Reports of a bomb alert in Northern Ireland temporily suspending the counting of votes, it gets a passing mention on the Beeb, and dismissed as insignificant. If only the response to other terrorists was similar. Sometime I wonder if it can be defanged by renaming it mild-inconvenienceism...

Voters queuing for hours in Leeds and Sheffield, with voters being turned away in Sheffield* due to insufficient staff to deal with the turnout.

Not enough ballot papers in Merseyside.

Epic Turnout.

Epic Fail.

It's rubbish, and I smell chaos, legal challenges and much fury, finger-pointing and general dissillusionment at what might have been the most interesting election in years.

*EDIT: revised claims of where voters turned away, I shouldn't follow unverified claims as they happen to broadcast. I'm sure I'll be advised of future corrections...

Last week several government databases decided I was living in Leeds again. Whilst I like Leeds, I'd quite like my post to end up in the same building that I'm living in. A few phone calls into the problem and the finger looks to be pointing at either the National Insurance Contributions Office or HMRC. I can't get through to NICO because all their lines are busy. As usual. However, as another department kindly sent me a letter saying they'd been in touch with HMRC about my tax code several days before things started going wrong, this is where I pick up the trail.

I had a Western Digital 1TB Green Power fail on me last week. No major disappointment, just a lot of stuff MythTV had recorded for me that I had either watched and was keeping on the off-chance I'd watch it again, or it was CSI Miami and I hadn't suffered from enough insomnia to need to watch it.

Anyway, the model I had is obsolete after a few months (big surprise there), and ebuyer don't have any in stock, so I have the purchase price of the old drive to spend on a new one, I choose a Samsung EcoGreen F2 1.5TB.

I had a load of frosting left over from another project, so I looked for a really quick way to use it up, other than show up to my monday game with a bowl of frosting and some spoons. For some reason I decided to ignore the big "NO!" scribbled on the swiss roll recipe in my BeRo book. Needless to say my swiss roll tin was slightly the wrong size and the planned swiss roll kind of turned half way over and cracked. I think I remember why the grafitti is on that recipe now.

Our internet connection is playing up. The upstream connection has been stuck at 288kbps since monday. Not the end of the world in itself, I go through the documented troubleshooting procedure, which revolves around a BT speed test tool. The BT test tool demands extra tests, after reconnecting at bt_test_user, at which point the test tool has a DNS failure. Fail 1.

I raise a support ticket on the Plus.Net website. When I click 'submit' I am redirected to a page requesting old credit card number are updated. Support ticket is not submitted. Fail 2.