Fran's Blog

For too long we have had mediocre snacks from the 1990s and 2000s. Everyone will be aware by now that Wispa is back. Lovely!

However, nothing quite prepared me this very lunch time, as I popped out with friend and old time colleague Mr. Clive Murray for the weekly Subway, for the discovery we made.

We headed to the local shop and as we reminisced about Wispa being back, the plucky shop owner said “they’ve also brought back the 80s Monster Munch packaging”. We excitedly looked, and there, in all its glory, was the old packaging, almost. Almost is better than nothing! They’re bigger again too!

I then saw this:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/3110135/Monster-Munch-crisps-relaunched.html
and this
http://www.findourmonsters.com/

AWESOME! What’s next? Any guesses?

I love startups, I really bl**dy do! Well, when they are exciting. I take the same view as Stefan Fountain that startups should be useful, fun to use at first, then they just get integrated into your life, they become something you just use. Some aren’t that useful and just fun, but hey, it generally follows.

Anyway, this year I really thought startups would be thin on the ground and I would no longer have that “crap, I wish I’d done that” thing I always have. Not so. I have discovered 2 I love. I have already written about Soocial, which is my current favourite, but another is called Graze.com. Graze has been set up by one of the guys who set up LoveFilm.com. It is a way of sending out fruits, snacks, hell, even meat to people in healthy snack form, they send it out in the post and it arrives the next day so you can scoff away and feel healthy-ish at work.

You have now been blessed with the knowledge, now go forth and spread the word.

I’ve just sorted a problem I have had for more than 10 years now. It took a while, but I think it is finally sorted.

What is this problem I speak of? Well, my contacts. I started using a mobile phone back in 1997. I had been using the internet for email and did have an address book. I had a list of phone numbers in my mobile which I had to re-type in a new phone each time I upgraded. My PC had friends’ emails, lovely. These friends also have addresses, one would hope.

So, 11 years later (probably more), I have a bunch of contacts which, despite being the same people, are not the same, my PC has an email, probably old and maybe a mobile number. My phone has loads of numbers for 1 person, but no email. Outlook has addresses. Each time a friend moves house, email provider or mobile number, I have to change a few devices which aren’t synchronised (well, some are, some aren’t). I know there is Plaxo and the rest, but it never quite did what I wanted.

Enter Soocial (pronounced “Social”, just to really confuse things). There are all sorts of sync clients for my laptop, PC, Gmail, Mobile. I don’t even need to plug anything in, it updates on the interwebamathingy. Next step was to blindly let these devices, not aware of each other yet, synchronise to 1 place. It was harsh, duplicates, mixed data etc. it took a couple of hours of synchronising, looking etc. (luckily I don’t have a huge database of contacts), but now I’m happy, eventually, I’m sure I’ll have to sync Faceboook etc. Maybe in 10 years or so, let’s see.

There are days when you need to contact a company’s customer services of some kind. You tend to call and have to wait for them to pick up, sometimes for 1 minute, sometimes 10, sometimes 1 hour. A lot of the time, these services have an 0870 number which is a national rate phone number which can get quite expensive if you are spending a long time, and generally, on your mobile, this will not be used on your free minutes.

So I went an discovered something that is genius, or helpful at the very least. 0870 numbers have to be attached to a normal landline number. There is a site that has these landline numbers in a database and it is called SayNoTo0870. You can then look up the 0870 number or company name, and get the cheaper normal landline number. Brilliant!

Now go and save those pennies!

So there I was, walking home last Friday. And I saw the photo pictured to, hopefully, the left of this text. I found this funny, why? I love these things. I love them because every time I am quite drunk round town. I look for the darkest alley I can find, and usually find one of these bad boys. It makes me feel good that I don’t have to sully someone’s doorstep, and now it isn’t even an option to try and find somewhere else.

The reason i found this funny was because while Westminster do it well (alleys) Hackney council don’t do it well at all. First, note the chain on the smallest branch of the tree. Now some drunken nutters will be tempted to tip the thing. But best of all is its location, on Old street. The centre of it all. Right in the middle of everything. Now, there are tons of alleys and small areas (only last week I heard a man loudly vomitting outside my flat, he really went for it), so why not put it there? Not sure. Keep on the Hackney, keep on.

Ahhh, Valentine’s day. i’m not even going to lie to you, good reader, I hate it. I could go on some ranting mission about the commercial aspect and various card making companies to sell cards for this lull in the year. But no, the reason I hate it is ‘cos it hates me. Or it did. As a single young scamp a few years ago, it would inevitably end up with EVERYONE going out, me ending up drinking on my own (and getting pleasantly drunk) thinking “here’s to another lousy year”.

I’m going to say it now, very clearly, I am a geek, I’m actually proud to have this title bestowed upon me, I’m out, I sat my parents down, and i said “mum, dad, i am geek”, they hurt at first, but now they have come to accept that sometimes I will bring a new tech item home for them to meet.

Every morning as I wake up, I read my RSS feed reader, this morning was no different, I read all kinds of tech stuff etc. but I also read some cartoons, my favourite currently being xkcd, this particular one tickled me as it’s what we have all thought, in some way, at some point.

Over the past year or so I have realised something. No matter whether one can afford something or not, there is a ceiling to the amount one might pay for something. There are some shameless prices out there for goods and services.

Example: There is a pizza place off Brick Lane, it’s an “organic pizza place” the pizzas look lovely, probably taste that way. But I refuse to go, why? because pizzas are £9.50-£10.00! Pizzas are not expensive food, or shouldn’t be. I won’t pay this because if I ordered I’d feel like the waitress, chef and owners are laughing at me as well as all the way to the bank, “I can’t believe these suckers pay this much”.

As we approach hopelessly, yet again into a Tube strike, yielding yet again to Bob Crow and his bunch of overpaid croanies, I felt it important to talk about my new London Transport love. The common bus.

I’ve used the buses for a few years in preference to getting on the Tube. I did rib a friend (sorry Jambo) when he had decided to do this many years ago for being cheap, but I now swallow my pride and have to say, he was right.