Wednesday, January 28, 2015
The way it is
"The marketing and media have now got so skilled that they make promises and raise expectations that the rest of the organisation just can't meet, or ever hope to meet."
And that, which came out of a conversation I had last night with Mr Old Friend BW, nicely encapsulates in one sentence exactly what is wrong with the world, at almost every level.
Saturday, January 24, 2015
Wednesday, January 7, 2015
You are what you eat
Tired of all the biased information on what you should and shouldn't eat, often based on questionnable research methods and questionnable use of statistics, fed to you by the media?
The problem is that there is often more than a grain of truth in something that is sensationalised, but it is often very hard to track down the original research paper (even using Google Scholar), and the majority of new research papers are now behind pay walls.
One source of sound research that I have found recently is the Food and Behaviour Research site.
You can sign up to receive email notifications when a new research paper is added to the site.
On a related note, I've mentioned before that I only use organic milk, and (where available) organic milk-based products.
I always wonder why (given that most people understand and accept that what a human mother consumes can pass via breast milk to her baby), people don't consider that the drug cocktail routinely forced into perfectly healthy farm animals does not pass into milk in a similar way.
It seems to me that consumption of non-organic milk is one of the significant reasons that antibiotic resistance so high in the developed world. But yet I don't hear or read of this being considered?
I guess that it is easier to blame GPs for over-prescribing to patients who demand antibiotics for every ailment, rather than explaining the difference between a viral and a bacterial infection for the umpteenth time, than to ruin the dairy/beef industry.
It always amazes me that organic milk lasts much longer than drug-filled milk. Poor stock rotation during the FOTCR™ season at The Coven led to a container of skimmed dated 22nd December being overlooked. And it was still OK when I (the world's fussiest person when it comes to milk freshness) finished it yesterday, 15 days after the use-by date.
Tuesday, January 6, 2015
Greetings, card problems
If you use, or have ever used Moonpig to send cards, you need to know about their [I suppose I should say alleged] security issues. Read right to the end and you'll discover that they've had 17 months since a developer more alert than their own pointed out the [I suppose I should say alleged] problem.
More info here.
What makes me really cross about this is that they put out a tweet this morning saying, "We are aware of claims re customer data and can confirm that all password and payment information is and has always been safe." It then took them another 8 hours to decide that maybe they had better investigate.
Had the PR department just got someone with even a basic knowledge of coding to read the original blog post when it was published yesterday, and look at other articles on that blog, they'd have realised that perhaps they did have a problem.
Mind you, had I found a problem like that (or even knew that it existed), I wouldn't have waited 17 months to go public.
You can't (apparently) delete you own account either... you need to phone them up and ask.
Just another reason why I'm glad I'm stuck in the last century when it comes to some things. And why I'm glad my shares are in Royal Mail and not Moonpig/PhotoBox.
*wonders how many other instances of this sort of thing are yet to be discovered*
Monday, January 5, 2015
5.1.15
Another Nice Date Day.
I just had to nip into town to post a parcel, get some milk, renew some library books and collect another that I'd ordered. I found that I'd nearly forgotten how to drive my car, not having driven anywhere since well before the FOTCR™. Still no need to do any other shopping. Fantastic.
When I got up in the night to go to the loo, I noticed, in the darkness, that our elderly neighbour's sitting room light was on, which is most unusual for him. I dropped round at lunch time to check that he was OK. He assured me that he was, but that he'd had "an 'inspiration to write something" and was up from "just before five to two until twenty-eight minutes past four." I commiserated, saying that I sometimes had that sort of urge in the night, and he looked most bemused. "Do you?" he asked, "I've only ever had to get up and write once before in my whole life."
That must be the secret of how to get to nearly 89.
Go to bed by 10.30pm, wake to the alarm at 7am, without stirring in between.
No hope for me, then.
