Sunday 16 October 2011

Cooksmart

There's a kitchen textiles company called Cooksmart. I have some of their tea towels. On several occasions I've noticed their logo on the tag and found it a bit odd. It looks like this:

Why, I kept wondering, have they used the chef's hat to represent the letter A when it clearly looks more like the M? Was it a strange oversight or a deliberate ploy to bait sad losers like me into blogging about them? It seemed so obvious that they'd got it wrong. In my head, I had already composed a slightly haughty email.

But first, to satisfy my hunch, I adjusted the logo to how I thought it should look.

And immediately I saw why they hadn't done it this way. Now it looks like Cooks' Art. The hat doesn't look like an M at all! They were right all along. In my head I composed another email to apologise for the previous email even though I'd never written it, let alone sent it.

I'm sorry for doubting you Cooksmart. I may still email you about putting the hanging loop in the corner rather that the side though. That annoys me.

The moral? Don't be a smart arse.

For the purposes of procreation only

Saturday 15 October 2011

Limbo (or, why 1&1 equals nothing)

My new website is finished and ready to roll and I have written a suitably dull post to kick things off. But I can't direct you to it yet because I'm still waiting for my domain name transfer to go through. I registered grahamnunn.net with 1&1 because at the time I was pissed off with 123-reg. I can't remember why. Now I feel completely the opposite - 123-reg have picked up their game. Their implementation of Wordpress is a dream. Everything is great with them. We hold hands sometimes and plait each other's hair. We enjoy the best days.

The transfer appears to have gone through - 123-reg are telling me that they now control the domain and I can do what I want with it, but this isn't true because the forwarding I set up with 1&1 (to redirect to this blog) is still in effect. I can't log on to Wordpress because I just get a Blogger 'page does not exist' error.

1&1 are crap. If you try to do anything at all, they give you seven different ways of doing it, all of which conflict with each other and none of which actually work. I've tried cancelling my entire contract with them (they still host the never viewed doormatpicnic.com) but after further conflicting advice, I just get a 404 error when I try to confirm the decision. For professional web hosts, their website is a shocking shower of shit. To achieve anything on the site, or rather attempt to, you have to Google it first because finding the answers on the site itself is next to impossible. It's like they want to exasperate the user into sticking with them. Yeah, way to go. Don't they realise that I have upwards of zero people waiting to see my new site?

As a rational footnote, it's possible that this is not 1&1's fault. There may be other forces at work here. But they're still crap, so my ire is valid.