tomment

the register today reports that the company who runs the Paris Metro is to install wifi on buses.

rock!

i just got the contract for the flat i’m going to be moving in to. i particularly like clause 17.

• (17) Not to keep or allow to be kept any dog or other animal reptile or bird in the Premises

there are about 3 full stops in the whole of this contract, and no commas.

this mings.

what is it? google boxer shorts, which say “i’m feeling lucky” all over them. only $15 from the googlestore.

the logarhythm site gets updated and gets a new look. nice.

so.. i decided i’d try and record the seagulls. and i did.

in the process i discovered a nice open-source multi-track recording tool for osx (and other operating systems), audacity. it’s noise reduction filter was particularly useful.

in recent weeks i have become particularly aware of seagulls.

2 months ago (or so), they began to peck our rubbish apart. you put your rubbish out for collection, half an hour later your rubbish (along with all the other rubbish in the street) is covering the road. the joy of living by the sea. and living by seagulls.

however, in the last couple of weeks, the seagulls have become particularly noisy. is this some sort of mating call? they begin being noisy around this time, that is sometime after midnight, and continue until about 8am. they don’t make nice sounds like normal birds, they make horrible squarking sounds which sits (un)comfortably between a donkey and a squealing baby. the other defining property is that they are incredibly loud, especially as i have my window open at night to avoid suffocation.

i can thoroughly recommend some remixes which appear to have been made by ratatat, there’s some mp3s doing the rounds.

go download before they disappear, and don’t feel guilty, it’s unlikely they’ll ever get a release.

lessig declares himself bankrupt with respect to e-mail, wired wrote an article about it, i dedicate this post to my brother.

how am i meant to revise when my chocolate biscuits keep melting?

phone rings. i answer.

‘good afternoon sir, i am calling from telco. could you tell me who is the person responsible for paying the telephone bills for this number?’
‘me’
‘what is your name?’

i say my name

‘well, i’ve got good news for you, i’m calling to offer you savings specifically on BT business lines…..’

i interject.

‘i am not a business customer, and my line isn’t with BT’
‘you don’t pay your line rental to BT?’
‘no - NTL’.
‘oh, well then we can’t help you. thanks for your time’.

what?

so, after much anger for about 1 hour that i wasn’t going to be able to vote in the forthcoming parliamentary elections, it turns out i can. a voting card popped through my letterbox this afternoon.

oddly, our polling station is the hanbury arms ballroom, kemp town’s very own nightclub.

When I was at school I never really thought about the crazy Walkers ’sports equipment for schools’ offer, which effectively means you have to eat loads of crisps in order to get a free cricket bat or something for your school.

The idea of advertising sport with fast food is pretty scary, as in Sarah’s McApple, it seems very wrong.

The Guardian reports sports bodies urged to shun fast-food sponsors, but it seems the Food Commission pointed out back in March how ridiculous it was, their press release Cadbury wants children to eat two million kg of fat - to get fit details that in order to get a set of volleyball net posts you’d need to ear £2000 of chocolate, which would involve eating 1.25 million calories. Nice.

where did geourl go? it’s been down for days.

most disgusting thing ever?

at safeway, now under morrisons ownership, they are shrinkwrapping individual peppers.

then i could have a PlusDeck - a cassette deck for the PC.

it allows you to digitise your audio tapes, and record your digital files to audio tape. fab.

living in brighton i forget what it is like to see fly posters in every direction you look. the council cracked down on it a few years ago apparently, and hence there are just no flyposters in brighton.

the telegraph today reports that Sony and BMG record label (advertising) executives face jail threat for flyposting. as you’d expect, it is a slight shocker of a headline, and they’ve just been asked to cease flyposting or they could get a jail term. interesting though.

in Brighton, more so than any other UK city outside London (i think), there is ridiculous demand for housing. the population is transient, maybe it’s a place to spend a year or so, but the feeling here is that people move on, or will move on, or have already moved on (and been replaced by new people).

as a consequence, the lettings market is ridiculously buoyant, a lot of people rent houses here, probably because property is so damn expensive. and it seems, for whatever reason, that the majority of property is let via agencies, of which there are probably hundreds.

unlike estate agents, the market for letting agencies is totally unregulated. how many stories have i heard about people getting done over by their agents? too many. and as a consequence, there seems to be no rules by which they play.

take the example of the new flat i am moving in to. let from outlet sales & lettings, or so we thought when we looked around the property. great, we like it. let’s pay a holding deposit.

the deposit is paid immediately, and then we find out that actually maybe they want a tenant to move in before we’re willing to move. what do you mean maybe? well, the property isn’t actually let by outlet, but by another agency, they’re just helping to market it. great.

so another agency gets involved (i’m not mentioning them for fear of retribution, as they’ll be looking after my house for the next 12 months!), and yes - they want us to move earlier. but i’ve paid a deposit, the house remains on the market despite the fact that we were told by the agency who we thought we were dealing with that a holding deposit would take it off the market.

so on it goes. we eventually negotiate a move in date which is a bit more realistic, but still has huge overlap with my current place. oh well. then outlet decide to let us know that actually they advertised the price wrong too, and it’s another £25 a month. what can i do? absolutely nothing, if i want the house, i have to accept - because they say, despite the fact they made a mistake, the rent is payable to another agent and so they can’t reduce it to apologise.

once again, as customer i am left with very few rights, the agents have just negotiated on their terms, what they want, what exactly is the point in me paying rent on 2 properties when i am on holiday and therefore don’t need either? why did they accept my deposit before they had even decided whether to accept?

so i guess i’ll just sweep it under the carpet, like every other person who rents their home in brighton, and pretend that i’m not spending £300 on absolutely nothing (that’s £60 referencing fee, £50 for them to print a contract for me to sign (both + VAT) and £160 odd rent when i can’t even move in). grr

Bristolian’s will now be able to get their fix of Daily Mail spun articles as Metro newspaper comes to the West.

Apparently buses have holders for them to be distributed. I imagine a happy partnership between the Daily Mail and First Group.

TRAIN TICKET - Bristol to London

i just got unsuccessful phone spam on my landline.
i answered the phone.
‘we have an important message for you, please wait 2 seconds’.
i waited.
nothing happened.
the call was disconnected.