Monday, 26 May 2014

Two irritations

First, I seem to have vanished from the world of google. A crude test used to be to take a string from a post, enclose it in quotes and ask google about it. In the quite recent past, provided that the post was a week or so old and the google crawlers had gotten around to it, the search returned one's own post, reviving one's faith both in search engines and in one's own visibility. However, this morning, trying as far back as 8th May, the test is not working. What am I doing wrong? Have my doings been demoted?

To further investigate this important matter I include here hoage, homalographic, humanitary, wendic and weothe, a string of reasonably obscure words drawn from OED and which today, conjointly, get no hits at all. Having just the three 'h' words get 1,480 hits, the first few of which at least are dictionary flavoured sites, which last are foiled by having more than one initial letter. On the other hand, there is further confusion in that results are not repeatable, with exactly what google does seeming to depend on the time of day or the weather. Or something.

Second, another incomprehensible message from an electricity utility company. Some gobbledegook about how much electricity I am using and whether am I am on the best tariff or not. I really do not want to spend quality time trying to understand all this stuff and would much rather be back in the days when I could just buy electricity from an electricity board which I could trust with my direct debit details and forget about the whole business. Not only have Cameron and his friends arranged for profits from the supply of electricity to accrue to themselves, they have also arranged for a lot of bother to accrue to me.

They also seem to have arranged it that no-one in the UK is building power stations any more. We can't, at least at the present state of the art, import the stuff from China, so there might not be any electricity to squabble about in the future.


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