ttj - Tom Jones

 Am now getting blank pages from Google Calendar: Um, how do I put a border around that screenshot?  It's white. Anyhow, Google Calendar now giving blank pages shortly after giving 500s < https://wibblement.blogspot.com/2023/09/google-is-giving-more-and-more-500.html > Time to move away from Google Calendar and other services, but also, are there desktop calendar clients that actually keep their own data and sync, more like smartphone calendar apps, so you aren't reliant on a live web site for desktop calendar?

Total state capture and moral bankruptcy are not the only problems facing Google.  They are also giving an increasing rate of 500 Internal Server errors.  This is the sort that means they've messed up, but not in a way that they should have messed up.  On the other hand, they have drawn a lovely picture of a robot falling apart. Today's example is from Google Calendar under calendar.google.com.  I was trying to make an appointment, and now I'm doing this. I remember, in 2018, a friend trying to convince me that 500 Internal Server Errors no longer happened, or if they did it was my fault, and that they hadn't seen any for years, and some other things.  They assured me that they would love to see screenshots of such a rare specimen, which I bored them with for a while.  That friend happens to be a Google employee. Well, there are plenty of others posting about Google Calendar on twitter today, including screenshots of 500 Internal Server errors, so I doubt this one is en

Prev: <https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/3352794691445397639/6820438698449558255>. After sitting in Aurigny's phone queue for 26 minutes, I had a brief conversation where I summarised the situation.  I had been trying to buy a ticket using my account, and Aurigny had discarded their customer passwords, forcing resets by email, and the customer had to pretend they had forgotten the password, even tho it was Aurigny which had forgotten the password.  But the email had not arrived, a couple of hours later. The rep helpfully pointed out that I could check out as a guest, and I agreed, while also remarking on  the amount of information that would have to be re-entered. The rep said: have you checked your junk folder.  No.  I checked it.  The reset email was not in there.  She said: have you added no-reply@aurigny.com to your allowed senders list?  We are entering the realm of a kind of ritualised, yet extremely primitive, and misdirected, form of worship, of the arbitrary qui

Now, did I want to enquire about chartering a boat, or did I want to give my time, which, remember, is part of a human life, for free, in order to train a psycopath's AI for free, in exchange for my human life? Hmmmm, let's see about that, shaweee: Oh.  And I've already tried calling the number on there, and it just beeps like it's an invalid number. On the amusing side, at least the AI training exercise, which I declined to do, is on the topic of modes of transport.

I have documented several times the worsening trend for companies to discard customer login information and force account resets, usually by an emailed link.  This is often accompanied by gaslighting the customer into thinking the customer themselves has forgotten their password.  The customer may also be required to lie in order to reset their password, for example by incorrectly stating that they have "forgotten" their password. Having worked in various IT departments, it is not hard to imagine the incompetence and chaos surrounding "decisions" to discard whole databases of customer authentication data, and force everyone to reset their passwords.  It is not so much a "decision" as a drool by an intermediate-level mammal down its own chin, accompanied by jumping up and down and grunting. It started out quite mysteriously, unable to book a ticket, because unable to log in, indicated simply with "Error / Login Failed": Already, there is a sign of

It was something of a surprise that it was possible at all to write a review of an airbnb host where the stay had not happened, and then the questions that you have to answer, in order to get to the freeform part, made no sense, because they assume the stay happened:       In all the set questions, then, I exceeded the character limit without saying what had to be said.  In the freeform review, I pasted in a written review, and this also hit the character limit, of 1000 characters.  But as the screenshot shows, this manages to communicate the basic point, the truncated paragraph being: In the end, they decided to try and keep the money whilst refusing to provide the service, which is the point at which I realised they were acting in bad faith.  I had to yell at t [..]     Just as a Ponzi is named after whatsisface Ponzi, so a Challis (more fully, Challis Extra Conditions After Payment Fraud) is named after whatstheirfaces Challis.

Being overcharged is so frequent that it's more a surprise when it doesn't happen.  Two more cases in the day after getting back to Guernsey.  In both cases I suspect it was a genuine accident. At Doyle's garage, I got a new gas bottle.  Attendant guessed which size, and I paid for that.  But when we went to get the bottle, it was a larger size that I wanted.  I now had to pay the difference.  They wanted to do this as a refund for the first one, and then a new purchase for the actual one -- fine.  For the refund, I inserted same card again.  It asked for PIN, which was strange.  He confirmed it was a refund.  The amount was on there, but it didn't say whether it was a charge or a refund.  I entered PIN and asked for chitty.  It said "debited".  I queried it.  He said whoops, I had indeed been charged again instead of refunded, and he now refunded the total accrued, which was 2 * original amount.  I then paid for the actual bottle.  If we were applying a Hamur