Category: Uncategorised

… well… it’s the usual pile of pants. More secure? Probably. Faster? Maybe. Huge download forced on people even though they may be on dialup as it’s classed as aN “IMPORTANT” patch? Yup.

I’ve used it for roughly ten minutes and only as one survey site I go to insist on IE; it simply won’t work with another browser. Each page is a “click the options” one (it’s a survey after all) and now before every single page I have to clear a dialogue asking me if I want the next page to have access to my clipboard. I can’t find an option to turn this off, though I guess it’s somewhere in the security options that I can’t be bothered looking through.

Another thing I don’t like is the removal of the text menu options (File, Edit and so on), though they can be “popped up” by hitting the ALT key. This, apparently, is to reduce “toolbar creep” which can “take up to 1/3 of the browser window”. Yes. If you’re a compete moron who downloads every toolbar known to man and has a spyware-infested PC. And if that’s the case, having a single half-height line removed will make next to no difference anyway.

Final minor whinges are also cosmetic. The inclusion of a search box in the top right which allows you to use any search engine seems OK… only the one toolbar I *do* use is Google’s which has this function anyway. In addition to which that one box lets me search Google normally, Google News, Google Images, Google Video, GMail, etc., etc., etc. Which pretty much makes the inbuilt one redundant. And there’s no way to remove it.

The other buttons included on the toolbar for IE are for some reason places along the new “tab” bar (and I don’t like tabbed browsing either – I disable it on Firefox). Thing is, the program seems to have decided that these appear from left to right starting at a certain point, so on a non-full size window you have those annoying “more” arrows so you can’t see all of the available icons without clicking. Why not have them right-justified if there’s space due to a lack of tabs?

The only way to give feeback to MS now (that they won’t listen to) is via a newsgroup. Essentially, it’s got through the release candidate bit, the general public have it and (until someone hacks it which will inevitably happen soon enough) they’ll wash their hands of any fixes.

Thanks, but I’ll stick with Firefox. Although, even that has it’s annoyances. Most irritating one is that if you have a large text box on the screen (let’s say your Blogger template) and you use the inbuilt search (CTRL-F) function, said textbox is ignored. Gah.

Oh, and a quick question. If Google and Firefox are so much in cahoots, how come the Google toolbars always come out for IE first? I want my Bookmarks online, dammit!

A couple of work-related stories, methinks. I just hope I’m not repeating anything with them. These, obviously, hark back quite a few months to when I wrote them. Just picture a wibbly curtain and “doodle-do-doo” noises as we step back to February…

Mr Who?

First off, last week I had to reset someone’s password on the server. It’s a regular occurence for this user – maybe twice a month. He just keeps forgetting his password every time they’re told to change it. His name? And I **** you not – Mr Careless.

I thought you brought it?

Two of the lads in the office went to site last week. They met up at Leeds/Bradford and hopped on the ‘plane. Alighting at Southampton they left the terminal to get a taxi to… erm… Now. Was it Poole or Bournemouth? Neither one had bothered to bring the customer’s address with them. Cue several embarassed phone calls and a taxi driver rubbing his hands as the meter ran up.

I want to go home

At least they did a good job when they were on site. Many moons before I joined my previous company, one of the engineers was on site with a large customer that I guarantee every one of you will have heard of.

Sat at a UNIX server, he needed to delete the existing code and replace it with the new version. Simple delete statement: rm -fr which just bins everything recursively from where you are “downwards”.

Without asking.

Which is a shitter when you realise that you weren’t in the right folder to start with and you’re actually trashing their entire system from top level down. As this guy is frantically trying to log on to another terminal to kill the process, the phone goes.

“Hey, erm… our system’s gone down? Is this anything to do with the upgrade?”

“Errrr… yes. Yes it is.”

Fortunately, they had given him a full system backup on tape before he started. I don’t know if they ever knew what happened.

Folks, if you want to get updated when this page has new posts, there are a few ways to do so. Bloglet died a few months back, so that option’s gone. You can still look to the left there and use the “Mail me” link – I’ll add you to a list and send you a short mail each time there’s a new post. Or, scroll down to the “Subscribe” box and use some kind of feed – Atom and RSS are both there.

The Audio version doesn’t seem to work with this blog, though it’s fine on the Travel Blog. I’m going to do some hefty work on the template on this one and republish sometime and I think that might fix it. In the meantime, I’ll leave the link there so when it does work…!

Please click on any and all adverts you see, too. As part of the template work, I’m going to try and get the charity information (and some sponsoring Google ads) down the right hand side. I’ve been meaning to do this for far too long and I have a couple of days spare. Bear with me, though, I might not get it done before I fly to Cairns.

Now back to the rude stuff:

Exporting “people”

I know immigration’s back in the news in the UK with them wanting to do what the Aussies and Kiwis have been doing for a while – let people in with skills and tell everyone else to **** off. Now, this is all fine and good if you can get it to work. Bear in mind, though, that Britain will still be a piece of piss to get into and once someone’s there, they can bugger off and work in Europe with their nice new passport.

This is exactly what’s been happening in New Zealand. It’s a lovely country, the people are great but wages suck ass and holiday allowances are akin to those given to galley slaves in Roman times. But… it’s easier to get a Kiwi passport than an Aussie one (despite measures made a couple of years ago to make it harder) so people still head there first, grind down for 5 years then piss off over the water to Kangaroo Land. Hell, even the native Kiwis work in Oz and bring their money home.

Changing the tack slightly. The UK still has a gazillion unskilled immigrants (legal and otherwise) that really are of no use to the country. They’re scum. And we don’t need them. For no other reason than we have enough of our own home-grown scum to be getting on with. We don’t need someone else’s. We’ve a proud history of producing some of the best scum in the world. From the barbarians that put the **** up even the mighty Roman empire through to today’s waste-of-space chav, we have some of the best scum on earth. Even the Yanks ripped us off with their trailer trash. We had caravans first, people.

Now a part of the problem with the immigrant scum (and note that by this I mean scum who are immigrants – I am certainly not applying the label to all people who move to the UK) is we can’t find them. They sneak in under the radar, don’t work, sponge off the state and expect sympathy when they can’t get work because they don’t even speak the ******* language.

So here’s the deal. We work out how many unskilled, unemployable, non-English speaking ******* there are who’ve just come over here for an easy ride (there are figures – double them to get a more accurate reading)… then we gather up the same number of ASBO-ridden chav ***** and export them – forcibly if necessary… actually, I’d prefer forcibly – to the countries we got these ***** from. A few tens of thousands of Burberry-clad, chain-smoking, drug-addled, breeding-like-rats chav ***** dropped in China may make them look after their own borders a bit ******* better.

May I volunteer my ex-next door neighbour as the first one to load onto a Hercules? If that piece of **** doesn’t convince some foreign nation that their own sponging ******** are a better deal than what we have to offer then I’ll drink my own piss.