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September 9th, 2005
07:12 pm - Signs of the times
1) My most recent bank statement indicated on its envelope that it was handled by TNT Mail UK rather than by the Royal Mail. I'm not sure whether this means we have a separate TNT postman, whether the final delivery is made by the traditional postman due to some sort of local-loop-style last mile arrangement or even whether they get milkmen to deliver the mail. In any case, this is one monopoly I'm not too thrilled about seeing broken, unless the bank can identify a 0.001% raise in my interest rates as being due to switching provider.
2) A local petrol station used to charge 90.9p for a litre of unleaded petrol and 96.9p for a litre of super unleaded, with a big display board outside displaying their prices using rows of three seven-segment displays. As a result of oil tankers being redeployed across the Atlantic, they put their prices up by 4p across the board. The super unleaded price has hit an overflow error. As a result, they just don't advertise it any more.
Three solutions present themselves to me:
a) Stop being tarts about the final 0.1p/litre, call it £1.01/litre and be done with it.
b) Stick it up to 110.9p/litre using one seven-segment display to indicate 11.
c) Market cunning pieces of black and white plastic which can convert a seven-segment display showing "0" into one showing "10", by the expedient addition of two black blocks breaking the top and bottom segments and a white line joining the incomplete sides of the zero together.
3) I've been enjoying watching Demoscene TV's "Old School" channel on and off over recent days. Very occasionally they show a demo that I remember from when ten or more years ago and it's a great burst of nostalgia. (In this case, it was Puggs In Space, and some of the music was still brilliant and upbeat.) I guess this is my equivalent of watching VH-1 or listening to an oldies channel. Unfortunately, to an extent, the existence of the full motion video makes the demo slightly obsolete, as demos now play second fiddle to video files as transmission media for the best graphics to be found on a computer. Of course, the same argument could always have been used about the video recorder and that didn't make demos completely obsolete at the time - but I'd've thought that most people would find Flash movies to be a much easier and more accessible way to get their art across. (Which, of course, may be a vote against them for many artists!)
4) Have recently been enjoying an exceptionally fromageux J-pop called God of Romance (lyrics), which sometimes comes around in the rotation on  brakusjs's Bemani 3-65 and elsewhere. (Is there a challenger to live365 for the mantle of "second best site whose URL starts with the word live"?) The tune for the virst verse is wonderful, ethereal and epic; the rest of the song is extremely silly in a very good way, with a tremendous pace to it and some remarkably forced Engrish-translation rhymes. You can get a .mp3 of a short version of it here, but that has only a fraction of the silliness and none of the ether. It's an .mp3 of the long version of the song I want. Erm, you want.
Current Mood:  loved, loving, struggling on
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![[User Picture]](https://l-userpic.livejournal.com/125306323/520396) | | From: | sbisson |
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| Date: | September 9th, 2005 11:36 pm (UTC) |
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| | Stand well back from the fuse... | (Link) |
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AFAIK it's a trunk unblundling sort of thing - the mail goes from A to B in one of TNT's orrange lorries. Then it goes from B to you in the gentel hand of the postman.
I think I know who you bank with now... | From: | daweaver |
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| Date: | September 10th, 2005 08:31 am (UTC) |
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| | Re: Stand well back from the fuse... | (Link) |
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I think I know who you bank with now...
Perhaps not; my parents and I both had a TNT-mail statement, and we have different banks. |
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