(Tuesday 31st August)Back from a week's holiday and off to Dublin tomorrow. Enjoyed the Cheviot Challenge on Saturday, it was good to go round with someone capable of finishing in such a comparatively fast time!
BT Communicator has finally added Associate Accounts but doesn't seem to have sorted out the login page, giving me a message that there's already an account associated with those details as though I was trying to register, not login. And what use is the email invitation when invited associates have to get back in touch to find out the account number? I've had to email them all separately!
I've installed Service Pack 2 on the second computer, although I still haven't got round to replacing the beta copy on here with the final version. I'm still in two minds about it - I seem to have spent a lot of effort undoing most of the so-called benefits, like patching it for optimum p2p use and disabling the firewall and pop-up stopper.
(Friday 20th August)We have a mouse in the house!
(Tuesday 10th August)Another golf competition cancelled :( what weather! Monkey, sorry for deleting your latest comment, just a bit too dangerous if viewed by certain people.
(Monday 9th August)Just to clear up a minor detail - after two people commented on my 70% excel result, I feel compelled to point out that I don't actually have results yet - all I know is that I must have achieved at least that as it is the minimum pass rate and the certificates for both exams have arrived. In due course we should get a breakdown of the marks and an actual percentage.
(Friday 6th August)Finally got my car back with repaired air conditioning - most welcome. Two fairly busy days, one spent wandering around Bristol in intense heat, on a day trip showing Emily the city as it will be one of her top choices for universities, yesterday an enjoyable round of golf with a couple of old friends, after the initial frustration of driving to Bamburgh, only to find the competition abandoned due to thick fog.
Easyjet finally agreed to refund my £50, but their "customer service" has to be the very worst I've ever encountered. After 5 phone calls trying to work out the necessary route through their IVR to connect with a person instead of the message "thank you for calling Easyjet Customer Service Dept" followed by termination of the call, I spoke to a girl who had the nerve to suggest I got my computer settings "checked by an expert" as their website couldn't possibly have made a mistake or malfunctioned! Not only was she in no position to state categorically which system had been responsible for the mix up, but it was a terrible response to give an already-annoyed customer. In the next sentence she completely contradicted herself when telling me the reason I'd received their email asking for more information, stating my message entered on their web form had reached them as unreadable garbage!
(Tuesday 3rd August)BT and Clientlogic have some strange ideas on what constitutes a security breach. How many BT Communicator customers would be reassured to know that any helpdesk agent can view their passwords in plain text (and give them out after answering a simple question quite a few people might know the answer to)? It's not rocket science to store passwords as MD5 hashes - even php forums do this, and resets can be done without anyone knowing what your password actually is. I would strongly advise anyone registering for this product to use a "throwaway" password they don't use for anything else - and be aware that their yahoo/BT email is not private.
Contrast this with their idea that posting comments on a forum is a serious security breach ... get real BT, your customers don't share that view! From #adsl this morning: "gotta love BT's lack of security" .... "a disgrace".
Once again, I'm so grateful to Krusty for his generous data transfer limit as I uploaded an unbelievable number of files in an attempt to re-organise the photopage last night. For the umpteenth time, I wonder why I masochistically do this by hand - trying to place the various pictures so they will display correctly whatever browser/view settings someone uses. Then working out the dimensions each photo needs so that people look the right shape, and altering hspace/vspace so they line up as I want them is a time consuming exercise in trial and error. I should probably get to grips with tables, but anyway it's done now. This started off with a request for a picture of the whole family on one sheet of A4, to present to Sheila More when she retires after many years as organist of Jesmond URC.
(Sunday 1st August)Yves - thanks for the guestbook comment alerting me to an "incompatibility" between those pictures and firefox/mozilla/opera browsers. Essentially, Internet Explorer is pretty good at interpreting code as it is meant to be written and can "override" errors, hence I could see them in AOL/IE browsers. Having turned off script debugging and error notification, I wasn't aware anything was wrong. I'm guessing you were using mozilla/firefox or opera as your browser. I've renamed the page the pictures are on, from *.jpg to *.html and you should have no trouble looking at them now. Testing this with other mozilla/opera users seems to show it is now OK.
And the difference in temperature? We live in the frozen north here :)
A pleasant day playing golf at Goswick in the Mixed Open with Robin.
(Saturday 31st July)A pleasant day out walking earlier this week, in the north pennines, starting from Hartside Cafe. Might as well make the most of this free time I suppose - in the next life, I think I'm going to marry a millionnaire then I won't have to think about working, because work sucks. I'd much rather be free to do exactly as I please.
(Thursday 29th July)Apologies, as I've said on past occasions, I hate deleting guestbook comments or the whole thing becomes contrived, but some are just too dangerous to leave. Amusing to see how pissed off people can get though! My comments remain - I have the ability to delete any guestbook entries I don't like :))
Some excellent news - I have passed advanced Excel! (and Word, but I was fairly confident about that). Having been informed by Gosforth Community Education that a "certificate" had arrived, I phoned up some weeks ago to learn that this was for the Advanced ECDL Word exam. No mention of any actual results arriving, nor any news of Excel. Deciding to wait until I knew one way or the other about this before collecting the certificate that had arrived, I then spent another week or two worrying about what had been a fairly stressful exam. I'd been very ill the day before with some type of stomach bug/food poisoning and the planned last minute revision had gone out of the window. The weekend prior to both these exams I'd gone down to Leeds to do some walking with Anne and had taken my laptop and CD so I could study - only to find the CD writer on the laptop couldn't read the CD made by my new CD writer on this PC. Again, no real work done.
I began to regret all those evening classes when instead of working, I'd googled a CGI login and just chatted on IRC for most of the night. For months, I'd arrogantly thought advanced Excel was something I would be "good at" without really trying. I think the whole class got a shock when we finished the coursebook and started working through past papers! I don't consider myself particularly gifted mathematically, and I didn't find questions like "add a function in cell B9 to calculate the present value of a considered investment yielding £7,800,000 after 3 years at 5% interest per month" particularly easy to get my head round.
Anyway, today I decided I might as well collect the certificate that had arrived, being pretty convinced that the British Computer Society would have sent all the certificates for one examination centre in the same batch and the absence of an Excel certificate was probably bad news. Instead, I was delighted to be handed a plastic folder which had two certificates in - Word Processing and Spreadsheets. The dozy woman I'd spoken to on the phone simply hadn't seen the fact there were two together! In fact, the results I'd been waiting so anxiously for had been there since 9th July. I'm looking at this Excel qualification and not really believing it. It must be such a borderline pass, I don't know how I scraped 70% out of the load of rubbish I submitted, but no doubt we'll get the actual marks and a breakdown at some point.
Booked another trip down to Oxford in October. Louise's last year at University College, we might as well make the most of the odd chance to get a taste of Oxford student life in a vicarious way. How much easier it is to book a flight with British Airways than Easyjet or Ryannair!
(Monday 26th July)Technical helpdesk staff often come in for scathing criticism regarding their product knowledge in general and PC knowledge in particular, BT Communicator being no exception, having recently come out of a customer satisfaction survey with a 40/60% split between dissatisfied/satisfied customers. While there is a lot of truth in this, it's a little unfair to blame the agents themselves. If the helpdesk seem stupid it's because they're not allowed the resources to learn how to do their job properly, and BT/Clientlogic have a warped set of values. It's a management policy which stifles any active interest in the project or any attempt to show initiative, learn about the issues affecting customers and obtain feedback. How well you do your job or how much knowledge you have counts far less than adhering to petty principles which are inherently flawed. Sadly, agents who phone in "sick", go AWOL or come in with a hangover are the kind of employee it seems they value. Likewise, you can download 7 viruses onto the BT network machines and that's not a problem either. But try posting helpful, useful advice on a forum!
In short, generally speaking call centres don't want intelligent workers - just monkeys who do as they're told and aren't interested in going the extra mile to give good customer service.
(Sunday 25th July)Internet Call Waiting works! It's rather good to get the chance to answer a second call when the phone is busy and stay on the internet while doing so.
As I sit here later in the day waiting for Easyjet to answer the phone and listening to their very irritating IVR (I DON'T WANT TO KNOW ABOUT BABYCOTS OR EXITING NEW ROUTES TO GERMANY!!), I am forcibly reminded that there is nothing easy about flying Easyjet! I don't see why I should pay £50 to change the rubbish information their online booking form entered in the name fields for passenger details, and they've managed to bury their online email contact form with impressive deviousness (which I only wish I could have matched on the crashbox). Budget airlines are not all they're cracked up to be - but if I get my refund I'll be reasonably happy.
I hope the actual trip turns out a bit better than this one did!
(Sunday 25th July)British Airways are an airline I fly with quite frequently, and what a delight they are to deal with compared to budget airlines! I appreciate the low cost of Easyjet and Ryannair, but the difference is noticeable. I need to travel to both Bristol and Dublin in the next few weeks and tonight tried to book both flights. Easyjet got to step 4 of the online booking form, then returned a "page cannot be displayed" (on several attempts) while Ryanair processed the flights, but even though I'd entered myself and Anne as the two passengers (which Anne confirmed she'd heard me read out on the phone), the booking confirmation had me down as passenger one and two! Needless to say, I now have to contact both airlines to sort this mess out.
This has not been the most relaxing of weekends :( I just want it over with, yet I'm dreading Monday.
(Thursday 22nd July)It's always nice to get unexpected Guestbook entries! Hello Jack from Canada. Yes, those photos of Rosie are nice, though of course they were professionally taken. As for being fit, she's in the TA and currently working in Germany for 6 weeks. Her civilian job is that of apprentice engineer - and the firm she works for have generously given her 6 weeks paid leave to go to Germany for 6 weeks paid TA work. Not bad.
After previously highlighting the network from hell, it's pleasant to draw attention to a very nice channel who would welcome as many members as possible in an attempt to get Q. Try it!
Sad and rather shocking news yesterday - and as these things usually are - totally unexpected.
(Sunday 18th July)Yay, I have BT Communicator working! No router problems (beginning to wonder if my router even has a firewall) and I'm (usefully) much more familiar with setting up the audio side of it and discovering exactly how ICW works.
And yes Alex, I take your point, but you're splitting hairs really.
(Friday 16th July)Work has suddenly got busier. I came home to discover that adslguide had a front page news item reporting on the day's press release, in which BT outlined their new VoIP product BT Communicator. Still in development phase, it's being released to invited BT employees and anyone who can locate the link to download it (up to a pre-arranged cut off figure). As with most beta software, there are the inevitable bugs and registration problems to sort out, including firewall/router conflicts which look like being a significant percentage of our helpdesk calls.
It's nice to see BT haven't lost their love of excruciatingly long customer surveys! I've had Communicator just a few days and already I've been sent two of these, which are very reminiscent of my time at FDS. Not only do they take a good 10 minutes to complete, but the questions are irritatingly similar, and ask for detailed analysis of casually written answers, ie "How easy did you find it to install BT Communicator?" "Very easy" "What was it about the installation that prompted you to reply "very easy"?" - and so on.
(Sunday 11th July)Congratulations to Lily and Dick on their golden wedding anniversary! I heard the best reply yet from AOL, when I phoned them recently. After waiting what seemed like an age while the IVR waded through the usual irritating messages, I finally got a recorded voice which said: "We are all outside the building taking part in a fire drill. Please call back later"!
(Monday 5th July)Completed the Chevy Chase in pretty poor conditions this year. Fortunately, although I originally entered the run as this was what Anne had entered, and I reckoned I could walk the event within the time allowed for runners, when Anne unexpectedly dropped out at the last minute, I changed my entry to the walking race (mainly as the only other person I knew who was doing the event had entered the walk), and a friendly face at the start of these occasions is nicer than not having anyone to talk to before the race begins. It turned out to be a very wise decision. The ground was boggy from the unusual amount of rain over the last fortnight, and conditions on the day were not particularly conducive to doing the event in a fast time. We walked through some very heavy showers and had to contend with thunderstorms rolling around the hills - conditions varied over the day from muggy and hot to freezing cold on the top of Cheviot and Hedgehope, when everyone arrived at the checkpoints soaked through. I'd have been hard pushed to "walk" the run in under 6 hours this year.
Messenger Plus! is well named! It is indeed Messenger plus some of the nastiest, most difficult to get rid of spyware. Along with upgrading to the latest version of MSN Messenger, these two plugins have tried every trick in the book in terms of installing spyware, which has proved particularly stubborn to ditch. After finally (or so I thought), ridding the computer of all traces of unwanted toolbars, attempted browser hijacks etc, the final sting in the tail was discovering it had put a redirect in my hosts file, so a 404 error was being directed to some dubious links. I hope I have now locked down the hosts file and added sufficient entries so that if any of these well known sites try to do their worst, they will fail due to the 127.0.0.0 loopback IP against their addresses.
Added The Register to my drop down list, and Trillian is now patched so that Yahoo will connect.
To read more archive weblogs, click here which will take you to the previous archive, which in turn contains a link to the one before that.