Category: Uncategorized

Right, lets see if I can actually keep this up to date and be bothered to post to it more often. I’ll make it my front page as well, if I can work out how to 🙂

Having deleted over 6,000 bits of comment spam I will also try and see if I have managed to stop people commenting on things.

Sitting here looking at the stamp duty bill for moving house. This could turn into a standard tax-is-too-high rant, so I’m going to try and avoid that. I don’t have a problem with paying my entire salary in tax this year at all.

No, instead it occurred to me last night that we always go on about how corrupt these 3rd world governments are where you have to grease palms to get anything to happen, and how this makes them inefficient and poor. And yet stamp duty is just a chunk of money I have to pay to a bureaucrat in order form him to process my application to buy a house. The only difference appears to be that there is a set tariff and it goes to a central department. Is that they key difference between taxation and graft?

From my TfL email:

DISTRICT LINE: Minor delays are occurring on the Ealing Broadway and Richmond branches due to trespassers on the track earlier at Ravenscourt Park.

PICCADILLY LINE: Minor delays are occurring on the Uxbridge branch only, due to a trespasser on the track earlier at Eastcote.

What is today – national wander on an electrified track day?

I remember once reading a piece in Private Eye satirising some chief exec who had so little time on his hands and was so off the wall that he sent round an office memo about the correct orientation to place the rolls of toilet paper in.

 

And yet there is an orientation to toilet paper. Any sane human being would always orientate it so that the free end hung down away from the wall, rather than right next to it. I am reminded off this because I found a roll at work today that had been hung the other way and found it really annoying. Which preseumably means that in the eyes of Private Eye I am now a nutter. All I need to do now is become a chief exec and I can impose my toilet paper fascism on others.

Why is anyone even remotely surprised that Apple are already in trouble far calling their phone the iPhone when Cisco have already got the name trademarked? Why do Apple not seem to care about other people’s intellectual property, when they must have realised over the years that they are wasting a fortune on all these name infringements.

And more importantly isn’t iPhone the most boring name ever invented? Its not like they called the iPod the iMP3Player. Everyone knew that it was going to be announced and everyone knew roughly what it would be like. It’s hardly revolutionary to anyone who has a smartphone (no matter what Jobs might say), although it is nicely designed (what it will look like after six months of rattling around in my coat pocket with my car keys is another matter).

Calling it the iPhone reinforces the problem that its really just a phone. If they want the wow factor, they need a name that sums up what it really is in their eyes. If they think its more than a phone, iPhone is the worst thing they could call it.