Tag Archives: Rant

Ebuyer Good and Bad

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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

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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]

PCW madness

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In a recent post, I mentioned I was still subscribed to PC World until this week, despite a claim I made many months ago to the contrary. I made a big enough deal of it last time, that I felt I should explain what happened – and this gives me the chance to explain why I finally did cancel the subscription.

Months ago, fed up with crap articles and over the top Ubuntu coverage (to the extent you would think PCW was sponsored by Ubuntu…) I decided enough was enough and planned to cancel my subscription. I went online, checked the details and realised I had paid for another two months. On a whim, I decided there was nothing much to be gained by cancelling now and that waiting until after I had the next two issues would be better. Obviously this is where the flaw was hidden. Two months later, I again forgot to cancel until after the direct debit had been taken out, and again decided to wait.

This carried on for months, and to be fair to PCW the general standard of its content did improve quite a bit – albeit only for a while. In the end, I decided to stop pretending to myself that I would cancel it and just enjoyed the subscription a bit longer.

You may be aware of the fact I have recently moved house to the middle of nowhere (granted, as I moved from the middle of nowhere this is not much difference). As part of this, I needed to notify everyone who writes to me of the new postal address.  You would think that a “modern” publication like PCW would make this easy. You would be wrong.

There is a subscription management site where you go to deal with all the problems. I went there, entered by 10 digit customer number and not once managed to gain access. Each time it claimed it could find no trace of my records. I filled in the helpdesk type page with other details (address etc) but it continued to refuse to acknowledge my existence. I tried telephoning the customer line but got stuck in a queue and I fail to see the reason why I should spend money to rectify their mistakes. After a short while, I finally gave up and got round to what I should have done ages ago. I cancelled the direct debit. I wonder if, now, PCW will accept my account every existed?

In the end, PCW managed to retain me as a subscriber by the skin of its teeth. It is ironic that a technology magazine finally lost me as  a result of its poor website… Still, at least I can use the money for a subscription to Digital Camera or similar 🙂

[tags]Ubuntu, PC World, Bad Customer Service, Bad Shops, Rant, Technology, Linux, Computer Magazine, PCW[/tags]

The manly code

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Another rant about gender values. Click away now if you like. This one’s about manly honour and its miraculously contradictory manifestations.

On the BBC site, there’s a piece about how a judge called a killer a “coward.” Branded him a coward even, how exhilaratingly medieval. Not a mudererer, note, or a killer, or even a manslaughterer , if there’s such a word. A coward. This seems to have been the worst penalty he had to offer.

(Don’t you just love our gradual conceptual return to medieval “community justice”?)

Playing field killer ‘a coward’

A killer responsible for the death of a 16-year-old on playing fields in Kent has been branded a coward by a judge.
Lee Cowie, 19, was sentenced to four years at a young offenders’ institute. He had admitted the manslaughter of Michael Chapman,…At Maidstone Crown Court, Judge Andrew Patience said he was not “man enough” to challenge Michael to a “fair fight”.

Apparently, he attacked the boy from behind. The dishonourable unmanliness seems to have caused more concern to the judge than the actual death. This half suggests that there wouldn’t have even been a crime if there had been a formal duel challenge and seconds.

It is an annoyance to me that the realm of life where women are consistently luckier than men is in the realm of murder. Women can often get away with murder by playing the “Don’t blame me, I’m just a girl” card.

Now it looks as if men might be also able to minimise the time they have to serve for crimes of violence, if they just have the sense to observe the rules of gentlemanly combat.

Petitions work then?

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That magical tiny number of people who can change government policy (see the post about the government bowing to “pressure” to allow the creation of human-animal hybrids) obviously didn’t sign the road-pricing petition. Millions of people took the time and effort to sign it but they weren’t the right people, obviously.

The government just ignored the whole thing, except for adding insult to injury by sending everyone emails with Blair’s name on it to say in effect “Thanks for participating but f*** off. Now I will tell you why you were wrong…” (Well, that’s what the anti-ID petition got)

On a personal note, I would never have signed the no road-pricing petition. I don’t have a vehicle. I am against cars. Well, against cars as much as anyone can reasonably be who sometimes gladly takes advantage of riding in other people’s and who takes the occasional taxi. I do object to breathing in secondhand vehicle emissions all day. I don’t like fearing death from some metallic monster every time I go out of the house. I don’t like living in a world so dependent on oil that any amount of evil seems OK, if it will secure it. And so on.

BUT, I am not so divorced from reality as to think that car journeys are the luxury jaunts of the privileged. Even ignoring the fact that people who live outside a few city centres have basically no alternative but to use a car to earn a living, get food or get their kids to school, I don’t think road pricing will cut urban car journeys by more than a miniscule amount. Bloody hell, people spend hours every day on the M25. Would anyone choose to do that if they had an alternative?

The UK has a rubbish public transport system. I live in a city. It normally takes me about eight times as long to get to work (2 buses) as it does when I have been lucky enough to get a lift. (It takes me an hour and a half to walk, on the days when I can still face the walk after a day’s work. The bus journey takes an hour a best – two at worst.) I could replace part of one bus journey with a train but this wouldn’t cut the time by more than a minute or two and would cost more.

My recent experiences of travelling by train have involved unbelievable expense with appalling service standards. It is cheaper to buy a used car and throw it away than to pay the train fare for 3 or 4 people to get to London from the North of England. (And you could breathe in less germs, have the certainty of getting a seat, smoke if you choose, stop when you choose and not have to listen to incomprehensible welcoming speeches every few minutes nor use toilets that would be considered below par in a hurricane refugees’ camp.)

With regards to the quality of service, last year, I made at least two train journeys that were a net loss to the train company. I.e. the service was so bad that they had to pay for me to use it. Both arrived hours after any possible connections were running and, on each occasion, I had to be taken by taxi for close to 50 miles. And was given a refund 🙂

Basically, there are currently no feasible alternatives to using a car for most journeys.

So this road pricing idea is just going to be another tax. Unlike direct taxation, the ability to pay will be irrelevant. What will affect how much you pay will be how close you live to workplaces, public services, schools and shops. So, also unlike direct taxation, there will be an impact on a wide range of apparently unrelated things like house prices.

So, the rich will be able to carry on driving at will, just getting irritated by the attendant bureaucracy of it. Other people will just get more and more stressed trying to stretch their wages far enough to cover the cost of the journey to earning them.

We all know the alternatives, if there really were any serious concern to cut the number of cars on the road:

  • An efficient and cheap public transport system
  • Encourage working from home
  • Planning decisions to stop cities and services from sprawling out endlessly
  • Stop closing down locally based services like post offices and schools

Too much trouble, hey? Don’t bother then, just get another source of revenue from drivers.

Paying the price of stupidity

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Oh dear. I am really not having a good day today.

This site, and a few others I admin, is hosted on a Linux server and today I was SSH’d in doing some admin tasks. One of the advantages of it being on Linux is the crontab. Over the years, the crontab for this account has grown into a convoluted, long, interesting, useful but undocumented crontab. For non-*nix people, the crontab is a way of scheduling things and is great for setting up automated processes like backups, sitemap submissions and the like.

Today, I needed to copy a line out of the crontab and use it elsewhere. I logged on and tried to list the crontab. In my haste I typed:

crontab -;

(missing the “l” key by a few mm). Argh. This has had the unfortunate effect of killing the entire crontab. I could cry. I should kill myself as punishment for the sheer stupidity. Now when I send crontab -l, I get the dreaded “no crontab for [account name]” message as a response.

What a nightmare. I am stupid enough to have no backup of the data in the crontab, nor was it documented well enough to recreate it properly. I should be shot.

At the bare minimum, I hope this will act as a lesson, for myself if no one else, in the importance of documentation and backups.

[tags]idiot, linux, rant, site-admin, why-dont-you, whydontyou[/tags]

I told you so?

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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?

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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]

Idiots on the Roads

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This rant may well be more specific to the UK than the rest of the world, but as 32% of the visitors to this site are Brits, I can live with that :-). As I have mentioned, or at least alluded to, previously, I have spent a lot of time over the last few weeks driving up and down the UK’s motorways. This seems to have given me an insight into how truly awful most people are when it comes to driving.

In the south of England, I am actually now convinced less than 10% of the population have even passed a driving test. The stereotype of BMW drivers never bothering to indicate, let alone give way or maintain lane discipline, is massively accurate but needs to be expanded to include pretty much every second car on the road.

I could (almost) understand such lax habits on quiet country lanes where few (if any) cars will be going over 30MPH. It truly amazes me when people are driving like this in heavy traffic at speeds in excess of 70MPH (we wont discuss speed limits here…).

Continue reading →

So this really is Dickens for 21st century

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In an old Wire-ophile post here, I called the Wire Dickens for the 21st century.

In case that wasn’t clear enough, this was supposed to be a compliment…. I was referring to Dickens’ passionate awareness of social injustice, the huge cast of wierd characters and his plots that took in every section of society. (Obviously, I’m alive in the 21st century, so I think the Wire outshines Dickens, but that’s just me.)

I have carefully failed to rave endlessly about Wire series 4 because I blatantly can’t do it justice. Plus, I have to see it a few more times to even begin to tie together the plot strands and understand the subtle ironies and get all the references. yada. yada.

But wow, there is actually going to be a Dickens for the 21st century and its name is Dickens World.

No, really. A faked Victorian London is being created as we speak. According to the BBC:

The overall effect is rather like Disney painted brown and plunged into twilight.

“Highlights” will allegedly include a Great Expectations boat ride, a Haunted House of Ebenezer Scrooge, Newgate Debtor’s Prison and a Dotheboys Hall Victorian classroom.

I must admit to being baffled as to who this is going to appeal to. I thought of myself, aged about 8, an obsessive reader who was lucky enough to live next door to a public library. I vacuumed up all of Dickens’ books, although even I recoiled at the mawkish bits. I certainly wouldn’t have enjoyed Dickens World at all.

Kids who don’t enjoy reading Dickens are not going to have any idea what any of the set pieces are about. So I imagine it will be a depressing experience to visit a downbeat version of Disney World for them.

Even in the event that a non-reading-obsessed child becomes interested by it and picks up a copy of Great Expectations or David Copperfield…. Bloody Hell, these are A Level English Literature set books. That will put off the average kid from reading for life.

This park was thought up by the creator of Santa’s World and (Hans Christian) Andersen World. Theme parks based round a Christmas myth and a collection of only moderately disturbing fairy tales. ( Not a Brothers Grimm Theme Park, you might note.)

Somehow a theme park based on child labour, workhouses, disease, debtor’s prisons, homeless orphans and child thieves’ gangs doesn’t seem like very much in the way of fun.

No, what am I thinking? I am putting in my patent claim now for the concept of a Wire theme park. (I have already drawn up the specs. I’m not wasting an investment opportunity by putting the details here.)

No, forget that. It’s in the USA, it may not be harrowing enough. What about a theme park that shows what life is like in parts of the cities of the developing world. Do you see the entertainment potential in child labour, orphans, child thieves’ gangs, ruin, disease, homeless kids raising each other in the streets? Blimey. What fun.

The 3 rules for a successful diet :-)

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Diets don’t work, according to a research report in American Psychologist, (Mann et al) discussed on physorg.com. Not only had most people who lost weight through dieting regained their weight in a couple of years, Mann concluded that

most of them would have been better off not going on the diet at all. Their weight would be pretty much the same, and their bodies would not suffer the wear and tear from losing weight and gaining it all back

Well blow me down with a feather, etc. Who would have thought it? Well me, for a start. Given the obsession with dieting, if diets worked, people wouldn’t be (supposedly) getting fatter and fatter all the time.

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Royal Marine, Royal Navy, Publish and Be Damned

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 (Update: It seems this has been added to Digg)

I am not sure why I have strayed into current affairs as a topic for debate here, but I promise this will be the last blog post I make on this topic (for a while at least…). Previously, I have ranted about the supposed “outrage” over the 15 sailors and marines held hostage by Iran being allowed to sell their stories, and about them wrongly being called cowards or a disgrace.

For people outside the UK, this may come across as little more than a parochial spat and, to be honest, I am amazed there is so little going on in the world that this is actually headline news. Again, today, I have spent most of the day listening to the radio. This is never a good thing, and especially so when I spend time listening to the Jeremy Vine show on Radio 2 (he gets callers to call in on current affairs topics). I am also very aware that they will screen callers to ensure the cranks get more air time than they deserve.

Knowing all this doesn’t stop the idiocy and bigotry winding me up though. (Again, this is long so most is below the fold)
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Poor Sailors and Marines

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Today’s radio news headlined with the supposed “outrage” that the 15 sailors and marines detained by the Iranians were being allowed to be paid for for their press reviews. Apparently The Sun newspaper (no, I will not post a URL to them…) has offered them a “six figure sum” [*] for their stories. From the breakfast radio news, this has caused outrage. People like Bob Stewart, Tim Collins and numerous other people were being mentioned as “outraged” over this decision by the MOD. The BBC news website had a lead article titled “Iran stories sale criticism grows” which explained the Head of the Army has banned all Soldiers from selling their stories following the Navy personnel being allowed to make some money off the story. Different media outlets have similar stories — all pretty much saying the same thing. The TV news had vox pop interviews with people in the street, mostly saying they “thought it was wrong for them to sell their story.”

The sheer barefaced hypocrisy, tinged with basic madness, of all this amazes me. I am (almost) at a loss for which parts of the nonsense to start with… Continue reading →

How depressing is this?

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There is a story on Health central about the death of a four-year-old girl, who had been prescribed some pretty serious anti-psychotic medication since she was two years old.

Obviously, I don’t know any of the facts here but that won’t stop me commenting on it. There do seem to be some complicating factors – the parents have other kids on the same medication, they have been under the attention of social services before and were warned about giving the child an overdose.

The Health Central post says

… Seroqel, an anti-psychotic; Depakote, which was presumably prescribed for bipolar disorder; and Clonidine, a blood pressure drug that is apparently used “off-label” to calm children…. my jaw dropped when I read this list of drugs, especially as Rebecca had been taking them since she was 2, when she was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder and bipolar disorder. ….prescribing several off-label medications together is even riskier, since their interaction has not been tested.

A two year-old on anti-psychotic medicine? Anyone who has met a two year old knows it’s quite hard to distinguish normality from craziness. Attention deficit disorder and bipolar disorder. Don’t these define two-year-old behaviour?

Taking up a point made a couple of blogs ago and made more strongly in a comment by Chris, we seem to be ever more willing to find medical solutions to problems. And to see psychiatric problems where we might not in the past. Continue reading →