What's annoying me today

I hope you sourced them from the fine folks at LMU!

I bet Genghis Khan never wore a polo. Or Oxfords.

I wear a polo shirt most days. It's how I roll.

Well I hope you dress the shoes down (whatever that means - scruffy shoes?)

I wear allbirds "trainers" and cords at work. I am a walking cliche of a middle aged man.

I am pretty much exclusively shorts at home including supermarket shopping and walking the dog in the snow.

The postman look

I'm being impersonated by a scammer of Australians.
That is pretty amazing as well as annoying.

One of the astonishing things about my return to the UK was the lack of communications infrastructure. I'm used to having mobile phone signal, usually 4G, everywhere, and I mean everywhere. I drive motorbikes to the back end of nowhere, signal is a given. Not in the UK. I live in a village of a few hundred, a mile outside Hay-on-Wye, famous for being stuck up its own arse and having two festivals this month to prove it. You'd have thought someone would've made a decent phone signal here. We're not exactly in the arse end of beyond.

Downstairs I rely on voice over WiFi. Our cable connection is max 7Mbps, Openreach won't upgrade despite fibre optics in the village, and we live on a street with 17 houses. So we have mobile broadband through Three, which only gets signal upstairs, though a reliable 50Mbps on 4G. Relief, something works. Except when it went down for two weeks and they couldn't fix it because they couldn't contact the farmer to get access to the mast.

I go into Hereford, there is full signal in the city. I was on GiffGaff, good signal but no data capacity on a Saturday afternoon. Switched to Lebara, a little better. Wife on Smarty, poor connectivity in the city. She wants to take contact less payments through cellular payment device, really poor connection.

WTF happened Britain? Communications is the new global industry. You fucked up!

Having laptop issues since last night. Can't get onto our network for some reason, and my taskbar is frozen. After talking to IT frrom about 8pmn to 10pm last night, they think it's something about a new 'group policy' update that was pushed yesterday. Been told to run gpupdate /force from CMD line, but it fails. I need to be on our network for it to work. But I'm in Sheffield. So. They suggested I come into the office tomorrow (today) but that'll cost me like £160 on a last minute train. Realised we have an office in Leeds however, so I'm going to go there today and hope that the local IT team can help (they should be able too). Fine. 40 minutes on the train. Easy. But no. There's a fucking train strike. So I need to get a coach. So after dropping Miss Shady at nursery I'll be cycling into town, then getting a tram to Meadowhall, then a coach to Leeds.Good news is that I've also lost my work ID card, so even getting in the office there is going to be tricky. Oh for an easy life. Fuck, I'd just take one week without any drama/issues.

To be fair, in Lebara, GiffGaff and Smarty, you've chosen resellers of other company's infrastructure that, while they'll probably deny it, get de-prioritised compared to direct Vodafone/O2/3 customers.

In my experience over last few years EE have by far the best coverage and speed. But they are expensive. Switched to O2 recently as it was less than half the price of EE, but often have the old H+ connection speed now.

Yeah, I'm just coming out of contract with EE in about a month and, unless they reduce their price, I'm going to have to go elsewhere as I can't justify the extra cost to myself.

Oh, it's not just communications..

I wonder if Shady will jump the turnstiles?

Chicago: Security minded.