Are BMS (01706713200) reading this blog?

Posted on Fri, 5 October, 2007 by ATGW

Now I have mentioned Bury Marketing Sales (BMS) here a few times and it seems there is a bit of a spooky co-incidence when I do. After my last blog post about the pond-scum organisation who were phoning me two or three times a day (from 01706713200), I had a comment on an older post on the same topic.

In this comment, Paul wrote how that, after complaining to BMS customer services he never had any further calls. I wrote that, oddly, I hadn’t had any calls from BMS since my last rant about them (even though calling customer services hadn’t helped me in the slightest). It seems I was being a bit premature.

Since my reply, late last night, BMS have tried to call me six times today. Seriously. The first two I missed because I was no where near my phone, one left a silent voice mail. The next call came while I was driving, I answered (handsfree, of course) and explained I was driving. The sales monster pretty much ignored it and started asking me questions about my handset choices, how long I had left on the contract etc. I continued to explain I wasn’t interested and had requested customer services take me off their war-dialling list. The salesman basically ignored this and carried on trying to convince me to take a new contract so I hung up on them. The last two calls came while I was fairly free so I entertained myself at their expense. Each time they called, I answered but didn’t speak. After about 5 seconds they would say “hello,” at which point I would start banging and crashing bits of metal together. Both times the call was terminated by BMS after 22 seconds (exactly, is that a part of their instructions?) Childish, yes, but it made me laugh.

Anyway, this got me thinking. Are they reading this blog? Have they worked out which number they call is mine (if they hadn’t, they probably have now unless everyone gives them the metal treatment…)? Was my previous comment seen as a challenge? Did they give up on me after my post, only to resume when I goaded them? Are they reading this? How will they react?

Come on BMS, let me know if you are here?

Bearing false witness

Posted on Thu, 4 October, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

Loki forbid that this is something that will happen too often but this blog is forced to at least
emit a low mutter in defence of the religion correspondent of the Times.

(Yes that was the vile Murdoch rag, the Times and the words were indeed “religious correspondent”. I told you that this wouldn’t happen too often.)

Ruth Gledhill’s blog has been getting lambasted by her fellow Christians in the Christian chatroom at Ship of Fools. LA Dave says:

mouthpiece for the Anglican right.
Ruth Gledhill of the Times of London is plainly one of the celebrity religion journalists (probably because she is one of only a handful of reporters at the quality press who bother covering religion). Reading her blog, however, I come away with the opinion that her pieces tend to be sensationalist and forever proclaiming that schism is imminent. Moreover, she tends to get her notion of American opinion on Anglican matters from the right-wing American Anglican blogs, such as Stand Firm and David Virtue, while ignoring liberal or even centrist opinion.
What is Ruth’s reputation in Blighty?

Well, she’s hardly a “celebrity”. She is the writer of the most popular blog on the Times. She is obviously a standard Anglican but she’s pretty fair-minded in her discussion of most things.

(She has spoken well of this blog in the past. Not that that would skew my judgement or anything…… Well, OK, it completely skews my judgement. But do you thing Anne Coulter would recommend any atheist blogs to her readers?)

I very rarely agree with her opinions. I don’t share any of her beliefs. But no one could see her as an illiberal ranting conservative. So this makes me confused.

Just to whet her appetite: One liberal contributor to Titusonenine just described her as the “Anne Coulter” of something or other. To those of you unfamiliar with Ms. Coulter, she is a far-right commentator. Unfair to be sure, but she is not all that popular among TEC liberals.

What? Anne Coulter strikes any Brits who’ve ever read any of her stuff (e.g. moi) as an extreme far-right-wing religious fanatic. There is genuinely no point of comparison here. (Sorry, no idea what TEC liberals are.)

I had a look at Titusonenine to search for what they found so right-wing in her mild bicycling-to-communion style anglicanism. But the only reference I could find was a listing of her blog on their “Anglican / Episcopal News”

I tried to find out what Titusonenine was about as a blog but my boredom threshold is way too low to go into Anglican debates about ordaining gay bishops and so on. But that’s what it seems to be full of. No eccentric characterisations of a mildly traditionalist anglican reporter as a right wing fundy maniac.

I suspect that LA Dave has, oh my Ogum!, been bearing false witness against Ruth Gledhill. In a Christian chatroom? Surely not? I am shocked.

Egyptian cartoon

Posted on Wed, 3 October, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

Life before death refers to a sort of online argument between a Swedish and an Egyptian cartoonist.

This is a pretty wierd story all round. What is it about Scandinavians and cartoons about Islam? How is that the Islamic world seems to be poring over Northern European newspapers and art shows?

I live in only slightly-less-Northern Europe and I couldn’t get my hands on a Norwegian or Danish or Swedish newspaper without getting on a plane.

And if I could, I couldn’t understand a word without some very serious Babelfishing.

Oh, I guess I’d just have to look at the cartoons then.

Which may explain why the Islamic world is on a hair-trigger with regard to any Scandinavian artworks that involve men with beards. For Freya’s sake, they could just stop having the Nordic press delivered every day and there wouldn’t be a problem.

One completely irrelevant thing about this debate is that the Egyptian lad is a genius cartoonist. The Swedish lad is outclassed here. (Yes, I AM too lazy to check the names and I want to sound a bit like a football commentator on this one) So, in my too-sceptical way, I thought. “Maybe this cartoonist is playing with the blogosphere to get some well-deserved exposure for his work”

I mean, if you are a cartoonist in the Islamic world, it must be difficult to go about your daily work of cartooning without offending someone. Then you look at the vast international exposure that comes to cartoonists from small Nordic countries that you probably never heard of before for doing a few uninspired but religiously offensive funnies.

Wouldn’t you say “I want some of that sweet fame”? You can’t actually produce an offensive-religious cartoon yourself. (After all, Salman Rushdie’s still in hiding well over a decade after writing an “offensive” novel and he lives in the non-Muslim world and has lots of wealthy and powerful friends…) But you can produce a cartoon that is meant to offend a Scandinavian cartoonist.

OK, the international cultural impact is a bit diminished by the Swedish lad being bowled over by the gratuitously offensive genius of the Egyptian lad’s cartooning and wanting to buy the work.

But it still sort of works. Those of us who would never have seen the Egyptian lad’s drawings have all seen them. And (despite some vitriolic abuse on their quality in the comments on Life before Death) we can all see he’s a world-class artist.

Give him a job on a Swediish newspaper, please. That’s got to be the perfect way to distribute your cartoons throughout the Muslim world.

And the Swedish lad strikes a blow for the Nordic good-natured rationality that we all love. Win win, really.

P*** yourself laughing

Posted on Wed, 3 October, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

For a truly fantastic psychic power that is too extreme even for Heroes, let alone the Fantastic Four, JLA, Teen Titans, see this on James Randi’s list of people trying to win the million dollar challenge:

Rosemary Hunter has applied for the Challenge, media presence requirement included, with the extraordinary claim that she can make people urinate themselves with the power of her mind.

Now that would be a ground-breaking experiment if it worked.

Sorry, I just had to share

Posted on Tue, 2 October, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

I decided I would see if good ol’boy Chuck Norris was back blogging about his doing the “cruel and unusual” thing and visiting US troops in Iraq. (Yes, some people are just really easily amused. I admit it.)

I lazily typed “worldnet daily” into the Google search bar, forgetting I was in Google Images rather than standard Google.

Showing that the singularity is here and that computer networks have achieved sentience, it said

Did you mean: worldnutdaily?

News on the Wire

Posted on Tue, 2 October, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

Casual, even indiscriminate, blog searching came up the news that HBO have finally given the Wire Series 5 a release date in the US at least. (wahay, w00t, etc.) It’s supposed to focus on the media.

In the UK, FX is showing all series straight through from Series 1 and is then supposed to go straight into series 5, when it runs out of previous episodes. I make that about a year in the future in the UK, which you’d expect to be at least 6 months after the US. The HBO site seemed to show no signs of having any future series on the go at all so I was getting a mite worried.

I know I shouldn’t even think this, let alone say it, but some episodes of series 1 have been pretty poor. (Strike me down now, Thor.) Series 1 will morph straight into series 2 which was generally poor for most of its run. When I say “poor”, it’s a relative term. The Wire is still so far ahead of anything else that even its poor episodes are pretty gosh-darned good.

But put yourself in the shoes of someone (for example moi) who has been sounding off about the Wire being the greatest work of art ever shown on television, etc, for so long that people I know have even started listening to me and watching it.

And then I find myself shamefacedly having to say “Well, that one wasn’t a very good episode” or “You have to watch them ALL to really get into the characters and storylines” or lame things like that, that sound like I’m covering my back over boosting something that turned out to be a bit naff.

Rewatching series 1 for the third pass, it is indeed still stuck a bit too much in a “TV crime” genre. That is good. Nothing wrong with the genre as such. But, I have to admit there is more cliche TV crime stuff in the first series than you’d expect after you’ve been acclimatised to nature of the Wire series as a whole. The whole set of programmes just slowly edges its way out of the “crime” category and turns into genius.

Or maybe it’s just that I don’t like McNulty, who is the central character in the first series. His character is a bit too irritating. It’s rooted in the cliche lone-wolf Philip Marlowe “flawed investigator with integrity” mould. Series 1 was just finding its feet, so it too often took the easy way out. Someone decided that McNulty’s character was supposed to bring bad to all those around him as a result of his arrogance, or something. So the cast have to keep saying that, in case you haven’t picked up on it. I can’t say that I would have picked up on it, to be honest, but that doesn’t mean that repeatedly telling me that’s what I’m supposed to see constitutes character development.

Sadly, last night’s rerun milked the whole “officer-down” scenario to death. The corrupt and manipulative Commissioner Burrell turned out to be a tower of non-judgemental sympathy to Kima’s partner. Even the repellent Rawls was there to give out sensitive heartfelt manly consolation to a McNulty whose guilt was expressed by his hands being covered with Kima’s blood. Come on. Out damned spot and all that? He wasn’t even remotely to blame. (He even threw up in a bin because she’d been shot, which seemed a bit out of character for a homicide detective.)

When a TV cop show presents someone drenched to the elbow in someone else’s blood, followed by them doing a symbolic handwashing Pilate-thing, it’s time to start putting extra notches on your cliche gun.

(I guess this blog post must be an example of what is the Americans call “tough love”, by the way. I adore the Wire but I’m not letting it get away with self-indulgence……..)

If you have started watching the Wire reruns and don’t think it’s so groundbreaking, stick with it. Because it gets more and more subtle and complex and goes deeper and deeper into the way society works.

Plus, the McNulty character is barely in it after series 1 and a bit of the series 2. He must have been too busy being a digitally-remastered Spartan, for which much thanks.

Pipex: Farce upon Farce

Posted on Tue, 2 October, 2007 by ATGW

Well, my opinion of Pipex was already very low. Before today I had them pegged as a terrible ISP with almost criminally poor customer service and basically inept technical support.

Today, they offended Forseti, and have managed to sink to a lower level on my opinion scale.

I wont fully repeat the tale of farce which has Pipex firmly in my “Bad Shop” category (in fact, I suspect they have more entries there than any other company), but in a nutshell after a month in which they were too inept to get BT out to fix my line (leaving me with no connection), they have still yet to get the service restored to the levels for which I am paying.

On Friday (four days ago), I spoke to technical support, who claimed to have carried out some tests and would now “escalate” the problem to BT. This is pretty much as far as I can push Pipex, as despite my only contract being with them, they do not have any form of service level agreement with BT – ineptitude, basically. Anyway, I was assured by the minimum wage arts student they have working as “technical support” that BT would respond to the fault within 1 – 6 days and get back to me.

Today, I had an SMS text message which informed me that Pipex Technical Support needed to carry out some more tests and could I ring them while I was sitting at the PC. This is a touch problematical, as I was at work miles from my PC, but never mind. Eventually I got home and had logged on by 1930 hrs to call Pipex as requested.

Now the farce got worse.

Every time I ring Pipex it annoys me. First off, it is an 0845 number so it costs money. Then the first thing they ask you is “if you are a residential customer, please enter your phone number now.” When you enter your phone number, you get presented with a list of options which runs “If you are a residential customer, press 1 now…” Why, in the name Kvasir do they ask you to enter your number first? Why?

When you finally get to press 2 for customer services, you are faced with an interminable wait, listening to some bored out of her head woman telling you “Thank you for holding the line. Your call is valuable to us.” Over and over. Why do companies think this is a good thing? What lunatic believes that the call is important or valuable, when you wait half the life of the universe for them to actually answer. And when they do, finally, answer it just gets worse!

After waiting a full 19 minutes (listening to how valuable my call is), the tech support arts student answered and went through the pointless list of “data protection act required verifications.” Finally, she asked me how she could help.

This left me a little confused, because she had just told me she’d called up my details and open tickets, so surely she should know I am calling in response to the text. Anyway, I explained I’d been asked to call and she went away. For four minutes. Eventually she came back and said that the “Technical Support” people (who was I speaking to?) had asked that I be contacted to confirm I wanted this escalating to BT. Slightly stunned, I said “yes” and she typed away and said, thanks – it will now be passed to BT. When I asked what had happened the last time they had promised it would be passed on to BT, she had no idea. She said it hadn’t been logged and didn’t know who had dealt with it. Now, I have the pleasure of another 1 – 6 day wait. Unless they text me half way through and ask if I want it to be sent to BT again…

This level of incompetence is mind boggling. I am at a loss to describe how frustrating, and how bad, Pipex customer service and technical support is. In August, I was given an identical run-around where over the course of a whole month they pretended to send the fault to BT, but never quite got round to it. It looks like this is going to happen again.

Showing that Loki really does have a monumental sense of humour, Pipex’s home page has a blurb which reads:

Sadly, this leaves me speechless. If it really is their “customers that matter,” why am I being singled out for this poor treatment. What have I done wrong, which makes Pipex pick me as the only person they are happy to mess around month after month?

If so many people like them “so much they’d recommend” them, why dont they bloody recommend them. I wouldn’t recommend them to Bin Laden…

Pipex are a terrible ISP. Their technical support is so bad it has become funny. Their service is abysmal (for instance, what happened to NNTP access?). In short, Pipex is bad. Do not use Pipex.

One bullet destroys three lives

Posted on Tue, 2 October, 2007 by ATGW

Now, normally I would be quite happy to rant about how the average person in the street should not be carrying firearms and the like, but in this current case it is a moot point. The weapon in question was held illegally and, for now, we don’t have a “right to bear arms” in the United Kingdom.

As background, today the news centred around how the person who shot and killed 12 year old Kamilah Peniston in April was named as her 17 year old brother, Kasha Peniston. In a nutshell, their mother illegally owned a .38 revolver, Kasha found it and was playing with it when “it went off” and shot Kamilah in the head. Paramedics arrived to find Kasha screaming for help, cradling Kamilah in his arms. She was later pronounced dead at hospital. (BBC news)

The brother was initially charged with murder (and pleaded innocent) but has now accepted a charge of manslaughter. (This is reasonable as murder requires intent, there is no reason to suspect there was any intent in this case). The mother has pleaded guilty to illegal possession of a firearm and ammunition.

From that one accidental discharge of a firearm, three lives have been irrevocably destroyed. The mother and brother will live the rest of their lives with the guilt, the social stigma and the criminal record. Assuming the brother serves the “typical” sentence for manslaughter, he will be around 25 when he is released back into the community – knowing nothing about adult life other than what he has learned in jail. Without wishing to be downbeat about this, the chances of him re-offending is significantly higher than his already high peer group. The mother has basically lost her family as well as facing a sentence of around 3 – 5 years (possibly longer as the consequences of her illegal possession may influence the sentence).

It is a tragic tale and it highlights a sequence of mistakes and errors – the mother should have taken stronger measures to ensure the children had no unsupervised access to the weapon, the son should have been taught how to use the revolver safely etc. The most basic thing which could have been changed to save the daughters life is for the mother to not have the weapon in the first place.

It is certainly the will of Cocidius that this tragic event happened at a time where there is considerable debate in the UK about people having the means to defend themselves in their houses. I am sure Kamilah’s mother felt she needed the .38 for a sensible reason, but does that reason seem so sensible to her now?

What use are web applications?

Posted on Mon, 1 October, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

OK, this is a bit Luddite but I am unimpressed by the news that Adobe are entering the online document processing market, according to the BBC. They’ve bought the online word processor Buzzword, that lets several people edit a document online. It sounds like a good idea, in principle, but…

Have you ever tried collaborating on a document online? It’s usually a fiasco. At least, it is on Messenger, You change something. The other person changes something else. It saves over your changes. Or the program won’t either of you save because it’s trying to synchronise two documents. And failing to get either working.

One of you is bound to have a stylesheet that defaults to comic sans 18 point every time you press the return key. One of you is guaranteed to take Word’s offer of last Tuesday’s recovered version of the document, by accident, because it sounds more convincingly like the document you should be working on than the actual thing in front of you.

The problem isn’t the tech. It’s that two separate things are two separate things. They get out of synch. If you are both working on separate chapters and can merge the complete document that’s a different matter. But, in that case, why not keep two documents until you’ve finished your own bits?

Upgrade Stalled

Posted on Sun, 30 September, 2007 by ATGW

It looks like not enough people made the correct devotions to Hermes and now we are not going to try and upgrade the blog this weekend. Heather has been sidelined by a cold and a fair amount of work and my internet access time is approaching the bare minimum. When we have more time we will look at what is required with the upgrade and give it ago. Please, keep making sacrifices to Ukko though.

Memetics

Posted on Sat, 29 September, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

We’ve been tagged by the excellent no more hornets blog with another meme. This time it is the “Evolution” meme. I am tempted to say that whydontyou blog actually disproves Intelligent Design by its very nature, as it definitely seems to be the product of chance events.

It’s a pity that we don’t have visual records because the look of the blog has changed a good few times, losing visibility a good few times when we’ve tried to change the theme. We tried a few themes, altered them a bit and finally decided it would be better to have control over the appearance of the site. Hence, we’ve had to learn how to create WordPress themes in the meantime and have even released some into the wild. This has brought us a weird collection of blogs that carry our name in the “designed by” bit at the bottom, with most ironically, a number of religious and even fundamentalist blogs, as well as (I kid you not) a penis enlargement blog.

The very first post here basically said Welcome. The next post was a recommendation for a book on philiosophy. I see a bit of a theme starting there:

Throughout the book Jamie Whyte uses logic to expose the common fallacies
that surround us day to day – ranging from the false authority given to victims of tragedies through to sheer evasive lies from the rich and powerful.

TW’s next few posts are also pretty interesting, a lot more astronomy and tech-centred than they tend to be now. My own posts soon degenerated into whinges about search engines being rubbish, so I’ll draw a veil over them.

We were much slacker about blogging in 2006. Whole months passed without many posts. But then nobody ever commented except on Ajax or Linux posts and we had no idea if anyone else ever read the blog.

I know the meme wants 6 posts but I’d listed too few, so now I’m going to list too many. A few selected posts from the old ones are Atheist belief, Prove or disprove, Linux partial success Happy Easter

The earliest post that is still unaccountably getting hits every day is a couple of lines pointing to an online source for Viking names with a sister post about Anglo-Saxon kings’ names that never gets hits although it has some actual content of its own. A lesson there maybe.

Other unaccountably still-hit-daily posts are the ones on food, imaginary megaliths in Liverpool and our alltime favourite, How to defend religion because it got us called an “entertaining blog” on the Times (We were planning to get t-shirts made) and got so many hits it temporarily broke our server.

Throughout the rest of the 2006, the blog rambled along, with some good posts, some rubbish ones. Very early in the blog, TW started posting on some of themes that he’s stuck to – including rubbish shops, internet magazines and digital photography. On one post, showing a photo of the Mithraic Temple on Hadrian’s Wall, he made this blog’s possibly first reference to the Biblical rains that have become a feature of the UK in the past year or so.

There were also plenty of anti-religion, anti-ID-cards and anti-1984-in-the-21st-century posts. The anti-ID stuff is starting to feel increasingly like flogging the proverbial dead horse, as more and more civil liberties disappear down the pan, so I think we’ve eased up on that a bit – not through optimism that the issue is dead but through despair that anyone can prevent it.

From January 2007, we were on the Atheist Blogroll, courtesy of an invitation via the sainted Nullifidian. This started to bring in some actual regular commenters, who constantly put us to shame, almost always outdoing the post they are commenting on, with their wit and wisdom,. (Bastards.)

This inspired us to try to hold a comment week, in which we commented on everything we read and solicited comments from anyone who was willing. This worked out pretty well except for me, at least, having to interpret “comment on everything” I read as meaning comment on blogs I read that have an easy-to-submit-a-comment capacity. (Registering with a google username or registering to read someone’s blog don’t count as “easy” for me.) After a few abortive attempts to comment on blogs that I really enjoyed, I also realised that it’s very lame to just say “I really enjoyed this” or “good post” so I often didn’t. It’s much easier to comment when you strongly disagree, of course, but I did little of that either, not much caring to argue the toss with nutters.

We are supposed to tag another 6 blogs and, obviously naming already-tagged ones would be pointless. There’s a good chance that the tagged blogs won’t thank us either. And I can think of a good few more that I’d like to pick, but Ill stick with the first half-dozen that come to mind. So here goes.
Nullifidian
Atheist Perspective
X is ….
Atheist ethicist
Clioaudio
Black Sun Journal

Upgrade Time

Posted on Sat, 29 September, 2007 by ATGW

Just to let you know we are planning to upgrade to WordPress 2.3 over the weekend. As this is likely to change a lot of our plugins (such as Ultimate Tag Warrior), there may be some problems with the site while this happens. Please be patient and pray to Hermes that we get up and running again without any problems.

Success breeds Success

Posted on Fri, 28 September, 2007 by ATGW

Abandoned Millstone at Prudhoe,
originally uploaded by etrusia_uk.

It is an interesting problem about the world of “Web 2.0” (and I hate that buzz word, I will make sacrifices to Odin as an apology), but one of the main promises it makes is let down by the fundamental way the processes work.

The web was touted as being able to democratise the world, allowing the most insignificant person the ability to have their message heard across the world. This was taken to a new level with the advent of Web 2.0 applications and now, everyone is supposed to be able to get video, audio or text out into the world with ease.

Partially, this is true. In the sense that pretty much anyone with a computer and net access can make a blog, upload video or audio tracks, the ideals of the Web/Web2.0 are sound. The problem lies with its finer implementations.

Think about your own browsing habits. Think about what blogs you read on a regular basis, what videos you watch on YouTube and what websites you visit. Think about how you find new things (Google? Yahoo?) and you can see that the vast majority of things will be the “highest ranked” for a given genre or search term. If you do a google search for something you are interested in, what are the odds you will delve to the seventeenth page of results and look at the sites there – much less link to them in your own sites and improve their page rank. Blogs are the same, Technorati page rank can spell a death sentence for a blog or, in equal but opposite measures, propel the blog to server breaking hits. Digg, Reddit and the like are all similar.

The basic flaw is a catch-22-like situation. Until your website/blog/whatever becomes popular no one can find it, but it wont become popular until people can find it. Certainly there are workarounds – for example, when Technorati indexed the Atheist blogroll it was a surefire way for otherwise low-profile atheist blogs to get disproportionately high rankings – but these are far from certain. However, once a blog or site (or whatever, I will use the terms interchangeably to mean generic things on the web) gets that high ranking, the success will breed itself.

This crops up in many areas: for example, on Technorati the most popular blog is engadget, so more people read its posts and more people favourite or link it, meaning it gets more popularity. Moving away from blogs themselves you get situations like the “Top Five / Most Emailed” on Scienceblogs – these posts get more exposure to the general public and, as a result get more hits and remain in the top five. It gets to the stage where a “Popular” item can be an order of magnitude away from the “normal” items, simply because its success breeds more success.

Moving to the picture starting this meandering, Flickr has a variety of ways in which you can grade your pictures – interestingness, most comments, most views or by the number of times they have been made a favourite by someone. The picture from Prudhoe Castle (above) is the winner of the “interestingness” stakes. Despite being on flickr for months, it has only generated 98 views, 2 favourites and 5 comments – but this is enough to top the polls over pictures which have had more views, more favourites and more comments. So, in the interests of breeding further success, I am posting the picture here to see if it gets more comments, more views or more favourites. To see if the effect is repeatable, I am also including the picture which currently has the most comments (and a lot of views, but no where near the most).

Whatever happens, on the web as in real life, it seems that the more successful you are, the more successful you become. Breaking into that “winners circle” is not an easy thing. Despite the golden hopes that the web would democratise everyone, the reality is that (with the support of Google et al), the web is concentrating the provision of information into small, partisan, groups.

Is this a good thing?

[tags]Democracy, Web, Web 2.0, Internet, Philosophy, Society, Culture, Success, Random Thoughts, Prudhoe Castle, Prudhoe, Castle, Photo, Flickr, Photographs, Technology[/tags]

Terrible Pipex Service – Fiasco Continues

Posted on Fri, 28 September, 2007 by ATGW

Well, I will try to keep this short and I promise to try and find a new topic to complain about, but surfing the internet at snails pace is painful.

I mentioned yesterday the fiasco I was having with Pipex, and their final suggestion was to do some tests for 24 hours then call back. Well, I carried out the tests and called them back. If only it had been that simple.

After a short lifetime listening to a bored “we value your call” (obviously they value it, I am paying to call them….) I got through to an operator who went through the questions required by the data protection act (I assume if it wasn’t for that darned act, they would happily give my details out to every one…) and once more I was asked what the problem was.

I explained, in detail, what had happened and the tech support creature started to ask me the standard questions about “had I checked the filters…” (etc). Fighting the urge to scream, I reminded him that I had already gone through all this and I was just calling with the test data so they could escalate it to BT. Rather than ask what the data was, he asked me “what sort of speeds” I had been getting “over the last few weeks.” I was stunned. So much for the 24 hours worth of tests nonsense. Anyway, I told him that before the “fix,” I’d been getting a consistent 4 (and a bit) mbps downstream and the line reported it was an 8mb connection and since BT fixed the exchange I was now on a line which reported itself as 500kbps. Then it got really comical.

The “technician” asked what sort of download speeds I was getting. I said 350 – 400kbps on average. He then explained to me how 350 – 400kbps was “about 4 meg.” This jaw dropping announcement left me silent for a moment or two while it really sunk in that he thought three hundred and fifty kilobytes per second was “about” four megabytes per second. What abstract definition of about do they use at Pipex? When I, politely, explained that 400kbps was “about” half a mbps he went quiet for at least 30 seconds. The silence became painful after a while and I genuinely wasn’t sure if he was still there.

Eventually, he found his voice again and said he would carry out some tests. After a few (silent) minutes where all I could hear was his frantic typing on a keyboard he confirmed the line was reporting it was a 500kbps and he would escalate it to BT – who would deal with it “in 1 – 6 days.” Wonderful, now I know that this time next week I will call Pipex again, who will say “sorry, BT had a problem, they will investigate in 1-6 days” and so on, ad infinitum.

Fundamentally this shows yesterday’s tech “support” person was lying through his teeth when he asked for the tests to be carried out. Today’s person didn’t care about my results and ran the test himself before sending it on to BT.

It amazes me that Pipex is still getting such rave reviews from people when they, basically, have untrained buffoons running their call centres and spend more money getting a low-life Z-lister like David Hasslehoff to front their campaigns than they spend on providing a service. As far as I am concerned Pipex is the worst ISP I have ever used (it is now even worse than Tiscali who used to be top of my List of Hate, comically Pipex’s fall from grace came when Tiscali bought them…) and I have no idea why every few weeks I get an email telling me how popular they are, how good their service is (for everyone else, obviously) and how I should recommend them to my friends. To be honest, there isn’t anyone I hate enough to recommend Pipex to them.

Please, feel free to spread the word.

[tags]Pipex, Bad Shops, Bad Customer Service, Pipex Sucks, Pipex Bad ISP, Bad ISP, ISP, Internet, Rant, Technology, Network, Tiscali, David Hasslehoff, Internet Service Provider, BT, ADSL, DSL, Modem, Networking, Orders of Magnitude, Bad Mathematics, Bad Networking[/tags]

Zero sense

Posted on Fri, 28 September, 2007 by Polly Unsaturate

Zero tolerance is a pretty stupid policing strategy, closely associated with the American right-wing, so it’s had to understand how it is that the Home Secretary, Jaqui Smith, has decided it’s a good choice for the UK:

Jacqui Smith today announced a “zero-tolerance” crackdown on anti-social behaviour, burglary and drug and alcohol misuse. The home secretary’s tough message to delegates on the final day of the Labour party conference in Bournemouth was designed to outflank the Tories’ renewed push on law and order.

This is quite a confusing collection of activities to lump together under a “zero tolerance” banner. It mixes together a range of things from serious crimes to legal personal choices. A helpless drunk might be annoying, even frightening, but locking him/her up is not going to stop you getting your home burgled.

The Home Secretary is obviously being advised by people with a limited knowledge of criminology but a good ear for a soundbite. And a sharp eye for the opinions of the Daily Mail readership.

The introduction of local crime data is designed to address the fact that, despite a 35% fall in the national crime figures since Labour came to power, most people believe that crime has gone up. Ministers hope the provision of local crime data will make clear the real situation and reduce fear of crime.

Correct me if I am misunderstanding here, but doesn’t this suggest that current laws and policies are associated with a reduction in crime? However, the media – what other source could people have for their beliefs about the prevalence of crime, given its comparative rarity? – are giving people a false perception that crime is increasing.

Hence, government policies have to change to match the false perception rather than the reality and must provide whatever the media are demanding.

Does this mean that a grateful media will then report crime as falling, even if it rises?

Clearly not. That voracious part of the media that thrives upon keeping the British public in a state of constant fear will not be sated so easily. It will continue to oppose any (especially a Labour) government on its crime record, because that’s just what a large part of the media does.

Sadly, in the course of Jaqui’s finding out this simple fact -which should be obvious to anyone with the slimmest grounding in GSCE social science or media studies, let alone with an Oxford degree – ever more people will find themselves labelled as criminal and ever greater numbers of poor communities will be alienated by heavy-handed policing.

And just in case you thought our society had more than enough electronic surveillance and biometric data on record, the police are now to be issued with hand-held computers and portable weapons-detecting and fingerprint-taking devices……

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Why Dont You Blog?

Challenging the Zeitgeist

Are BMS (01706713200) reading this blog?

Bearing false witness

Egyptian cartoon

P*** yourself laughing

Sorry, I just had to share

News on the Wire

Pipex: Farce upon Farce

One bullet destroys three lives

What use are web applications?

Upgrade Stalled

Memetics

Upgrade Time

Success breeds Success

Terrible Pipex Service – Fiasco Continues

Zero sense

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