Thoughts for the day

Standing at a bus-stop gives you a chance to observe life. I concluded, while waiting for the 302 yesterday morning, that parents who let their kids eat toffee crunch bars, crisps, and drink fizzy pop on the way to school are possibly stoopid, but who is saying to these people "feeding your kids this crap will mean their teeth will fall out, and they will grow up fat, and get diseases"?

I like Brando products. They do what they say they will do, they are reasonably priced, they last, and even though they are ordered direct from Hong Kong, they arrive quicker than a lot of stuff from Amazon that I've ordered recently. My latest Brando purchase was a hard-case for my Palm T|X. The leather flip-case was excellent, but when trying to use the Palm as an MP3 player (with Pocket Tunes) the case fired off the screen to create a bookmark, making the player skip. The hard case arrived today. It's a very nice, rattle free design , that closed with a good 'click', and there's cut-outs for all the important connectors (and the SD card strangely?). The case is nowhere near as nice from a tactile point of view as the leather one, which is silky smooth, but the payoff is that I've now got a reliable MP3 player for the bus and the bike.

My weather site using Weather Display is running well, and I've managed to customise the built-in site - so go look at it! My ISP is Metronet and uploads never fail and as far as I can tell I'm going to stay within my monthly upload / download allowance without incurring any extra PAYG costs. Metronet have been consistently reliable, although I did have a couple of issues with them not actually reading the support tickets I put in when my MaxADSL speeds started dropping. I think that the takeover by Plusnet has now bedded in, and some of the problems may have been resolved by now.

Final gripe for today - for the second year running the Institute of Biomedical Sciences have fouled up my direct debit, meaning that my subscription to this august body is overdue again. I think this is less of a criticism of the IBMS, and more a whine about the whole direct debit system, which leaves the paying customer out of control of their own money. Standing Orders - now there's a good idea......