denyerec.co.uk

We’ve just received a reminder from dear old Powergen and they open like so:

As a customer who normally pays your bills very promptly, it is unusual for us to have not received payment by now.

Do you think they’re honestly keeping track of that? I wonder what the reminder would read like if we never paid on time? It’s not like you get a bonus for paying on time either, there’s no incentive as they blatantly rip you off whether you’re prompt or not. Perhaps it’s time to buy an army of hamsters and couple them up to dynamo running wheels?

Our last electricity bill totallyed 81 UK Pounds for the quarter. That’s 27 pounds a month for the less mathematical people out there. This might not seem surprising, until you consider the following details. We run, in our household, the following electrical things:

• Fridge Freezer
• Washing machine
• Vacuum cleaner
• 2x PC’s
• 6 100w lightbulbs
• PC peripherals occasionally, such as scanner, printer, etc

That’s it.
No TV, no stereo, no ambient lights, no novelty electronic goods, nothing. The heating is gas, the lights aren’t on all the time, we don’t have a power shower, the cooker is gas and we don’t have anyone living in the basement we don’t know about.

So… what the hell is going on ? We’re with Powergen and although they’ve admitted raising prices all across the board (Along with most UK providers) it still feels like we’re being skimmed somehow as we have a tiny amount of electricals compared to some people, yet are paying more on our bill than anyone else I know.

I don’t know how you go about working out how much you should be paying, asking Powergen would be like asking the tax office if you really have to pay that much with, naturally, their answer being “yes” every time. Anyone out there got any ideas?

Well, even though I installed the blacklister, which has been rather successful, there is still some arsehole using randomly generated spoofed email domains to spam my site.
I don’t give a damn about Texas Holdum and I have no idea which genius spammer thought this site would be a good vehicle to advertise it, but there you go. For the time being, comments have been switched to moderation only. Perhaps I need a wordlist or URL blacklister, as detecting on email address is obviously not robust.

Answers on a (moderated) postcard.

For those of you who tired quickly of Microsoft’s eye-punishing bright blue colourscheme, you may or may not be aware that there are alternatives. The obvious ones are the “Olive” and “Silver” themes available in your display properties dialog, or you could revert back to the Win2K look if you’re feeling retro.

If however you fancy something else, help is at hand. Handily, this isn’t some crazy WindowsBlinds GUI overhaulling thing that will crash your PC and scare your grandparents, what I am on about uses WindowsXP’s native “styling engine”.

Currently I am using the Opus 1.5 theme by a chap called Bose. It comes in 3 colours, one of which being olive green so I’m all set.

To use these funky “MSStyles” you need a modified DLL patcher which you can download from the Neowin Forums. It’s quite safe, but it might violate a EULA somewhere along the line, modifying MS files and whatnot. Ho hum.

Neowin have a bunch of themes in their forums too, for those who don’t like Bose’s.

As “Stink Bomb” (Who the…) pointed out, we do not have a television. How then am I so well informed about series’ such as The Sandbaggers ?
DVD’s and my computer, of course! 😉

That link does go through to my Amazon affiliates thingy, which has successfully earned, well, nothing over the last 9 months. Whoot! Praise be for affiliate systems. Go on, click it, buy it, I’ll get 20p.

Goodness knows I could use it.

Recently we’ve been watching the first series of a 1978 show called The Sandbaggers.
Portraying UK intelligence in a more realistic light than James Bond could ever hope to, this series is heavy on dialog, doesn’t waste any time and doesn’t have any car chases. Well, there are a few, but it’s hard to imagine a Hollywood car chase in some of the things they drive…
Check out The Ops Room for more info and get hold of it, thoroughly recommended.
I’d give you more links, but my clipboard is broken.

If you were thinking of moving to Canada, it looks like now would be a good time to go through with it.

I would say “Unlucky, America.” but something deep down says that they’re not the ones who are going to end up paying.

*sigh*