Could I help save Portsmouth FC? [General]
07:02pm GMT, 4 Mar 2010

At least one person thinks so:

Date: Thu, 04 Mar 2010 11:07:33 H0600
Subject: SOS [PORTSMOUTH FC}
To: website@darkskills.org.uk
From: James Cox 

Good Day,
         My name is James cox kennedy,the chairman of Cox enterprise & Cox
communications Incorporation.I was reading a news about a football club
in england {PORTSMOUTH FC} and to my understanding it seems the club is 
about to go into administration but i have made some enquiries about the 
club but it seems they are not ready to deal with americans but i am very 
interested in purchasing this  club i have the funds but im just looking 
for a  good british business man/woman that can be my frontperson on this
deal ,we will sign an agreement through our lawyers before i put my money
down on this and everything else will be taking care of,Please get back
to me as soon as possible if you are interested.
James Cox Kennedy.
Cox communications,
Chairman,
ww2.cox.com
speak2cox@gmail.com
+1-404-547-8736
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_C._Kennedy

Dear absentee [General]
12:04am BST, 28 Aug 2009

Dear absentee,

Thank you for gracing me with an automated response giving me the awesome news that you are on holiday/sabbatical/raising your offspring/have left the company. I would like to reassure you that the experience was in no way diminished by the receipt of 23 similar messages from other people in reply to the same email.

I'd like to suggest some additional things that you might want to add to your away message next time you jet off to the Algarve/have a long posh-sounding holiday/get knocked up/resign/get sacked.

• If this automated away message raises any tickets in your ticketing system, then please close them. Then you might want to consider spending a fruitless time trying to work out how to filter out away messages from every email system currently known to man.
• If this away message happens to cause a mail loop, you might want to fix it before it generates, say, 500 emails.
• There's every chance, of course, that I am actually in the office and have forgotten to unset my away message. In which case, please feel free to ignore this message.
• If it's that bloody important, please phone.

This could be a problem with the server's configuration [Computing]
07:08pm BST, 19 Jul 2009

I just wanted to install the latest Firebug. Good to know that it happens to us all.

Address handling deficits [General]
12:21pm BST, 10 Apr 2009

Dear web developers and people who commission websites aimed at a UK audience,

It would make my life easier if everyone who created forms for entering postal addresses on websites spent some time thinking about where people actually live. Many of you seem to think that we all live in addresses that look this:

22 Acacia Avenue
Smalltown
Burbshire
XX9 9ZZ

This is simply not the case.

A few specific tips for people to consider:

• In common with most of the 7.5 million residents of London, I do not live in a county. Do not make county a mandatory field. Do not add "Greater London" to the selection of values. It isn't a county, it's a workaround for your broken assumptions about the way the UK is administered.
• Technically, the residents of Portsmouth, Southampton and other unitary authorities do not live in a county either and have not done since 1992. I repeat, do not make county a mandatory field.
• For much of my time in London, I have lived in houses converted into flats. These are typically distinguished by number or letter. Please have some facility for entering the flat number or letter. Please do not only have a field for house number and then validate that it only contains a single number and no letters. Living in the same building as someone does not imply that I would like to share my post with them.
• Postcodes are more complicated than you think. Do not write your own postcode validation rules. "EC1R 3ER" is a valid postcode. If you choose to use someone else's validation rules, please ensure that you have some way of finding out when the Royal Mail issues new postcodes which break the existing validation rules.
• If the postcode I enter is not in your database of postcodes, it might mean that it is a new postcode that hasn't made it into your database yet. You are updating your postcode database, right? Please allow me to enter a postcode that isn't in your database, after warning me.

In essence, please do not waste my time trying to validate that my address adheres to your fundamentally broken view of the way the UK works.

Update: Fixed a typo.

Robins in the snow [London]
06:53pm GMT, 2 Feb 2009

The great thing about robins is that they're so inquisitive; you can get really close.

One aim for today was to get a shot of the parakeets of Tooting Common, but they were, unsurprisingly, huddling away somewhere out of the wind and I only caught a glimpse of one of them. Cracking day though. The heaviest snowfall for 18 years coincided with a pre-arranged day off.