• 4 Posts
  • 204 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 20th, 2023

help-circle

  • We had a really early one in the 90s, like way earlier than anyone else we knew, in a car we bought from some rich guy. We only used it once or twice as a novelty as my Dad always insisted he knew better. Plus it had its maps loaded up using some CD which was really out of date and it wasn’t like you could type in McDonalds and it would take you to the closest one, you had to put the whole address in and even then I think it wouldn’t find it half the time.

    The first one I got was a gift in the 00s and it was bloody awful. Once I t turned me off a perfectly straight road to drive through a graveyard and then put me back on the road I had been on. Another time it turned me off and sent me down the only toll-road in the UK, then got me off at the first exit and put me back on the toll-road in the opposite direction to get me off at the place I’d got into it earlier. I had to pay twice to go nowhere and it added five minutes to my journey.

    Just to add, when people came round our house in the late 90s my Dad would make me turn on the computer to show them MS Autoroute, which was an offline piece of software that was used to generate routes, basically what Google Maps does now with directions, but it would just give you something to print out. Really useful for the day and you could even get it to estimate how much the fuel would cost, etc.










  • There is a network that was built using taxpayer money (Openreach) and they’re required to lease it out to other ISPs. However, other companies are free to build their own and only use parts of the Openreach network. Virgin Media (formerly NTL) have built their own network but most other companies only build own small sections here and there and plug into Openreach for the rest, but Virgin don’t lease their network out. So you’re basically using Openreach or Virgin Media.


  • For these quick jobs where you just have to momentarily commit and you can’t give up once you’ve started (when they’ve answered the phone) I’ve got the mental gymnastics pretty well down.

    It’s kind of like when you need to get into a cold swimming pool. I just go to the deep end and block out that it’s going to be horrible and think about nothing else than the act of making my body jump in. Once you’re flying through the air it doesn’t matter what you think because you’re going in