UnorthodoxY Archive It's wasn't what you thought

Just a quick check on edfringe.com …

Despite all of our efforts this week we are unable to open our box office.

We are determined to have box office services operational as soon as possible and we will post a further update on Monday 16 June at 10am.

In the meantime there are some venues that are able to sell tickets for shows at the Fringe. Please click HERE for a list of venues and contact details.

We recognise that the service we have provided over the last week has not been acceptable. We will continue to work over the weekend and we apologise for the inconvenience this has caused.

FAIL!

To be honest I’m not going to gloat, these things happen and I can imagine the utter chaos going on behind the scenes.

I am amused that they said on Thursday that the problem was resolved and the box office would be open today.

Clearly they were wrong, that sounds to me like they’ve no idea what’s going on. I wonder if they have a back-up plan to revert to last years system …

I was mooching around the Internet reading outraged fan reaction to things like a factually incorrect Star Trek cake, Indy IV (more on that in a sec) and Dr. Who when I stumbled across this fantastic phrase:

… and it’s almost literally like I’m covered in bees.

(from here)

I think everyone should try and use that phrase whenever they can to express their outrage, particularly that classic fanboy outrage that can only be provoked by something completely insignificant.

Help me make this turn of phrase mainstream, start slipping into normal conversation. You may want to practise a bit until you can say it with a straight face.

Talking of outrage, I saw Indy IV last night, and I know a lot of fans are almost literally covered in bees about it but I really can’t see why, I liked it.

In the end it’s a good fun action romp, that uses the Indiana characters in the Indiana universe without ever quite making it to the level of true greatness. Still it’s better than a lot of junk out there.

In particular a few of the complaints against it are really stupid, the reason (and spoilers) after the jump.

(more…)

So I’m back from my latest trip, visiting the Baltic and Nordic states.

My feet and legs hurt from too much walking, and I opted to go straight into work from the airport this morning*. Ugh.

Still I enjoyed the trip, it’s been blues skies and sunshine all they way (apart from today when it rained this morning on my way to the airport). I’ll try and post some brief thoughts soon and full posts for countries when I can. This might take a while because I’ve checked my diary and it’s looking like I might only have one free night in the next two weeks.

And finally, it’s that time again, has edfringe.com pulled its socks up this year ?

No, they haven’t:

All website, telephone and counter sales have been suspended until we are able to resolve the problems we are having with our computer system.

Worse they seem to have pulled the entire listings offline, so you can’t even browse and note stuff to buy later. I guess I’ll have to resort to an old-fashioned paper copy for the third year in a row.

I can’t wait to see how the screw it up next year.

*I was so tired and cranky I even screwed up this post so it was in the sidebar yesterday instead of in the main page so that’s actually yesterday.

Time taken to refit my bathroom: 6 months with around 2 weeks actual work.

Time taken to refit my kitchen: 3 weeks with around 2 weeks actual work.

Admitedly it cost three times as much to do the kitchen but I doubt that altered the timescales, it’s probably more that Fraser Joinery don’t suck. Although their website could do with some work.

I’d have liked the kitchen to be finished before the weekend, but in the end it didn’t matter since I spent the weekend in Cardiff baking in the sunshine and occasionally making a fool of myself (by barking like a dog on stage in front of a bunch of tourists for example).

All of this means my life returns to a vague sort of normal for the next few weeks and I can hopefully catch up with the pictures and posts I’m missing from my recent trips.

The normality only lasts until the end of the month, at which point I head off on another long tourкомпютри втора употреба around Europe.

Eeek, I’ve been hacked. This morning I received a helpful e-mail from Google, an extract:

We recently discovered that some of your pages can cause users to be
infected with malicious software. We have begun showing a warning page
to users who visit these pages by clicking a search result on Google.com.
Below are some example URLs on your site which can cause users to be
infected (space inserted to prevent accidental clicking in case your
mail client auto-links URLs):

Eeek!

A quick look through the source reveals some dubious looking iframes (so that’s what NoScript has been bitching about, I thought it was just the new 2.5 wordpress code.)

I’ve cleaned up the code, deleted the bogus user, and changed some settings to help prevent this in the future. I’m running the latest WordPress code so I imagine this happened after I updated to 2.5 and before I applied the 2.5.1 security fix. I doubt it’s been around longer as I would have seen the warnings from noscript.

Anyroads, if you browse the site without virus protection from Internet Explorer then you’re an idiot — but you might want to consider getting your computer checked out anyway.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Damn hackers.