Laugh? We laughed...

Sometimes you just have to laugh.

Last week it was the last day for one of my work colleagues. A very talented developer, who will be a loss to the department. Our Head of HR (or, more accurately, our sole HR person) happened to be down in our office for the day. As she was there, she invited him in for a quick chat, to find out why he was leaving.

One of the reasons he gave was job security. At this he received a very indignant look as she proclaimed there was no problem with job security. "What do you mean?" she said. "There's plenty of job security!"

Fifteen minutes later he discovered the reason she was down in our office was to make somebody redundant. Somebody who has been with the company 18 years, and now is being made redundant 6 months into the new ownership.

Oh, the irony.

Our office move is under way now, the lease has been signed and everything. So in a week or two my commute will double. Naturally I am not being compensated for this in any way, as I may have mentioned before. I've also found out there's going to be no server room, meaning a couple of noisy racks (with no dedicated air-con to keep them cool) and many other non-rack-mountable servers in the main, open-plan office. That sounds great!

Better...

Virgin Media managed to slightly redeem themselves last night by providing a man on the telephone who:

a) Was not Liverpudlian, so I could understand him.
b) Was competent and identified the issue.
c) Said he'd solve it and call me back in a couple of minutes
d) Actually did solve it and called me back in a couple of minutes.

So an improvement, and my email and internet work again now.

Feel my wrath, Virgin Media

Seriously, do big companies exist purely to piss me off?

This time, as the title suggests, it's the work of Virgin Media, or Telewest as they used to be known.

Yesterday I got my bill. It was higher than usual. A quick comparison to an older bill revealed they were charging me about £12 more for the same services. I called their Customer Services and actually got through to someone in England! Well, Liverpool, so it's still hard to understand them, but better than India. They explained it was because I was on a special discount rate and it had ended. I asked them to put it back again but she gave me another number to call. I rang this, and it turned out to be their "if you are thinking about leaving" number. Fair enough, so I spoke to a nicer-sounding woman who offered me the same stuff for £61. This is better than the £71 they want to charge, but still more than the £59 I was paying. Only £2 more, but that's not the point. I've lost Sky One, which is the best channel, so I'm getting less for my money. Not to mention the "traffic management" on their "unlimtited" broadband. So I don't want to pay more than I was.

She wasn't having it, so I said I was going to investigate Sky and might cancel. She explained that all I had to do is give 30 days notice. I was rather hoping she'd beg and plead for me to stay, but that obviously wasn't going to happen. I mean, I've only been a customer for 6 years, why would they want to keep me? She offered to put the £61 price on anyway but I said don't bother for the time being and went off to investigate Sky and BT prices.

Then, later on in the evening, my broadband and TV went dead, after the power flickered for a second. I rang Customer Services again and spoke to another Liverpudlian. He said he couldn't help with the broadband, because they want to charge you 25p/minute to call them, but could help with the TV. His "help" with the TV consisted of "can you please unplug the box from the wall and plug it back in again.... ok, is it working now?".

It wasn't, and I said it was probably an area fault, as it's pretty unlikely both the broadband and TV would go at the same time. He said that as nothing was showing on his system it couldn't be, and arranged for an engineer to visit on the... wait for it... 4th of August. 4th of August! 11 days away! I asked him if he thought that'd make me not cancel; he didn't have much of an answer, but did agree to give me a month's free TV.

Anyway I called Ele's dad over the road, and his had gone off as well. So obviously an area fault anyway. Good news is that's likely to be fixed quickly, without needing a visit to me, and I might still get my free TV for a month. Come the morning, it was fixed.

And then today I try to go into my Webmail from work, and discover that it won't let me in. I tried their "selfcare" page and this does let me in, but says my email account is suspended. I try emailing myself and it bounces back immediately. I call the number on the website (which puts me through to the wrong deparment), before finally getting through to the right one. He has a look and can't do anything so tells me to ring broadband Technical Support on an 0906 number. Now, this is obviously a fault at their end, so I object to paying 25p per minute (even on my employer's phone bill) to contact them. They say they refund the charges for the calls if it's their fault, but I have no confidence in their competence to do this. In the end I emailed them via their website.

But I think I'm going to be forced into staying with them. Getting a BT line installed will cost £125, and a SkyHD box is £300 (although it can probably be bought elsewhere for about £180), then there's the Sky installation costs and it probably won't be that much cheaper and I'll be stuck on ADSL rather than cable, which means I'll also have to buy a new router. And I'm still annoyed with Sky for their stunt with Sky One.

Bastards, the lot of them.

Water water everywhere, and there's actually some to drink

Hurrah - I can drink my tap water again! This means I don't need to go down to Tesco's carrying a baseball bat to murder anyone that gets in the way of my water-gathering again. There was a picture today in the paper of a bloke in Bournemouth who has loaded up the back of his people carrier with hundreds of bottles of water. This is stupid for two reasons:

1 - It is very selfish to those who also need water.
2 - There is no contamination problem in Bournemouth, making it completely unnecessary.

And today, in breaking predictable news, Gordon Brown visited a flood-hit area for ooh, about 5 minutes, and proclaimed it to be the fault of..... climate change! What an idiot, especially when it has been widely written about how this is the fault of the jetstream (where the cold air from the north meets the warm air from the south causing an area of low pressure) occuring further south than usual, so it is over us, instead of safely north of us. This is not climate change, it is merely an unfortunate event. In any event, if the cold bit has gone further down than normal, it can easily be argued that it is "stronger" than the warm bit; if the world is warming up to this huge degree (geddit?) then surely the warm bit would be stronger, pushing the low pressure area even further north? Then we'd have nice hot temperatures like the rest of Europe currently has.

There you go - explained in laymans terms. The BBC don't use terms like "warm bit" , do they?

Anyway, I've had enough now and I demand that government do something to reinstate Summer. A few months back I wrote that nothing could stop it coming, not even Tony Blair, but it appears to have stopped anyway - a rare example of me being wrong. I'm not sure Blair had anything to do with it, but I'm still looking for the evidence and haven't ruled it out entirely.


PS - Sorry, Coleridge, for the shameless way I have bastardized your poem.

"Hello, Noah? I'd like to order an Ark please."

That was interesting rain, wasn't it?

My garage roof has more holes than O.J. Simpson's defense, but it's never been a foot deep in water before. If I'd been quicker off the mark I could have stuck the house on the market advertised with an indoor swimming pool.

Still, there's nothing of value in the garage (quite the opposite, really), apart from a lawnmower and some bikes. What would have been better is if the whole thing collapsed, then I could've claimed on the insurance for a nice shiny new one that isn't infested with spiders that are probably unknown to science and exist solely in my garage. Maybe I should invite David Attenborough in; he might name them after me.

Apart from that we were fairly lucky. Our bedroom ceiling and a wall (hidden behind a mirror, fortunately) are a bit stained where water leaked through the chimney breast, but not as bad as some. The photo's in the paper were the funniest. Near my parents' house a few miles away there is a railway bridge that cars pass under. It always floods. So in this rain it was certainly going to flood. But that didn't stop people from trying to drive through it. And when I mean floods, I mean to about 6 or 7 feet in depth. Idiots.

But the best news of all is that we can't drink our water. The same useless water company that last year wouldn't let us use any because they didn't have enough (yet still expected payment as if they did have enough), have this year managed to contaminate the supply with all this rainwater (and, I'm sure, will still expect payment in full). I was lucky to find out, as I saw a brief mention of it on the Sky News website. So now we have to boil our water before drinking it. Plainly this is stupid, as it takes ages to cool down again, so I went to buy some from Tesco's. Small snag was about 10,000 people had the same idea. Old Mother Hubbard had more on her shelves. I saw a cage with some cases of small (750ml) bottles in it, so I had grabbed about 15 bottles of those, when a Tesco man came down the aisle with a pallet stacked full of 6x2l bottles, which he proclaimed to be the last in the store. A minor frenzy ensued as people grabbed then. I managed to get 2 packs of 6, and by the time I'd put them in the trolley and turned around to see if I could get any more, they were all gone. This was a pallet stacked about 5 feet high, by the way. Hopefully it'll last us through the crisis. I suspect that if I drive a few miles out I can get more anyway.

Apparently the water company were driving around in vans with loudhailers, and distributing leaflets warning customers to boil water, but I didn't see, hear, or receive any of these. So it's a good thing I was lucky enough to see it on the website, or else I imagine I'd either be dead or dying a slow, painful death.

Wonderful.

Feel my wrath, Symantec!

Apologies... I've been on another one of those lovely courses up in old London Town, this time on ASP.NET. Better than sitting in an office, I suppose.

Anyway, I know you've missed it, so here's another moan. This time about Norton Internet Security.

The other day, my email stopped working. I couldn't connect to either Blueyonder or Compuserve, for either SMTP or POP3. Strange. T'internet worked fine, as did Ele's Hotmail. This ruled out several things: It's not Outlook Express, 'cos her Hotmail works through it, and other internet ports are fine, only 25 and 110 were not working. I rebooted my router and cable modem with no success and assumed it to be a Virgin Media problem, because since Telewest got absorbed into their NTL-hell, nothing has worked quite as well. Plus, their status page said there were internet issues in my area.

But the next day it still didn't work. I tried from my laptop, and this worked. So now it's not Virgin's fault either. Thinking it might be my router at fault, I slapped the Visual Basic CD I'd come across a couple of days before into my laptop and within about 2 minutes had built a little application to listen on port 25, i.e. pretend to be an SMTP mailserver (the miracle of VB!). I couldn't connect to this from my desktop, so I assumed my router was doing odd things. I tried a different port, and it worked. Thinking it a bit odd that my router would block only 25 and 110 I started to think this wasn't the problem. I disabled the Norton firewall on my desktop but it still made no difference, but I was still convinced the router was fine. I then remembered that I'd let LiveUpdate run and download various Norton updates...

I tried searching on the Symantec website for help. It told me that if I was experiencing problems getting emails then I had to upgrade to the latest version. I was running the 2006 version so I let it upgrade to 2007. Fortunately it didn't try and charge me anything. And it fixed the problem! Hurrah! Only it seems that the 2007 version doesn't come with the AntiSpam stuff, which when I thought about it is why I didn't upgrade to it at renewal-time earlier in the year.

So, because their upgrades screwed everything up I've now got an inferior product to the one I paid for. Not much inferior, because the AntiSpam was useless anyway, but that's not the point.

After this, and after both my parents and Ele's parents both had to buy new PC's after attempting to put Norton onto their (admittedly aging) PC's, I don't think I'll bother paying for it again next year.

Happy birthday to me!

Yes, today is the start of my last year staying below the age of 30.

Someone at work said that their worst year was 29, because it's so close to 30, but when you reach 30 becoming 40 is still a long way off. Interesting point. It seems like only yesterday that I was turning 21; time certainly does fly. In the past year I've watched Joe turn from a barely-crawling baby to a walking, talking, running, jumping toddler. A very interesting year.

I've got a tip for you today as well: Did you know that the Windows XP setup recognises USB drives? I didn't. So when I was wiping a laptop at work, I deleted the main partition, and also a second partition that it was showing, which I just assumed (without thinking) was part of the main drive. It was only seconds later that I realised I had left my USB drive connected... yup, completely wiped the whole thing. Very irritating. Ah well, you live and you learn.

Spelling is just far to difficult.

I was alarmed today to read of a group called the "Simplified Spelling Society".

It appears that their mission is to get us all to butcher the English language so that spelling becomes easier for children to learn. They even picketed a spelling bee in the US (they are an American group).

How stupid! For starters, kids generally don't have a problem with learning to spell. They've been managing for hundreds of years so I don't see why they are suddenly unable to learn. And in any case, stretching their minds is surely better than making everything easier.

Additionally (adishonaly?) words do follow basic rules, meaning that even if you are unsure of the spelling of a word, you stand a good chance of getting it right. It just becomes instinctive after a while. Changing the spelling of the words would throw out all of these rules.

The new system would be largely phonetic, and here lies the problem: Different accents pronounce different words differently. A London/home-counties type of person such as myself, would write "bath" as "barf". Northerners would write it as, well, "bath". Keeping the spelling non-phonetic alleviates these problems. Text would become unreadable as different spellings are used for different accents. At the moment if somebody from, say, Glasgow sends me an email, I can read it. But talk to them on the phone and you'll understand about one word in five. Translating that to the written word as well would be disastrous.

In March, Ele and I took a weekend break to Stratford-upon-Avon and visited Shakespeare's house. I'm not the biggest fan of The Bard really, having been made to suffer the depressing tedium that is Romeo & Juliet in high school, but I appreciate his contribution to literature. More to the point, they had an original manuscript penned by the man himself. I tried to read it and couldn't. The printing press stabilised spelling and grammar a great deal, and this is a good thing. Consistency has made the whole shebang a lot easier.

Still, at least we could give the Americans victory on "vase". We English insist on pronouncing it "Varz", but are happy to say "base" and "case" whilst sniggering at those that say "vase". I've always thought that a bit odd.

It's all becoming a bit to text-speak for my liking.

Change to phonetic spelling? Oova ma did boda as they would say in Newcastle.

Well I haven't got much to say, but I haven't posted for a week so I thought I should.

The reason for the not-postingness is not because I'm lazy, which I am, or that I've been working hard, which I haven't, but because I've been on another programming course (this time on D-Flat, or C-Sharp as Microsoft like to call it, and C# as they like to write it).

You may feel that my employer values me highly, and is keen to invest in me. To this, I would say "codswallop". I'd actually say something ruder, but children might read this - specifically Jessica - and then I'd get told off by Ele. Anyway, the reason this is bollo-, er codswallop is because the only reason I was on a course was because my employer has a cunning strategy of "don't replace any staff if they quit". So when one of the C# programmers from one of our other offices left, they decided to train me and another guy here, so that we can do his work as well as our own.

Still, I get to put it on my CV and that's all that matters. It was up in London, a stones throw away (if you're really good at throwing) from Bank tube station, which made for a surprisingly easy journey each morning. Apart from the day that my "Via Bank" train decided to become a "Via Charing-Cross" train, which I fortunately realised before the point-of-no-return that is Kennington. But it meant I lost my seat and couldn't keep reading my book. Very distressing.

Next week I'm off on another course (ASP.NET, in case you're wondering), but only for 3 days. Still, it's a further thing to go on my CV and it's better than sitting in the office all day.