So yesterday I was walking back from Borough Market at lunchtime with my Flour Power brownie and sandwich in hand, when I spotted some people collecting money for charity with slightly amateur looking handwritten signs saying something about Anne Widdecombe having been arrested.
And now I find out (via londonist) that this was all a charity stunt in which they were collecting money to get her out.
Bugger. Do you think I can get my quid back?
So the other Friday, I made my best stab at slipping out of the office at half four, as subtly as you can when you’re laden down with bags and wearing a big winter coat, and made my way north on a surprisingly quiet Northern line. Sal and I were off to Bruges for the weekend, you see, and I wanted to get up to the new St Pancras station (named, of course for the patron saint of the digestive system) in time to take some photos.
There’s a slight air of the unfinished about the place (or at least there was two weeks ago), with lots of metal shutters and boards all over the place covering up the places where the concessions will soon be, but it’s an impressive, imposing station nonetheless… In need of supplies for the journey, however, the lack of facilities at St Pancras forced us to walk over the road to its shabbier, smaller neighbour. King’s Cross might not have the Gothic architecture, a lengthy champagne bar, or a giant statue of some lovers snogging, but it does have Cornish pasties.
The Eurostar refurb apparently doesn’t extend to the rolling stock, by the way, which has the same slightly worn interior as it has for years, but we pulled out of the station on time, and, as Sal dozed beside me, I drank my first Duvel of the weekend, read my book and listened to Radiohead serenading me through the countryside at 186mph…
Part way through the journey, I spotted that a lady a few rows in front of us was wearing a Eurostar/Greenpeace T-Shirt bearing the slogan “I took 2 hrs 14 m to save the climate. London St Pancras – Paris, 14/11/2007”. Well that’s a relief if we don’t have to worry about that little problem anymore. If we’d only known that it was going to be that easy, then maybe we could have tried it sooner. (And perhaps then we’d have been spared Live Earth…)
**
Bruges itself was lovely, of course. (Cold, but lovely).
There was chocolate. There was beer. There were chips…
Sadly as Bruges is in the Flemish part of the country, I had to be typically rubbish about the whole language thing, and just speak to everyone in English, although I did get one or two chances to use a bit of my French–at one point a woman stopped us on the street and actually asked “où est la gare?” It doesn’t get more textbook than that, but sadly the answer wasn’t “go straight ahead and take the third street on the right”, it was more like “er, I dunno; it’s really far away” accompanied by lots of pointing to my map, and ended with me suggesting that she should “Suivre le canal”. I’m not sure how helpful that was.
The other opportunity was when we went on the tour around De Halve Maan, the last remaining brewery in Bruges, where I got to laugh at the tour guide’s jokes once in English and then again when she repeated them in French. Yes, I know, I am sad.
Oh, and one other bizarre incident: as we wandered the streets of the town looking for just the right chocolate shop, we passed a middle-aged American couple looking in the window of a deli.
“Look at these sandwiches”, squawked the lady to her husband. “Look what’s in these sandwiches. Oh look at what’s in these sandwiches!”
I’ve no idea what part of the states they were from, but it must be a very sheltered part. When we walked back past the same shop a little while later I had a look at these sandwiches I’d heard so much about. I can confirm that they were just normal sandwiches. With, like, meat and cheese in them.
—-
[*] Barman to Sal as we left the bar on our first evening in town…
I seem to get more and more misdirected emails these days. I’m not talking about proper spam, but rather what seem to be real emails that were intended for a different Matt: for example, there’s the Central Indiana Christian Songwriters’ Association who email me every now and again inviting me down to open mic nights at their church. Sadly, I’m unlikely to make it down there given that (a) it’s in Indianapolis, and (b) I don’t think they’d appreciate an unbeliever in their midst.
And from time to time I get apparently genuine emails from other people with the same surname as me–most recently a certain Lucas Armstrong from New York set me an mp3 of a track called TSMM by “Perpetual Groove”, which (Wikipedia informs me) is an American “Jam Band” (whatever that means). Apparently “the music has [my] name written all over it.”
One of my colleagues has the same problem: he deals with this by sending them joke replies (and then blogging about it), but I can’t quite bring myself to do so, and usually just hit delete…
But anyway, today I got this email:
Hi,I am the seller of the eBay item :150180086509,and I’ve just been contacted by the eBay staff who informed me that the winner of this item got rejected due to security reasons (either failed to follow through on the purchase commitment or outright refused to do so). Your last auctioned bid prior to being outbided is taken into consideration as eBay policy automatically proclaims you to be the winner by default.Nevertheless,I need your agreement on this so I may contact eBay to confirm your winning position otherwise I’ll relist the item. If you’re interested please confirm by forwarding this message to e-mail and include your name,address and ebay ID. Thanks!
Now I have never used ebay, and my instinct tells me that this is some kind of scam. But what’s the scam?
Suspicious things:
– Why don’t you tell me what the item is or provide a link to it? Searching ebay suggests that the item in question is this one. I’m not sure buying a mountain bike from a chap in Victoria is entirely practical, given that the cost of shipping it half way around the world might be somewhat prohibitive…
– Why do you need my ebay ID? If you have my email, and you know I was the second highest bid, then surely you already know this?
– The grammar isn’t quite as odd as it usually is in 419 scam emails, but I’m still not sure if a native English speaker would say “please confirm by forwarding this message to e-mail”: what does that even mean?
Anyway, I’m curious, but not quite curious enough to want to bother replying (although, oddly, I am still curious enough to go to more effort and blog about it…) so I’m asking the internets: what exactly is the scam here? Anyone?
My output on these pages might have dwindled recently to little more than the occasional photograph or screenshot and the most minimal of commentary, but I don’t normally stoop to the level of just linking to stuff that other people have written.
I’m making an exception today, though, because I want to link to Ben Goldacre’s absolutely spot on article about Homeopathy from today’s Guardian.
Partly because, well, everyone should read it, but also because I have a feeling it might come in handy again in the future and I want to bookmark it.
So there’s this London radio station, right. And they happen to be running a competition at the moment in which they are asking their listeners to do their marketing for them (well, they already ask their listeners to pick the records, so this isn’t such a great leap–presumably they will soon be outsourcing all remaining jobs at the station to their listeners: I look forward to Alex Zane running a competition with the chance to win the opportunity to come in to the studios late at night and clean the toilets for minimum wage).
Anyway, they’re offering a prize of £10,000 (the “marketing budget”) to whoever does the best bit of promotional activity for the breakfast show, and most of the efforts so far have been, frankly, rubbish. But I’m highly confused about this one. For the benefit of any non Facebook users, the idea appears to be that they will get as many people as possible to join this Facebook group and then they will use the £10,000 to fund a bar tab at a huge party:
“The £10,000 that we win (and I’m sure we will) will be used for a mega awesome super party that is free for everyone that is a member.
All the money goes on boooze, imagine that a £10,000 bar tab, in a quality establishment.
The more people the bigger it can be.”
Um. Apparently no one in the group has even the most basic grasp of mathematics. Surely the more people the smaller it will be? They’ve currently got 3,022 members, so if they all turn up at this party that’s going to be a whopping £3.30 each. That’s not going to go very far at London bar prices, is it.
When one of the organisers of this Facebook group was interviewed on the radio show the other week, he suggested that they would hire a venue like Koko. Presumably the group organisers are planning to pay for that out of their own pockets (given that they’ve committed to spending “all the money on booze”), but I’m confused about that too. You see, Koko’s capacity is only 1,500, so half of the group’s members aren’t even going to get in, even though they promised that the party will be “free for everyone that is a member”. And anyway, those lucky 1,500 members will have the whopping sum of £6.66 each towards their drinks.
Don’t spend that all at once, kids…
We had salmon for dinner last night. I was both relieved and amused to read the allergy advice…
Always read the label, kids.
[Busy. Can’t Stop. Proper blog with words and paragraphs and everything coming soon, promise…]
I was just doing one of those YouGov surveys that they send to me from time to time.
Um. I’m not quite sure how to answer that last question, though… Anyone?
(I don’t know if I “thing” anything about Ming, really, but I do thing that Tony Blairs and Iain Duncan Smith are doing sterling work for their respective parties…)
It’s rather remiss of me not to have mentioned it so far, but as well as surviving my 30th birthday last week, I also reached the end of my photo a day project. In case you were wondering, this is what the last year of my life looked like:
I may not have taken the most exciting photograph every day (you may be able to spot for yourself the occasions on which I clearly got to the end of the day not having bothered to take a picture of anything, and so ended up taking whatever we had for dinner that night…), but I definitely enjoyed doing it. And already I look back at this photographic record of the last year and think: did I really do all that stuff?
Hopefully it’s also made me a better photographer.
I’m not sure I want to stop now, especially as I have a lovely new toy to play with.
So I think I’m going to carry on, for now at least. You can follow my continuing progress here.
One of the reasons for continuing is that I really want to learn how to use my new camera. Right now, I’m mostly letting the camera do the hard work, but I’ll get there.
I had my first test last night when I joined Rob, Claire, and Laila at the Bloomsbury theatre to see another Lou Rhodes solo gig. Knowing that Rob had booked the tickets (and therefore figuring that we’d probably be sitting quite close to the front), I thought that this might be a good opportunity to try out some gig photography…
Unfortunately, my initial efforts were a horribly overexposed blurry mess, so I was forced to stray from the automatic comfort zone and try changing the only settings I knew how to change–increasing the ISO setting; decreasing the ISO setting; increasing something that I later worked out was the shutter speed; decreasing it again. I had no idea what I was doing, but I eventually settled on something that seemed to work, and proceeded to fill up my memory card…
The support unexpectedly turned out to be someone I had heard of–Mark Morriss, formerly of Hounslow’s finest britpop also-rans, The Bluetones. I actually used to be a bit of a fan (somewhere I have all their early singles, including the relatively rare first single, Are You Blue Or Are You Blind), so I recognised him straightaway. I could have sworn that The Bluetones had their initial success over 12 years ago, but Mark Morriss somehow doesn’t appear to have got any older over the last decade. Perhaps he was about 12 when the band started, or perhaps there’s a copy of Expecting To Fly in an attic somewhere on which his wizened face is slowly aging…
Lou Rhodes was excellent as ever. I’d only listened to the new album once before the gig, but I’d recognised most of the songs from the performance we’d seen her give at Glasto this year, which has to be a good sign I suppose.
And she did that thing where she follows Beloved One with her cracking solo version of Gabriel… Lovely.
I am so pleased that the Nationwide building society has decided to implement new internet banking security measures. Yesterday, on logging in, I was prompted to submit my answers to five questions from a choice of twenty, and I can now be asked to answer these questions at any time when using the online service. Fantastic: more stuff to remember. This is in addition to the 10 digit customer number, the memorable place, date and person, and PIN that I already needed to remember in order to use the service.
The more stuff they require me to remember, the more secure the system must be, right? Surely now I have five extra things to remember, it must be five times as secure…
They have massively missed the point. If they really cared about security, they’d implement proper two-factor authentication, which is about using at least two different methods of verifying that the user is who he says he is. Typically, that means verifying that the user knows something (like a password) and verifying that the user has something (like one of those security token/fob things that generates a really long number when you press the button). But clearly issuing every customer with a token would be far too expensive, so instead they’ve decided to implement a security system that verifies that the user knows something, and, er, verifies that the user knows some more stuff.
Fantastic.
This provides no additional security whatsoever over their existing authentication methods, and it’s actually worse, because the more stuff you ask people to remember, the more likely it is that they will start writing it down.
Of course, Nationwide claim:
These security questions offer additional peace of mind when you carry out transactions on our Internet Bank as only you will know the answers.
But this is nonsense. The questions are either going to have answers so obvious that anyone who knows me could work them out, or they are going to have answers I’ll need to think about, in which case I’ll either need to remember what I happened to think was the best answer to that question when I filled in the form in October 2007, or I’ll need to write down the answers somewhere.
Out of the full list of 20 questions I could not find a single one to which I could give an unambiguous answer that I wouldn’t need to remember. The questions included the likes of:
“Where did you first go on holiday?” (I was probably 1 at the time. I don’t know)
“What’s your father’s middle name?” (He’s got two: which one should I put?)
“What team do you support?” (Ok, so the answer’s “everton”, but should I write it as “everton”? “everton fc”? “the blues”? “the toffees”?)
“What was the name of your first employer?” (my first employer was the guy who ran the restaurant I washed dishes in when I was 16; I can’t remember his name, so should I put the name of the restaurant? Maybe I should put the name of my employer for my first proper job? How will I remember which one I chose?)
“What is your favourite colour?” (Seriously: is this a Smash Hits interview? Who has a favourite colour?)
They go on to say:
The questions were chosen to meet the needs of our diverse membership. We have listened to the views of people across a variety of age ranges and lifestyles. We have also taken into account industry standards.
Questions should not be taken too literally, if you feel you’re unable to answer a question, either choose a different one, or provide an answer that means something to you. E.g. If you don’t have a favourite song, you could answer with a song that is memorable to you, such as the song played at your wedding.
You can type what ever answer you like, it’s not a test, as long as you give an answer that you will remember.
Yes, but that’s the whole point: how will I remember which song I picked at the time I answered your question? You’re not the only financial institution I have an account with, and it’s only a matter of time before they all start asking me to answer some silly questions of their own. I’m never going to remember all the answers I gave unless I start writing them down…
[The Nationwide cares so much about security that it was fined £980,000 by the FSA earlier this year when a laptop containing 11 million customer account details was stolen from an employee’s house.]
Oh, I almost forgot. Appropriately enough this was when we were in Kensington last week on the way to a real hospital…
In a car. Alive!
On Holby, that’s how she died.
Is it not real, then?