Absinthe and L&P!

A bit of a side track...

I have this bottle of Absinthe in the cupboard. It's been there a while. A friend said I had to try it so I did. Straight... almost spat it back out... Pretty scary stuff. Not surprising when it says 70% alcohol on the label.

Some months (or years) later, I thought it was time to try again. I got a small sieve and put sugar in it and poured the Absinthe through. It changes colour... cool. It even tastes better. OK it's not so bad..

The other night I thought that's a lot of work to go to. So I thought: could I just mix it with something? We have this softdrink (soda) here called Lemon and Paeroa (L&P) and pour this over Absinthe and it changes colour like doing the sugar ritual and it's even easier to drink.

So if you're in New Zealand or find some L&P, give it a go.. Add it to your list of things to do while visiting New Zealand :-)

Scam Websites

I found a charge on my credit card a while back

UOL THE NAMESDATABASE 866 395 4982 US
12.00 U.S.DOLLARS

Weird. Stands out given I only do transactions in US dollars every two or three months.

After some googling, it seems I am not alone with these charges.

Seems a couple of years ago I signed up to a website and paid to get in touch with an old friend. I thought it was a one off charge to give me access for a year but they keep charging you each year. Best part is try to get in touch with them to get them to stop and email is really my only option and they don't reply to those if you query why you are being charged. Others report exactly the same problem.

So these tossers just quietly pull $12 a year from thousands and thousands of people. If you're in the States another charge in US$ would just blend in. They must make a killing...

They seem to be associated with classmates.com as well so think twice before giving any details to these sites.

Do Western Digital drives suck or is it just me? Or maybe they don't?

Typical.. as noted I created a nice new system to test Windows 7 and what happens? My 250GB Western Digital drive now thinks it's name is

WDC ROM MODEL-HAWK-----

and it is 8 GB. Not that anything can see it anymore. It still in warranty but without any proof of purchase I definitely won't get squat...

In some countries I could march back in and say it's broken and they'd bend over backwards to help me. We don't really have a customer focus in retail in New Zealand.

We have a some law named the Consumer Guarantee Act but you still feel like you're asking someone if you can beat their mother up for even thinking about returning something.

Anyway this drive is broken and there are a lot of hits when you search for the phrase above. Looks like they're not the most reliable things on the planet. So I think I'll give them a wide birth for the moment...

Update a few hours later: I turned everything off for a while (this is usually a 24/7 machine) and the drive is back. Not sure how well but seems ok so far. So give that a go if you're WD drive goes weird...

Update some 18 months later...

I've had two more western digital drive die in the last few months and they were not coming back noway nohow. So in my eyes western digital have some very severe quality issues and I will not be buying any more anytime soon.

So I have two dead drives (both blue advanced format EARS models if any one is searching for "western digital dead drives are rubbish") fortunately both are backup drives but I now have no backup and my main drive is also a western digital so it's getting replaced as soon as I can get a new drive. Need to check reliability on other drive brands...