amelierosalyn.com

After finally finding something to talk about for my dissertation (ongoing fiasco with that, urgh) and a decent way to write about it, the phone rang. Grrr. I considered not answering, but it might have been the boyfriend needing me to pick him up or something.

The following conversation ensued:

Me: Hello.
(Silence)
Me: *Prepares to hang up*
Man with heavy accent: Hello?
Me: Hello.
Man: Is this maddamaddablah?
Me: I'm sorry?
Man: Is this Mrs. Murphy I am speaking to?
Me: (Begin flat, bored tone) No. Wrong number.
Man: Can I speak to the owner of this number please, would that be you ma'am?
Me: Yeah.
Man: Hello ma'am my name is (pause) John. I am from blahblah company can I ask whether you use a mobile telephone at the moment.
Me: Yeah.
Man: Is it pay as you go or contract.
Me: Contract.
Man: How many months are left on your contract please ma'am.
Me: I just renewed it.
Man: Oh. Um. Does anyone in your family have a mobile phone?
Me: Yes. They're all happy with their services. Bye.
Man: Oh no worries bye.

(No question marks because he didn't make any of those questions actually sound like questions)

Normally I hang up on these people as soon as I hear the odd silence after I pick up, since I know it'll be one of these people trying to sell me stuff (they're on some automated system that seems to wait a while before telling the operator that the call's been answered). For some reason though I didn't. Meh. Anyway. Why is it that these people ALWAYS call when a) the number is ex-directory and listed on the TPS list (the UK equivalent of the Do Not Call list, I believe) and b) they have called 3985719835 times before and each time they have been hung up on or told that I AM NOT INTERESTED.

Look what I spotted while out shopping today:

(Excuse the quality, it was getting dark and my phone couldn't quite cope with that :P )

In case you can't tell, the guy is parked in the middle of the road, NEXT to the parking spaces. Although there's no one moving in that picture, that road leads to the car park exit and a lot of people use it - this guy was blocking off one side of this road and causing a lot of problems.

...so I submitted him to youparklikeanasshole.com. Hahaha :P

This whole situation was not made much better by the fact that the other side of the road was slightly taken up by another badly-parked idiot (also submitted to YPLAA.com, go me!).

Seriously, can people not park these days? Even I can park better than that and I freely admit to not being able to park!

1. Idiots who redistribute insecure scripts or scripts that aren't around on the author's site any more.
   I saw a classic the other day: "PHPCurrently (might be hackable) - download here!11one" Might be hackable?! Why on earth would you give it out for others to install then? For your information, PHPCurrently isn't just a "might be" in terms of "hackability" - it's a "definitely".

2. People who think they know what they're doing and preach about it when they have no idea what they're on about.
   "I LERNT PHP!11!1" No, you learnt PHP includes. "OMFG THATZ LEIK PHP THO I ROOLZ!!11"

3. WordPress.
   Why are you suddenly not working with my forms any more? I'm not talking about this site - WP (usually) worked fine on here, but it's a client's site. Can't really switch them to my CMS because they need the rich text editor (and no, my CMS doesn't have one :P ). No explanation as to why the form won't work. Same script, same version, same everything... WP just doesn't like it any more. Gah.

4. University work.
   I have to do my dissertation again, from scratch. The draft I handed in last week was no where near good enough, apparently. Grrr.

5. Cutenews.
   Now don't get me wrong, I'm sure it's a great script. I've never used it though, and I always associate it with really bad "tween" sites full of rubbish tutorials, stolen layouts and all that. Of course, there are exceptions to those, but still... The URLs are ugly (who wants those long index.php?subaction=showcomments&blahblahblahblah=1&blah=2 things? Not me) and it just ... doesn't appeal to me.

Um, and other things that I can't think of right now. :P