Thoughts and random ideas, when I can be bothered.
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BBC NEWS | UK | ‘Naked’ scanner in airport trial
Judging by the user comments to this article, this is going to save me a load of time at airports. Because the machine shows clothing ‘x-ray’ images, most people will complain and take the manual frisking. I’ll be using the machine and be through in a flash! Maybe they could get Ryanair to run them, then people could pay for a manual frisk, making my flight even cheaper!
The Times reports that the Pound drops to 5 month lows against dollar, Euro now worth 91.4p etc. etc.
Mervyn’s right of course, the UK economy is in a mess and you need some stiff inflation to stop people spending money they don’t have and to start reducing the UK current account, but I liked one of the user comments to the article:
“Boost output of what? Increase exports of what? Unless we plan to sell our garden centres or estate agents to the rest of the world, this sounds like hot air.
‘All hail a new economic dawn’, we manufacture the best garden centres and DIY shops in the world. We are foremost in the fabrication of cheesy sales patter, by greedy post adolescences with gelled hair trying to sell over priced real-estate.
Or maybe we can convince the now rich Greeks and Spanish to come and spend their Euros in our holiday resorts. The ad. could read, ‘Come to Great Yarmouth where the sea is the same colour as our gravy, and you can watch the romantic sunset behind the oil rigs as you dine on fine pie and chips in one of our many quality promenade locations’ “
I’ve had a Canon Ixus V2 digital camera since about 2002, just 2 megapixel, great picture and it’s been solid as a rock. A few months ago, however, I switched it on and the screen wouldn’t show the picture from the lens.
I couldn’t work out what was wrong, so I did a bit of hunting around on the web and it turns out that it was probably the CCD, the part in the camera that senses the light. Apparently they’re used in several cameras of that era and sometimes the wires to them come off. Not user fixable, the part needs to be replaced by the dealer.
A bit more hunting around on the web and it turns out that Canon decided to make it fixable on warranty, regardless of how old the camera is. I found my nearest Swiss Canon dealer was only about five or six miles away, so I dispatched my girlfriend to take it in there and see if it was fixable under the warranty. If it wasn’t, I’d dump the camera, it’s only worth 15 pounds on eBay.
They took the camera away and a week later, they’d obviously decided it wasn’t fixable and gave me another camera instead, a smaller, sexier, newer, 5 megapixel Ixus from around 2005. From the inspection sticker on the box, I think it’s a refurb, but apart from that, you really can’t tell it from new.
Now that’s what I call customer service - next camera I’ll be buying will definitely be a Canon!!
From our local zeitung (meaning ‘newspaper’).
Rough translation: The yodel club in Altberg (it’s the mini-mountain behind the house) was one of three formations, at the Mothers Day concert in Regensdorf.
I guess it keeps them off the streets.
As shown on by the BBC, on their home page. So, in case you’re a local and you didn’t already know, that’s what Sir Fred’s house looks like and now you have somewhere to off-load all those rocks in your pocket.
A few weeks ago, I was snowboarding down that hill behind our apartment…
To be honest, it wasn’t the headline that grabbed my attention, it was the comment that was left at the bottom of the online article by a reader of The Times website:
“This is no ordinary P45. It is a Marks and Spencer’s P45, complete with a crisp white envelope and in delicately detailed print.” Andy, Liverpool, UK
I didn’t realise that they had M&S in Liverpool.
See those cows? Three like that turned up a couple of weeks ago, in the field behind the apartment. Nice aren’t they? No. They have bells (look closely). Not only that, but they are normal bells that go ‘ding’, instead of the ‘donk’ that the flatter, regular Swiss cow bells should go like.
They ring each time the cow bends down to munch some grass, which is all day and what seems to be most of the night. It’s like a mega wind chime on a windy day. Ever had someone ring your doorbell again and again and again, all day? Same thing.
Luckily they’re all heavily pregnant, which is why they’re there right now, awaiting the barn where they’ll be off to when the time is right.
Phew!
Never mind the credit crunch, there was complete ‘Schneechaos’ (snow chaos) here in Zürich, as shown on the front page, page 2 and 3 of ‘Blick’.
With snowfall of this magnitude not seen in October for 100 years, one of the morning trains was a full TWENTY-FIVE minutes late.
Personally, my train was 13 minutes late and now I’m starting to question my original logic of moving to Switzerland for an easy commute.
Apparently, because the leaves are still on the trees, the heavy snowfall has caused many tree branches to break and fall onto the track.
Luckily, everything was sorted out before hometime…
Now that the Icelandic Landsbanki bank has gone bust, the UK government wants to short-term lend it £100m. Given that Iceland has no money, a load of debt and a now a ‘patchy’ credit history, I wonder if the interest rate will be at a ‘Crazy Joe’s’ level of, say 29.9% APR?
Anyway, let us not ponder why the UK government watched Landsbanki collapse, asked for our money back, be refused and then say “We still want our money, we’ll lend you some more money so you can pay back what we already lent you.” Wasn’t it the big people giving small people easy credit that caused the problem in the first place?
Nonetheless, I had to chuckle when, after they’ve been offered the £100m, Landsbanki suddenly becomes a viable company again, quietly relaunching under the name “New Landsbanki”. Hehe, great trick, the oldest ones are the best!
Think ‘Get’ and ‘Now’. Lose the ‘t’ and say them together. ‘Genow’. This is a word used in everyday German, well, it is where I work, anyway. It means ‘exactly’.
It’s usage is like when you buy a car that you’ve hardly ever seen around before; when you get your one, there’s one on every street.
Once you stumble across what it means, suddenly you realise everyone’s saying it. At the end of each sentence almost. ‘Genau’.
It’s so much easier to say than ‘Exactly’, which makes a change, everything else I say in German gives me a sore throat.
Genau. You’ll be saying it all day now.
Genau. Genau. Genau.
You know, my blog seems to be full of misery. Mostly about the UK economy and all that. Well, maybe that’s just how it is.
But actually, I’m feeling really good. I knew all of this was going to happen, so I’m not too fussed.
The summer has been good, I can afford to go shopping and drive around and my partner is usually cheery. Life could be a lot worse!
A few days ago, she put some eyes on the Pac-man ghosts that she knitted for me, which made me smile. It’s all about the small things, really…
I always wondered how Iceland could have a couple of banks that were offering great interest rates on savings, yet still have UK FSCS backing, so you get a pay out if they go bust.
Actually, Landsbanki has only partial FSCS cover, the Iceland government has to stump up the first 15 grand, which is why I favoured Kaupthing when looking for a good place to dump savings, but I’ll come to that…
Now lets look at some facts… Iceland has 300,000 residents and, since having visited there a few years ago, I have no idea how they can afford anything as the environment is harsh and I didn’t really see any industry. It’s not surprising, with only 300,000 people, you’ve got no economies of scale and so I reckon they are relying on tourism. Maybe they have some special natural resource well I don’t know about.
Anyway, their interest rate is 15%, so inflation must be rampant and their currency must be sinking like a stone. How are their government going to stump up the £15,000 per UK depositor, now that Landsbanki has folded? They’ve got no chance, UK depositors have put billions there, way too much to pay back.
If the Iceland government borrowed the money from Sweden or some other country that said they’d back them, they’d never be able to pay back the interest. Quite how they managed to get accepted into the FSCS scheme at all is beyond me.
The way I see it is that the Iceland economy is like a dragster engine, it was entering into huge financial deals, with difficult to value parameters (i.e. high interest rate, probably strong currency devaluation), and all looks fantastic until the fan belt snaps. For the Icelandic banks, that’s it, game over, no limping home with a misfire and some strange engine noises like the UK, the Iceland engine will be trashed.
How do you, Joe Punter, calculate the risk of lending your savings to Landsbanki, in an economy on steroids? Answer - you can’t, so it’s not worth the risk, unless you can get good insurance. Sadly the insurance in this case was the Iceland goverment, with just 300,000 population. If you had savings there, good luck getting them back.
So what about Kaupthing? Well, I had a small wad of cash to stash earlier this year and they were looking good with a high interest rate on instant access accounts and a full £35k FSCS guarantee, unlike Landsbanki. The 12-month rate looked good also, but I didn’t trust them that much due to the reasons above, so I stuck with instant access.
Good job I did, because I think that Kaupthing will go bust also. Today I transferred all my cash from them into a UK bank. I don’t really want to be a guinea pig for the FSCS when they bail out Kaupthing savers, because whilst they may offer the protection, they’ve never had to provide it and you could be waiting for ages for your money, it’s not like they’ve got nothing else to do right now.
Moving savings into the UK feels like jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire, but I’ll take my chances. I’m just glad I don’t own any property…
