Be Excellent To Each Other

Very nice. How much time do you have in Rome?

If you like cheese, there's a great restaurant based around cheese.

Cheese.

Oh hello!


Barclaycard are idiots. Go online to change my address (like I should have done four months ago). Put in the postcode, look up the street address. "Field value is too long, maximum is 23 dharacters. Please abbreviate". But...you looked it up! Why would you set a maximum field length shorter than what YOU JUST FILLED IT IN WITH? Fine. I'll appreviate it. Hit submit. Changes it back to the unabbreviated value and then complains it's too long again.

BARCLAYCARD, YOU'RE FUCKING DUMB.

Four nights, arrive on the Thursday and leave the Monday evening. I can't believe she kept it secret for so long, she booked it before the summer last year

What the fuck street do you live on?

Excellent. We loved it (and Pompeii which is an easy day trip) and you need a few days to see enough of it.

One that's more than 23 characters!

Still, when you're creating a text field that you're going to autopopulate from a look up, you set the max input length to be the size of the longest street name the lookup might return, no?

Oh I didn't realise we could visit Pompeii...I don't know if we'll have time mind you, since one day will be taken up with the rugby and general drunken revelry. I can't wait though, it's going to be so beautiful!

Agreed. It took plenty of effort to get them to believe my road existed. The autocomplete filled in wrong details.

That'll be an issue with their source postcode DB though. I can kind of forgive that as they'll be subscribing to a third party service. To autopopulate a field with data that's too long for the field though? That's just ridiculous.

Our service/install engineers send us shit (usually of their making) and expect us to jump, instead of doing what they know they're supposed to, all the time.

For instance, one just sent a screenshot* with German text on it. So I took a vague guess (because I know a vague amount of German) and followed it up with "I'm not manually transcribing German into Google translate."**

* To someone else, despite having been told repeatedly who the product contact is
** This is why they always go via someone else, apparently believing anything other than "forward to Bik, re-forward the response" happens that way. My refusal to jump up and down like a puppy in response to vague unhelpful demands clearly works.

It was more the refusal to believe me when I phoned.

That happened to me years ago; O2 wouldn't sell me a phone because their system couldn't find my address. It was part of their security checking process that the address had to be in the system so it was a total no-go. They referred me to the Royal Mail, as that's who supplies their address data, and I had to fill out a request for them to add it to their data then wait until O2 got a refresh before anything could go ahead.

And that's what makes me laugh about Barclaycard. I work for a bank - how well exactly do all your anti-money laundering and fraud checking tools work if you can't even accurately record your customer's address?

Happy Gillday !

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2014/01/v ... suke-oono/

Books cut into stories

Yep, there are organised tours from Rome, but they are pretty expensive and don't give you that much time there - probably 2 hours which is nowhere near enough.
Instead you can do it on the train which is really straightforward.
There's a fast and very modern train from Termini station in Rome down to Napoli which takes about an hour and costs under £50 return if you book in advance. You can do this on http://www.trenitalia.com/ and then you pick your tickets up from one of the machines in the station (which do English) on the day. Once you get to Napoli it's a 3 minute walk to the circumvesuviana line which, and this is being fair to it, is a rattly old heap of crap but it takes you to Pompeii Scavi station in about half an hour.

Well worth doing if you are in Rome

But that's coming from the same third party service. You surely can't expect them to do a count on every possible response?

The fact they've limited it at all is rather odd though, I must confess. Still, they have a few more customers than I do.

"Hi, $PostcodeDBVendor, we'd like to use your service! I'll assume you can provide us with a web service? Kindly let us know the max length of all your return values, and then we can use that for our input fields when we populate them. Thanks chums! Hurrah for interoperability!"

Also, the number of possible values returned for a full 7 character postcode isn't going to be that big, you could easily find the max. length

The Barclaycard website is shit though, I've not been able to change my contact details on that because it refuses to accept that "Shropshire" is a valid county, despite that being the one returned by the postcode lookup. I can't be arsed to fucking argue with it, I've just left it. Never use the damn thing any more anyway.

Salops!

Same with Leicestershire, I just told them Leicester was in London and they happily believed me.

FAO TheVision. I found an auction for you to bid on. buy me.

Happy birthday Gilly! Xxx

Both consoles are locked in with no keys so presumably, they can't change the games? Deal!

Bow down before my CPC 6128, it has 8GB of storage attached to it:



[flicks V's at Speccy and C64 users and runs]

You don't play games anyway!

Fair point but I do actually play my 3DS. It's easily my most played console as I can sit with my daughter asleep on my lap and play at the same time.

I'm hoping she'll want to go to lots of after school clubs when she's older so I can sit in the car playing on it while waiting for her.

There's something pleasing about marrying old and new tech. 8GB would feel like almost infinite storage space on an 8-bit machine.

I think my Amiga has a 2gb flash card and that's more storage than I'll ever use.

2GB is easy to fill on an Amiga. I've got a 4gb card and it doesn't have much space free.

*explodes*

The one downside is that the floppy emulator requires the CPC's DSK images to be converted from 178k per side to 1 meg per side. So you need more space than you might think.

Have also run up against the problem that it can only run as a B drive, which some games dislike.

Oh yeah, if you want everything ever released on there it will fill up, but there aren't that many Amiga games that still hold up well enough for regular play.

By no means do I have everything ever released. But most notable stuff is on there. If someone mentions a game it's nice to go and actually play it. It's not like you have to worry about the cost increase between a 2GB and 4GB card these days.

I wouldn't have known what 8GB was back in the day!

It was amazing when I got my 3.5 inch disk drive that formatted to 400k per side (you had a switch on the back which switched sides of the disk as the CPC has no comprehension of a double head drive).

Parents evening tonight. My only consolation is thinking it *must* be worse for the teachers than the parents.

I've a feeling someone is going to have his phone taken off him later this evening.

If any of you remember my wallet was stolen while I was in australia, nearly a year ago, I got a message from some random guy about 3 weeks ago on facebook (only saw it now) saying his mate found it on a roof somewhere. Asked if I wanted to do something with it or for them to destroy it.

Nice to see that some people still try and do the right thing.

It's taken him this long to spell your surname correctly.

Noticed clawmarks on my winter coat. When I was a friend's house the other week and it was on the coat rack, their kitten must have started climbing on it and used it to delay his fall.

Hessian bag. Brick. Canal.

That's a bit wasteful. He could give it to a charity shop or something.

Full moon last night maybe? Did you wake up naked in a wood?

I do need a shave and haircut, come to think of it.

That describes about 90% of this forum I reckon.

I think I'm still drunk.

It's going to be a looooooong day.

Heh:

I notice that Deus Ex game has popped up on Google Play, has anyone played the iOS version and is it any good? Given they're charging a fiver for it I'd rather hear from someone who's actually played it before I fork over for it.