Category Archives: WTF

Crazy email filtering

PC 200” posted a blog entry about their force’s email filtering system which made me laugh enough to want to mention it here.

They block inbound attachments, which could be a pain, but is sensible enough.

However, they also block “bad” language (as I’m sure the police don’t get subjected to foul language often, and their poor, delicate sensitivities would be mortally offended by it….) – but then send you an email to report that an inbound mail was blocked, describing why:

You’ll get an email which says something along the lines of “you have been sent an email containing offensive or inappropriate language. The language contained is of a value of 60 points. The word was either one of the following or a derivative of: fuck, fucking, fuckers, mother-fucker, fuck-off”.

So, they’ll block the email containing the word that might offend you, then send you an email containing that word and many other alternatives of it!

And the other thing which intrigues me, is that somewhere in the Home Office a committee has sat around a table wondering how many points to give swear words. You can imagine it. A whole afternoon, or more, debating how many points to give ‘bollocks’. “OK, we’ll give ‘bollocks’ 50 points, agreed?” “No, if we give ‘bollocks’ 50 then we have to give ‘arsehole’ 65, surely”, “Yes, but if we give ‘arsehole’ 65 then we have to reduce ‘wanker’ to 63.” “OK, let’s give ‘bollocks’ 45.” “No we can’t do that because ‘balls’ is 45.”

I’ve been reading his blog "200 Weeks" for a while now, well worth a read.

There is no hope

According to this report, Camelot have had to withdraw a scratch card because the general public are too thick to understand negative numbers.

From the article:

Tina Farrell, from Levenshulme, called Camelot after failing to win with several cards.

The 23-year-old, who said she had left school without a maths GCSE, said: “On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop. But when she scanned the card the machine said I hadn’t.

“I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher – not lower – than -8 but I’m not having it.

Continue reading There is no hope

Grr, MySQL and enum types….

I want to stab MySQL between the eyes. Or rather if MySQL had eyes, I’d stab it squarely between them.

It just wasted far too much of my time with this bit of annoying behaviour. I’ll admit it was also my fault, but I still think MySQL reacted in a retarded way. (But then from a “database” system which on its default settings is happy to silently mangle data however it feels, that’s not too surprising).

Continue reading Grr, MySQL and enum types….

Woman cleared of criminal negligence in dog attack

BBC News reports that a woman accused over a fatal dog attack on her five-year-old granddaughter has been found not guilty of manslaughter.

OK, this woman was supposed to be responsible for a 5 year old child. By her own admission she had consumed two bottles of wine, and smoked ten joints – that alone likely means she would have been in no fit state to responsibly look after a child. But, she then chose to allow a dangerous pit bull dog into the house, which then killed the little girl.

The dog was illegal (under the Dangerous Dogs act) and had already been involved in two previous attacks. The dog’s owner has been given a prison sentence but the woman has been cleared of manslaughter by criminal negligence. Why? Did she really think that allowing a vicious dog (pit bull terriers are banned precisely because they are vicious, dangerous dogs bred to fight) was a good idea?

Three Valleys Water cont’d

I already wrote a post about how Three Valleys Water randomly decided to remove our meter.

We’ve just had a bill through from them, with a meter reading that they took on the 28th August, billing us £82 for three months usage. That figure is utter crap, it’s way too high. Not to mention, there was no meter attached to our supply on the 28th August! That’s a day or two after I noticed that the meter had been removed.

They’ve put the bill on hold (just as well, because I was going to instruct my bank not to pay the Direct Debit) while they send an engineer out to see what’s happened, then when they get the report back they’ll “adjust the bill”. I can suggest a suitable adjustment – stick the thing up your fucking arse!

Continue reading Three Valleys Water cont’d

One hell of a gift voucher!

I placed an order with Amazon today, and applied a gift voucher to it. When I added the voucher, I was quite amazed by the saving it offered:

Amazon huge gift voucher

I had no idea I’d received a 9 billion pound voucher! Unfortunately, it subsequently changed to the correct figure of £20, otherwise I’d have added all of Amazon to my shopping basket :)