Jimmy Page’s Trousers

I am the quintessential procrastinator.  That Hamlet bloke has nothing on me.  What the hell is wrong with me?  I know I should be doing something a little more worthwhile (relatively speaking at least) and yet I don’t.

Instead I do other things.  I drink lots of tea.  I stare out of the window for a bit.  “That internet’s not going to surf itself”, I say and sluggishly click from one site to another.  There are so many unnecessary and inessential draws on my time.  How much masturbation do you think is too much, for instance?  So many pointless things eating into my day.  Eating into the time in which I should be doing something productive.

I need to break this dilatory pattern.  I need to steel myself and get a system going.  I need to turn off my email notifications.  I need to resist the siren call of Google Reader.  I need to stop wondering what’s happening on BBC News and Boing Boing.

Damn this internet.  Damn its e-ticement.  Damn it for its information-allure.  Damn its myriad methods of interrupting what I should be doing.  Damn it hell for its easily accessible pornography.

P.S.  In Sideshow Bob fashion, I am aware of the irony of posting on the internet in order to decry it.

I’m off to Tom Waits on Friday.  Great.  My ticket purchases and my attendance at the show are subject to some pretty stringent anti-touting measures.

• Tickets strictly limited to two(2) per person.
• Ensure that the credit card used to purchase tickets belongs to the person who is attending the show.
• On entry all patrons MUST present a valid I.D. (Passport or Driving Licence) matching name on the ticket(s) in order to gain entry. Failure to provide matching valid I.D will result in you not gaining access to the event.
• If you purchase 2 tickets, both patrons must be present at time of entry. All tickets will be scanned for validation on entry.
• Any tickets resold will be refused entry. No resale allowed under any circumstances.
• Only tickets purchased from official Ticketmaster outlets will be valid.
• Tickets are non-transferable.
• Tickets will not be dispatched until 2 weeks before the event.

Now, I believe that these measures were insisted upon by Tom’s management and there’s not much that can make me unhappy when I’m going to get to see Tom Waits at the end of it. Why, therefore, am I calling Ticketmaster an Awful Bastard?  Well, it seems that Ticketmaster are extremely pleased that this measure seemed to ‘work’ last night and are therefore considering implementing it for future events.  Brilliant, just brilliant.

I would like to see some information on how much of a problem touting really is.  Ticket purchases are limited anyway so how many legitimate tickets go to touts?  Some information regarding how many tickets go to touts versus how many tickets Ticketmaster hold back for corporate or VIP use/sale would be nice.  I’d like to see some information that provides a proper reason to inconvenience legitimate concert-goers through these anti-touting measures.

Ticketmaster’s anti-touting drive is made all the more ironic and annoying by the fact that their site now offers an ‘auction’ for tickets to shows.  Didn’t manage to buy a ticket at face value?  No problem, just go and bid a ridiculous amount through Ticketmaster themselves.  Ticketmaster are effectively touting their own tickets.  What a shower of hard-necked bastards.

For inconveniencing real people to prevent 3rd party touts from cutting into Ticketmaster’s own touting, Ticketmaster are Awful Bastards.

I’ve just posted a vague and rambling comment over at Clarissa’s. One of the things I arsed on about has inspired me to post a directed, no, a very directed post at a particular subset of our modern society.

So then, this post is directed, firmly and definitely, at people whose house alarms go off for no good reason.

To be clear, ‘for no good reason’ means, when no fucker is actually breaking into your house.

Now, if anybody reading this has come home, on more than one occasion, to hear their alarm wailing or to see from the panel that it has activated at some time over the course of their absence, I offer the following advice:

Get it fucking sorted.

Seriously.

In the first instance, if your system false-alarms more than once or twice, you might as well knock it all off with a hammer and sell it to gypsies for some magic beans. That’s all the good it’s going to do. One or two false alarms and all your neighbours will cease to pay any attention to it. Your house may well be in the process of being emptied by twelve burly blokes in stripy jumpers, driving a high-backed Ford Transit with ‘SWAG’ painted on the side, but all your neighbours will think is “there’s that fucking alarm again - why don’t they fix it, the worthless bastards”.

That’s the most compelling argument to get it sorted. There is another though - neighbour annoyance.

Now, if you’re an alarm-falsely-ringing person, it’s entirely possible that you couldn’t give a rank, foetid, shite about your neighbours. Probable, even. To you, however, I pass on this entirely true tale of woe and warning.

I once shared a common, semi-detached wall with a couple that travelled a lot. Often this was great. I got to play some loud music whenever they and Mrs. Jimmy Page’s Trousers were away. Hurrah. Decidedly non-hurrah, however, when their house alarm went off for no reason.

Many of you may be aware that, in a lot of house alarm installations, there is an external flashy-noisy box on the side of the house and that there is also an internal noisy-beepy-sireny box. This internal box, in many badly installed systems, continues to make lots of noise long after the external box ceases. If, for example, you happen to live in a semi-detached house next to one of these systems that activates falsely, with nobody to disable it, you may well spend an entire weekend without sleep as its incessant wailing can be clearly heard through the common wall.

It is worth noting, false-alarm people, that a weekend of no sleep due to (even) an internal siren, may well cause an, otherwise sane and law-abiding, person to be found in your back garden with a screwdriver and a breaking-and-entering-intent when you eventually return home.

Actual B&E was narrowly avoided by a fortuitous return. It should be a lesson though, that I was on the premises and fully ready to prise open a window and hammer the shit out of an internal alarm box.  Two days of ceaseless noise will do that to me.

So then. If not for concern for your friends and neighbours, than at least for selfish motives of property preservation, get your fucking alarm sorted. Seriously. You know who you are. It’s not going to cost you a fortune. Look in the phone book and call an alarm guy. Adjust the sensitivity, change the timer on the external box, make sure there’s a timer on the internal siren. Do this. Do it you lazy, selfish bastards.

Tuesday:

Bad Time: My boss wants me to attend a meeting with an external client. I hate this. I don’t like people at the best of times and this just sucks. I’m not a consultant. I don’t have enough bullshit in me. To top it off, I don’t actually know anything that would justify my presence. Not keen.

Good Time: Talk to my brother and arrange to meet him for lunch after the meeting.

Bad Time: Before leaving for the meeting in town (Dublin), I realise that I don’t have the required change for the parking meter. No nearby carparks and I can’t face stopping somewhere along the way to buy something I don’t want just to get change. I therefore steal the money from Baby Trousers moneybox. Not my proudest moment. Rationalise it by figuring that what with free food and board, not to mention the nappies, for the last three years, she’s up on the deal.

Bad Time: Spend one hour and fifty minutes driving the ten miles from my house to the meeting. It’s not even rush hour.

Bad Time: Arrive late - they’ve all started and clients look grumpily at me.

Bad Time: Listen to my ‘colleague’ simpering in a sycophantic, everyone’s-best-friend fashion. He’s running the meeting and his ‘relationship-building’ really pisses me off.

Bad Time: At ten past one, with twenty minutes to go, Everyone’s Best Friend, suggests that, as we are only half-way through the stuff he wanted to cover that we keep on going. “Let’s just grab a coffee,” he says.

Bad Time: I go to feed the meter after stopping somewhere along the way to buy something that I don’t need just to get change.

Bad Time: My stupid new shoes are rubbing my heels raw.

Bad Time: I phone my brother to tell him I’ll be late. He grumbles.

Good Time: I decide that I’m leaving at half past two whether we’re done or not. I tell our newly-reassembled meeting.

Good Time: Two thirty and I’m away.

Bad Time: My stupid shoes have hit bone. I limp to the car.

Good Time: I phone the brother to arrange to pick him up on the quays.

Bad Time: I hit traffic on Grand Canal Street. There’s a policeman blocking the road.

Good time: Although policeman is turning a number of cars away, when I reach him and he asks where I’m going, I tell him “up Pearse Street, onto the quays”. He waves me through, saying “Go ahead then. You might have a bit of trouble on Pearse Street”.

Bad Time: I get onto Pearse Street and discover that by ‘a bit of trouble’, what the policeman meant to say was “Whatever you do, don’t go up Pearse Street. Bits of a building are falling down and the entire street is closed off. There’s no possible way that you can make it up there”. Why would he let me go there? I am stuck.

Bad Time: I phone the brother to tell him. He’s annoyed, like it’s my fault or something.

Bad Time: I sit on Pearse Street, not moving for forty five minutes. I pass the shouty-sweary stage and descend into fuming, impotent anger.

Good Time: (Relatively speaking) A bus in the bus lane beside me moves a few yards, exposing a side street behind the train station. I seize my opportunity and mount the kerb to get up there.

Bad Time: At the top of the side street, all the traffic that has been diverted now blocks all other roads. I spend another forty minutes getting to the quays via Merrion Square, Ely Place, Stephen’s Green, Mercer Street, George’s Street, Dame Street, Christchurch and High Street.

Bad Time: The brother has taken the bus to a pub near my house.

Bad Time: I drive the rest of the way home, grumbling and wishing I believed in God so that I could hate him and take his name in vain.

Bad Time: Collect grumpy brother, go home and eat toast to make up for the fact that neither of us had any lunch.

Bad Time: I take off my socks, exposing red seeping welts. I extract a number of small, rubbed-off pieces of my skin from my socks.

Bad Time: I take a shower and the water stings my raw heels.

Bad Time: We get the bus back into town as we’ve got tickets to see Stewart Lee. Very talkative young girls behind us on the bus discuss sexy boys and getting drunk.

Good Time: Burger in Rick’s.

Good Time: Pint.

Bad Time: Go to Laughter Lounge. Before we even go in, the bouncer angrily tells us not to talk during the performance.

Bad Time: Bloke inside door stamps our hand for readmittance. For some reason, the stamp reads ‘FAG’. Someone’s taking the piss. Have visions of getting a hard time from scobies for the rest of the night.

Good Time: Stewart Lee. Great set. Very funny. Go see him if you get a chance.

Good Time: Pints.

Good Time: Kebab.

Now, while you can see that there are some good times listed above, I think you’ll agree that many are, at best, moderately good and can probably be described as good, only relative to the rest. Overall, I reckon that the list is heavily skewed towards the bad. Why? Why? Is it some sort of Karmic thing? What have I done to deserve it? Four hours in the car to travel a twenty mile round trip isn’t right, is it? What have I done? What have I done?

Arse.

It seems that everybody on the net is writing about poor old, dead, Heath Ledger. I had no intentions of following suit (maverick, me) but when I found an article from the Westboro Baptist Church, stating that they would be picketing his funeral, my ire needed release. I’ve linked to a repost of the article as their site is incredibly slow. To be honest, it’s probably better that most right-thinking people steer clear of their site, tolerantly named godhatesfags.com, anyway.

The Westboro lot are that shower that are generally pissing off most people by doing things like protesting (for whatever moronic reason) at the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq. It seems that these fucksticks will also picket Ledgers’s funeral because he was once in a movie where he played a gay cowboy. Well, they’ve certainly thought that one through. Yep, flawless. Fucking morons.

Predictably, they have cited a verse from Leviticus in order to justify their tasteless, mindless, insanities. Leviticus 18:22, The sin of Heath: Thou shalt not act in a movie as one who would lie with mankind as with womankind ‘cos it’s an abomination, innit.

Leviticus is great if you’re a nutjob. Pretty much anything you want to feel religiously aggrieved about is in there. It’s one of the most intolerant books of the Old Testament (which is saying something). Deep within its overwritten verses we have all sorts of ridiculous shite. Today’s lesson then, A Look At Leviticus or Fuck, Some People Are Stupid.

Lets start out easy - what you can eat. Don’t leaven your buns. Don’t eat old meat (there’s lots of stuff about either eating or burning various foodstuffs and animals). However, whatever you do, don’t eat stuff like pigs or anything fishy that doesn’t have scales (and I really like prawns too). Also hares, vultures, owls, bats, dogs, weasels, mice, lizards, snails, blah, blah, blah. The list goes on and on. You can eat beetles though.

As you can imagine, it being concerned with religion, sex is well represented:

Don’t uncover the nakedness of your dad, sister, auntie, monkey, etc. Menstruating women are unclean and you shouldn’t uncover their nakedness, not that you would because you’d obviously have banished them for seven days. And if you did happen to uncover her nakedness during her ’sickness’, well you’d both just have to be turfed out of town, wouldn’t you. Could be worse though - it could have been death or the curse of dying childless.

Oh, women are also unclean for a week after having a baby boy or a fortnight if it’s a girl (’cos girls are dirtier than boys - everyone knows that). To be purified, they need to leave the blood and mess of childbirth on themselves for a week (or a month, I can’t remember). No showering now ladies.

Bestiality gets a look in: Neither shall any woman stand before a beast to lie down thereto: it is confusion. Not in that film I saw. Everyone seemed pretty sure about what they were doing in that. Wanking: Don’t let your seed pass through the fire to Molech? Now that’s confusing.

Don’t eat fat or blood - incidentally one of the reasons that the nutty Jehova’s Witnesses refuse transfusions. It doesn’t say don’t get it intraveneously, twats. If you’re going to take this twaddle literally, don’t cherry-pick.

What else? Oh, yeah, thou shalt not put stuff in the way of blind people (really, it’s there). Just because it’s funny, doesn’t make it right. Don’t chop off the corners of your beards. Remember to burn prostitutes. Don’t let anybody with any physical deformity aproach the alter - anything from a dwarf to someone with a flat nose counts. And as for you, Potter, don’t be a wizard or it’s bleedin’ stoning for you, me lad. We also have God murdering children (Aaron’s kids) for gross misconduct and forbidding their father to grieve, various other sacrifices, stonings, and murders. Also pestilence, rape, slavery, and kidnapping get a look-in.

So, quite a mixed bag of sin, then. Hurrah for Leviticus and it’s very sane, reasonable and measured approach to religious law. Oh, how I hate the complete, fucking morons who quote the ramblings of dead, fucking morons to justify their fucking insane fucking beliefs. Fuck right off, Westboro Baptist Church. Fuck right off, anyone who reads shite like Leviticus and thinks, “Hmmmm, maybe these insane ramblings make good sense.” Fuck right off. Stupid bastards.

Lot of ‘fucks’ there, but I stand by it.

A warning: This post contains geeky talk of wireless networks and such. If you’re the type of person that hates such geekery, you might want to skip it. Just scroll down where I slag something else off instead.

Netgear (or as they prefer to shout it, NETGEAR) are a company that makes, among other things, wireless network routers and adapters. These devices, in theory, allow one to connect, wirelessly, to one’s broadband service from around the house. Pretty much everybody knows that these days; it’s no longer arcane knowledge, known only to geeky types with thick glasses. Also, as the wireless home networking has become more popular, these devices have become more simple to allow non-geeky types the ability to install them in their homes. All good so far?

Now, I am a geeky type (sans thick glasses though). I have considerable experience in things IT. I have wrestled with many, seemingly inscrutable, technical problems over the years but none have made me as angry and caused me as much stress as setting up a Netgear router and USB wireless adapter did last week.

So convinced was I that it was going to be as easy as the many other home-networking routers I’ve installed for friends, family, and self, that I cockily decided to do it at 10PM one evening over the Christmas holidays. “It’ll be easy, plug and play,” I thought. Plug and play, my arse.

The Netgear router first. As it was replacing an existing router, I swapped them and then made my first mistake: I tried to follow the instructions and used Netgear’s auto-install CD thing. Shouldn’t have done that. Not only was it painfully slow to run, it bore only a slight resemblance to the printed instructions that Netgear wanted me to follow. Options stipulated by the printed instructions were not available, or were called something else on screen. Sometimes the required on-screen instructions were available but in completely different places to those the printed Netgear instructions suggested. After about three-quarters of an hour, I gave up on Netgear’s unhelpful ‘auto-install’ thing and went and did the thing manually. Right. That’s the router sorted. At least the network adapter should be easy.

Ha!

Once bitten, I decided to install the adapter manually and eschew Netgear’s auto-install. This proved impossible to do as the drivers for the adapter were, helpfully, not evident on the CD. Nope, they seemed to be buried somewhere within the bowels of the install program’s files and were impossible to install manually. The adapter install application had the same, annoyingly preventable, issues as the routers. I eventually struggled through only to have Windows baulk at the Netgear adapter and tell me that it didn’t like it. A number of other attempts gave the same result.

Off to a different computer (the Macbook, which connected perfectly as it is brilliant) to check out Netgear’s support online. Jesus, it’s shit. Netgear make some pretty big claims on their ‘Search Tips’ page, namely that it’s ‘better than Google’. It’s not. Netgear’s search page is shit. It tries to be clever but it fails miserably.

Anyway, long story already, but to cut it slightly shorter, I spent four hours arsing about with the Netgear wireless adapter before I managed to make it work. When I did, the reception with the super-duper ‘RangeMAX’ technology was worse than my old cheapie adapter. Also, every time the PC booted or woke up, NetGear’s oxymoronic ‘Smart Wizard’ pops up and won’t go away until you click to close it. What a pathetic piece of programming. Took another twenty minutes to get rid of that.

So then, with my apologies to non-geeky readers for the geeky post, I hereby name Netgear, Awful Bastards. Their software is shite and poorly thought out, their hardware seems only moderately better than cheap crap from three years ago and their support site is awful beyond words.

Netgear seem to have set out to do their best to make their products as unfriendly and useless as they can (and in this, at least, they have succeeded). If you’re looking to wireless up your home, my advice is to buy something other than Netgear kit.

If you haven’t already read the start of this story, you can take a look just two posts down.

Have UPS Courier Service improved and made right their cock-ups of the last few days? Have they fuck.

A driver called today at about lunchtime. He had a package. I was excited until I took it from him. Pretty light. Ah, that’ll be the bag that I ordered with the MacBook. That’s grand. I signed for that and asked him where the other package was. He stared blankly.

“I’ve only got the one for you,” he said.

I opened the package while he was there and showed him the bag. “There’s supposed to be a computer that goes in here,” I said.

He shrugged. In fairness, he wasn’t even a UPS person and was just some bloke that had been subcontracted out. I couldn’t blame him for this latest fuck-up. Nope, the blame for this fuck-up, and all of the other fuck-ups in a long line of fuck-ups, lies squarely with UPS Courier Service who continue to astound with the high levels of incompetence and low levels of customer service. I’ve spoken with more people there, going as high up the management chain as I can get and while I’m being assured of frantic levels of activity to get this sorted, I’m not all that confident.

UPS Courier Service are very, very bad. UPS Courier Services are awful bastards.

.

UPDATE:

Well, after a lot of hassling and a lot of phone calls I finally managed to get this sorted.  I was still hassling people in their warehouse until after 7PM.  It paid off though and I succeeded in annoying and shaming them sufficiently that they had some poor guy who happened to live in my area drop the package off on his way home that night (as the couriers had all buggered off for the day).  So, just after nine, some guy who works in their accounts department or something called and dropped it off.  Very nice of him too, although he did stand about after he delivered it as if he was waiting for a tip.  Sorry mate, not after the day I had.

The winner of today’s Awful Bastard Award is UPS courier services.

A while ago, I stopped the pretence of requiring a justification for it and bought an Apple MacBook. The only real justification I can muster is that it’s a thing of beauty which, speaking as someone who works with a lot of computers, is something that can be said of them very infrequently. Anyway, as I wanted to change the standard specification a little, I reasoned that buying online was the way to go. I’d recently bought an iPod for Mrs. Jimmy Page’s Trousers (the small one - I’m not made of money) via the online store and it all seemed trouble-free and easy. Indeed, the ordering part of this process was trouble-free and easy.

Then UPS got their hands on it.

According to the tracking thing on their website, it was supposed to be delivered on Thursday last. It wasn’t and there was no update on their tracking thing as to why. Early Friday morning, their site listed it as IN TRANSIT. Yippee. I spent most of the day looking out the door and window to see if the big brown UPS van was outside. As it got towards five in the evening, I was beginning to worry. I had one weak thread to cling to though… Maybe the UPS man lives in my area and is saving my delivery for his last one on the way home. I realise how pathetic this seems but I’m ok with it.

That last thread broke however, when I refreshed the tracking website and read “THE RECEIVER IS NOT LISTED ON THE BUILDING DIRECTORY. UPS IS ATTEMPTING TO OBTAIN THE INFORMATION AND COMPLETE DELIVERY.” Now, I live in a house. It doesn’t have a building directory. Mrs. Jimmy Page’s Trousers and I don’t really see the need, given that there’s just us and Baby Trousers in residence. Also, UPS’s attempts to obtain ‘the information’ didn’t stretch to ringing me. I was quite angry but, after battering my way through their phone menu system, which tries to keep you from humans, I found that they’d all buggered off for the day.

Incidentally, I have discovered the way to speak to a human on the UPS phone menu is to angrily hit the ‘#’ key repeatedly while shouting “CUNTS!” at the top of your voice. You will be diverted.

So, angry but still in some control, I reasoned that they’ll just deliver on Monday instead, as any courier company would do if they failed to deliver on the previous business day. On Saturday evening however, I just happened to refresh the tracking page. It had a new listing stating, once again, “THE RECEIVER IS NOT LISTED ON THE BUILDING DIRECTORY. UPS IS ATTEMPTING TO OBTAIN THE INFORMATION AND COMPLETE DELIVERY.” This time however, it listed a revised delivery date of 21st December. Next Friday. This time I shouted “CUNTS!” at the top of my voice as I punched the wall (not quite so productive as my phone discovery I’ll grant you).

So, on Sunday, I went about grumbling with dirty, thunderous clouds hovering over my head. This morning, first thing, I rang UPS and tried my ’speak to a human’ trick - it still works. I’m waiting to hear back from them but I’m going to go ahead and award them the Awful Bastard Award for their work so far. If they somehow manage to sort this out quickly, I may upgrade them to just Bastard Award status, but I’m not holding out much hope.

For now however, UPS are awful bastards.

UPDATE: Well, they’ve retained the title. As may have been expected, they didn’t get back to me. Three phone calls later, I spoke to someone who told me that it seemed that the driver, on Friday, couldn’t find my address.

“He didn’t ring for directions,” I said.

“No. You see, the drivers don’t actually have UPS company mobiles and most of them won’t use their own mobiles to ring customers,” said the UPS girl.

“So, if they can’t find the delivery address and they won’t ring for directions, how does the package get delivered?” I enquired.

“Oh, usually, if a customer doesn’t get their delivery, they phone us when it hasn’t arrived and we’ll get directions from them,” she said.

Really. Honestly. I’m not making this up. According to the girl I spoke with, that’s UPS’s failed delivery policy. Wait until the customer gets so pissed off that they call UPS and go insane trying to navigate their automated phone thing. Then, finally be told that the driver couldn’t find the address that is on every map of Dublin for at least the last seven years, is certainly available on all of the major GPS maps and that the only communication method open to said driver was to use his own mobile phone to call the customer, which he (rightly) wasn’t willing to do.

What a complete shambles UPS must be.  That’s just astonishingly poor.  UPS are, indeed, awful bastards.

After a bit of arguing and hassle, they are apparently going to deliver tomorrow.  The girl even took directions from me although, as I don’t know where the driver will be coming from, they are not the most useful.   After dictating direction for the girl to type, I asked her to note that, if the driver is still unable to find me, he should phone and I’ll happily reimburse him the fifty cent for the call.  Apparently, she didn’t have enough room to fit that in.

Helpful.

I’ve noticed over the last few week or so, Blogger has modified their (never pleasant) comment system to disallow any non-Blogger users from leaving their website address when they post a comment. This means that I can’t comment on someone’s blog and leave a link to my blog. The options are to post anonymously, to use a ‘nickname’ (which with no web link is only a small step up from anonymous) or to use a Blogger ID.

I don’t want to use a Blogger ID. I have a perfectly fine, non-Blogger blog and I want to be able to tell people about that when I comment on something. Blogger, and their owners, Google, have most likely pissed off a pretty massive portion of the blogging public. Well, they’ve pissed off me. And the Gurrier. And, from doing an ironic Google search, lots more people.

I hate this proprietary shite.  Sort it out Blogger. It’s not on.

What can you do?

If you’re a Blogger user and it annoys you that commenters aren’t free to include a link to their sites or if you’re a commenter and it annoys you that Blogger won’t let you include a link, do this:

Go to their Feedback Page and paste the following into the ‘Suggest New Feature’ field at the bottom:

Please restore the ability to include my (non-Blogger) URL when I post a comment on a Blogger site.

.

Let’s go comrades…. Blindependent bloggers blast bloated Blogger blunder. I think I got away with that one.