Archive for the ‘Rants’ Category

Just when you’re down enough there is always something to give you that little extra kick.

Went round drive-thru this evening to find that meals have gone up £0.30 as well as having gone up £0.50 on breakfast!

As I left for uni this morning I was debating whether I could be bothered to go into town and pick up my phone (which was in for repair) or whether I should pick it up later. I decided to make the trek down to town as I need my phone to test my FYP on a phone browser on. I got down there to have them turn round and say “sorry, we had to send it off, it’s going to be 14 days.” So it should be due back right about the time I’ve just handed my FYP in. Fantastic.

Having got my new phone I requested my network unlock code for my old phone.

I phoned back in a few days when the said it would arrive. It hadn’t. So they requested it for me again. I rang back on the Monday. They still didn’t have it and requested it again. Wednesday I got an email with it. I entered it into my phone. And it bricked it.

Everything worked fine. I followed the instructions and then restarted my phone to find I got a “configuration error” message no matter what SIM I put in it.

I phoned up Vodaphone, several times, and they had no clue. They said back up your data on it and take it back into a Vodaphone shop and they will send it away for repair. So I downloaded and installed the crappy Sony Ecricsson software to backup my important data and guess what - it fails every time.

Any idea how you can recover data off a mobile phone anyone?

Meanwhile o2 is a whole different story. Norm dug me out an o2 SIM card which I inserted into my phone so I would have a pay as you go phone on o2’s network when my Vodaphone one wasn’t working. But the SIM refused to activate. So I tried to activate it online and was greeted with a message saying this was not an o2 number.

So I phoned up customer services who informed me that they had no record of this number in the database.

So I went down to the o2 store to get a new SIM card. Which I did as well as £10 top-up. I got home, inserted the SIM into my phone, phoned up and activated my top-up card and got the text messages to install the “settings” whatever that is. But despite having topped up, I apparently don’t have any credit. Fantastic.

I am most enjoying my new phone.

It looks quite good sat on my desk not doing anything.

I phoned up Vodaphone on Tuesday to get my unlock code for my k800i and they told me they would have it by Friday so I phoned back yesterday and they told me they didn’t have it. Not they didn’t have it yet, but rather they didn’t have it. And have now requested it for me again. Fantastic.

I got a call from Vodaphone retention this morning.

Suddenly, they can do me the packages for new customers and can even give me the special offers on top of that too. So I now have 500 minutes and unlimited texts and they’ve even gone as far as to throw in free itemised billing (which I already had lol). Best of all they are now doing it £5 a month cheaper than o2.

So I now have a phone on the way from Vodaphone and a phone on the way from o2 as well as my PAC code even though I don’t need it. Messy, messy situation.

First of all, such heresy as was rumoured back in January has been put to rest. I remain as ever a Sony Ericsson fanboy. And not just because the contract was £5 cheaper than going with an N95 or P1i. But because I’m old and afraid of change.

I have however officially requested my PAC code from Vodaphone. Much as Kieran ran into problems when he wanted to upgrade his phone when his last contract expired I phoned up Vodaphone to complain that none of their price plans on their website were available from the upgrades process.

The patronising call centre worker explained (well more confirmed my suspicions when I proposed such ideas) that they were only available to new customers. To be honest I thought such practices had now died out but apparently not. I explained to him that the packages being offered to me were “just rubbish” so he passed me through to their promotions department.

Properly implemented CRM systems shine through as always as I began talking to the girl in promotions by giving her my phone number, confirming my full name and address and other security details even though I’d already done that twice this call (once with the automated system when you phone up and once to the guy in upgrades).

She managed to throw me together 150 minutes and 500 texts for £25 a month. However given o2 were offering the slightly more appealing 400 minutes and 1000 texts for not much more I decided to officially abandon Vodaphone in favour of o2. No doubt I’ll be telling a similar story in 18 months time.

Guess who I’m on the phone to. It’s not hard. It’s the same people I am always on the phone to. UK Online. A somewhat ironic name it would seem. And opening itself up to derogatory word play but someone of any interlect.

Our connection isn’t just dropping, it’s just entirely going away and not coming back. Normally they do a tone test which magically starts it working again but even after that it died again tonight and support have nothing else to try.

After this happened yesterday advanced support refered me to their advanced support team (who don’t work this late) and who were supposed to re-adjust my line this morning. But didn’t. And are now scheduled to do it tomorrow when they arrive at work.

When someone first suggested we hire someone to manually ferry packets from the exchange and back I thought they were joking. Now I’m just wondering…

My Windows desktop (Inca) stopped displaying things like filenames. They just disappear into blank test whenever you try to open a file.

My Linux desktop (Zapotec) refuses to play DVDs despite now having the codec installed.

My file server (Olmec) won’t boot if I initialise some of the hard drives into an array. Individually they work fine, if I plug them into the motherboard’s SATA connections. But if I try to run them through my really expensive RAID controller the computer complains of a boot failure even if I just put one into a JBOD configuration.

My Linux server (Nazca) is a write-off because I installed Webmin and Webmin now refuses to remove itself or allow me to run any kind of updates.

My laptop (Toltec) can’t even make 3 hours battery life anymore.

One of my web servers (Jennifer) is just being really, really slow despite my restarting like every service on it.

So, back to this plan for us to all run away and become pirates…

I’m currently trying to report an issue with my VPS. I can’t though because ServInt’s support site is down.

Seriously, why is it so hard to find a reliable host?

I was moving away from PowerVPS as I’ve had a few problems with them recently including hostnames and root passwords mysteriously changing in the middle of my trying to set up my new VPS. But I’m not getting any further with ServInt. Bare in mind that these are the two most well respected VPS companies in existence. So it’s hard to draw any conclusion other than than I am cursed.

Consider some of the fun problems we’re currently tackling. Most of the websites in the network use nsx.mazedev.com as their nameservers. These are registered with the domain registrar and so are seperate to the server which hosts mazedev.com itself. Yet if you take that server offline, all domains that are not .com or .net (such as .co.uk, .info and .org) stop resolving. Yep, get your head around that one.

Meanwhile I still can’t get any work on my project done, run my website backups or generally access anything at Burchett Place because of our connectivity issues. The replacement modem was supposed to arrive today, after all I ordered it middle of last week and payed for next day delivery. It hasn’t turned up. I can’t phone City Link because eBuyer haven’t given me a consignment number and I can’t phone eBuyer because they are closed for new year.

This results in me not being able to go home and do some revision because I need to be here with internet access to resolve these issues I am having with all the websites which is now starting to cost me lots of money, money which I don’t have. Still, who really wanted a degree anyway?

Many people are probably in bed by now.

After all it’s 1am on Christmas Day morning.

Of course most people didn’t have to drag their ass out of their nice warm bedroom at 11pm Christmas Eve to go spend 2 hours trying to bring the internet back online so that they could get on with doing some of their final year project for their degree which requires remote access.

As it turns out, I’m not in this group of most people. Nor have I actually got anywhere with the time I’ve spent unless you class ensuring I don’t get enough sleep before getting up tomorrow as getting somewhere. Personally, I don’t. But maybe I should as it would ensure far more victories in life for me.

So there is some quality time down the drain now it’s just a case of waiting to see how much money goes down the drain as well. Of course that’s a joke - it’s going to cost far more of my valuable time to sort it out than has been taken up so far. Happy holidays everyone.