benjamin allen

Frick Well, I finally turned twenty, and boy do I feel… hmmm… okay, so at the moment I feel exactly the same, but I’m sure I’ll throw my back out any second, and forget to take the torrent of medication I will soon surely need. What do you mean overly dramatic!?

So what has happened whilst I took the weekend off? Well, not a lot really, but I shall enlighten you on a few choice events, as follows…

First off, I bring you the not-supposed-to-be-funny-but-really-really-is news of a man dying in a cake eating contest (and no you anti-American Nazi, it was not in the US). I know this sounds completely made up, but you can check the BBC for proof! This is really bizarre, and although I highly doubt it was due to the actual cake itself, I would get ready for some nanny-state regulation regarding a limit being set on confectionery consumption being put in place very soon.

Next? Well, next comes news that the human race is evil. Maybe not in so many words mind, but the message is pretty clear to me. Can adults really be this blind as to the realities of childhood? Surely not. Maybe when they grew up everything was phosphorescence and dolphins and little kitty cats, but times change. Now bullying (and being bullied) is just part of reaching adulthood. Think of it as an initiation into reality. Think of it as learning about life. Think about it as anything you like, but please don’t get your knickers bunched up over it.

And last but not least today, I have a bone to pick with Mario Cacciottolo (awesome name by the way) and his editorial on the demise of cheques. He says that cashiers (which he refers to as shop assistants, derogatory anyone?) are dumb founded at the very sight of a cheque book, and continues, that cheque payments can take a very long time to complete. Well this simply isn’t true. I work on an ePOS system myself, and find that cheques are almost as fast as plastic transactions. Why? Well quite simply, you take away any element of interfacing with the customer! I no longer have to stand and wait for the customer to forget his PIN, remove his card too early, or get his card declined. I can do everything required, myself, and the only point at which the customer is involved is the signature. And although some still have trouble with this, on the whole there are few delays here.

But hey, don’t get me wrong, I want the cheque to die like the rest of the mob. It takes a lot more effort on my part that simply waiting for the customer to faff and is a much greater risk than taking the cash there and then. So die cheque, die!!

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Please excuse my language, I am merely copying what I see and the media is wholly to blame. Sounds like a pretty shitty excuse, no? Well apparently some parents seem quite happy accepting that excuse, with the current (suicidal) state of affairs in Bridgend. I’m sorry, but if you want to blame someone, you really need to blame yourself (or Wikipedia). Let’s face it, if your children couldn’t talk to you about whatever problems they had, then you were the problem. And in that case the kids should have known better than to just give up, they should have gone to the numerous groups around the country that are put in place especially for young people to talk to about their problems. And if they didn’t know about these places? Well, that’s the government’s fault. But I fail to see any link between these mammoth fails and the media.

It’s the media’s job to report the news, I mean, unless I’ve been horribly misinformed? It’s just what they do, right? If that news is grim, well, so be it, life goes on. Or not….. Sorry, that was cruel! Haha. Umm, where was I… Oh yeh, the media. To be honest, looking at the age (and mental age) of these victims I’m surprised that people seem to be putting so much stock into them actually keeping up with the news. Seriously, most of the people I know don’t bother, and they’re much older than these peeps. Oh well, whatever, this is boring now. Get on with your lives people!!

Oop, almost forgot, those of you paying attention may have noticed that the title of this post seems a little, umm, mean-spirited let’s say… Well, that’s because it’s not specifically to do with the Bridgend massacres. In fact it came from the remarkable story of a (swanky) Italian restaurant in Staffordshire. Yes, I know what you’re thinking; Swanky restaurant? In Staffordshire?? But that’s not the amazing part, oh no, the best bit is what was printed on their bill. You’ll have to excuse me if I’m incorrectly filling in the gaps here, but I think it reads something like:

SUCK MY DICK FUCK FACE £0.00

< insert joke about that being a good price here >

Apparently this was meant for internal use only (again, I smell a joke here, but I’m going to rise above it) and the restaurant owner finds it a mystery how this ended up on the bill. Oh well. I’m not really going to comment, other than to say the owner was pretty clever with his statement. Of course the silly bitch who saw this on the bill spouted that she wanted “some compensation” and the owner quite rightly said that he would offer her a free meal. Fair enough, but just to rub it in her face, he also said he would donate the price of the meal to charity, as opposed to simply refunding her. Yes, refunding her the £280. I just love that touch

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Well, it’s official, Toshiba have decided (wrongly, in my opinion) that HD DVD is a dead horse, and that they’re going to stop flogging it by the end of March ‘08. Great news for all those early adopters there, but I suppose that’s the price of said adoption. You’re going to get bitten, so unless you can afford it, I’d just let the big boys play with the new toys. So stop whining and grow up!!

I’d just like to point out a now defunct Wikipedia article that caught my attention, due to it’s pleasingly specific title… High definition optical disc format war. Great stuff you can find on Wikipedia. Great, great stuff. How bizarre!

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Yes, so I took a week off, big deal. If you were wondering what I did, well I can fill you in. Basically, I did nothing. And I mean, nothing. Bugger all. And it was gooo-ood! But now I have to return to the regular life of doing, well stuff and thus, posting will continue on the site. Fun times!

Not got much to report at the moment, other than the obvious of course, that you must now address me as Mr. Allen. After all, I am the Director of my own company, and that’s how we Director’s prefer to be spoken to. You agree, right Rich? Sorry, Mr. Harley?

Lots of work will need to be done on this venture, so you will have to bear with my updates on this site. I know you will though, you’re just that great!!

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Okay, so I wouldn’t normally post this kind of news (yeh, I’ll censor news if I want, this is my site) because I usually love the Americans and their way of doing things. But seriously… Wow. This is just taking it too far. Why would you sue a lawyer for starters, especially if you, yourself, are a lawyer. The whole idea of the court room scene here seems hilarious to me, but there we go, it would appear I see things differently to others.

So the guy (and by guy, I mean bitch… sorry, lady…) shook hands with the opposition’s attorney and apparently was so vicious she was nearly hospitalised. In a nut shell. Pretty unbelievable stuff, that any anti-American-ite would love to comment on, but if they actually took the time to read the story they might see the full picture. Let’s start with the headline:

Assault rap for rough handshake
- BBC

Now of course, this sounds petty and ridiculous, and as such, this is an attention grabbing headline. Heck, if it wasn’t so sensationalist it would struggle to even count as a headline, that’s just what they do. Even the BBC’s. So you click on the article, and see the following as the introductory paragraph:

A Florida lawyer has been charged with assault for over-vigorously shaking the hand of a fellow attorney.
- BBC

Again, seems pretty daft if you ask me, but I guess a hand shake could be construed as violent… kinda. But it’s only when we reach the seventh paragraph do we actually see what happened:

“With Keene in hand, Brewer made an upward, then a quick downward motion and pulled Keene toward the ground moving her forward, almost causing Keene to fall to the ground,” said a court security officer.
- BBC

So basically what happened is this; The jerk lawyer whose husband had just been prosecuted, “insisted on shaking the prosecuting lawyer’s hand” and was generally being an ass hat, in shaking it like a nine year old when the teacher says ’shake hands and make up you two’… Doesn’t seem so far fetched any more does it.

As a secondary note, who would let their wife represent them in a court of law?? And don’t be smart and say ‘well, no, I certainly wouldn’t, she’s a freakin teacher, not a lawyer‘. I mean if she was! Maybe because she’d be free? No idea, just doesn’t strike me as being a great idea is all. I mean, you could get really turned on with her being in charge and blow your, ummm, case. Yeh, case.

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They always seem to be the most out there of all the countries, in terms of cultural behaviours and trends (and bizarre television gameshows) and this amazing story goes to prove that they’ve still got it. Coming straight from the Prime Minister himself, Yasuo Fukuda (don’t tell me you didn’t know!?), the existence of UFOs is “not yet confirmed“. You have to admire how honest and forward they are.

You’re damn straight Mr. umm, Fukuda, their existence has not been confirmed, or disproved, so maintaining that healthy open attitude is the best thing we can do. Not like some freakin conspiracy theorists shrieking that UFOs absolutely, positively, do exist, and conduct nightly probulations on their gooey insides. That’s crazy talk right there, ya nut job.

I hereby declare that I believe UFOs may very well exist! But, just to clarify, not that they do exist. So don’t be taking my words as a confession of my other worldly friends. Their my friends damn it! Nothing you can say will take them away!!

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Although it seems a little out dated I just thought I would share a review of my phone, from osnews.com. It’s a nice little review, but I just ahd to pull the author up on the following statement… basically my objection is this: the touch buttons are 100% functional! I have never, not once, failed to hit one correctly, and that’s the honest truth. Seriously, you must be using it wrong, because I’m telling you right now, they always work.

The soft keys are not real keys, but touch-sensitive surfaces. Unfortunately, while it looks cool, these touch-based surfaces don’t always work.
- OS news

And don’t anyone go and think I’m just a SE fanboy, because I’m not, they just happen to make the best phones! Okay, okay, so I’m on my third already, but I’m confident that the break downs affecting the first two phones were purely bad luck on my part…

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Wow, I do apologise for not giving you a daily dose of my personality yesterday, I managed to follow a day at university with several hours running round at work, so by the time I was home I was feeling pretty drained. Surely you’ve had this at some point in your life? Well, I just couldn’t bring myself to write anything witty and amusing, so I didn’t bring myself to write anything. Fair enough I think you’ll agree, my motto as always, if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.

As I write this now however, following a wonderful day of losing money at online poker, I feel refreshed and rejuvenated, if a little poor. So here we go, I plan to cover a few things today as I have a back log of articles building up in Firefox. Stick with me, I’m going to skim quite quickly over the last couple days, okay? Ready? Go!

First off, the story (fiction) of yet another major Internet backbone cable being broken in the Middle East. I say fiction, because the conspiracy theorists of the world are united in their efforts to bring meaning to the freakin’ coincidence of two cable breaks in a week. Please people, relax, Egypt will still be able to access online pornography, don’t you worry.

Next up, a new record for valuable domains has been set with cruise.co.uk buying cruises.co.uk for over a million dollars (I say dollars, because, even in the current economic climate, they’re much cooler than pounds). Wow! All that for a co.uk? Seems over priced if you ask me, but then what do I know, being but a lowly bloggist. Sigh. Of course being a UK domain means that it is inherently cheap and nasty, as proven by the two most expensive domains of all time, sex.com and porn.com, which recently changed hands again for nine million and eleven million dollars respectively. Needless to say, it’s obvious what the Internet is home to.

The next titbit to catch my eye was the interesting news of Egg’s website outage, announced a little too recently to the culling of the less interesting credit card customers from it’s books, for theorists to take sitting down. That was a mouthful wasn’t it! Woah. Umm, yeh, well egg.com was down for about 24 hours, so obviously, the hacker who had his card declined wasn’t that awesome.

Also in the last couple days, I discovered how to write ‘supermarket‘ in Chinese, I learned that shooting at youngsters is acceptable some of the time, HSBC doesn’t have anybody check the doors are locked when they close, and people would like their poultry to be a little more expensive.

And as a totally random distraction, I also found this amazing shopping website. Check it out!

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Well today I was going to give my take on eBay’s ridiculous new policy of banning sellers from leaving negative (or even neutral) feedback for buyers, but there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to write that article. Instead I just wanted to quickly show off the new French high speed train (the Automotrice à Grande Vitesse, or AGV) due to it’s sheer awesomeness. 200mph regular operating speed? Sign me up!!

Obviously, this couldn’t be launched in this country, there would be far too many health and safety officers to placate, and the general uproar from the mindless public complaining about environmental issues and other such bullshit. Sigh. Roll on the day when I can leave the country for good! If you want to learn more about the train itself, or at least the idea behind it, then I suggest this article (from 2000) that explains more about how the train works, and why it is a true successor to the current high speed generation of trains.

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Just look carefully at the title before you jump to the (incorrect) answer of carbon dioxide. Unfortunately I don’t know what C02 is, and nor does Google apparently, the only results being other news sites that have made the same school boy error as the BBC. Yes it’s true, the BBC have managed to incorrectly write Carbon diOxide as C-zero-two all the way through this article. Oh dear.

Well it was going to happen eventually I guess, and apparently already had happened, given the number of results from that Google query, but I didn’t think it would be the BBC who fell into the trap. Someone needs a chemistry lesson. I’m sure as hell not going to give it though, I only have a GCSE. And yet, I can still point out someone else’s mistakes. Ahh the wonders of a free society.

And I know it doesn’t mean much, but I guess I should put a quote up, in case they rectify the (glaring!) errors. That’s right people, this isn’t the only occurrence…

Corus said the investment would reduce C02 emissions by reusing gas generated inside the Basic Oxygen Steel (BOS) plant.
- BBC

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Does anyone remember that Crash Test Dummies toy car from years and years ago? It was awesome, you wound it back, and let go, and it would fly at great speed into the nearest wall/table leg/person’s leg/cat and all the body panels and doors etc would boing off. What an awesome toy that was! I must have played for for hours on end. And probably still would be playing with it, if my dog hadn’t mauled the pieces so they no longer fit. Sigh, oh well.

Anyhoo, nostalgia aside, I was reminded of this amazing piece of recreational merriment by the photograph used for this news story. I mean what the hell?? How did the car end up like that Well, however it happened, I love it. And that’s pretty much all I have to say on this article. Well, other than I guess the teenager did it (you gotta love it, even the normally impartial BBC, paint the youth as being the criminal already…) and I have no clue why the house would require demolition. It barely even needs a new coat of paint look.

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Can I just start by letting the world know that I think Egg is an absolutely great name for a company? Well, of course I can, this is my blog, but ya know, I just really wanted to get that out there. In fact the name is just that, out there. I love it =)

Anyhoo, business names aside, this is an interesting story with some frumpy protesters to mock, so I thought I’d give you a little breakdown. Egg were purchased last year by Citigroup (hence my swish title for this post) and they decided to get rid of a load of credit card clients because, and I quote:

they are people we decided we no longer wish to lend money to regardless of their status
- Egg

Awesome. I love the straight shooting, none PR speak there. Obviously there are some who don’t, mostly customers I must admit, and mostly those who pay their credit card bill in full every month. That’s just super for them, but it means that Egg (what’s known as a business by the higher order) misses out on all those lovely interest payments. Which we can’t be doing with, obviously, so they got rid of 7% of their customers. Great, I love the idea, and I will buy the guy who thought of it a beer, as a mark of respect for their ingenuity.

As usual people are screaming from the rooftops about how shitty Egg has suddenly become, and how they’ve lost a lot of customers (no shit Sherlock, about 7% to be exact) but this one commentator stood out among all the rest.

If they deem fit to remove my Egg card, I shall be removing my Egg Savings (which has a far larger balance than my Egg card!)
- Mary

Okay. Now on the face of it that seems like a pretty fair decision. But if you read between the lines, it makes so little sense, you may wet yourself from laughing. You have been warned.

Now, we can safely assume that this Mary bloke has a decent amount of savings, otherwise why would he even bother, right? Okay. And now he’s saying that because Egg took his credit card off him (which carried zero balance I’ll add) he will move his savings? So either he’s going to reduce the interest he’s earning on that money to make a point to Egg, or he’s with Egg purely out of laziness and he could already be getting a better deal elsewhere. Take your pick. Of course, both result in him being labelled a jackass by myself, and probably others, but hey, I’m sure he’s used to it. He is, after all, a man called Mary.

You know, I’ve just had a thought. Maybe it’s a women…. Naaah. And before I sign off for today, I just noticed this other guy (no really, his name is Trevor) who apparently is so emotionally over-active he got really rather tearful when he read the letter saying his card was being cancelled. Mmmkay, that dude needs help.

Fair enough if that’s what they want to do, but don’t send a really upsetting letter that makes it sound like we have a bad credit history all of a sudden
- Trevor Smith

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Or at least, that’s what a few hussy parents think about the name given to some furniture sold by Woolworths. Lolita? Seriously, it’s a little odd I’ll grant you, but offensive? Or, in the words of the terribly literate Mrs Hanly, of raisingkids.co.uk, “it literally couldn’t be worse taste“.

How about if they called the bed, “My First Fuck Station” ? Hmm, or “The Tight Sleeper” ? You may have to think about that second one. I’m so sick, I apologise. Just illustrating how ridiculous this crazy woman is.

She’s not very culturally aware either, for example, in Chile the term Lola and Lolo (think of Bob and Robert if you don’t get the connection) are both used everyday to refer to young children. I don’t see any wild Chileans (seriously, that’s the plural) dancing about over the word… do you?

How about Japan, where Lolita refers to a fashion movement, designed to mimic the look of young girls? Nothing wrong with that, those crazy Japanese always do things differently. It’s brilliant, don’t get me wrong! Of course Lolita was also the 969th most popular American girls name in 1990, as well as being a town in Texas. Useful pronoun all round then.

Okay, I’ll admit it, I’ve gone off on a little rant here about how the name Lolita is a complete non-issue, but let’s not forget that she was the (indirectly) eponymous lead in the novel from Vladimir Nabokov. In the story, an uncle falls in love with a twelve year old girl. Boo hoo, sob sob, that’s sick etc etc. Who cares. A great many people have read the book, it is important literature, and I don’t see why this is suddenly a no go for current generations.

The name itself, interestingly, comes from the Spanish word for suffering, Dolores, which when shortened, becomes Lola (don’t ask me how). But anyway, all this of course begs the question, why name a bed such anyways?? Makes little to no marketing sense to me, but as the spokesperson for Woolworths stated, they had no idea of the connotations. Clearly they pulled this name out of their ass then…? Whatever, it’s a perfectly reasonable name, and the brain dead Mrs Hanly (and others, I have no doubt, please don’t think this is personal) should really open their eyes to the real word. It would save them a lot of embarrassment.

And I couldn’t resist leaving you with one last quote from that dopey cow. Enjoy!

I expect a company like Woolworths to actually know what it means and the connotations and stuff
-Catherine Hanly

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