So much for loyalty

As I mentioned in my last post I have a nice loyalty discount n my contract, a “reward” for not cancelling my account when I didn’t need it.

Turns out they don’t really value loyalty and if I choose to upgrade to the phone I want not only do I need a bigger contract or an upfront payment, I’d lose the so called loyalty discount.

The best upgrades can do is a £35 a month contract on the Desire S (as the Neo isn’t available till july) or a £25 a month with £90 up front, considering the contract’s only costing me £5 that’s really not going to happen I may have been happy with 25-discount + £90 but more than I’m paying for 2 contracts just for one? not a chance.

What’s stupid is I’m sat on a price comparison site looking at a £20 a month contract on that phone with the same provider, no cashback, just a simple contract and free phone, umm its a bit of a no brainer really.

I did kind of expect to lose the discount, but its not a good way of rewarding people for choosing to stay with you, if I’d renewed on line I could save £6 on my bill… my bill that costs £5? no obviously they’d take the £10 discount off me and replace it with £6, so not only would I not get a new phone out of that I’d end up paying more and getting nothing in return.

Looks like that contract is going and I’ll wait and see what’s on offer when my main contract is upgradeable, maybe the neo will be out and run at a decent pace at a decent cost too!

I’m still curious how much it’ll cost just to use my free contract and pay for my use, instead of this rubbish where I’m paying an upfront fee every month for minutes and texts I just don’t use.

So he enters this tunnel and the clouds are swirling around him, so fast he sees lines, feels himself accelerate then a feeling of weightlessness, so he entered a cyclone was sucked up to 2000mph and spat out the end, I may not know the science right but I know enough to hazard a guess that if the wind had slowly built up and if there was some magnetism going on maybe the plain could have been accelerated using natural probably re-creatable forces rather than relying on science fiction, dark energy and space warps.

They actually spent about 10/15 minutes explaining the science of a space warp and warp drive, apparently you need a positive dark energy behind a ship and a negative infront, but their description of dark energy makes it to be anti-gravity to negative dark energy would be called gravity, in other words its a gravity drive and needs lots of energy probably more than a single thunderstorm would have generated, which is why Star Trek use a matter anti-matter reaction to power their warp core.

Anyway rant over, I’m going to see if I can figure out who dunnit in CSI: Miami before Horatio gets them

twitter follower spam

facebook application/group invite and update spam

social network status update spam

blog comment spam

forum spam

MMO chat spam

IM Spam

newsletters, supposedly agreed to mailings

virus and phishing  emails

random blog posts

and of course actual spam mail

oh and the millions of ads on webpages

all spam

Twitter followers, start following, in the hope you’ll follow them in return or just follow all the links that every tweet has to their website, thats probably trying to sell something or just paid for by advertising, do they jut add everyone that shows up on the timeline or are they watching for specific words?

Facebook app spam, “Please invite 2million friends to try this pointless app”, it probably wasn’t even that good, but then after that it posts your score for everyone to see, or everytime a friend does something in one of the game apps, it posts a story for everyone to see, no I’m really not interested that someone planted or taken a photo of some flowers in their virtual farm, I’m really not interested in virtual zombie stuff or mafia recruiting. There now a new trend of facebook pages with some funny picture on it that you have to like and invite everyone to to see whatever it is, just share the picture, I don’t want to tell everyone I wanted to know what the picture was, friend x likes funny picture x50, I don’t care! its spam all spam.

Status updates, sometimes theres just too many and too much info, does everyone you know really need to know you just had a big poo?

All the others are pretty obvious, whats the point? would you really buy something you saw a link to on a website or email without word of mouth verification from people you know to be real? Legitimate adverts are fine for letting you know about things but annoying still, but really a link on a forum post thats not even related why do they bother? is it just to boost page rank by having more links so they look legitimate by being high on google?

and all the adverts they either lead to pages hoping to sell something, or to more pages hoping for you to follow their adverts, can you trust them even if they’re on well known pages? probably but the advert people still let through some, and there’s just so many annoying ones, with rollovers or popups and noises

Chat, forum, comment and im spam all sending links to the advert pages trying to make money, its all about attention seeking and money grabbing.

It doesn’t matter what service you use it can be corrupted and abused for spam, thankfully we have some nice people out there that want rid of it all and provide nice little apps that strip ads and block spam messages, just a smae they’re not 100% effective and some slip through

oh and this is spam too

I’ve had a letter from labour and lib dems I’m not sure if they’re asking for my vote or just what I want their policies to be about but to sum it up, this is what they’re policies always seem to be

Labour, The tories messed up the country when they were in power over 10 years ago so vote for us becaue they’ll just do it again

Tories, Labour have messed up the country while they’re in power so vote for us because we’re not them

Lib dem, we dont have any policy, so we’re going to ask you what you want, but we’ve not been in power yet so give us a chance

Ukip. we hate foreigners, we’ll get out of europe n kick them all out, we’re also not labour or the tories so vote for us

Green, we want to save the world by annoying everyone and raising taxes, so vote for us and we’ll take you back to the dark ages

Random independent, we’re not going to tell you anything but just appear on your ballet, so vote for us because well with the mess the others have made what have you to loose?

They’re all working a bit of one-upmanship and really show no interest in doing whats right for anyone other than for their back pockets, and makeing sure they discredit the other parties to make sure they get voted in so get more money.

So who to vote for? with the recent exposure of thier “expense” claims for things that have nothing to do with their jobs, as they say power corrupts and maybe they didn’t break any rules, by following the rules to the letter, they maybe didn’t do anything wrong unless you you pay attention to ethics.

So you save a bit of tax, on anything in a sensible price range the tax is so little its hardly worth it. And as their in an airport, the prices are pushed up more making the savings even less significant.

Having spent quite a bit of time at Heathrow, and saw all their duty free shops, its full of big brand shops, the ones that nothing sells for less than 3 figures, fine you make some decent savings but what you do save is probably more than you’d be willing to pay.

One salesman asked if there was anything of interested, I commented that it was out our price range n his responce was “The more you spend the more you save”, while technically true it doesn’t stop the prices being rediculous.

I can understand the cheap booze, n little things but laptops and of all things luggage! surely if you’re in the airport departure lounge to see the duty free your luggage is already on the plane and any cases you buy are no use and probably can’t go on the flight anyway? And the clothes shops expensive designer brands that no normal person could even afford the tax savingnevermind the price of the items, isnt their some limit to the cost of items on your insurance? just buy one of them n you’re probably over the possessions limit.

And the caviar shop? WTF? why would you take over £100 worth of fish eggs on holiday? either rich people are weird and can’t buy things while they’re away or these shops are all there to cash in on the fact that people will beleive its worth spending more on something than they would normally because they’re not paying tax.

It kinda ironic that the London/England souvenir shop was staffed by none English staff. fair enough the majority of the airport staff seemed to be none British but its London where everyone goes when they come here, so its no surprise, but seriously the shop that sells all things British couldn’t even be staffed by a Brit? If you went to Newcastle you wouldn’t really expect a Cockney to be selling you Geordie souvenirs would you? I’m all for equal opportunities, just strikes me as rather ironic (assuming I’ve used the word right).

An my last thing, how many W H Smith’s does the airport need? I understand a few scattered around on the way to gates etc, so its not so far to walk but 2 or 3 in the main seating area, selling the same, isn’t that just a bit much?

Fair enough on a rental, a notice saying this is a rental please don’t copy/sell me

but you buy a dvd, and the first thing your forced to sit through is the don’t copy, sell, rent, broadcast, show in public etc, you may only watch this dvd alone in a seeled windows roomwith no chance of anyone seeing it, because if we found out a second person saw this dvd without buying it then you’d be in for a huge fine

I don’t want messages like that, I bought the dvd to watch the movie or whatever’s on it not to be threatened by some faceless group, and most have the dvd locked so you can’t skip them to get to the menu

At least back in the days of video, you could fast forward through the threats, and then the trailers to get to the actual show

And trailers? whats the point? coming soon to cinemas/dvd, what if the dvd was bought a few years after what’s being advertised, not only is the information out of date, but its probably irrelevant too, I didn’t buy a dvd to be advertised at, I bought it to watch whats on after, again on a rental not such a problem if they’re kept up to date and were also available or you might also like… but on a dvd that I’ve payed for I want what I’ve payed for, not threats and adverts especially not ones I cant skip

you pass one of these light signs and they say FOG, why? is it not blatantly obvious that its foggy, maybe the whole limited visibility isn’t obvious enough for some people they think that telling people its foggy will do what? make them realise that it is, surely if they hadn’t noticed that themselves then a sign isn’t going to help

warning fog patch ahead, fine it mightn’t be visible yet, but a sign warning you its foggy in the middle of thick fog is a bit silly really

I manage to use a computer practically all day everyday without becoming infected, no virus alerts, pop-ups,infact nothing not a single thing, even with no resident protection on my home pc I don’t get infected, so why are so many people infected ?

Granted if you connect to the internet directly with no firewall you have about 30s before an attack gets you but you’re just plain stupid for not getting someone to set you up properly

Virus writers and crackers give hackers a bad name.

After 4 separate anti-malware apps and about 10 hours I’ve come to the conclusing that re-installing windows would actually have been faster.

First we had the malware detected by Avast, then what was detected by AVG, then spyware doctor then superantispyware

why don’t the anti-malware companies get together and form an uber-definition set that they all use so we can just use 1 app, and instead of we kill x thousand infections, they can sell their own product saying they have faster scanning better detection resident protection etc. that way it wont matter who’s product you use they’ll all clean the same problems

to misquote Lord of the Rings

One list to rule them all, One list to find them, One list to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them

with the 1 definition list available it would simplify my job I dont want to run 4 maybe 5 separate programs to clean a system (funny that the one that fixed the problem was the copy command) I want to run 1 scanner that will find all known problems and correct them.

I think its had faults since day 1, the main one being the rev counter not working properly in certain weather
its been in the garage for services where they can’t find anything wrong, its been in for problems where there’s nothing wrong or another garage has found the problem’s more serious

ite been repaired for some electrical fault that stopped the gears working

and now the radiator decided to break n need replacing! so I now have a shiny new radiator for my car

what’s the point in paying so much money for a car if they’re not built well enough to last must beyond the warranty? The warrenty should be to catch any obvious faults with it, it shouldn’t then start falling apart!

I’m being watched, and its by a spider, or it appears to be a spider it could very well be some high-tech surveillance system made to look like a spider just to creep out anyone that’s being watched