waider

My online banking stopped working with Safari. Known problem, apparently. I just tried logging in, got the error page, and recycled back to the front page only to discover that there's now a separate link for people using Safari to follow.

When you click on it, it goes to an IP address, and you get a certificate error on account of this (hostname doesn't match certificate). This is exactly how people get spoofed by phishing sites, and here's the Bank of Ireland doing it all by themselves. Most excellent.

update: for bonus points: the IP address doesn't have a reverse lookup (although whois reveals that it's at least in BoI's IP space); and for extra bonus points, there's a "Protect yourself online" link which, when you follow through it and click its "Proceed" button, dumps you back to the real site where your hapless Mac browser will fail to work once more. A+.

My government-aided special savings account matures at the end of March, and to this end I have to submit a declaration that I've not broken any of the rules associated with the scheme. Reading through the paperwork I find I can submit this declaration online; bear in mind this is essentially a tax document of sorts, in that it's a pretty grievous offence in the eyes of the Revenue folk if you lie on it, but they're happy to accept a checkbox on a web form as a declaration. Go Revenue!

The Bank of Ireland website which is hosting the click-to-declare page then leads me to a page covering further options once the scheme has ended: increase, decrease or cancel the monthly contribution to the account. I try to click on one of the boxes and discover it's not an input box, it's a graphic. There's a note at the bottom of the page to the effect that they can't take this instruction on-line, you have to PRINT THE FORM and post it. NNNGH.

So now I'm trying to decide if this is a sort of incompetent not-getting-this-whole-intarweb-thing on BoI's part or an ingenious way to continue raking in cash, given that in the absence of any instruction the monthly contributions to the account will continue unabated until members of the Irish League of Procrastinators (motto: we'll get around to it) finally realise that it might be a good idea to send in that form we received months ago.

Very chatty checkout lady at the supermarket. Chatting so much to the woman in front of me that she absent-mindedly lifted up the "Next Customer Please" thingy¹ and started adding my groceries to the other customer's. Then there was a problem with the credit card swipe, so she had to key in the card number by hand, during which she uttered the following gem:

...these are really difficult to type in, you have to get all the numbers exactly right, not like those barcodes...

Er, yes. Quite. Just scan my stuff already, eh?

1. Dunno what you call these things. It's a little plastic doohickey that you put on the checkout conveyer to separate your stuff from the next/previous custmer.

The Boston Phoenix chimes in on the Jon Stewart Crossfire appearance:

Stewart's Daily Show does enormous numbers for cable; a recent appearance by Bill Clinton drew a reported 1.9 million viewers. The crew has a bestselling book, America (The Book). Stewart's on the cover of Rolling Stone. By contrast, Crossfire is a dying show based on a dying paradigm. (At least I'd like to think so, although Fox's detestable Hannity & Colmes would seem to suggest otherwise.)

Now, I don't have access to any US TV channels except Discovery and CNBC Europe, so I can't verify if it is a dying paradigm, but everything Stewart had to say and indeed a lot of what I've read of American media (and the never-ending stream of lightly rewritten Americanisms that show up on Sky News, Sky One, MTV, and even our domestic channels) seems to indicate the contrary.

I discovered, to my amazement, that the Irish Government's website allows you to submit a request for a passport renewal form. Which I needed one of. So I submitted my request on Wednesday evening, and got an email saying, "We'll post one out to you". Fair enough, I thought, can't expect to have online application forms or anything (although the Revenue Commissioner has pretty much every form you need available on the website as a PDF file).

The form turned up yesterday, in a hand-addressed envelope. Yes, hand-addressed. Some poor schmuck had to copy my name and address off a screen and write it on an envelope.

I'm still giggling over this.