ttj - Tom Jones

The governments of Guernsey and Jersey are currently in the process of tendering a multi-year "contract" to run ferry services around the Channel Islands and to England.  This amounts to selecting a winner, who will then be granted a monopoly, and have millions of pounds thrown at it, in order that it can provide a shit service to islanders. Meanwhile my visitors, coming over for two nights, are now arriving at 15:30 instead of 10:00 because of "tides".  Tides are predictable to the minute, decades in advance.  I have received the tides excuse before, and I spoke to a member of the crew about it, and they mumbled.  Everyone I have spoken to has received the tides excuse, and everyone I have spoken to spotted that it was a silly excuse.  One person I spoke to knew someone in Condor, who said it was a fake excuse. No one seems to question whether the Guernsey government should be throwing vast sums of money at a company in order to severely degrade the quality of tran

# dpkg -i FIXME # apt --fix-broken install # apt-get install linux-headers-amd64 gcc make perl reboot # vboxconfig builds kernel modules $ VirtualBox

Amazon have still not fixed their 500 Internal Server issue, despite my clear root cause analyses. Customer puts thing in basket.  Customer changes delivery address, in this case from UK to Guernsey.  Amazon falls over with 500 Internal Server Error. As noted elsewhere, Jeff Bezos is notorious for asking for a root-cause analysis for every issue. Let's separate things into PRCA and DRCA.  That is proximal root-cause analysis, and distal root-cause analysis, respectively. The proximal root cause is that Amazon is failing to handle some cases where a basket's shipping address is changed from a location that the basket can be shipped to, to a location that the basket can not be shipped to. The distal root cause is that Jeff Bezos is retarded.

The Debian installer has been the same for 15 years or since whenever Joey Hess stopped doing it. There are dozens of obvious micro-improvements to anyone using it. It has always been bad at connecting to wifi during install.  You enter or choose the SSID, and enter the password. It then shows a big progress bar, and announces that it is trying to exchange keys, and after several minutes it fails.  Sometimes it does succeed, usually not. Laptops now tend not to have wired network, so it's annoying.  But to work around, just install fairly minimal from DVD [image], and then connect to wifi once you're logged in to the installed OS.  This works straight away, so the installer is not using the same connecty thing as the installed OS.  It should be.

I recently had a conversation with someone who thought that changing currency with your bank was always a bad idea, and it was always better to use a separate service to do the foreign exchange, such as Spammers Wise, Cowboys currencyfair, or Revolut. I just had a look on the online banking at changing 1M USD to GBP, and 1M EUR to GBP, between my different currency accounts within this same private banking relationship, to line up a chunk of GBP.  The indicative rate was 1.5% off the xe.com rate.  This is bad.  It indicates a spread of 3% if it's symmeterical.  I am going to call the 1.5% thing the half-spread.  It is loss for the customer, and mostly profit for the bank.  One would not want to do it for a large amount. Then I wrote to them and they called me, and we ended up changing them at half-spreads of 0.13% and 0.17%, respectively.  These are not just good, they are very good. The fintech brigade starts at around 0.5%, so it is better for smaller amounts.  I don't know h