Now I hate AOL

Sorry if you are an AOL user, but if you are then please think of changing your provider. As a bit of “Disclosure,” I used to be an AOL user in the mid 1990s but, thankfully, I got over it.

My recent tirade is a combination of dislike for AOL and Packard Bell’s choice of software.

I have bought a new laptop (Packard Bell, MZ36 series) and it is brilliant. I really like it. However, today I foolishly tried to uninstall the AOL software which is doing nothing but popping up every now and then, running in the background and taking up disk space.

Doing the decent thing, I used the control panel “uninstall” applet. Possibly my big mistake. I started the uninstall process at 1655hours (BST) and as I write this it is 1815hours (BST). The process still has not completed. I refuse to believe that the AOL 9.5 software is so large that an Intel Core 2 Duo processor takes over 1 hour, 20 mins to remove it so I assume the thing has crashed. Being new to Vista, I have no real idea on how to stop it or how to kill the process without causing problems (I tried doing it in Task Manager but it didn’t die).

Worryingly there is a large collection of software I have no intention of ever using which Packard Bell have “Helpfully” installed for me. Do I have the courage to remove all of them?

[tags]Technology, Rant, AOL, Computers, Bad Service, BT, Vista[/tags]

Misuse of email? Maybe

I am not fully sure yet, but it looks like ClassicFM needs to be added to my personal list of “Bad Organisations” which sell on your email address to spam houses.

I have mentioned this in the past, but basically when I sign up for various things online I use a Gishpuppy email address. Ok, it is an ugly website but the service is really useful. With Gishpuppy you can create an email account tailored for a specific use which re-directs your email to any account you want.

To this end, when I registered for a special offer at ClassicFM.com a while ago I used the email address classicfm.zqa at gishpuppy.com. This is the only place I have ever used the email address and the only time I used it.

While I was on holiday (and all day today), I have had in the region of 8 – 10 spam mails sent to that email address. Not a massive amount, but annoying – especially when I have only used the email in a single place. For completeness, the header information reads: (I have removed my real email address and munged the gishpuppy one)

Return-Path: <Pace2Calderon@comptia.com>
X-Original-To: [REAL EMAIL REMOVED]
X-Envelope-To: [REAL EMAIL REMOVED]
Delivered-To: [REAL EMAIL REMOVED]
Received: from minuteman.ai.net (minuteman.ai.net [205.134.188.6])
by robin.systems.pipex.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6EEA4E0000EB
for [REAL EMAIL REMOVED]; Sat, 7 Jul 2007 18:34:00 +0100 (BST)
Received: by minuteman.ai.net (Postfix, from userid 1002)
id E73849A3; Sat, 7 Jul 2007 13:30:11 -0400 (EDT)
Received: from 1D597C28 (84.127.79.26.dyn.user.ono.com [84.127.79.26])
by minuteman.ai.net (Postfix) with SMTP id 60F0A9A3
for <classicfm.zqa @ gishpuppy.com>; Sat, 7 Jul 2007 13:30:10 -0400 (EDT)
Received: by event.comptime.net (Chostfix, from userid 322)
id 22DCE52121; Sat, 07 Jul 2007 12:33:17 -0800
X-Original-To: rat-07@guide.comptime.net
Delivered-To: industry-07@advertisement.comptime.net
Date: Sat, 07 Jul 2007 12:33:17 -0800
From: “Clarke, Consuelo” <Pace2Calderon@comptia.com>
To: classicfm.zqa @ gishpuppy.com
Subject: Recruiting [GishPuppy]
Sender: Pace2Calderon@comptia.com
Precedence: bulk
Reply-To: Pace2Calderon@comptia.com
Message-Id: <20070707173010.60F0A9A3@minuteman.ai.net>
X-Antivirus: AVG for E-mail 7.5.476 [269.10.2/890]
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Type: text/plain

All of them were pretty much the same as this (with different return addresses and paths) and I am sure people who know much more about the subject than I do can make more sense of it.

It is possible that Gishpuppy is the weak link and sold my email address on (or had it stolen) but as I have dozens upon dozens of Gishpuppy addresses, I am not sure how likely that is.

At the moment, I can only assume that ClassicFM have either deliberately allowed my address to be used or are just inept at securing my details.

Shame on them.

[tags]Bad Shops, Spam, Classic FM,Gishpuppy[/tags]

Ebuyer Good and Bad

Well, first off, I was wrong when I worried about Ebuyer getting my goods to me, they actually arrived today. Fortunately, I had relied more on City Link’s claims of when the goods would be delivered than Ebuyers and was able to accept the delivery.

Oddly, even though Ebuyer claimed the shipment would only be two thirds of the goods, all arrived at the same time. I wonder if Ebuyer are aware of this… 😀 Overall, this is not a “well done” to Ebuyer, I am relived the things arrived but the almost random scheduling is still annoying. I hope it never comes down to a case of me singing a company’s praise simply because they managed to do what I paid them hundreds of pounds to do…

Also, especially pertinent since my local authority now only collects household waste every two weeks, the amount of packaging used was outrageous. Seriously. I even took some pictures (one of the items was a new memory card so I had to try it out) to prove my point.

Box on side Box from top

I have put some household items around it so you can get an idea of the size. It is a big box. You would think it held something really big, or really fragile.

Contents - shot 1 Contents - Shot 2

As you can see, the sole contents of this box were FIVE DVD-RW disks. Yes, only five. All that packaging for five disks. Amazing really. The memory card was a bit different as it came in a plastic envelope – much more in proportion. I wonder if I can make Ebuyer pay for the extra costs involved in getting rid of that carboard and the plastic padding that was inside (doesn’t photo very well, so I excluded most of it). Anyway, I am still going to think of Ebuyer as a bad shop for a while longer…

[tags]Waste, Environment, Bad Shops, eBuyer, Google Checkout, Rant, Shops, Society, Technology[/tags]

I should have known better

Rant time. Recently, I was foolish and naive enough to ignore my previously imposed ban on using Ebuyer and I bought some new tech from them. Stupidly, I assumed the problems I had with them (over a year ago now) would be a thing of the past and, as an “Online” company they would have everything sorted.

Yes, I am stupid.

I made the order last week (oddly using google checkout to pay, but that is another tale), and the first warning signs popped up when I had two confirmatory messages from Ebuyer with different delivery dates (tomorrow and wednesday…). Today, I had the “Your Order Has Been Shipped” email from both Ebuyer and Google Checkout. The message from Ebuyer only lists two of the three items I have bought (even though everything was in stock when I ordered and when I just checked the missing item again, it is still in stock…) and says delivery will be on Wednesday. At the same time I got an email from Google Checkout saying Ebuyer had shipped the order and it would be delivered on Tuesday (tomorrow). Sheer brilliance.

Both messages had a “check your order” link where I could go to Ebuyer and see what the delivery date is. When I followed the link, I was presented with a log on screen. Not having any log on details, I asked them to send me some to the email address Ebuyer had associated with the order. When they sent me the password, I logged in only to find there were no pending orders and no shipped orders.

Amazing. Just like last time, I am here with no real idea of when the order will be delivered and if the whole order will arrive. Despite being an e-commerce company, Ebuyer’s website is no use at all. Google are slightly more use, their email contained a link to check the tracking number on City Link, however the link from google reads: (I have replaced by order number with a place holder)

Track Other package No. City Link – [order number]

Which gets a “your search returned no matches” result from Google. Wonderful.  I have checked with City Link and it seems they think the order will be delivered tomorrow, so I suppose I will have to assume that is the correct one and wait in for it. It does make me wonder what the point in arranging a delivery date when you order is, if for what ever reason, I hadn’t check my email in time to take tomorrow off, I would have been stuck. Last time, Ebuyer showed it had no interest in customer retention after this happened – not even a “sorry for the confusion.” I suspect that, again, this will involve several days off work as each item arrives at random intervals. Bah. I hope I learn soon.

[tags]Ebuyer, bad shops, bad customer service, Google Checkout, Rant, Technology, Shops[/tags]

Buying from the Bad

A while ago, the customer service of ebuyer infuriated me to the extent that we went about creating a new category here (bad shops) and I genuinely intended to never buy from them again. Sadly, market forces have worked against me and I find myself about to make another purchase from the customer service vortex that is ebuyer.

Recently I have discovered that I need to get a DVD-Recorder. This is OK, because they are reasonably cheap now – Tesco’s sells Liteon models for under GB£70. As I was looking through the shops, considering which model to get (I want one which has built in DivX for example), I found Sainsburys sells a DVD-recorder which is DivX and has an 80gb HDD for £130. How can you turn that down? I went home and checked online to see if there were any other deals and, blast,Evil ebuyer do a Liteon DVD-recorder with a 160gb HDD for £124. Blast and double blast. It is hard to mentally justify spending the same amount of money for a machine with half the capacity, so another order with ebuyer was put together. I hate myself for it.

Comically, ebuyer seem to have done everything in their power to stop people purchasing products there. The DVD Recorder I want to get is the Liteon HDA740GX which I have seen in Currys for £182 and on Froogle should cost over £156. It is, from what I have read, a good model. Most shops (eg, PC World) sell the 80GB version for the price eBuyer is asking for the 160GB monster. Ebuyer, being cheaper than anyone else I can find by a fair amount, get the order. Blast, double blast and triple blast.

eBuyer Screen Shot - taken 14 Jun 07Now, the strange thing about ebuyer is when you try to navigate back to the product page you come across this conflicting bit of information. If you look at the second and third entries there you can see what I mean! (screen capped in case they ever fix it… 🙂 )

For some reason, the e-commerce site returns two identical products with different prices. One version, with a manufacturers part number of H DA740GX is going for the reasonable price of £124.5, but should you be foolish enough to buy the HD A740GX you will have to fork out £202.93. As far as I can see (with admittedly only a basic search for the manufacturers details), these are identical products.

Hopefully ebuyer will manage to deliver this to me by Wednesday as they have promised (and I had to pay for, as they don’t deliver for free to the remote places in the UK) otherwise I will have to resort to my somewhat impotent ranting against them and boycott them again (until I need a new tech order…)

On the e-commerce front, it isn’t just ebuyer which is insane. I was in PC World today (in the real world shop) and I saw a Belkin WiFi Phone which looked interesting, but there were no prices on it in the shop. Basically, this is a phone that connects to your Skype account via a wireless connection to your router. So, no need to have your PC on to use Skype which overcomes the main hurdle I have to using this wonderful service. Now, to prove this product exists you can look at it on the Dell site (which seems the cheapest) or on Froogle. It is real. It is what I wanted and it was in the shop I visited – they had dozens and it looked like they had been there for ages.

On the PCWorld website, however, can you find one? No. I tried searches for “Belkin Wifi” “Belkin Wireless” and even “Belkin.” At best I got a list of cables and network cards. No signs at all of the phone. Crazy.

Still, Dell sell it, so anyone reading this and looking for a present to buy me – consider it!

[tags]Bad Shops, Ebuyer, PCworld, Dell, E-commerce, Technology, Customer Service, Shops, Society, Froogle, Skype, Belkin, WiFi, Wireless, Telephony, Phone, LiteOn, DivX, Tescos, VoIP, Sainsburys, Currys[/tags]

I told you so?

Ironically, a mere ten minutes after I made my last post about the terrible service provided by Virgin Media, I got a phone call from Heather saying the Engineer had been round. Now, this is the second visit booked by Virgin Media (i.e. two days off work) and Virgin have had eight days to get things sorted out. You would think this visit was going to be little more than a formality to plug in a new cable modem.

You would be wrong.

The engineer brought the cable modem, but didn’t have the right power cable. Sheer brilliance. Now, not only is there no way of knowing if that is indeed the real fault, but Heather took her second day off work for no reason at all. A new visit has been booked for Tuesday (13 days after the fault was reported), and hopefully this time the engineer will bring everything they need to see if it works. If it turns out to not be the modem, Thor only knows what they will suggest (another visit a week later, maybe?).

For some odd reason, Heather seems reluctant to close her account with Virgin (attachment to email address / website I suspect), despite the fact she could pretty much get an ADSL contract up and running in less time than this has taken. At it’s longest, I have had ADSL set up in 10 days… Virgin have not been able to help an existing, long serving, customer in that time. I suspect this is an example of a company which spends too much of it’s money and time trying to attract new business, rather than maintaining it’s current customer base…

[tags]virgin, virgin-cable, Thor, virgin-media, virginmedia, cable-tv, cable, bad-service, bad-shops, rant, rants[/tags]

Will Virgin Come Through?

Although heather has been without a functioning Cable Broadband service for over a week now (reported last Thursday), hopefully Virgin Media will have sent someone round to sort it out today. Personally I am not holding my breath that, even if they do, it will result in a functioning service worth the massive costs.

Shamefully, even though there have been multiple faults and several off-line periods in the last few weeks alone, all Virgin Media are giving as compensation for 8 days without a service is a £20 refund. I would find that almost insulting.

As I have mentioned one or two times previously, I am about to move house and looking at my options for a new internet service provider. Until about six weeks ago, I had Virgin as one of the main contenders and thought the TV/Broadband combo was well worth getting. Now, you couldn’t pay me.

I must say a big Well Done to Virgin Media, they took over cable companies with good customer service records, and generally very loyal customers, and managed to make a complete hash of everything. Brilliant. I bet Sky are laughing themselves to sleep every night…

[tags]virgin, virgin-cable, virgin-media, virginmedia, cable-tv, cable, bad-service, bad-shops, rant, rants[/tags]

Side Admin

A couple of asides for general information. First off, I have been working my way through emails lately and a few people have asked for a return to the “old” theme. While I suspect most of these people are Heather, I am sure not all are, and there are a few valid points made (apparently this theme breaks on IE6 or older, which makes up over a third of the visitors). As a result, while a bespoke theme is being worked upon, we will revert to the Fallseason theme of a few months ago. Personally, trying to settle on a “nice” theme which works for as many people seems a task which I will never, ever, manage.

Secondly, as mentioned the other day (“Not Many Posts“), there have been a few problems with Heather’s access. Virgin Media were supposed to send an engineer out today to fix it. As a sane person would have guessed, the engineer never turned up (an accident was to blame, no more details known) and now she needs to rearrange the visit. While accidents do happen, it is a shame that cost cutting measures by Virgin have meant that they had no slack in the system to work around this and it could be another week Heather goes without access. What great customer service…

Nokia N73 – Cameraphone disapoints (long)

About seven months ago I bought a Nokia N73 camera phone as part of a contract with the 3 network. Although initially I was very impressed with this, and the service, I think a lot of this was simply down to the “excitement” of buying some new technology. As a fair amount of time, and a lot of use, has passed I felt it would be reasonable to do a “mid term” review. Some of the issues (good and bad) I have with this device are difficult to pin down to being the responsibility of either Nokia or 3 so I will talk about both here. For the terminally impatient, I can summarise this by saying that given unrestricted choice in the future I would neither buy a Nokia N73, nor would I connect to 3. This said, the things I find important may differ from every one else, so your mileage may vary…

First off, I haven’t had any problems with the Nokia when it came to making telephone calls. In this, most basic of features it worked perfectly 🙂 . Sadly, this is about the only feature where I haven’t found things which annoyed me! If you only want a phone to make (and occasionally receive) calls then the Nokia N73 is brilliant. However, if this is all you want, there are a million other makes and models which would serve your needs at a fraction of the cost.

I was looking for a phone which would allow me to take photos, access the internet, send emails and maintain a basic calendar service. I could have opted for a PDA but connectivity would still have been an issue. In a given month I use the phone more for text messages, emails, note taking and photos (over 2000 to date) than I do for basic calls. As a result, this is not an ideal phone. Continue reading

Not Many Posts

Very short one. Things have been quiet here for a while (especially when you look back at January / February’s post rate!) and this is likely to remain the case for another week or so – with occasional bursts of activity 🙂

As the moment, I am on the road quite a bit (this is being sent by the wonders of a hotel WiFi link and isn’t cheap!) and, as is becoming a regular occurance, Heather’s Virgin Media cable connection has died. Virgin have assured Heather they will be out to fix it by Tuesday (she reported it on Thursday) so things may improve.

All I can say is, especially as I am looking at a new ISP, the last one I would consider is Virgin media.

ShopWiki, DoubleClick

I was reading a post on Matt Mullenweg’s blog (PhotoMatt), titled “DoubleClick and Kevin Ryan” which talks about Google having bought double click, and Kevin Ryan (co-founder) has moved on to a new start up called ShopWiki. (I am not going to link to them though).

Basically ShopWiki sends bots out to trawl the web and find products at the best price for you. You may think this is a wonderful thing, and it may well be. I am somewhat intrigued though as to why this site (notable for its abject lack of sellable items) has been getting hammered by the Shop Wiki bot for most of the last two days (until it got the .htaccess treatment). As far as I can see, the bot ignored the Robots.txt entry I put in for it (although my track record with this file is poor).

I think the idea behind ShopWiki seems sound and I am sure it is a wonderful new idea. But I have to question the validity of the data it has collected, given the time and effort it spent looking round the contact pages here. In a spambot like fashion, the ShopWiki bot seems to have concentrated on pages which made reference to emails and the like.

Time may modify my point of view, but for now I think of this as a Bad Shop.

Misuse of Email Addresses

Quite some time ago, thanks to the wonder of Magazine Cover Disks, I installed Concept Draw MINDMAP personal edition 4. If you need to make mind maps and the like, this is reasonably good software and certainly worth the price (i.e. free). Part of the installation process required me to register with concept draw, and provide them with an email address.

Being a naturally paranoid fool, who always assumes the worst, I used the services of Gishpuppy to create a one-off email address for this registration, which automatically forwarded emails to my main account. If you haven’t already done so, I cant suggest strongly enough the advantages of going to the site, registering and getting the plugin (if you use FF / IE) to allow you to “Gish It” every time you are asked for an email address.

Basically what happens, is you give gishpuppy some keywords and a domain which you want to use the email address on, then it creates the address for you. As an example, if your key words were whydontyou it may create the email address whydontyou.4ry@gishpuppy.com. You give out this email address and when anything is sent to it, it gets forwarded to your real account. It is a great way of testing the water with some services.

Anyway, as I said I created the GishPuppy address and registered. Everything was fine for a few months, but for the last five or six weeks, I am getting a deluge of spam emails to that address. Now, I know I have never used this address anywhere other than the ConceptDraw registration. Today I got an email from a site admin saying that there had been a massive amount of spam from my email address (the Gish one) and suggesting I check the firewall to see if I have been hacked.

Now, as I see it, one of two things has happened. Gishpuppy has compromised my email address to spammers, or Concept Draw have. If it had been Gishpuppy, why would they only give up one email address? I have dozens registered with Gish (I use them every time I have to register somewhere so I can filter the return emails), and none of the others get spam emails.

Sadly, I can only draw one conclusion from this and it certainly ensures I wont buy anything from Concept Draw in the future. To give them the benefit of the doubt, I have tried email Concept Draw to explain I felt emails were being misused but, oddly, I have had no response.

Virgin really crying out to be sacrificed now

Grrr. Virgin Cable TV:-

Sky One= no great loss.
FX = only channel you can legitimately watch the Wire on UK TV.

Happily rewatching series 4 tonight, ready to catch all the smart bits of dialogue that I didn’t quite get the first time or read the messages supposedly coded into Omar’s t-shirts by the costume designers that I wasn’t paying attention to. And so on.

Screen goes blank five minutes after the credits.

Ominous blue box comes up, holding the words that I’m not authorised to view this channel.

So it costs about £80 a month – for broadband, tv and a phone I make barely half a dozen local calls on – no matter what the ads say – and they can’t even pay out the Wire now?

Virgin – ad vs reality

Just when I was starting to feel positive about Virgin.

(My net connection service is sorted. I was even beginning to feel a mite guilty – maybe the fault really was my raggedy cat5 – further damaged by the building work.)

An advert in the bus paper – the Metro – this morning compared the great cheap Virgin cable service – 10 MB broadband plus cable channels plus phone rental for £30- with the inferior Sky service.

The advert showed Sky with an impressive 80 MB or something- can’t remember the detail, sorry, but Virgin claimed it was capped and is slower the further you are from the hub (isn’t that true of all DSL anyway?) and costlier, at £36 plus £11 BT line rental.

Now, I was already a mite baffled, because surely it’s 10 Megabits not MB, which I am pretty sure usually means MegaBytes. Maybe it’s just how they put these things in ads, but as far as I can see, it’s exaggerating the speed by a factor of 8.

But I get home and open a letter from Virgin. It announces a 1 May price increase to £37 (though doubling the bandwidth, I am pleased to see) and an increase in phone charges. (Well, an exciting new way of calculating the phone charges, that sounds like a reduction – if you take some extra inclusive phone charge package – but slips in that they are rounding up to the nearest minute.)

So the price they are advertising today as being £6 a month lower than Sky’s package is actually going to be £1 more in a month. (And still minus Sky One.) Hmmm.

Virgin Service Woes – Contd.

It seems the current “issues” with getting connected via Virginmedia are still alive and kicking. Hopefully this will not last for two long and normal service can, eventually, resume.

Until then – thank you for your patience.