Last night I was standing next to the ticket machine, pondering that even though I had £3.80 in my hand, I still didnt have enough change for the carpark.
The Robber Barons (aka Windsor & Maidenhead Borough Council) wanted to take £4.30 from me to park for an hour and a half. from 7:30pm till 9 when the car park becomes free!
A lady who had just bought her ticket thrust some change in my hand and said “there you go” and wandered off.
Thanks whoever you are!
I drive through Windsor every day and the other day a couple of things struck me.
Some things become clear when there is a little bit of adversity as per the recent snow.
Good Stuff
Bad Stuff
Sitting here feeling sorry for myself I was watching “Dave” on TV. No not my brother, but the TV channel.
Up came one of those financial adverts. a company called quickquid were telling you how you could get a short term loan from them until pay day to tide you over. What struck me was the text that comes up on screen saying what the APR is.
2356% APR! that is not a misprint “Two THOUSAND three hundred and fifty six” percent APR.
I don’t care what the circumstances are, the people behind that company need to be tarred and feathered for that.
I dont know him, all I know he is an under 11 who plays football.
The local under 11′s play football on a field behind us. Last Saturday was their Season Kick off or something, lots of people and loads of games with the other Under 11 teams locally. I only know about Chris through the person who spends a lot of time shouting at him.
I was setting up for our BBQ. All I could hear all day was “Keep with him Chris” “Move Back Chris” “Dont stop Chris” “Do this Chris” “Do that Chris”. These and other phrases were repeated every time Chris was playing. I dont recall any shouts of praise.
I dont know whether Chris is any good, all I know is he must think his Dad/Manager never thinks he is doing the right thing when he plays football.
I have been building a Media Centre PC, as the XBOX360s media capabilities were great but lacked a few features I wanted (Mainly proper Divx playback)
I needed a multi-channel sound card, so I bought one from maplins, it is based on a C-Media chip (8738), and was advertised as 5.1 channel output and included SPDIF in and out (so I could use an optical connection to my Amplifier)
Trouble is, if you want to actually USE the SPDIF output, you dont get multi-channel sound from it, only 2 channel, how ridiculous is that? Just to run salt in the wound, you actually have to tick a box setting it to 2 channel output before you can enable the optical output, thats just taking the piss.
Now I have to find myself another soundcard, but that means spending money on something else, something I have been trying to avoid…
Ripped off twice this week.
Firstly at the company party (always a good bash) at a very posh hotel in the middle of Windsor. You can’t expect the company to pay for all the drinks but the hotel took this as a green light to charge 3.60 for a pint of “cheap” lager and nearly a fiver for a Vodka lime and Lemonade, it made me flinch. The itemised receipt showed they charged 1.85 for the lemonade mixer! That equates to a markup of nearly 400% Flippin heck, that hotel must have been fleecing American tourists for too long.
Secondly – Pay and display…Why do the machines that don’t give change always require payment in a combination of coins you are most unlikely to have? Do I sense a conspiracy?
Well I have seen it all now…
As I was driving along the road this am at about 7:45, I was confronted by an unusual sight, 5 or 6 cars and 4×4′s parked in a bus stop. Initially I thought there had been an accident, but no, they were dropping their kids off at the bus stop so the sprogs can get the bus to school!
How ridiculous is that? kids cannot even walk to the bus-stop!
I was looking to buy an album by Ben Harper & The Innocent Criminals the other day, and came across it on the itunes website for under a tenner.
In HMV they wanted 18 for it, but then going to their website it was 13???
I bought it from Itunes and burnt it to a cd, I would rather have the “real” cd but I would also rather save 8. No wonder Itunes has sold 500 MILLION songs since it started.
One thing I dont like, is that Itunes do not provide CD cover art for the songs, I would always make a physical copy of an album bought off Itunes, so why dont they provide artwork for the cd itself now that so many inkjet printers can print to cd’s?
So I made a cover myself, I downloaded a cd cover, chopped it and printed it directly onto an inkjet printable cd using a Canon i865 printer
.jpg)
One of my pet hates, able bodied people in disabled spaces.
Last week I went to the Sports Centre, and as I was walking through the car park I nearly got ran over by a BMW X5 (yuk) going the wrong way round, it wanted to get to the last disabled space.
It screeched in and two guys got out, opened the rear doors and got out their sports bags and Squash racquets, I may be slightly naieve, but I dont see many situations where someone who can play such a physical game as squash could qualify for a disabled badge?
As they looked pretty fit, I decided discretion was the better part of valour and I was not going to make any sarky comments…
Why is it that Sports Centres, and Supermarkets seem to make no effort to enforce disabled parking? Is it because the Supermarkets don’t really want to upset “customers” and the employees of Sports Centres simply don’t care? Maybe all places that provide disabled spaces should be made to take reasonable steps to enforce them, or be fined along with those that park in them without displaying the blue badge.