Google in major breach of privacy

Head Rambles Posted on by 9

I cut the grass yesterday.

Naturally I had to jump through all the hoops that such a job entails.  The battery was nearly flat and one of the tyres definitely was.

While the battery was on a quick charge I removed the offending wheel.  Naturally I couldn’t inflate it due to the old tubeless tyre problem.

Of course I remembered the sage advice I received the last time I had this particular quandary, which was to use barbecue lighter fluid.  So I brought the wheel out onto the front drive [in case I demolished or at least set fire to the garage.  I poured the fluid into the tyre and set fire to it.

It lit all right but the whole wheel just vanished in a sea of flame, which wasn’t supposed to happen.  What was worse, I hadn’t taken the precaution of having a bucket of water on standby.  As luck would have it, I was in need of an urgent pee so that was that problem solved.  Luckily no one passed my gate on the lane, or they might have wondered what the fuck I was doing.

I eventually got the tyre inflated using a new invention of mine – a mixture of Vaseline and washing up liquid [patent pending], and got the battery juiced up enough to get things started.  I mowed the lawn which was a bitch as the grass was about six inches deep and was sopping wet.

But what has this got to do with my headline about Google, you ask?

By coincidence I was messing around with Google Earth afterwards and checked out The Manor.  Fuck me but there I was mowing the lawn!

Me mowing my lawn
Yup.  That’s me.

I grant that it’s a little fuzzy and the weird lava flow on the bottom right is in fact a shadow of a tree and not a lava flow but I am clearly identifiable in the act of finishing off that corner of the lawns.  You can see that I was wearing a white t-shirt and my hair is in need of a comb.  Scandalous!

I never gave permission for that photograph.  My garden is a private place and there are strict privacy laws governing over flights by drones which presumably also apply to satellites.  But they have the absolute gall to not only to spy on me in my private space to to publish that photograph in a place where the entire fucking planet can see it.

I’m going to sue them for millions.

The speed of light

Head Rambles Posted on by 2

I decided to phone Sky yesterday.

There was no particular reason other than my annoyance at paying for a service that provides a cart load of stuff that is useless to me.  Herself rarely if ever watches their films which all seem to be aimed at the brain dead, such as Superheroes, Zombies [confirming their brain dead status], Horrors or Teenage RomComs.  In other words they are a steaming pile of dung and make no allowance for those of us with a discerning nature.

So I went into Sky’s website to look for a contact number.  There wasn’t one.  Their support consists of a menu thing where you drill down through a series of menus until you eventually end up with a series of FAQs, none of which are any help.  Leastwise I never found the FAQ that asked “What are you going to do about those of us who dislike the utter shite you call Premiers?”

I eventually decided to try their Messenger service so I clicked on the link.  That brought me into Farcebook [yech!] where the little chat thing informed me that Carlos [or Carlo] would be my assistant, but that he was busy and would get back to me in half an hour or so.

So I left Carlos [or Carlo] to finish off his game of “Call of Duty” or whatever and I went about my business.

Now I am not that fond of Messenger or any of those Chat things unless I’m in touch with a friend, and Carlos [or Carlo] hadn’t graduated to that status yet.  One of the things I find frustrating is that while I am typing stuff in, I keep getting repeat messages asking if I’m still there.  I can’t help it if I’m a slow typist?

Anyway, it occurred to me that I had a series of questions and comments that I wanted to put to Carlos [or Carlo] so I opened a text editor and spent the half hour writing long paragraphs explaining precisely my stance on their crappy service.  I even predicted the first question which would be “How may I help you?” so my first paragraph started of with “Hello Carlo [or Carlos] and thank you for helping me.  Here is my problem……“.  I like to add a touch of politeness at the outset.

It’s amazing how much I can type in half an hour and it afforded me a chance to be precise and eloquent in my messages.  I had them all sequenced by predicting in advance what his answers to all by questions would be.

Sure enough, after half an hour or so a message popped up – “Hello.  My name is Carlo [or Carlos].  How may I help you?”.  I scrolled to the top of my text editor and there was my first paragraph that I wanted to send, knowing that Carlo [or Carlos] should be impressed with my speed of response.  I pasted into Messenger and pressed Enter.  The fucking thing scrolled like mad and I realised I had accidentally copied my entire opus and had sent it all at once.  Woops!

It took a while for him to read it all and to get over the shock of my typing skills but eventually I got a response – “Thank you for your comment. I suggest you contact our Customer Loyalty Department” and he gave me a phone number. He was probably too shaken to deal with me any more and probably needed a stiff whiskey.

I rang the number and got onto a girl.  She seemed to be devoid of personality or sense of humour, but I did finally get her to knock around €30 off my monthly bill which wasn’t too bad.

I hope Carlo [or Carlos] got over his shock and didn’t need a transfer to the phones.

Sorry Carlo [or was it Carlos?].

Not exactly plain packs

Head Rambles Posted on by 9

For a while now I have been getting fags for Herself in the new “plain” packs.

The other day though I got my first example of the pipe tobacco version.

For quite a while now they have been pushing their medical porn at me with their often humorous images and their blatantly false or totally misleading messages.

Old pack

Okay, in this example we have a photograph of a bloke.  Is he contemplating the meaning of life?  Has he got an itch in his ear?  I think he possibly has toothache.  They claim that smoke contains 70 substances etcetera which is possibly true, but they fail to mention that the actual quantities of those substances are so incredibly small that it takes a sophisticated laboratory to even detect them.

So now we move on to the brave new world that is going to dissuade me from ever smoking again.

New pack

Wow!  Same old messages and a different image [but from the old stock].  So what exactly is the change that is to radically change a lifetime’s enjoyment and destroy said enjoyment for ever?

Well, the colour is different.  I quite like the new colour: it has an earthy feel to it.  It reminds me of the mountains as it has a quality of peat bogs and tree bark.  The images as I have said are the same, which is a bit disappointing, but just moved around a bit, and the text is the same old drivel that I never bother reading.

So what is it that is to be so repellent?

It’s the bird!  The condor bird is missing from the pack,  Is it that avian image which has been the underlying cause of my smoking all along?

There is another difference that isn’t apparent in the photographs above, and that is the texture of the pack.  The old one was glossy and has a very plastic feel to it, whereas the new pack has a pleasant velvety texture as it it were made of a very fine silk.

I like that texture.

I think I’ll carry on with the smoking after all.

Boulder 293

Head Rambles Posted on by 4

I see there are more doom laden prophecies from the Warble Gloaming mob.

Have you noticed how the formula never changes – if we don’t do X in Y years then Z will happen?  X is an always increasing variable and Z is more doom laden as time passes, but Y is always a positive value?

So I was reading their usual stuff about how we must stop using coal and oil instantly, if not before, or else untold calamities and catastrophes will fall out of the sky.  There will be plagues of locusts and groups of four horsemen will be a regular sight.  We’ll be heating our homes with fire and brimstone.

A bit over half way down the page though I came across an interesting video.  It’s all about Boulder 293 [did you know that individual rocks apparently have names?  I didn’t] which has shifted.

Now Boulder 293 [known to his friends as Rock] weighs 620 tons and has moved a bit.  They don’t make it clear whether 293 shifted as a result of Warble Gloaming or whether it is in fact the cause.  They overlook other possible reasons why it may have moved, but then these people tend to ignore little items that may not suit their agenda.  Could the boulder have shifted simply because it fancied a different view?  Maybe it was the fairies?  Maybe it was a prank by a couple of the local teenagers [they breed real men on the Aran Islands].

It also begs the question as to why Boulder 293 was chosen.  Why didn’t they choose Boulder 576 on the Oregon coast that hasn’t shifted in a thousand years?  Or Boulder 3980 in Brazil that weighs over a thousand tons and nips down to the shops every Friday afternoon?  Why not the Mottee Stone in Wicklow which as some point before calendars existed decided to climb a mountain to get a better view its friends in Wales?

The Mottee Stone

Anyway, I would suggest a couple of alternatives.

They could super-glue 293 to the bedrock?

Or else they could dynamite the thing and turn it into a million harmless pebbles which could be then tossed into the sea.

That would put an end to all this Warble Gloaming nonsense.

In Wonderland

Head Rambles Posted on by 10

I had the strangest experience yesterday.

I had an appointment to see an eye specialist in a place in Dublin called The Beacon Clinic.

For those who are not familiar with the place, the Clinic is part of the Beacon Centre which includes apartments, a hotel, a sort of shopping mall, a hospital and of course the clinic.  It is all contained in one vast interconnected structure of steel and glass.

I drove into the underground car park which is vast and a maze of one way systems.  I parked near one of the little “islands” that announced itself as the Clinic.  Fine.  I was doing well.

I entered the “island” and climbed the stairs.  Here I hit my first problem – the whole centre is a multi-story edifice but the ground floor differs depending on which way you enter it.  So the ground floor is in fact the first floor if you don’t use the front door.  Confusing.

Anyway by chance I exited the island on the correct floor, and following instructions I walked through the atrium level past the coffee shops and café [and an Information Desk which I have never seen manned] and tried to enter The Maze.  I say tried, because each door I tried was locked and there were several of them side by side.  Eventually I got through a door that had been locked the last time I tried it.  Surreal.

I call the next section The Maze because that’s what it is.  It is a massive series of interconnected corridors with a glass roof and units containing anything from IT companies, through chemist shops, to clinics for every ailment known to man.  All the corridors look exactly the same.  Luckily I found the right clinic and actually discovered where the door to it was.

After a couple of hours of having my eyeballs prodded and poked and having very bright lights shone into me, I left the clinic and that is where the real strangeness started.

I have an excellent sense of direction.  Lead me into a normal maze and I will find my way out of it straight away.  But The Beacon is in another dimension altogether.  I retraced my steps and passed by the coffee shops and the unmanned Information Desk and there was the door where I can get back down to the car park underneath.  The door was locked.  I looked around for another door but there wasn’t one.  I could have sworn there were two doors when I first entered.  Eventually a girl came out the door [with no problems whatsoever] so I nipped in before it closed.  I headed down the stairs, but they seemed to go on forever.  I had visions of arriving in some sort of underground bunker full of mad scientists.  I decided I was way below the underground car park at this point so I climbed back up again.  I then realised that somehow I was in the Apartment Block!  I exited the door and found myself back in the Maze again.

I wandered around for a while.  I contemplated asking someone for directions but everyone looked even more lost.  Eventually I found myself back at the coffee shops so I headed out the door again.  Now the outside was completely different.  At this point I realised that the building must be actually moving around so that if you go in a door and out again, you’ll somehow have transported to a different part of the Centre.  Clever, but frustrating.

I now found myself outside surrounded by glass walls and sad little trees growing in pots.  In the far distance I saw a door marked Beacon Hospital.  I headed for it, keeping my eyes firmly fixed on my destination and not daring to blink in case it transformed itself into the Hotel.

I confess that at this point I was beginning to wonder if I was asleep and dreaming all of this.  Where else will you find a building that can rearrange itself and apparently have four dimensions?

Anyhows, I entered the hotel at the Ground Floor level and then had to descend the stairs to the Ground Floor in the other dimension.  I found the car park!  Naturally at this stage I was at the very far end of the structure but I found the car and sat in, in disbelief.  What the fuck had just happened?  Did I dream it?  Is this seriously a plastic building that can rearrange itself just to confuse people?

I was lucky to get out of there alive.

Trying to keep calm

Head Rambles Posted on by 1

Yesterday was an “interesting” day.

I had noticed for some time that my mailbox had been filling up with little messages telling me that this site was down, and then a minute or half an hour later another mail would arrive and tell me it was up again.  Annoying!

I did some checks and sure enough the server was running slower than a sleeping snail, and that if you wanted to see the site you’d have to get into a long queue and if you didn’t get to the head of the queue in time, you’d be fucked out.

I sent a polite message to my grease monkeys who look after the machinery, and told them to remove their respective digits from their bum holes and fix the server.  Or words to that effect.

They wrote back and said my site was full of crap and it was my fault.

I was a tad annoyed with that so I set about shifting the whole site onto a different server.  For those of you who have never tried moving a site, it is a fucking tricky job if you are to do it without causing a break in service.

I was in the middle of the move and at a particularly important juncture when the power went in the house, so I lost all connections to the Big Wide World.

We do things differently here in Wicklow.  When a storm hits the country, a lot of people lose power as the wind takes down trees and the like.  In Wicklow however we prefer to have our power cuts either before the storm or after it has calmed down.  I suppose it makes things easier for the line crews?  Anyway, here I was with a dead calm dry day outside and the power went.

Eventually the power came back and I completed the transfer.  Okay, the site was down for a little while but you can blame the power cut for that. 

I wrote to the grease monkeys again this morning.  I told them I had shifted the site and it was running like the clappers and that server response time had dropped from 17 seconds to around 0.7 of a second and that it wasn’t my site but their fucking server that was the fault after all, and that I had just wasted a whole fucking day getting my knickers in a twist.

They wrote back saying that they were delighted that my site was running well and that it must have been the server’s fault.

*sigh*

Whipping up a storm

Head Rambles Posted on by 6

There is a bit of a wind coming.

Now we aren’t talking Category 5 Hurricanes or anything like that, just some wind and rain.

The meeja of course are going into a frenzy.  A day or two ago they started warning us of impending doom and that they even had a name ready for this new wind.  Wow!  Then they became more confident and declared that the storm was officially called Callum.  We then had a Yellow Alert but this has been upgraded to and Orange Alert.  Double wow!

It’s only a bit of wind and some rain, for fucks sake.

I had the grave misfortune to see the beginning of the news on TV3 last night.  [I refuse to call it Virgin Media One as it’s too much of a mouthful, and it’s a naff name anyway.]  TV3 is the young people’s tabloid television of the airwaves and in typical TV3 fashion, the storm was the lead article.  They breathlessly announced the impending doom with words like “catastrophic”, “deadly” and “extremely dangerous”.  They all but told us to buy all available bread and take to the bunkers. 

It’s only a bit of wind and some rain, for fucks sake.

I’m waiting for them to “upgrade” the storm to a Status Red.  We will a be told to stay indoors and hunker down and under no circumstances are we to venture outdoors.  As I speak [?] Crisis Management Teams are meeting around the country.  Crisis?  Get a grip!

It’s only a bit of wind and some rain, for fucks sake.

Ironically I have to go out tomorrow.  I have my first hospital appointment in about twenty five years and I’m not going to miss that.  I have to get my eyes looked at [and there loads of jokes in that!].  By all accounts the journey will be interesting, with trees, lorries and inside out umbrellas flying through the air as I drive.

Fuck it.

It’s only a bit of wind and some rain, for fucks sake.

The people have spoken

Head Rambles Posted on by 15

Right, you lot over in the UK.

We have [apparently] held a vote here in Ireland and the results are in.

There is a 75% majority demanding that you mob hold a second referendum on this Brexit lark.

Now don’t start whinging that you already held one.  You know damn well that’s not how things work in the EU.  If you get the wrong answer you just have to keep going until you get it right.  That’s democracy, EU style.

So stop acting like a bunch of cry babies and get out there to the polls.  You may think you want to leave our cosy little Dictatorship Union, but your elders and betters [and the Irish] know better.

The result of our little vote is fairly decisive, so you cannot ignore it.  The people have spoken.

And anyway, we’re damned if we are going to be stuck out here in the Atlantic while you lot next door enjoy your freedom.

That wouldn’t be right.

Right?

Dough nuts

Head Rambles Posted on by 7

There was a phenomenon here in Ireland recently that has me utterly baffled.

I realise that different people like different things.  I like cream cakes, lemon sponge cakes, Bakewell tarts and, yes, doughnuts.   When it comes to the latter I may or may not choose it if I happen to be in a cake shop.  I certainly wouldn’t go out of my way to buy one unless there was a specific occasion such as a party where people will only accept doughnuts, but I think that’s an unlikely event.

Recently however some American crowd opened a shop in Dublin called Krispy Kreme [you can tell they’re American by the fact that they cannot spell even the simplest of two words].

Okay, so the shop opened.  There was a queue waiting for the opening event but there were free doughnuts on offer so that’s fine.

But the queues continued in the following week.  People were using their drive through facility all night and queueing for up to an hour just to buy doughnuts.

Why?

Why in the name of all that’s holy would anyone want to sit in their car for an hour in the middle of the night just to buy doughnuts?  I don’t care how good they are supposed to be, it is still insane.  I could understand if it were bread or milk with an impending disaster on the horizon but fucking doughnuts?  Were they sprinkling the top with crystal meth?  Were the doughnuts baked with cocaine and filled with heroin?

You don’t believe me?

You still don’t believe me?

Another brick in the wall

Head Rambles Posted on by 8

Priceless!

Parents who refuse to let their son wear a skirt to school may need to be referred to social services.

Yes, you read that correctly.  It seems that wearing traditional clothing is tantamount to child abuse, and that the state can now determine what clothing your child wears.  But there again, the state obviously knows your kids better than you.

So “gender questioning” is now part of the school curriculum?  Now the key word here is school, which leads me to assume that we are speaking of pre-pubescent or adolescent children who are going through massive hormonal changes?

I remember those days.  Things started happening both physically and mentally.  Suddenly those girls who I disliked because they were, well, girls suddenly and for some inexplicable reason became objects of desire.  It was confusing but to have someone suggesting to me that maybe I might be a girl in a boy’s body would have really confused the fuck out of me. 

Nowadays of course if a young girl picks up a screwdriver, or a boy picks up a doll it is immediately assumed that the child is going to be “transgender” or “non-binary” or some such crap, and little Johnny who was spotted experimenting with knitting needles suddenly gets renamed to Joanna which utterly confuses the poor kid.

I have nothing against that tiny minority who in adult life decide to cross-dress or even have operations [provided I’m not paying for them] but messing with children’s minds is dangerous.  After all, if they are under eighteen then generally they are supposed to be shielded from such things as porn, voting or even [God help us] smoking so if they aren’t mature enough for a so called adult stuff then they certainly aren’t old enough to decide what gender they want to be.

To take a line from the song I used as a title –

Leave our kids alone.

[P.S. I see The Foggy Mirror came across this piece of lunacy as well!]