'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe

And really finally, before I forget today's hilarity was attempting to pay for lunch. Normally when paying by debit card in the UK, the chip'n'pin machine will prompt you to enter your PIN. Actually signing when paying is almost unheard of these days, though occasionally happens if the chip has died in someone's card (which will also mean that you have to swipe your card rather than just slot it into the machine).

Today it didn't prompt at all - instead it quickly flashed up "Authorised" on the screen before saying "Please remove card"... and then printing out a space for me to sign. We all thought that was rather odd, but I signed it anyway (with a pencil, as the staff didn't have a pen!) and left it at that. Then a little while later I checked the receipt out of curiosity and spotted that it said "Refund". And that instead of "Please debit my card", it said "Please credit my card". It appears that the waitress had somehow put through my bill as a refund by mistake!

Well, myself and the GNU went back to try and work out what had happened and if necessary actually pay for lunch. The waitress was as surprised as we were by the whole thing, but in the end decided to undo the refund with an equal charge, then repeat that for the actual payment. Except on the second payment, she accidentally put it through as a refund again! This time she caught it and managed to cancel it, and then finally correctly entered the payment for lunch. I now have a collection of receipts for various states of credit and debit transactions, and probably have a rather confusing bank statement to look forwards to at the end of the month.

Yay for the strong pound!

$19.95 is about £10.80 in real money at the moment, which is very nice when renewing your LJ paid account.

I have to admit though, looking at this makes me envious of the Americans as far as games go. They're paying $50 (~ £27.10)for Twilight Princess, whereas we're paying £30 (~ $55), and falgship games do go for as high as £40 (~ $75) in the high street (prices checked on Amazon).

Edit: ...although LJ's secure server doesn't look quite right to me (the way the padlock icon vanishes part-way through loading the page does not fill me with confidence), and so I'll hold off on renewing for a while. It looks like they may be pulling an image in from the non-secure site, which is not what you're supposed to do when creating a https page.