deKay’s Blog

Because when I went in there today, this is what I saw:

It would seem that Boots don’t realise it’s only the first week in September. They had four whole rows of this sort of thing.

For a litre of petrol. One pound sixteen.

Just over four years ago, when I got my current car, a tank of petrol would cost me around £30. Now it’s £47. I don’t even have a choice, either - I can’t manage without my car because public transport in Norfolk is pretty much non-existent.

Rubbish.

I’m not happy.

You know I rang Microsoft to ask if I bought an Elite 360, and transferred all my stuff over from my Premium, whether they’d be able to fix the DRM to allow me to play XBLA games even when offline? And they said yes, it was possible? Well, having transferred the data over today, I rang them.

And they can’t do it. So I now have £400-worth of content I can’t play, on a £260 console I wouldn’t have bought if they’d told me it wasn’t possible.

I’ve made a complaint that on their bad advice I’m now heavily out of pocket. Lets see where that gets me.

I’ve just been woken up by what can only be described as an earthquake. Woo!

Yesterday, eBay announced that they’re going to stop allowing negative feedback on sales. Sort of, anyway - only buyers will be allowed to leave negative feedback, with sellers having to make do with positive or nothing. Of course, this now means that (for sellers) no feedback is the new bad feedback. I believe it’s a backwards step. I’m not saying the positive/negative feedback thing is the best solution, but this is even worse.

I lost any faith in eBay years ago when they couldn’t sort out a problem I had with someone who sent me a non-working Dreamcast game. They made out it was up to me to contact the seller, even though I’d emailed them several times and sent messages via eBay (which they had logs of) - all to no response. In the end, I just gave up on it and left them bad feedback (which they somehow convinced eBay to remove).

Then there’s the problem of pirated products. Until recently, almost all GBA games on eBay were pirated copies. Did eBay care? Clearly not, as the traders kept on trading. the only reason the number of knock-offs has declined is because interest in the console has. Sellers have moved on to selling dodgy DS titles instead. Almost every DVD I’ve been interested in (mostly anime stuff) has blatantly been a copy, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a non-pirate Ranma 1/2 DVD box set on the site.

And the fees! There’s a fee for listing. There’s a fee once your item has sold. There’s a fee if you use Paypal to receive your money. There’s a fee if you then take your money out of your Paypal account and put it back into your bank account. Lets not forget who own Paypal - eBay! Oh yes, and for many (perhaps all, now) categories on eBay you now can only accept payments by Paypal. eBay is forcing you to use their other service, so they can ensure they scalp you twice. Or four times. Surely this is illegal?

Of course, eBay say the reason they “prefer” Paypal is so they can help their customers when things go wrong. Except they don’t help their customers when things go wrong. In fact, they help scammers instead - far too many people have sold items, sent them with proof of postage, only to have the buyer complain the items never arrived and had money claimed back from Paypal and/or eBay. The seller has no comeback. Now, they have even less, as they’re not allowed to leave bad feedback for the buyer.

Madness.

So this morning, I arrived at work some 90 minutes late. Considering I’m often 15 minutes or more early, that’s almost two hours later than usual. The reason? An accident. This accident, in fact.

I’m not complaining about the accident at all. It looks especially nasty, by all accounts, and I hope everyone involved is OK. I’m also not really complaining they closed the road. After all, what else could they do?

No, my issue is the way in which they redirected traffic. All of it. Through some little villages, with narrow back roads. Narrow back roads that can’t take a lorry going in both directions. Narrow, flooded, back roads. They could have redireced each direction down different roads, but that would be far too sensible.

Norfolk is not well presented in terms of roads, and a problem like this really shows it up as a long-forgotten county in terms of transport infrastructure. That particular road (the A47) is really the only main road (certainly running east-west) and that six-ish mile stretch is an accident blackspot, and has been passed over for dualling now for something like 40 years. Closing it brings 80% of the county’s traffic grinding to a halt.

Incidently, I was held up for half an hour coming home last night due to a broken down lorry on another road. How annoying.

Bonus points awarded for understanding the picture reference in this post. In fact, bonus points will be awarded for knowing about the picture at all…

Well, they still are. This arrived this morning.

With apologies for the rather obvious headline.

Since Wednesday, my internet connection (4Mb cable, ex-NTL now Virgin Media) had been playing up.  I’d not really had time to look into the fault, but on Friday night with the arrival of some new networking kit (ordered before I started getting problems, ironically) I decided to get to the bottom of it.

After some testing with various speedtest sites, it became clear that the problem was my upload speed.  On a Virgin 4Mb connection, it should be around 400Kbps.  I was getting between 2 and 4Kbps, with the occasional 16K spike.  Amazing. FTP uploads confirmed the figure. Even to my Virgin-provided webspace (do people still say “webspace” these days?).

Next, of course, I made sure the fault wasn’t at my end.  I reset the modem and router.  Tried disconnecting all bar one machine from the network,  tried four different computers (my XP PC, Macbook, Mac mini and Linux EeePC), connected my PC directly to the modem, tried both Virgin and OpenDNS DNS servers - everything.  Nothing improved my upload at all, and it was also apparent that my download was suffering a bit too - with speeds not above 2Mb.

With nothing left to try, I had to call Virgin. On their 25p-a-minute premium rate technical support line.  And so the fun began. Read the rest of this entry »

Which may come as a bit of a shock to some of my readers, as I’ve been vocal in the past about how much I don’t wish to be a part of Facebook, MySpace, Bebo et al. It wasn’t as much of a shock as it was to me, though - I didn’t have a say in it!

I got an email today saying I’d been added as a friend by someone I know who works for the LEA (Local Education Authority) on an education-based social networking site That Shall Not Be Named. It would seem that I have an account there already, and this appears to be due to the fact that all linked LEA-provided resources such as this share a common sign-on.

Of course, my profile is blank, aside from my name (which is incorrect anyway), which is just as well as the privacy settings don’t “stick”.

With the Royal Mail postal strikes over the next few days, at least we can rely on City Link to deliver our goods safely, yes? Well, no.