The Great Email Migration
Nov0
After much deliberation and scratching of my beard, I’ve decided to move all my personal email to Google Apps. No particularly exciting reason except that it gives me better server-side spam filtering and faster webmail access. Now all I need to do is wait for 8,250 emails to find their way across the ether and enjoy the usual chaos whilst the universe’s DNS updates itself.
Smearing Emails Across Politics
Apr1
As you will no doubt have heard over the past week (unless you’re one of those under-a-rock type people) there has been Yet Another Scandal revolving around so-called ’smear’ emails sent by Labour adviser Damian McBride, containing unfounded allegations involving members of the Tory party.
This in itself was a generally stupid thing to do, and his resulting firing a necessary step to be taken. The trouble is that in the traditional style of the British press the story has been dragged around, beaten, pinned up against the wall, dragged down again, rubbed in various heaps of hyperbole, slander, disgust, outrage and bile and generally overused. What is even more annoying – although not unexpected – was that the Conservatives involved demanded an apology from Gordon Brown himself for the actions of somebody else.
For the Love of PDF
Dec0
Today I received an email from the SU. Nothing unusual there, it was telling me about interesting things I could do as a Student Rep.
This email had two attachments. Again, nothing too special – attachments are good and explained more details about a couple of the opportunities.
The attachments were a .docx and a .doc – bad.
The assumption is clearly that everybody has a piece of software which can read those file formats. A .doc isn’t too bad, since it’s a standard for Word, but very few people have upgraded to the Word 2007 needed to read the .docx format. Even worse, both formats kinda assume you are either using Windows and have a copy of Office, or have bothered to download something like OpenOffice (which can read both formats).
Enrolled, Exchanged and Elderly
Sep0
Today I had to head up to the Sports Centre with my ID card and various bits of enrolment paperwork to go sign myself on for another year at Lincoln. This I approached with some trepidation, as last year’s enrolment was a 3 hour queueing marathon since nobody had bothered to test any of the systems.
This year was much faster, a 30 minute queue and a quick scanning of a couple of barcodes. I’m now officially a Level 2 Computing and Cybernetics student at the University of Lincoln. Hooray!
Hooray for WiFi!
Dec0
A huge thanks to National Express, who have finally got the hang of this customer service thing in providing free WiFi on their East Coast train service. This is a welcome departure from GNER’s somewhat irritating “Pay us $100,000,000 for the privilege of connecting!” stance, however in the spirit of being big business they still ask for some information – namely your email address so that they may better spam you with unwanted offers.
Surely if you’re offering free WiFi, you may as well just leave it open and not require a HTML login form so that users with browserless devices (VoIP phones, for example) can take advantage. Oh well, it’s still better than nothing.