denyerec.co.uk

Our last electricity bill totallyed 81 UK Pounds for the quarter. That’s 27 pounds a month for the less mathematical people out there. This might not seem surprising, until you consider the following details. We run, in our household, the following electrical things:

• Fridge Freezer
• Washing machine
• Vacuum cleaner
• 2x PC’s
• 6 100w lightbulbs
• PC peripherals occasionally, such as scanner, printer, etc

That’s it.
No TV, no stereo, no ambient lights, no novelty electronic goods, nothing. The heating is gas, the lights aren’t on all the time, we don’t have a power shower, the cooker is gas and we don’t have anyone living in the basement we don’t know about.

So… what the hell is going on ? We’re with Powergen and although they’ve admitted raising prices all across the board (Along with most UK providers) it still feels like we’re being skimmed somehow as we have a tiny amount of electricals compared to some people, yet are paying more on our bill than anyone else I know.

I don’t know how you go about working out how much you should be paying, asking Powergen would be like asking the tax office if you really have to pay that much with, naturally, their answer being “yes” every time. Anyone out there got any ideas?

If you were thinking of moving to Canada, it looks like now would be a good time to go through with it.

I would say “Unlucky, America.” but something deep down says that they’re not the ones who are going to end up paying.

*sigh*

Over the last few hours I’ve been receiving a lot of spam comments from sunny@moonlightshadow.us and they’ve been cluttering up my mailbox and this blog.
This has forced me to implement comment blacklisting, with that idiot’s name at the top of the list. Feel free to spam him/her in return, if they’ve chosen to litter my website with garbage then no doubt they’re busily doing it to other people too. The hack I have installed is the WordPress Comment Blacklister by Laughing Lizard. Nice and easy, very happy.

sunny@moonlightshadow.us is the address, whoever you are, sod off and do something useful with your time instead of polluting the internet site with your gibberish adverts for goodness knows what.

Look.
I know there are some of you out there who insist on using Internet Explorer. My stats tell me this.
Some of you may not realise there is life beyond IE, some of you may simply not have known there were alternatives.

GO HERE and install Firefox. Yes, it’s a different internet browser! *Shock*.

Still don’t believe me? Have a look at this article and think again. Yes that’s right, now even respected US Government security type people are actually telling people to switch away from IE, their reasoning is that it’s simply so vulnerable to exploitation that it’s crippling things left right and centre (Though many of the people who’ve already moved will simply tell you it’s because it’s crap.)

Do the right thing. Set fire to a fox today.

Yesterday my girlfriend went into Barclays Bank to try and get her almost-useless VISA Electron card switched over to a VISA Debit card. For people in the UK who know, the Visa Electron is about as useful as a 1923 issue Deutschmark note. In fact marginally less, as at least you could still use one of those to wipe your arse. (Though plastic cards are useful for spreading thermal compound around and, rumour has it, grouting.)

The upshot of the affair was this. My girlfriend could not have a VISA Debit card because her credit rating does not exist. She can, however, have a BarclayCard Credit Card with a £2500 limit. If she uses the credit card to build up some credit rating she can then apply for the debit card.

Hands up who sees the issue we had with this?

They won’t give a debit card to someone who has no credit record, but they’ll happily throw you a two and a half grand creditcard your way. Errr, hello? This I don’t understand. Surely your credit rating doesn’t matter if you’re using a debit card as you can only spend the money you already have anyway!

Barclays are idiots and I think this only goes to show how hopelessly lost in “Credit Card Culture” the UK has become. Gah.

I picked up on something from an EMail newsletter I’m on and tracked back to this article at Slashdot.

The thing that boils my blood is Microsoft’s statement:

“an excess in freedom of speech and freedom of thought, by means of the dissemination of information.”

What the HELL (Sorry young readers, but I’m really mad) is that supposed to mean? The American Police State is out of control. Who are they to try and push for legal action against someone who decides that they don’t want to pay through the nose for some software?
Illegal to use it without paying, I can follow.
Illegal to annnounce you’re going to use Linux instead? Jeebers.

They are, of course, trying to dress the lawsuit up as a libel action, saying that Sergio Amadeu likened them to drug dealers and “oh mommy it hurt us”, but what I really think they’re trying to do is clamp down hard and fast before public acts of large-scale Microsoft Bashing really do start to make an impact.

Mr Sergio Amadeu was bang on the money and his decision is one I hope the rest of the developing nations will follow. I just hope he isn’t intimidated by the legal move against him, or is assasinated in a “car accident” and replaced with a Microsoft-Bought lackey.

One wonders if I’ll get a letter from Microsoft about this blog post, for an “excess of free speech” on my part. Facists.

Don’t worry about the post title, I’m just seeing if Google picks me up.

Mobile phones have wrecked peoples’ ability to co-ordinate a plan. It is true. 10 years ago when I was riding around on a wee BMX, no more than 1 phonecall to each friend was required to bring them, without fail, to the designated meeting point for whatever reason. Try the same thing tomorrow and you’ll have consumed £5 in phone credit before everyone has even agreed to go in the first place and that’s before people actually get underway.

Admit it, you’ve been there. You call, you get a maybe, they’ll “text” you back (Oh my how I hate that turn of phrase…), you get a message a little while later saying “Sure, where?”. You call or “text” them to give them the details. This continues until all parties have been notified.
Shortly before you depart yourself you will have dealt with several calls confirming the location, that someone can’t make it even though they said they could, someone can’t come as they’ve had a better offer and someone has forgotten if it was this Tuesday or next week. Oh and you get a wrong number from Romania and a robot voice promising that you’ve won “One of the following great prizes”.

En route to the destination more calls flood in though you’re not sure why and upon arriving, half of the people are late, some are lost, some turn up next Tuesday and there’s a Romanian at the restaurant who’s voice you swear blind you recognise.

Why? I have reason to believe it’s got something to do with how humans respond to pressure and deadlines. See, if the first phonecall is your last and from that point on you have no way of contacting the organiser, then the details become concrete. Only if something disasterous happens will you seek further contact with the guy organising the event. However, the ubiquitous nature of the mobile means that you think in the back of your mind that you can get hold of the guy instantly, regardless, so there is no motivation to remember the details and also, to stick to them. You’re running late? Just call, it’ll be OK. Can’t remember where you’re meeting? No worries, just “text” them. Etc etc etc.

I wonder how far things will have to go before people other than me start to find this annoying ? Maybe they won’t, maybe most people will begin to accept that a simple trip to the cinema should require 4 phonecalls, 3 SMS messages and a 2 hour meeting window? My mobile only receives calls, I’m too cheap to put credit on it, perhaps this is why I’m not taking the slide into the disorganised world of the mobile masses. My aim is to remain punctual, afterall, I am British 😉

As some of you who know me will know, I don’t own a TV. For those of you who don’t know me, I don’t own a TV. I don’t want one, quite frankly because it’s a drain on my life I can do without. Time flies past fast enough without me wasting even more of it slumped infront of a random picture generator designed to sedate the intellect. Ok where was I? people in the UK have to pay the TV Licensing Authority if they want to own a television. For those of you in the “free world” this might seem bizarre and in this day and age, it is. It stems from the days when TV’s were a new invention and the government required some way to fund the programs being broadcast. This was of course in the heady days of “BBC1″, no adverts, no independent stations, just the good old BBC. Then along came the other channels who funded their cause with infuriating, intellect-sapping adverts. It wasn’t their fault though, they didn’t get a cut of the license money so they had to pay their way my making a pact with the Devil. Next up, Sky TV, Cable and a whole host of providers from places where TV Licenses never existed who also used the Devil-Pact method of fund raising. Ok where am I going with this? Ahh yes…

See we don’t own a TV, so we didn’t buy a TV license. This meant that for the last 8 months we’ve been receiving threat-letters from the Licensing Authority. I say “Threat” because they start out accusational then apologise just in case you haven’t got a TV and then move on to tell you how you can pay for one., they don’t for a second acknowledge the notion of “Innocent until proven guilty”, nono. You see everyone owns a television. Those who don’t are liars who “will be caught”.
Frankly I find that quite offensive, I mean I know not to take the threat letters personally, but their approach is still despicable. It gets better too.

Deciding I’d had enough of the threats, I called the TVLA and informed them ever so politely (As is my nature) that we didn’t infact own a brain-numbing device and they could stop sending us letters. Two days later, another letter! This one was slightly different however, this one was a subtley veiled threat without the bold red type of the last one. “Dear so and so, you admitted to not owning a TV and we find this highly irregular, so we’re going to send the hit-squad to search your premesis because, frankly, we don’t believe you.”
Naturally, that’s the condensed version.
I had in my hands a letter telling me, quite plainly, that they outright did not believe me and would be sending some government spooks to search my house. Hello? Human rights? Respect of privacy? If the drug dealers next door aren’t having their house searched then I’m damned if we should. I wasn’t privvy to a vote on TV licensing so the system in place is not part of my “free choice” as a citizen in an allegedly democratic country, it seems the moment I was born I was automatically opted-in to the damned thing.
We can’t afford to pay the protection money that our government demands to keep its henchmen out of our home, so if they do call we are compelled by law and a search warrant to let them poke around our house. We have nothing to hide, sure, but that’s not the point. Personally the mechanism which gives them the right to invade peoples’ property on a whim seems as immoral as it does insulting. Not only that but the blind assumption that everyone owns a TV and anyone who says otherwise is a liar is bloody annoying.

What next? Compulsary drug rehab for everyone, just because they don’t believe anyone can survive in the UK without being inebriated beyond sensibility?