The Hero is slick. And here I am trying out the new WordPress app. You never know, it might encourage me to blog more instead of just tweeting.

www.jajah.com

maybe we need a celebrity to point out some interesting problems in the british political arena. speaking of which, my local green candidate has a blog. would you vote for someone who didn’t?

they say:

The finding could bring forward the day that true artificial intelligence is developed.

a good read. they use the ‘normalised Google distance’ to determine how related a pair of words are, more search results means more related.. etc. i feel uncomfortable about google being involved in anything particularly useful though, for some reason.

A quick google search for Transport Direct turns up a case study at microsoft.com. I find titles like Fast Development, Lower Costs and Prepared for the Future.

Best quote:

We have been able to do it at a reasonable cost and in reasonable time frame.

I wonder how much of that £50 million went to Microsoft, and I wonder why they opted against open standards, instead preferring a proprietary, vendor lock-in approach.

Perhaps they’d have been better with an open-access, shared database. A transport wiki with more structure. Description of a Journey, anyone?

Did I mention, they also appear to have missed a lot of very important data. How about cycling?

then i began ordering them according to the departments i might find the items in, in order to avoid unnecessary walking and time consumption.

a short while ago i began adding prefixes to the beginning of each item on the list (much to the amusement of many), according to which recipe it came from. my shopping lists can get rather large and in case i can’t get something fundamental, i can scrap the whole recipe.

i now suspect that this was from a subconscious notion of namespaces, using recipe and ingredients.

every 30 – 60 secs there would be a short bit of glitchy interference. it sounded like some weird glitch electronica, but only briefly. turns out it is actually the taxi rank a few doors down using their radios to communicate. is this illegal, that they are cutting up over our radio signal?

at the beginning of july I moved house, I contacted NTL in early june to have our phone line and cable internet connection disconnected at that house and moved to a new flat. all seemed to be ok. unfortunately they weren’t able to install at the new flat for their own reasons, not mine, and they agreed not to charge me for terminating the contract.

unfortunately it took them until december to realise i had actually moved house and had left the phone line and cable connected during that time. i’ve been calling them every month since july, and since i stopped being a customer i estimate i have phoned them over 50 times. until december they continued to take money from my account without telling me, as they don’t provide paper bills for their cable broadband service, because the amount is fixed every month.

NTL agreed that they had overcharged me and refunded circa £30 in december, unfortunately leaving £100 remaining. i’ve written to them, Trading Standards wrote to them in november, and yet i have received no response from them. they have told me 6 times that they would call me back when they had resolved the problem, NTL have never called me.

i tried to close the matter on 31 december, unfortunately NTL were having none of it and instead agreed to investigate why i hadn’t received my refund, for money they had taken from my account without my permission for services i terminated 6 months previously. they never got back to me.

under no circumstances should anybody ever deal with these morons. i am not alone in my experiences.