Planet Sillicon

BP crashes and burns

By blog on Jun. 20, 2010.

Anyone got any marshmallows?

Seriously, this oil spill disaster is going to be almost as bad for the company as it has been for the environment. I’m at a loss as to what to say, okay well no I’m not, I’ve got a lot to say, and here I go.

Can you believe that that unmitigated, worst natural disaster ever for the US, event was caused by one of the world’s wealthiest companies trying to make more money!? Quite frankly, I would like to see the financial news for BP get a hell of a lot worse than being dropped from the BBC index of world’s largest firms. I want this company to really have to fix this, and be monitored a lot more closely from now on.

I think they paid far more attention to their independent financial advisers instead of who they should have listened to, their independent ecological advisers! I’m rather angry at the financial and ecological disasters hitting the world thanks to too many big companies being overly concerned with banking more money for themselves. If you check your current account, and see more money than you would need to live comfortably for the rest of your life, then you sure as hell should settle down and not take huge risks, make poor choices and take unwarranted short-cuts.

If you watched the responses from Tony Hayward to the US Senate, you’d be forgiven for reasonably assuming that the man did absolutely nothing at all. His response to so many questions was ‘I had no involvement with that part of the company’ or ‘I was not involved with those choices’. I mean, what part of the company was he involved with? Golf? Lunch? Naps? Bah! What a wanker!

I hope oil companies take a lesson from this and don’t attempt to earn themselves more money in the future at the potential cost to the environment and people who’ve got to live near those places that could be affected.

Spam in disguise

By blog on Jun. 14, 2010.

Don’t you hate when you buy something from a website, and then they forever send you spam-like emails. I hate that.

I bought some office equipment a while back as I had to have a pretty comprehensive set up for working from home. Now I’m getting spam emails telling me to buy digital dect cordless phones, and you know what, I never will! When I do have to buy a new phone again for my home, I’ll absolutely be getting a BT phone. On a side note, how cheap and creepy is this telecoms company’s website? Seriously, you can’t see what their range of telephones is, or how much you’ll have to pay for service, or… anything. You’d have to buck up and kiss your money goodbye if you were going with that place, because seriously, they look dodgy. Telephonix’s website is pretty damn crap, but at least you can see prices and detailed listings of their phone systems for businesses and what not.

There’s always the allure of going with the cheap, little companies, but there’s also the fear that they’ll go under in two months taking your money and services with them. I just don’t like getting spam at all, let alone spam from people who I willingly gave my email address to.

In spite of attempting to unsubscribe, I am still getting emails from Aion about their upcoming events and what not. They’re obviously one of those groups that thinks if they make it really hard for people to unsubscribe they’ll be able to get further hooks into people. Well, no, no you can’t have that. I don’t mind knowing what’s going on with LOTRO, but apart from that if I’ve stopped playing a game I don’t really want to receive more emails about it.

I suppose if it were emails coming from somewhere you bought from, where the item purchased wasn’t one that would last the next five years, and the store had something more than that one item, then I wouldn’t mind quite so much… No, no scrap that. I’d hate that. Don’t spam me. Let’s just leave it at that.

Still very busy

By blog on Aug. 30, 2009.

And I’m not fond of it! I want more relax time, but there always seems to be more that needs my attention before I can relax.

For instance, I had a friend approach me to help them with some finance stuff, because they were looking to create an investment portfolio and they knew that I was interested in that sort of thing. I think basically he wanted to have some idea before he met with an accountant so he could sound the guy out. By no means am I an expert, but when you have friends that can tell you anything about something as… open to misuse by others, as money, then you make use of their expertise when you can!

I pointed him in the direction of a few good sites and said I would help more when I had the time, or he could go ahead and investigate all this himself. I wanted to help, but I didn’t have the time to sit down and help properly, and I didn’t want to help half-assedly. He came back to me today to say that he had found a good offshore financial service, and that he was going to be investigating it further. He offered to pass along what he found, too.

I found it really refreshing to see someone really doing their homework before investing anywhere, especially as, like me, the guy is busy! If everyone was as careful with where they put their money, then I think a lot of people would be a lot less worried in general life. That’s just the way it seems to me, anyway. There are things that are way beyond our control, like what happened to the international finance markets, and that is always going to be the case, but if we are careful with what we do have control over, then I’m guessing we would be able to accept easier those situations that weren’t our faults, and have a lot less situations where we could have done something differently to gain a better outcome. I’m rambling now, I know it. That’s it then, enough.

Thankful for the weekend

By blog on Aug. 15, 2009.

I am so thankful for the weekend right now, because it has felt like a mammoth week and I am exhausted!

Most of this comes from the severe lack of sleep I’ve had, due in large part to my sympathy towards an ailment my SO is currently suffering from. She has a back issue, currently, so she can’t sleep properly, and keeps waking up with severe pain somewhere between four-and-a-half to six, very occasionally seven, hours after going to bed. Now, I like a good eight hours, but when I see her getting up, I can’t let her go off to deal with it by herself, I want to help, so I get up with her and help her any way that I can.

That’s fine, that’s part of a relationship, and I know she’d do the same for me. I’m happy to help her whenever I can. The issue arose this week, however, of a colleague from work asking for my assistance to open a bank account specifically for offshore finance investments and the like. He’s heard me talking about such things in the past, and thought of me when he decided to get into that sort of thing.

Normally I wouldn’t mind helping him out, but it would mean doing it on the weekend, and I think this weekend I want to do little apart from sleeping and playing Plants vs Zombies. So I set him on the right path, at least, and told him he can either go ahead with it whilst I’m finding the right time to help him out, or he can investigate banks by himself and go ahead on his own steam.

Thankfully he understood that I’m not intending to be rude or mean or such, but that I’m really just suffering, like my SO, after a week of very little sleep! Alright, now I’m off for a kip, then I’m going to play more of that addictive little game. I can’t get that song out of my head, either… I may be starting to lose it.

Not sure about the tracks

By blog on Jul. 14, 2009.

I happened to be looking up some Zelda info in the past few days, and I ran across the video of Nintendo’s soon to be released, Spirit Tracks. I’m put off by the train aspect, because it seems so limited compared to the boat used in Phantom Hourglass, but the video does also show that the dungeon play looks more like the last game.

Link looks to be spinning a Deku leaf or something like it in some of the video, and Link also gets to control the Phantoms last seen in Phantom Hourglass. But still, this whole train thing seems overly steam-punk and not in the spirit of the Legend of Zelda games that came before it. It’s so gimmicky and unappealing. This image kind of exemplifies what I feel was the driving force behind the choice. In case you are interested in the train aspect, here is a big ol’ wallpaper that has been released for the game.

I think I need to stop panning the game now, because, quite frankly, I know I’m going to play it, and I’m probably going to love it too. Whilst I can’t see myself getting into the train thing, really, I can see the rest of the game being a heck of a lot of fun. I really enjoyed Phantom Hourglass, I like playing the Zelda games on the DS, I like using the stylus for much of it. The Wii Zelda was also a lot of fun, but I am pretty darn concerned about the lack of Mastersword – or any sword – rumours floating around about that one.

Anyway, I’m off now, I said I’d go to the movies with that estate agent friend I mentioned in my last post. See, if I go to the movies then I don’t have to spend the next few hours talking about UK property, or which of the numerous property blogs out there are the most accurate – yes, he spent twenty minutes one day talking about property blogs! I can’t fathom how he can talk so much about fast house sales… I don’t find it interesting… nearly at all. I mean, I find finance stuff interesting, but housing stuff is just… not compelling to me. That’s why I’m off to a film!

Trying to be nice

By blog on Jul. 14, 2009.

Do you remember when I wrote of selling my mother’s house because she moved into a retirement community? And how it was a surprisingly quick house sale? Well, because it all went so swimmingly, my SO and I took the estate agent out to dinner to say thank you for his hard work.

It went alright, and it turned out we did have a few common interests. However, he’s one of these people that can’t leave work at work. Every time I run into him or get an email from him, he is always talking about the housing market, and talking about property news, and talking about which areas are selling well at the moment, and talking about what property prices are like at the moment.

Today he sent me an email, and gave me a link to, you won’t believe this, real estate forums… I am surprised that a forum like this would be out there, and that it would have enough activity to keep going… Anyway, so I am trying to be nice, so I told him it looked interesting and that I might join, and then I tried to guide the conversation to a shared interest.

It’s an uncomfortable situation to be in, when you don’t know someone very well, and their primary topic of conversation is one that most people, myself included, have no more than a passing interest in. It makes me want to drop any attempts to be the guys friend, just sort of let the new friendship run it’s short course with no more momentum put in from me, even maybe some brakes put on from my side. It’s really simple, how can you expect a person to continue to communicate with you when you are so fixated on one area of interest, almost to the exclusion of all else?

I don’t know exactly what I am going to do here… I’ve been so busy of late that I don’t have a lot of time for friends anyway, especially not ones that I don’t really know and who are fixated on something so boring! Yeah that decides it, I don’t have the time or the patience to coax a reasonable conversation from this dude. Alright, back to work now.