As another of my random and pointless posts, I’ve found this handy web-site which shows the translation of an English word across Europe. Hours of fun typing in words, although, for example purposes only, I went for beer.
Category: Random Posts
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And the Blog is Changing…… All Good Things Must Come to a Sort of End….
This blog has reached nearly 5,000 posts and it’s becoming really quite difficult for anyone to easily navigate around it. Topics veer between Good Beer Guide pubs to British Airways, from random museum exhibits to Wetherspoons, from Norfolk churches to walking group trips. Eclectic, absolutely, but for search engines and those who drop in occasionally, it’s too difficult to find anything.
I accept that this blog isn’t the most important media outlet in the country, however much I think that it should be. But, if something is worth doing, then it’s worth doing right. And just to reassure anyone who is concerned (goodness knows who) that the blog is closing, then that definitely won’t be happening. In the future, there will though be just one daily post which encompasses everything exciting (or what I consider exciting, which is very different to what others might define it at) that has taken place in the previous day that I think is worth writing about.
Which means that there will also now be a series of new web-sites where I’ll focus more specific content on. Over the next few weeks I’ll be creating entirely separate web-sites for:
Accor Hotels
British Airways
Good Beer Guide Pubs
Long Distance Walking
Poland
Random Museum Exhibits
UK Churches
Wetherspoon Pubs
Which will free this blog to become a more navigable site with its one post per day, linking to the above external sites when I think it’s necessary to do so.
I think it’ll be very lovely and I’ll be making the shift this week to the new style.
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IHG – New Rewards Scheme
Back to my niche content…. A new rewards scheme from IHG was announced today, although there are nearly no details other than the above structure of the new scheme, and it doesn’t come into use until March. I’m not sure why a company would launch a rewards scheme during the calendar year as it appears to have even confused them in their own FAQ, let alone card holders. The reduced tier qualification recently announced and confirmed is now only in place until March, so if anyone is quick they can get their status before the changes take that reduced status away.
It looks like a muddled mess to me, not only have their increased their requirements in terms of nights (which I assume means they’re hopeful about the outlook for the hospitality industry for later this year), they’re encouraging people to get status without any clue of what that status looks like. There’s nothing here that looks exciting, but perhaps they’ll surprise and delight me and other card holders.
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Random Posts – Booking.com Genius Level Three
As another random post, I never knew booking.com even went up to level three until they e-mailed me this, but apparently it’s a new thing. It seems quite clever, they’re saying to hotels that people in level three cancel fewer bookings and are more loyal, so it’s best to offer them larger discounts. I don’t use booking.com all that much, but this might be a slightly handy benefit for when I’m in an area without Accor or IHG hotels….
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London – Pret Perks
This is another one of my irrelevant posts, one in a long series. If I’m being honest with myself, the audience for this sort of post is low, even by my standards. Anyway, I won’t let that stop me. Pret have introduced a new loyalty scheme, which replaces their long-standing one where staff give free things to whoever they think looks attractive. I wanted to see what ‘Perks’ I could get, and I did Google it, but no-one seemed to know and a few people were asking. So, with the aiming of getting another two views, here’s one of the answers.
It’s a choice of snack…. Or at least, the first one for me was, I’m sure that they vary.
The list of possible options that I could have had.
And what I went for, as I really quite like these. I know they’re fruit, but they’re dried them out and so that counts a little less as fruit in my eyes. The staff in the busy London Pret said that they hadn’t anyone claim one of these perks to their knowledge, so they weren’t entirely sure how it worked, but it simply involves scanning a QR code and that worked fine.
Anyway, irrelevant post aside, I’ll get back to writing about pubs and history now.
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Good Beer Guide 2022
The Good Beer Guide 2022 edition is now out and the CAMRA app has been updated, so I can see which of my favourite pubs have made a reappearance. My delight is mostly reserved to see that the brilliant Hop and Vine is back in, although I’d have refused to have acknowledged that the book even existed if it hadn’t….. (I admit to copying much of this text from last year, but I did check the Hop & Vine first!)
Here’s the list of Good Beer Guide pubs that I’ve visited….
Anyway, the new copy is available at https://amzn.to/3269OCx:
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Burger King – Burger Roulette
Back to my entirely random posts again….
I saw this stupid promotion a few weeks ago and meant to check review sites to see if it worked out. The idea behind it was that customers could go into Burger King and get a random burger for £2. There were very clear warnings all over the Burger King web-site that this wasn’t suitable for vegans, vegetarians, anyone with an allergy, anyone who didn’t eat bacon, anyone who hates halloumi and so on. Realistically, that’s a huge number of people ruled out of the entire promotion.
I thought initially that users of the app could see what random burger they would receive before committing to purchase it, which I thought was quite clever before I went to the web-site to read more. Burger King has had to add to their web-site policies explaining that customers cannot refund these burgers or request any changes. If you don’t like it, the burger has to be binned which doesn’t strike me as the most environmentally friendly option.
Anyway, I’ve gone to look at the reviews and I can’t find a single positive one (and I’ve scrolled through a lot of pages other than the pointless press releases they dumped out at the start of the campaign. I’ve found tens of negative ones though. This one probably sums the whole thing up:
“Burger Roulette is a fake game.
1. Every time I try, I get the same burger… NO surprise, NO roulette
2. They never show you the result in front of you.
3. The roulette is not transparent and kind of cheating roulette.
4. ALL roulette MUST reveal and show to customer in front.
This is fake roulette, at least I never seen any fair roulette in front of me!”How on earth this was Burger King’s big idea of the summer I’ll never quite know. Perhaps people loved the concept very secretly. Anyway, random post over.
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Reviews – The Old Smithy in Ambleside
Apologies for yet another random post….
Clicking on the above image makes it larger and easier to read, although the language is NSFW. The replies from this fish and chip shop owner are certainly direct and punchy, which makes for some interesting reading. He only replies to Google Reviews I think, or at least not to the TripAdvisor ones at https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Restaurant_Review-g186319-d7780294-Reviews-The_Old_Smithy-Ambleside_Lake_District_Cumbria_England.html where his restaurant is rated at 17/17 in Ambleside which isn’t entirely ideal……..
Anyway, certainly something of a slightly different style to read on Google reviews…..
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EDF’s Dash for Cash
[I’m pleased to say that EDF have now resolved this to my satisfaction, although they made it very hard to do so…..]
And a personal rant, but since it’s my blog I’m allowed….
My electricity usage is low, it’s fair to say. For the best part of ten years I’ve been paying British Gas about £10 to £13 per month and all was well. I stupidly switched to EDF, who don’t burden themselves with competence, because I greedily wanted to claim a £50 joining fee. Anyway, they charged me £13 per month for electricity as well, so all remained well.
To cut a long story short, they didn’t read my meter when they said they did, so I had an estimated read and a big bill. We’ll ignore why they told me they had read the meter, but there’s another long story of incompetence there.
They’ve now produced a new bill with my actual meter read that I sent them. My electricity usage is £53.51 from March to October 2021 (thrifty eh?) including standing charge and usage. That’s not per month, that’s in total.
That means that my annual usage is going to come in at around £120 per year, probably slightly less.
How much have EDF decided, with this new bill taken into account, to charge me per month? They’ve gone for £133 per month, so over ten times my actual usage. I don’t know whether they think I have a huge Christmas party for the entire neighbourhood where everyone plugs in lots of devices or am planning to start a cannabis farm or something. Although on a more serious note, reckless actions like this can push people into severe financial hardship and it looks to me like a desperate dash for cash from EDF.
Pretty unimpressed….
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Max Hawkins and Living Randomly
This is Max Hawkins, a programmer who spoke at a TedX event. I’ll use the text they provided as it sums his talk up as well as I can:
“For two years Max let a randomized computer program determine the course of his life. Everything from what he ate and the music he played to the city where he lived was determined by the whim of the computer. The randomizer sent him everywhere from a shopping mall in Japan to a goat farm in rural Slovenia. He tells the story of his randomly generated life: how he stumbled upon the concept of chance, why it became an obsession, and how he discovered that refusing to choose can be a radical act.”
I’m very engaged with this whole random thing, which is partly something that I’ve been doing with GeoGuessr in selecting random locations to visit. Max has a web-site at https://maxhawkins.me/ and he has randomized huge sections of his life in what I consider to be an inspirational manner. He started by writing software to pick him up in an Uber taxi and be dropped off at a random food venue, which even he himself didn’t know the location of until he arrived. He then chose to live in random places, go to random Meetup events and listen to random music. Having the opportunity to live in different places around the world for a month or so brought him so many new perspectives and life experiences.
And there’s something in this. I followed Max’s Spotify playlist, which is 30 random songs generated every day. I found more stuff that I liked on that playlist than I did on Spotify’s own algorithm of recommended music. When I’ve used GeoGuessr locally, going to random places is like a chain reaction of finding other things I never knew existed and then felt the need to investigate. And it creates adventures, such as the national GeoGuessr challenges that Nathan and I have done. On a simple level, just going to read random Wikipedia articles can be an interesting way to pass the time, so many new things to learn and become intrigued by.
I’m not sure that I’ll take the element of the random as far as Max has, but he has managed to be taken out of his comfort zone to try almost endless new experiences. Algorithms can perhaps limit our lives, we follow the recommendations of Google or whoever, but they are really just keeping us within our comfort zones and never showing us anything really new. Often, we might think that our experiences are new because we’ve visited a new pub down the road, but is that enough for a meaningful life?
This was an alert I received from Google a couple of hours ago, they’ve decided that I like notable coffee and notable beers, so they’ve suggested this location. It actually looks pretty decent, but Google has also decided that I don’t seem interested in notable tea (which is probably true to be fair). And this is the danger, it’s sending me to what look like new and interesting locations, but they’re the same sort of places. I will visit, as I see no need to not go to places that I like, but the joy of the random is going somewhere I wasn’t sure I’d like, then discovering it offered something very new and exciting. And, I can quite like innovative teas, so I shouldn’t rule those out.
For my friends, expect a wave of things being done randomly in the future. I don’t think that many of my friends find me particularly predictable anyway (I have a lot of “good ideas”), so they might not be too surprised. Without getting too deep, there’s some sort of order in the chaos as well, so many coincidences and things which felt inevitable. Meeting people and having experiences which were random, but which seemed to be destined to be, as if the universe meant for that to happen.
So, here’s to the random. It’s the future.
