Microsoft Office: coming soon button

I warn you: I’ve decided to publish a blog post and I’ve never been moanier!

It’s been ages since I’ve blogged, but I’m not going to apologise or say I’ll try and blog more frequently now because:

•         It’s not true, and I couldn’t give a flying frick about blogging or my blog. Actually, I think I prefer not blogging. So it probably will be months or years before you hear from me again — if you ever do; and
•         Nobody reads this blog anyway.

Anyway, enough of that. My beef today is the stupid little loud hailer icon next to the minimise button in Word and other Office apps.

Yes — this thing.
 
I keep hitting it by mistake when I go to minimise the window.

And when the sidebar popped up today after I hit the damned thing again, I spotted the following text:

Office has a fresh look. It’s modern and new, designed to help you focus on your best work.

Seriously? What a load of fucking bollocks.

I think progress peaked with Office 2010 personally. And this touchy-feely modern-vibe bullshit just makes me want to boke!

A Christmas checklist from B&Q

 I received the following piece of nonsense in my inbox earlier from B&Q. 

Seriously? A Christmas checklist. I've annotated it accordingly!

Because that's what you really need over Christmas, isn't it - a fricking toilet seat! Actually, they say 'seats' - PLURAL. What sort of digestive calamities are B&Q anticipating here??

What utter bollocks this is. Mindless consumerism at its absolute worst! (On second thoughts, that award probably goes to secret santa arrangements in workplaces up and down the land. Suffice it to say that I always opt out of that nonsense.)

Best Christmas EVER!

I’ve been confounded by Asda’s marketing campaign for Christmas 2017 which has been thrust under my nose every time I open a Metro or turn on the TV for the last few weeks.  I’m fricking sick of it.  That campaign, of course, is the one promising people (but presumably only those who shop at Asda) the best Christmas ever. 

(Yes - I've really cut this out from the paper and scanned it in.)

Best. Christmas. Ever.  I mean - Christ...  where do you go from there?

If Asda are right, future Christmases are going to have scarily big shoes to fill.

There’s enough ‘organic’ pressure exerted on people throughout November and December to enjoy Christmas at all costs without subjecting them to a marketing campaign that’s focused solely on adding to that pressure.  Come on, Asda - that’s just cruel!

I’m not particularly anti-consumerist around the festive period.  I’m really not.  But I really hate the way that after months of build-up and increasingly intense coercion to invest (in every sense) in Christmas and all things Christmassy, from the evening of 25 December onwards, it’s dropped like a scalding-hot turkey that everyone ought to be ashamed of.  Before people have barely had time to whip off their tacky paper hats or locate the Alka-Seltzer to ease their indigestion from gluttonous helpings of Christmas lunch, the message comes down from on high that Christmas is over, it’s time to move on and focus on stampeding out of the house to the Boxing Day sales as a remedy for being cooped up with loved ones for, what, a WHOLE fricking day.  Hours later, we’re then directed to shift our minds to New Year’s stuff, detoxing and gym memberships.

So, after months of being subjected to shedloads of Christmassy shit, we’re then, in an instant, to pretend it never even happened?!?  Well – I’m sorry.  I’m just not playing that game anymore. 

I honestly believe that enjoying the entire festive period is much better for our collective mental health.  Why the constant search for the next big thing?  How about celebrating the present for a bit? 

So, Asda, I’m going to enjoy Christmas, but I’m not going to try to inflate it into something bigger that it can never live up to.  And I’m not going to venture into one of your cheap and nasty stores in any event.

Try to come up with something a bit more sensible for next year’s Christmas campaign, eh? 

Christmas sandwiches

Since 2010, November has always brought with it the first opportunity since the previous December to wrap my chubby little chops around a Christmas-themed sandwich during my lunch hour. As you can tell, I'm something of a lunchtime gourmet when I venture into the office.

Imagine my delight when today, after two weeks of eagerly looking, I finally spotted the Christmas butties neatly haphazardly displayed on the chiller shelf in Sainsbury's Local. There was just one Turkey Feast left which I quickly discounted; I never fancy the 'last turkey' of anything in a shop. Thankfully, my greedy little eyes spotted a few boxes of turkey with pigs under blankets left, so I practically shoulder-barged out of the way the dithering shopper in front of me and made a grab for one.

I thought it would be a good choice with which to open my Christmas sandwich account for 2017. Turkey with pigs under blankets has been one of my go-to Christmas sandwiches for the last two or three years and it's always a safe(ish) bet (to the extent that any of them are).

I noticed that the box design has received an overhaul for this year; it now sports a bright pink exterior with a few seasonal stars (of Bethlehem perhaps?) which, I thought at the time, gave it a hint of cheeky sophistication and sass. (Incidentally - I've always been a sucker for nicely-presented tat.) So, as I mooched my way towards the self-service checkouts -- I mean, why interact with another human if you can possibly avoid it? -- I thought: “oooooh – this is going to be a belter of a sandwich”. Or, as I saw on a pub sign in the run-up to Christmas last year, "It's [going to be] like Christmas in your mouth!!". Whatever that means.

^{Note: this box is last year’s get-up.  I couldn’t find a picture of the new one and I didn’t have the presence of mind to take a photo of the box myself.}

However, my excitement was short-lived. Once I got back to the office and finally made a start on my eagerly-anticipated lunch, I was disappointed. The sandwich wasn't sassy. It was stale.

The disappointment that hit me when I finally wrapped my chops around what turned out to be a miserable excuse for a sandwich is hard to convey. It's a truly galling experience when, after a fortnight of excited anticipation, you realise after the first gobfull that your supposed Christmassy sandwich is utter shite.

So, what was wrong exactly? Well - the sausages weren't flavoursome, the cranberry sauce was insipid being neither sweet nor sharp, the turkey was largely absent and to the extent it was there, was dry, the bacon was rubbery and un-bacon-like and the bread might have been fresh sometime last week, but it certainly wasn't today. Put frankly, it was wrong in just about every way a turkey, bacon and sausage sandwich could be wrong. And, to add insult to injury, I was left with a few pence of the tawdry excuse for meat stuck in my lower left third molar for the rest of the afternoon.

Trying to force that sandwich down was somewhat akin to, I should imagine, eating a curious assortment of flavourless cardboard pieces squidged lazily between two slices of stale bread. And it cost me £2.35.

Let's hope things improve when I try a 2017 version of the Turkey Feast. Because one thing's for sure: I won't be giving the pigs under blankets a second chance this year.

We noticed you’re using an ad-blocker. Oh really?

Like any self-respecting web user, I’ve used ad-blocking extensions for years now - since at least 2006. There are some sites so peppered with ads that browsing them without an ad-blocker just isn’t viable (I’m thinking in particular of some F1 sites I like to check frequently). Some sites are so bad that if it came to a choice between visiting them without an ad-blocker, or not visiting at all, I’d pick the latter, frankly.

Intrusive web adverts are annoying. There’s no getting around that. Equally, though, I’m not so away-with-the-fairies that I don’t recognise that a lot of this nice stuff we’re used to accessing freely on the net has to be paid for by someone, somewhere. Ads are the obvious way of doing that, but the dynamics of this model have changed hugely over the years and are becoming, by degrees, harder to sustain. (So I hear anyway.)

The use of paywalls is becoming worryingly commonplace – both across web content in general and streaming media in particular – and this approach flies directly in the face of some of the key founding principles of the web. And in this increasingly confused and scary world we live in, I think the need for the web to respect the principle of giving information freedom is more important than ever.

In the last couple of years, an increasing number of websites feature code to check whether visitors have ad-blockers installed. Where an ad-blocker is detected, the visitor sees a message of thinly veiled emotional blackmail or, increasingly, out-and-out pleading, asking the visitor to disable their ad-blocking functionality or to whitelist the relevant website. Some sites even prevent you from reading the article until you do one of these two things.

Most news agencies have used this tactic for some time, but other types of sites are now following suit. Even the ten-a-penny technology sites which regurgitate already regurgitated non-news, FUD and trite observations are doing it. I know. You wouldn’t think they’d have the nerve to try to guilt-trip visitors into viewing ads.

Almost invariably, I ignore all pleas of whitelisting. The one exception I made was for the Guardian’s website. Hey, I have to get my do-gooding, left-wing libertarian kicks somehow.

The bottom line is that web ads need to be more palatable and less intrusive. If there weren’t so many of them and if they weren’t so damned distracting and annoying, visitors would be less inclined to block ads in the first place. It’s a bit like the situation a decade ago when copyright holders were rightly lampooned for over-charging for their content, not doing enough to make it easily-accessible to customers in innovative ways, while struggling to understand why many users were choosing to download content unlawfully using peer-to-peer file sharing software. Thankfully, we’ve seen a lot of progress on that front (think: Spotify, Netflix and Amazon Prime, for example).

Back to web ads. The ones which get most on my thrupnies adopt the shock ‘n’ awe approach in which banner ads abseil down from the top of the screen, bumping the page content asunder in unnerving jolts, with the lower page content then being flanked by further ads. As these then load, the page content re-renders again so your eyes are bouncing around the page trying to catch up and you’re quickly reduced to a quivering nervous wreck. It’s a bit like expecting web users to browse the web high on crystal meth. It’s unacceptable and it’s disrespectful to the site’s visitors. And it’s no wonder use of ad-blockers has skyrocketed in recent years.

So, please, ad-makers and sites which feature them: try and be a bit more subtle and less annoying. Else the chances are your ads being unblocked are pretty much nil. And if that happens, we’ll all end up losing in the longer term.

Naming storms. Why it gives me the fricking squits.

I wrote this post nearly a month ago in mid February 2016.  I’ve read it a couple of times since then as I’ve pondered whether or not to publish it.  Am I being too harsh, I wondered, or getting my knickers in a twist over something trivial.

In the end, I’ve decided, no – I need to say this stuff.  Someone needs to. 

But I have toned the original language down considerably. 

#storm-in-a-shitpot

----------------------
One of the latest things to get right on my proverbials is the ridiculous policy the Met Office have adopted of naming storms.

In their infinite stupidity, they say the pilot project (with their equally ridiculous Irish counterparts) has been launched for the following reason:

The naming of storms using a single authoritative system should aid the communication of approaching severe weather through media partners and other government agencies. In this way the public will be better placed to keep themselves, their property and businesses safe.

I say: what absolute bollocks.

Like most Brits, I’ve got a morbid fascination for the weather. My father’s a self-styled full-time weather-watcher and observationist (yep – just made that word up). It’s his favourite topic of conversation. Michael Fish would have looked like a part-time amateur compared to him. And he’s not the only one; Britain loves its weather forecasts like no other nation on earth. In short: we’ve all got our eye on this stuff.

Everyone with half a brain knows that stormy weather brings with it risks of property damage and injury. Mass media and the internet mean people get to hear about this stuff more easily and quickly than ever before. That’s what makes the public ‘better placed’ to help themselves. You really don’t need to give a gale of wind a fricking Christian name to somehow give it kudos. A storm is a storm. Giving it cute name is merely to fall into the same anthropocentric trap we always do: convincing ourselves that as the supposedly superior species, we’ve tamed nature and have really got this one covered. Only we haven’t. And we never will.

And as for protecting people, is it really going to help those who like nothing better than to head out into the eye of the storm with their cameras? You know, the types of people who like to go out photographing waves while standing smack bang in the danger zone. Who get washed out to sea, never to be seen again. Or who get their faces smashed in as waves crash over them and hurl them at high speed across the harbour.

Giving a storm a first name isn’t going to save such people from their own stupidity. So let’s not even try.

Instead, let’s stop with this patronising bullshit of naming storms. If nothing else, it’s another Americanism at a time when that’s really, REALLY the last thing we need.

Back from the brink

As Murray Walker might say: “I make no apologies for my absence… but I’m sorry I’ve not been here”.

In case the world missed it – which, of course, it didn’t, as nobody reads blogs now – I’ve been away for a bit. 

It wasn’t really a conscious decision.  I just found myself busy with other things to do and afflicted with a serious disinterest in both law and blogging.  That’s something of a handicap when it comes to producing content for a legal-themed blog.

I’ve thought about returning before now and I’ve even had a flick through some of my old posts a couple of times.  But despite doing this, I couldn’t quite bring myself to start blogging again.  The mere thought of blogging just felt a bit, well, tired and old, frankly.  I’ve only come back today to have a cathartic whinge. 

Aside from all that, Blogger seems to have thrown a wobbly interacting with Windows Live Writer and the freshly-released Open Live Writer.  Trying to post to Blogger using the web interface makes blogging even more of a ballache.  And my life’s full of enough ballaches at the moment.

Tradition dictates that I should be putting together this year’s festive-themed header for Law Actually, but I’m not sure I can stomach it.  You’ve all seen enough bells, Christmas trees, and frigging Santa for another 12 months I’m sure.  I know I have.