daily life: this is Moscow calling

I had a scary moment yesterday. It is 10pm and I am watching some TV on my HTPC. Then, shock horror, I lose my internet connection. I glance at the router and the internet light is Orange, the router instructs me that their is an issue with the line, but just to be sure I restart it before coming to the realisation that I must phone BT. And so begins the worst 24 minutes of my life.

Firstly I phone to check if any faults are reported for my area, but sadly there are not.
I have to go through to Tech Support who are based in India.
While on hold I am instructed to visit www.bt.com for online help, okay then, I'll go do that when you fix my internetz.

When I finally get through to a 'technical advisor' she immediately instructs me to reset my router to factory defaults, which I politely refuse to do. After 10 minutes of battling, repeating every word 5 times, agreeing to be referred to as Ireye because I can't get her to understand my name is Matthew, she agrees to perform a line test and promptly promises to phone me back in 10 minutes.
25 minutes later I get a call, and the 'advisor' agrees that there is a fault with my line - Good job you hadn't instructed me to reset my router to factory defaults then. And they promise that an engineer is looking into it.

At 11pm on the dot my internetz are back, albeit at a reduced sync speed of just 8mb.

Then this morning BT phone me from India to ask if my problems are resolved, after 5 minutes of NPA where I tell the advisor I DON'T need assistance setting up my Wi-Fi, that my Xbox 360 and PS3 are working fine and that my BT Vision Box has been unplugged for 12months because it is rubbish, whilst being referred to as Mr Iran (Don't ask), I finally get off the phone.


I do have to hand it to BT that they can be efficient in fixing a fault, and the processes for making sure everything is fine the next day are a nice touch. But for the love of God, please can I speak to somebody who can string a sentence together in English. Repeating yourself 10 times over is not going to impress your customers. When you are continually referred to by the wrong name you get a bit annoyed. It's bad enough that the 'advisor' quotes a script that can't possibly resolve your fault.

You have been reading theguywhomoanscallediraney

technology: welcome to the world of yesterday.

Technology sure does move fast, and as William Shatner will tell you we can only imagine the miracles that are to come.
Shatner's Toupee would have flown off his head if somebody had told him that in the year 2011 I would be typing this message, and in mere milliseconds somebody anywhere in the world would be able to read it. Not that anybody is actually reading this nonsense.

I sure would like to know what magic those 2 buttons on that phone will be used for. One can only imagine, but I bet if you press them somebody will commission a decent Star Trek TV Series that doesn't get cancelled after 4 years.

entertainment: Son of a Preacher Man

I'm all for ensuring children grow up to become moral adults who know right from wrong. But I am getting a tad annoyed by all the preaching and 'high horsery' that is so prevalent on TV and film at the moment.

At the start of every Star Wars: The Clone Wars episode they flash up some moral nonsense along the lines of

"You hold onto friends by keeping your heart a little softer than your head."[src]

How on earth is a 4 year old even going to understand that anyway? I'm not even sure I do. We've got to a point where toddlers are being versed in Plato to teach them that stealing is wrong. All I needed was Postman Pat not stealing the post, now he flies around in his Royal Mail issued Helicopter, or his Royal Mail Hovercraft. How many DVDs did he pilfer to pay for that I ask you?

I've just put my down payment on a theguywhomoanscalledmatthew branded Stealth Bomber.

anouncement: they don't like it up 'em

Don't panic! I haven't gone away, but I have been incredibly busy  for a few weeks. Nothing has really annoyed me the last few days except that Google's 1.31 Google Checkout PHP files are full of bugs. But at least there is still Stuart Ashen's new BBC Comedy show 'Back Space' that I really advise you to check out. I've placed the first episode below, but I recommend that you click through for the rest (new episodes each Friday). Episode 2 is the best so far.

I know, there is nothing more annoying than when a blogger blows smoke up the @55 of another blogger (walks into coal-shed with shotgun slung over shoulder).

Well, I have to go and watch Psych, if you've not seen it before then watch the explanation below.

technology: development by divination.

Web development is a lucrative business and as web technologies have tried to meet the needs of users old approaches have been deprecated in the name of usability.

One example of this is Tables, back in the 90s every website was built around tables, if you need to position something on a page you used a table. It was messy and more than a little unreliable, but then came the DIV, a neat little box that you can position anywhere on a page, and automatically manoeuvre based on the screen size and resolution.
But with great flexibility comes great annoyance, and web development has been reduced to a hair pulling procedure of messing with CSS, floating here, clearing there. After 20 minutes of trying to float a div at the bottom of the screen you'll be curled up in the corner of the room, rocking back and forth in a puddle of your own drool.

There is only one think that can bring you back from the edge in such scenarios

driving: sirens song

If you drive regularly you probably listen to the radio from time to time, and in my case BBC Radio 2 is my station of choice, I do like a bit of the Jeremy Vine show.

But what annoys me is when songs with sirens or horns are played on the radio. How many times have you been trundling along and suddenly hear what you believe to be a police car or ambulance. You check your mirrors, look in your blind spot, trying to work out if you need to pull over. Unable to locate said vehicle, and slightly confused you assume it was in the distance and continue your drive. But alas, yonder sound does alight in your ears once more (I don't know why I went all Elizabethan either), and again you can't locate the source of the siren. Then it dawns on you, it was on the radio, some idiot decided to put the sound of a police car on the song, and some bigger idiot chose that song for the play-list

Everybody knows (yes mum, I put in the Cohen reference) that 99.99999% of all radio listening occurs in a motor vehicle, so it doesn't take a genius to realise broadcasting such sounds can be incredibly dangerous. Imagine if each of the ~8million drive time audience simultaneously started checking their mirrors, how many thousands would perish in the 'Great blind-spot check of 2011'

Therefore I call on the UK government, no the ECJ to legislate that any song containing a siren, alarm or horn should be banned from radio broadcast.

I'm a public service you know.

daily life: letters from the edge

The Royal Mail get a lot of stick, and although they often annoy me, I feel most of it is a tad extreme. Yes, the Postie arrives at 12pm on a good day, yes the Postie steals your valuable parcels, and yes a letter would arrive faster if you strapped it to the back of a sloth .

But where I draw the line is what I call the 'Royal Mail Tax'. If you ever import items into the UK exceeding the customs threshold (around £17) you have to pay import tax, VAT .etc. Fair enough (although they included P&P in the price). But then the Royal Mail charge you a 'Processing Fee' to take the items to HR Revenue and Customs for processing, and to collect the fees from you at your sorting office. This is possibly fair, it probably costs about 50p for RM to do this. But how much does RM charge you for this 'service'?


You probably guessed wrong, it's actually a whopping £8. How do the Royal Mail justify this tax, that often dwarfs the VAT and Customs charges.

Example, I imported some CDs from the U. S of A, with P&P they were about £20 (just over the threshold), the customs charges were about £4 so it was £24 (still cheaper than Amazon.co.uk), but then RM stuck their Royal Mail Tax on top bringing it to an eye watering £32.
How can the RM charge me £8 when the customs charges were only £4? If the item is £200 you could argue the £8 is small, but here it was nearly 50% of the cost of the items.

Royal Mail, I declare WAR on your TAX. Tell me if you think this was worth the hassle.