Grumble - the Amtrak trackside experience. This was truck about 80, of about 145 (didn't count exactly), and it sat there blocking the view up to and above the station roof for a good 10 minutes.

Grumble - the Amtrak trackside experience. This was truck about 80, of about 145 (didn't count exactly), and it sat there blocking the view up to and above the station roof for a good 10 minutes.

As I said "Remember in the USA, freight goes first(no matter what they say)" That also means it blocks stations and at times level crossings (grade crossings to our colonial friends)

There are several rail cams at crossings and it is often a 100+ car train will totally cut a town in half for hours sometimes, if there is a mechanical problem.

Just spent a grueling 45 minutes trying to register my free game I got for buying a Samsung 970 EVO Plus M.2 NVME SSD.
Firefox, even with all script blockers disabled, refused to log me in with my Google account.
Chrome logged me in but refused to take me past the page with all the details on me and the product.
Had to revert back to IE11 to get it to work, but beware... the serial number on the box is wrong. It misses a letter that does show on the product itself.
If you fill in something wrong, you can't just change it and be done, no, you have to restart from the first page, reload everything and fill everything in again... yes... fun...

Then I filled in the serial number with lower case letters. Wrong! I had to use capitals. By this time I was ready to fling the SSD off the balcony.
And really, for what? For registering a game. A free game. Either Anno 1800, Far Cry New Dawn, The Division 2 or Assassin's Creed Odyssey. I went for Far Cry, the cheapest game I now see...

Anyway, managed to get through the last page. Now I'll hear within two weeks if I filled everything in all right, or that I am missing something.
Then within 6 weeks after that I get my game code, with limited availability time. You'll see I'll get it during my vacation, having had to install it during that time, or something like that. Well F it, Samsung, you've had the most irritating page I have ever had on the internet. If I don't get the game code, or will lose out because I'm away, I'll ritually burn the EVO.

Grumble.

Yay, doing a closed beta again. Can't say anything beyond that. Not even the name of it. :)

Grumble:

einsteinathome.org’s server IP address could not be found.

Glory, Einstein is back.

That's a good point. All the modern talk is about the customer switching, but it happens the other way too - and nobody talks about that. I once had a bank account, and my custom was 'bought' twice by new owners without my consent. I started with Girobank, but found myself taken over by first Alliance & Leicester, then later by Santander. Nobody asked my permission - I was just a chattel.

Wow, I can't believe this. :-(
So glad I escaped their clutches.
OVO to pick up 5.8M chattels soon
The energy ombudsman is going to be busy. :-)

Lost 22 kilos since I changed my diet end of March 2019. Been mostly using carbohydrate-poor vegetables only. Do still have carbo days and days with meat, but 75% of the diet was pure veg, with a little fat. And walking. 5 kilometers per day.

Haven't walked that far in two weeks due to an infection under my heel (calcaneal spur) that started when I reached 135 kilos. But am now 120 kilos and feeling very fit. Only 20 more to go. 😍

That is a glory, congrats! I changed my diet a little over a year and a half ago. Smaller portions, more veg, less greasy and fatty foods, and walking/jogging (more of a fast walk) about the same distance daily. I've lost nearly 14 kg in that time with those changes. Keep it up!

Since I normally don't post in here, a grumble: I've had a cold since the middle of last week, and I can't wait for this congestion to go away.

Now I know where my additional weight came from ;-)

Daily visits to Mr. Simms? 😂

But glad for you, last time around you looked a little thin.

Grumble: it took 4 normal emails and one nasty email to get the watch maker servicing my Seiko 6105-8009t (8110) to react to me and send it back. I'd wanted to give it some TLC, it being such an old watch and all. It's in fine running condition, just that the sapphire is a bit scratched and the number plate has some mold.

Glory: just looked at this watch's price asked on eBay. Up to €3,500!
Uhm, you know what? I'll leave it in the condition it's in, as it's only going to be worth more. Even broken ones run for up to €2,000!

Seiko released a limited edition reissued version this year that went for $4,250.-

Glory: just looked at this watch's price asked on eBay. Up to €3,500!

Would it have told you what was happening with last week's SETI time warp?

That Richard Haselgrove keeps emailing me with all these new email addresses and mysterious, possibly nefarious links. "I thought it was something you would want to see"... I'm sure it's not. 😜

The sample email Jord sent to me had a hanmail.net email address - possibly Chinese, but registered in Korea according to a whois lookup.

Unfortunately, I can't prevent either Chinese or Korean users putting my given name into the 'From' field of a spam email account - we could all do that, although 99.99999% of us wouldn't.

I'm sorry for Jord's sake that he seems to have attracted a stalker or spammer who has decided that an email ostensibly from me is more likely to bypass his natural caution, but that's the world we live in.

Second modem in a year that's broken. This time we're without WiFi, but at least all cabled internet is working. Doesn't help that we urgently need to print something and the HP2630 is only available via WiFi. :-(

Second modem in a year that's broken. This time we're without WiFi, but at least all cabled internet is working. Doesn't help that we urgently need to print something and the HP2630 is only available via WiFi. :-(

Last firmware update sorted out my modem problems but I still haven't persuaded my laptop to stay connected using internal wi-fi. USB dongle is fine however.

Second modem in a year that's broken. This time we're without WiFi, but at least all cabled internet is working. Doesn't help that we urgently need to print something and the HP2630 is only available via WiFi. :-(

It must be because of all the spam e-mails it was passing on :)

I've turned off the WiFi radios in the ISP's modem/router and re-enabled the ones in my Asus router. So for the moment the flat has got WiFi again.
ISP is sending a technician over to check things in my flat. I don't need things checked, I can tell out right the modem's dead. It's also dropping packets on the cabled network. The biggest problem is that the network goes through that modem and its mapping is incomplete. My NAS is nowhere to be seen in any index, although I can reach it normally with direct links.

Oh well, better now than during my vacation.

I can do magic me.

So back in March I bought a USB-C to USB-C data cable at some store in the UK (Richard, where did you bring me?) and used it to transfer data from my phone to my tablet and back.
Coming home I promptly forgot where I left that cable, have been looking for it a couple of times but never found it.

So last night I walked to the other side of my living room to check something there, and lo and behold, on the floor, between two boxes lies a black cable. I pick it up and my word, it's the USB-C to USB-C data cable that I couldn't find. Really not got a clue how I did that, so I can only attribute it to me being capable of doing magic. So watch it. :-)