Traffic
Is it just me or is the traffic godawful so far this week? And is it just me or are the vast majority of problems caused by a small number of utter gimps? Will people have re-learned how to drive after the bank hols by next week? I hope so.
Attention, jobhunters
At the moment I have a job on offer so I have been sifting through CVs, doing interviews etc etc. Having seen a large number of job applications recently, I thought I'd share a few basic tips to help anyone reading this to actually get a job; instead of sending thousands of applications off to people who just click 'delete', perhaps after chuckling a little.
DON'T put or do these things on your CV:
1) A photo of yourself. I am not interested in seeing you looking like either a convicted paedo or a mail-order bride. I'm not employing actors, I'm employing mechanics. I don't care what you look like.
2) Your 'personal goals' to excel thoroughly in everything you do, climb Everest, watch every Rocky film back-to-back or whatever. Irrelevant vacuous bollocks.
3) Tell me in great detail about lots of irrelevant yet highly paid jobs, while the one job you've had similar to the one you're applying for is a footnote from 10 years ago. This tells me "stopgap job, he'll sod off very quickly".
4) Overuse 'power words' or marketing speak so your CV ends up reading like some scam webpage advertising a pyramid scheme. I mean FFS.
DO put or do these things on your CV:
1) Tell me about what similar jobs you've had, AND WHAT YOU ACTUALLY DID IN THEM. "Worked for Company 2001-2008" is OK, "Worked for Company 2001-2008, responding to breakdowns across X area, carrying out routine servicing at so-and-so, carrying out engine overhauls on XYZ , sourcing parts from a variety of suppliers, dealing with customers..." is fantastic and would stand a good chance of getting you a job. Even if your only job was working at a burger chain, and you're applying for a job as a shop assistant, tell them WHAT EXACTLY YOU DID. It shows at least that you know what you did there.
2) Put down RELEVANT qualifications. If the fact that you're a fully certified H&S forklift inspector and you were trained in advanced CANBUS troubleshooting is buried in details about your swimming certificates and your highest break in snooker, your relevant qualifications might not be noticed.
3) It's a good idea to summarise why the hell I should give you a job at the top of your CV. When applying for a mechanic's job, a paragraph or two saying "I am a highly experienced and skilled mechanic, who has carried out a wide variety of work from X to Y, on A, B and C machines." can work wonders.
More DONT's:
DON'T phone up every 2 days chasing your application. Some people recommend this; but I'm actually quite busy and chasing your application all the time is going to piss me off.
DON'T apply for jobs you're hideously unqualified for. By 'unqualified' I don't mean 'doesn't have a degree', I mean 'has so little of a clue about what the job involves, they dont realise that "forklift mechanic" might involve skills that you don't get simply by working in a place that has a forklift'. I've been on planes, that doesn't make me a plane mechanic. By appying for jobs you couldn't even be bothered to fully read the description of, you're wasting everybody's time.
*I wish to point out that this post represents my personal opinion and does not represent any official opinion of any company, anywhere. If you have applied for a job recently and you have done all of the 'donts' listed here, it is entirely coincidental and this post is in no way based on you being a tool.*
Daily Fail
Sometimes you see something so unbelieveably stupid that it instantly gives you a headache for the rest of the day. This is an example of such a thing.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/food/article-1323610/Natures-Lucozade-How-A-lists-favourite-coconut-water-effective-sports-drink.html
My eye of course was drawn by the word 'Lucozade' in the headline, we at FNS towers are long-standing fans of the incredible healing powers of the revered orange beverage. Reading the said article however had effects wildly different to healing;
Coconut water has become the latest celebrity craze after studies showed that fluid extracted from young green coconuts is naturally full of isotones – the kind of electolytes which are added to sports drinks to aid hydration. [emphasis mine]
Let's have a look at the Wikipedia article for 'isotone' - "Two nuclides are isotones if they have the same neutron number N, but different proton number Z."
Somehow I doubt that is what this article refers to.
Probably it is either some kind of moronic misunderstanding or charlatanesque misrepresentation of the word 'isotonic', a word commonly used to market sport drinks and meaning that two solutions have the same osmotic concentration when compared. This is important for example when something is going to be administered by a drip; if the drip is too watery or too concentrated (i.e. not isotonic) compared to your blood, then bad things will happen (your blood cells for example will either shrivel or explode). For a sport drink this is somewhat less important. As for containing 'isotones', this makes about as much sense as saying that a warm coat contains particles of warm.
Methinks the Mail is printing bloody adverts as 'news' again.
Anyway, if we're talking sport drinks or electrolytes, Brawndo can't be beat. It's got what plants crave.
Subsidy
Right, I notice today that yet another Twitter campaign is going among self-congratulatory trendy types to 'save' the BBC from having the indignity of having even a single penny of its multi-billion pound taxpayer funded budget cut. Of course all claim (as with any other public sector 'darling' that faces cuts) that any cut whatsoever would definitely result in the destructive loss of all of the valuable and productive parts of the organisation, as waste and unnecessary bureaucracy don't exist whatsoever. All of the BBC's budget is spent on [insert whichever programme you happen to like here] and the entirety of the NHS budget is spent on hard working nurses. Of course.
I also recall the ongoing discussion of providing rural areas with a 'minimum standard' of internet access (currently mooted at 2Mbps), paid for by charging everybody else more money in some way or another. Not content with buying up all the cottages and becoming arch-NIMBYs to prevent anything useful ever being done in the countryside (like for example, actual farming); smug back-to-the-land organic Guardian-reading types now want me to pay towards their frigging broadband so that they can all sit at home on the evenings and enjoy multi-megabit access to news forums, Wikipedia and the like so that they can further spread their own particular brand of corrosive bullshit.
In light of this, I have come up with a list of things that *I* consider enjoyable and essential to civilised life, that I *demand* that everybody else in the country subsidise for my benefit. To do otherwise would be, I dunno, denialist, or portray an absence of inclusive thought or put the cultural and economic future of the nation at risk, or something like that.
1) Decent sausage and bacon sandwiches.
On certain industrial estates around the west midlands, there is a real problem obtaining a good quality sausage and bacon sandwich; and at the outlets that do sell such foodstuffs often have lengthy queues at lunchtime for some reason. I propose that a tax be levied on tofu, rocket and soy beans for the purpose of funding a new network of butty huts to bring the fortifying goodness of a decent meat sandwich to all corners of the country. The tax should also fund a new government agency to monitor and regulate the quality and price of said sandwiches, and also the queues to obtain them.
2) Internet radio
For too long, the heroes of our independent non-commercial broadcasters have gone unsung and unrewarded. They work tirelessly to bring delightful programmes such as 'The SHAPE of things to come" and "The Friday Night Smoke" to the ears of countless dedicated and grateful listeners. Unsullied by commercial concerns and unencumbered by BBC bureaucracy, internet radio collectively serves millions of listeners every week. It's high time that the stations and DJs who have worked so hard for so long are justly recompensed for their sacrifices.
I propose a £5,000 per head annual tax on every person who has ever posted a '#savebbc6music' hashtag on Twitter. This will enable everyone involved in internet radio to buy a desperately needed new computer, and will also fund an army to protect us on the day that apparently Rupert Murdoch will turn into a giant robot (with machine guns for arms) that will attempt to destroy every media outlet of any kind not directly controlled by him (a Guardian comment warned me that this could happen). It's our only hope. To refuse to support this tax is supporting Murdoch robot murder. Think about that.
3) The late night availability of cigarettes and biscuits in Birmingham
For too long people in this fair city have been unable to obtain reasonably priced cigarettes, biscuits and rolling tobacco within walking distance between midnight and 7am on weekends. This has led to unbelievable anguish and suffering as people have had to let their night-time hunger go unsatisfied, or roll their extra large night-time 'cigarettes' from unsuitably dry tobacco.
To resolve this issue, I propose a £1,000,000 tax on every arsehole with a sense of entitlement who campaigns endlessly for some fucking thing or another that they appreciate to be subsidised to the tune of millions of pounds by some other poor sod (or alternatively everyone). The tax is to be quadrupled for each of those people who claims that their opponents are 'shills' for some shadowy organisation or another.
The money raised by these taxes (some billions of pounds) will fund an elite team of butlers, a fleet of delivery vehicles and a network of warehouses to store, distribute and provide said goods during the designated hours. It's our only hope..
” £20 Elgar note withdrawal ‘a national disgrace’ “
As seen in The Daily Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturenews/7861063/20-Elgar-note-withdrawal-a-national-disgrace.html
Once again the Telegraph deems the opinion of some bloke as worthy of printing in their newspaper, whereas we all know that such drivel is the stomping ground of blogs like this.
Professor Jeremy Dibble, from Durham University's music department, says that the replacement of the £20 notes featuring Edward Elgar with notes featuring Adam Smith is a "national disgrace" that "tells us much about the way in which the arts is now viewed in England. Bank notes should applaud the greatest aspects of England and English culture".
Sorry Dibble, but for one we are talking about BANKNOTES here. Items of money. Economists are far more at home on money than musicians are. Furthermore, I would rank Adam Smith's contribution to the modern world as approximately 6,000x more important than that of Elgar. The old notes look like something a 4 year old knocked up in an elderly version of Paintshop Pro before printing on a decrepit inkjet printer with a dirty, clogged 'refil' cartridge anyway.
In conclusion: STFU, Dibble.
Hi-vis jobsworth patrol
To cut a long story short, it's St Patrick's day today [edit: no it wasn't] , and much of Digbeth is closed off to allow the parade and related festivities to take place, as they have done every year in Birmingham.
Normally we residents of the surrounding area receive information about road closures etc, so we know what is happening and can make plans to accomodate. This year I received precisely fuck all.
Anyway, I had to visit my mother this morning, and returned home about 2:15. Every road in the vicinity of my flat is utterly clogged up with buses, taxis and cars; not helped by the many minicab drivers who attempt to cut the queues and end up blocking what little clear road remains when they try to get back in to the queue.
My flat (and the car park entrance) are within 50 yards of the somewhat generous road closures.
Last year I seem to remember residents being allowed through. Not this year.
A certian hi-vis vest wearing tosser seems to be taking great pleasure in his 'duties' of causing maximum inconvenience to everyone and wielding what little 'power' he has, or at least thinks he has; backed up with lots of authoritative sounding words like 'council' and 'police'. Apparently we're supposed to drive round hideously congested streets for hours, hoping to find a parking space somewhere nearby (clue: there's a festival on; there aren't any) and walk a mile or two home, then back again later to collect the car because he, THE ALL POWERFUL ROAD CLOSURE MAN OF JUSTICE, allows NO-ONE TO PASS!! I should "take it up with the council if I don't like it" (his words).
What I will say is this- fuck you, you utter waste of skin, oxygen and everyting else; you fuckpigs in yellow bibs (inspectors of various types, 'compliance officers' etc etc etc) are the one thing above all wrong with Britain today, and I know it's a terrible cliche but your backs will be first against then wall when the revolution comes. Fuck off and die.
N.b: I'm home now, thanks to a barricade nearby being unmanned and having blown down in the wind. The roads inside the cordon are of course deserted.
Things that have pissed me off today: 04-02-2010
This post was originally intended to be about something else, but in true attention-seeking blogging style, it will be about things which have today pissed me off.
1) Drivers who hog the fast lane of a motorway (or similar road, I'll get to that in a minute) at an unreasonably low speed, and the minute they're off the motorway and on other roads they are tailgating, cutting people up and suddenly in a massive rush. Yes, Mr. twat-faced driver of a black Vauxhall Vectra who pulled into A-Plant's yard this morning, I'm talking about YOU.
2) Passwords. You can't have passwords that are both easy to remember/use and secure. Every single website in the world seemingly now requires you to either generate a new password, or re-use one that you already have. If you have a new password, you'll forget it. If you re-use a password, the admin of that site can use your details to log on to other sites. A certain online banking service requires a new unique password every damn month, which can only mean that every single user has a post-it note somewhere with their banking password on it. Yeah, really secure.
3) Website registration forms that don't mark the 'required' fields, or specify what they require of your proposed password (eg 'must include numbers', 'must be more than 8 characters') until you click 'confirm'. Then, when the form re-appears with the 'errors' the cheeky bastards re-tick the 'please send me all the spam in the world' box. Yes, Ebuyer and the 'Livejournal' login required to comment on The Independent, I'm looking at you both.
3.1) Online shops that don't tell you that something is out of stock until you try to order it.
3.2) Verified by Visa and MasterCard Securecode. They are both intended to protect everybody else at the expense of the cardholder, give you even more passwords to write down somewhere and are implemented in a piss-poor way that creates security holes you could lose a ship in.
4) Roads that aren't officially motorways, but are in almost every way; like the A5 through Tamworth, or the A42 (M42 in disguise) north of J11. This is done to save money by cutting back on safety standards, and to avoid 'outrage' by the local press and green activists when a new 'motorway' is announced. Build the same road without hard shoulders and with green signs instead of blue, and seemingly nobody cares. Idiots. the result is you get a motorway-style road, with most people doing 70+mph; with cyclists, tractors, people broken down in lane 1 (no hard shoulder, you see) and general morons doing 35mph, just to add a little inconvenience and danger to your day.
5) Flaky internet connections that don't like more than one computer using them at one time, even when they are only doing a little light web browsing. I don't know whether its router issues, or something about the connection itself; but either way it pisses me off.
6) Over-inflated product specifications, such as LCD monitors with a "1,000,000:1 dynamic contrast ratio" (1,000:1 when tested by anyone other than the manufacturer) and stereos with "600W 'music power' (5W RMS)".
7) Spam e-mails that advertise e-mail spam lists.
Mobile phone resellers. The fuckers who phone you up saying that they're 'affiliated' with your/another actual phone network, and they can offer a billion minutes per century and a dozen texts per trimester for a low price of £36 per month, with a free Nokia WTF and blah.... fuck off you useless parasites.
9) Apple, for their seemingly limitless ability to generate vast media hype by releasing products that already exist out there, but hey, Apple will put it in a shinier case! Made much worse by their association with 'creative' types, who are all so bloody creative and free-thinking that they all have the same go-to brand for computers and gadgets. Wankers.
10) 'Creative' people. In my experience, the people who would describe themselves as 'creative' are NOT, they are just talentless churnmongers who read about what all the other 'creative' people are doing and copy it, whether it be the shitty tune they made on their PC, or their derivative graphic design, or whatever. Normally these people bank all of their self-esteem in the 'creative' pot because they have no other redeeming features, talents or abilities whatsoever that they can use to describe themselves. Quite often they have no job as well, so they can use the 'creative' label that they've applied to themselves to justify this fact, claiming that they're a 'freelance artist', or they are 'working on a project' or something, while all the while they are arsing around pausing only to suckle on the taxpayer's teat. Twats. Utter despicable twats.
11) WordPress, for converting no.8 on the list into a fucking smiley.
12) People who sit at home in their heated and lit house, on 200Watts-worth of computer, posting messages onto the internet about how somebody-or-other is 'wasting resources' by driving a car, not re-using supermarket carrier bags or doing something else that they disapprove of.
Economy measures
I spoke to the managing agents of the block of flats I live in yesterday, to report some problems with the electrics. Basically the 'Economy 7' circuit timing is all to cock, the storage and water heaters are coming on in the day instead of the night, meaning everything is cold when I get up for work, and everything will be running on expensive day rate electricity.
Anyway, I phoned them back a little later because I remembered that the heaters in the communal areas haven't worked all winter, so I'm getting cold draughts under the front door etc etc. The conversation went something like this..
M "The heaters in the corridors haven't worked for some time.."
A "Yeah, we pulled all the fuses for them, they were costing a fortune in electricity"
M "Well, I'm not happy at all with that"
A "We asked all the property OWNERS and they agreed, you're just a tenant [emphasis hers], you'll have to complain to your landlord"
M "Well I only LIVE there.. what's next, are you going to turn the lift off to save money?"
A "Ah but the heaters aren't essential; most of the developments we manage don't have them, and the lift IS essential.."
M "But the heaters are fitted, and were there when I moved in, anyway the lift isn't essential, there's stairs..."
I strongly suspect that after my advice, next week the lift will be switched off..
I'm still trying to figure out how pissed off to be about this, it's not so much about the ambient temperature in the corridors (I dont exactly linger in them) as the fact that my heating bills are going up because my hot air is leaking away. My bedroom backs onto the stairwell as well, so thats colder now; the wall in question is freezing.
Thinking about it, what probably happened is that the agent wrote to the service charge payers, saying something like "Due to the rising cost of energy, the service charge will rise by X% next year, unless....". The (supposed) net reduction in the charge will reduce upward pressure on rents, so possibly my rent is lower now than it would have been, etc etc but my own electric bill has now risen by a certain amount as a result...
The main reason that I'm miffed is the fact that I didn't even know; they could have at least put a poxy notice up (after all, they have put notices up after the smoking ban that imply that we can't even smoke in the flats, which is incorrect). It would of course be poetic if in the future they had to shell out to repair damp and mould problems, caused by the lack of heating...
They DO earn back 0.1 Martin Point for NOT trying to 'enviro-bullshit' their way out of it, I expected some bollocks about "reducing our carbon footprint" (it's amazing how often this desire happens to mesh perfectly with the organisation in question saving money..).
Thoughts?
Units of measurement
Now, here's something I picked up via The Devil's Kitchen
The Royal College of Art's graduate show has opened, and this year, the show-stopper was a plug. Min-Kyu Choi impressed every passer by with his neat, apparently market-ready plug that folds down to the width [FNS: surely you mean 'thickness'] of an Apple MacBook Air. "The MacBook Air is the world's thinnest laptop ever. However, here in the UK, we still use the world's biggest three-pin plug," says Choi.
I'm so glad that the thickness (10mm) is expressed in terms of Apple Macbook Air™-Thicknesses; I would find it incredibly hard to visualise the extreme super-cool sleekness of such a plug without the universal yardstick of a Macbook Air™ to compare it to. I have at least a dozen Macbook Airs™ on my desk, on hand in case I need to measure something about half an inch thick*. Although, I have heard of a fantastic new invention that can be as little as 1/4 of a Macbook Air™-Thickness, which surely must make it at least 4x as super cool as a super cool Macbook Air™.
I'm also incredibly glad that someone has tackled the decidedly uncool and un-"now" unfreasibly large BS1363 UK 240v plug. I often look at the plugs I have in my life and think "to hell with safety and practicality- I want plugs to look cool, yeah!". Indeed, a flimsy sleek fold out plug will come in useful to me every time I'm lugging electrical appliances or chargers around and could use the extra few cubic centimetres of space so freed up to carry, I dunno, one of my fleet of measuring Macbook Airs™?
PS: They could give the plug a super-cool "now" name like iPlug, or something. That would make it absolutely perfect.
*or just to have a wank over the sleek perfection that is absolutely anything with a fucking Apple™ logo on it. Fuck yeah.“BT Business Direct”- useless, useless, useless
When I'm not doing radio, sometimes I'm the IT man for my workplace, and we currently need to seriously upgrade one of our computers. "No problem", I thought, and went to dabs.com, an online computer and parts retailer that used to be good. Dabs was bought out by BT (the multiheaded British Telecom company, for those who don't know) some years ago, and now the business arm has been rebranded as BT, complete with pictures of grinning chimp-like folk happily using laptops on the front page, and inducements for me to take out their crappy broadband service. Ho-hum.
I select the motherboard, processor etc that I want, and go to check out. It asks me if I have a "BT Business Direct username"; I don't. It transpires, after filling in the long form to register, that my old Dabs details are still on the system (it tells me this by saying "account already exists with this email address" blah blah).
Time to check out. My company credit card is refused by "Verified by Visa", which is completely unable to handle the concept of a company credit card; it asks me for my date of birth (which companies don't have) and then falls over, accusing me of fraud. I try again with a personal credit card, which is of course registered to my home address. When I try to change the 'billing address', it changes everything except the postcode, which is still set to my workplace. It has changed the delivery address in the same way, even though the billing and delivery addresses are displayed seperately and have seperate buttons to change them. It is at this point that I notice the site has increased the delivery charge from £3 to £8 for "super ultra speedy nutter delivery" or somesuch bollocks.
I change the delivery address back to my work, and this also fucks up the billing address, making it a mish-mash of the two addresses.
I give up and order from Misco instead, cheaper.