Dear Nationwide - thank you for cancelling our insurance policy

No really, thanks. I mean if you hadn't changed your system so that you no longer renewed our contents insurance by default so that our policy expired while we were travelling in November and then not said you would take the payment and reinstate the policy when I phoned up to complain but not managed to process it and then not phoned me or written to me until today, when it was too late to reinstate the policy, I wouldn't have been annoyed enough with you to go and get a quote elsewhere and discovered that I could get better insurance for less than half the price - or that even premium insurance from cuddly brands like Marks and Spencer or Greenbee (John Lewis) are cheaper than you. You could also change the training you give your phone operators so that when they realise I'm upset they don't ask me 'how I am' while they look up my security details, but hey - if you did I might have lost the edge of fury that made it worthwhile shopping around. I owe you one (well, no, I feel like you owe me the extra money I've been paying you all these years that I didn't bother paying the £50 fine to take my home insurance elsewhere while you had my mortgage, but at least you're not gouging me any more - and I might even drop the gold credit card now you add a transaction fee to all my overseas payments and get myself organised and get that Santander Zero card instead). You gave us a good deal on our mortgage and you had us for over 12 years but now - yeah, it's over.

It's also possible to play a fun game called 'how low can this quote go'. Simon was getting quotes from Axa that were twice what I was seeing (though still cheaper than Nationwide); he halved the price by adding me to the policy (obviously a woman in the home stops so much stuff getting broken in all those drunken bloke parties) - and I took another 10% off by skipping the comparison sites and getting the quote directly from Axa. Who emailed my the policy documents in about 2 minutes (with paper copies coming by post) and give me an online form to alter my policy any time I want to add that insurance for spilling paint on the carpet. I feel like I'm at least in the twentieth century!

politics and banking and - oh it's all depressing

I do love good writing. A couple of gems linked by friends recently with delightfully snarky lines in... because without that I couldn't bear to read about any of it!

"the word ‘Conservative’ was tucked away on the posters in small letters, like a slightly embarrassing smell"

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-ignore-the-propaganda-and-spin-ndash-the-tory-party-hasnt-changed-1903987.html

"Our economy was like a town where everyone has juicy insurance policies on their neighbors' cars and houses. In such a town, the driving will be suspiciously bad, and there will be a lot of fires."

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/32255149/wall_streets_bailout_hustle/print

Microsoft Outlook Software Connector; not for those who can't read?

Initially we were amazed by the number of people writing that the OSC beta crashed their copy of Outlook, because the information that you had to uninstall the first beta was right there on the Downloads page, and briefly referred to on the Download Complete page that you got directed to. They were easy to miss - Simon didn't spot them first time around - because if you just clicked Download instead of reading about what you were about to do, you only got a brief one line that again, your eyes could glaze over. After a bunch of us pointing this out, Microsoft has made the instructions on the second page much harder to miss - though I'm sure some people still will. The problem is that the monkey is already trained.

Read the instructions? The manual? The FAQ? For years the Web has been training us to click that button! click it! click it now! Click for the survey! Click for the download! Click away the security warning! Click! Click!

All those people who said a Windows Update made their system blue screen, when it actually blue screened because they had a rootkit (and for all those people who insist that there are no security improvements in Vista over XP or 7 over Vista, the reason the systems crashed is that the rootkit was patching the kernel and telling it to load a legitimate executable to disguise itself but the code wasn't in the same place when the PC rebooted - that's part of the address randomisation that Microsoft introduced in Vista and extended to basically all the kernel pieces in 7); at some point they probably clicked on something without reading it... 

When you're installing software, yes the installer should say one more time what you need to have done - or even check that you've done it. When you're building beta software that's not intended for the general public (a public beta doesn't mean the software is for everyone, it means it's for those who feel comfortable trying something that by definition is not finished), the temptation not to add extra time and work that you could spend fixing a bug or writing another feature must be huge. But these days, I guess we all have to assume that no-one will read the instructions if they can just click and expect the system to do the right thing.

Or maybe nobody will read anything longer than 140 characters now...

And the only people who would have had to uninstall the previous version are those using the beta of Office 2010. And, er, that's 2.5 million people. If they all buy it Office will have the same quarter Windows 7 just did...  

Adobe - sign your Flash updates or I'll agree you're lazy (and cheap)

Either I've just installed malware, or the Adobe Flash security update I just installed wasn't digitally signed by Adobe; it brought up the yellow for warning, this app isn't signed dialog. That's just completely unacceptable for any program, from any publisher, let alone from someone as big as Adobe, let alone for apps that have become targets for attacks. A digital certificate costs what, $99? $25 if you're cheap. The time to sign an update is what, 15 minutes of developer time? What that costs is peanuts compared to reassuring and protecting users. I'm almost hoping that I have got malware rather than that Adobe has been this lazy and cheap...