Category: Rant

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Unison Strike

It makes me sick!

I walk past the Unison building every morning and for the last few days there have been several beggars stood outside asking me for more money.

It galls me to think that the beggars posing as workers think they deserve more money. Damn few of the rest of us are getting anything. In fact we are all TAKING A PAY CUT. Thats what it means when times are tough. But Oh No, if you’re in a union, in particular if you are in the public services you can bend us all over a barrel. Didn’t anyone teach these people economics 101.

1. You force the government to give you a pay rise.
2. The government still needs to pay for hospitals, police, roads etc
3. They raise taxes and print a few billion notes to cover costs.

We’re all feeling the pinch. Petrol is up, food is up, gas is going up and the private sector is suffering. What makes these unions think they deserve the money more than anyone else. They don’t!

I sincerely hope I am not alone in thinking that Gordon Brown should tell them all to grow up. I’m sick of pampered public sector workers thinking they’re having a harder time than anyone else in the country. Their two day strike has cost some families two days more childcare. Did they think about this, I would imagine that the ones organizing the strike have and the more pain they can inflict to get what they want the better.

My personal opinion is that anyone striking for more pay in the current climate should be positively encouraged to find alternative employment elsewhere (fired).

It’s time society and government stood up to unions, that are nothing more than self interest groups and lobbyists, shafting the rest of society. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against an honest gripe and workers putting down tools, but this is taking the piss.

 

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Captital One Scam

I just received a credit card offer from Capital One in the post today. They offered me a credit card with a 34.94% APR. Yes, thats right, 34.94%. Lets put this in perspective.
capitalone.gif
Lets say on your 18th Birthday your parents give you £100. Being sensible you invest this in a pension scheme which of course saves you tax etc. Over the next 45 years the pension scheme earns 34.94% interest annually. Guess how much you would be worth when you reach 65 years of age.

£670 Million

Lets say mum and dad could afford to give you £5000 pounds and you did the same with this. How much would you be worth at retirement.

£33.5 Billion

For our American cousins thats

$65.3 Billion

You’d be the richest person on the planet by a long margin. Bill Gates would be asking you to dinner.

To say I was dumb struck is an understatement. I had a look on their website and they are offering credit cards for 9.9% APR. So if you take their mail offer up they charging you 3.5 times more than on line customers. What customers are unlikely to check on line? Yes, the elderly and low income.

I don’t know about anyone else but charging 34.94% interest seems morally wrong to me. I recently read the book Super Crunchers and to be honest I am pretty sure that I am just one of a random selection of customers they have sent offers to.

Capital One have been pioneering the use of random statistical tests to see where customer pain points are. It works like this.

100,000 customers get offered credit cards (the numbers following are just examples). The customers are broke up into random segments where

25% get offered the credit cards at 34.94%
25% get offered the credit cards at 24.94%
25% get offered the credit cards at 14.94%
25% get offered the credit cards at 9.94%

They then count how many people in each segment take the offer up. Capital One can then work out where the maximum profit point is. This sort of thing is going on all the time so I shouldn’t be that annoyed about it but I just cannot help feeling it’s wrong.

Note: For these people who scoff at me not including inflation try the calculation where we assume our enterprising little investor saves the same amount each year plus another 10%.

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Virgin Media £250 for 2Mbit Connection

I complained recently to Virgin Media about problems with my account. Well, it gets better. Have a look at the following two numbers, numbers are in bits per second:
virgin-media-logo.jpg

  1. 56000      This is the theoretical speed of an ordinary dial up.
  2. 147456    This is currently the average speed of my connection

Not bad.  Virgin Media is 3 times faster than a dial up. Wow, slow down. The really shitty part is that I am paying for the following speed.

  1. 2000000

If we apply some simple maths to this we get:

2000000 / 147456 == 13.5

This means that my Virgin media bandwidth is 13.5 slower than what I’m paying for. At the current rate I would have to pay about £250 to get a real 2Mbit connection. Should I complain again…… Whats the point, I get through to someone who can only check the cable modem. You spend ages on the phone and they tell you nothing is wrong.

I hate changing services but this is becoming insane.

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Daniel Gibbins Conman or Gibbon

I was recently approached by a member of the St. Nicholas (East Dereham, Image on the right taken from Simon at the Norfolk Churches website) committee and was asked to go over a proposal from Daniel Gibbins. This committee member had some misgivings about the whole thing hence contacting me. He assumed that because I work for Yahoo! and bore him half to tears about websites a lot I might know a bit about websites, he was right.

dereham-st-nicholas.jpgAnyway, it took me about five minutes to realize that Daniel Gibbins is a novice posing as a professional. Professional web anything and Daniel should not be mentioned in the same sentence. This is not a particularly uncommon thing. For instance:

  • Honest Tradseman or Cowboy.
  • Car Dealer or Wheeler Dealer.

Sometimes people are just misguided, they have done a two month DIY course and they consider themselves plumbers, brickies or joiners. It’s an ongoing war professionals in any trade or profession have.

The story gets better though.

I decided that rather than let Daniel take the money from the church I’d be prepared to do the thing for cost price (not charge for my time) which would be cheaper. I would also go through a proper requirements gathering process etc and provide them with a much more tailored solution. I am not normally that charitable, it just happens that the committee member that approached me is my future father in law and of course this makes his daughter my bosswife to be.

The problem I had though is, how do I tell the church committee that Daniel Gibbins might be a conman without sounding like a tosser.

I could tell them that his DNS servers are running on the same class C network, not necessarily a bad thing for toy websites but not exactly something you should be selling in a commercial package. Or I could list evidence pointing to him being a reseller for Heart Internet. I could list some severe flaws on his websites, tell them that I don’t believe the guy is a Christian, at least by my definition, or that most of the websites he has done are awful. His content is mostly vapour. Most of this they would not understand. For instance if you do not understand what dynamic content is how am I meant to explain DNS and why you need two servers.

After a lot of discussion with the committee member it was agree that I would meet with some of the committee to go over some ideas etc. I walked them through some bits and bobs and the whole thing took a couple of hours. This was mostly to show them possibilities for the website and to try and show them just how much more could easily be provided over and above Daniels proposal. I was asked some very pertinent questions and a lot of good ideas came out of the meeting. I was also asked some questions about what I thought of Daniels proposal and I answered them honestly, I only wish I had not been so damned politically correct. A couple of the committee members gave me the impression they had some concern about Daniel but I got the distinct feeling that the whole meeting had been a waste of time and that the decision had already been made by a higher authority.

Shortly afterwards the committee met with Daniel, and as I suspected “they” (I am not sure if the committee was actually involved in the decision or not hence the quotes) decided to go with him.

When I think about it why believe me

  • I don’t go to church and Daniel says he does.
  • I don’t claim to be a Christian Daniel does.
  • I didn’t wear a suit, Daniel did.
  • I didn’t wear a cross on my lapel apparently Daniel did.

I knew something was fishy and I am pretty sure more than one member of the committee suspected something was wrong. I decided at that point to count myself lucky I had not been asked to do the site and not to push any further with it or it might be a bit embarrassing for some people. Besides, shit has a tendency to float so I decided to keep an eye on Google and wait for Daniel to cock things up. Well, I didn’t have to wait very long. I searched Google for Daniel Gibbins today and the first entry read Daniel Gibbins LIAR. For those wondering the image on the right is Daniel Gibbins (Image taken from ezinearticles.com where Daniel has created an expert Bio by stealing copying content from books)
 
Daniel-Gibbins_74963.jpg
I searched further down the results for entries about Daniel Gibbins and a lot of people have been giving him quite a pasting. Now, we all make mistakes, I’m as likely as the next person to cock something but what a pasting.

The basic story is this:

Daniel Gibbins Stole Content from other peoples books and sold this as his own. Is this dishonest? Hell yes, it’s illegal. Daniel has infringed various copyright laws and in more than one country. He has been selling these articles to make himself look like a professional web designer. Of course this is not all he has been up to.

Off the back of his new found web professional status he sets up two companies/websites

  • cortinawebsolutions.co.uk
  • churchwebsitedesign.org.uk

Of course he’s a Christian so the next logical step is to help the church, so he starts canvassing them for business. Now at this point we might think that Daniel is not very clever. But, if we dig deeper we would find that the price Daniel is offering for his services is suspiciously close to an amount each diocese was offered to build themselves a website. I can hear people saying that this is just being enterprising. I also found it odd that he offered huge reductions to get close to this price. Is he doing this genuinely because it’s the church or has it more to do with thats all the church could spend.

In Daniels case I personally believe that this can only be attributed to one of two things.

  • Daniel Gibbins is a Conman.
  • He’s not very net savvy and does not realize the severity of what he has done (hence Gibbon in the title).  

Now. If he is a professional web designer then he fully understands what he has done. This is schoolboy error stuff i.e. only someone under 12 might be able to claim it was a mistake. Even so, most schoolboys understand what plagiarism is. In either case this is not someone you want to be running your website for you.

My advice to Daniel:

First off, make a public apology. Especially to Rich. He should then start taking down all the copyright infringed content. I would also recommend he find suitable homes for websites he has already done on the back of a lie. I don’t doubt that the other sites will learn soon enough about what has happened and the fall out could be quite bad. You don’t want the church publicly blacklisting you or your business online.

My advice to the Owners of websites hosted by Daniel.

Get out before the shit hits the fan. Download all your
content from the website and get it hosted somewhere sensible. Here are a few key points to get you started.

1. Don’t confront him till you have all your content and control of your domain.

I am not suggesting he would take your site down but….

2. Get control of the domain name.

If you don’t have the admin password to control the domain you need to get it and then change it. This is really important. You must have this to control your website.

3. Backup your website to your PC.

To do this you need to save each page or run a tool that will mirror the website. If you do not know how to do this let me know the website and I will download it for you and send you a zipped up file. Make sure you get all the images etc.

4. Find another hosting provider.

Hosting a website is cheap. You should not really be paying any more than £10 a month for a static website. You can get cheaper deals but if it’s over a tenner they might be selling you a big white elephant. If you have a dynamic site (most of Daniels sites are static) then the hosting might cost more. For instance a wordpress blog. Again it still won’t be very expensive. You can get reasonably reliable small hosting deals for £3 per month so shop around.

5. If you know other site owners using Daniel help them.

6. Put something on your website saying you are no longer associated with the church web design project otherwise he will be able to con more unsuspecting victims into giving Daniel their money.

Another thing for Daniel to bear in mind is that employers, particular in the technical area use Google and Yahoo! to research people so a job change might be a good idea.

I might add I am not a web designer myself. I’m a web developer, this means I tend to work at the back end of websites, this is part of what I do at
Yahoo! If I have ever called myself a professional web designer, I meant professional web developer. Yes, there is a difference
and I am sometimes guilty of using one when I should be using the other 😉

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Virgin Media Hell

NTL hell is now Virgin Media Hell. I have had a fault on my broadband for over a week now. It’s Christmas and I am not using my broadband much so I have not been overly bothered about it. I made the stupid assumption that Virgin Media would be hot on the heels of any faults.

How wrong was I!

I checked on their website to see if there is a local fault and according to Virgin Media there is no faults in my area. I decided to report a fault….

Virgin Media, in their wisdom have introduced a charge to call their technical support line. Basically to report a fault I need to pay them 25p per minute. Yes, you heard that correctly! I spoke to a different helpline on the local rate and was told that I would be refunded if it was a genuine fault so this leaves me in a bit of a dilemma.

You see, I remember spending in excess of 40 minutes on the old NTL technical support lines and eventually hanging up. So is Virgin Media different Do I risk spending £10 waiting for them to answer my call? I wonder if they have seen a drop in fault reports since introducing the charge.

I decided to call and see how long it takes to get through because with no Internet connection I cannot work. So the story goes like this.

I called them at 12:39:10

and I let it ring until 12:41 (I was surprised I didn’t get music)

Got someone at 12:41:20

and left the phone at 12:50

so the call came to over £2 but I was told I would get a refund. I was also told that there is no problem with the cable modem and that if an engineer comes out they will run the exact same tests and if there is no fault they will bill me £25. I decided against calling out an engineer.

Now. I have checked all my gear, it works fine. I have connected to two different servers in two different countries to make sure it is not the ISP the server resides with. Same problem, intermittent connection. So the lowest common denominator is Virgin Media. Unfortunately Virgin Media technical support are unable to diagnose faults unless it’s the cable modem. So this leave me with a severe problem.

The Internet is where I make my living. if I can’t work the mortgage won’t get paid. So! Do I stay with Virgin Media or do I go with BT?

I am sure BT has it’s own problems but they might be able to diagnose faults and therefore fix problems better than Virgin Media.

Has anyone else switched from Virgin Media to BT?

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Fashism

The title is not a spelling mistake. fashism.jpg
This is worth a read. Its fairly tongue in cheek but good fun.
The Last Language War / Language Trolling Post You’ll Ever Need To Read (Hopefully)
The comments are a testament to how dumb some people are. Bits like:

“Oh…. Why didn’t you include my language”.
“I cannot believe you didn’t include the language X”
“Language X would have been the cool kid, splurgh”
“Blah blah blah”

Why are developers so petty, why do they not get sarcasm. I have heard developers, between bouts of mental wanking, talk about “Fashion Victims” as if these people had some sort of disease. Wake up, we’re all susceptible to fashion. You might be fashion conscious about:
Clothes.
Programming Languages.
Cars.
Gadgets.
Processors.
Pets.
Yours might not be on the list but I am sure that between us we could find something. Does this make us all fashcists?

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Luton Estate Agents

Mike Willis are a bunch of cowboys. We used them to rent a flat for us. I have never dealt with a firm that lied through thier teeth as much as these guys. Here is a list of some of their failings:
1. Failure to pass on money from the tenant on more than one occasion
3. Failure to carry out spot checks on the property as agreed.
4. Failure to advise us that there was a problem with the washing machine for over 4 weeks.
5. Failure to arrange an electrician to complete works on the property.
Do not use Mike Willis for anything, they are by far the most unprofessional firm we have ever dealt with.

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Vanishing software

I recently came across this article.
Making that vital development decision
please don’t go off and read it. I was looking forward to reading it until I read the first paragraph.

I believe that within five years, all software development will be based on one of two virtual-machine technologies: Sun’s J2EE, which is based on its JVM (Java Virtual Machine), and Microsoft’s .NET Framework, which is based on the CLR (Common Language Runtime).

I made the interesting parts bold.
This article was written in “Jun 13, 2002”. What this means is that in a couple of weeks time 80% of all development work on the planet will cease. No more work will be carried out on Linux, Windows, macintosh, not to mention more than 80% of all dynamic websites.
After reading that sentence I was unable to continue. Anyone who believes something like that or expects me to is hardly qualified to make a rational judgement about J2EE or .NET.

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iGoogle

I just noticed that if you click on iGoogle from that point forward if you go to the normal google page it redirects you to iGoogle. What were they thinking.

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Google “Do No Evil”

I belive one of Google’s core values is “Do No Evil”.
I have just watched “Lord of War” and from it I got the impression that some peoples definition of evil are very different than others. I think the same can be said about Google in as much as that their definition may be a bit different than mine.
I have spent the last two months worried sick that I have been shunned by Google for some unknown transgression with regards spamming their search engine which is something I go out of my way not to do. I have hunted a fair bit online to find out why my website has take such a massive hit in earings and today I think I found it.
Google has been releasing a software update called “BigDaddy”, I have no idea what this is going to do for Google but according to some blogs I have read in particular Matts this new update will pave the way for expansion etc of Google blah blah.
Meanwhile I wait in the background wondering if this is the cause of my dilema. I read the forums, search Google for Google related information (Ironic isn’t it) and generally worry myself sick thinking I have done something wrong and have been penalised.
I don’t know about you but if Google could do something about my distress but chooses not too then surely this could be construed as being a little bit evil. On the other hand if releasing some bulletin etc impacted the masses more than us web masters then that could also be construed as being a little bit evil as well, probably more so. It’s certainly a sticky situation to be in regardless of what side of the fence you are on. However they did say “Do No Evil”. If you have read “Built to Last” it would appear that Google has not yet seen the Genuis of the AND” and would appear to still side on the “The Tyranny of the Or”.
Why can they not keep us informed of these impacts and make massive changes. Would it affect share price that much, is their share price more important to them than their users?
I have no idea what has happened over that last few months (which is the biggest problem) but whatever they have done I appear to be on the wrong end of it and have never felt as let down by them as I do now. It is small comfort to know that this happens fairly regulary and given enough time it will all sort itself out.
I really hope it does.