I recently took out your Amazon ‘Prime’ expedited shipping service because I thought it would make my life easier. Considering the number of orders I make with Amazon in a year it should work out a little cheaper, and the convenience of getting next day delivery on _all_ of my Amazon orders sounded great. It really did. GREAT.

This week however the magic of Amazon Prime has been wholly dispelled thanks to your use of Citylink, a courier so consistently awful that I’m amazed they’re still in business.

Let’s start from the beginning. I ordered two items from Amazon on Monday, making sure they were eligible for Prime delivery. I did this because I was quite keen on having them the next day. Now, I knew that I wouldn’t be in between 9am and 5pm on Tuesday being one of those ‘types’ who works in a normal job during normal business hours, but I was prepared to go out to a depot if necessary to pick it up.

What I wasn’t prepared for was the card left by Citylink saying that their depot was in Livingston. LIVINGSTON. Since you might not be familiar with the geography of southeast Scotland, Livingston is SIXTEEN MILES AWAY from central Edinburgh. That is to say that any of the 477,000 people living in Edinburgh (Scotland’s capital city) who work normal business hours during a normal working week and decide to use Amazon Prime will have to travel SIXTEEN MILES to pick up their orders.

Look, here’s what 16 miles looks like: [link] (and yes, I know it’s actually 15.8 miles, but I’m trying to make a point here)

Now, I’d be inconvenienced enough if I had to drive 16 miles to pick up my order, but my car is in the garage at the moment. So, in order to pick up my order I’d have to take a 20 minute train journey (£6.90), and then walk for 44 MINUTES [link] to the Citylink depot. And of course then I’d have to walk 44 minutes back to the station, and 20 minutes back into Edinburgh. By which time I would be in a very bad mood indeed.

To put this into perspective, I could drive to the Amazon depot in Glenrothes in 53 minutes, saving us all the bother of using a courier in the first place and singlehandedly saving the planet from becoming a hideously polluted wasteland: [link]

So, my Amazon Prime order is stuck A MILLION MILES AWAY in Livingston, and I haven’t the time nor the inclination to go and fetch it. Thankfully my friend who lives near Livingston offered to go and pick it up for me. This morning I spent FIFTEEN MINUTES on hold waiting to speak to Citylink’s customer service department (despite only being third in the queue) to ask if my friend could pick it up. I was told that they could. Great! Or at least they could if they had a proof of MY name and address. Meaning that my friend would have to drive twenty miles into Edinburgh to collect my info, then drive 16 miles out to Livingston to pick up the parcel, drive 16 miles back to Edinburgh to deliver it to me, and then drive 20 miles back home again. I told Citylink that I might pass on that offer, and asked them to try and deliver it on Monday, leaving it in the stairwell of my block of flats (if they can even get access, the other flats being occupied by people who work normal hours on normal working days).

So this is all a bit rubbish, isn’t it? I’m sitting here thinking that Citylink are a bit rubbish for putting a delivery depot serving a major European city 16 miles away from the centre of that major European city, and I think Amazon are rubbish for using Citylink for a supposedly ‘Prime’ service.

Let’s look at what the competition are up to, shall we?

Oh look, here’s DHL. They deliver parcels you know. And where’s their depot? It’s OVER HERE [link], only 4.6 miles away on a major bus route.

And Parcelforce? They’re ALSO 4.6 miles away [link], and less than five minutes walk from a major bus route.

UPS? They’re just across the road from DHL. 4.6 miles.

This makes Citylink look even more rubbish, doesn’t it?

Worse still, it doesn’t look like I’ll be watching Mad Men season 2 in any hurry, which is a shame as I was really looking forward to it, especially after the cliffhanger at the end of season 1.

So, Mister Amazon, I’d ask you to do one of the following things to fix this sorry situation:

1) Stop using Citylink so that I can enjoy my Amazon Prime membership unsullied by their shambling idiocy.
2) Keep using Citylink, stick my Amazon Prime membership into your special Amazon Prime membership place, and refund me in full.
3) Send me ONE MILLION POUNDS in full and final settlement of my complaint, and a box of those nice Thorntons chocolates.

I look forward to your prompt reply.

Kind regards,

Rodti MacLeary
Edinburgh

Today I looked at his blog.

The header image of chimneys and craw-stepped gables looked familiar. Very familiar. A quick look at Google Street View confirmed my suspicions. It’s the roof of my old flat!

Spooky ooky.

And so back to The Road. It’s certainly not a great film for a first date, probably isn’t a patch on the book, and the subtitle ‘Cormac McCarthy’s Giddy Laughter Hour’ was perhaps a little misleading, but it’s certainly one of the most moving films I’ve seen recently and one I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend. The plot hangs on a simple but terrifying premise, that an Unknown Very Bad Thing has happened to the Earth, and all plant and animal life is dying as the planet is engulfed in firestorms and the atmosphere becomes increasingly noxious. Some human survivors remain, but as the last stores of food run dry desperation sets in and cannibalism becomes rife.

Our protagonists are a man (The Man) and his son (The Boy), inching through a horrifying but beautifully realised post-apocalpytic America with nothing but a shopping trolley containing their few possessions. Only the briefest backstory is given in a series of flashbacks early on, showing the Unknown Very Bad Thing (which you don’t see, but was clearly quite bad), and their wife/mother commiting suicide in a Captain Oates “going out, perhaps for some time” style.^[1] Cannibal bandits roam the wastelands, and every building they enter to scavenge for food is full of haunting memories of the world before.

A few things occurred to me in the first twenty minutes of the film. The first is that the location scout on this production should have won an Oscar for finding the bleakest, darkest, most utterly godawful places on Earth to film in. Apparently a lot of the filming was done on the abandoned Pennsylvania Turnpike, which is very creepy indeed. I’d go so far as to call it ‘creepy eepy’. The second is that you could probably edit all the scenes of The Man and The Boy shambling around (with or without shopping trolley), of which there must be at least 90 minutes, and release it as a new film called “TRAMP QUEST” with lots of brass band music dubbed over it. Finally, and on a slightly more sombre and serious note, I realised that I’ve perhaps been a little naive in my perception of what the world would be like after a catastrophic global apocalypse. I suppose there were two potential scenarios that I’d considered:

Scenario 2 doesn’t concern me too much, because of course we’d all be vaporised or blown up and get to see a really big asteroid before the curtain fell, so death would be interesting and mercifully brief in equal measures. Scenario 1 however brings the slightly less appetising prospect of slow, painful death and huge parts of the world left irradiated and uninhabitable, but there’d still be plants (albeit slightly poorly looking ones) and there would still be animals to eat (although they’d be glowing green and have three heads), and most importantly there would always be the hope that there would be SOMEWHERE left reasonably unscathed that the survivors could go and form a new society based on trumpet worship. The Maldives for instance. No one’s going to nuke the Maldives, and they’re really nice too. After a slightly inconvenient trek through the ravaged wastelands of Europe and the Middle East we could all go to the Maldives and live on the beach and have sexy fun, all the while parping our thanks to Kalahaptro the Great Trumpet Lord. Problem solved.

In the world of The Road there isn’t even a glimmer of that hope from the very start. There are no animals. All plant life is dead or dying. It seems that this is a catastrophe on a completely global scale, without exception, without reprieve. I found that a pretty hard concept to come to terms with, and one that challenges your thinking of how you would cope in such a situation. Watching The Man show his son how to use their last bullet to blow his own head off is utterly chilling, but at the same time is his ultimate act of love for his son.

The Road is an ordeal, and a fairly long ordeal at nearly two hours, but it makes it clear from the start that you must suffer as The Man and The Boy have suffered. It’s definitely a must-see, not just for the terrifyingly bleak world it brings to life but for some great acting, particularly from the young actor who plays The Boy, and with appearances from Robert Duvall and Michael K Williams (Omar from The Wire). Just don’t watch it on your own as I did (in floods of tears), definitely don’t watch it if you have children (that you like), and have a stiff drink and some Prozac ready for the end.

So fragile is life.

Back to post ^[1] Although of course we all know that Scott and chums probably ate Captain Oates, but later scored out their entry for the day (“Ate Oates, chewy thighs”) and replaced it with something a little more suited to later publication.

As documented on this very blog only yesterday, I received a threatening and abusive email from a member of an Edinburgh-based email list I run, by someone using the pseudonym flatulentbadger@gmail.com. Now I don’t know this person, and certainly don’t think I deserved to be called a cunt or punched for moving the date of a meeting, so I replied with what can only be described as remarkable restraint (transcript). I couldn’t however help but be intrigued as to who this mystery arsechimp was.

So, a Google search for flatulentbadger. Well, a few things came up, but nothing that gave me much of an obvious lead. The first thing to catch my eye was a Twitter account. Interesting. It didn’t give much away though, other than that Twitter user was obviously quite interested in Expression Engine and was more than a little bit sweary. Not a great deal to go on there, so back to Google I went with my knapsack on my back and a big sexy grin on my face.

Next stop, a hit for member called ‘flatulentbadger’ on the DigitalSpy forums. Digging through a few posts I found this post where he describes himself as “a short fat middle aged male” and how he was “in Waverley Train Station in Edinburgh.” At last, the Edinburgh connection. Personally, if I was a short, fat middle aged male I probably wouldn’t pick fights with 6’3″, 18 stone men with scars across their faces on the internet, but perhaps that’s just me.

Back to the Expression Engine tip, and this Google hit, where ‘flatulentbadger’ says he’d be up for an Edinburgh Expression Engine meet. Another win for the Edinburgh connection, and now we’ve verified the Twitter account as belonging to our internet chum! On the Expression Forums ‘flatulentbadger’ usually signs his posts with ‘fb.’, but in this one he signs it ‘db.’. Interesting. What’s more interesting though, is that for one of only a couple of times on those forums, he also mentions his work on www.planetseafishing.com, which runs on ExpressionEngine. This is gold, because now it only takes a quick WHOIS search on that domain to give me the name (and home address) of the person who owns that domain. In this case, ‘Douglas Bell’. Now that accidental ‘db.’ signature on the Expression Engine forums doesn’t seem like that much of a mistake.

What else can we find out from this? Well, he runs his own server with 1and1 (he mentions his move from dedicated to shared hosting here), the IP of which is 213.165.83.26. A reverse lookup on that IP reveals the following domains:


1. Appleblog.co.uk
2. Around-the-med.co.uk
3. Aroundthemed.co.uk
4. Designbydefault.co.uk
5. Di9it.com
6. Docjobs.co.uk
7. Fishing-planet.com
8. Macblog.co.uk
9. Medhomes.co.uk
10. Oilfab.com
11. Planet-fishing.com
12. Planet-seafishing.com
13. Planetseafishing.co.uk
14. Planetseafishing.com 1 listings
15. Seafishingplanet.com
16. Striplight.co.uk
17. Theappleblog.co.uk
18. Themacblog.co.uk
19. Tintedfish.co.uk
20. Tracianproperty.com
21. Zelebrities.co.uk
22. Zelebrity.co.uk
23. Zelebs.co.uk
24. Zelebs.com
25. Tintedfish.com


You’ll note the Mac and Apple related links in there. Remember those. Also he has tracianproperty.com, presumably a client.

So, we know lots about ‘flatulentbadger’ (a.k.a. Douglas Bell) now, and it’s pretty incriminating. I don’t want to go about falsely accusing people though, and still wanted that little last piece of damning evidence. And so I came full circle, right back to the email list that he had got so tetchy about in the first place. It’s an Apple Mac list, and so Apples and Macs and things that aren’t Apples or Macs but are related to Apples and Macs could perhaps be another part of the sticky organic residue that holds this all together. His ‘flatulentbadger’ posts didn’t give much away, but a quick search on the membership list revealed a ‘Doug Bell’, email address dpsbell@gmail.com, who joined on the 7th of July this year. While looking up his joining date in the logs I also found his home IP address, 94.193.93.217, which reveals that he’s a Bethere broadband customer. I’ll at least give the fucker some credit for that. But I digress. I had a quick hunt through the mailing list archives and came upon this, a post from ‘Doug’, and how about that signature at the bottom, a short but sweet ‘db.’.

ENDGAME.

Now to decide what to do about this rather sorry little affair. DECISIONS….

UPDATE: It turns out he turned up to one of our first meetings three and a half years ago, just the once. I can see how important these meetings must have been for him. WAT.

Not a member huh? but you still send me list messages? Either remove me completely, reinstate full posting rights or the next time I see you gangling down the road I will have no problem crossing the road to lamp you.  

Just for your own edification Rhodti, the reason you have such problems with people (I know I am not the only one) is your inability to organise shite, its like a cat hearding competition run by an autistic. Is it the 2nd, 3rd or 4rth tuesday of the month, or is that thursday? In three fucking fucking years its still, how is everyone for this week? dont mind if I just drop this into your calendar?. Other people have lives you feckless cunt, set a time, find a place (3rd tuesday for me) and stick to it.

I particularly liked the bit about him having no problem crossing the road, clearly a well-aimed dig at my tendency to get confused around pedestrian crossings.

We’re just a bunch of hens in the henhouse. All we want to do is lay our eggs and have some fun. We want to smoke a joint, get laid, listen to some rock ‘n roll, see some good movies. That’s all we want to do. You know what they want? Power. They want the power. This is what I objected to with Timothy Leary’s statement: “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” Oh no, no, no, no, turn on, tune in, take over. You’ve got to take over. Don’t drop out because if you drop out, they win.

This is from a great interview with Ray Manzarek and Robby Krieger on their new Doors documentary ‘When You’re Strange’.

After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Read more… (via @robcmorgan)

No amount of ‘HELLO WORLD’ programs in any language will ever possess the beauty of something like this in BASIC:

10 PRINT "BUM TRUMPETS"
20 GOTO 10

It could be a great medium for imaginative play, too. I remember writing programs with my friends which formed the centrepiece of our ‘detective agencies’ or secret spy rings, with super-secret logins and databases of sensitive data about our classmates. This was all very well until one of my friends started a similar effort with his sister to which I didn’t have a login. I remember spending ages trying to hack my way into it while they were distracted by Lego, desperately mining for any incriminating evidence they might have had on me. Childhood McCarthyism at its best.

I’ve made sure my kids have a Mac of their own, a slightly elderly anglepoise iMac G4, and hope that one day I can coax them into Terminal to learn a little bit of command line kung-fu, but in a such a slick GUI-driven environment there’s no real need for them to do that, no real hook into that world. If I really wanted them to get into programming then I’d probably have to try and explain Objective C and Xcode to them, things that I’m not really comfortable with myself, in order to try and cultivate their creativity.

Through chance I discovered this article by Steve Klabnik on this very issue, wonderfully titled ‘The Little Coder’s Predicament’. It makes for very interesting reading. And through that article I discovered the Hackety Hack project, a Ruby-based environment aimed at entry level coding at its most basic level (no pun intended) and which looks like it would provide the quick, easy and rewarding results that gave programming in BASIC such a hook early on.

I’m going to install it on their Mac tonight, and unbeknownst to them they’re about to spend the majority of their summer writing code while their dad looks on proudly.

Cut to yesterday, and the day of the epic migration. Internet banking didn’t work, and phone banking was about as capable as a quadriplegic in zero gravity. The disappointingly-not-Spanish call centre agents were very nice about it though, and apologised for being rubbish. I decided to be merciful, and let them off just the once.

Today however, instead of my account having woken to this morning’s dawn a towering behemoth of banking potency, it had all gone to shit. My balance completely disagreed with the figure I’d been given on the phone yesterday (in my favour, making me think some pending charges had disappeared), my card was rejected twice in a shop before finally going through, and a faster payment issued from my account proceeded to crawl through the banking system so slowly that it made the heat death of the universe seem like a fleeting moment.

I called them to find out what the effervescent lemon-flavoured fuck was going on and was told that the first payment to go through once you become a Santander customer will take 3-4 working days. Not that they were actually going to tell me that in advance or anything. Or perhaps provide any warning whatsoever. So here I am, lots of my money now stuck in the banking ether, and all that Santander could do was say “Erm, yes, sorry about that”.

Of course, if this bad news had been broken to me in stilted English by a Spaniard I might have taken it slightly better, but as it is Santander can fuck off.

From Gizmodo:

So, is Mark a Macrumors or Gizmodo reader? Hmm? The public must be told.