The Skull Cinema

A few years ago I set up a new company in the UK. The government here has invested quite heavily in digital services so this can be almost entirely completed on-line. You begin the process by notifying Companies House , the venerable UK registrar for companies (for 180 years this year), that you have set up a company. In order for you to do that on-line the Government needs to have some sort of user registration system and one that is a bit more secure than your regular website. Enter the Government Gateway , a government-wide ID system launched in 2001. It was initially designed to be a one-stop-shop that would provide a log-on solution for all of the UK government's on-line services. Whether you were a business/organisation or an individual citizen, with security credentials backed up by GCHQ no less. The Companies House process was exceptionally straightforward and a Government Gateway ID (GG ID) was set up by Companies House for the business. No problems. Another early task...

As described earlier , here are the instructions from HMRC on how to delete a Government Gateway ID (GG ID), should you choose to do so. 1. Login to your account with the GG ID you wish to delete. You'll need your GG user ID and password. This will also require access to your second factor authorisation device. 2. Once logged on, select the ‘ Manage account ’ option at the top of your homepage. 3. On the next page choose the ‘ View or change your business tax account details ’ link under the ‘ Account details ’ heading. 4. On the following page select the ‘ Manage your Government Gateway details ’ link at the right-hand side of the page. 5. On the page after, choose the ‘ Your Government Gateway profile ’ option under the ' Your profile and settings ' heading at the right of the page. 6. Finally, on the next page choose the ‘ Delete my Government Gateway user ID ’ option at the bottom of the page. 7. Confirm that you want to delete your user ID ...

You have to wonder why Hermes went through the hassle of rebranding themselves to Evri, then you get a parcel delivered by them. Only a year ago in a desperate, and cynical, attempt to shed their woeful reputation as the worst parcel delivery company in the UK Hermes rebranded themselves as Evri. On the 14 th March 2022 they rolled out their corporate PR machine and made promises . "The new brand will also see a significant investment in its customer service as part of its commitment to ensuring that its customer service remains responsive, knowledgeable and helpful. This will include Evri opening a fully UK-based customer service team and adding 200 experts who will be based in local depots, closer to where potential issues are. It will also be upgrading its chatbot and releasing more phone lines for those who prefer to speak directly to someone." So was it a surprise when I got an e-mail about a parcel I was expecting? Well, most other couriers don't do this an...

A good article this time, which entails a slightly different approach to editing than that taken for stub and start class articles. Less than 0.5% of articles are rated as Good or above on Wikipedia. As there is much more content than a random page usually throws up I may or may not edit the whole article. If I choose not to, I will often take the lead or last section and edit that before moving on (or sometimes a section at random if it looks interesting). Also, rather than making all the edits in one or two sessions, I will try to break down the edits so that reasoning can be given for each group and also so that another editor can revert something that they don't like (or is wrong) without having to trash all of the edits. Often if you are going to get feedback from another editor articles like this will be where it happens, so it is reasonable to be on your best (editing) behaviour. With all that in mind let's get to Jack Warhop's article . Warhop was an early 20 th...

Just to make things different, instead of a random article a List came up. Entitled Hoogendijk , it is a short list of people with that surname (almost all of whom are Dutch, unsurprisingly). Lists are quite common on Wikipedia ( forming 4.4% of all pages), so they will crop up now and then. Normally they do not require much editing at all, as the Page statistics for this list show with a grand total of 6 edits over 12 years. In this case there is a little preamble giving some information on the etymology of the surname. Here we can add a wiki-link to the term dyke, just in case the reader is not clear as to what the term relates to, and the single reference is not in a template so that can be expanded and reformatted into a Cite Web template reference. So at least there is something to do. The reference is mildly interesting as the page it links to is written in Dutch. So an infrequently used term is needed, |language=nl , which adds a descriptor to the citation. Also the nam...

The next topic demonstrates what is great about random editing. The 2015 ACC women's basketball tournament is not a subject I have any interest in whatsoever. But you can still help out sometimes. The article is rated as a stub and is basically a list of tables with content describing a post-season college league women's baseball tournament. It appears to be predominantly the work of a single user Lewisthjayhawk who has, let's say, a colourful history and leave it at that. Not that there is anything wrong with the content which all looks competently put together to my untutored eye. In fact, the only constitutive work was to add wiki-links to the list of players at the end of the article. A bit of minor editing to take out some white space and a wikilink for an abbreviation that would mean something to an American sports fan but not to me and it was done. Apart from adding an {{unreferenced}} template to the top of the article as it has not a single reference to...

And here we are at the Alexander Aircraft Company , a start-class rated article about a defunct aeronautical engineering company from the USA in the 1920's. As this is a subject with more interest to me I spent a little longer than usual on this article, giving it a top-to-tail polish. Starting with the lead paragraph , which consisted of a grand total of twelve words on arrival, I expanded it, if only by a bit, so at least there are now two sentences. The associated book citation was limited so this was expanded as well. Founding and Disaster subsections received a heavy dose of wiki-linking and the single reference provided across both subsections was dead, requiring a trip to The Wayback Machine to search for the given URL. The Wayback Machine is part of The Internet Archive , which is a not-for-profit set up back in the early days of the web to archive the nascent internet, as it was recognised that the content was not anywhere near as permanent as the previous forms of...