Tag: shrill

A bit of a rant.. and get off my lawn!

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This is another entry in the “I'm getting old” saga…

Katy and I are in Leics at the moment. Last night was one of her great-uncle thrice-removed-sort-of-thing's 50th wedding anniversary and we'd been invited to the soiree. At times, I felt like I was back in Buckingham with the the events organized by the Chevaliers de Colomb that all my uncles used to belong to. Same sort of social hall, same sort of crappy DJ, same sort of homemade buffet. The evening was being held at a “working man's” club (i.e. a big hall with a bar). It has the distinction of having the grossest toilet I've ever seen (and I've been to Mardi Gras in New Orleans). The floor was so slick with urine that I almost slipped and fell over. That would have been nice.

Anyway. The evening was mostly fun, except for the music. The DJ was pure and absolute shite. Some songs got played twice (or more) in a span of 3 hours. The rest of the time, it was just plain cheese mixed in with some truly bad remixes. The whole of it was just too fucking loud. Getting tinnitus is not my idea of a good time, nor is having to shout at the person sitting next to you to be heard.

Speaking of remixes though, let me interrupt this rant with a bit of a side-rant. I like music. I like many sorts of styles of music. Modern music is, sadly, trash that I would not feed to pigs (if such a thing were possible). A lot of what I heard last night was blatant riff rip-offs from golden oldies and the remixes… don't get me started on the remixes. Kung Fu Fighting was not the best ever song when it came out, but it didn't deserve the humiliation that it got last night. To date, the worst ever butchered remix I've ever heard is Gerardo Mejia's Latin Till I Die, a latino-rap remix of Oye Como Va. The truly sad thing? It was playing in the lab when I was doing my master's degree. A girl I was working with had never heard of Santana and thought this great song was the original version.

So yeah. I know everything old is new again, and that everybody is ripping off Pachelbel anyway, but still… Give credit where credit is due and try to respect the classics, for the love of God.

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There go those plans straight out the window

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Not a happy bunny at the moment.

I got my passport and visa application back today. I have just pissed away 350 quid, as visa has been denied. Well, not so much denied as me being told that I don't qualify for it as I'm currently under a pseudo-diplomatic visa. Reading between the legalese, it means that as long as I work for the EBI, I need the clearance exception visa that I currently have. As long as I have that visa, I cannot qualify for a spousal visa. As long as I can't get the spousal visa, I can't start the citizenship process.

What's even worse though is that when my contract runs its course, I'll need to apply for a spousal visa to stay in the UK. I'll have been there 9 years, but none of those will count for anything, immigration-wise. I will not have a job anymore, but I won't be able to apply for any until I get the spousal visa. Having a job will go a long way to being able to get a spousal visa. Anybody see the nice catch-22 in the making?

On the plus side, a job is not really a requirement, as long as we can show that we have means to support ourselves. That's a strong incentive to start saving; and the golden handshake I get from the EBI should help with that as well.

Still, I do not need this aggravation now.

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There is justice after all :)

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I had a look at my credit card statement online today and I found out that Natwest declined the transaction for the bastard webhost from hell. Initially, they told me over the phone that the transaction would have to clear first before they could initiate a chargeback but since the fucktards actually had our old address on file, Natwest refused the transaction. Interestingly, I've still not heard a peep from them regarding the declined transaction. I just hope that I get something that doesn't come from an automated system so that I can finally sent a vitriolic email to a flesh-and-bone human. ohpleaseohpleaseohplease :)

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Good news, annoying news

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Good news: the Home Office cashed the visa fee cheque, so that means that the application is being worked on.

Annoying news: Remember NetBunch, the band of fuckwits that was hosting my website last November when nothing was working? The incompetent asswipes that would not answer my faxes and emails? Well, they happily went ahead and renewed my contract with them and charged me 90$USD for the privilege of being given shit service and generally ignored. Nice of 'em, yes? I contacted Natwest to have that charge cancelled on my credit card and sent them a nice flaming email for their trouble.

Bastards.

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Are we having fun yet?

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It's 5:30 and I've been tossing and turning for the last hour. I can't really say that the rest of the night has been any better. My back is killing me and I've been almost pushed out of bed twice tonight. Throw in Katy's snoring (she has a cold) and a bad case of wandering duvet and you get a really, really satisfying night's sleep. And if you believe that, I have some prime real estate I want to sell you in Florida…

In other news, I've already mentioned that Katy has a cold, which is making her miserable. A grumpy Katy tends to spread the love around and since I tend to be the closest target, I get a lot of it – which isn't doing wonders for my mental health at the minute.

All in all, I'm tired, my back hurts and I'm not in the best of moods today. To top it all off, today is Thursday – i.e. meeting day. This day can't get any better than this – and it hasn't really even begun yet.

JOY

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website update

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My current web host is completely crap. It's worse than crap. It's pus-riddled donkey ass. It's pissed me off past the point of no return, so I'm canceling my service and getting a new host. Things should be working in the next few days. More as things develop.

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More pissed off than I should be

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I think I've now fixed all that was broken when my friggin ISP got hacked. I have to say that I am not impressed with their tech support. Getting hacked is bad enough, but that's forgivable. Losing all the backups at the same time, less so. Needing to migrate every user account to a new box, you're starting to suck ass. Then we get to the realms of the truly incompetent: creating my account twice, giving me two sets of DNS server information to update my domain name registration. When asked which one to use, giving me the wrong set.

Finally, everything seems to be back up, with all the content found and only one JPG file lost to the ethers. I can live with that. What pisses me off though, really really badly, is that I lost over two years of access logs!

Now I'm not really vain generally, but I liked to be able to see how my website progressed over time. At it's busiest, I was going over 10GB of bandwidth a month! Craptacular.

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We are fucking not amused

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My website hosting provider was hacked a few days ago. All their servers have been wiped and what's worse, all the backups have been deleted as well. The fucking losers. I have a backup of my website on my laptop, but I know that there's some stuff that was only online. It's not mission critical, but it does piss me off. When I'm back in the UK and have a broadband connection to re-upload everything, I'm going to go through the links on my LJ and see what's lost and what I can recreate.

In the meantime, I'm going to put my bookmarks online so I can at least have a copy at hand to go browse stuff.

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