FoshizniK!

After months of searching through Gumtree et al to find somewhere to live in Cambridge, I am going tonight to look at a double room in a shared house in the wastelands between Mill Road and Cherry Hinton Road, somewhere behind Cambridge Leisure.

It’s not a student house, it’s not a bedsit, it’s ten minutes from uni and it’s CHEAP – £90pw all in. Which is GOOD.

But I am having doubts now. As much as I hate getting the X5 every day (although if you have to get a bus every day, the mightiness of the X5 means it isn’t quite so arduous), and want to be closer to uni, able to get a job in Cambridge without being constrained by buses etc., I wonder whether I would miss the security of “my flat”, and whether I am ready to leave St Neots for a third time.

St Neots is great; most of my friends are there, little brother is there, it’s handy for getting into not just Cambridge but also Peterborough, Bedford, London etc.

More than anything though, despite the fact I share a flat, it’s very much “my” place. I can do what I want when I want. I have all my crap spread all over the place, I can have who I want round when I want – I don’t have to live by someone else’s rules. It’s a selfish thing basically. Could I live by someone else’s rules?

So I am going to look at this room in CB1 today, and will keep the following in my mind. If it’s truly an amazing place, I’ll seriously think about moving. But anything less, I’m going to stay where I am, at least for the time being.

There’ll be other places. And £90pw does seem a little TOO good to be true…

This post at Guyism, if you can bare the annoying habit of auto-playing movie trailers, struck me as being a little short.

Their “six signs you spend too much time on the internet” are all well and good, but there are a few missing, and we need to allow some nods to old “signs you spend too much time online” posts from the old days – you know, before Facebook, before free blogs, when a dotcom cost fifty quid and you had to send them a cheque to pay for it.

First, the points Guyism raises. Vis, you speak in Twitter, you speak in the third person, you threw away your TV because everything is online, you know everything before it happens because of the 743 blogs you read daily, you have friends you have never met in person and you have no attention span.

The last one is interesting. Once upon a time, before tabbed browsing (who would have thought that something so simple would be so great?) you had a long attention span. 56k modems were considered fast. As Roy states on the IT Crowd, “you’d be up all night and you’d only see eight women.” Now, if a YouTube video takes more than three seconds to buffer, I give up on it. Bet you do too. The internet hasn’t made us impatient, but broadband certainly has. (more…)

Ghostbustering is the practise of walking two or more abreast in a location or situation where it is not appropriate, such as in a slim gateway or corridor, stopping the stream of people coming the other way.

This REALLY fucking annoys me. Owing to campus redevelopment at uni, there is a big fucking chunk missing from the middle of the site. Therefore there’s a lot of people moving through small gateways and doors which were originally intended as low-traffic portals.

Now, I know it’s nice to meander along next to your mate or that nice-looking female who eyed you up across the lecture theatre earlier. But when there are fifteen people trying to come through the gate the other way, how hard can it be to walk behind them just for a second? (more…)

What caught my eye this week…

Guyism - 14 Horribly Unappetising Foods

Pictures for Sad Children

21 Motorboatable Girls on Boats

20 Good CAPTCHA Phrases

This is brilliant, from A Softer World:

In fact, it almost beats Kelvin’s marriage proposal a few years ago, when he chucked a ring at his girlfriend and said “You can wear this”.

She’s still his wife.

Today, I got a circular email along the lines of that old classic, the Nieman Marcus cookie recipe email.

This was a typical “forward to all your friends” circular way back in the mists of time – i.e. the late nineties. Do you remember it? The gist was, this woman was having coffee at the above named department store with her neice, daughter, nephew, son, cousin, sister, mum… it varies. But that’s not the point. Basically she bought a cookie. She asked the waiter for the recipe, as it was so damn nice.

The recipe was produced. She went to pay her bill. The recipe had cost her $600, or some such amount.

She said she didn’t want the recipe that badly; the store said she could have already copied or memorised it, and she had to pay.

So she decided to forward the recipe on to EVERYONE in the WHOLE WORLD, in the hope that people would just make the cookies themselves and do Nieman Marcus out of much much more than the $600 she had paid – after all, the cookies were $1.50 each, so to “break even” she only needed 400 people to not buy one to begin to “hurt the company”.

This has ALWAYS annoyed me. Number one, because people are fucking stupid enough to believe things like this. It’s almost as unbelievable as “if you forward this email to 50 friends in the next six seconds, your dick will double in size and that hot 18 year old girl across the road will fall madly in love with you”, or “Forward to a million people and Bill Gates will find Maddie”.

Number two, why the fuck would you go out, buy a cookie and then ask for the recipe? These people are in business. OK, Nieman Marcus is a high quality multi-million dollar retailer, which doesn’t survive on the income from a few biscuits. “Oh shit, we’re down $600 this month because no-one bought these cookies. Fuck!” No. It’s one less ivory backscratcher.

Three, if I am out shopping, and fancy a snack, I buy one. I don’t think “I may be hungry now, but rather than spending a quid or two on something to munch, I’ll wait three hours until I get home – having gone via Tesco to spend a fiver on the ingredients – then spend half an hour making biscuits, because this company treated this lady meanly.” No. Gimme the fucking cookie now.

Four, and most unbelievable, is that fifteen years on people STILL insist on forwarding the same ridiculous old emails, albeit in a slightly different guise – this time the store was Selfridges and the recipe was for a cake, but it’s the same exact story.

Don’t do it people. You’ll face the wrath.

It’s odd, my last name. I know – or at least know of – every single person with my last name.

Namely, me, my brother, my dad and step-mum, my uncle (dad’s brother) and aunt; the dad’s cousins (x2? one may be married now) and one of the cousin’s two kids, who live near Aberystwyth.

That’s it.

There’s also single-figure numbers of a branch of the family – related a fair few generations ago – who spell it Chillistone rather than Chilestone. Rootsweb has this:

Subject: Re: [OEL] Population trends

Let me give you a current worked example.

My name is David Chillistone. Before about 1840 it was spelt Chilestone,
but "my" branch of that family name ended up with the spelling "Chillistone"
through a clerical error (all were illiterate Ag Labs, so had no idea how to
spell the surname anyway). There are a few people of the Chilestone
spelling around, but not many. There's single figure numbers of
Chillistones. Here's why. (more...)

Apple have announced the launch of the much-anticipated “Jesus Tablet”, the iPad.

As usual, most of the predictions were nowhere near close.

Unlike earlier Windows tablet PC’s, the iPad has no keyboard, no DVD drive, you can’t install normal apps on it and use it like a normal computer plus touchscreen. No. It’s a whole different thing.

But it’s so pretty. I want. Now.

iPad at apple.com

Started back at uni on Monday. Got off the bus to be met by the site of the empty bed store on East Road being turned into another Tesco Express.

Everyone knows Cambridge is one of the UK’s biggest Tesco towns, with well over 51% of all retail spend happening at the Evil Empire. Most people also will have heard of the mass protests that accompanied their plans to open a store in Mill Road, mostly citing the fact that the wide variety of independents in that street will be forced to close. (This is crap, of course; if you don’t want the indies to go bust, keep shopping there instead of at Tesco. Bet you won’t though.)

But the arrival of the East Road store seems to have been met with less fanfare. It’ll certainly do well, with all the live-in students of ARU – a few hundred – being three minutes’ walk away. But is there actually a gap for a store here? Newmarket Road Tesco is open the same hours and is only a ten minute walk. Asda is even closer, and the hated Mill Road Express about fifteen minutes.

Then there’s Sainsbury’s in the city centre, Co-Op at Milton Road (two of them), and Chesterton Lane, and Mill Road, and Newnham. Another Express at the Junction site on Hills Road. All these shops are within a fifteen minute stroll at most from the new one.

And while we’re on the subject, why does no-one complain about the Co-Op’s aggressive blanket coverage of Cambridge? No-one kicked up when they opened on Mill Road for example. Maybe because the Co-Op are seen as “nice”, they’re owned by the people that shop there etc. But to you or me, Co-Op is just another place to buy food and fags – exactly the same as Tesco. So why are they not seen as a threat to local business?

Cambridge is a fairly small city, albeit one that’s expanding quite a bit. I think Tesco need to calm down a bit, but maybe Co-Op do too. They have eight food stores in Cambridge, plus banks, funeral services, travel agents etc. Tesco’s website shows 9 stores, not including East Road, and they also seem to have forgotten about Bar Hill Extra, which is slightly outside the city but still very much counted as a Cambridge branch. They also don’t list One-Stop branded stores, which are fully owned by the Evil Empire.

Like it or not, Tesco are a threat to local business, because as much as people say “I won’t shop there” they always will.

No Mill Road Tesco Campaign