Time to kick in the “new bike post” generator.

New Bike!

Well nearly, this is the demo one I tried again today, my one will be a bit different as it’s not an off the shelf bike and so some of the bits I’ve chosen aren’t these ones. Luvverly though Some more pics here.

I am becoming a hippy – I’ve started to get a weekly organic fruit and veg box. The main difference I’ve noticed so far is that for some reason it’s all covered in soil.

The anti hippy antidote is the big old Volvo sitting on the drive

I decided to upgrade firefox and IE at the same time, not sure why. But the comparison is interesting.
Firefox ~5.5Mb
About 10seconds to install, when finished prompted me if I wanted to start Firefox – yes please!
Not initally a lot different than the old one though, the icons have changed a bit.

IE ~15Mb
Start of install tells me it has to install updates – I only downloaded it 5 seconds ago.
Installs updates for about 5 minutes. During this time the windows update shield thing pops up telling me I need to restart, even though IE7 installer says it’s still installing updates…
I go away and come back and it’s urging me to restart. so I do.
Tappity tap go my fingers waiting for the restart
It’s back.
Initall impressions are it’s a lot different. Where’s the menu bar? I don’t really like the look of the tabs, though there is less real estate taken up by addres bar etc. than firefox.
First page is a bit odd though – having to choose your search engine, and some other settings I didn’t get.

Satisifyingly my work application still works in it – which is nice.

I did have a bluescreen of death later in the afternoon though….

I had my credit card fraudulently used about a month ago, I first learnt about it when the credit card company phoned me up and told me there was some suspicious activity on my account, i.e. online casinos at 1 in the morning. Happily enough the charges they said were suspicious didn’t make it through to my card, however 2 further charges, dated a few days later (after my card had been stopped) did make it through – for a total of £354.67 !

No worries thinks I, they know it was fraudulent – they told me and my card was stopped at the time. But no, when I phone them it turns out I have to dispute it. OK, I begrudgingly fill in the forms, send them back prompty, they tardily send me back a letter saying they will investigate.

A month later and I’ve heard nothing more. I phone again, “It can take up to 180 days” – WTF! Whilst I’m not being charged interest the fraudulent charge still affects my balance, which they were about to charge me as my direct debit payment is for the full amount.

When I was with HSBC and I had a fraudulent charge (for much less money) they just refunded it and gave me a new card. I don’t know if “standard industry practice” has changed since then, but I’m inclined to go back to bartering sheep.

I’m being spammed by the Tory MP for where I used to live – same mail 7 minutes apart and no unsubscribe link ! Also:

PS: I need your help to let people know what I am doing and how I can help them. I need to deliver my Parliamentary Report in your area. If you can help to deliver a small number, please let me know by return! Thanks for your help.

Maybe I should say yes and then just dump them :p

When doing football scores you’ve really got to get the numbers the right way round.

We all contribute to CO2 emissions when we drive.
We can all do something about it.
It’s simple and doesn’t cost the earth.
On average‚ it’s just £20 a year.

from targetneutral. Of course if you really want to do something about your emissions you could allways walk/bus/cycle/anything but a car. But of course it’s easier to salve your conscience by giving 20 quid to an oil company.

I’ve just spent ages trying to work out why my XBox360 wouldn’t connect to my PC running Windows Media Connect. As I’ve just changed the router of course I blamed that, and have spent a long time perusing the interweb to find out what could be wrong. I’ve played with the router UPnP settings, stared at subnet masks etc all to no avail.

Then I looked at the event log, the only warning messages were from Windows Defender. And it was whinging about a port I knew that the XBox stuff needed to be open. I uninstalled it and it all starts working.

Bah! Hopefully google will find this and it might help someone else.

Find me here Before judging the time remember that the organisers say it was the worse weather in the 11 years they’ve run the event!

Aparantly there are lots of nice views on the SDW, I didn’t see any of them!

As part of moving house I’m ‘coming back’ to BT, basically because Sky broadband is free but you need a BT line. I dreaded cancelling NTL due to their bad reputation. I got through quite quickly, they guy took the details, and then the ’system was down’ and he couldn’t do it.

When I tried later though it turned out it was all set up, the guy must have done it later when the computers worked again. Wahay!

Whilst writing this though I’ve been on hold for nearly 10 minutes trying to get through to BT ….

Update
After nearly 20 minutes I got through and it took about 2 minutes to do a credit check, give me a phone number and arrange for the line to be turned on on Wednesday morning!