(But you knew that anyway.)

Tate Modern currently has an exhibition of Gabriel Orozco. No, I'd never heard of him. He's done some photo series, some diagrams and some sculpture. The latter varies between the silly (toilet paper on a ceiling fan) to the more impressive (a Citroën car made much slimmer and an undersized lift).

It also includes an empty shoe box. Now, the other pieces have lines around them, with words like 'don't touch' on the floor.

Guess who kicked the shoe box when passing?

Apparently, it's called 'Empty Shoe Box' and it is supposed to be in that exact location.

I am tempted to ask for the cctv footage and sell it as Art.

You're on holiday in Mauritius and there's a problem with the hotel. What do you do? Complain to the manager? Put up with it? Write a bad review somewhere when you get home? Or call the island's President?

The last one is what the person I used to work with did. It helps that she and her husband knows them, but they ended up getting transferred, for free, to the most expensive place there.

Recently, she's been looking for somewhere in London. (They moved out a few years ago to somewhere near the Welsh border and it's too far when they want to stay in London late.) She finds somewhere, but there is competition for the place.

What do you do? Cross your fingers? Offer more money? Or send your CV?

As I said, the funny thing is, it works.

I must watch Society again. The rich really are different…

I booked a couple of flights with BA yesterday. Normally, they'd be rather low on my list to consider but the alternatives were way too early, way too late, involved more than one plane per journey, way too expensive, or more than one of those.

And while it's not me ultimately paying for them, it doesn't seem right to pay three times what I could pay, particularly as this way I get to go from my favourite London airport: City, as seen at BiCon 2003 and 2010. It's very easy to get to from here and you can sweep through onto the flight rather than having to walk for miles and hang around for hours. (There is not a huge shopping mall at City, I wonder if that could possibly be the reason for making you hang around at Heathrow, Gatwick etc… Nah.)

OK, total cost £135ish. "Why not upgrade?" asks the site. Then it tells you the reason: ".. from only £608!" Yeah, four times the cost of the seat I have, that sounds like value for money.

The other weird thing is that if anyone else on the planet had used their card to pay for the flights, that'd be that. Because it was me, I have to bring the card used or they might not let me on the plane.

"Hello, I'm a banker and someone else is trying to steal the millions in what I think is your bank account by claiming you are dead." Now who would go "Yes, that's my billions… only $190 to withdraw it, you say?" 🙂

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There are people who would say that the first two words in the title are unnecessary given the last two, and I can see why.

I think it was 2001 that we signed up to Homechoice, a video on demand service over broadband. At that point, they had an enormous catalogue of programmes, and it was greatly appreciated by L before and after JA's birth.

The other reason for going for it was that it included 112k (really – you got it via a serial port) always on internet: the experience of someone's financially suicidal 'all the one hour call internet dialup you want for using our dialling code for voice calls' deal had convinced me we needed that. It meant other people could use the phone, for one thing 🙂

Gradually, the Homechoice catalogue got smaller and smaller as their losses mounted. They expected to be worth billions, but lost tens, if not hundreds of millions. But the customer service was always excellent and the broadband got faster and faster. (More than average given it had to be low contention for the video to work.)

Eventually, the TV service became live Freeview channels plus a tiny library. They offered their own phone line service, which we took up (the 'triple pay' beloved of such companies). Loses continued, and they sold out to Tiscali, who sold out to TalkTalk.

Now, because the phone was in L's name and the TV and internet in mine, we've always had two bills. Last month, TalkTalk decided this wasn't on for some reason and we had to merge them. Fine with me, but they needed consent from both of us. They got this from me, but kept on trying to talk to Lisa by ringing here during work hours, and – it turns out – never rang her on the mobile or work numbers I gave them, or at the times I suggested.

This morning, I get a call from them saying that they still haven't had consent from L and if they don't get it, terrible things will happen. She's out (taking the gerbil to the vet's) so she rings as soon as she gets back about 30 minutes later.

It turns out that they have cancelled our broadband because they didn't get her – the one who gets the phone line bill – consent to merge the two. It's still working now, but should stop tomorrow and they'll be a fifteen day delay to get it restored.

Fuck that. How easy is it to move from one non-BT provider to another?

As well as the headline price rises, they're getting rid of several travelcards.

If you didn't go into zone one (or only did so on the bus) you could have a 2-6 travelcard = currently £5.10 off peak. Not from 2nd Jan: you'll be charged the 1-6 (now £7.50, then £8.00) or 1-4 (£6.30, rising to £7.30) rate = much more. Why yes, I do often get the train to Elephant and Castle (border of zone one and two) and get the bus or Boris bike from there.

They're also getting rid of the zone 1-3 and 1-5 day rates, and these will be charged as 1-4 and 1-6.

This is apparently not a price rise, but "simplification".

Oh, and the minimum automatic Oyster top-up will go from £5 to £8, giving them more of your money for longer. Deposits for new Oyster cards go up from £3 to £5.

Reading through the Evening Standard, I come across a name from the past.

There's no picture, but the dates on his online CV add up.

If it is the same one, he was an obnoxious young Liberal member of the Young Liberals from Leamington. He gave me a lift to the special conference in Blackpool that decided to merge with the SoggyDemocrats to form the 'Social Democratic and Liberal Party' (as it was supposed to become).

He ended up doing some of the more poisonous ("Bangladeshi shocker" and all that) campaigns for the LibDems in Tower Hamlets in the early 90s. It was so much fun as well as necessary to do a couple of columns in LibDemNews telling him to stop being racist.

He's now a 'penny shares' tipster (i.e. someone who makes money from telling people to buy shares in tiny companies) and manager of a fund that invests in such shares (i.e. someone who makes money from using other people's money to buy shares in tiny companies).

The Standard piece doesn't mention that it was them he used to work for.

One of the things I like about Spotify is being able to find cover versions. That's easier for some songs than others, of course, thanks to the popularity of titles…

Radioactivitat (Radioactivity) was the almost title track on Kraftwerk's follow-up to Autobahn, Radio-Activity.

First, the 1975 original.

The truly wonderful 1990s reworking from The Mix.

The 2004 tour live version, which goes from the original to the rework and which was the highlight of the concert for me (and in English, if you insist 🙂 )

Good covers:

'Powerplant' (the English translation of Kraftwerk!) with strings.

Observer dancy version.

Screamin' Rachael's slight rework of the Observer version.

Ultravision, synth.

Andrea Belli, acidy.

An almost acoustic version from one of the Trans Slovenia Express albums.

Kat Onoma live electric guitar.

Jah On Slide, a reggae version.

Blackstone rock it.

David E Sugar on 8-bit games console hardware.

Not on Spotify, although the rest of the album is:

Senor Coconut's Latin dance.

Less successful:

Robot Project sounding like it was 8-bit console hardware.

Binary Sequence using a drum and bass drum track with almost ambient sounds.

Fatboy Slim doesn't quite get it.

The Triffids, sounding like it was done in someone's bedroom.

Ultimate Bassmachine – I'm not completely convinced this is a cover version.

Mustn't forget:

Orchestral Manoeuvers in the Dark (as they were then) writing a song based on a speeded up version.

One of the things I am doing at the moment is going through the several hundred tabs I have open on Firefox and doing what I intended to do when I opened them (read the content, comment etc – if you get a comment on something that you wrote in July now, this is why…)

One of them is the stream of most recent public posts on DW. (Actually two of them, I had the LJ equivalent too.)

And one of the posts is this one, on it being the anniversary of the Montreal Massacre today. In case you've forgotten, a man, annoyed that he hadn't got into university, decided to kill women who had.

.. but checking one minor detail proves the story's about someone else entirely.

Liberals / SoggyDems clearly won too many by-elections in the 1980s for my memory to remember which one was which 🙂