I’m a big fan of call centres and the excellent customer service I usually get through them. Ahem. I also love big cable networks (*cough-Rogers-cough-bastards-cough*) because I really like the way I pay them a lot of money, more every month it seems for the same jerky, pixellated, “reality” cookie cutter crap. Not that I’m bitter though.

SO it is with great relish I bring you this article from Reuters. It tells how a hacker or employee got in and changed the hold message. You know the one that normally says “Your business is valuable to us” while somebody destroys “Heart of Gold” on the harp, or the clarinet? They apparently changed it to something that isn’t exactly what the company would say to customers, or out loud anyway. It had a lot of curse words in it. Here’s a cleaned-up quote from Reuters:

“You are through to NTL customer services. We don’t give a (expletive) about you. We are never here. We just (expletive) you about, basically, and we are not going to handle any of your complaints. Just (expletive) off and leave us alone.”

Ahh funny stuff. And everybody secretly feels this is how you get treated at some places anyway, right?

I’m a dog lover of course. If you can call Harvey a dog. He’s more of a hairy son.

Anyway, I’m a dog lover and I saw this article from, you guessed it Boing Boing (why do I even bother having a blog, when all of the good stuff I post is just a rehash of their site? That’s a good question. I may have to ask somebody about that. Maybe Boing Boing will have something on it tomorrow.). So anyway, back to the dogs.

Here’s a direct quote:

Scientists report that dogs can smell disease in the urine of bladder cancer patients. In the study, published in this week’s British Medical Journal, the canines successfully identified a cancer patient’s urine sample placed among six control samples 41 percent of the time, far better than the 14 percent expected by chance. From an Associated Press article on the research:

“Perhaps the most intriguing finding, though, was in a comparison patient whose urine was used during the training phase. All the dogs unequivocally identified that urine as a cancer case, even though screening tests before the experiment had shown no cancer. Doctors conducted more detailed tests on the patient and found a life-threatening tumor in the right kidney.”

Way cool stuff. It makes you wonder what else dogs can smell, doesn’t it? Maybe they can tell when you are going to bang your head on a cupboard by your smell. Or maybe they can tell when you are going to accidentally bounce a cheque to Hydro. That would be very handy to be able to do: “Honey, do I smell NSF to you?”. Of course this makes me want to treat Harvey much better from now on, cause you don’t want to tick him off and have him ignore something important. Yep, it’s all ground beef and steaks for him from now on.

Well today I bring good news and bad news.

The bad news is if you own a fancy bike lock, you’re probably screwed. The news on the web today is those Kryptonite locks that cost a fortune are easily defeated by a .29c Bic pen in about 2 seconds.

Here’s the link on Wired.com

And now for the good news. If you happen to own a very expensive bike, lock it up with your expensive lock and return to find that your bike has been stolen with a very inexpensive pen, you may be very glad that you can now buy a prescription-stength over the counter heart defibrillator. Yessiree, that shock machine thingy they use to restart your heart in hospitals is now available to anyone with $2000 in their pocket. It’s really a must-have item. I mean the humour value alone makes the price seem worthwhile. It delivers enough current to light a 150 watt bulb for one second, or in other words enough to knock down your brother when you jump him when he’s soaking wet from the shower and leaving him twitching on the bath mat.

It’s a great world we live in.