The website of Alex Kinch, live from London
Posts tagged Annoying
Daily Mail readers h8 txt msgs
Sep 24th
Link: I h8 txt msgs: How texting is wrecking our language | the Daily Mail
It must be a slow news day over at the Daily Mail. With no apparent stories of immigrants stealing our jobs, paedophiles ravaging our kids or any other general threat to the pretend ‘la la land’ middle England readership that the Daily Mail purports to represent, they’ve decided to lay into text messaging.
It is the relentless onward march of the texters, the SMS (Short Message Service) vandals who are doing to our language what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours eight hundred years ago.
They are destroying it: pillaging our punctuation; savaging our sentences; raping our vocabulary. And they must be stopped.
Right.. I’d imagine Genghis Khan would be a little peeved to have his plundering and pillaging antics compared to someone asking if you fancy a pint later (or should that be l8r?)
PS: I expect someone will buy me this t-shirt after my little rant 
‘Smishing’ outbreak hits Canadian town
Aug 16th
Link: BCNG Portals Page (R)
Welcome to the picturesque town of Maple Ridge, about 45 minutes East of Vancouver. Surrounded by magnificent mountains, pastoral meadows and beautiful lakes, it’s a great place to take a vacation (so says the area website). However, bad things are afoot in Maple Ridge. Residents are getting worrying text messages telling them they’ve won a cash prize, in a ‘smishing’ outbreak.
The text message that beeped on Veronica Cellier’s mobile phone was too good to be true. It said congratulations, you have won $428,000 and directed the Maple Ridge resident to e-mail ‘the claims office” at claims@standfordproductions.org.
‘I’d never heard of scams through text messaging,” the 32-year-old said incredulously. ‘I’m just not stupid enough to respond.” Cellier was one of four Telus customers to report the scams which targets short message service (SMS). Smishing or SMS phishing variation of the phishing scam where the user will receive a text message with an Internet or e-mail address.
The article goes on to say that ‘smishing’ is like phishing – if you follow the link or reply, bad virus things will immediately invade your computer, phone, washing machine and toaster.
It’s times like this when you do wonder about how gullable some people really are.. Anyone know if Nigeria gets cheap texts to the UK?
HTC and the curse of the weak displays
Jul 23rd
A few friends of mine have HTC phones. HTC? You know, the guys that make that nice Touch handset – the one that Ewan quite likes. I’ve really been into Symbian phones over the past few years (both S60 and UIQ), and never really considered a Windows Mobile device. However if someone had asked me up until a few weeks ago which one would I recommend, I wouldn’t hesitate to send them off to get an HTC unit.
Then I witnessed a strange thing. In the same weekend, two friends had their screens completely fail, both within a couple of hours of each other. We’re not just talking a slight failure, or maybe a few duff pixels: oh no, we’re talking complete and castastrophic display failure. There’s no sign of physical damage to the plastic part of the screen, not even a scratch.
They’re both with Orange, so a quick phone call, and Orange being their usual unhelpful self (‘have you tried switched it off and on again?’), and the next day they got their handsets replaced by courier.
Over the weekend, the screen went *again* one of these two week old replacement handsets. That’s it in the picture at the top of the article. It looks like someones shot at the middle of the screen – but again not a single scratch on the plastic. They haven’t been dropped, kicked, sat on, or anything obvious like that – the displays just seem to be randomly failing.
One phone having a problem is just bad luck. Two – hmm, perhaps a concidence. Three phones from two people in as many weeks? It reeks of a manufacturing fault, or a problem with a batch. Orange just keep replacing the handsets under insurance – but how long will that last?
Incidently in all my years in mobile, with more handsets than I can remember under my belt, I’ve never had a broken screen on a phone. Seen it happen once on an HP iPAQ, but that was after serious daily abuse and a catastrophic dropping incident.
Teachers say mobiles are ‘offensive weapons’
Jun 26th
Link: BBC NEWS | Education | Mobile phones ‘offensive weapons’
Expect this to turn up in the Daily Mail tomorrow..
A teaching union is calling for mobile phones to be classed as potentially offensive weapons. NASUWT general secretary Chris Keates said the way pupils misused them to bully their teachers meant they should be banned from school premises.
Hmm ok. There was me thinking from the headline we were talking about throwing mobiles at the teacher, or attacking them with the power of a Razr flip. Anyway, the article goes on:
Ms Keates is raising the issue of mobiles with ministers at a task force meeting on Tuesday. She is particularly concerned about websites such as Ratemyteacher and Bebo which, she says, provide a vehicle for false allegations and abuse by pupils which can damage teachers’ self esteem and careers.
She said: “These sites are fed by pupils’ misuse of mobile phones. The time has come for mobiles in schools to be placed in the category of a potentially offensive weapon and action taken to prevent their use by pupils while on school premises. Regrettably, our evidence shows that some schools are still not taking these issues seriously.”
Right. Firstly, what’s stopping pupils using Ratemyteacher and Bebo from their PCs at home? In fact, they’re probably more likely to do that as the data charges on prepay are pretty crippling.
And second – ‘offensive weapon’? What’s that about? I’m surprised they haven’t banned pencils yet, following my complaint sometime in the 80′s that the boy that used to sit next to me in Infants school used to constantly stab me in the leg with a blunt HB.
Of course if you’re a Daily Mail reader, this is yet another serious issue that needs a knee-jerk reaction. Standby for the feedback from ‘Angry from Tunbridge Wells’..
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