Well, after almost 10 yeras of dumping photos here, its come to a point where I now have to split some of the gallery into publicly accessible images, and those I must keep private. What was over 7,500 images has been slightly reduced to around 6,000. They’re not all art, but some are useful – if you’d like to use the pictures ask me and I can send you a high-res.
Category: Rants
Repairing the car
Well, the brakes on the car weren’t so good, to the point that it was more effective to try and ‘will’ the car to a halt by the sheer power of the mind in place of using either the pedal or the handbrake! Turns out the front pads were gone, and brake fluid had leaked on the rear ones making them ineffective. Luckily, its only about 150 quid to get it fixed.
Finally: The bank deposits
After three weeks, the bank finally deposits my cheque. Guess they made a bit of money off of my money while they looked after it.
*sigh*
Trouble with banks
So I had a cheque, for a reasonable amount of money. I took it to HSBC to pay into their machines. They normally have two forms, very similar in size and appearance. On this occassion they had run out of the savings account deposit one. So I grabbed the other form, crossed through the incorrect information on the form, and wrote out the deposit details as normal. On the back, I filled in the cheque details, and wrote a note explaining the ‘normal’ account deposit forms had run out. I depositied this on 2nd June 2005.
The cheque was processed on June 6, and funds transferred on June 7. But not into any of my accounts; disappeared into the HSBC slush fund, deep within their clearing services.
On June 10 I contact the bank to enquire as to my missing deposit. Thats when I found out it had been cleared. Despite numerous phone calls, the problem has still not been resolved. I have had to obtain a statement from the organisation who issued the cheque, showing the amount on the cheque, so that the branch will, “In good faith” credit me this money while they try and sort out what happened.
The shoddyness of Microsoft: Internet Explorer Update Fiasco
Microsoft Corporation comes under a lot of flack from the IT community for slipshod work. The constant state of software being released by them that is either incompatible with everything they (and anyone else) has done, and an unprecidented number of security holes leads to much ridicule of the organisation.
I’d like here to just make a point of the latest (as at December 15th 2001) blunder that the company has fallen into. They have today released what is being termed as a major patch to their web browsing software, Internext Explorer. This has only been made available for versions 5.5 (Service Pack 2) and 6. While end-of-life’ing older versions is probably acceptable, it should be known that 5.01 SP2 is not that old, and the lack of a patch for this older version will hurt some organisations and their SOE.
Just to not miss other coverage of this, here are stories on Slashdot and The Register.
The main point is thus: take a peek at the image here showing my laptop with its installed MSIE 6.0 under MS Windows Millennium Edition, and me trying to install this update.
Which begs the question: what version do I have of MSIE installed? And where is my patch to fix the security vulnerabilities that MS is (perhaps) trying to rectify?