Looks like Europe has made it a lot more difficult to dispose of your old credit card than the debt that’s on it … With my current credit card being set to expire soon, the bank recently sent me a replacement one to helpfully enable me to keep maintaining their bottom line in the future.Continue reading “Recycling credit”
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Severely handicapped information technology
Everyone knows the abbreviation IT these days. (But probably no one knows that it dates to 1958 …) My feeling is that its modern incarnation is often missing a few letters ahead of IT. Just like admin, IT departments love to inform us how they are only there to serve us when the reality isContinue reading “Severely handicapped information technology”
BCD 14.05.2023
I know that I’m doing a lot of these bonehead comments of the day lately, or at least a lot more of them than my regular entries, but it’s a good news, bad news kinda thing. The good news is that admin here in Not-Bielefeld and surroundings have gone relatively quiet again. The bad newsContinue reading “BCD 14.05.2023”
BCD 13.05.2023
Here we go again … Once more the American legal system is punishing businesses for underestimating the creative stupidity of their customers. Remember the famous 1994 McDonald’s coffee case where McDonald’s was sued successfully for selling “defectively manufactured” (i.e. hot) coffee that was “unreasonably dangerous” because an older lady managed to spill an entire cupContinue reading “BCD 13.05.2023”
BCD 23.04.2023
With Russian forces stalled menacingly close to the EU’s eastern borders for over a year now, it’s comforting to know that similar threats are being recognized and neutralized here in western Europe on a daily basis too. Case in point: this CNN story yesterday on how Belgian customs in collaboration with the Comité Interprofessionnel duContinue reading “BCD 23.04.2023”
Discover the unfriendly skies
These are boom times for the airline industry and thank God too! After the recent corona pandemic scuttled any number of airline companies and forever left its mark on our meeting structures and travel habits, it was an open question whether or not the industry would ever recover or even be as relevant any longer.Continue reading “Discover the unfriendly skies”
BCD 09.04.2023 (Easter Sunday edition)
If, unlike me, you’ve ever wondered what day Easter Sunday will fall on in some given year, you could look at a calendar. Or you could ask Google. Or you could quickly work it out for yourself using this simple calculation for our bonehead calculation of the day (BCD): (The following figure is the sameContinue reading “BCD 09.04.2023 (Easter Sunday edition)”
Good Friday Disagreements
With lots of spare time this weekend because Easter means that everything here in Not-Bielefeld is either closed or illegal (including, of course, public viewing of the morally questionable 1974 Japanese anime production of Heidi, Girl of the Alps), my thoughts wandered back to the question of why Jesus seems to die on a differentContinue reading “Good Friday Disagreements”
BCD 03.04.2023
With increasing political polarization marching seemingly uncontested across the globe, it was time for some good news on the political front and CNN, as well as many other news outlets, promptly delivered. This is a victory for local democracy. Finally! After being under threat for so long and from so many different corners, democracy gotContinue reading “BCD 03.04.2023”
AdminGPT
You know that it had to be done, right? With all the excitement, coverage, and concern about AI these days, I was simply curious if ChatGPT could do a better job at admin than real admin types could. (And by “better”, I mean better for us as the end users. After all, the real pointContinue reading “AdminGPT”
The Blog About Fog 