Category Archives: Wibbles

A place to rant about stuff.

Wibbles, WTF

FA supporting criminals

Just read this post on 200 Weeks about the FA supporting a convicted criminal.

Ashley Sestanovich was a member of Grays Athletic who play in the Blue Square Premier League. He’s not currently able to play as he is being detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure whilst serving 8 years for conspiracy to rob.

Sestanovich tipped off two illegal immigrants that 11 grand would be at a roofing company. The cash wasn’t there & a 42-year-old father of a newborn was shot, he died 7 months later.

Where does the F.A. come in? They kindly agreed with the player’s appeal against Grays Athletic’s refusal to pay him after his arrest. The club has been fined £500 & told to pay Sestanovich £14,000 within 2 weeks or the club will be banned from the league.

Club chairman, Mick Woodward, said the club would not be paying the money to someone who attended 3 training sessions & played 20 minutes of a pre-season friendly due to being involved in a ‘heinous crime’. He offered to pay the £14,000 “wages” to the victim’s family but the F.A. are enforcing their decision.

Um, so this “footballer” commits a crime, gets put away, and expects the club to still pay his “wages” – and the FA agree with this?

What the hell is this country coming to? I don’t bother with football anyway (especially the Premier league, it’s not about the sport anymore, it’s just a commercial thing), but as “PC 200″said, “if this is not yet another reason to switch support from football to another sport, I don’t know what is.”

Fair play to Grays Athletic for refusing to pay the money to a criminal, and I hope the FA see some sense.

A BBC report on this said:

The FA said because Sestanovich was arrested after he signed for Grays, the club were obliged to honour his contract until he was actually convicted of an offence, under contract law.

Um, he might have signed a contract, but I’d imagine that contract, like most employment contracts, included terms that the contract would be severed if you were convicted of criminal charges. Even if not, if you break the law in a serious way, you no longer deserve the protection of the law.

Motorcycles, Personal, Wibbles

Even colder

Okay, yesterday I posted whinging about how cold it is. Today was even worse – not only did I have to use a lighter to heat the disclock to defrost it before being able to remove it, I got to a petrol station and couldn’t open the fuel tank because the lock on the cap had frozen too!

Thankfully the staff at the Sainsburys petrol station in Stevenage (Poplars) were very helpful and came out with a can of their own de-icer to help me out, which was appreciated.

Wibbles, WTF

There is no hope

3 Comments

According to this report, Camelot have had to withdraw a scratch card because the general public are too thick to understand negative numbers.

From the article:

Tina Farrell, from Levenshulme, called Camelot after failing to win with several cards.

The 23-year-old, who said she had left school without a maths GCSE, said: “On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop. But when she scanned the card the machine said I hadn’t.

“I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher – not lower – than -8 but I’m not having it.

Continue reading There is no hope →

Wibbles

Pay up you selfish overpaid wankers

BBC News reports:

Premiership footballers who agreed to donate a day’s wages to a nurses’ hardship fund have coughed up less than a third of the money, organisers say.

Five months ago, 255 players promised to make donations to the May Day for Nurses appeal.

Big names, including Steven Gerrard and Thierry Henry, agreed to participate. More than £750,000 was pledged but just £200,000 has so far been collected.

These guys get paid ridiculous amounts of money for kicking a ball around a pitch, and can’t be bothered to fulfil their promise to donate a single day’s wages to help out nurses who do a worthwhile job actually helping care for people?

(Via Random Acts of Reality)

Programming, Wibbles, WTF

Grr, MySQL and enum types….

3 Comments

I want to stab MySQL between the eyes. Or rather if MySQL had eyes, I’d stab it squarely between them.

It just wasted far too much of my time with this bit of annoying behaviour. I’ll admit it was also my fault, but I still think MySQL reacted in a retarded way. (But then from a “database” system which on its default settings is happy to silently mangle data however it feels, that’s not too surprising).

Continue reading Grr, MySQL and enum types…. →

Wibbles, WTF

Three Valleys Water cont’d

I already wrote a post about how Three Valleys Water randomly decided to remove our meter.

We’ve just had a bill through from them, with a meter reading that they took on the 28th August, billing us £82 for three months usage. That figure is utter crap, it’s way too high. Not to mention, there was no meter attached to our supply on the 28th August! That’s a day or two after I noticed that the meter had been removed.

They’ve put the bill on hold (just as well, because I was going to instruct my bank not to pay the Direct Debit) while they send an engineer out to see what’s happened, then when they get the report back they’ll “adjust the bill”. I can suggest a suitable adjustment – stick the thing up your fucking arse!

Continue reading Three Valleys Water cont’d →

Information Security, System Administration, Wibbles

Damn hackers… :(

2 Comments

I got a phone call earlier today from Bytemark, who host a VPS server for me. I’ve had this box with them for a couple of years, and it’s been good.

However, it seems some idiot script-kiddie has used a vulnerability in some webapp to download and run a Perl script named udp.pl to do a UDP DoS against another server (something IRC related).

This had been happening since late Friday evening, and the excess bandwidth charge came to over £80 :( Now I don’t blame Bytemark for charging me really, they’ll be charged for the traffic so they have to pass it on – I blame the bastard who was abusing my server, and myself for (a) not having kept up to date enough, and (b) not noticing quicker (if I’d looked at my mrtg traffic graphs over the weekend I’d have instantly seem that something was amiss).

I’ve not been able to find any evidence as to how the attack came in, but I suspect it may have been WordPress – I hadn’t upgraded from 2.1.2, and apparently there was a remote code exploit in PHPMailer, which WP used, so WP was vulenerable to it. Other possibilities are Dokuwiki (which I’ve updated to latest version) and Gallery, which I’ve deleted.

On the plus side, I’m pretty sure they didn’t get actual access to the box beyond running their flooding script, although I’m still nervous trusting it, so I think I’ll have to move everything off it ASAP anyway.

In the meantime it’s behaving itself. Really not a good day today – slept through my alarm somehow and woke way, way late for work, then have this shite to deal with this evening… bah, hope tomorrow is better!

Lesson learned: make much more effort to stay up to date with all software; keep a much closer eye on the system; install Tripwire or similar; be more vigilant.