Posts by Andrew Moore 1720 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Mar 2007
I saw a great description at the weekend after America's almost non-appearance at the G20 summit. It said that we have now moved into the Post-US era; the time when America's relevance on the world stage diminishes and some other country moves in to fill the void. Right now, that is looking like China or Russia, India lagging a lot behind them and Europe in a distant forth place.
Better than that is when they guess the value of the package, while ignoring the value on the customs declaration form. When I queried them about it, they told me it was because sometimes people don't put the correct value on the form. I told them that was a matter for Customs and Excise to pursue, not them. Strangely enough the extra charges were dropped once I got a case number back from Customs...
Re- Wifi "hijacking" had something similar recently trying to get a bus ticket. Turns out the app was trying to access the bus companies wifi and of course it was behind one of those useless login screens- which the app did not present to you and was only evident if you opened up the browser.
And of course, the error message displayed had absolutely nothing to do with the app failing to get an internet connection.
I had an incident once where an America company installed kit and rather than putting a proper 3 pin UK plug on all the gear, took an American extension strip, stuck a UK plug on that and then plugged their standard US plugs into the strip. While unplugging one of these, my fingers managed to slip under the plug and touch the two pins...
We banned Vaios in our company after the motherboard failed on the bosses one and there was no way to get at the disk drive (which contained all the boss' photos in a non-backed up location) without disassembling it, voiding the warranty- a fact the support droid in Sony's call centre was all too gleeful to point out.
2 previous autonomous vehicle accidents were also the result of the human occupied vehicle forcing a bad move and hoping that the self preservation of the driver of the other vehicle would allow them to get away with it. Downside is all the autonomous vehicles do not appear to have human-level self preservation built in. On the plus side, get enough of these vehicles on the road and it'll make the arseholes think twice before barging across 3 lanes of traffic or turning suddenly without indicators...
In my office I'm sat across a sales droid who has spent two weeks trying to get a piece of software working so that he can demonstrate it to a client. Which has involved multiple daily calls to a call centre I'm pretty sure is located in India. This is for software that I'm fully trained on. Apparently the sales droid was told to use the off site support rather than asking me for support because the company pays a yearly support contract and they want their monies worth...
I've tried telling the small breweries over here (Ireland) to drop the use of the word "craft" and use "micro" instead. "Craft" cannot be protected/defined so it's open to use by anyone, whereas "micro" has been defined by Revenue has meaning a brewery that produces less than 30,000 hectolitres a year.
Unfortunately, it's not entirely true- all exported beers whether they were going to India or not were brewed stronger. And as for adding hops to act as a preservative- well that was the reason why hops were added to beer in the first place- to act as a preservative.
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