Bloody Microsoft

I know this pales into insignificance compared with most of the stuff MicroSquish does, but just out of interest, why on earth do they say that setting your browser homepage to MSN is recommended when installing MSN Messenger 6.0? This is the biggest load of nonsense I’ve ever heard!

Clouds

Have you ever noticed how cool clouds are? They’re fuckin’ A.

Check ‘em out:

Would I live in France?

Having just returned from France, I thought I’d take an objective view of whether or not I’d like to live there, based on my experiences in the last week or so…

Please note all thoughts and opinions expressed here are that of me, and not necessarily representative of anyone else, or other. Well, they probably are. Except French people.

1) French people smell

It’s a well known fact that French People smell. They’re always eating onions and never wash.

2) There’s dogshit everywhere

It’s true. Dogs poo literally everywhere. It’s something of a slalom wandering about any French city in a bid to not get any “merde de chien” on your sandals.

3) They drive like absolute lunatics

I suggest staying well away from any motor vehicles. Not only do they drive everywhere about 6 times the speed limit, but the police seem to have absolutely no interest in this. I saw someone speeding, straight past a French copper, who whistled his whistle, glared at the car a bit… and then ignored it. And they can’t park. I lost count the number of cars I saw parked either completely randomly in blatant non-parking zones, or actually on the pavement. Or at really obscure angles. Bizarre.

4) French people are stupid

Look at this photo! They have a cage full of pigeons! Not only can the pigeons just fly out… they’re pigeons for crying out loud! Oh and the odd chicken.

5) French women don’t wear bras

They wander about with their tits flapping about everywhere. It’s a wonder there aren’t more eye injuries you know, especially if they ever try to run anywhere.

6) All they ever eat is bread and cheese

“Monsieur… vouz voulez du pain et fromage?”. No you git, I want a steak and a beer.

7) They speak a weird language

It makes no sense. And they speak at 80 times the speed of normal people making it impossible to follow.

Everything is dead

Nothing grows in France. There’s no water. There are no plants. The grass, which ordinarily is green, is in fact, brown. Or dead. Or soil.

9) Everyone kisses each other

Men kiss other men. Women kiss other women. Everyone is always kissing. What’s wrong with a good old fashioned, traditional British hand shake?

10) French people are lazy

They don’t do anything. Ever. They just sit about. If they’re walking somewhere, it’s only because they’ve just smased their car up (see (3) above) or they’re walking somewhere to sit down. Shops don’t open until after midday and if they ever do any work (like the binmen) it’s in the middle of the bloody night.

So, would I live there?
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Msgplus

I thought I’d quickly share a little recommendation for a MSN Messenger add-on. If you use Messenger, as opposed to say Trillian (or Yahoo/Aim etc.) then this a great free little addon which adds heaps of functionality. Official site is here…

It’ll allow you to do away messages, remove the ads, quick texts and all sorts. A very useful feature I just found is the ability to change your status by typing (i.e. not having to right click the icon and select it.. For example

/away

will set you away.

/online

will set you back to online. Others are:

/brb (Be Right Back)
/busy (Busy)

etc.

Do have a look. It’s free! You can download it here

Sony redeems itself, a bit

For what seems like an eternity now, I have been struggling and struggling with Sony. I have bought a *lot* of their equipment in my lifetime, and generally speaking I have always been very impressed. However, and without going in to the gory details, recently I have been so fucked off with them that I vowed never to buy anything Sony ever again.

The short story is: I have a VAIO (Sony laptop computer) – I bought a docking station and some memory for it from SonyStyle (grr). The docking station is fine, great in fact (although overpriced). The memory didn’t work – just caused my computer to crash. Phone SS who told me it wasn’t their dept, had to phone VAIO-LINK. Did that. Have you tried this? Yes! Are you sure! Yes! Will you do it again? OK. Still didn’t work. You can imagine the situation, about 20 phone calls over the space of 3 weeks, none of the promised ringbacks (so me phoning their London number which reroutes to BELGIUM!), havign to explaing the whole fiasco to 20 different people, constantly being told it was someone elses problem, please phone them, until EVENTUALLY, I am told it is SonyStyle’s problem (i.e. the people I bought from and phoned FIRST). So I’m back on the blower with them, at about 2pm on a Friday afternoon:

“Oh I’m sorry sir, you’re outside of the 2 weeks cooling off period, so you need to speak to the supervisor, but she’s gone home. I’ll ask her to phone you on Monday”

TWO WEEKS COOLING OFF PERIOD!? YOU FUCKING MORON, THE REASON THAT TWO WEEKS HAS PASSED IS BECAUSE OF YOU, YOU CRETINOUS LITTLE ARSEWIPE. AND WHY IN THE NAME OF GOD HAS YOUR SUPERVISOR GONE HOME EARLY? ISN’T HER JOB SORT OF IN HER TITLE, TO SUPERVISE? HOW LAZY IS SHE!?

Needless to say I didn’t get that phone call Monday morning. Eventually the memory was returned to them (all i needed was a return code and for me to send it back, for crying out loud). However, I did not get a replacement. I had to pay P&P on something that was shite and I was thoroughly let down.

And I let Sony know this too. I emailed and faxed them, repeatedly. To this day, I have had no response, hence my vendetta against every buying anything Sony ever again.

However, my VAIO died quite spectacularly on Friday morning. Whilst I was all backed up, I really did not fancy the prospect of formatting and reinstalling XP Pro since it had been a fucking nightmare the first time I did it.. so reluctantly, I reached for the VAIO recovery disks, fearing for my sanity.

And this is where there is a happy twist in the tail! They actually worked brilliantly! Admittedly it installed XP Home (but shhh, I won’t tell anyone if you don’t, and let’s face it, there’s frankly bugger all difference between Home and Pro… it’s a bit like having a VW Golf instead of a Seat Arosa… it’s the same fucking car, just a different badge and one is more expensive).

And here I am, typing away… all back to normal. System is runnign fine, I’m SP’d up and it’s all good. So, well done Sony!

My simple advice is: Sony make good kit. OK the vast majority is horribly proprietry (I mean the Memory Stick… what a bag of shite) but generally, it’s top quality. Just, please, whatever you do NEVER EVER EVER USE SONYSTYLE – it’s overpriced, the delivery is shite, and the customer service is non-existent.

Please don’t use them. Please!

Open Your Eyes

Vanilla Sky is a great film. A lot of people said it was pants, and I remember when I left the cinema, I wasn’t that impressed I had a feeling it was trying to be a bit too clever.

However, I have it on DVD and have now watched it a few times. It is definitely one you need to watch more than once, and I’d say 5 times is about right. It’s a real thinker of a film, with many excellent philosophical ideas in there.
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Hawaii

Me got printimicated…