Category: #Rant

Rantlets – Road Rage, Speed Cameras, Speed Bumps

Rantlets – don’t you just love a good rant? Well, here are some mini rants – Agree or not, at least have a laugh, you twisted little bugger.

Just as a strict disclaimer… If you’re offended by this, assuredly none of the below (Or anything on this site) is targeted at you as an individual. Nothing here is anything-phobic, or rasist, or anything baring a good rant and dark-sardonic humour. If you don’t like industrial level swearing which would make satan bush, then scroll on by and don’t whine that you weren’t warned. If you’re offended, scroll on by and enjoy your life. If you laughed at this article – I like you 🙂

Continue reading Rantlets – Road Rage, Speed Cameras, Speed Bumps

Reasons why I’m not a c*nt

Reasons why I’m not a c*nt.

This is going to be a short article.

Erm… maybe.

Yeeeee nah, I’m a c*nt really.

Click the link below. You’d better like swearing though. There’s a fuckton of swearing, and for the less educated amongst you, that’s like 1000 shittons. So if you don’t like professional industrial level swearing which would put a roughneck to shame, or if you’re a snowflake, then scroll on by and have a nice life, otherwise read on.

Continue reading Reasons why I’m not a c*nt

Rantlets – Murder, Freakiness & The young who can’t use a telephone

So – Rantlets – A series of mini-rants on random topics

I do love a smash of random rants – good for the soul.

These Rantlets have been brewing for a while, eking out their thin veil of truth, trust, and a bucket full of sardonic-mode moral outrage. I’m letting them roam into the thoughts of the public. Keep Calm, and RANT on!

Just as a strict disclaimer… If you’re offended by this, assuredly none of the below (Or anything on this site) is targeted at you as an individual. Nothing here is anything-phobic, or rasist, or anything baring a good rant and dark-sardonic humour. If you’re offended, scroll on by and enjoy your life. If you laughed at this article – I like you 🙂

Continue reading Rantlets – Murder, Freakiness & The young who can’t use a telephone

When the fuck did I become an old man?

Recently something smacked me in the face so hard as to knock me into next week. Yup that’s right… fucking time travel, motherfuckers. Only this isn’t the nice kind of time travel where Doc Brown and a mongrel of questionable origin is awaiting you with a nice warm amplifier. This is the kind of time travel which makes reality movies about the collapse of civilisation look like a fucking cartoon. This is getting old(er)…

So, as I was saying about the knocking and next week. It’s next week, and I’m old.

  • Things are too loud
      Yes, this is even though I wake up deaf with bad sinuses every morning.
  • Bright lights are too bright. Someone turn off the fucking sun – vampire? Maybe.
  • Alcohol sometimes works too well… Upside is a cheap date, or more then likely ‘night in’, as it hurts to go out…
  • All I want is for a nice quiet, dim, and peaceful pub to crawl into.
  • Oh, look… I blinked and it’s next fucking year.
  • My body has now altered it’s default setting to ‘ache like a bitch’ (Sorry if this offends all you bitches – not really.)
  • Music. I’m beginning to think of classical orchestral music as ‘super classic’ and 80s rock’n’pop as classical.
  • Clubs. What the fuck are clubs apart from dark, noisy, and hostile environments where the young get off their faces?
  • When the fuck did women start dressing in a pair of tights and some cling film to go out on the town – come on women – leave something to the imagination – I don’t wanna see your thinly veiled minge, even when drunk off half a pint of lager at four in the afternoon. Go put some fucking clothes on.
  • I realised my parents were fucking retards, nasty fucking dribbling retards with as much as an idea of reality as the most retarded of my cats – you know, the one which licks anyfuckingthing.
  • It doesn’t require alcohol to wake up (Yet again?) with a hangover.
  • People in their 30’s are referred to as kids.
  • I’ve forgotten twice as much as I currently know.

So getting older. In my imagination I can see a bold figure clawing away at the walls of life itself, whilst being dragged kicking and screaming into the eternal darkness, all the time screaming like something more wild than wild. Reality: Everything fucking hurts.

You know the worst part? I’m not evening fucking 45 yet, and I might have the best part of another 40 years doing this shite. Still, I’m a cheap date now, and by the time I’m much older I’ll be able to get off on a whiff of perfume 😉

Oh, and you people in your 20’s and 30’s reading this – you’ll all think that this will never be you. HaHa!

And there’s this bastard…

Simple article: How dare these bastards protect child abusers.

One might be suggesting that these scum-vermin burn in the fires of their self created hell. You got it folks, personally as a victim of abuse at the hands of the catholic church this hits close to home, they promote abuse, they protect abusers, here in black and white from the Guardian. How can the members of the catholic cult claim to have any morals? If you, as a normal, moral human found out that a club you belonged to promoted and covered up child abuse, would you A) Report them to the authorities, B) Kick shit out of them, or C) LEAVE THE CLUB… Note none of the options in the previous sentence are STAY IN THE CLUB AND PROTECT THE ABUSERS… Just what is wrong with them!!!

Yes, this is a rant. No, staying a member of an organisation which protects abusers isn’t the same as being an abuser, for the individual to be protecting an abuser on a personal basis – but it is being complicit, supporting those abusers and those who protect the abusers. It’s not the same as living in a country with a hideous human rights record where you can’t leave – membership of a cult is a choice, especially when you’re informed of the abusive actions of said cult.

I Find That Offensive!

iftoI was listening to the Jeremy Vine show on BBC Radio 2, the subject matter, centred around “the right to take offense” struck a chord with me. In the programme, the author Claire Fox described her experiences with young adults which inspired her to write the book, “I Find That Offensive“.

I agree 100% with everything she says in the book, and I fear for the future of the society which allows, and to a lesser extent encourages this behaviour among the young.

It’s a very interesting read, which I would strongly recommend to any thinking and reasoning adult – and if you have the opportunity to change the mind of a young person to be more open and less offended, then please enable that most vital skill set whenever, and wherever you can; survival of the race by decreasing future offended-wars is a noble quest. (I’m also of the opinion this ties in with a secular or atheist point of view, I strongly suspect the religious mind isn’t capable of this, not truly…)

There are a few memes drifting around the interwebs concerning the same subject – all along the same lines – and they’re true… “So fucking what?” as Stephen Fry says…
IMG_1451

This is where Blasphemy started, and we all know how fucking evil that shit is – people have been killing and torturing other people throughout the ages in the name of that fucker, and the worst thing, it still goes on today – however it now seems that the youth of today is intent on broadening this to other subjects as well… Claire Fox describes a talk regarding a footballer, convicted of rape, discussing whether or not he should resume his career, where any other points of view than further, and more extreme methods of punishment were shouted down, and effectively banned by the court of “I’m offended” – it’s a sad state of affairs when our young adults are so mentally closeted they can’t even hear the opinion of others.

IMG_1452It’s my personal opinion that they’ve simply had it too easy, they don’t know what real life is actually like, they’ve never struggled for crusts of bread, they’ve never been broken, never hit rock bottom and then fallen some more – IF you’ve been unfortunate (Or should I say fortunate?) enough to have been that broken, you know, you just fucking know that life isn’t that simple. The act of being broken – it makes you – when coming out the other side, you have a fresh appreciation of what actually matters, and you know, just being fucking offended simply doesn’t live in the same universe as real life.

Here are a couple of quotes of mine, and I sincerely hope they offend someone somewhere…

“Offended? – Good. Makes you feel alive. Everyone has the right to be offended, cause offence and be told to fuck off, quite equally. Anyone who thinks anything else is clearly fucking insane.”

“Anyone who is offended merely by words not the context / intent of the words is truly stupid.
Stupidity is the only universal crime.
Darwin for the win.”

Another tweet to @BBCRadio2, which will be ignored. #atheist

Here’s yet another tweet from yours truly to @BBCRadio2, which they will ignore, as per usual.

bbcr2tw

The BBC, which is paid for by the British Public under the licence fee (Read: Thinly veiled tax), are intent on shoving the opinion of religious crazys at us pretty much constantly; further, to add insult aimed towards the thinking majority of the world – they don’t even acknowledge the criticism. #bastards

The religious constantly and consistently lack moral fibre, as witnessed throughout the ages, and more recently in the religiously motivated attacks on the free societies in which we all live in and value. When was the last time you heard of an Atheist killing people because they were gay, or otherwise ‘offensive’… Fucking arseholes, the lot of ’em… And don’t come at me with the ‘peace’ argument – If you had morals, and happened to belong to a club who raped, killed, and tortured people – you’d fucking leave… Even passively belonging to such a club would surely lead to world wide condemnation… Oh, wait, it’s a religion – well that’s OK then. LIKE FUCK.

Don’t know why I bother!

Racism, Sexism, or just plain discrimination – none are pretty, either way.

bbcjobsThis story from The Sun (Which the BBC have rubbished, but who believes them these days?) has irked me. This is a prime example of racism, and would be just the same as advertising the positions as white only, or women only, or dare I say, white-working-non-disabled-male-only.

The BBC should be ashamed of themselves. I think I have a higher moral standard as an individual as they do at an organisational level. What I think is “The best person for that job“… Fuck any other consideration… I mean it’s fucking 2016 and this shit is still going on, come on BBC, grow the fuck up.

I don’t care what colour a person’s skin is, or if they have the right number of limbs, or if they’re fat or thin, or any other feature about ’em – what is important, is that in a holistic way they fit in the role, having the skills and will get on with other staff in a harmonious manner – a workforce needs to get on!

I had a nasty experience of “positive” racism a number of years ago, in an old role, working for a different company (Which shall remain nameless!). Myself and a colleague were put in charge of recruiting someone to back-fill a tech role in a small team of tech-specialists; the role was internal-only, and had to be drawn from the existing work-force. There were a number of applicants, and we narrowed the selection down to just two of them; this is where things went wrong, and left a very sour taste in my mouth.

The “boss” said to me, “give it to this person, they’re black, and hasn’t had a promotion yet”. The person in question wasn’t anywhere close to the two people we’d narrowed the list down to. So they got the job. For those who read this, and may know the details – I hold nothing against the person for getting the job, they did in the end manage very well and grew as an individual, however to this day I can’t help think it was the wrong thing to do, as (Despite best wishes) they simply weren’t the best person for the job, and at the end of the day, I’m sure some customers suffered because of this.

I can only think of the abject feelings of humiliation the person in question felt about this, as I’m sure at the end of the day, they knew. OK, they had a job, but to be honest they were the victim in this – trapped by a management team with absolutely no moral compass what so fucking ever.

In this instance, the media has done the country a service and exposed this nasty trait at the BBC for all to see.

Right person for the job, nothing else should ever matter.

Yes, I have friends who are from all walks of life, and I don’t give a fuck what shape they are, what colour they are, male/female/inbetween, gay/bi/straight/whatever, or if they’re disabled, or not – they’re all good fucking people and should be treated equally – none of them should be put above another for any other reason than they’re most suitable for x task/role/whatever.

TalkTalk: The Fibre Saga

TTFOfferWell… We recently decided to believe the advertising (Silly, I know), and upgrade our TalkTalk Broadband package to include the new ‘Fibre’ package, which claims to be 5x faster than the standard ADSL2 which we had.

Well… Fibre isn’t fibre, in this case it’s VDSL2, and whist there may be a fibre somewhere along the route, probably to a green box at the end of the street, there is no fibre to our house. Kind of misleading there, TalkTalk. To add insult to this, there is a £50 upgrade fee, now I’m not sure what this is covering… An Openreach engineer visiting the box at the end of the street and changing a cable over, or some other operation, OR the new ‘Super-Router’, either way the “Free” bit of the offer isn’t.

HG533So the upgrade went smoothly enough, the line speed is excellent, the VDSL2 speed is excellent and works as advertised (You can tell there’s a ‘but’ coming, right?)… BUT their ‘SuperRouter” isn’t super, well, apart from super-crap. Plugged this in ahead of the VDSL2 upgrade (Can’t really call it Fibre!), as it also functions fine on ADSL2… Problems:

To start with, it didn’t play with the rest of the network here, the rest of the network being 2 unmanaged gigabit switches, a wifi access point, and the usual devices. It wouldn’t connect using the existing cabling to the ‘core’ switch on the network, this being 30ft away along cat5e cable, the previous Netgear router connected just fine at 1gig. I actually had to go buy another unmanaged switch to sit next to this thing.

Secondly it has only 100mbs ports, not gigabit ports… Really I know, as this device sits on the periphery of the network, and isn’t in this case a core component, that it wouldn’t be too much of an issue – however it was a disappointment, especially when I knew the previous model given out by TalkTalk was a HG635 model, with gigabit ports. I really feel for those who use it as a network core without knowing how much it will knock their speed and capacity. Still, I tried to make it play nicely.

Daily reboots as it managed to kill the network, and I didn’t even give it any work to do, the work of the DHCP server and the Wifi access point already being handled flawlessly by the other devices on the network, ALL it had to do was provide an interweb connection via NAT. Somehow it managed to kill the network daily, and had to be rebooted before anything else would work.

It took me a week of the super-shit performance, and settling for a second (?) best device, plus reading countless horror stories of this device before getting to the point of spending money on another router. I didn’t even bother to contact TalkTalk, as most, if not all, of the horror stories make it perfectly clear that the only thing it would do is raise my blood-pressure.

D7000Enter the Netgear Nighthawk D7000 – I paid £130 for this router, and I have to say worth every single penny, and a lot more (In fact, upon checking, it’s now £170!). The D7000 is an amazing device, boot it up, connect with the details on a small sticker, and run through a connection wizard which asks what ISP you have, and it just works, perfectly.

There are ample configuration options, and of course the usual ones need to be changed from their defaults, including the wifi access point ssids, passwords etc. There are options to lock down the network with MAC filtering, the various encryption options etc. The router has gigabit ports and a USB3 socket if you wish to share a storage device with your network. Also, unlike the ‘SuperRouter’, it communicated just fine with the rest of the network, at gigabit speeds, and doesn’t need a switch of it’s own lol… The uptime is awesome, not a single reboot has been required in a month, and the rest of the network is rock steady.

The D7000 also boasts Quality Of Service features, both for ports, and devices. With the ports option, you can chose from a large list of predefined services, or input your own; the device options will allow you to set one of four priorities for the traffic – importantly both sets of rules can be live and functional at the same time.

The Wifi is excellent delivering on 2.4 and 5ghz, with separate IDs and passwords per network, both for a ‘core’ network and a ‘guest’ network. The device has three aerials, and it is capable of ‘beam forming’ where by it just doesn’t transmit blindly in a dome, but is able to focus the signals to the devices physical locations, which seems to work very well, for me at least. AND it looks like a space-ship 😉

Overall the TalkTalk ISP is great, IF all you want is a broadband wire – it is truly unlimited, the speed is excellent, we’re getting what we pay for. Don’t believe the hype of their ‘SuperRouter’, it’s anything but super. Do go buy a Netgear D7000, it’s worth every penny.

// EDIT

TalkTalk came back to me on Twitter today, no offer of an apology, no offer of a refund for supplying a piss poor device, only an offer to tell the team LMAO! This is the reason I didn’t contact them in the first place, would’ve been bashing my head against a wall by now!

Love the bit where they call the device ‘free’, bet you one way or another, we end up paying for it!

Don’t let me put you off TalkTalk as an ISP, they have a brilliant wire service, just supply shockingly bad devices, and don’t really do customer services, in my opinion…

#fail

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Live life.

Just answering a closed group thread on Facebook. Typed in the below. How to summarise a life.

22 Years ago I had nothing. I worked hard, first job in retail which gradually worked up to 70+ hours a week and a near miss with a break-down over 7 years. Second job (In I.T.), again for 7 years with a 40 hour week, however I worked 2 hours from home for 2 of those years. Third job (I.T. job) started in 2008, 35 hour week, pay has more than doubled in 9 years doing that job, and 3 times what I was on in 1994. I’m lucky with the jobs, however I know it could all vanish overnight. I have more insurance than you can shake a stick at, and won’t be going back to 1994.

As for how? Muddle though, save what you can, live as much as you can. Be drunk. Lots. Fall in love, get married. Dump false friends. Be loyal. Don’t be blind, know when to cut and run like a gazelle being hunted, and when to stick like a superglued barnacle. Make the choices, commit where you can. Go fucking ballistic, no regrets.

22 Hard fucking years, half my life, damn good luck with yours.