You are currently browsing the The English Guy's Personal Blog weblog archives for February, 2010.

 

Posted by richard

A quick joke before bedtime.

I was in the pub and they had a pub quiz. The question was, where on a women’s body is the curliest hair? Strangely I got it wrong – apparently the answer is Africa!

 

Posted by richard

I suppose it’s difficult to imagine how a weather service can be so biased, perhaps other countries don’t have the same issues as we do? When you see it once you might not notice it, but if you watch the weather every day you’ll begin to see it. The vagueness of weather forecasting above Oxfordshire, anything past that is “up north” and probably not worth worrying about from the weather forecasters point of view.

This morning I woke up expecting snow. It had frozen hard overnight, and was doing so at midnight when I went to bed. The national service had generalized snow clouds in the area, so I thought they might be right.

I went to weather.com to check it, checked this area and guess what the forecast says? Rain all day. Clearly wrong, there’s a few centimetres of snow on the ground and it’s coming down thick as I write. Accuweather for UK & Ireland has it right though, snow all day, and snow/rain for the next few days.

As for temperatures it’s definately 0 or below.

Can our weather services get it right at least once, please?

 

Posted by richard

Why would russian spammers add a western email address to send their cyrillic email to?

Idiots.

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Posted by richard

I had a weird problem tonight, freaked me out.

I hooked up my bluetooth adapter to transfer some stuff to my phone. Everything seemed ok. I fired up my skype and was talking to a friend when the screen froze. I rebooted but when it came back up it gave me a BSOD. I was a bit puzzled but rebooted.

It kept on doing it. Heart rate increased…

I was beginning to think I might be ordering new computer parts but on a webpage I found some guy mentioned removing hardware parts just in case, if you’d added something. I thought that the only thing I had added was the bluetooth adapter, so I removed it, rebooted and it came up fine.

So it was the Belkin Bluetooth adapter, giving me the acpi.sys BSOD, on Windows 7. Watch out for it.

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Posted by richard

Recently in the news, Toyota’s recall of millions of cars because of some fault with the accelerator pedal. It gets stuck in certain situations, and in several models.

On the TV the other day though, they were saying this really damages Toyota’s reputation, how are they going to recover and so on, but that to me seemed odd. I mean, they’re doing the right thing, protecting the public from a fault that has been found. How can that be damaging, in the long run, to Toyota’s reputation?

If they had done nothing, that would have been bad. But instead they’re biting the bullet and coming forward and making sure that profits aren’t the most important thing to them – we are. This kind of “let’s get this fixed before anyone else gets hurt” attitude might do them well in the future, assuming the media can stop hyping this up so much.

I’m not the only one that seems to think that this is being overhyped, Investopedia also thinks that we might want to compare this to other recalls, and not jump on the ‘hate Toyota’ bandwagon too soon.

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Posted by richard

The snow revisited this part of the world again last night. Paddy texted me asking if I’d seen outside and when I looked it was coming down thick. It’s pretty to see, makes me think of when I was a kid I suppose.

It had started to stick, and the cars were only just making a dent in the snow on the road, but you could tell by the sound of them as they went that it wasn’t going to stay, slush was starting already. And it wasn’t cold enough.

This morning, barely a few flakes remain. So much for that!

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