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Using a 'one ring means x, two rings means y' code doesn't work on nearly every mobile. You don't know what their ring tone is. Try one/two quick missed calls instead.
OK, for this to make sense, you need to know that a) prostitution is legal in the UK and b) the demand from women for straight male escorts (SMEs) is very, very tiny and the supply of men who want to be SME's is huge. Probably worksafe, unless you have really really nannyish work in which case you've probably been blocked already
A tiny bit, but gosh, this will have been the snowiest winter in London for ages.
The walk to school did help me wake up a bit (although I feel the bed beckoning) because the Super Bowl was good enough to stay up until 3am UK time for the end again. This is not always the case…
I first became interested in American Football in the mid-70s through the boardgames on it, especially the super rock-paper-scissors of Football Strategy. At that point, TV coverage in the UK was fifteen minutes a year, five of which was explaining the rules.
When Channel 4 started in the early 80s, one of its best bits was a weekly hour long highlights programme, and they showed the Washington Redskins – Miami Dolphins Super Bowl live. That spoiled UK viewers a bit: it was close until the end, and was decided in a play that used to feature on the opening credits of the highlights programme for years afterwards. Prior to the snap, Redskins' running back John Riggins goes in motion, the man on the Dolphins' defence who had done such a good job tracking him slips slightly and loses a yard, ball handed to Riggins who runs outside, the defence just misses the tackle because of that slip.. touchdown. Truly a game of inches.
Reality set in with games like the Chicago Bears – New England Patriots one in the year the Bears had an awesome defence and everyone knew what the result would be before the end of the first quarter: lots of Super Bowls are not good games.
But this has made three very good ones in a row.
Cut in case you haven't seen the recording you made of it yet
The sockets on one side of the UPS* are battery backed up ones. The sockets on the other side are 'just' surge protected.
Why yes, I did have this PC plugged into the latter. The battery side had the old PC and the monitor.. and an empty socket.
Still it's been an excuse to have its monthly reboot into Windows for the various patches.
* 'Uninterruptable Power Supply', otherwise known as a battery which will keep mains-powered things running in the event of a power cut for a few minutes at least, long enough to turn them off properly or put them into hibernation until the power is back.
Edit: Ah, the cleaner managed to get water in the kettle's electrical contacts.
Hmm, a Press Association story saying breastfeeding has almost no benefits to the baby has been picked up by the Mail and the Telegraph and… with predictable results.
It says the study was published in the January 2010 edition of Acta Obstetricia et Gynecologica, a Scandinavian journal, and was a metastudy of the benefits of breastfeeding involving tens of thousands of women overall.
Except that it wasn't. There is one article by Sven Carlsen, but it's about hormone levels in breastfeeding women, involving a study of 181 women. It's not surprising he's interested in this, because he's at the Department of Endocrinology of Trondheim University Hospital.
The source of the PA article appears to be at news-medical.net, which makes it clear that the basic story is the one on hormone levels, but tags on Carlsen's comments about the benefits of breastfeeding at the end.
And it's that which has been picked up. As I am not about to pay to read the journal version, I don't know what studies the comments were about, but they were clearly not the focus of the article – this aspect is not even mentioned in the abstract!
I've forgotten to go 'hooray' here over this story from a couple of weeks ago: Food labels advice change over Palestinian territories. I am happy to eat food grown in Israel. I am not happy to eat food grown in the occupied territories but sold as from Israel. As there has previously been no way to tell which was which from the label, this has meant not buying any of it.
This last bit hasn't got through to the Israeli embassy – at the moment, people like me don't buy any food from 'Israel', and far from this change playing "into the hands of those who are calling for a boycott of Israeli goods", it means we can now support goods produced in Israel proper while continuing to boycott the ones from illegally held land. Hooray. It'll be very interesting to see how much stuff was from the latter…
We came back to London yesterday. Normally, we check the traffic news before going on a long journey, but with the final leg being a simple Cambridge – M11 – London trip, why bother? This is why: earlier that morning, a lorry full of pigs overturned between two junctions of the M11 with no other good route between them. If you didn't check the traffic news, cough, the only warning was a sign that the road was closed about a mile or so before one of the junctions. This meant a big queue of vehicles turning off to go another way.
We could see the two most plausible routes were solid, so elected for a tour of the narrow wet roads of the Essex countryside, including the delightfully named village of 'Matching Tye'. Overall, the journey took us about four hours, twice what we had expected. The story doesn't mention why there was no indication of this closure earlier on the M11, at a point where sensible alternative routes existed…
I do wonder how viable Spotify is when half the ads on its free service are about itself.
One that wasn't just now was from Vodafone. 'Why not buy a phone + £100 of calls for a xmas present?' it asks, before giving you the answer: because the calls voucher expires after 30 days.
Clearly I am not its target market. That'd keep me going for several years.
1. We got a new credit card in September, the Santander Zero, mostly for use abroad. The first statement had a payment for £1.49 to a BSkyB related phone thing. Nothing to do with us, so we phoned up to report this. Turns out there would be another £1.49 for the same thing next month. The relevant card was cancelled, and another one sent out.
Postal strikes meant we weren't particularly fussed when it hadn't arrived quickly. However, the second statement did, on Friday. The two £1.49s that were supposed to have been cancelled were still there… along with someone's shopping spree in and around Manchester over three days while we were away at various places for half term. This included two £900+ spends at two different branches of Currys, four £200 or so visits to cashpoints around the city, etc etc etc until they went over the card's credit limit. (Which there was a charge for!)
Incredibly, Santander's fraud detection systems did not pick this up as being suspicious: a new credit card, replacing one known to have had a identity fraud problem, being used to buy lots of big things in multiple branches of the same store, two hundred miles away from the card-holder's home. Hmmm, do you think there might be something odd about that? Had they had a fraction of a clue, they would have been able to catch them: one purchase was for a train journey with a reserved seat.
2. So that's what's going on just across the footbridge (off the bottom left of the picture) over the railway line from us…
A week ago, someone was murdered in Brighton and their flat set on fire.
Can you spot the problem with the BBC story? Continue reading