Recycled Nirvana

Last week I was looking for something on Amazon UK, I can’t remember what exactly, and stumbled on this rather incongruous pairing in Amazon’s “Frequently bought together” feature:

• 3 x Proteam recycling bags
• 1 x Nirvana (greatest hits) CD

I wonder how many times something needs to be bought together to qualify for Amazon’s definition of frequently bought together.

@minifig tweeted this morning: “I guess the people who [are good] enough at English to write believable spam end up working for PR agencies, right?”

Which brings me quite nicely to an example of the kind of phishing emails that we get occasionally at the University. This one arrived this morning:

Dear Webmail User

This is to formally inform all our webmail users that we will be upgrading our site to block spam. We also have congestion due to the anonymous registration of accounts, so we conclude a number of accounts which are not active and your account is among. We are sending you this e-mail notification to alert you of this upgrade and let us know if you still want to use this account. Because of congestion in the mail server, Webmail Administrator would close any unused account.

To confirm your account active, you are obliged to give us your e-mail account information listed below, this information would be needed to verify your account and all below information are kept classified;

* E-mail:
* Username:
* Password:
* Re-type password:
* Birth Date:

Waiting for the details of your e-mail.

Warning! Account owners who refuse to send this information after 3 days of receiving this warning will lose his / her account permanently.

Seriously?!  Oh no!  I’d better reply immediately.

I guess that spammer won’t be getting a PR agency job any time soon.

Woah! That’s been way too long since my last post. March feels like a long, long time ago — although between then and now I have got used to only 4-5 hours sleep a night, although that’s now improving a great deal.

My last post was about an expensive evening.  Things haven’t got much better, to be honest.  Our dishwasher packed in (started pouring water all over the kitchen floor one Friday evening!); the other morning the en suite shower started pouring water through the study ceiling; the boiler stopped working a few nights ago (lost pressure and was spilling water onto the floor — switching it off, topping up the water pressure and switching it back on again seemed to do the trick); and yesterday the new dishwasher stopped working (again: switch it off, switch it back on again did the trick).

Then there’s the car: Renault Mégane Sport Tourer DTi.  Great car, does about 650 miles from one tank of diesel.  Rubbish car, though, if you need to replace a headlight bulb: you have to take it to a garage, unless you have arms the diameter of a drumstick and the agility of Mr Tickle.  So we’re going to sell/trade in both cars (Vauxhall and Renault) and buy a new estate … stay tuned for details!

Washing machine

It’s been an expensive evening today.  First the washing machine packed in, and we decided to cut our losses and buy a new one.

With twin boys we definitely need a reliable washing machine. The new one (Indesit WIXE 127) has faster programmes and is more economic than our existing one.  That was £280 spent in just a couple of clicks.

While the purchasing process was relatively pain-free on the Currys website (unlike the Halfords site, which didn’t allow me to even add the products I wanted into my shopping cart) I wasn’t terribly impressed with the Currys website feature that suggested additional/complementary products.

With my new washing machine it suggested that we needed a “4-way surge protector with telephone protection”.

Does the Indest WIXE 127 come with telephone/internet access?

Roof bars

Next up: roof bars. We’re going on holiday early next month, to the environs of Shrewsbury for a friend’s wedding.  This time we are four, and as you know small babies need an inordinate amount of stuff, so we’re borrowing a roof box … but need roof bars for Jane’s Renault.

So I turned to Halfords, and as I said it wouldn’t allow me to add them to the shopping cart. It got stuck in a loop, the warning in Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome informed me.  Thicko IE8 just kept trying …

I got the roof bars cheaper (about £80) on eBay in the end, anyway.

I was always disappointed the Pet Shop Boys never released songs with titles such as “Today we sold another terrapin” or “The rabbits at the back of the shop are getting hungry”.

I was chatting with a colleague at work this afternoon about the weekend. He’s off to Ikea in Edinburgh tomorrow to buy furniture.

He was complaining about the car parks.  How can it be, he said, that inside the store is so ordered and organised and yet outside in the car park is just a chaotic free-for-all?

I agreed.

In fact what I said was: the way that the Ikea car park is laid out is completely wrong. There should be two car parks.

So first of all you drive around the first car park looking for a parking space and then when you get there there’s a little card that tells you the location of the parking space in the second car park, like Car Park 2, Aisle 23, Row 4.

I’m going to write to Ikea and suggest it. It’s my Ikea idea.

(Did you see what I did there?)

Last night I tried to empty my Recycle Bin in Windows XP, which in itself was a little odd given that the icon said it had items in it, but opening it revealed … nothing.

I decided to try to empty it anyway. Imagine my surprise when I got this confirmation dialog box (below):

Are you sure you want to delete 'WINDOWS'?

While I’ve been tempted in the past … I clicked No.

I got a fantastic comment from a friend of mine to whom I had sent an invitation to online music streaming site Spotify:

If, as a child, I had been told by my future self that one day I could play any LP I wanted on my own personalised television thing, I would’ve hit myself for being a liar. Truly remarkable.

I remember in the early 1980s my dad telling me that one day there would be television sets thin enough to hang on your wall.  I thought it was science fiction … and now I’m staring at one on my “own personalised television thing” as I type this.

Flip-flops for babies would be so cute … just not very practical.

Conversation while feeding Reuben and Joshua the other night.

Gareth: You know, in many ways having children is like having a dishwasher.

Jane: Really?! How?

Gareth: Well, you know … you don’t actually need one but life feels somehow … better … with one.

Jane: Yeah, but the main difference is that a dishwasher makes your life easier.

Gareth: I suppose so. And you don’t fill your children with tablets and salt.

Jane: … or dishes!

Gareth: So … erm, in conclusion children aren’t like dishwashers, are they?

Jane: No, not really.