Ministry shutting their doors

Al Jourgensen is calling it quits for Ministry after their forthcoming album.

"I think it's time," Uncle Al says "...and I'll be leaving on the top of my game instead of hanging on too long and doing crappy Aerosmith and Rolling Stones albums 30 years later."

I'm disappointed but can understand why he's doing it. There's something grotesque about watching an ancient Keith Richards rattle his bones around on stage. Even Madonna, who can still see the full shape of her prime in the rear view almost induces vomit when she gyrates around the stage in her leotards.

Al should be a beacon of sensibility for all rockers past the age of 50.

Jourgensen says that the next and final album will also be another assault on the White House. "It's a trilogy," Jourgensen says. "The next one's going to be called 'The Last Sucker,' and it's also about this corrupt administration. So we'll do that one, and then me and George Bush go riding off hand-in-hand, into the sunset."

I'm not entirely pleased with this little snippet. Who needs another obviously political album against the cause of the moment. That's some pretty boring material there, Al. As long as it has thunderous guitars and a lot of screaming I'll probably buy it anyway.

So long Ministry. It was nice knowing ya.





(Originally via xrrf)

Tags: Ministry, music, bands

Amir's laptop continued

On Friday I posted about the lovely Amir and his piece of crap laptop he sold on eBay. Hilarity ensued! I received some great comments, they received some great comments and an Internet lynch mob not unlike the lost camera group was formed.

Everyone who has ever had a bad experience on eBay knows and embraced their fury.

Always the last to know, the mainstream media have finally picked up on it. Yesterday it was the BBC talking about police investigations into an unclear party. Today on this ismoney.co.uk a further story developed about Amir selling other faulty equipment to someone else.

Debbie McInerney, 42, from Newport Pagnell in Buckinghamshire, claimed she paid him £147 for an iPod in March but it never turned up. She claims Amir banked the cheque but failed to answer emails asking when the iPod would arrive.

Amir denies it... of course.

In a rather surprising showing the creator of the original blog has offered to take the site down for an apology and a refund. Ahhhh! At least there's one good guy here. But will Amir see his chance?

The saga continues.....

Tags: vigilantes, laptops, ebay, data protection, news, Amir Massoud Tofangsaza

e-mail subject lines are not for playing

I had a very long weekend. Not through any sense of say, responsibility, more that I just drank until I couldn't drink no more, talked until I couldn't talk no more and ate until I couldn't eat no more.

I am tired and quite broke.

I am also rather irritable.

As if it's not bad enough trying to drag your exhausted carcass into work after a weekend of FUN, your co-workers just manage to make it worse.

My suspicion is there's this one... guy... or lady... that kicks off the mood for everyone in each time zone. He steps on someone's foot on the tube, or fines someone for being a penny short for their train fare. It's the guy that cuts you off on the M62, or the female who insists on listening to loud dance music on her pink iPod whilst you're trying to stay awake so you don't end up in Clitheroe.

And after 30 minutes of listening to that 'From Paris to Berlin' song, or having a swollen big toe thanks to that dickhead in Docs. Or whatever shape that one minor infraction appears in, you become slightly less tolerant.

Your view becomes a little less rosy and a little more jaundiced and as you swing your yellow eyes around the escalator you know you're less likely to excuse the minor foibles of everyone else. You look around, forehead wrinkled because you can't afford to have Botoxed, livid and maybe you just let your shoulder bag hit someone when you get off the tram. Shouldn't be blocking the doors anyway right?

You feel some guilt; random acts of violence aren't ever really socially acceptable. The English further fuel your guilt by saying 'sorry' when you run into them. So you walk to the office, maybe slightly sheepish or feeling a bit more empowered.

That guy though? He goes into work bruised and angry. Maybe a little ashamed for saying 'sorry' to you. So then he forgets to make a cup of tea for the girl in the office he doesn't like anyway and hates that he's obligated to do it for her at all. I mean she just sits there, why is she owed tea? She never brews up anyway; she doesn't deserve that cup of tea. Today is the day he stands against English social convention.

That girl, in turn, is so pre-occupied with rejected rage that she forgets all e-mail etiquette. She starts sending out mail to her co-workers, as part of her barely understood duty. But she's flustered so the written word rebels against her and said correspondences become enigmatic code better left to the guys monitoring Echelon.

One of those e-mails eventually finds its way to me with the subject ******URGENT****** when nothing contained either deserves an asterisk or the any URGENCY.

I then send out an e-mail to my department asking the guys to confirm that the SuSE boot disk I downloaded over the weekend connects to a remote server with source files. One of my colleagues, in an attempt to be amusing maybe, calls me a muppet for not knowing.

Then I send him a CAPS LOCK E-MAIL TELLING HIM THAT WAS THE QUESTION I ASKED IN THE FIRST PLACE, using asterisks to hide my irritated swearing. My temper is already frayed, I'm tired and it's 11:30am and the glow of beaning that guy with my bag has already faded.

So, what will my co-worker do now? Will be perpetuate the day of badness? Will he step on someone's foot or send a nasty e-mail? Who else gets to join the chain of employment angst?

Tags: work, e-mail, etiquette, bad days

Amir Massoud Tofangsazan's laptop

Amir sold a faulty laptop to a buyer on Ebay. He also mis-represented some fundamental details, like the amount of RAM and a DVD-RW contained. Understandably, the buyer was a less than happy man when he received his package.

Some months later, the laptop is up and running. The buyer then discovers that the seller hadn't wiped any personal data from the laptop, including passport scans, banking details, photos of women's legs and a big cache of porn.

So, what does he do? he creates a blog explaining what happened and what he's found.

All he wants is for you to link to him. I am happy to oblige.

Tags: Amir Massoud Tofangsazan, ebay, laptop

Gary the Cinnabar moth

Gary the Cinnabar moth
Originally uploaded by vulgarcriminal.

A rather random photo taken last weekend. This is Gary the Cinnabar Moth. He lived with us for a few days. Just chilled right there the whole time. Then, we came back on Sunday and he was gone. Very pretty though, wonderful colors.

Zipcar's free rides in San Francisco

I wish services like this existed in Manchester. I find public transport to be a frustrating trial of horrible people and even worse service. Seriously, why the fuck can't you just move up the train a bit? Bitch. I want to beat you with my umbrella....

Anyhow Zipcar claims to take the hassle cars and general transport by offering a sort of sharing service. For a low annual fee of 50 bucks you can er, borrow a car for a few hours a few times a year without all the pesky obligations involved in owning your own. Sounds ok, if a little limited and expensive. I'd buy into it if it meant one less day of delays and impossible Metro Soduku.

They're restricted to only 7 cities at the moment but promise to provide outlets for more in the future. I'm a little confused at how they're targetting their service. For example, Chapel Hill and not Portland or Seattle.... What the hell? Strikes me as being a bit like opening a hemp shop in San Francisco and then another in El Paso, yet expecting them both to be similarly successful.

Geographical limitations aside, they are making a good move by offering up free commuter rides around San Francisco during May and June this year. Take advantage if you can, I know I would if I didn't currently live in the English heart of darkness.

Gypsies and Leigh Life.... continued

As of yesterday afternoon I'd made up my mind that I really didn't want to continue the argument about prejudice against the gypsies on Leigh Life. I'd pretty much had enough after it devolved into baseless accusations, mudslinging and not a single coherent argument for thinking all gypsies were dirty scum (shocking, I know.) I posted on my livejournal encouraging people to go have a look to see what was being said.

Unsurprisingly my friends saw my side and were equally as disgusted with the forum as I was. But that's for us to hammer out and, in my mind, has nothing to do with the forum or its posters.

End of story right?

Wrong. Today I checked my referral logs and found a search for 'who is vulgarcriminal in Wigan' from this range of IP addresses. I'm sure it doesn't mean anything, or at least I hope I'm sure. I doubt anyone would be so barbaric to decide to hunt a person down because they disagreed with them on the Internet. But then, I could be wrong. I've been dreadfully wrong about people during this whole argument.

I'll have to let Andy and our post lady know to keep an eye out just to be on the safe side.

Open Guide to Manchester

Some of my cohorts are planning to pay me a visit next month and we're trying to come up with ways to entertain them. I'm not a huge fan of Manchester Online but it does the trick, occasionally. I was cheered to locate another web resource in wiki form that has information from the users.

Manchester at Open Guides.

Blogger up and down more than a... up and down thing

It seems to be the week for bad service. Since about 1:00pm Blogger seems to be suffering some difficulties. I either receive a 504, JavaScript time out error or my little publishing marker stuck at 0%. The Blogger status page isn't telling me anything but the group certainly is.

This is turning out to be a very frustrating week.

How to tell easily tell what processor you have in Windows 2000 Professional

Need to find out what processor you have but don't want to reboot? If you want more detailed information about your system than what My Computer gives you then do this.

1. Click Start, type dxdiag in the text box and click OK.

2. The first screen that comes up should look like this and have much of the information you need.

Urban Gypsies and Leigh Life

If there's one positive thing that's come of an intrinsically useless argument on a message board, it's curiosity about what the UK gypsies are. I've always been a little intrigued, one of the residents of Leigh was correct, my great grandparents on my mother's side were Scottish gypsies that roamed the West Coast clamming. Apparently that's how both of them were raised. The legacy ended when Grandma rented an apartment in downtown Portland and forced a stationary lifestyle on her offspring.

I don't have any romantic notions of what it must have been like for them. I've since found out that her father wasn't only selling fresh shellfish by the sea. He was also an employee of the FBI in one form or the other. A secret he kept up until after he died. The traveller lifestyle couldn't have been all that for him to take money from Uncle Sam and then have to hide it. I don't harbor any misplaced loyalties to any traveller population because if it either. My family's history only serves as an amusing anecdote during conversations about geneaology.

What I'm finding shocking about that message board in the present is how acceptable it is to claim that the travellers will lie, steal and cheat taxes. When there's no differentiating between one group from another, or even thinking that there may be some gypsy populations that abide by the law. It's perfectly ok just to call them all a bunch of dirty criminals without a second thought. Even someone who considers herself educated clamps on to these beliefs like they'd lead her to the Holy Grail.

I can't find any reason for it other than just cold hate and a few bad experiences. Their biggest argument seems to be rage that the last camp who went to Pennington Flash left litter. What the hell? The last few times I've been there it was covered in ASDA bags and cans of Strongbow like every other part of England with a bit of green on it. To an Englishman the home might be the castle but beyond the gates it's all an outhouse. Yet, not a single person on that board will even admit that English people litter, it was the gypsy camp that brought down the neighborhood.

At the behest of Barbara (who turned nasty) I've gone and done some research. To summarize, I've found I was right to say that many of the insults were needless prejudice. Another article elaborates even further how unfounded many of the commonly held opinions are, including many on that board. My claims of racism were correct as well since many gypsies are from recognized cultural and ethnic groups.

Every time I think to myself that it's amazing how far we've come over the last 40 years, something like this comes up. No matter how many words fall out of use, or groups protected, people will always need to feel better than someone else.



Paul Ross photography

Talk, Talk sucks.

I'm sitting here on hold with my ISP trying to find out how much of a charge I'd have if I cancelled my service with them. I so wish that I hadn't written anything good about them at all because I was obviously so very wrong.

It started yesterday at around 4:00pm when I noticed I couldn't browse to any websites. I did a quick ping to all of their servers, figured the connection was good and then started trying via FQDN. No luck. Obviously DNS right? So, I figured that I would give their technical support lines a call to find out what was going on. That's when my hell started.

After 90 minutes of being dropped, listening to Charles Dunstone's apologies about the call volume and I found only clueless sales people who were extraordinarily unhelpful when they realized I wasn't giving them any money. I've heard Tom Petty's 'Something in the Air' so many times that I now want to beat it with sticks until it dies. They don't have any other hold music.

I finally get someone around 6:00 called Mohammed Bex (Becks) in technical support. He tells me there is a 'problem with the servers.' I ask what the problem is and he refuses to tell me. I shit you not, he said I didn't 'need to know.' After a lot of arguing with him I finally got him to confirm it was a DNS problem but only after I'd said it first. What the hell? I then asked him why he'd just said it was a random service problem. (I misunderstood him, his accent was quite thick.) And....

He accused me of lying to him.

I kid you not.

At this point, I'd had it with Mohammed Bex and decided to try and speak with a manager. He wouldn't give me the manager's name until I apologized to him for lying. So, begrudgingly, I did. After about 20 minutes on the phone with this prize winner I hung up and waited for the 50 minutes for the service to return.

7:00pm I tried again. Nslookup still wasn't working. I then heaved, lifted my tired head and started dialling again. After another 30 minutes I finally got to Collin, who was a lot more pleasant and did something magical to make my connection work.

Today I decided that perhaps I'd like to cancel. After about 4 phone calls to Talk, Talk, I finally end up with Sindy, Cindy (?) who doesn't know what a cooling off period is. Well, after 20 odd minutes of hold/talk time she eventually she figured it out and it turns out it's only 14 days. We can't cancel the service without paying them 70 odd pounds for doing so.

Talk, Talk was the biggest consumer mistake I have ever, ever made.

I wish I would have checked ADSLguide first.

Pikeys in Wigan part two

About a month ago I posted about a gypsy camp near us that had been disbanded by the local police force. The only further information I could find on the Internet was from a website called Leigh life. I called the thread barely literate due to the massive amounts of blatant and completely unashamed racism many of the posters were shouting. Including threats to burn them whilst they slept and how all gypsies were essentially no good.

Well, they found me. Unsurprisingly they took exception to being called barely literate and decided that I am a horrible, vile immigrant. Well, a few. There do seem to be a couple that are articulate and are trying to get their point across, which I accept. Many of the others, however, I'm finding very difficult. Much of what is being said appears to be the same slurs and half thoughts that are thrown out at any minority group. How many times have I heard that Mexicans are dirty, violent and don't work? How many times have I been shown that's not true?

I'm reserving opinion on all of it until I can get to some hard truths. What I do like is how my abhorrent neighbor is apparently better than the gypsies because he's an alcoholic and it's a disease. Yeah right, you people haven't met him.