Mr Mist’s Blog

I have (after some time - almost a year in fact) finally got around to updating my bblogreader plugin. The changes are only minor, but are in response to the comments that I’ve had on the plugin.

You can now choose to exclude entries in the BB logs that are just warnings, and you should also see locally adjusted timings (assuming the code works.)

Enjoy!

Oh, I also enabled gravatars for commenters

Mariokart Wii is awesome. Buy it now! It’s great fun! The wheel is a really funky addition to the controller, which, whilst not doing anything, does everything

Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz would probably be equally fun, if I could control it at all. But I can pretty much make the monkey go off the edge, or roll around until I run out of time.

Sonic and the lost rings (or something) falls pretty much neatly between the two.

Also the Wii is quite disturbing when the blue light flashes on and off.

It’s only a few more sleeps now until Christmas Day! woo! This year seems mostly to have become about moving house, which is odd seeing as how we didn’t start that until my birthday. Most of the year before move (BM) has blurred into a globule. Apparenly lots of tradesmen are going to descend on the house en masse on the 14th of Jan to fix the outstanding issues. woo! The cats won’t like that though, as we will probably have to stuff them into one room. They don’t like being in one room, even though it’s a massive room and they have all they need in it. They are fussy cats.

Into my naughty list for this year goes Demon Internet. Now, I had been with Demon for a long time, from its TAM account on dial-up through to ADSL which I took from pretty much the moment of moving in to my old house to when I left, and, throughout that time, they were alright. They provided a pretty consistent service. So, it’s a bit of a shame that, on leaving, they’ve been utterly useless. I cancelled the account over the phone. At no point did the man suggest that an account fee would be payable, otherwise I would have paid it with him. So it was a bit surprising to get an “overdue account” letter a few weeks later - I should interject at this point that we had to cancel all our DDs when we moved ‘cos of having one of those all in one accounts - but, I thought, well fair enough maybe they’ve had to charge due to when I cancelled. So I rang the guy and he said “yes you actually owe us 12 pounds not 24 pounds” (it said 24 on the bill) so I paid him that money over the phone there and then, thinking that would be that. (At this point I asked for a letter to confirm. He wouldn’t send one. He gave me an “authorisation number”.)

Cut to later. Another letter comes through DEMANDING payment, because I “have not been in touch”. At this point I decide that enough is enough and write a letter to the head office about it all. Days pass. I get no response from Demon. I do, though, get ANOTHER letter DEMANDING payment saying that I have made no attempt to contact them and threatening to hand it over. I call customer services and speak to the useless assistant who says that yes, the account is clear and closed. I ask him for a printed letter. He evades and, when pressed, offers an email. I say “no, I want a printed letter on your headed paper”. He says “ok I’ll do that” and we end the call. He’s not done that. As yet I STILL do not have a letter.

After my ‘phone convo I followed up with my own email to their credit control centre, asking them for a letter etc.. They finally replied by email yesterday after a couple of days of doing naff all. SIGH.

So, to recap, I still have NO response to my original letter whatsoever.
I have NO letter from customer services despite my own letter, a phone call and an email asking for one.
I THINK that the account is clear, but have no real way of knowing what will happen, because their automated system only started sending demands AFTER I had already supposedly the account.

So, in short, feel free to join Demon Internet for your web service needs, as, it seems, you won’t have any problems just so long as you don’t ever want to leave.

We are now off work until the new year - though I have to do the 31st since I had ran out of holiday. oops.

Merry Christmas!

ooer. It’s almost Christmas. Another year has swept by stupidly quickly. Astonishingly, I’ve not had time to update here this week, what with one thing or another. This weekend I have been mostly on call for work, so am lacking energy to really work on this place, too. This week Laura sprained her ankle so I have been mostly at home with her. Not a lot happening. We have a set of curtains up in the Lounge now, though. Progress! I’m tired.

SO yes, basically, haven’t really found a chance to work on the site properly since moving house. Possibly this weekend as I’m on call for work so we can’t really go anywhere far away, so may be more at the computer. Speaking of computers, have upgraded to the Intel Core 2 Quad 6600. Swapped platforms from AMD. A peculiar experience, as I was told that you should just be able to boot onto the Windows XP CD and do a repair, rather than reinstalling from scratch. So, this is what I attempted, but, for some reason, the Windows Setup refused to find my old install, and then refused to ask me any questions whatsoever about where I wanted to put Windows, and just went ahead installing away. I eventually killed the setup and tried again. Same result. I then loaded the windows option from the multi-choice list, and (lo and behold) it booted into my old windows, with no probs. So, really, I don’t think anything was overwritten by setup, as I deleted the two half-baked install attempts from my other partitions. I may yet have to reformat if odd stuff starts happening.

Traffic on the way to work is generally ok, about 30 mins. Traffic home is variable, but generally rubbish. The roadworks on the M1 mean that it’s hardly ever a good route, so I have to mess around and it can take an hour. Which is a bit naff considering I am closer to work than before. Hopefully this will improve once the roadworks go.

I have lots of speakers that are not plugged in yet. No idea really what to do with the rear speakers. The cable is a pain.