Monthly Archives: December 2006

HBOS and the spirit of Christmas

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According to the news, there is a protest going on outside the HBOS headquarters in Edinburgh on the night of their Christmas party related to the collapse of Farepak. Now, I understand that the staff of HBOS did not break the law and can happily sleep at night knowing they did their jobs correctly.

Consider this though, from what I was hearing on the radio today, HBOS recovered most of the £31 million that Farepak owed them. Again, nothing legally wrong with that. Meanwhile the Farepak savers will receive about 4p in the pound from what they put in. HBOS made £4.8 billion pounds in profit last year. To refund the Farepak savers all of their money would cost them £44 million, roughly 1% of that profit. Personally, I don’t think a 1% investment of their profit in brand building by giving those worst off, those who use services like Farepak their money back is a bad investment. Unfortunately they’ve left it a bit late now. Quite how the people in charge of HBOS managed to make such a complete hash of their image in this I don’t know. I mean I know banks are fairly heartless institutions, but I never thought they could be so bloody stupid…

Damn Firefox

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I was just typing away at an entry here that I might well attach to the end of this one when I decided to look up the spelling or a word. “I know, I shall use trusty Google”, I thought. Well, I didn’t actually think that, I looked at the Google search box in the top right corner of Firefox and typed in the start of “chimera” to see if the suggestions came up with the right spellings. They came up with more than one that I thought could be correct, so I actually performed the search. Having established the correct spelling, I went to click on the tab containing my half typed entry. Only, oh dear, Firefox has displayed the results in the tab I currently had open. Arse. Not quite sure why it would have been designed like that. After all, in Firefox 2 we have a useful “Close Tab” button right there on each tab, so surely it is a cheap job for the user to do to close a search tab once they have finished it. After all, aren’t you looking for something that might well be relevant to another tab?

Anyway, what I was saying was that I’d changed the theme to a third party one, Iceburgg by Devlounge as it has a nice wintery feel and we’d put the Christmas tree up. I’ve been tinkering about with various things this evening while Kate is away including setting myself up a user account on her PC. We only have one set up in our house so far, which is her box with my monitor and speakers (hence the chimera reference I was originally going to make). Now that I’m retyping this is does seem a dull thing to say, so nevermind…

Trains

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As you may or may not have gathered from the last post, we now live in Ledbury. Ledbury is quite a nice little town and we live close enough to the centre that we can walk in from here. As Ledbury is lucky enough to still have a train station, when we went out on Saturday night in Hereford I thought it would be fun to go on the train. I like trains. I don’t know if it comes from the sort of person I am – a computery person that gives me an interest in the inner workings of things and the “golden age” of steam, but hey, I like trains. Kate will attest to my excitment when we got to on a Pendolino last year. As usual, the actual going on the train came nowhere near to my obviously ludricous ideas of a train service.

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New Bed

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Last night involved a mad cap dash from work to home to Ikea in an LDV Convoy to get a new bed. I’ve had a bed from Next for the last 3 years and unfortunately it seems to be ready for the knackers yard already. The frame itself isn’t in too bad condition, but that’s only because I made some repairs to the slats using much tougher cord and some tacks from Homebase. I’m hoping therefore I should be able to get a few quid back for it on eBay.

The mattress though is another matter though – it’s now in a worse state than the one I had in the rented house in University and like I said, it’s only 3 years old. Thankfully, the new mattress we’ve gone for from Ikea comes with a 25 year guarantee and because Ikea sell the various bits of the bed seperately if the slats do get broken (and it did only come with the cheapest slats as part of a special offer) we can always get new ones later. Plus the design looks much more substantial. So here’s hoping it goes well. All we have to do now is sell the old bed that is currently filling our second bedroom…