On the lope

After thinking - and writing - about the different ways people pronounce certain words the other day, it struck me that I'd forgotten my absolute pet hate:

envelope

It's pretty clear to me that the word begins with an e, therefore, when followed by the consonant n, you'd generally pronounce the combination, en, as en (unless you were French, or stupid).

So why do some people say onvelope? Do the same people say onvelop when describing something that is wrapped or enclosed?

Tits.


Accosted
I can't go to the local shopping centre without being accosted by people trying to sell me things. Today it as AXA Healthcare. Despite my best efforts to ignore him by trying to send a text message,the young Scouse lad called me over:

"Scuse me love, do you use the NHS? Do you have an NHS dentist?"

"Yes, and I'm not interested in anything you're going to try to sell me."

"OK, but did you know [The Mysterious They']re privatising dental services?"

"Funny that, I just signed up to an NHS dentist a couple of months ago, there are loads of them where I live. And I work for the NHS, they're not privatising dental services."

"But for 32p a day, you can have this (he points to a laminated card) much dental work. If you fall and smash your teeth, we'll pay for up to £10,000 worth of restorative dentistry. Those are expensive glasses, you could have £70 towards your next pair! And you get this much life insurance too!!"

"You get restorative dentistry free at the dental hospital - it's one of the biggest in England you know. And my glasses should be expensive, but they were only £100 from Costco. I don't need life insurance."

"What about if you have kids and they get ill and you need to stay with them in hospital?"

"I'm not going to have any children.

"What? No kids? Ever?"

"Certainly not! And if I'm clumsy enough to fall down the stairs and knock all my teeth out, I shouldn't be looking after kids anyway. Look, I'm not going to sign anything, request any further information or give you my contact details because I'm not interested, but it was nice talking to you anyway.... love!"

I left him to it. On other occasions it's photography studios, peddling once-novel ways of taking family photos, but which now seem a little naff. I take better photos than they ever could. Their photographers would never come up with this:

This:

Or even this:

There's nothing difficult about taking interesting photos of your loved ones, you just need a camera and a bit of imagination (and perhaps Photoshop if you can take the stress).


Wasted
I spent all of yesterday trying to install my lovely new PDA onto the PC at Base 2a. It wouldn't have it and everytime I tried to sync, it crashed the PC. Now, the PC here is a bit old, but it's OK. But because it's old, the USB ports are around the back and I used an extension cable to plug things - like the Hotsync cable - into the machine. After more aborted attempts and uninstalling/reinstalling the software, deleting registry keys (eek!), I'd almost given up when I had the bright idea of plugging the Hotsync cable straight into the USB port rather than using the extension. Hey presto! it worked!

This means that, because the Palm is now recognised as being properly installed, it can get recharged via the cable after I've worn the battery down playing games on it. Fantastico.

This bit of the post isn't at all interesting, but it might help some poor fucker who, like me, is Googling to see why their Palm keeps restarting their PC when they plug it in.


Y viva Espana
I ordered some software from an international website yesterday and was a little puzzled when the online order form was in Spanish. I've just checked my site stats and the IP address for this machine is showing up as coming from Spain.

How's that then?


iPhone-your-solicitor
Nice to see Cisco systems are suing Apple over their use of the name "iPhone" for their new supergadget.

Ha ha ha ha ha. Stupid twats at Apple always thinking that people would flattered to have their patents and trademarks stolen.