NSA reps are touring college campuses to reassure that their wholesale monitoring of the net is necessary and proportionate. Presumably they think the students will pose a threat in some way...

It is probably a recruitment drive. They are always on the look out for bright sparks.

Amazon.

I ordered something from Amazon a while ago and they had trouble getting it into stock. It wasn't a time critical item so I just left them to it.

Yesterday, I get an email from them. 'We've finally got your item and we're sending it to you. It'll be with you on December 24th!'.



When I made the order back in November, I set it to deliver to my work address. On December 24th, my office will be literally closed. The building will be locked up and aside from fire or whatever, nobody can get in and there is no-one there to accept the parcel. So I go to Amazon and change the delivery address to my home address.

This morning I get another email from Amazon. It says 'We've sent your thing out for delivery. It'll be with you on December 23rd, by courier. Please be there to sign for it!'




I'm ay work on December 23rd. In fact I'm the only one of my team who will be, which means I really have to be there. So the parcel will arrive at my house on December 23rd, which will be empty. It would then disappear into the courier's returns system, two days before Christmas. I suspect my chances of ever seeing at again would be bordering on nil. The courier also doesn't allow you redirect the delivery until they've tried to deliver to the address on the label at least once. So I'm currently ringing around various friends and relatives etc to see if anyone can house sit for me on Monday for a bit until this parcel, which I ordered back in sodding November and which Amazon have managed to contrive to cock up the delivery of on the two most sodding inconvenient days of the sodding year, turns up.


[LIFTED] Amazon. Really, just [LIFTED] them. I've had so much sodding trouble with them just managing to get things I've paid for into my hands, I really can't be bothered with them any more. If you tell someone it's going to be delivered on a certain date, and they go and change some of the details of the order shortly afterwards, that means the details of the delivery matter. STICK TO THE EFFING PLAN YOU JUST TOLD THEM!

Note to self. When liquidising soup with a hand blender, make sure any splat is directed away from your body, especially if wearing a light grey t-shirt . Doh!

Mum got a Canon IXUS 140 for Christmas. She wanted to install the software that came with it.
God, Canon know how to make rubbish software. First off, the installer only partly worked the first time and had to be run twice before it decided that everything had been installed properly. This was, in fact, a lie. Or rather, all the software is there but ImageBrowser EX won't actually run either after the CameraWindow app has downloaded the photos or if launched independently. No error messages - you just get the windows loading circle thing for a bit and some hard disc activity then nothing.

I checked the Canon website for updates and was somewhat stunned to find that the CD supplied actually had the current software on it so there isn't a newer version that might fix the problem either.

Ultimately this doesn't really matter as she can still get the pictures off the camera and onto her laptop but I still think it's a pretty poor show. It's not like it's even a Windows 8 machine (Win 7 HP 64 bit) so it's not like Canon haven't had plenty of time to make sure their software actually works. A peruse of the Canon support forums rather suggests this isn't exactly an uncommon problem either.

I'm kind of tempted to remove all the Canon software and just let Windows handle it now.

Canon software's shocking IME.

Yep, I've never used the Canon software with my last 2 camera. I had a bad experience with a Shureshot several years ago. I just installed the Windows RAW filters and Lightroom on my PC.

The muppets round here are stealing the sandbags from the local river. Yeah.

Wow. That really is a special kind of stupid.

From the BBC:


On the other hand:

New jeans arrived from The Hut's sale! Win!
Except the zipper is so stuck, that when I finally free it, it takes 3-4 teeth off the zipper itself.
So that's going back then.

I made some tomato soup. Without checking I put in a heaped tablespoon of hot paprika. The recipe only said a teaspoon. So currently burning my mouth on my spicy soup.

Burning your mouth on hor paprika, really?

Couldn't you make more soup without any paprika at all and dilute it down?

I will grin and bear it.