NTL are really crap. If you have a choice between NTL and someone else check the competition out because they would be hard pushed to be as bad as NTL.
I have been complaining for over a month now that my connection is very slow in the evenings and every time I phone up I end up taking to someone in india who insists that we go through the same script every time.
It goes roughly as follows:
I supply a postcode and they are unable to find it on their system. I have told them repeatedly that the post code they have on their system for us is wrong. I give them the one they have on the sytem for us but we have moved from theh script a little bit. They inform me they still cannot find the post code (or cannot be bothered looking) so they ask me to get the mac address of the modem. I get the distinct feeling its easier for them to have the mac address.
Once armed with this they seem to find some details that could be ours. They then ask to speak to Jenny. I explain that I have been on the account for a long time now and they still insist that Jenny must come to the phone. They still don’t recognise my name on the account and insist that Jenny confirms I am who I say I am, utter shambles. Not only are they wasting my time they are wasting Jenny’s. What’s really frustrating is that we go through this EVERY time we have a problem which is failry frequently. Jenny tells them that I am authorized to be on the account so we continue (at this poing I know they have not updated any account details to reflect what they have learnt ie they have a bad postcode on their system and that I am an account holder).
I am then asked what firewalls, virus software etc I am using. If I tell them that I have anything running I will be asked to turn it off. They then ask me if I run any filesharing software, err no. I am then asked if I have a router connected to the modem, at this poing if you say yes you are in unknown territory because they won’t support that configuration (Their highly trained operatives are not highly trained in IT, they are highly trained in call handling times which means following a script). After some more questions which I have answered on several occassions dotted over the last month I eventually get the opportunity to get an engineer to come out.
Some people would be glad they got through etc but we have had an engineer out who changed our modem. I could have told them then what the problem is. The problem is as follows.
During the evenings our bandwidth drops to dial up speeds. It does not take a rocket scientist to realise that more people are coming on line in the evenings and NTL are not able to cope with the bandwidth.
My next port of call will be trading standards because we are paying for a 2Mb connection and its taking google.com up to 20 seconds to load. We are not getting what we are paying for by a longshot.
getting the following sort of speeds:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/robin.d.h.walker/speedtest.html?1139855238265
Mon, 13 Feb 2006 18:27:48 GMT
1st 128K took 563 ms = 232810 Bytes/sec = approx 1937 kbits/sec
2nd 128K took 531 ms = 246840 Bytes/sec = approx 2054 kbits/sec
3rd 128K took 531 ms = 246840 Bytes/sec = approx 2054 kbits/sec
4th 128K took 547 ms = 239620 Bytes/sec = approx 1994 kbits/sec
less that 3kbps.
Abbey Business Account Shambles
If I were to ask you what the most fundamental things a bank must never do I am sure there are a few who would pick the following answer.
Loose your money
To open an abbey business account you need to deposit £50+ worth of cash. I opened an account with £120 and guess what? The account opened but the money was missing.
I have spent several weeks trying to get through to someone on the phone about this matter. I spoke to someone a few weeks ago at the weekend and was told I had to call them during the week but they would get someone to call me. Guess what, no call.
I went with this Business Account because it looked like a good deal but I am slowly realizing that it might not have been a good idea, their customer service is severely limited. Every time I phone during the week I get held up in queues for twenty minutes.
As an update: It took me two years to get the money. Yes, they kept the money for 24 months. If I was to withhold money from any company that long I would end up in court. However, I was warned that if I tried to take them to court that I might not get the full amount back especially if I did not put in enough effort to get it. It seems crazy that a company can hold your money and then you need to work to get it back out of them.
Abbey never apologized or gave me any interest on this money. Surely there must be some law in the UK to protect people against this sort of behaviour?
Layered Technologies
I have just been combing through the logs because I have been getting hit quite hard recently and was wondering who by and I noticed the strangest thing.
I noticed the following IP address was cropping up under different referrers.
216.32.75.122
I also found the following blog entry about Layered Tech supporting referrer spam
So far I have noticed them masquerading as the following referrers.
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; FunWebProducts-MyTotalSearch; SV1)" 1 www.uklug.co.uk Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)" 0 www.uklug.co.uk Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)" 0 www.uklug.co.uk Mozilla/2.0 (compatible; Ask Jeeves/Teoma; +http://sp.ask.com/docs/about/tech_crawling.html)" 0 www.uklug.co.uk Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; BecomeBot/2.3; MSIE 6.0 compatible; +http://www.become.com/site_owners.html)" 0 www.uklug.co.uk aipbot/1.0 (aipbot; http://www.aipbot.com; aipbot@aipbot.com)" 0 www.uklug.co.uk
Oxford Dictionary
I noticed tonight that the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is being replaced by www.webster.com.
How do I know this? Well, have a look for
ClAMOUR
what on earth do they mean chiefly British variant of CLAMOR
BOLLIX. What they should really mean is
CLAMOUR
proper spelling of our americanised terrible spelling of CLAMOR
All jokes aside I use webster.com almost religiously and have even adopted color over colour. Having looked at the OED website it’s little wonder why people are now using the webster.com dictionary over the OED. The OED has pushed a small search box over to the right hand side corner and filled the screen with:
1: A word of the day
If I wanted a word of the day I would go looking for it. Its a bit daft to place this “nice feature” above the dictionary.
2: A quote From.
I own the “Oxford Dictionary of Quotations” and if I am after a quote I am not looking for a Dictionary.
3, A word From (some foreign language).
Who cares how the French say “shit”, wheres the ENGLISH dictionary …..(I o)
I think the OED is selling itself short. I know that for some people Webster is the be all and end all but I am still a believer in the OED. I would like the OED to retain the definitive English dictionary crown but judging from their website this looks unlikely. They should really place more emphasis on it than they do or they risk becoming runner up to webster.com or some other more techno savvy company.
Heroin Take Away
I just noticed the following in an article on the BBC. I admit the article was written quite a while ago but it still struck me as stating the bloody obvious.
Youngsters in Luton can now get a fix of heroin delivered faster than a pizza, a community drugs project has warned.
so whats new. I was under the impression that it pretty much the same everywhere. Only just yesterday I saw a drug deal take place on the way home from work. I regularly smell “Grass” when walking through Luton town center, particularly at night.
The articles also goes on to say
drugs use was on the rise among Asian communities in the UK.
Again, whats new. Its on the increase everywhere. To top it off though I also liked the following statement.
They also warned that drug dealers were seen by teenagers as role models.
Do I have to ask “whats new” again. Why should teenagers not look up to people who drive around in brand new BMW’s and Merc’s. When ‘Dad’ says
“Son, drugs are bad! Don’t do them and don’t sell them!”
‘Son’ then sees dad catch the bus to work while Mr drug dealer sales past with the roof down in a BMW convertible.
What message are we sending to the kids when this happens.
“Thats society won’t tolerate drugs.”
Errrrrrrrr, wrong answer!
As far as most kids are concerned they see flash cars and bling on the drug dealer, looking at his dad he sees sweat on his brow and a worn out suit on his back.
We are not sending the right message to the teenagers by allowing drug dealers to walk the streets. Lock them up and throw away the key. Of course it costs a lot of money to put people in prison so we tend towards leniency. God forbid we would be too harsh on our criminals and cost the taxpayer more money!
Walsh Western Shambles
I ordered a set of Non Dell rails from Dell 7 days ago and they where ready to be delivered to me on the Thursday. I though this was great. I got a call on Thursday from Walsh Western saying that they had tried to deliver the rails. I found this very odd because Jenny was in the house. They said they left a card saying they had been there. I phoned Jenny and she had a look for the card. It wasn’t there.
Friday: Same thing. They say they left a card and Jenny was off work the whole day but we received no card and have not heard anything from them at all.
Saturday: I called them to ask what the hell was going on and they told me that it would be delivered on Monday.
Monday: No rails, No card, No phone call, Sweet FA. I tried to phone but they all close at 17:30.
TO BE CONTINUED
This is just a bit pathetic although not as pathetic as my recent encounter with Midland Mainline.
Edenvale University Scam
The university above is completely fictitious. They have copied Leeds Uni. Compare the following 2 sites
Leeds University
http://www.edenvaleuniversity.net/
They have even left references in the source code of the page to Leeds university. They are selling qualifications. It would appear that some people are using them
http://www.quivivre.com/datadean/ddcv-txt.txt
After reading this guys CV I noticed what appears to be another dodgy site
http://www.wwdlc.net/
I have not seen this “Body” mentioned anywhere else yet they have listed Edenvale as one of their universities.
lamicrogroup rip off
I just came across www.lamicrogroup.co.uk tonight and had a look their prices and its more expensive to buy from them than it is to go buy from the dell outlet.
Much to my astonishment I then came across www.lamicrogroup.com which has the exact same products and the exact same website except the prices are in dollars. What knocked me for six is that all the servers are half the price of the uk models.
This begs the question, are they ripping off uk customers? It certainly looks like it to me.
Amost posioned by a crap Chinese restaurant
We got a delivery from a Chinese restaurant tonight:
The Oriental
2A Granville Road
Luton
Beds
LU1 1PA
When we actually got the meal it we found that there was raw chicken in it. I got a refund and reported them to the local council. I have no idea what else we can do about it. I think they shouldn’t be trading if they can’t be bothered to cook the food properly. It’ll be the last time we order anything from them.
Continue reading “Amost posioned by a crap Chinese restaurant”
Unsolicited Email
Last year I was looking for work so I registered with gojobsite.co.uk and stuck my CV up their. I actaully did get some leads from it but nothing substantial.
Anyway I seem to get random emails from recruiters that are completely irrelevant. I don’t get them often but I do get them and I know that its a bulk mailing system they are using. They have not even looked at the details they just do a mix and match hodge podge and come up with a list, the more the merrier because they know there are plenty of dumb ass people who forward job offers emails all over the place. If you think there is nothing wrong with this then have a read of Sharp Practices.
Anyway I got another one today and I politely asked them to take me off the mailing list. The reply was as follows
The email was sent through an internet candidate database. Your details
have come up in a search of keywords from your CV.
Inevitably, there are mistakes made with this type of search, meaning
job descriptions may not be perfectly suited to your profile.
However, we invite candidates to send their CV so that we can update
their profile accordingly on our in-house database
If you no longer wish to receive emails through internet databases,
then this point needs to be raised with any Recruitment websites you are
subscribed to.
If you wish to be included on our in-house database, please reply with
your most up-to-date CV, detailing your ideal position in the body of
the email. We will then call, or email you with details of more suitable
positions
Any questions, do not hesitate in contacting me directly
If I had registered with several recruitment sites how am I meant to tell which one I am to go back to and change. The other thing is, I might be very happy with the other companies that send me job advertisements except his and no internet recruitment company I have come across allows you to selectively choose which “Partners” of theirs are allowed to send you emails.
I know that the laws changed on December 11 2003 so I decided to go looking to see if there was anything I could do about it.
This is what I found
I have asked them to take me off their email list and they have failed to comply. I have replied with pointers to the appropriate materials online and I am awaiting a reply to that. If I get no joy then I will report them.