huray, huray, it's a bank-bank holiday

Yeahhhh ... 4 days of holiday. Beautiful!

However, for me they might be more unpleasant than normal working days, especially tomorrow morning when I have to wake up at 6 at the latest, ah comon, 6.30, let's negociate ... ok, I have to wake up early, so that I make it at Waterloo at 7am (sigh!) to meet this other globetrotter Roberto. Yeap, after being drunk for 2 days celebrating Berlusconi's loss of power... (nah, I'm kidding about him being drunk part)

So tomorrow morning, 7am, Waterloo, get our arses on Eurostar, destination Brussels ... Funny thing today, I tried to check my Eurostar reference number as it's supposed to be 8-letter reference and mine is 6!!! (sheesh, I foresee a cloudy future tomorrow morning, touch wood!) ... and when I typed www.eurostar.co.uk I was taken to the french version of the website. I type www.eurostar.com - same thing, the page I get is in french. My, have I woken up in a parallel universe where the french have won the last battle? (well, let's be generous here ... any battle?!). I quickly put my wits to work and I delivered this message:

"Why do I type www.eurostar.co.uk or www.eurostar.com and I'm taken to a website which is in french without an option to switch to English?
Is it a new marketing technique to encourage more English to learn the beautiful language of Voltaire? How can I use Shakespeare instead?"

to their support team. Thanks to this latest state of the art technology called "email", I got my own message back in their reply, so this is the exact message I sent. Now, I don't want to spark a religious war here on who's better, Voltaire or Shakespeare ... no one could care less anyway, as it's not about football.

The reply came prompty and from a human operator named David. It's a nice surprise, given that other companies blatantly ignore your emails but they proundly put links on their website saying "Contact us".

Well, the guy tried to teach grama how to suck eggs in that he explained to me what cookies are ... well, I'm a software engineer dude, I eat cookies every day (actually I don't anymore since my dentist said ... either you quit or your teeth will). The end of story is ... it couldn't have been cookies, because I have never accessed their website before from work (not to mention setting my default on french - who in the right mind would do that? answer: a french) and my settings on the browser doesn't allow other parties to set cookies for different domains than their own.
And especially that I delete my cookies and offline content every month or two - since I can't view page sources in IE because of that (sigh!).
He also lectured me about how to delete the cookies.
Of course I didn't delete any cookies and of course that 5 minutes after that, without me doing anything to my browser, the site was magically back and working as expected.

Could this be another french trick in their quest for world domination?
It could well be.
Or I can also imagine a geeky hacker smirking somewhere in a dark room, not having left that room for 35 days in a row and with an uptime of 2 years, 45 days, 5 hours, 20 minutes and 6 seconds sharp. 7 seconds now...

Anyway ... another funny thing that happened today ... we were lunching and talking bollocks as usual (oops, excuse me, can I say bollocks online?) and somehow the word "Romanian" came into the conversation.
Automatically a woman next table, 45-ish, with a heavy eastern european accent said to us : "What do you have to say about Romania?" like she was a bit upset, a how-dare-you sort of question. We were all confused for a second or two ... this was highly unconventional. We're in England for God Sake, you don't just go talking to strangers just like that. You wait for someone to introduce you. Sweet heaven!
Quickly I recovered from the shock and I said simply "Nothing." The woman said "Ok" and that was it. Most likely she was a romanian. Duh. And then I remembered that very close from where we work there's a company called "Black Sea Company". It could have some romanians aboard.

So that's about it folks, I wish you a happy escape, fingers crossed for some sun or mid-finger raised for rain, as the forecast is rain-rain-rain and some sun right about the time that we're supposed to come back to London. Ah well, we'll probably hide in some dodgy tavern and indulge in pleasantries with Stella. Stella Artois.