Me: “Hi.”
Them: “Hello. Three ninety-nine.”
Me: “Thanks.”
Them: “Thank you.”

This morning’s conversation went like this:

Me: “Hi.”
Them: “Hello sir, how are you?”
Me: “Very well thanks, how are you?”
Them: “I’m good thank you. That’ll be three dollars and ninety-nine cents.” Me: “Thanks.”
Them: “Thank you. Have a nice day!”

To attempt to balance this plainly biased anecdotal evidence, I should mention the “conversation” I had with the baggage-handler at Penn station before I got on my train to DC. American trains go a long way, it is a continent after all. As such, many trains require you to check in your baggage before you get on the train. I assumed this would be the case with my train, so approached the man at the baggage desk. He was slouched over said desk, chewing a pen. I said I’d like to check my baggage in and he responded “Lemme see yer ticket” around the pen. After inspecting my ticket he said “It’s carry on”. I said “I’m sorry?”. He snapped “It’s a carry on train. You carry your luggage on.” I apologised and thanked him, and he seemed to mellow. “Where ya from?” he asked. “England,” I said, smiling. He said… absolutely nothing. He stayed slouched, chewing his pen, staring at me.

Also, I should say I don’t believe the woman in the chemist’s is actually interested in how my day is going any more than the figurative one in the UK, or indeed any other person to whom I am a stranger, but it is the /willingness to engage/ that I admire.

Anyway, I have digressed so much I never actually started. Sadly it’s now time for me to go hunt some dinner. The only other salient point you need to know is that Gary cooked chicken marabella for dinner, which was very nice (mental note to cook it when I get home) – that’s where the ‘chicken’ of the title comes from

Right, see you cats tomorrow. Probably.

Today started smoothly enough – up at 6 to checkin at 8 for a flight at 11. Unfortunately said flight was delayed by two hours.

Shortly after 1 the passenger sat next to me buried her fingernails into the armrests as we zipped off the runway up to 40,000ft (at over 500mph. Five. Hundred. Don’t be all ‘ya ya, that’s what planes do, get over it’ – that’s impressive!).

I was sat in the emergency aisle. When they asked at checkin if I would be prepared to help the crew in the event of an emergency landing I was tempted to say “well I’ll try and make everyone be quiet so we can drown with a spot of dignity” but I felt my audience wouldn’t have appreciated it. Thankfully the promised disaster never occurred (unless you count the makeup on one of the trolley dollies-haw haw! But seriously, she looked like the joker. Anyway)

As I sat on the plane I congratulated myself on my planning – I knew the bus from the airport to the train station would take about an hour, including getting the baggage on, so I’d left a four hour gap. This was now a bit-less-than-two hour gap.

*bung*

“This is Captain Hoojamaflip, JFK have us in a holding pattern, we will be arriving slightly later than scheduled.”

Bum. Hole.

When we arrived at JFK I still stood a chance, as long as customs went smoothly.

I expect those of you who have been to the US recently are chuckling now.

The ESTA, which I’d filled in online, needed to be filled in again on paper. I had no pen, but on the advice of recent US visitors I did have a printed copy of my ESTA form with me anyway. Not good enough! Needs to be on the BLUE FORM, as an official kindly snarled at me. After much pen-borrowing I got through customs to baggage retrieval, where my flight’s baggage had got mixed up with another’s. Tick. Tick. Tick.

By the time I got to the shuttle bus I decided it wouldn’t make it on time, so I got in a taxi. This would’ve been a good idea, had it not been rush hour.

So the drivers are all mental in New York. To a man. A man in particular being my driver (but of course), who weaved between fast-moving streams of traffic just like they do in the fillims. Strangest part about it: nobody blew their horn. Not once. Like they just accepted it as normal. Also no pedestrian ever shouted “I’m walkin’ hyeeeeyr!”, which was something of a disappointment.

The part of town containing JFK is fairly dull. Kinda like any other city really. Didn’t “feel like America” so to speak. Well, not until I saw a massive billboard with a splattered blood motif inviting people to give details on cop shootings by ringing 1-800-SHOT-COP.

Soon enough we reached NYC proper, and it was nuts. Vehicles (including bicycles and rickshaws) and pedestrians all ignoring signals and going (at speed) when they felt there was a gap. Eventually we pulled up and the driver waved me off down a street with a vague ‘that way’. As it turns out, he meant seven blocks ‘that way’. Cheers!

All was not lost at the train station. The woman at the ticket office politely informed me they’d take the cost of my unused ticket off the price of the next one. Hooray! So that’s $76 off.. slightly less than $200. Unhooray!

So that brings me to where I am now, in the quiet coach of the Acela Express to Washington D.C. (Americans always use full stops between letters in acronyms – trufax!). We just stopped at Philadelphia, and the light is fading. Over here it is getting close to 9pm. My phone says it is 0135, and my brain says it is banana o’clock.

Goodnight, if you can.

http://www.openrightsgroup.org/campaigns/disconnection/why-care
http://www.38degrees.org.uk/page/speakout/extremeinternetl

The 38degrees site will help you write to your MP too.

Dear Mr Lloyd

Have you read the digital economy bill being rushed into law without debate?

It makes the owner of an internet connection liable for any copyright infringements that occur through its use, even if those infringements are carried out by someone unknown to the owner, without their knowledge.

Let’s imagine an average household. Fred has wireless internet installed at home, but he’s by no means an expert. His 13-year-old son knows far more than he does about the computer. Unfortunately for Fred, one of the things his son knows is how to download songs for free. He has a vague feeling that it’s supposed to be wrong, but he’s never really understood how – it’s not like he’s stealing them after all. Sadly, an infringement is an infringement and the kid will learn when Fred gets the first letter from the ISP. A couple of weeks later Fred’s son invites a friend over to work on a school project. His friend brings his laptop, and it automatically connects to the wireless network. It then resumes what it was doing before he put it to sleep at his own house – namely downloading the torrent of the new Transformers film. Oh dear! Infringement two. Fred is now particularly tense – the second letter has made it quite clear he’ll be disconnected next time, and he has no idea how to stop the computer letting his son download songs. Can you make the computer do that? He doesn’t know, so he has to rely on his son’s word. Unfortunately for him his technically-literate neighbour has hacked into Fred’s wireless network and downloaded several films.

When Fred gets disconnected, the letter says he can appeal. But what can he say? He has no idea who downloaded that last batch of films. His son is adamant it wasn’t him, or any of his friends. Fred doesn’t have the technical knowledge to know where to begin proving his innocence.

It’s fair to say I grew up with the Internet – I was “online” before the web had been invented – but even with that experience I couldn’t prove Fred innocent either. His wireless router probably doesn’t record information about the computers it connects to the Internet (mine doesn’t), but even if it did all it could record would be the MAC address. This is effectively just a name, unique to each computer. The record would contain entries for Fred’s computer, his son’s computer, and a mysterious other computer, which was connected at the time of the infringement. Unfortunately even with this information Fred still can’t prove his innocence as there’s nothing to say he doesn’t own the third computer too.

The fear of similar situations will mean public wireless internet will all but vanish. What cafe owner will take the risk? A technically literate one would realise the need to record extensive logs, which comes at a cost significant enough to make the free internet too expensive to be worth the effort.

Perhaps more important than the technical considerations is the fact we are talking about “proving innocence”. If that concept in itself is not fundamentally wrong then it is surely a significant enough departure from the usual application of law that it deserves intense parliamentary scrutiny – don’t you agree?

The music and film industries like to portray anyone disagreeing with their draconian copyright reform demands as freeloading “pirate” pseudo-anarchists who just don’t like paying for things. This is simply not true – all of my technically-literate friends are against this bill, and all of us regularly buy music and films, whether in shops or online, through services like iTunes and Spotify.

In a leaked email (available at http://www.boingboing.net/2010/03/12/leaked-uk-record-ind.html) Richard Mollett, Director of Public Affairs at the BPI relates a “strange sense of detachment” amongst MPs regarding the digital economy bill. Apparently, MPs are “already resigned to the fact that they will have minimum input into the provisions”. Are you already resigned to it Mr Lloyd?

Yours sincerely,
Chris Russell

The last time this happened I came across a piece of software called Rosetta Stone – it claims to teach languages in an “intuitive” way, and has an endorsement from Eddie Izzard, which is quite impressive to me. However it costs a small fortune (~£400 for a full course) which put me off at the time.

Recently though it was bonus time at work (woohoo!) and I was reminded about Rosetta Stone. So I did a bit more research.. and found one or two reviews that talked about a concern of mine – that Rosetta Stone’s “intuitive” method completely avoided teaching grammar, leaving you with a good stock set of phrases for various situations, but little ability to develop your knowledge beyond that point.

Another product seemed to deal with that – Tell Me More claims to be used by substantially more European governments, universities and businesses, and will happily tell you all about grammar if you ask. Iiiinteresting..

So tonight I decided it was time to just go for it – out came the debit card, onto Tell Me More’s website goes the browser. After being redirected to the correct site for buying in the UK, I started entering my details. I tend to have things delivered to work (cos most of the time I’m there, not at home – clever eh?) so I had to enter a separate delivery address. The website invited me to check my details – it listed the correct addresses, but had me as “Miss” on the delivery. Oops! Must’ve filled that in wrong – “amend”.. I set it to “Mr”. Invited to check my details again – I’m still “Miss”. Hmm. I tried to fix this a couple more times but the site was adamant. Whatever, it’s only an address label. Next stage! I entered my payment details – and was sent back to step 1. Getting quite peeved now. Payment details again.. back to step 1. Right. RIGHT.

Off to the “contact us” page. I entered a polite message suggesting that I expect somewhat better service when they’re asking me to part with £400, and hit the send button. Javascript errors galore! *sigh*

I went back to the front page. “Contact us”. “Consumer”. I’m presented with a slightly different contact form. This one has a field marked “Date:” followed by SIX boxes, marked “Day”, “Month”, “Year”, “Day”, “Month”, “Year”. You want two dates? Which two dates? I only have one birthdate, so it can’t be that. If it’s the date I got really fucked off with your website, that’s today. The date I went to your competitor and gave them £400 – that’ll be tomorrow.

(In case you were wondering – German)

A few weeks ago I tweeted my annoyance at Apple refusing to replace my knackered Etymotic HF2 earphones. A few people have asked “what happened next”, so I thought I’d post the (slightly odd) tale here..

My headphones started having problems a few months ago – I sometimes had to wiggle the cable around at the jack to get sound in both channels. In hindsight it was obvious the wire was coming away internally, and I should’ve taken them back to Apple then, but I didn’t *shrug*. As you can probably guess, some months later one channel died completely, so I took them back to Apple.

The guy in the Apple store was remarkably difficult. At first he told me I couldn’t bring the earphones back as I’d owned them longer than two weeks. I pointed out that since the earphones were faulty that rule wasn’t relevant (you can take something back to a shop for no reason at all within two weeks of buying it). He went to talk to the manager.. when he came back he asked if I had the debit card I’d used to buy the earphones. I said no, the card had been replaced since. His face lit up – “I’m sorry, we need the original card to trace the electronic receipt!”. His smile faded when I showed him the emailed version of the receipt in my gmail. He went to talk to the manager again.. and this time came back beaming – “Apparently we don’t stock them any more, so we couldn’t replace them anyway. Sorry about that!” I didn’t think I could demand a refund as I’d owned them for about 8 months, but I wasn’t sure.. so I left it at that.

I did a little more research when I got home (as I couldn’t get data on O2. Again. Oh, I can’t wait for this contract to be up.. anyway) and found things a little hazy. The only concrete rule I could find was that if something you buy develops a fault in the first six months, the law considers that the product has always been faulty, so the retailer must replace it for you. After six months, the onus is on the consumer to prove they didn’t cause the fault – which of course they can rarely do. I certainly couldn’t..

Etymotic have a 2-year warranty on HF2s, so I guessed I’d have to go to them. The thought of possibly having to pay postage to and from the US, and the potential lengths of time involved concerned me, but I didn’t have a lot of choice. I emailed Etymotic’s tech support, and tweeted my woes.

A day or so later @Charles_Kennard rather enigmatically offered to help with my HF2s. Google suggested links to Etymotic, so I mailed him. He was very helpful, and interested to hear what happened at Apple. I explained all, and sent my broken earphones to the address he gave me (in the UK, handily). My shiny new HF2s arrived on Monday. Thanks Charles!

Etymotic’s tech support got back to me yesterday.. suggestion was that they would pay the postage back to the UK, so it wouldn’t be quite as expensive as I thought. But I told them I didn’t need their help after all..

So I’ve learnt to be much more of an arse with Apple – the next thing I buy from the Apple store is being returned if anything about it is less than perfect. Etymotic, on the other hand, have come out of this ok in my opinion. HF2s have really good sound quality, and they’re the most isolating earphones I’ve ever owned. The cable problem is widespread, and that’s disappointing in a product so expensive, but the warranty does much to ameliorate it.

The punchline of this whole thing is that I spent so long without HF2s my ears have regained their virginity

There is a gushing quote from the Telegraph review on the back which starts “Within the first 15 pages I was carried away by the sheer craziness of it all”. I’m 100 pages in.. and I still think it’s bobbins.

I looked it up on the web tonight in case it was meant for under 11s and Waterstones had just mis-shelved it – apparently not. Not only is it for “all ages” (and it appears to have quite a devoted following) but it is often compared to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy. I can’t help but find that slightly irritating.. Hitchhiker’s is a book full of witty insights on human behaviour. Despite the fact it started as a vehicle for various of Douglas Adams’ sketches it had several plotlines and many well-developed characters. Arthur Dent particularly was so well characterised you couldn’t help but feel an affinity for him. Against this we are to compare a blue bear who is born into a wacky situation before moving into another wacky situation, pausing briefly to describe the new wacky situation before tumbling headlong into, yes, another wacky situation. Not only is that not particularly entertaining, it’s easy. Let’s see if I can show you what I mean:

I don’t remember how I first met the trolls of Hum-da-woo, but my earliest memories were of their warty faces peering in at me in my basket of custard. For reasons unknown to me at the time they took me in as one of their own, combing my feathers and changing my custard regularly. In return they expected me to help hunt for Toffee Wombats on the plains – a task for which I was ideally suited, being a parrot with a sweet tooth and eyes that could see a thousand yards.

Gradually my need for custard became too great for the trolls to satisfy, and after many years of friendship I knew we had to part. The fateful day came when I perched atop the handle of my little custard basket and, with tears in my parrot-eyes, squawked a fond farewell to my carers of many years. Their eyes similarly moist, they turned from me and walked back toward the village – the Toffee Wombats wouldn’t hunt themselves after all. Taking a deep breath I picked up my basket in my beak and flew off into the sunset.

Bedazzled by the brightness of the sunset I quickly got lost. I say I got lost, I didn’t really know where I was going in the first place, but nonetheless I wasn’t going in the direction I had intended and this caused me some anguish. After some hours of not knowing where I was I decided to land. I came to a standstill on a large grey rock. I put my basket down, and preened for a moment. To my deep astonishment, the rock spoke! “Have you no respect?” it boomed, “How dare you stand upon an Elder of the Granite Magisterium?! I, who have beheld the Darkening of The Wonkysocks – I! who single-stonedly thwarted The Army of Miserable Pasties!”

(etc.)

It’s train-of-thought nonsense. It’s hardly the beginnings of a novel.

I don’t know, maybe I’ll change my mind in another 100 pages.

Hello*

I am writing** with a query regarding your lovely pepperarmi sticks which I have just finished eating one.

I read on the packet that a stick has 150% pork. I had to ask my friend Sammy what % means because I never knew and Sammy is clever so I knew he would know what % means so I asked him. He said it was something to do with “out of a hundred” and that 100% of something is one of it, and more than 100% means more than one of it. He was going to draw me some pictures but he had to collect Cheryl from the swimming baths and when he got back we’d forgot but I think I know what it means now.

What I want to know is if 100% pork means one whole cow, does 150% (which is 50 more than a whole one) mean one pepperarmi stick has 51 cows in it?

Because if that is what it means I think you should tell more people about it because if you can fit 51 cows into a little stick, that means you can fit a great big farm in a carrier bag instead of lots of fields! I think farmers would like to know how to do that.

I was worried that you might not have time to go out to all the farms in the world telling farmers how to fit their cows into sticks but then I thought if you tell me how to do it I could go out and tell the farmers for you. I am free in the evenings except on Thursdays when I am a Cavalier*** in my local reenactment society.

I have packed my bag already, I thought I would go to Mr Wollesley’s farm first as it’s only just down by the paper shop but I will wait for you to say yes first.

If you do want to do it yourself then tell me that too, I don’t mind. I would like to hear how it goes though!!

Thank you, and keep up the good (pepperarmi making) work!!

Chris

*Sammy says emails shouldn’t have “dear mr X” written on. If you find this rude please tell me and I’ll try harder.

**or rather EMAILING!!

***not the car!!

From: peperami@unileverconsumerlink.co.uk
To: chris*@*.com
Date: June 15th 2009
Subject: Peperami CaseID#701249#

Hello from Peperami

Dear Chris,

Thank you for your recent query about the confusing labelling on Peperami.

Under the labelling laws for processed meat products like sausages, we are
required to state the amount of raw meat as a percentage of the finished
product – including all the other ingredients like spices, salt etc.

For raw sausages the meat percentage will be less than 100% because other
ingredients are added during manufacture.

However, Peperami is a cured sausage and weight is lost through evaporation
of water during manufacture. This means that the weight of the raw meat we
put in before cooking and curing is higher than the weight of the finished
Peperami that is sold. The meat content is therefore more than 100%. As
an example – a 25g Peperami is made with 27g of raw meat.

I hope that this has helped. If you need any further information, then
please let me know.

Kind regards,

Aysha Pirgali
Careline Advisor

[booooooooriiiiiiiiiiiiiing]

dear mr swizuls-matlo my name is christopher and i am 7 yers old and i liv in manchester and i hav just been eaten jelly spiders FUN GUMS i like them lots becose they r cullerful and nice i have dun a project for school on spiders and i learnd that they hav got 8 legs but yor ones only hav 6 my dad seys they must be mutunts and if i tell yuo yuo will giv me sum 4 free i hav sent yuo my project so yuo can see it miss elkin scant it in 4 me she seys i shud eat fruits not swets but i think fruits are boran my adress is **** fank yuo yors sinseerly christopher russell

[No reply. Heartless bastards!]