We live in a mad mad Pentax world .. [houmous]

Hi all. I would like to introduce you to the world of Pentax - whose internal mission statement I sure you will find is ....Customers? F&*k em!
Having purchased a Pentax Optio 330 a month or so earlier I set off for Cape Town loaded with flash cards and expectations of some excellent piccies - this was one of the most beautiful places in the world right?
Unfortunately my Pentax had other ideas - 2 days into holiday it stops working.
I return to UK with 6 piccies and promptly return it to Pentax under warranty. I receive a swift reply. My camera failed because of sand in it and therefore my warranty is void. Furthermore it is 'not financially feasible to repair it'. In short therefore I have effortlessly transformed my prized digital camera into a piece of junk.
I'm not happy and also know something that Pentax don't. Five years ago I was very silly with using a camera on the beach which led to its early demise. Since then I have been ultra careful with cameras on the beach and didn't actually use this one at all where there was sand.
I ring 'customer services'. After some discussion the woman tells me she will personally inspect the camera. She rings back to say it was 'full of sand'. Now I start to have trouble staying calm. I politely tell her that is not correct explaining how careful I am now with cameras and that I was not using it to build castles with. I can start to tell she is feeling uncomfortable but she stands her ground and insists it is unrepairable. She does however now offer me a special arrangement designed to help people in my situation i.e. the effortlessly converting a digital camera to a lump of metal situation, by offering me 30% off list price on a new camera. I stupidly thank her and end the call.
10 minutes later I ring back. I explain that I have ascertained list prices of their cameras and the 30% off they are offering equals virtually to the pound the price I can buy their cameras almost anywhere. I feel the tension on the other end of the line and momentarily go off into a semi fantasy imagining this woman explaining to her equally appalling husband in their nice Martin Parr style neo Georgian house somewhere near Chelmsford about this awful man she had on the phone today...
Anyway I start by clarifying the purpose of Pentax offering 30% off to customers 'in my position'. Its to help me right? Its to put me in a better position than someone off the street wanting to buy a Pentax? Yes that's right sir. Ok this is good - well unfortunately its not achieving that, so surely all you have to do, having agreed the objective, is to increase the discount - say 50%. No sir 30% is the best we can do. But that's not achieving anything! You haven't done anything to help me!
There is a silence. You will have to write in if you aren't happy and say what you just said sir. Why! I'm telling you! Why do I have to write in! The reason is because you want to go home and its just a delaying tactic!
I then tell her that I subscribe to a number of camera MB's and feel I would be letting my colleagues down if I didn't post my experience re my broken camera. This provokes an instant reaction involving veiled threats about what they will do if I post 'slanderous'!!! comments regarding Pentax on the web.
Di then comes into the Houmous den at this point and tells me she can hear me yelling from the other end of the house and I will give myself a heart attack if I'm not careful - she suggests I tell the woman to stick the camera up her arse. In a moment of rare decorum I ask the woman to return camera to me.
I receive camera - take to local repairer who fixes it no problem for £150. Lets say he took £50 labour and paid 100% mark up on the bit (shutter mech). This means f&*king Pentax could have fixed it for a £50 part.
I was already to buy the new slimline Pentax Optio S (I love anything I can always carry with me - which is why I put up with the appalling functionality of the Palm m515 but that's another story ) but they can definitely stick that up their........
Finally a quick comparison - I accidentally threw my Creative Zen across the gym last month - oops! Creative had the right to tell me to sod off but no - they collected it from my house and gave me a no quibble replacement - I immediately went out and bought a MuVo as well.

Jade has child, why?! [lurks]

The human race is fucked. We've not only side stepped evolution but we're trying our damndest to go backwards. The evidence? Jade Goody, that hideous braindead mutant from Big Brother, has had a child.

I'm astounding that a man volunteered to inseminate it in the first place but on a purely humanitarian level, surely the world does not need another fat, ugly and stupid person? Madness, it's just not right.

Nukey Brown Ice Cream! [lurks]

Heh check this out. "The Newcastle Brown Ale ice cream goes on sale at supermarkets and speciality shops across Newcastle and Northumberland from next week." Aww come on, clearly that should be in my local Tescos, it's gotta be worth a try :)

Links of the day; the internet rocks! [brit]

We all get links to various things during the day that break the monotony of running our respective global empires; so today I thought I'd share some with y'all...
Recording Artists Safety Guide To The Beach - sums it all up really.
Truly terrifying costumes for your cat - it's quite amazing what those Japanese fellas will come up with (gotta love the English though).
Gregory Smith - heard of him? neither had I until lunchtime; he's 13 years old, and has an IQ so high it cannot be measured.. and he's been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Impressive IQ; utterly fucked up kid.. check out the pudding bowl hairdo!
Add your links as you see fit..

women and the vote [lurks]

Right, this Big Brother thing. I got thoroughly bored with it last time around so I haven't bothered to watch this one at all. All I saw were a few web news reports about one particular minx that likes to wear bikinis, has nipples like thumbs and stripped off in front of one of the contestants in the bath or something. Now that might entice me to watch it but I still didn't.
Anyhow, news filters in that the first evictee is out. Who is it? It's the fit bird. You know, the one in the bikini with nipples like thumbs and a penchant for getting them out. The housemates are apparently stunned as they'd have thought she was one of the last to go, some boring geek/clod (who I'm sure we'd like plenty :) was the odds-on favorite.
So how do we explain this? It's simple, you see most of the people voting are women. Women will always evict foxy minxs given the chance.
The thing is, I'm trying to work out why this is. We all know our women don't like us looking at other women but prior to this issue, I hadn't really thought about that much too hard - just took it for granted. Now I'm puzzled as to what the genetic imperative is concerning this.
I mean blokes being jealous of women is a no brainer, we're protecting the resource which can further our genetic line. On the other hand, why are women even worse and quite rabid about making sure their stud doesn't even talk to a more attractive female?
I mean, ladies, quite frankly there's enough spunk to go around. :)
Puzzling. However the huge volumes of statistical evidence from women voting such as Big Brother and the Eurovision Song Contest, proves beyond a doubt that actual logic and merit has absolutely nothing to do with how they cast their vote. Notice there's no foxy politicians hmm?
See that's it, maybe we've forgotten an important lesson which men in millennia gone by have realised. Maybe allowing them to vote at all wasn't such a good idea in the first place hmm? :)

Iraq - when the dust settles [lurks]

Before I head off to Ye Old Dickens to get blotto with the EED London posse, I thought I'd revisit a subject much blogged and hotly debated on this very web site; Iraq. Donald Rumsfeld has dropped the bombshell that no WMDs may ever be found in Iraq. I'm afraid that this is, for me, a stretch to far. Up until this point I found the lack of any discovery/announcement as being quite odd but had assumed in due course something would turn up. It hasn't.
Now, historically I must say I was pro-war purely to remove Saddam Hussain. I was saying this when the government was giving it large on the WMD rhetoric and failing to persuade a large proportion, verging on a majority, of the nation of the need to go to war. So they changed tack into what a bad man Saddam is and how this is the right thing to do on a purely humanitarian and world-peace level. Which is fair enough but it wasn't the proviso for going to war originally.
So now all that evidence which Colin Powell presented to the security council, absolutely none of that has turned into any hard proof even after the regime has been ousted and the country occupied by 'coalition' forces? That raises some extremely important questions of our government, even for the pro-war lobby folks who ultimately, as I do, feel that ousting of Saddam was the right thing to do.
One of only two scenarios can be the case here;
Scenario one: The supposedly most capable of experienced intelligence agencies of the world (the CIA, MI6 and conventional military intelligence units) were completely wrong and dramatically overstated the real WMD threat. They failed to pinpoint that they were being told what they 'wanted to hear' from the defecting Iraqi scientists and that huge quantities of pre-existing chemical and biological weapons were destroyed and they failed to identify this fact.
Scenario two: We were being lied to. The intelligence agencies had full knowledge the real threat of Iraq but our government communicated an entirely difference and largely fictitious story on the threat from Iraq in order to justify a war with Iraq. The rest of world was right, there was no real threat from Iraq.
Now it strikes me that scenario one is frankly careless to the extreme. Heads must roll, changes must be made. Woe that it should come to the fact that we cannot adequately spy on a backwards middle eastern dictatorship when we have such interests in the area.
Ultimately, however, I can forgive the government for that.
That brings me two scenario two. Now there's some disturbing evidence that Downing Street had already staffed up to a point to generate justification content on Iraq. Remember the plagiarized and 'spinned' US student report published as an official UK dossier? But this is a different ball game. If the alleged threat, more importantly, if there *was* no intelligence evidence which we were repeatedly told existed and did in fact not exist, that's all together different.
It doesn't matter that Saddam was ousted. It doesn't matter that a good result was obtained. If scenario two is the case, this democratic nation was lied to and our forces sent into a war on false pretences. If this is proven to be true, and of course the issue is how you go about doing so with the built-in mechanisms of state-protected secrecy, there can be no other sentences other than the immediate sacking of the current government.
One thing is clear to me, there is no 'good' scenario. Either we have completely incompetent intelligence agencies that have dropped the ball yet again post 11/9 or we have a morally bankrupt government that is making the highest level decisions it is possible to take in spite of what it means to be a democracy.
I'm just surprised it's as quiet as it is...

Radiohead live on the tele! [lurks]

While the lads are all over on the Isle of Man, happily sending me gloating SMSes and texts to Rebot, I'm sitting here doing some work-related stuff up late. I'm flicking around channels on the Digibox (I've a little tele beside my monitor just for the purpose) and I tune into Friday with Jonathan Ross.
Bugger me if Radiohead aren't guests! Yes, those guy that's just don't do interviews, don't do TV, nothing. The ones that did a few shows that were sold out to the rich and famous well before mere mortals could get a ticket. Also the Radiohead that has an album out quite soon but which has been happily swapped on the net for some time.
Bloke down the pub told me it's fucking brilliant and all that but then what would he know, the filthy pie rat eh?
They did There There from the new album, then had a chat with Ross and then finished the show by doing fake plastic trees. Awesome stuff. Now if only someone vidcapped it and made a torrent eh? That would be elite.