ttj - Tom Jones

  The web page that is supposed to say when your bins in Oxford are collected still says "Your Bin Zone is error".  And the green and blue bin messages just have a comma or something.  It's been like this since I got the house last year.   Has no one in Oxford been able to find out when their bins are collected, for the last six months? Come on Oxford brainiacs, make your ruddy web site work!

update: answer is that you log in with your barcode and password from the SOLO service, not from whatever comes up when you search the web for "log in bodleian". I used to be able to log in to the Bodleian's web site, using "barcode" id and a password, and order books to a reading room for the next day.  This was good. Now, their login page doesn't provide that option.  I don't know how the concept of "Oxford Single Sign-On" has changed since I left -- perhaps this now includes mere Bodleian members.  I click on this, and get.. a Microsoft Live web page.  What the absolute fuck. Instead, I try registering for an account, hoping to be able to link it to my existing membership id ("barcode") later.  Nope, it's "identify buses" time: And of course, if you do the buses, then next it's traffic lights, then bridges, then motorcycles, and it never ends.  I'm not falling for it again.  So how do I log in to the Bodleian...

I've just received yet another spam from Uber.  I opted out.  Yes, I've opted out several times before.     The spam from Lenovo is more interesting.  They are very determined to piss off their customers, and their geniuses in the spam department have come up with the following wheeze: the spam is dressed up as a "rewards statement", and according to their legal theory, can now be counted as "transactional" and therefore mandatory.  Never mind that I didn't get any reward points this month, nor did I ask to enroll in their rewards scheme, nor did I consent to use of my email address for anything except specific communication about a laptop purchase I did a while back. Note how they taunt the spam victim with "This is not a marketing or promotional email. You cannot unsubscribe as this is a transactional email".  If anything is asking for some anti-spam litigation, this is it. Around 2013-2014 I did take legal action against a dozen or so spamme...

I went to a post office and paid to redirect my post from a family member's address, who hosts my UK mail address, to my Guernsey office. I've done this maybe 4 times before since leaving the UK, and it's always worked fine.  This time, all post for the address got redirected, not just for me, even tho that's not how I filled in the form.  Royal Mail make themselves almost impossible to contact, but I completed some online "contact form".  Got no email acknowledgement.  Sent two items in the post, one should be redirected, the other delivered as addressed, wrote clear notes to this effect on the fronts of the envelopes.  Both got delivered instead of one.  Now, none of my post is being redirected, but at least the householder is receiving their post. Apparently there is a "dedicated redirection contact form".  Okay, under this dialog the page navigates to the redirection contact form.  But I was hovering over "dedicated redirection form" te...

I moved to Guernsey in November 2022.  In 2022, I spent fewer than 90 days (nights) in Guernsey, so was expecting to be non-resident for tax purposes for the year.  I was pleased to receive this confirmation, spontaneously, from the tax department, called "Revenue Service": It states simply, albeit with a typo, that my ("[me]") "[..] residential status for tax purposes in [2022] will be 'non-resident'". Imagine my surprise when I received an "Order Imposing a Penalty" dated 2024-03-04.  "In respect of the failure to deliver a return of income for the Year of Charge 2022 within the time specified by a notice given in accordance with the provisions of section 68 of the Law".  Looking at the situation more carefully, it did seem possible that (leaving aside any issue of not having received a notice) one might be non-resident for tax purposes, but still required to submit a tax return, in a particular year. On April 10th I asked thi...

This bill includes 16.68 GBP gratuity at 12.5%, which by definition is optional. I paid with the exact amount, 150. If they had not added gratuity charge, probably would have been same result. Fine. Waiter came back and said “I hate to be a stickler, but it’s a hundred and fifty AND THIRTEEN PENCE”. The optional gratuity was 16.68 GBP, so he is “being a stickler” about less than 1% of the optional GRATUITY. Without this precious 13p, the total amount of the optional gratuity is 16.55 GBP instead of 16.68 GBP on a base bill of 133.45 GBP. Have people really become this fucking retarded? I can not function in the brit tard sphere.

It looked like Bitstamp may have left their ill-advised captcha anti-feature behind, but I just got double captcha'd WHEN I WAS ALREADY LOGGED IN. I can not overstate how ill-advised this is.  You are failing at authentication, you are disrespecting your customer by valuing their time at zero.  You are presuming to tell them that they must provide, for free, some of the lowest-value labor in the world, that of training AIs.  In this case, food with motor vehicles, and the question is "what does not belong here".  This is not the future of anything.  If you are doing this, you are doing it very, very, very wrong.

In my previous article "emirates unable to sell tickets" [0], I documented how Emirates is implementing industry best practice, by have a ticket-sale-like web process which ends in an error page instead of a ticket sale. [0] < https://wibblement.blogspot.com/2024/01/erimates-unable-to-sell-tickets.html > In the end, I got a confirmation email for a flight booking from them, and the funds are pending on my credit card.  So the sale did go thru.  On average, this is worse than the sale failing.  I could have gone straight from their error page to trying to book with another airline, and ended up with two bookings.  Or changed my plans altogether, and had a booking to cancel.  The email could easily have not arrived, because that's what email does.  In this case, it's worked out okay. So I went to book the journey back.  This time, after several petty errors, their web page hung indefinitely on "Saving your seat selection".  As usual, a lot mor...

I just tried sending 6 XMR to my Kraken deposit address, that I have used many times over the years. So far, it hasn't appeared. So I went to Transfer -> Deposit to check they still have the same deposit address for me, which I carefully recorded in my own records years ago, and have used many times since. Look what I got: There is a contradiction here between "you need to generate a deposit address to make your first Monero deposit to Kraken" and the "Recent transactions" shown below, all to my long-standing deposit address. So, what has happened to the monero I just sent to my long-standing deposit address?  And why have Kraken broken the deposit address?  This is serious.  Funding addresses on these accounts are like account numbers: people send money to them.  A service provider can't just disappear them. Luckily it was for a small amount this time.  Because Kraken have visibly messed up their web site and service so badly, I had the heebie-jeebies ab...

Firstly, the URL I had for logging in to Kraken [0] is giving a blank page: [0] < https://www.kraken.com/sign-in > So I go to the front page, and am confronted with a horrific "modern web" experience.  There is a jarring animation, showing all sorts of things happening on a picture of a phone screen.  There is "Accept" for cookies.  Why?  There is "Get the App".  There is three lines for menu, and when you click on it, by now perhaps just hoping for some respite from the bleeding eyes, okay, now there is a "sign in", and the URL is indeed [0], but it's the blank page. And so, like every modern activity, the thing changes from trying to do the thing, to trying to contact the business about the non-working web site.

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 t...

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, fo...

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...

  In "choose what level of brokenness to accept", let's accept for the moment that web sites should be sending out forms with lists of countries for users to complete, to tell the web site their address. The above is such a form, sent out by the Savoy on the Strand in London.  The top countries are "Canada", then "United States", then ... "Afghanistan".  Do they not expect lots of their customers to be British?  And WTF is fairmont?

Last year, Kraken's incompetent compliance team asked for documents supporting source of funds.  Since apparently the buyin logs were not enough, it was really more like source of wealth documentation that they wanted.  I duly spent several days assembling the required audit trail documentation. Kraken's web interface, which is generally appalling, could not accept multiple documents in one category (this one being "source of funds").  Kraken repeatedly asked me to email them the documents in the clear -- a clear case of criminal negligence in handling customer data.  Their other suggestion was to (really) append all the documents into one big PDF.  This, in the interest of pragmatism, I eventually did. Five months later, and Kraken's very bad "Account Documents" section for my account shows my submission as "Unprocessed".  Yes, you have to interact with the document (hovering) to get it to say the status "Unprocessed".  Otherwise, yo...