The disordered mad of a brain man

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.

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?

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 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.

When the screen on my PC died horribly (see recent post) I looked up what to replace it with and came up with the Benq G2220HD: 22" 1920×1024 that doesn't do HDMI (but then neither does anything here), doesn't have speakers (so what), but the actual display is very very good for the price. But can I get one?