22 November 2017 (Wednesday) - Gigabytes



I slept like a log last night. I was eventually woken by Fudge fidgeting shortly before the alarm was due to go off. I scoffed my toast whilst watching Star Trek cartoons, and because I couldn’t be bothered to get off the sofa I put on the episode of “Red Dwarf” in which RImmer became Ace Rimmer.
I allowed myself a few minutes to waste in cyber-space. Lookoing at Facebook I found myself rather humbled. Yesterday I’d posted up a little piccie of me finding my nine thousandth geocache. This morning I saw that thirty-three friends had posted congratulations, and sixty three-people had pressed the “like” button.
A couple of days ago a friend of mine was whinging on Facebook that Black Friday was an American thing and had no place in the UK. Today that same person was wishing everyone a happy Thanksgiving (!)
I thought Thanksgiving was tomorrow?

I had a little look at my phone as well. A couple of months ago I realised that I was getting through my mobile data at quite a rate. I was originally give a gigabyte of data each month, and was (on average) using about eight hundred megabytes of it. I asked for more data (it never hurts to ask) and the nice people at the phone company increased my allowance. This morning I was half way through the monthly billing period and I had used three hundred megabytes of the fourteen gigabytes I now have. (That’s just over two per cent) I’ve always been very conscious not to go over my data limit… maybe I needn’t worry quite so much in the future.

I set off to work. As I drove the pundits on the radio were discussing the recent death of teen heartthrob David Cassidy. Apparently loads of women now in their fifties and sixties are heartbroken that he died yesterday. Even though most of them had never met him, or even seen him, or probably never even listened to one of his records for thirty years.
They wheeled Leo Sayer onto the airwaves to say nice things about Mr Cassidy. Leo Sayer... he was big in the 1970s. I thought he'd been dead for years - it turns out he lives in Australia now.

there was also a lot of speculation about what the Chancellor of the Exchequer was going to announce in the afternoon's budget speech. Apparently unlike with previous budgets, quite a lot of the detail has already been made public. Those on the radio were of the opinion that most of the budget was the brainchild of the Chancellor himself with very little input from the Prime Minister. It would seem that her position is so weak that the Chancellor can do what he likes and she's pretty much powerless to stop him.
Those on the radio were making great show of how the Chancellor was trying to juggle the books to keep the various wings of the Conservative party happy, and to be seen to be doing the politically correct hing. Interestingly at no stage was it hinted that he might have planned the budget with the national interest in mind.

I got to work, and we spent a little while playing with the boss's phone. She's got this gadget on it which doesn't need a password, or fingerprint recognition. instead you stare into it and it recognizes your eye. It worked for her, and it wouldn't accept me.
I remember seeing this in the film Star Trek II. When the film came out we thought this was amazingly sci-fi...
She finds this very useful - when out on her horse she can activate her phone by staring at it, and then tell it what to do using the voice recognition software. The technology is amazing, isn't it?
We also had a little disaster at tea time. A colleague had bought a packet of kettle chips for tea break time. In that packet were nine crisps. Nine - we counted them. That was nearly ten pence per crisp.
What a rip-off.

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