I’m helping to build a new blog called Sick Britain, a new blog about the urbex scene. If you’ve no idea what I’m going on about then it’s probably best to start with the post called: What is Urban Exploration?, see if that tkes your fancy and then dive in and start exploring!
I’ve been doing Urbex now for about six months so I’m relatively new to it but I love exploring the unknown and the feeling that you never know what you’re going to find. Check out some of my Urbex photos on Flickr, or some of my faves here…
written by thirtyfootscrew
I’ve just been on the phone with PayPal trying to resolve a refund issue, apparently if I don’t have funds already in my account I’m not allowed to refund someone’s transaction (even though I have a valid credit card) unless I wait 7-10 days to setup bank funding. In the mean time my eBay customer will get fed up of waiting and leave me bad feedback – all because PayPal seem to be selective about when they choose to take credit cards.
So, to try and see if there’s a way around this I phoned up and verbally wrestle with their ridiculously complex speech recognition system until I got fed up and started saying “Agent” for every answer. After fighting my way through the machine world I eventually got to speak with one of their off-shored customer service reps whose language skills were so poor he had to ask me to speak slowly (I don’t have a strong accent at all) and he told me the reason it’s not possible is because the policy said that it’s not possible – the only useful suggestion he had was for me to find someone willing to give me £5.70 as a personal gift and I can refund from that.
On the guy’s 3rd of 4th repetition of the same policy script I told him that I’m looking to find a way around the problem and that I don’t want to get bad feedback because of their stupid policy. All of a sudden the line goes silent and the guy says “there’s no need to use profanity”, I re-stated what I said assuming he’d misheard me and he said “you’re not allowed to use that word”, I asked “what word? – ‘stupid’?” and the guy says “yes” – it’s considered as profanity in PayPal’s world. I do want to stress that I was not aggressive towards the guy and I did not make any personal remarks about him – just their policy.
This just brought me to a climax of annoyance so I just asked to speak to a supervisor, I held for five minutes before the call was dropped and had to redial the customer services line, fight with their machine again and then hold for 15 minutes before getting to a supervisor. The supervisor was American so I didn’t have any language issues and but he kept running round the same argument which is roughly:
me: I want to issue a refund for a transaction.
him: You can’t do that because your account balance is zero.
me: But can’t you take the money from my credit card?
him: No, because you’d then be using borrowed money.
me: But when I make a payment for a purchase you let me use ‘borrowed money’.
him: That’s different because this is a refund.
me: But why is that different, I’m still taking money from a source and sending it on aren’t I?
him: Yes but in this case you’re paying borrowed money into your account.
me: But with a purchase the money still goes into (and then out of) my account.
him: Yes but this is different.
me: Why?
him: Because it’s a refund.
Repeat four or five times and that was pretty-much the conversation, he did apologise for the fact that I was hung-up on and at no point did he seem upset or offended when I called their policy stupid – maybe it’s a regional thing, or maybe he doesn’t hold ‘the policy’ as close to his heart as the other guy.
P.S. Does anyone feel like giving me £5.70 as a personal gift?
written by thirtyfootscrew
\\ tags: Annoying, Customer Services, PayPal, Speech Recognition
 I just saw a BBC News story (seen here on the Times Online) stating that Turner Prize winning artist Mark Wallinger is to build a gigantic white horse to mark the building of a new Eurostar station. The massive horse is going to cost a total of £3million ($4.4 million) and according to The Time will have testicles that have “the volume of a people carrier” each! Now this seems crazy, but I love it for two main reasons…
Firstly, it’s absolutely stark raving mad but in a very British way – the fact that out of all of the potential subjects for an enormous status (bigger than the Statue of Liberty) it’s the most quintessentially British of animals – a white thoroughbred horse. Secondly I love it because its quite rare these days for people to build enormous and essentially pointless structures (Millennium Dome excepted).
I honestly can’t wait for this “Angel of the South”, it’s given me one of those rare moments where I’m glad to be British and when it opens (perhaps even before) I’ll be one of the first down there to have a look.
written by thirtyfootscrew
This morning I received an email from the Editor in Chief of JPG Magazine, Laura Brunow Miner, saying that they’re having to shut down due to lack of funds, the full text of the email is here: http://www.jpgmag.com/blog/2009/01/jpg_magazine_says_goodbye.html.
It’s sad news from my perspective as I’ve always found the magazine to be an inspiration and whilst I’ve not been too involved in the community it always ends up outputting great results.
I’ve included the full text of the email below in case their site goes down…
Continue reading »
written by thirtyfootscrew
\\ tags: Credit Crunch, Economic Crisis, Econonmy, JPG, JPG Magazine, Magazine, Photography
I just checked the news again and aparrently there’s a financial crisis on. Still. The ‘credit crunch’ as it’s being called is the biggest gift the world could ever have given to the 24-hour rolling news readers, economists and other financial pundits, it’s pretty much all I hear: morning, noon and night. Whilst watching BBC News 24 the other day I heard a news reader ask a guest economist, “so what do you think about what we think is going to happen”? They’re paying people good money to speculate about things then paying other people to come in and speculate about the consequences of the original speculation – clearly with a US election and a financial crisis the 24hr newsmonkeys are like pigs in slop. The most annoying part of the whole process is that the news programmes these days seem to follow the same basic formula:
- Financial Crisis x 15 minutes.
- Political stories (usually related to the financial crisis) x 5 minutes.
- Skateboarding horse (or some other “and finally” story) x 2 minutes.
- Sport x 5 minutes.
- Weather x 2 minutes.
- REPEAT
There’s probably a stack of interesting stuff going on elsewhere in the world or even in our own countries but we never get to hear about it because of the dreaded Financial Crisis. It’s a close call but I think that the Credit Crunch is on course to absolutely destroy the previous orgies of pointless repetition: the deaths of Princess Diana, Pope John Paul II and the Queen Mother. There should be a Guinness World Record for the number of times the same fact has been repeated on a 24-hour rolling news programme, if anyone actually had those numbers it’d be scary. Another piece of sloppy journalism I heard the other day was a reporter stating that “because the banks are unwilling to lend money there will be businesses who can’t get loans to pay their staff”, surely one point that stands out there is that if a business has to borrow money to meet it’s own payroll then it was pretty screwed in the first place!
That’s not my sole beef with the media either, I’m still reasonably certain that the media have played a very strong hand in exacerbating (if not actually causing) the current financial brouhaha. Initially there was a problem with the banks and only the banks, a whole industry of people had sprung up taking crappy mortgages, bundling them up into crappy (but shiny new and exciting) financial securities that were then sold to a bunch of greedy fools. This kinda went wrong and a few banks became a bit wobbly (notably Northern Rock in the UK). From this point onward the media was absolutely full of doom and gloom at every turn and has set out on a crusade to destroy whatever consumer confidence the world’s developing countries had left. Well, it’s worked and they’re still raking in the air-time and the (consistently diminishing) advertising spends from major marketing companies.
In a way I can forgive the media a little bit because despite all the blustering and headlines not much has actually happened. Sure, a few bankers have lost their jobs but I personally don’t know one single person that’s lost their job or suffered any negative impact from the current financial climate, in fact I have a colleague who just last week walked into the bank and within half an hour came out having doubled their entire credit line (and I’m not talking small change). Sure, house prices are lousy at the moment but that’s been hapenning for ages – despite all the crap in the news it wasn’t caused by the current state of the economy – if anything it’s an actual cause.
I’m off to see if I can make shoe-leather soup out of Vegetarian Shoes, gotta save those pennies somehow!
written by thirtyfootscrew
I recently attended the BMF motorbike show near Peterborough, at the event I captured around an hour of HD video (1080i) on my Canon HV20 camcorder and I wanted to create a couple of YouTube videos to share the experience. Being an awkward type I decided that iMovie just wouldn’t cut it, I’m not against iMovie per se but I really want to learn how to use professional tools rather than rely on consumer-level software. It took some serious head-scratching, teeth-sucking and general messing around but I was quite pleased with the final results…
BMF 2008 – OCC, Grand Prix & Flying Gunners
BMF 2008 – Moped Enduro
The elements I like most are the intro (visual effects and overlaid titles) and the “lower thirds” (little strips popping up at the bottom telling you what you’re looking at), the parts I like the least are the audio mixing (I didn’t add any filters or compressions) and the track changes on the soundtrack (I didn’t cross-fade the songs).
written by thirtyfootscrew
\\ tags: 2008, BMF, BMF 2008, Canon, dirt, Enduro, Final Cut Pro, HDV, HV20, iMovie, Moped, Moto, Motorbike, Motorcycle, OCC, Orange County Choppers, Peterborough, race
So everyone’s buzzing about Microsoft buying Yahoo and I’ve been trying to work out what my opinion is. My first thoughts were that (in Search at least) it’s just one ‘also ran’ buying another ‘also ran’, nothing too inspiring. I still think that’s true but it’s worth underscoring the fact that Microsoft are betting their business on Search and in turn on advertising. Over the last few years Microsoft have started transitioning to a ‘Software as a Service’ model and services in general (think Xbox Live), this is clearly an important extension of that. A lot of people see this as a bid to rival Google in Search but if you start applying the advertising model to IM, Flickr and perhaps even gaming.
As an industry gaming has grown to be larger than both the movie and music industries and the power to be able to sell-through ads into the Xbox dashboard and even into billboards and scenery inside games could be a huge market. I’m not sure that we (the public) will find out but look for signs of an API allowing developers to integrate Yahcrosoft ads into games, the buzz about in-game ads has been building for a while but it’s been crying out for a standard for developers to work to, well – here it is. On top of all that remember that there’s plenty of other cool stuff in the deal including Flickr (note that things like this are exactly the reason I stayed away from Flickr). It’ll be a while before this actually make a difference but keep your eyes open…
This blog post has also been cross-posted on my specialist gaming blog, hosted on the Gamercast Network.
written by thirtyfootscrew
\\ tags: gaming, Merger, Microsoft, Search, xbox, xbox live, Yahcrosoft, yahoo
Tonight I’ve just spent well over an hour waiting for a train, the reason given for the delays is that there was a fatality on the tracks which was apparently hours ago. It’s not the event that I have issues with, shit happens, the problem I have is with the train company. London Midland is one of the companies that took over the carcass of the recently disemboweled Silverlink which I imagine was eviscerated for being rubbish in the first place. Well, here’s some news: changing the fucking logo didn’t help!
I noticed the problem right away on the first day after the changeover, they may have changed the logo, the livery, and even the timetable but they didn’t seem to change the staff. Now I’m not saying that all of the staff are useless, some are nice, courteous and helpful (and I’ll thank that one woman when I see her next), but enough of them were crap to have provided a legendarily bad service in the first place.
Tonight’s debacle was centred around the eagerness of London Midland’s staff to spout rubbish, slam doors directly in the faces of passengers who were calmly and politely asking questions and herd people onto trains only to herd them back off, onto another and then off of that one, etc. etc. I ended up on two separate trains, the guy next to me had been on three, all the while London Midland’s staff were just stonewalling passengers and sending people across the station on rumours and speculation. All this for the happy price of £15 per day with a 50% chance of getting a seat – even on a good day. Wankers, fucking wankers.
written by thirtyfootscrew
\\ tags: ATOC, Commuting, London Midland, Silverlink, Trains
Yet another relaunch? Yes, but this time I’ve done what I should have done in the beginning and started hosting my own blog on my own domain - writing on a shared blog just feels like signing a guest book at a B&B. One of my plans for the new blog is to broaden the topics about which I post, previously I’d limited myself (more-or-less) to gaming and techie stuff but now I’ll talk about absolutely anything.
So, hopefully you’ll find something here you enjoy, if not let’s just hope I enjoy writing it otherwise we’re both screwed.
written by thirtyfootscrew
\\ tags: blog, relaunch, thirtyfootscrew
It’s been a while since my last post, and yes I’m aware that means that I suck at blogging but I don’t care. It’s the thought that counts and I really do want to keep it up, recent developments mean that I have an added incentive to put finger to keyboard too so hopefully I’m back.
There’s a whole load of old news I want to post about before I get swallowed up by the torrent of new news so I’ll go through that in a separate ‘catch-up’ post sometime soon but for now I’ll leave you with some helpful advice: Cadbury’s Creme Eggs don’t melt properly. I just tried to make cakes out of Special K and Creme Eggs and oddly the fondant stuff seems to foul up the chocolate so I’ve got a big pile of mess in the fridge trying to set.
From now on I’m going to consult the experts before I try anything like this again – if you’ve not seen them before you HAVE to check out the masterful creations at pimpthatsnack.com, these guys know where it’s at.
written by admin
\\ tags: cadbury's, creme egg, pimp that snack, special k, suck at blogging
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