Colour me proud! My daughter’s results at GCSEs are seven A grades and four B grades! Woohoo!
So it seems as though Gary Glitter has decided that after being in one place for a few years, he’d better start earning some more air miles by travelling around from location to location in the Far East.
If that is the case, then he’d be well-served by not returning to the UK as there are plans afoot to slap a Foreign Travel Order on him which would prevent him travelling abroad from here. That would scupper any plans he might have to get access to decent airport lounges in the future by upgrading from blue to gold or platinum frequent flyer programmes.
I found out very recently that possibly my favourite free service on the Internet is no more. It’s a sad loss.
A friend was celebrating their birthday, so as usual I decided to go to Apple’s iCard site to send them an iCard. These were electronic greeting cards: you selected the image you wanted, selected the typeface, wrote your greeting, added the recipient’s e-mail address and clicked the send button. The recipient would then receive an e-mail from you with the card as a JPEG attachment. Simple, elegant and spam-free.
For some reason, it was a service that Apple provided free of charge despite being at least nominally part of their .Mac package - I had this for a while but decided it wasn’t worth the money to me as I had more than enough provision elsewhere.
And It Just Worked.
But now Apple has rolled out its MobileMe service and has confirmed that the iCards service is no longer available. Their suggested solution?
“If you do not use Mac OS X v10.5, there are many third-party greeting card services that are available online that can easily be located using your favorite Internet search engine.”
That’s as may be, but without exception - in my experience - they’re all shite and/or look like Spam/dodgy sites. Another blogger, Thomas Fitzgerald, puts it very well:
“Most e-card sites and services offer either advertising riddled flash cards or ridiculous website hoop jumping for the recipient to receive their card. Many offer poor quality animation and annoying sound in something that looks more like spam than a greeting card. Apple’s solution on the other hand was incredibly simple. They licensed some high quality artwork and photography and made it super simple to both send and receive. For the sender, you simply select an image, add your message, select the recipient and click send. On the receiver’s end they simply got an email with a jpeg of the card and message attached to the email. No jumping through hoops, no clicking through websites, no barrage of advertising. Simple, effective, elegant, and unfortunately, soon to be gone.”
Amen to that.
Bingo from the Banana Splits
Kathreya from Big Brother
Has anyone noticed the remarkable resemblance between the Banana Splits‘ Bingo and Kathreya from Big Brother? I wonder if they are by any chance related?
You know I am starting to get more than a little ticked off with Internet Explorer 7 on Tablet PCs. It seems to be incapable of coping with the closure of a tab when that tab (or maybe the next ‘live’ tab) is showing anything modern like a web 2.0 site or some such social networking site. What happens is simply that the program stops working and sometimes allows itself to be closed with the X but more often than not requires the task manager to close it.
Can someone please explain to me the point of pointy shoes (ho ho)?
The other day, I was on my way to a meeting and had some time to kill and as I am now wearing work shoes every day, I thought it might be worth buying myself some new ones.
Now I’m a size 9 generally and that was - as far as I knew - Mr. Average when I was younger, though nowadays it appears that bigger is the norm. Anyway, you don’t really want to look like a cross between between Krusty the Clown and Aladdin, I’d have thought, so why do blokes seem to want to buy ridiculously long shoes with pointy or cut-off pointy ends?
I tried on a Hush Puppies pair that looked like a halfway decent Oxford but hadn’t realised the extent of the shaped toe which made the shoe a good couple of inches longer than my present pair. Why?
Well Claire lied: having been told again nearly three weeks ago by O2 that they would definitely call me back within five working days and that Be Broadband - part of O2 - would have removed their details from the line, their website still claimed that a service was already on that line, no-one called me back.
My Vodafone usage has started to come up again since I started using the webcam so I decided to give O2 one final chance to redeem themselves. So I called O2 on Friday last week and a helpful guy called Mike said he’d try again and ring me back when it was resolved, which he did an hour later.
He then took me through things and the line check sadly came back as a tad pathetic, but nevertheless they could do me a service at £7.50 a month subject only to a fair usage cap which is fine. So the other was placed as an existing O2 customer using one of my kids’ O2 mobiles as the customer details - so Jack presently gets order status updates texted through to him.
I am told the line should be active by the end of the week - at which time I’ll be able to see what sort of speed they can deliver - and my wireless router should arrive at the office here tomorrow. The speed is not what I wanted as they don’t have the exchange unbundled yet and no fibre optics in place, but we’ll see.
Well no surprise there: having been told on Friday by O2 that they would definitely call me back within 24 hours by when Be Broadband - part of O2 - had removed their details from the line, after 48 hours their website still claims that a service is already on that line and no-one has called me back.
{sigh}
Of course, if I visit the Be Broadband website it says I can get ADSL2+ and would I like to place an order?
Left hand, meet right hand…
Anyway, O2 have no record of my telephone calls - excellent stuff, O2… - but Claire has promised to ring me back within 5 working days. We’ll see.
I have just moved into a flat in London and had thought I’d use my Vodafone mobile for voice calls and my Vodafone 3G USB stick for Internet access. The thinking behind this was that I am already paying monthly sums for both services, so why pay for a new line and new broadband access? This was reinforced by the download limits contained within many mainstream home broadband providers which are the same as or less than my Vodafone mobile broadband account allowance.
It soon became apparent that my bundled call minutes would be insufficient for calling home regularly of an evening, so I decided to arrange for a landline through BT. This was set up and working on Wednesday this week - well done BT - and gives me free evening and weekend calls as I signed up for a year.
Now I started to have ‘issues’ with the Vodafone mobile broadband: my account gets billed mid-month, so to track usage, I have to use the full version of their software. Vodafone also compress images whether you want to or not but the full version allows you to modify the extent of this, whilst still having them compressed. I also cannot FTP files to webservers without them being cocked-up by Vodafone en route. In addition to this, one important aspect of my use would be to keep in touch with my kids over Windows Live Messenger but this does not work with the full version of the software.
The alternative is to use Vodafone’s “Lite” software. The downside with this is that the compression is worse and not adjustable by the user and the software only tracks usage on a month by month basis and not on my billing basis.
So I decided that I would sign up to broadband. BT are overpriced compared with other providers, so I decided on O2. According to their website, broadband is already activated on that line through Be Broadband … who are now part of O2, but because I’m not the customer of record, I would need to contact BT to have the tag removed: O2 blamed BT re-using that number for the cock-up.
After an hour and two dropped calls by BT - same old, same old - I was told there definitely isn’t a tag on that line, but according to their broadband checker:
“For Postcode [telephone number, not Postcode, removed] on Exchange BERMONDSEY We’ve just tested your line and can confirm your line supports the UK’s most complete broadband package, BT Total Broadband. We estimate your maximum download speed to be 0.5 Mbps (Megabits per second). Download speeds are dependent on a number of factors, such as the distance between your telephone exchange to your house and how many people are using broadband at the same time so whilst your broadband speed can vary, BT Total Broadband will always give you the maximum download speed available based on these factors.”…which is frankly pathetic! Entering the postcode instead, I get this:
“For Postcode [removed] on Exchange CANARY WHARF We’ve just tested your line and can confirm your line supports the UK’s most complete broadband package, BT Total Broadband. We estimate your maximum download speed to be 3.0 Mbps (Megabits per second). Download speeds are dependent on a number of factors, such as the distance between your telephone exchange to your house and how many people are using broadband at the same time so whilst your broadband speed can vary, BT Total Broadband will always give you the maximum download speed available based on these factors.”So it seems something is wrong somewhere! Anyway, when I went through to O2 to place an order, entering the telephone number tells me this:
“Be broadband is currently activated on this BT landline number. Because Be is part of O2, you can move to O2 Broadband without any penalty and without giving Be your usual three month notice of cancellation. You’ll need to get a MAC key from Be before we can take your order though. So please raise a ticket through Be’s member centre (http://www.bethere.co.uk/memberhome.do), or give them a call on 0808 234 8566.”It clearly isn’t, and that number seems constantly engaged. Ringing O2, they told me it definitely was so there must be a tag still on that number and that due to Data Protection Act issues, I would have to contact BT to get it removed. So here I am: there isn’t or there is a tag on the line, which is either in Bermondsey or Canary Wharf neither of which will support anything much by way of line speed and which may or may not be in O2’s “Broadband” area - which is actually ADSL2+ - and may or may not be in O2’s “Home Broadband” area which is slower and more expensive. {sigh} Wouldn’t it be good to get the right answer to the question first time?
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