bible says nothing about the existence of witches, nor that red stuff is always blood. You wrote to me in red, am I to assume that this is blood too?

Jamie

ps, I am praying for your misguided souls.

Jesus is coming back very soon as the reigning King of kings and LORD of lords! (Revelation 19:11-16)

At the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father! (Philippians 2:10-11)

Are you ready Jamie?

I'm ready!

ps

Does Revelation 19:11-16 really capitalise "LORD"?

Low Battery Warning Beep Script For Linux

#!/bin/bash

DIR="/sys/class/power_supply/BAT0"
STATUS=$(cat "$DIR/status")

if [ "$STATUS" == "Discharging" ]
then
        for PREFIX in "charge" "energy"
        do
                if [ -f "$DIR/${PREFIX}_now" ] && [ -f "$DIR/${PREFIX}_full" ]
                then
                        REMAIN=$(cat "$DIR/${PREFIX}_now")
                        FULL=$(cat "$DIR/${PREFIX}_full")
                        PRCT=$((100 * $REMAIN / $FULL))
                        if [ $PRCT -le 10 ]
                        then
                                mplayer /usr/share/sounds/bark.ogg
                        fi
                        break
                fi
        done
fi

Put that in your crontab and smoke it.

UPDATE: There is/may be a warn file in $DIR which you can use instead of 10/

Suspicious eBayer Minds

I recently sold some small bits and pieces on eBay. I wasn't really interested in the small amount of money that they'd generate, I just didn't want to consign them to landfill. The winning bidder of an incomplete set of bicycle skewers, which sold for £3, eventually emailed me to say that he had a cheque for me, "printed by Nationwide". I replied that he could donate the money to charity and I'd send him the skewers. to quote my new favourite blog ACTUAL QUOTE TIME!

Dear Jamie Kitson

Thank you for your e-mail. Whilst I have every intention of paying you, I shall now also donate to charity by purchasing one of those magazines from poor young people on the 'high' street.

The cheque will have to go back to the branch which issued it, for shredding and, hopefully, a credit. There can't be that many people with your name where you live and you must have a bank account so I am curious about your response, HOWEVER, I AM keenly aware this is none of my business. If it is a question of security though, as with some eBayers, it would make sense not to use your own name. I am myself concerned about security, which helps to explain my unfortunate delay as I was reluctant to link savings account and card, (which I have done some time ago). Also I am learning while buying, not having been a seller yet. I am wondering whether to have a different ID for sales. Ebay suggests using different eBay and e-mail IDs for security reasons but I think that anyone who encounters Virgin/NTL and tries to do anything with it's e-mail system, is surely doomed. Well I'm sure that's quite enough from me for now, too much probably, so I will leave you with my profuse apologies and regrets.

As soon as I get Paypal I will certainly reimburse you.

Yours Sincerely Andrew

Hi Andrew,

you may have received the skewers by now, if so you will see that I've put a return address on the envelope. I am not overly paranoid about security and my address is publicly available, it just didn't seem worth the effort of going to the bank, queuing, etc. for £3*. In fact I have a two year old cheque from TFL for £2 that I haven't paid in yet.

I don't think your bank will need to credit you as, as I understand it, the money for cheques does not leave your account until the cheque is paid in to the receiver's account.

Cheers, Jamie

* Let's say I get paid £10 an hour, that would make £3 of my time about twenty minutes, roughly the time all that would take.

UPDATE: Oh dear God, will this ever end? I wish I'd just thrown the damn things away.

So far all that has arrived is a "TO PAY" card. It may be nothing to do with you but I have to wonder.
Did you get the packet weighed and proper postage paid? Thanks and sorry to bother you with such a trifling matter but I remembered you saying you don't like going to the bank for small things and it occurred to me that the same could apply to the Post Office. Again I apologise if I'm imagining something absurd and suspect you unfairly, just that you said you posted the set remains weeks ago!
Regards
Andrew

I'm beginning to think that it's me that's being ridiculed.

Dear Jamie

The excess was only 37 pence, plus a fee of £1 and I had to pay with stamps on the card, (at the Post Office which I had to visit anyway). So I shall be refunding you, if indeed it is the skewers and that is just a guess on my part, bearing in mind that I am expecting 15-20 items or so. If it's not the skewers then I shall write you a grovelling apology! Shall let you know when item arrives.

Regards

Andrew

Barclays' Definition of an Upheld Complaint

A little while ago I made a complaint on the Barclays website about my Barclays Debit Card vs Oyster woes. I wasn't really expecting a response having never had one before, but not only did I get one response, I got two! Admittedly the first was to say that they had promised to keep my updated, and so they were keeping my updated by letting me know that they hadn't finished investigating yet. But the second letter (banks haven't discovered email yet) was the really exciting one. They admitted that some customers had had problems, and went on to say that they didn't have a solution for the problem yet* and then, and this is the best bit, they went on to say that my complaint has not been upheld. Let me just recap, they admit that they have a problem, they admit that they don't have a fix, and yet my complaint is not upheld. One wonders under what circumstances Barclays would uphold a complaint.

* In the meantime I have been to my local branch to request a non-Wave and Pay debit card as suggested. A very helpful chap called the debit card issuing department who said it wouldn't be possible, but after three days he called me back to say that they'd found one down the back of the sofa and that it would be on its way to me soon. I have yet to receive it.

UPDATE: I got on a bus on Friday and did my usual trick of waving my wallet around at the Oyster reader and the bus driver actually asked me if I had a Barclays' card, so it's obviously quite a common issue.

WeGame.com Spam

I got these two spammy looking messages this morning informing me that "Fioleau" waned to show me a picture. I marked them as spam and clicked the unsubscribe link. But then a friend of mine said he'd received the same thing and that we did actually know a "Fioleau". Curiosity getting the better of me, I foolishly clicked on the "YES" link. Of course, I had to sign up, so I did*. The hilarious, amazing, funny, life-changing image is shown, top-right. Once I had got up off the floor from ROFLMAO I looked for the "delete my account" button. There must be one somewhere, surely? No. In fact I can't even see a "logout" link.

Did "Fioleau" really want to ruin my day with that image, or did WeGame go through her address book spamming every address she had?

* I signed up using a different address to the one that I was spammed on, and at no point did WeGame check I had access to the address I used.

Best Sausage Roll Ever (London, St. Paul's)

As well as doing fantastic coffees and quality sundry lunch items, Grace on Creed Lane, near St Paul's (in grey here in its previous guise as Tantric Tonic) also do the most perfect sausage rolls (crappy picture, left). Light, crisp and flaky pastry surrounds just the right amount of coarsely ground pork and a whiff of mustard. I'm really not into Ginger Pig sausage rolls (right) where the sausage is the size and shape of your fist.

No Guarantee

About 18 months ago I bought a refurbished Dell from Gasteiner Technologies which came with their standard one year warranty. Last Friday it died and will no longer power on. I had heard a rumour that under EU rules retailers must always give a 2 year guarantee with substantially expensive/electrical goods. It seems that this is not quite true, but that is because the British Sale of Goods Act meets and exceeds EU law. The SoGA says that an item must last a reasonable length of time. All this left me wondering if standard guarantees/warranties have any point at all? Let alone expensive "extended" warranties.

Usually I would be up for the fight, but I am not really sure that I want to peruse this, I almost accept that I took a risk in buying a refurbished laptop and this time I lost. Having said that they did sell me a laptop for £500 which has broken after 18 months, and that's not really acceptable.

Incidentally I was surprised to find that Dell didn't have one standard price for replacing the motherboard of my laptop. I was originally quoted €400, but when I pointed out I could buy a new laptop for that I was told that I could get a discount, the best deal I was eventually offered was £100 if I bought a three year warranty for £160, which if I was then guaranteed to have a working laptop for three years would have been quite a good deal, if I wasn't so against extended warranties and giving Dell any of my money. I've since been told that buying a laptop from Dell is similar, it's always best to ring them and see what's the best deal you can get from them. The representative also used the rather odd analogy of not being able to take out a warranty on a dead person. After I questioned her on what she'd said she swore that she'd said "insurance", though it still seems a bit of an odd thing to choose to say.

UPDATE: The BBC has a good article on this.

The Mess That Is The Mobile Web

I wanted to check an ebay auction on my mobile the other day. I typed in m.ebay.co.uk as the m subdomain seems to be the common mobile web shortcut (see m.google.co.uk and m.flickr.com). But that didn't work. Next I tried ebay.co.uk/mobile (I think I might have googled for that) which linked to pages.ebay.co.uk/mobile/web/ which in turn promised me that the address I was after was ebaymobile.co.uk. But that didn't work either! Eventually, I think through googling some more I found it at wap.ebay.co.uk. eBay isn't the first company to use the wap subdomain, see also wap.tfl.gov.uk. I think the most rediculous mobile subdomain I know of is nationalrail's pda.ojp.nationalrail.co.uk. Kai is against the .mobi TLD as he believes that it will fragment the web, but as all these subdomains suggest, we do need separate pages for devices with small screens, as good as CSS is, it cannot do it alone, and once you admit that we need different pages for mobiles wouldn't it be easier if we all knew that we could use the .mobi address? I really do prefer the m subdomain over all of this though, purely because it's fewer letters to type on a tiny keyboard. Incidentally wap.ebay.co.uk is pretty good and ebay.mobi forwards to ebay.com.

UPDATE: Another thing that annoys me is browser detection. If I go to a mobile site I do not want to be redirected to the desktop site just because the site in question doesn't know about the browser I am using.

UPDATE: I emailed ebay about their issue, and surprisingly they responded. In their email was this gem: "We do have carrier-specific mobile sites." WTF?

Technology Bites

I received what looked like a piece of spam from one of my contacts today. I called him to check and sure enough he hadn't sent it. It seems that spammers are more and more turning to cracking peoples' accounts in order to get spam through filters.

Various issues with the EasyJet website:

• Insurance is still added automatically, despite orders by EU regulators to do otherwise.
• Once you have provisionally chosen your flights, you don't seem to be able to change them without actually "removing" them first.
• Baggage costs £8 per journey leg, but booking a return journey you are only given the option for the entire return journey at £16. As far as I can see the only way to get individual £8 option is to book the two legs separately, and then you have to pay the card fee twice, which is £3 for debit cards and £6 for credit cards, so you may not be much better off anyway.

Booking train tickets is also a bloody nightmare, the train companies seem intent on hiding return fares and promoting single fares. Yes two singles can be cheaper, but you often have to be very flexible with your times otherwise you can end up spending twice what a return would have cost. Bring on renationalisation I say.

My HTC Touch HD is finally back from the repair centre working!

Fourth Time Lucky

My HTC Touch HD is back at the repair shop. For the fourth time. Since HTC fixed the scratches, after much persuading, that were picked up from the first time that I sent it back the screen had been going blank intermittently. I really don't think much of the quality of their repairs.