2011 July | Head Rambles

Archive for July, 2011

Securing the future

Grandad July 5th, 2011

There is always the possibility that I could be hit by a bus tomorrow.

Or it could be a stray bolt of lightning.

Or a meteorite.

Or something.

Leastwise, as some wise old sage was once heard to mutter into his cornflakes – “you never know the day nor the hour”.

With that in mind, I started wondering about all my Interweb shit. Herself wouldn’t be able to access anything that I have done on line. There is a lot of important shit in there that she would need to access. There is also a lot of shit in there that I don’t want her to access. *cough*

I did a quick guess as to how many user names and passwords that I had.

I guessed at twenty, give or take a few.

I was wrong.

One hundred and ninety fucking one accounts.

Holy shit!!!

Where did they all come from? I haven’t a clue what half them are, but I must have signed in at some stage or other. Other accounts have several user names, and I don’t know why.

I have managed to write them all down and will leave her the file in my will……

minus all the sites I don’t want her to know about, of course.

That should bring the figure nearer twenty.

Heh!

computers , Internet , Rambles
Comments(4)

Real money

Grandad July 4th, 2011

Back when I was a lad, currency was simple.

Coinage consisted of the farthing, ha’penny, penny, thruppeny bit, sixpence [or a tanner], shilling, florin and half crown. There were notes for ten shillings, a pound, a fiver and the rest upwards were rarely seen unless you worked in a bank.

The relationship between the pennies, the shillings and the pound was very simple too. There were twelve pennies to the shilling and there were twenty shillings to the pound. It couldn’t be easier. Any child could, and did cope with it on a daily basis.

In fact it was all so simple we tried to make it a little more difficult by using English currency at the same time. They used the same denominations but slightly different shaped coinage. One thing that did piss me off was that the Irish were literate enough to use both coinage systems, but the British weren’t and would rudely refuse the Irish versions. That was enough to convince a young lad that the Irish were far more intelligent than the British, but that’s another story. Heh!

Then back in the early seventies, they fucked the whole thing up by introducing decimalisation. It was sad seeing a tradition being killed off in the name of dumbing down but there it was. We had to cope with a new range of coinage.

That changeover wasn’t too bad and within weeks we were all used to the new coins and the over-simplified conversion of a hundred pennies to the pound. Slapping down the correct price of a pint was no problem whatsoever.

Ten years ago we changed to the Euro.

I don’t know what it is about the Euro but I fucking hate it. After ten years I still can’t get the hang of those fucking coins. They are small, fiddly and a pain in the fucking hole. Every time I have to pay for something I find myself twiddling coins to see what number is stamped on the back. The coins are too small and there isn’t enough difference in size. Fucking Mickey Mouse money I call it.

The sooner that fucking Euro implodes the better.

Then we can get back to the good old pounds, shillings and pence.

Real money.

Rants , Times past
Comments(17)

Conundrum

Grandad July 3rd, 2011

Our automatic washing machine has a cycle called “Hand Wash”.

How the fuck does that work?

Reading John Grisham

Grandad July 2nd, 2011

I like John Grisham.

I think I have read most, if not all of his books.

One of the things I have learned about the legal system is that the primary method of defence is attack. No matter how guilty the accused is, he tries to get off by discrediting the primary witness. Whether he is a Mafia Boss or a leading politician, all he has to do is to discover one little aspect of the witness’ life and blow it out of all proportion. So a quick joint twenty years ago means the witness is a drug dealer and the slime-ball gets off because the testimony is corrupted. Or whatever.

Dirty but probably effective.

-oOo-

I wonder if Dominique Strauss-Kahn reads John Grisham’s books?