One of the things that pushed me into buying my nice new shiny Mac Book Pro was that my Windows XP Dell D800 had been really getting on my nerves. Over the last 2 weeks before consigning it to the laptop graveyard it had been installing Microsoft Updates every day, usually requiring a restart, slowing down and then interrupting my work.

One of the final straws was my machine slowed to the point of almost doing nothing. Opening the task manager to see what was slowing it down took 2 minutes, only to find out that it was a Windows Service – other tools and digging tracking it down to Automatic Updates. I had to kill auto-update to get my machine working again. Every time after that that I tried to update because I knew there was an issue, the machine would freeze. I found a knowledge base article describing the problem, it had an attached patch – did it work? No.

So, one whole evening was wasted before I gave up trying to get to the root of the problem, and Windows Update has remained disabled till the day it was dumped.

I have been travelling to Dublin a lot recently, with many trips through both Stansted and Dublin Airports.

Stansted is renowned for it’s long walks, but I think that Dublin Airport has now taken the crown for trying to make air travellers walk closer to their destination.

I had noticed some new buildings, that I originally took to be portacabins, or temporary site offices. Along with the various bits of construction equipment I assumed they were for the site workers while they built some new exciting extension.

Instead, those buildings were the new walkway to another set of gates. They have removed a couple of the older gates at the end of one of the “piers”, and attached this echoing, cheap and nasty tunnel that zig-zags for about half a mile to a new hut filled with cheap and nasty metal chairs and the most basic gates you will have ever seen. No screens with flight details, no-tannoys, a tacky queuing system and a door straight onto the airfield with a rickety wooden ramp down to the ground that has wire grate tacked onto it as an anti-slip measure.

So, Ryanair has become an even nastier experience that it was before, hurrah. A couple of weeks ago I had to use Easyjet for a change, and I was surprised how much better things are. The planes are more comfortable, with wider aisles, and the staff are more friendly and accomodating. Ryanair seem to be hunting for the last possible euro of profitability and are nowing dipping below the level of acceptance – I wonder how much more that travellers will take before they start voting with their feet.

I always fill up my car when I am down to the last gallon – I know when I am down to the last gallon because I have a computerised “range” reading, along with MPG and various other gizmos on my car. Last night I get the “beep beep” warning and decide to pop around Tescos for a top up. I always fill to the brim too, who wants to go to petrol stations more frequently than they have to?

Anyway, there is a queue of at least 20 cars along the service road leading to Tescos, and yellow-jacketed people are wandering around puffed up with their own self importance. Eventually one walks down the queue and asks through our window – “What are you here for?”. “Petrol” we say, and off he goes. What else did he think we might say?

After about 20 minutes we get to the second car from the front of the queue (my range reading has dropped 6 miles while we’ve crawled about 100 yards). Again, a yellow-jacket knocks on the window. We wind it down. “You can use any pump”, he informs us – heh! I wonder if we’ll always get this service! The woman in front of us seems to have been confused by this simple instruction as there must be about six pumps free, and she is just sitting there. We weave around her stalled indecision and get to a pump. At last!

I leap into life, not wanting to hold up the other desperate motorists for a second longer than necessary, getting the cap off and the nozzle rammed in the inlet pipe and eagerly pulling the handle – whirr, glug, glug as the petrol trickles from the miserly pump as if it is reluctant to let go of its precious content. After three minutes and half a tank of petrol, click – and it stops. I stand there desperately pulling at the handle, nothing – please let me finish filling my car, you can’t have run out already! One of the attendants wanders over. There is a three minute cut-off set. What the hell?

Someone explain why the following logic helps:

• Slow the pumps down. This makes it take longer to fill up a car, so increases the chance of a queue forming.
• Hire some yellow jacketed people to ask pointless questions. This makes it look like there is something serious going on, hence we need to panic and go and fill up before we need to.
• Limit the amount of petrol you can have. This means you have to go back sooner, and queue again increasing the length of the queue.

The woman that was in front of us then pulled up behind us, spent a couple of minutes figuring out how to open her petrol cap, and must have only put one gallon in. Nuts.

The final salt on the wound was that this morning, on the way to work, I passed quite a few petrol stations along the A12, none of which had queues and all seemed to be open. Sigh.

The BBC are reporting that an 11 year old girl has been taken into custody in California for throwing a stone. Now, for an hour as a warning to get some form of message through to children that violence is wrong would be an admirable goal, working against the feeling that we have in this country that youth can get away with anything, at most being issued with a piece of paper (an ASBO) which they can boast of having to their friends.

But, in this case (being the USA) three police cars and a helicopter were mobilised to apprehend the child. Impressive. Then she was held in custody for 5 days with only a 30 minute visit allowed from her parents. Now she is under house arrest, and she is back in court next month. So, why did she throw the stone? She was being harassed by a group of boys with water bombs. The boy she “injured” has admitted starting the fight.

Why can’t we have some balance? Here we have no effective policing for youths, in the states they throw the book, bookshelf and library at the kids.

Sigh.