All Banks Are Completely Incompetent

It won’t have escaped your notice that UK banking is in a sorry state. My personal experience of domestic banks over the last forty years is that they are singularly incompetent at everything they do. I won’t bore you with a catalogue of woes, but I will share my latest experience with you. My partner and I have a joint mortgage with Halifax. The other day we received a letter as follows:

Dear Mr Dobson & Miss Jordan

That’s it! That is the entire letter. See the scanned image. The only manipulation I’ve done is to blur out our postal address.

Covering Your Router In Aluminium Foil

A friend was given a suggestion by someone from IT to alleviate network connection issues. The suggestion is to wrap their router in "tin foil". When they'd finished laughing, they called me for an opinion. Assuming they meant ordinary aluminium kitchen foil, the suggestion is ludicrous. The best you might hope for is that it doesn't make any difference. If it has any affect it would surely be to act as a Faraday cage, keeping external radiation out and internal radiation in. I decided to test it. I performed six throughput runs alternating between uncovered and loosely covered with a folded sheet of kitchen foil. Each run consisted of three one-minute trials, where TCP upstream and downstream speeds were averaged using TamoSoft Throughput. The server was my development PC upstairs; the client a downstairs laptop two metres from the router. Both were connected on the 5GHz WiFi band. Here are the results. The best you can say for the foil is tha...

BBC Cowering Before Right-Wing Authoritarianism

Gary Lineker is of course right in everything he says about the government's asylum policy. There are two issues. First, should a regular presenter be restricted from political comment outside the confines of their role, in the interests of public broadcast impartiality? The answer is obvious, and you would have thought that the BBC had learnt its lesson when it ended up apologizing for censuring Naga Munchetty for heartfelt comments on Donald Trump's blatant racism, following a public and internal outcry over her treatment. Munchetty's comments were made on a live BBC broadcast. Lineker's comments were off-air on his private social media account. Nobody is in any doubt that the comments are Lineker's rather than the BBC's. Second, how circumspect should anyone be about comparing right wing nationalism with the political ideology of the Nazis? The answer is very. But Lineker has indeed been cautious in his language. I pointed out myself in the lead-up to the...

Boris Johnson is a Pathological Liar

When I was a teenager, our class were caught gambling and the head decided to cane us. He lined us up to ask each child if they were involved. Nobody lied; the idea of dishonesty was much worse than the fear of corporal punishment. Boris Johnson is the exact opposite: a pathological liar; a delinquent who derives psychological satisfaction from the slightest deceit; from getting one over on people. And he covers up any exposed mendacity with further fabrications. He was unanimously found guilty of lying to the Head of State by eleven Supreme Court judges. He was fired from his job as a journalist for a campaign of systematic lies about the EU over a prolonged period and after multiple warnings. He conspired to deceive the nation before the Brexit vote with deliberately misleading financial propaganda, when the Treasury's own forecast for leaving was for significant long-term financial disadvantage. He knowingly lied about the difficulty of getting a Brexit settlement with the EU. W...

Aniseed Balls

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