What is it with companies that demand your email address then spam you with drivel, without ever giving you the option of saying "No, I don't want that shit."?

Does British Midland really think it's a good way to attract customers?

I flew with British Midland on Saturday.  It was four times the price of Ryanair's 'free' flight that I took in the other direction.  Today, BMI decided to spam me.

Frankly, if I wanted a fucking loyalty card from them, I'd have got one by now.  The fact that I haven't asked for one is a really strong hint.

But worse... You have to give them an email address to be able to book online with them.  And there's no way to say "No, you can't use this address for your marketing bullcrap."  There's no way to opt out.

So they spam you.

The spam also has no way to opt out.  There's no "Stop sending me junk" link, no "I really couldn't give a rats ass about your loyalty program" button, and any replies are swiftly met with an error saying the recipient 'failed'.

The only way to opt out of it, according to their privacy policy, is:

"You can change your personal details or withdraw from our mailing list by contacting website administration at bmi, Donington Hall, Castle Donington, Derby DE74 2SB or by visiting flybmi profile from the website homepage."

However, I don't have a flybmi profile.  I'd have to go to their site and give them more information, just to stop them abusing the information they already have.

That's not going to happen.

All of which makes me glad that I didn't give them my real email address.  I gave them one specific to this booking, which has now been consigned to the bit-bucket in the sky.  Should they ever have to contact me about anything important, well they're shit out of luck.

Serves them right.

It's a shame companies like that force people to go to such lengths to work around their nastiness.

I've grown my pile of books to read, so I'm not in any immediate need for recommendations.  But when I run out of books, I'll be checking out these three URLs:

• Good Reads.
• The New Classics from Entertainment Weekly.
• 50 Best Cult Books from the Daily Telegraph.

I'm not entirely convinced the Entertainment Weekly list is a good idea.  It's never been something I've had much interest in reading, so I'm not sure we share the same taste in many things.  Also, of the books on that list that I've already read, I thought about 50% of them were drivel.  But the other 50% were pretty good.  So I reckon I've a 1 in 2 chance of getting a decent book to read if I pick something from it - and those odds are better than a random purchase from Waterstones.

"Jokes I Don't Get"
Score: 3/5

It's traditional that books try to hook you with the first page.  The accepted wisdom is that it's only the first page, maybe the first paragraph, and sometimes only the first sentence, that someone browsing in a bookstore will read when deciding whether to buy the book or not.  So authors have to try to hook the read early.  One of my favourite first paragraphs ever came from The Crow Road by Iain Banks:

"It was the day my grandmother exploded. I sat in the crematorium, listening to my Uncle Hamish quietly snoring in harmony with Bach's Mass in B Minor, and I reflected that it always seemed to be death that drew me back to Gallenach."

The quiet scene with the "WTF?  Exploded?" makes you want to read more, to get involved with the story.

Well, this book tries that too.  Here's the first sentence in this book:

"It was my 18th birthday when I chanced upon Harrison Dextrose's The Lost Incompetent: a Bible for the Inept Traveller, little knowing that it would one day lead me to kill a man with a dead penguin."

How's that for WTF-ness?  It certainly has you asking questions (possibly including "Why the hell did I buy this book?")

The book itself is a surreal romp, littered with jokes I just don't get.  It may be supposed to be a satirical allegory, like Gulliver's Travels.  Or maybe not.  I just don't know.

I mean, I get some of the jokes, obviously.  But some of the surrealism just leaves me feeling that I'm missing something.  And I probably am.

This is summed up quite well by the quote on the cover: "This book is cooler than David Hasslehoff in a room full of otters."  That quote comes courtesy of popbitch.com, and while I know they have a thing for otters, it just passes me by.  Ditto Hasslehoff.

On the other hand, there are some genuinely nice, funny, quotable bits:

"I shook my head.  The genius of Ike's pronouncements was in their seed of sense, planted in a mud of madness."

I just wish I knew what more of it was about...

"Some Good C# Details"
Score: 4/5

It's been a while since I reviewed any technical books here.  I've still been reading things, it's just rare for me to sit down and read a whole book.  Usually my enjoyment runs out, and with it my patience.  I have a bunch of books in my really-must-get-back-to pile.  I'll not name names though.

This book is a bit different.  It's not a beginners tome, and it's about a language I'm pretty familiar with.  A bunch of folks have praised this book out in blog land, so I was looking forward to it.  One of the things that really made me anticipate it was when someone said that the author takes a topic, goes into a good deal of depth with it, then goes just a little further.

And he does - sometimes.  I don't think I'm a hugely advanced C# developer, but I understand it pretty well.  My first surprise was how much of the content I already knew.  I've been using C# 3.0 for a while now, so most of the topics were at least a little familiar to me.  I certainly got the most from the bits that were least familiar, but I read it all and it also refreshed in my mind the bits I thought I knew.

So, to properly set your expectations: for example, he talks a lot about LINQ, he shows the general syntax, and shows how you can use it.  Then he shows you how you can use the same LINQ stuff with a different provider.  Then he shows the same query against a SQL Server provider.  Then he shows you how to access the expression tree to implement your own provider.

That's quite a journey, and LINQ is only one part of what the book covers.  So it does go in to a good bit of depth sometimes, and that's great - it's just a bit more depth than most of the other stuff out there.

I've also seen folks on mailing lists pointed at his chapter on generics, and it's a great description of how they work and how they can be used.  He talks a lot about how generics handle covariance and contravariance (also known as the "why can't I pass my List<DerivedClass> to this method that expects a List<BaseClass>" problem), which is good, but he doesn't explain why the hell the language designers chose to implement it that way.  (Sorry - apparently I still find that problem annoying.)  Still, that's not his fault - he's just reporting on the language and how it can be used.

The book itself is quite readable, which I still find surprising in technical books.  Some technical books are well written and just flow, others are more patchy and harder to read - some you really have to work to read.  I found this book to be quite engaging and easy to follow.  So, if you're looking for a book to get up to speed on C# 2.0 and C# 3.0 (and I suspect absolutely none of you are), then this is the book for you.

"Better Than His Previous"
Score: 3/5

I wasn't too impressed with some of Mark Billingham's previous work.  I liked his first books, but after a while the series descended into drivel and I stopped buying them.

So I wasn't particularly looking forward to this one.  I think it was a Christmas present from SWMBO - it wasn't a book I had on my wishlist, so no-one else would dare buy it...  It has taken me this long to get around to it (but that still puts it ahead of a couple of others that were on my wishlist, so go figure).

And it's better.  Well, it's better than the more recent drivel, with their formulaic plots and predictable patterns.  I still don't think he's got back to the heights he was at with Sleepy Head, but at least he's making progress.

"Musings Of Prima Donna"
Score: 3/5

This book is a comic romp through the early eighties, with a fairly dislikable drama student as the central character.

It was funny in parts, a bit (deliberately) cringey in others, and not so good in still other parts.  Even though it was of variable quality, it was still a fun enough book to read.

I really couldn't help wanting to punch the guy though.  That may have detracted from the score a little...

I think the author has tried to be true to the years when this book was set, but I'm not sure he consistently managed it.  I remember reading some slang terms the characters used, and I thought they came in around the 1990s grunge era.  Maybe I'm wrong and they were in use by teenagers in 1983/84 though - I couldn't be bothered going through the book to find the quotes I'm talking about, so I'm certainly not going to spend more time trying to fact-check it.

I suppose part of the cringeworthiness of the book is that we can recognise the main character - either in ourselves or in others we knew at that time.  I still wanted to punch him though.

I know you're all dying for an update after all the foolishness surrounding me trying to get an iPhone.  So here goes.

I phoned Carphone Warehouse again, once again to no effect.  They just never answered the phone.

So on the Monday after all the hassle (a week and a half after placing the order, half a week after cancelling it) I went back to Carphone Warehouse in person.  I spoke to the same girl.  She said that there had been a problem because the Regional Director didn't have enough information to complete the form.  I asked why she didn't phone me then, since both she (the regional director) and she (the sales person I was talking to) both had my number.  She didn't really have a good answer for that.  I think it was just apathy.

Anyway, after standing around for another ten or fifteen minutes while she spoke to the regional director again, handed over some more information, went on hold to someone else, asked me to confirm that I hadn't received the phone, got some more details, and talked to the regional director some more about some conference she was going to travel to, she finally came back and confirmed it had all been done.  They couldn't do a refund there and then, but they'd post a cheque out.

"So, that's it?" I asked.

"Yes," she confirmed.  It was all handled now, and I wouldn't have to contact Carphone Warehouse again.

Sorted.

So I wasn't even slightly surprised when an iPhone was waiting for me when I got home from work the next day.

I decided to hold on to it (an iPhone in the hand is worth two iPhones not available in any stores).  So I called Carphone Warehouse - this time using the seekrit, seekrit phone number the sales person had given me (the one they answer, as opposed to the one they publish), and they said it was fine to hold on to it.  They hadn't cancelled the contract, or, well, done any bloody thing at all despite all my visits.

I know I'm perpetuating their business by not demanding a refund, and I still think they're a bunch of muppets, but by this stage I just didn't care.  None of the stores had a 16GB black model, and I suspect I'd still be waiting if I'd handed this one back.  But I didn't, and I have an iPhone, and it's not half bad.  More on that sometime, maybe.

"Good Book, Great Title"
Score: 4/5

I'm not sure whether it was me or SWMBO who got this brilliantly-titled book.  I was a bit disappointed in the only other book by James Lee Burke that I'd read, so I wouldn't have ordered it after that.  I may have ordered it before I'd read that first one though.  Or SWMBO might have ordered it.  She definitely read this one before me.

Anyway, I thought this was a much better book, with fuller, more rounded characters. That's a little odd, since this book was published in 1993 and features the same central character as the first one I read, which was published in 2005.  I can't really explain why the character that seemed fully fleshed out in the 1993 publication seems like a thin characterisation in the 2005 publication.  Maybe the author was just tired of writing about Dave Robicheaux by 2005.

Still, this book comes across much better than the more recent one, and even the setting feels different.  You can almost feel the Looziana heat coming off the page here.

And it's got the title.  I love the title.  The title does make a bit of sense once you've read the book, but even if you didn't it's still a great title.

I'm glad I'm not the only one that thinks couriers here don't have much of a clue.

The choice of couriers here isn't great, but so far my experiences have been:

• UPS: Woeful.
• Famac: Truly terrible.  SWMBO had to wait 30 days to get a package that should have been here in 3.  They were clueless (at the time) about collecting from the depot (the depot that's just down the road...), and they generally didn't have much idea of where the package was or what to do with it.
• City Link.  Occasionally OK.  Some mainland companies rely on City Link, since (I think) they guarantee that all packages have to be signed for by someone at the designated address, but whoever delivers to our area is usually sensible enough to try getting a neighbour to take it, or occasionally putting it out of sight and sticking a notice through the door telling us where it is.
• DHL.  Mercifully rare, given the experiences of others.  I've had to go to their depot to pick things up, for all the same reasons UPS gave.
• ParcelForce.  These guys have been OK sometimes.  They're not startlingly brilliant, and it's annoying when I rush to get there for 5:59 to find out they've buggered off early, but generally they've been less hassle than the others.
• Royal Mail.  Our postie is great.  He knows where we live, so there are no DHL-like problems, he knows who he can leave packages with, he knows where he can leave packages, and generally he knows how to "do the right thing".

It is worrying that, with ParcelForce, I'm grateful for a courier that occasionally verges on competence.  It's not like this is rocket science.

I thought UPS were supposed to know what they were doing, delivery-wise.  I thought they had a good reputation.  The reputation was all I had to go on, since I've never had anything delivered by them.

Well, it turns out I still haven't had anything delivered by them.  They called on Friday, but couldn't deliver my package because no-one was here.  (Hardly a surprise - most folks work for a living, and there was no clear indication of which month the package would arrive, let alone which day.)

I think we just missed the white van that tried to deliver, because he was leaving our area when we got there and the time on the notice said 5p.m., and we got there at 4:58.  I tried driving out of our estate to catch up with the van, but he was gone by the time I'd got there.

UPS give you a number of options on their 'infonotice'.  I can:

• Arrange collection.  Except the UPS web site lists no depots in Northern Ireland where I could go to collect it.  And much as I am looking forward to getting my hands on my package, I don't want to have to fly to another country to get it.  That, to my mind, would defeat the purpose of paying money to a delivery service.
  
• Arrange delivery for another day.  This would be great, except it's only available Monday to Friday, and as I pointed out, most folks work for a living.  I could take a day off, but that would cost significantly more than the package is worth, again defeating the purpose of using a delivery service.
  
• Arrange delivery to an alternate address.  This, I thought, would be my saviour.  I could just arrange to have it delivered to where I'm working.  Sweet.  Except that they'll only take an alternate address that's 'close' to the original delivery address.  If I was somewhere they deemed close enough to the original delivery address, it wouldn't be a problem because I could walk the couple of steps from there to the actual delivery address and we wouldn't have got into this problem in the first place.  The fact that I was 15 miles away ruled out an alternate address.
  
• Authorisation of delivery.  I could sign things to authorise them to leave the package.  Since duty was due on the package, I'd have to leave cash sitting out where any passer by could get it.  And I'd have to leave a yellow UPS infonotice clearly visible, telling passers by exactly where the cash was.  And where the package would later by, if they'd prefer to nick that instead of the cash.  I'd also have to sign away any chance of holding UPS responsible for said nicking.

I phoned them.  Actually, by now I've phoned them several times.  Their phone lines are open longer than their delivery times, but they were shut when I called - it seems they really only want customers who do this stuff for a living, because they pretty much refuse to work around anyone who isn't available during their chosen hours.  But this time I got through to someone.  Only, I suspect because we made a point of getting here early - we were here before 5p.m., so that if he delivered at roughly the same time, we'd be available.  Needless to say, they won't give you any clue as to when they're going to deliver - they just tell you the day.

He was early.  The new notice says 4:20p.m.  But I didn't really have much choice about this second delivery attempt anyway, since they don't answer the phones on Sundays. 

They use Countrywide over here, so I could go to their depot to collect it.  Except not tonight.  The cutoff for them allowing you to pick up a package is 3:30 - 50 minutes before today's delivery attempt.  But I could pick it up tomorrow.  But only between 5p.m. and 6p.m., against for security.  The depot is open all day, up until 7p.m., but I wouldn't be allowed in.

So tomorrow I get to navigate through the roadworks and subsequent gridlock to Mallusk - a nightmare journey of traffic and bad driving.  The journey itself can take hours if there's an accident, so the 1-hour window where I'm allowed to pick up my property is looking quite small.

I used to think City Link were the worst couriers in this country, but UPS has clearly raised the bar.