benjamin allen

In possibly the hottest story of the month… no, who am I kidding, this story is absurd… Ryanair has come under fire for a recent ad it placed in several newspapers, depicting a sexy model in the stereo typical ‘cute school girl’ outfit. I can’t quite fathom what people have against this advert, the ASA (Advertising Standards Authority, or, if you prefer, Absurd Silly Asses) claims this links teenage girls with “sexually provocative behaviour”. Ha!

I’m sorry, but if you think people need this image in their morning newspaper to link teenage girls with provocative behaviour, you seriously need to catch up with the times. This is what school girls do. In fact, what’s wrong with any girl (under, let’s say, fifty) showing off her body? I don’t have a problem with that, and no smart arse, it’s not just because I’m a guy. We live in a, supposedly, free country, remember? People can do what they like as long as it falls within the stringent guidelines of our democratic society. Yeh.

Of course, I fail to see where this would cause “serious or widespread offence”, if any. Who exactly would complain?? Guys definitely wouldn’t, older women wouldn’t, women who swing that way wouldn’t, and the demographic the picture depicts? Well, they may get the wrong idea and start idolising this girl as some kind of role model, but other than that, no offence. Maybe it’s just the complete morons who like to complain about things they feel are inappropriate. Well, excuse me, but I didn’t think you had the right to shove your opinions down my throat, and influence what I read/watch/listen to. Oh wait, we live in a free country, my bad.

Needless to say, from a company that has been in various advertising debates previously, Ryanair told the ASA to shove it. No really, they said they would continue to run the ad, unaltered. Rock on!! The comments made by the Head (yes, you heard me, he’s in charge!) of Communications, Peter Sherrard, echo my thoughts exactly:

“This isn’t advertising regulation, it is simply censorship. This bunch of unelected self-appointed dimwits are clearly incapable of fairly and impartially ruling on advertising.”

What’s even more amusing is that, of the three newspapers who placed the ad in front of 3.5 million readers, just a single complaint was received. That paper said it wouldn’t run the ad again… fair enough, presumably out of fear of losing that reader? Whatever. What’s even better is that the remaining two papers, who received exactly zero complaints, also said they wouldn’t rerun the ad. Huh?? I don’t get it.

Just one last point about Ryanair though, I urge you to read this article from The Wall Street Journal, as it has some absolutely fantastic quotes from the Chief Executive, Mr O’ Leary, about how he runs his business. I think he’s going to be my role model, not the half naked school girl. I dunno, he just strikes me as being easier to imitate.

Kinda depressing though, that they wanted to keep the ad running, and no newspapers will accept it. Hmm, wonder if I could find a copy somewhere…..

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Dear me, there are some whiny bastards out there. Check out this dude for example, he is bitching about being at the forefront of technology, because he thinks it’s insecure. Basically he received his new debit card, and it supports one of the new wireless, hands free payment systems being rolled out by Barclaycard and Visa. Obviously, if you leave you card lying around all over the place you’re asking for trouble, but I’d be willing to bet he has never lost a piece of plastic in his life. He just seems to be that kind of anal-retentive person. For example, he made sure to shred the new card, and place it in several different bins. Of course this meant he could no longer withdraw cash using his old card (apparently all he used the debit card for anyway was the ATM… begs the question why he was bothered about the wireless system in the first place) and thus kicked up a stink at his bank.

What a douche.

Surely he realised that, as a basic security measure, old cards would no longer work when the new one was activated? Nope, he must be a very narrow minded individual with nothing better to do than try to claim compensation for this little snafu. Seriously, he did try and claim compensation. The bank declined his request, partly because he was being a douche, but also because they failed to see, as I still do, exactly where this was the bank’s fault.

I’m sure someone will explain it to him soon. And at least someone who left a comment feels the same as me… that this is a fucking brilliant innovation, and I want it here as soon as possible.

Personally i think this Pete guy is a little OTT and frankly I’m surprised to be reading about something so trivial on the register.
– Richard

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You may have heard about this, I don’t know, but some entrepreneur just bought the private plate ‘F1′ in an auction, for £440,000.

Incredible enough, the guy is minted, and buys nice things. But some people aren’t happy with that. Oh no. As you can see from some of the comments here, there seems to be some mentality of hating success in this country. Well, hating success, or just uncontrollable jealousy. Why people think it is wrong to spend such amounts of money on completely discretionary things I don’t know, what’s even worse is, for whatever reason, they seem to think it appropriate to demand justification for his actions. Amazing. It sickens me it really does.

The guy is buying this plate to put on his £320,000 hyper car, and as far as I’m concerned, he can do so for whatever reason he likes. He might think it’s an investment, which I guess it is, or he might think he’ll look cool driving around with that plate on his car. And he definitely will, though you’ll be hard pushed to find anyone to admit it…

Hell, he may just be doing it so he can say “he did it” (sound familiar?) even so, I really don’t mind, more power to him. The man earned his money through hard work and intelligence (not that I have a problem with people who inherit amazing amounts of money, they don’t even have to work for it, lucky bastards) and he can spend what is his, however the hell he wants. I’m not going to lay any laws down about the freakin’ morality of spending all this money on ’stuff’ when there are people starving around the world. Who gives a flying rat’s ass about them?? His money, his rules. And I’ll defend him to the death. In fact, I’ll defend him until I have that much money to drop on a flamboyant number plate myself, because then I’ll have to divert my defensive skills some what.

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Yeh, right, I get it. The bad drugs that get dealed are bad, and I will only take them if I fully understand the risks (not that I’m supposed to say that, but what the hell). So what? I hear you cry. Well, imagine my shock when listening to Radio One yesterday only to hear Rockstar by Nickelback. Nice song. Too bad they censored the word ‘ass’. Ha, that’s pretty funny though, right, because some frumpy types may take offence? Fuck knows why, but you know, fair enough. However that wasn’t the horrific part.

No.

They also saw fit to censor the word ‘drugs’. Drugs! I am not kidding here, the BBC thought it would be best if they didn’t mention the D word, you know, for fear of sending hundreds of teenagers out onto the street to purchase Crack Cocaine and off themselves….?? Of course. That’s what any logical human being would think, right? Wrong!!

This censorship just goes to illuminate the path down which this country is being led. And, it’s not some carefully made crazy paving, framed by arches of trailing ivy. It’s most definitely a rusty metal grill, where we all have to wear tagged electro-magnetic boots, so we can be tracked and controlled 24/7.

Just a quick glance across the BBC brought up the following tragedies of so called ‘free-speech’… Be strong, please.

• Dog leash goths ‘hounded off bus’
• Three Little Pigs ‘too offensive’
• EastEnders stabbing angers fans

Okay, so dog leash girl, as I have branded her, is a little odd but still, human rights etc. pretty much cover the clothes you wear don’t they? Or have I been horribly misinformed, and we all wear orange jumpsuits now? Having said that… we are told what to wear when we ride a motorbike. What if I don’t want to wear a helmet? What the fuck business is it of the Governments? I guess I could just become a stupid fucking minority and get whatever the hell I wanted (yeah, it’s Sikhism you uncultured dumb ass) And that leads me nicely onto the second outrageous story.

How about the offensive little pigs? Well, again, I think that little story will still be told all across the country, however, god forbid some religious Nazi over hears you, because they’ll be quick to segregate some minority or other that can be seen as a victim. Why? I honestly have no idea. Other than my usual stance of course, that human beings are terrible, terrible, horrible things. I know, I am, and you are, and you are, and you are (if you imagine I’m looking round the room when you read that, it makes more sense). We all are, we can’t help it, that’s just the way life is. Doesn’t mean I have to like it though, and it doesn’t mean we can’t try and reinforce the illusion that it’s not that bad.

The last story is a little more puzzling however, you’ll have to give it a read (it’s only short, don’t worry) and come back to me. I, obviously, don’t watch TV such as this, and thus am completely uninformed as to how the stabbing actually went down. I can only assume that people are getting onto their high horses because the very mention of ‘knives’ is somehow taboo? Nope, I don’t understand either.

Sigh. Sorry for the kinda long rant, just thought I’d share. Thanks for enduring

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Of course, the rest of the world already has done, but to us poor souls trapped in the decaying hell hole that is Britain this is some magical new wonder material. Seriously, 24Mb ‘broadband’? What the hell. All across the globe people are laughing at the UK’s ineptitude, and our tiny ePenises.

But finally we have started the race into the Twenty First Century, just 8 years late, with the introduction of optic fibre to ‘around 600 new homes‘ in ‘either Bournemouth, Northampton or Dundee‘. Wow. Great news there then. I guess sometime in the next half decade I might get the chance to move to a large city and experience some form of high speed Internet. Meh, it’s cool, I’ll just move to America and get a properly unlimited connection for half the price.

Exaggeration aside however, the article does mention that BT is still not convinced of demand… Bullshit. Look, you run fibre to my house, I will happily pay upto, hmmm, what, £60 - 70 a month? for a properly unlimited 50Mb/25Mb Internet connection. And when I say ‘properly unlimited’ I mean properly unlimited. That means no ‘unlimited, but only between midnight and 6am’ or ‘unlimited, but as long as you don’t go over 50Gb a month’ or even worse ‘unlimited as long as you stay within the unbelievably blurry guidelines of our fair usage policy’. I want proper unlimited Internet, at high speed, and I want it for around £30. That is, after all, what the rest of the world gets, why not here? Ahh, because we don’t live in a free country any more… something like that anyway.

Here’s the original article anyway, for those interested.

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So I’m thinking that to get my posting rhythm back I will start posting about news events happening in the world that interest me, on a kinda regular basis (not too regular mind) let’s say. Hopefully you’ll enjoy what I enjoy, and the first of these is the news that the RIAA’s website has been completely taken offline due to an SQL injection bug in their script. Funny stuff. See the following for a more detailed report, but personally, I think this is great. If you visit their website from the above link, you can see for yourself (as of today anyhoo) that everything is gone, and the website is extremely slow. Cool!

• TorrentFreak
• reddit
• Digg
• Mashable

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Wow, it has been too long since I posted, and I’m still getting a regular dosage of search engine traffic etc. Amazing, I’ll have to look into that, and see if it’s not all just me checking the ads etc. Or checking that my hosting account is still active. Or maybe, if the hosting company has over charged me by $240. Sound silly? Not really. In fact it was actually a $7.5 million fuck up. Seriously.

But it’s cool, I got a phone call from my credit card company asking if this was in fact a legitimate charge (before I knew what was going on mind, it was about 9AM, I was barely alive) to which I replied ‘Sure, why not’. Oops. But never fear, Dreamhost have already charged the money back to my card, no harm done.

Still pretty awesome watching this thing unfold over the day though. For example, as I read about the incident this morning there were 400 comments to the status website, now there are over 1000…. Cool. Most of them bitching about being charged over fees because they’re either broke, or bouncing off their credit limit. Meh, whatever. If your bank doesn’t refund you once you explain (in fact, I’d be surprised if they even charged you in such a short time period) then you should seriously consider switching banks.

I chucked in my two cents of course (American company) under the imaginative pseudonym of ‘Ben’ so you can check it out over on those two sites if you like. I get told to fuck off by another customer, who was sadly born without a sense of humour. It’s good shit

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Yes, let’s get the Happy New Year out of the way now everybody, good times will be had, and another year has ticked by etc. etc. If you’re wondering why I have refrained from posting this year, until now that is, then you’ll be happy to know that it is not because I am short of things to write about. Oh far from it. In fact I have a great deal of things that need to be discussed here, but most of them are currently, ahem, classified? Okay, I just don’t think it would be wise to talk about them right away, put it like that. But they will be here shortly! So don’t be panicking!

Other than that, I will be starting some regular features, mainly to get me back into the swing of writing for the blog, I must admit I got lazy last month. So, here we go, the shiny new 2008 me, ready to attack the world and shove my opinion down your throat. Nah, I’m just messing with ya, you people can swallow this stuff up just fine…

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