Once in a while you realise you have a need for a Miscellaneous Arbitrary Item that you don’t possess, and wish to obtain one quickly, for (almost) immediate use.
The other day I experienced this phenomenon, and in my case the Miscellaneous Arbitrary Item was a tape measure. While in abundance in our hose, spring-loaded retractable tape measures with 2m stand-outs are not exactly the nicest thing to hold against one’s delicate torso while measuring one’s chest size for a new suit, for example. Their laminated fibreglass construction and reinforced design are counterproductive when it comes to measuring anything but a straight line.
Knowing there’s a branch of Boots reasonably close to home, I quickly searched boots.com for ‘tape measure’. Nothing. How about ‘tape’? Thirty results, none of which provide a measuring facility. Strange. A few clicks, and I arrived at the Boots weight management page – surely a tape measure here. And success – partially. An image of a woman measuring herself using exactly the kind of thing I am looking to buy!
But where could I buy it? After what must have been seconds of staring at the page for a clue, and then a few more seconds performing the same website searches as before (just in case it was user error), I decided to email customer services.
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I’m a huge fan of the SimCity series of games, having cut my teeth on SimCity on the BBC Micro. I wasn’t particularly good at it (being around 11 or 12 years old) until around 4-5 years later, in 1993, I started playing SimCity 2000 on the Atari ST, at which point the gameplay became isometric as opposed to top-down.
Anyway, that’s all largely irrelevant. I bought, with no small amount of trepidation I might add, SimCity Societies when it was released in 2007, and thought it was ok – so long as you don’t expect it to be a proper SimCty game. SimCity 4 was the last proper SimCity game, released in 2003.
Then in 2008 came Spore, in the same simulation vein as the SimCity and The Sims series. Again, an ok game – until you get immersed in it, and then you realise it’s brilliant. But that brilliance isn’t matched by EA’s apparent commitment to customer care.
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Oliver in a dress
There is no point in having a dog if you can’t occassionally dress him or her up.
Ever since Oliver was a puppy, we’ve taken almost every opportunity to stick him in a t-shirt or dress him up as Santa. Seeing as he ‘enjoys’ it so much, we have taken to dressing him up for Halloween every year.
Last year he was Frankenstein’s monster, although no photos exist–probably because I was laughing too hard–and this year he was some kind of witch (or maybe a princess) in a very pretty purple dress and matching hat.
It took a minimal amount of modification with a pair of scissors, and he did keep getting his claws caught in it at first, but at £8 from Tesco you can’t go wrong.
I’m nearing the end of the 18-month O2 contract I took out with my Viewty. With new technology reaching obsolescence after only a short life, why post about something that is so old?
Because when the Viewty first came out, people seemed to be falling over each other trying to be the first to review the phone. They hadn’t used it in anger. And boy, this phone makes me angry. When people ask me “is it a good phone?”, I struggle not to begin ranting. It is still widely available, so if I cause just one person to stop and reconsider the purchase of a Viewty, I will consider this post to be worthwhile.
The technical details, pictures, and many reviews of people singing the Viewty’s praises are everywhere. Just google it. I’m going to skip all of that rubbish, and tell you why you should have stuck with Sony Ericsson.
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They say that bad luck comes in threes.
I don’t know who They are, but why did They have to say it? Why not twos? Or “bad luck comes accompanied by no other instances of bad luck whatsoever”?
Anyway, following the tragic and catastrophic failure of my UPS, and the terminal affliction suffered by my wing mirror (oh yes, terrible times indeed), my computer has now decided things were still going too well for its liking, and a further helping of drama was required in order to provide some kind of counterpoint to the general wellness from which I was suffering.
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