Disloyal...

Call Centre: "Hello. As a loyal BT customer, I would like to offer you..."*

Me: "Can I stop you there? I am not a loyal BT customer. I left BT five years ago and took my landline and broadband from Talk Talk because it was half the price. I have been extremely satisfied with Talk Talk and loyalty to BT was not my reason for coming back. I wanted my broadband from o2 and the levels of anti-competitive bureaucracy which still exist in the UK telecoms market mean you have to have a BT line for o2 broadband and you have to have it for 12 months, even though I really want o2 to have my landline too. I could, of course, leave BT early, paying a penalty of around £100, so I am waiting until later this month when the Ofcom ruling which forces you to reduce early termination charges comes into effect and then I will be off again..."

Call Centre: (silence.....)  "Erm... oh..."  (silence, click, tone....)

(This is an adapted highlight of a call from earlier today. It may not be word for word, but these calls are recorded for training purposes, so I suppose I could always ask for the transcript. If I'm loyal enough.)


(*Also, if BT is reading this, possibly for training purposes "As you are a loyal BT customer, I would like to offer you..." would be better...)

Seriously...

How thick would you have to be...?

OZ -6 (HK -3): Wired up...

I am in the process of not-quite-packing.

This is a procedure which involves gathering together things which might be necessary for my holiday without actually packing them into anything. The suitcase is still in the loft.

It's a very useful phase of the proceedings as I am also getting a number of other jobs done as a by-product. For instance, sorting out my "home file" (a product I swore I would never possess) while trying to find my passport in it. This involved a trip into town to purchase A4 filing wallets (or "slippy dippies" © Chris Kilby 1990s). These were cheap, which is good, because I could have just lifted some "used" ones from work... This led to several hours sorting out contents of aforementioned boxfile and categorising and shredding and wondering why, in the light of the advice I give my Dad, I still have the receipt for a printer I bought in 2001 and threw away in 2002.

Anyway, here is the collection of electronicage I have to take abroad...



USB cable, another USB cable with slightly different end (in white), camera batteries (why it can't take ordinary batteries, that you buy in a shop, I don't know...), charger for camera batteries, earphones for iPod, memory card for camera, USB stick to back up photos to avoid what happened to Tina's Australia photos, socket adapters to turn safe, earthed three-pin plugs into wonkily angled, two-pin, flimsy death-trap plugs, phone charger...

That's the luggage allowance gone then.

Trainspotting...

I'm not sure if this is classed as one of the Great Railway Journeys of the World, but me and my Dad went on the Settle -Carlisle Line on Friday. Didn't get much time in Carlisle (probably enough...), but that wasn't the point.

The line is now more widely used than it was when it was under the threat of closure in the 80s. This is mainly to do with the fact that it's been well marketed as a tourist attraction. It's a great way to see the western Yorkshire Dales...

This map shows the stations all the way from Leeds as captured by GPS along the route... (Just got geeky new phone which does that...)



The journey takes about three hours, heading up the Ribble Valley to Ribblehead where the famous viaduct is...



..and where we stopped for a look round. There's a great restored station with a very knowledgable live-in railway enthusiast station master. You can buy a postcard and other paraphernalia...

The viaduct is really huge. You only get how huge it is if you're standing underneath it, or when you see a train going over the top...



The line then goes to through Blea Moor Tunnel, into Cumbria and to Dent Station, which is at the head of Dentdale and the highest mainland station in England, and then past Ais Gill, which is the highest point on the line.

As you might expect, the views are spectacular all the way... the three peaks of Pen-y-Ghent, Ingleborough and Whernside, many more viaducts other than (but none as big as) Ribblehead, beautiful dales and villages, plunging waterfalls and raging rivers, and the forests in the Eden Valley.

And then you get to see the other side on the way home!

I might become a trainspotter yet.

Long, Long Ago in Sherwood...

I suppose I'd be looking grumpy too if I'd been on pause for 14 and a half days...



My Sky+ obviously has issues and clearly I have a lot of catching up to do before I can watch X-Factor...

Is that an iPod in your pocket...?

I am seriously not making this up....

I knew that Marks was trying to be a bit more up to date and trendy, but do we really need this?

I suppose it's only the next logical step after integrating your iPod with your kitchen, your car, your running shoes (not my running shoes, obviously) and your toilet roll holder (!)

But as they might say... "This is not just the future. This is the M&S future..."

Hello Auntie...

I went on an official tour of BBC Television Centre yesterday.



Well, some it.

There are bits you don't get to see. You don't get to see the Blue Peter garden. Presumably in case you vandalise it, or dig up the time capsule or tell everyone about Petra. And you don't get to go inside the news studios, in case you are a lesbian and Nicholas Witchell has to sit on you. (This was the official reason given by the tour guides, Simon and Debbie *)

We start with the very low budget Walk of the Dead Entertainers...



Dame Thora, Arthur Lowe, Ernie Wise, Marti Caine, Jon Pertwee... Bruce Forsyth and Tess Daly **

And then on inside, where no-one could accuse them of cashing in on recent remakes...



Actually, the last one is Gordon the Gopher. They keep him in a glass-fronted cage now. Perhaps they could do the same with Andi Peters.

We got to see TC1, which is a really big studio where they were rehearsing for Dance X, and TC8, where they were recording the Catherine Tate Christmas Special. In July. "Whadda f***in' liberty!!"

It's all a bit pedestrian. These days no-one really needs the whole "don't wear blue if you're a weather forecaster" thing explaining to them...



...but they do it anyway. And they let you read the news...



(Lisa Kaplinsky)

...of course they show you where Roy Castle did the tap dancing...



...and you get a good look at the Holby Plastic People (don't look if you are of a nervous disposition...)



Now... dinner time!

* Simon is what happens when you're no longer convincing sitting on a bar stool in the background of the Queen Vic, and Debbie is what happens when you're too old to present CBeebies.

** Well, it can only be a matter of time for one of them, and the Strictly Tragic Accident where the other gets a good kicking and falls forever into Len Goodman's handbag is not far off.

Dosh; Bosch; Posh; Slosh; Wash... Gosh!

I have a digital camera, digital radio and digital television. I've had a digital clock for ages. (And digital watches are a bit 70s, aren't they? Despite being a pretty neat idea...)

And I've now got a digital washer. With touch sensitive buttons.

God knows if it's any better at getting clothes clean than the old one, but it has the advantages of working, (which the old one had stopped doing), being whisper-quiet (it says in the advert) and beeping when it's done.

It saves the Earth too.

A bit like Madonna does.

Probably.

Your Starter for Ken...*

It's been a while since I watched University Challenge...



...but clearly things have changed.

*I'm really sorry about the post title.

Anti-Rant (Being Nice for Lent...)

The Church of England says I don't have to give anything up for Lent this year. (Actually, as I have had no pancakes, I wouldn't have to give up anything anyway, would I?)

What I actually have to do is "something helpful" and "good deeds." I can even get text or web reminders in case I forget to be helpful and good which, let's face it, is likely.

Yesterday, I had to "go to a party". Today I have to "spend some time in silence..."



...like that's gonna happen!

But I am slowly buying into the whole "Changing the world a little bit each day" message - I even have a copy of this, and have done some of the things in it. (Well, one of the things - I turn the TV off standy when I go to bed now. However, as I have just bought a big new tv when there was actually nothing particularly wrong with the old one, my "change the world" account is still seriously in the red...)

Anyway, back to the point. I'm going to write a thank you letter to someone. It's one of the things on the CoE list and will make me feel better about myself.

Yesterday in London, I dropped my phone and the slidy front bit slid off completely. The front and back bits hung together precariously on a spring and getting them back together was like being on the Krypton Factor, and involved patience and tweezers. When I got it back together, it didn't work. The screen flashed pretty colours then went black.

The O2 website said I had to take it to an O2 Shop. The woman in the O2 Shop said they would have to send it away to Nokia. She said it could be 28 days. She said they didn't have a loan phone for me. She chewed gum while she spoke.

She helpfully suggested I could take it to the little mobile phone shop on Millbrook Road. They might do it in 48 hours.

Well, they were nothing short of brilliant.

They took the phone in at about 10am. They were polite; they knew what they were talking about; they didn't promise anything they couldn't do; they had a sense of humour. (Take note of all these, girl in O2 Shop...) I went to work. I picked it up at 4pm - all fixed under warranty.

So, I'm going to write to Next Communications in Southampton and thank them for the excellent service. And for the (albeit very small) audience here... Thanks Sam and Chris. I would have been very grumpy without my phone. And I wouldn't want the Church of England texting me about that.*

*Not that they would have been able to...

Oooooh!! Ahhhhh!! (Just A Little Bit...)

Can't quite believe it's a been a year since it was a year ago at the fireworks... (?)

Anyway, my experiments with High Definition TV have gone as far as two extremely pixellated mobile phone videos of the display at Lakeside in Eastleigh - have made them small so they look better...

And now, it's Sunday. Hallowe'en is over, we've put the clocks back, done Bonfire Night - time to get into the loft for the Christmas decs! :-)

Talk Talk to me while you can...

Have finally dumped BT after paying them £11.99 a month + Caller Display + Call Diversion + Calls (= a lot) for actually not making any calls and then paying Virgin another £17.99 a month for broadband on top of that.

It is something I will undoubtedly regret. Although TalkTalk has a very trendy personalised Welcome Pack...



...and everything is written in very calm and reassuring Plain English, it has an unenviable Customer Service record: "Press 1; your call is important to us; we expect to answer your call at 3.37am" etc.

My switch date is 8 September. Say goodbye now. It's unlikely that you will see or hear from me again after then...

0° 00' 00"

At 9.21am today, my left foot was in the Western hemisphere and my right foot was in the Eastern hemisphere.

Traditionally, people do this at Greenwich, but there are lots of other places in England you can do it too.

I was officially at (roughly) 53° 22' 3.00"N, (exactly) 0° 0' 0.00", which is Eastgate in Louth between a fish and chip shop and a drycleaners.

Apparently neither my GPS nor Google Earth would have said that's where I was, but as it's only a few metres off, I'm not going to quibble.

My Very Easy Method Just Speeds Up Naming... Damn!!!

This is all very bizarre.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Pluto loses status as a planet

I somehow feel cheated out of a bit of my general knowledge, something I've known since primary school and which isn't right anymore.



It almost seems like science should always be forging ahead and today it unexpectedly lurched back.

Another branch of science leapt forward at the same time though, 'cos the BBC report is timed 13:34 today and it was documented gospel on Wikipedia by 13:36...

Pluto is the ninth and smallest of the traditional planets of the Solar System, though its status as a planet has been disputed in recent years. It qualified as a planet under the draft definition but it failed to qualify under the final draft, voted by the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union on August 24th, 2006. (Wikipedia).

So, there are now only 8 planets in the Solar System and a few irregular lumps of rock. It still keeps its name, but it's now just a pub quiz question for 50 years time and a dog.

And what of the mnemonics?

Earlier in the week when the draft proposed keeping Pluto and a few other newly discovered rocks, they were getting longer...

Most Victorian Euphoniums Make Cats Jump Suddenly Unless Neighbours Play Calming Xylophones. (The Times).

...but now they can be shorter. My favourite is...

Make Vanessa Eat Massive Jam Sandwiches Until November...



I clearly have too much time on my hands...

One flew over the Junk Mail filter....

Now, I would never normally admit to finding anything in Tina's junk mail remotely amusing or entertaining in any way, consisting as it normally does of such things as...

• Fwd: Would you hold the ladder? Note: forwarded message attached. I thought this was really funny...i hope you like it as much as i did! Tinaxx or
  

• Fwd: FW: Mates Note: forwarded message attached. Is that a rag doll....or really a person? Txxxx or
  

• Fwd: FW: Tennis Note: forwarded message attached. This is good fun! My record so far is 11...I only had a quick go...honest! Txxxxxxxxxxxxx or
  

• Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: Bubble wrap Note: forwarded message attached. I personally found this quite therapeutic...have a pop! Txxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

You know, the kind of thing your inbox is permanently plagued with. Especially if you know Tina....

However, I have obviously let my guard down, (it must be the holidays), because I have to admit this is very addictive, requiring, as it does, skill and precision and dexterity etc, and not just being a poor quality video of a bloke up a ladder with a kilt on, which was the last thing she sent to 237 unsuspecting friends and family...



*edit: I didn't kill the dog either...

A minor explosion...

Well, I suppose it had been a long time coming, and all the tell-tale signs were there, but my computer blew up on Friday evening.

There was a bit of a high pitched schreeching sound and a smell like someone had pulled forty Christmas Crackers at once.

Then a bang and a flash and all was dark.

So, I ventured inside the computer, which was more colourful and a lot more dusty than I thought it would be and sought advice from Jon, who is a person I talk to when I have computer problems, and he assured me that it was the power pack.

As I bought the computer ages ago and it had a mere (as it turned out) 300W power supply, apparently I shouldn't have added 8 more USB ports, a DVD rewriter, a memory card reader, a second hard drive, a new sound card and bluetooth and expected it to cope...

So out came the old power pack and, thanks to speedy service Novatech, who allow you to reserve an item on their website and pick it up the following morning, even on a bank holiday weekend...


(Yes, I know there are a lot of wires. But sensible people mark where all the wires plug into before unplugging them to make life easier. Like I say, sensible people do that...)

...and in went the new one. A mammoth (possibly) 550W of power which would probably run the computer and the central heating without the risk of setting fire to the house.



And so, eventually, all the plugs were back where they were supposed to go and it works. It's even quieter than before and doesn't go blue screen quite so often. Even the wireless keyboard seems to work, and nooooooot doooooooo thiiiiiissss like it was before.

And if you think it's mending my computer which makes me a geek, wasn't Doctor Who sad last night?? :-(

Wayfaring.com

I have been introduced to Wayfaring and am not really sure how much use it will be yet.

But I've "done" Easter...



You can click and zoom in and look at satellite images and see photos and link to websites etc. You can also show routes you have travelled, but I haven't worked out how to do that yet...

A much more interesting use for it is the Jacktracker - mapping Jack Bauer's movements during the Day 5 of 24..

(It did highlight the fact that I have been to two restaurants called Belinda's during the holiday - one in Arundel and one in Bude. Which is probably more restaurants called Belinda's than anyone needs to go to.)

"Maybe I LIKE the misery..."

...© Mrs Doyle, Father Ted.

Couldn't pass this...



...without thinking that it would be the perfect place for her!

Thursday: The Snail on The Rail

A big change in Dublin from my last visit was the fact that they have finally finished the tram lines. There are two, but there's a ten minute walk between them. Considering it cost €1.5 billion, it doesn't smack of much joined-up thinking in the planning process. Never mind joined-up tram lines.

(Viz. also, Tunnels which are too small for lorries...)



The green line ran four stops from the city centre right in front of the hotel and only cost €4.50 a day for unlimited travel.



It's called the LUAS, which is Irish for "Speed". I hate to think what would happen if Sandra Bullock was driving. However, the tram combined with the Dublin Bus Tour 24 hour ticket meant that it was dead easy to get around, and we avoided some of the problems of car ownership.

Near a tree, by a river, there's a hole in the ground...

Right, time to respond to Andy and his comment about people feeling it necessary to advertise what they have been listening to on their blogs.

I have a last●fm profile which gives you personalised charts showing what you have just listened to. It works by installing a plugin (Audioscrobbler) to Windows Media Player (or whatever other player you are using) which watches your playlist and uploads it to a server somewhere. It's all "opt-in" so it bypasses the hassle which Apple has just had spying on i-tunes users' listening habits.

You can then use an RSS feed to add this information to a website, and that's how it appears on this blog. I've chosen to show you only the most recent three tracks I've listened to:

a) because you then can't see the full horror of my listening habits, and...
b) last●fm classes "recent" as about 24 hours, so even that disappears soon.

But... it only tracks what you have listened to on your computer... and so provides a completely false record of what you are actually listening to. I listen to most of my music in the car or on my i-river (like an i-pod, but better...) or around the house.

The music I listen to on my computer tends to be very random and it's often stuff that I have downloaded (legally!) or tried to find online for a specific reason. I listen to so little on the computer, despite having nearly all my CD collection on there, that if I listen to an artist twice, they appear at the top of my weekly charts. The other week it was Tears for Fears, because I had been talking about Donnie Darko. You make the connection.

Anyway, Andy got me thinking about my vinyl collection. My singles are all in the loft, about 500 of them (some of them picture discs and flexi-discs and 33rpm EPs) but my LPs are still on shelves in a spare room, even though I no longer possess anything to play them on. Most of what I still want to listen to, I now have digitally in one form or another, but I had a fun half hour looking through the gatefold sleeves and feeling the static as I took the albums out of their inner sleeves for the first time in about 16 years.

Not being in the least bit ashamed of my wide (and sometimes crap) taste in music, I am quite happy to share that the last piece of vinyl I ever bought was The Riddle by Nik Kershaw...



...which is in here with the rest of the stuff - a real slice of naff 80s!