ttj - Tom Jones

 Around 2011, I went to a talk in Oxford by a former head of Ofcom.  The surprising thing about the talk was the self-congratulatory framing.  This former head of Ofcom had no idea how incompetent they were, and was simply putting things in terms of presumed success. Several of their fails mysteriously allowed scammers to scam via premium lines; in other words, the organisation was corrupt and captured. Instead of allocating 07 to mobiles, they allocated loads of 07blahs to mobiles, but 070 or something was called "personal numbers", which were actually premium lines where a juicy cut went to the number operator. They then allowed a situation to develop and fester with so-called "local rate" and "national rate" numbers.  In both cases, these were premium-rate numbers under prefixes like 0845 and 0870, where, again, cuts went to the number operator.  Phone networks were under no obligation to charge the same as for local or national geographic numbers.  A c

 ÖBB, Austria's train operator, fails, but it wouldn't take much to bring it round.  Sadly, the fails get more and more annoying with time and repeat use of the service. On ÖBB, business class is the top type of first class.  Basically, business and first are the other way round from on planes.  The business class seats are huge, just two to a row, and look comfy.  But there's a design flaw.  Lean back, and the chair starts reclining.  There is no support for someone who just wants to lean against the back of their chair.  The recline mechanism is always skidding around.  Ask staff about this, and they will always claim the particular chair you are in is broken.  Ask for a working one, and they probably can't do it.  As a one-off trick, they might be able to do something special with the mechanism that locks it upright.  I've seen this once.  All other business class chairs in the fleet are "broken". Some marketing dipshit decided to hang magazines from ho

 The term "inflation" is a propogandistic euphemism for currency debasement. Inflation, generally, means something is getting bigger.  In the case of currency debasement, the things people might want to present as getting bigger are: prices and wages.  This is wrong.  Something is getting smaller.  The value of each currency unit (franc, pound, dollar, euro or yen) is getting smaller.  That's why the number of units you need for the same thing, goes up.  The reason the value got smaller is that the dipshits operating it printed a lot of new units, out of nowhere, in the world's largest type of corruption by magnitude of value diverted.  They printed them for themselves and their friends, and the rest is complificating bullshit, so even those "with an eye for detail" end up not being able to see it. A better term would be debasement. Having use of the term "inflation" then allows for language tricks to be employed, like talk of "reflating the e

 The Microsoft Nokia 215ds is a Microsoft-era dual-SIM basic phone, and it shows.  This is in the sad, post-failure phase of Nokia's existence, during which the brand got reputation-mined by Microsoft. The design is apparently too cool to say the model number, so unless you label it, it will end up as a mystery phone in the phone drawer.  The model number inside the battery compartment is given as RM-110, which has nothing to do with the 215ds under which it was marketed. The handset's not really usable for basics.  It's not worth dissecting it fully, any more than it's worth dissecting a run-over badger, but I can give a couple of examples. The address book's Name field is limited to 16 characters.  In practical use, this is often not enough to record someone's name with a brief reminder, like when and where you met them.  By contrast, on the Nokia 6100, my reference classic Nokia, I gave up trying to reach the limit in the name field just now.  The 3 lines ini

 I recently got a letter from Postfinance (Swiss), importantly informing me that my USD account balance was minus 67.19 USD.  I haven't done anything with it for a while, so I guess it just went slowly down from their fees.  Fine. This USD account sits next to other accounts in CHF, EUR and GBP, that I hold within one customer relationship, and manage together.  The total balance across the four sits at a healthy positive amount.  Given this, one might assume that negative 67.19 USD on one of the accounts doesn't present a big problem.  Perhaps ignore as long as there's plenty in the other accounts to cover, or gently remind. The PF letter gives a deadline of 10 days for me to fix my delinquency, after which they fee me 20 CHF.  They also charge antoher 20 CHF every time they remind me.  It doesn't take a psycho MBA to point out: they now have an incentive to "remind" me.  Sure enough, the reminder follows hot on the heels of the original, presumably "ear

 It's a basic requirement of companies offering services to the public, that the corporate identity should be clear. As a last resort, the company has an obligations, in jurisdicitons I know about, to receive legal notices by mail at its registered office address.  But way before that, the customer needs to know, so as to have a handle on who or what they are dealing with. There is a trend, noticeable for at least the last decade, for companies to try and obscure their corporate identity. Let's say that the basic company identifier consists of the company name and jurisdiction of registration.  This is enough to uniquely identify a company.  "Foo Ltd registered in England and Wales", or "Bar Ltd registered in Austria", are identified.  Just "Foo Ltd" or "Bar Ltd" are not. Fuller company information includes the registered office address and registration number. Basic company identifier must be included in correspondence (including email),

 I always forget this, and it's not even that easy to find from web search due to proliferation of types of iphone model and poor google search, so: press power and home button at the same time

I recently opened a new account with wise.com, formerly known as the spammers transferwise.  This is part of my futile effort to have a basic payments capability. wise.com seem to be following the trend of thinking that the more convoluted they make all their processes, the more "verified" things are.  Processes should involve as many SMSs, smartphone cameras, selfies, time-wasting, assumptions, and glitchy crap that doesn't work, as possible, to reduce the probability of successful account setup. This journey started when I decided to look at the Transferwise card as a possible payments card.  I had previously abandoned Transferwise in favor of Currencyfair (also spammers, as it turned out), because Transferwise kept spamming me.  But I still had the account details. Login with my old account details didn't work.  The only option was something like "I've forgotten my password" to do an account rescue.  But I hadn't forgotten my password.  wise.com,

 Last year I had a simple rendition of the 7 minute workout routine recorded by a voice artist . I wanted a simple audio track to help get the timings right.  I used to have a good "app" that did it, but that handset died.  Subsequent "app"s have got rubbisher and rubbisher, by having mega-configurable exercise order and making it complicated, with intrusive advertising, by synthesizing unpleasant robot voices instead of simply recording a human voice, and by making everything sound so pumped. Youtube video mmq5zZfmIws is not bad, but they have not been able to resist having ads, and a quick part of the morning routine can not have ads, it's just too tacky.  But one can watch someone doing each exercise and see how to do it properly.  Incidentally, they are at 30M views, also because daily routine.  The track I got recorded, in m4a format, is: https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=1c91iH6XJrfCiItTJErJAmIbNdGuHN0tr (direct download link) https://dr

 When adding a new video on Youtube, one is told: Checks will not run until SD has finished processing  What is "SD"?  Googling the message returns only 5 results, and they are not informative.

It's a basic requirement of hotel rooms, that the room should be dark at night, to allow quality sleep.  Almost no hotels meet this basic requirement, and Sorell Seefeld fails to meet it in three ways: a red light from the TV   your faithful reviewer covered this with black insulating tape  a very bright light, lighting up the room, from the air conditioning control panel   your faithful reviewer initially tried taping a hotel card over this, but the light was so bright, it shined through:    so your faithful reviewer covered the whole thing in tape:  , light coming from a hole in the door   your faithful reviewer put black insulating tape over this:  It is not possible for a hotel to score more than zero, if there are lights on in the room when it should be dark.  Some people from marketing had kindly printed some cards and left them lying around, assuring us that "Your sleep is close to our hearts".  Accurately, the woman shown sleeping is depicted sleeping not in the d

 In an effort to get a workable EUR bank account operating in the EU, I've ventured outside Austria, and tried opening an account with DKB, a German "no branch" bank. They've outsourced their verification process.  You get an email with a link to a third-party "identity verification" service, hosted under a domain other than dkb.de.  Bad start. The idea is to have a video call in which you show your id and answer some questions. My first call didn't get answered.  After around 15 minutes wait, the web page suggested making an appointment, which I did, for several days later.   When the appointment came around, I started the video call, and sure enough it connected to a typical call-centre outsourcee.  I requested slow German, and he offered to speak in English instead.  He asked me some questions like am I opening the account for market research, and is it because I have a new job.  Then on to the main event, the showing of the passport.  This went badly

 Taleb observed in Antifragile that it took 6000 years between the invention of the wheel, and someone putting wheels on luggage.  Sadly, castors without brakes result in a lot of rolling around.  This is getting worse each year, as the luggagetards seem to take unbounded delight in reducing the friction in their castors, but never add brakes.  Thousands of people are going round announcing they "work in luggage design", but not a single one has implemented the most obvious and beneficial "innovation" available to them. I have so far been unable to (spot test and) buy any luggage with brakes on the wheels, despite asking in several luggage shops. Searching online yields promises of "universal" castor parts with brakes, where "you must have a strong ability in DIY", meaning: they're not universal, and the fitter may as well be crafting the whole item from scratch.  It also brings up a 700 EUR piece of Chinese tat, with no brakes visible in the

 test 2021-10-10