Friday August 29
 
13:57
 
Damn It

Just after I transfer 3,000,000 yen into British quid, the rate falls from 204 to 200. Three hundred squid. Bet it falls further also.

Damn fiends. (Don’t know who is a damn fiend, but someone is.)

At least 204 is better than the 210-215 rates of the past few months and I’ll get a decent interest rate back in the UK - 5.5% compared to 1% in Japan.

Friday August 22
 
10:18
 
The Bodies Were So Hot That Police Could Barely Touch Them

You always think that the dangerous time for being in a plane is when it’s in the sky or landing - not during take-off.

A jet owned by the troubled Spanair airline overshot a runway at Madrid’s international airport and exploded into flames.

…

“The scene is devastating,” said Pablo Albella, a Madrid city emergency rescue worker. “The fuselage is destroyed. The plane burned. I have seen a kilometre of charred land and few whole pieces of the fuselage.

“It is all destruction,” he added.

A police officer said the bodies were so hot that police could barely touch them and told El Pais the shattered wreckage bore no resemblance to a plane.

smh.com.au reports that no Australians were involved - presumably because they are all in London in IT jobs or drinking booze.

The flight was a code-share with Lufthansa. I have flown with Lufthansa a couple of times. One time, a few years ago, they refused to let me listen to my iPod because “Even though it is legal in the EU to use an MP3 player onboard, in Germany it is illegal.” If they spent less time on irrelevant crap and more time looking at the safety measures of their codeshare partners, maybe this wouldn’t have happened.

Tuesday August 5
 
22:58
 
Skype Exposes Kids To Porn

I am really getting sick of getting these pornographic “Contact details requests” on Mac Skype. It wouldn’t be so bad if they actually wanted to shag me but they only want to use me for my money.

Seriously though, I cannot find a way to prevent these appearing on Skype on my Apple Mac - unless I hide myself from being online altogether or choose Do Not Disturb, which means friends cannot contact me.

I wrote to Skype support and they gave me Windows only instructions on how to block contact pop-ups - stupid arses, given that they know my version of Skype is Mac. When I followed that up with “There is no such configuration option for Mac”, they ignored it.

While Windows users have an option to block these pop-ups, Mac users don’t. I don’t have Skype-Me set, so I am not receiving them because of that.

There is a serious side to this: If this was a family Mac and children were playing games or using iPhoto, the “calienter mujer - sexy dirty bitch xxx” pop-up could appear at any time. That’s bad enough, but since the default is to let dirty bitch see my computer is online and allow contact, kids could very easily get exposed to pornographic chats by just clicking OK.

I’ve tried raising this again with Skype and they didn’t respond. I contacted the news desk at The Register, The Guardian, and The Sun and only The Register responded - however it seems they then got sidetracked with the latest iPhone rumour and stopped following it up.

Skype exposing kids - and innocent me - to pornography. It’s only a matter of time before pedophiles catch on and I hope then that Skype gets sued to the heavens in a high profile case - because if they ever claim they didn’t know, I’ll be the first one providing evidence that they did know they were exposing children to sex and refused to do anything about it… and I’ll be keeping my emails to show The Register, The Guardian, and The Sun also ignored the issue.