Arcoarena

Smoking: revisited

Well it looks like the smoking ban might actually happen and as long as pubs continue to serve food rather than stopping and allowing people to smoke I’m happy.

Breakfast news (BBC, natch) had a pro and an anti smoking people on and the pro-smoking bloke seemed a bit silly

On whether it’s fair to subject bar workers to smoke he said
“Well they’ve got a choice”
Interviewer: “What of being unemployed”
Man: “Oh don’t be silly, they could get a different job in a non-smoking pub”

But of course on the suggestion that smokers will still have a choice of going outside for a smoke he said
“That’s not much of a choice is it”

Quite, my heart bleeds for him.

The BBC ran another comments page on the smoking ban and my favourite post is below

“Having a smoking section in a pub or restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.” Mike, London

Chip and Pin: Part Deux

Hmmm. More controversial than I thought. I have to admit that I’m not saying that ‘Chip and Pin is the best thing ever to happen and we should all be jolly grateful to those lovely banking chappies, Amen’. But I think it’s an improvement in most cases. After all the old cards didn’t have the chip which I (am led to) believe is more secure, and with the old cards if someone has your pin they can still take a lot of money. Part of it is about realising what debit cards actaully do. They are to (almost) all extents and purposes a big wad of cash that we carry round in our pockets.

One last thing is that someone on the BBC website did point out something rather cunning. Write a PIN on the back of all your cards. Just make sure it’s not the right one. Hopefully it’ll get rejected and swallowed by the cash machine when someone attempts to use it.

In other news (literally) it took me 15 minutes this morning to realise that it was Sian Williams presenting breakfast news and not Natasha Kaplinksy. Why do they have to put people that look that similar on at that time in the morning?

ID Theft

ID theft has been in the news because apparently people are throwing out too much sensitive information.

I was reading the comments on the BBC website (yes this is another post to bitch about people saying stupid stuff) and someone stated that

‘Readers should be worried - with chip and pin. Until the machines for entering the pin number are more private, it’s too easy to see what someone is doing and spot their pin number. All that needs to do then is mug them and get the card. Not very secure, to my mind.‘

Why do people keep saying this? Surely before chip and pin all someone had to do is mug me and forge my signature which is written on the back of the card! Now that chip and pin is here they actually have to see me tapping my pin in (or threaten me enough). At least if I drop it in the street people can’t use it with only the information written on it.

Now to stop me having to continually write bitter posts about people saying stupid stuff will someone please invent an open authenication system, that will be adopted by all websites. Onto this authenication system I want a system called ‘eSlap’. This will allow bitter and twisted people to directly contact people and point out their stupidity. This isn’t needed for this site of course (you all know my email)

TV Copy Cats

One would think that if you want to copy an idea you’d do it well, wouldn’t you. Not the BBC seemingly. I’m a bit of a fan of Scrapheap Challenge and I’ve been enjoying the new series (or atleast those bits of it that don’t feature Lisa Rogers - sorry anyone that likes her but she just annoyes me, at least the last co presenter, Cathy Rogers confusingly, seemed to know what she was talkig about end{rant}). Now where was I?

Oh yes. Mechannibals it’s on BBC on Sundays. It’s a little like scrapheap but instead of a scrapheap they get they’re own houses. The winners get all the stuff they trash replaced and the losers get a toolbox to fix it. The fact that it’s an obvious copy doesn’t really irritate me. It’s more the fact that it’s a bad copy.

The good thing about Scrapheap is that it’s big. People use big engines to do some really impressive stuff and there’s lots of noise and mess etc. Mechannibals is lame by comparison and the things that get made, generally, don’t work. The most disturbing this about this program is the contestants. The blokes are generally a bit wierd (and probably bitter that they aren’t good enough to go on Scrapheap). Also at least once per episode the wives generally break down in tears and look like they’re seriously considering divorce.