Home
Ephemera in Stone
in cyberspace nobody can hear you scream
Recent Entries 
Latest Month
November 2009
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
Entry Tags
5:13pm, Sunday 1st July 2007 - (X)html
in pub

TfL’s Journey Planner website.

content-type: text/html;charset=utf-8

So it’s html.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC
          "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
          "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

Oh ok, it’s not, it’s xhtml. And lo, there is much <br/>ing and, er, <li/>ing.

But what’s this?

<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">

Containing

for (i =1; i <= li; i++)

Argh!

(Why yes, I am screen scraping.)

3:50pm, Wednesday 3rd January 2007 - T-Mobile
in pub
I'd registered with them before, but couldn't remember my password. Or my username.

Lots of websites these days don't demand you remember yet another username, they just ask you to use your e-mail address instead. And EasyMobile, for all their faults, did the right thing by treating my phone number with them as my username.

As well as the ubiquitous "forgot your password?" link, T-Mobile have one labelled "forgot your username?" The first wanted my phone number and username, the second my phone number and password. I tried guessing my username, and after getting it wrong three times was locked out of their website for five minutes.

Returning later, I reregistered. It didn't complain that my phone number belonged to a different login, and even managed to retrieve my credit card details from somewhere (would have been nice if it had told me *before* I re-entered them, though).

That was last night. I've already forgotton my username.
12:50pm, Thursday 7th September 2006 - That personality meme thingy
in pub
  1. Ew, it assumes everyone’s on MySpace. (“Quick MySpace Survey” is the heading).
  2. How badly laid out are the radio buttons on p2? Answer: Very. (I didn’t get past this bit.)

The brightly coloured bars this thing apparantly generates does not include one indicating bolshiness, but you may assume that if it did, mine would be…

10:14pm, Friday 2nd June 2006 - Paypal
in pub

Paypal, how I hate thee.

Why can’t I just enter my card number and be done with it? It’s not like I can ever remember my password. So I have to do the change my password dance. Which involves entering my card number. *headdesk*

Why are you asking for a delivery address? I already gave a delivery address to the furniture shop. Oh well, here’s my address. You want to verify my address? Here’s credit card number. You already have a different address for that card? No shit! I moved! Oh, I’ll just select “no delivery address” and hope the furniture shop uses the one I gave them.

6:04pm, Friday 19th May 2006 - Unnecessary authentication
in pub

If your website is closed for maintenance, it should tell me before I log in.

8:21pm, Wednesday 26th April 2006 - Littlewoods muppets
in pub

Littlewoods’ website wanted me to type in my phone number so many times, my pizza got burnt. And they haven’t realised that online ordering should happen entirely online, rather than me having to phone them tomorrow, presumably to set up a direct debit.

8:00pm, Wednesday 21st December 2005 - Olds
in pub

Henry Hughes & Hughes’s website looks all very professionally designed.

And then you notice the only piece of news listed, which it keeps displaying again and again, is “Henry Hughes & Hughes launch new website”.

It’s not even particularly new news.

Advertisement

This must be Monday. I never could get the hang of Mondays.