Archive for February, 2006

Ok, so last time I came in here and blogged about nobody else coming in out of hours, someone did. In fact, I think someon else came in as I was leaving too. But that’s not the point. There is nobody here now. Partly because nobody comes into uni on a Saturday and that it’s 11:49 so everyone will still be asleep but that’s not the point.

I had to come down to drop off some coursework and filming starts for Nightmare 90210 in like 10 minutes.

I’ve just taken the new beta site of Emo Today. It may not look any different but it’s a massive change – I’ve basically re-written the site this evening.

In terms of asphetics and what you can actually see changed, there is now a margin at the bottom of the page, the words lyrics has been removed from end of each line on the track listings for an album, it will no longer display the track listings box if there are no lyrics and the lyrics page has a slightly different title. Other than that I don’t think anything has changed.

Behind the scenes though – first of all, the old MySQL stuff has gone, replaced by my database class. All the main template code has been moved into header and footer includes. The news database connection now only kicks in on the news page. There is more SQL validation to stop attacks. Loads of stuff has changed.

It’s also worth loading that there is a fresh load of new content including biographies and album reviews to check out. Some new genres to categorise the stuff into as well.

I’m quite getting into WordPress 2 now. I’ve upgraded the Blog Steak network and it’s quite good that on the gossip sites and such, when I post about a celeb I can just browse through the previously uploaded photos and select a few I’ve used before for that celebrity.

So I went onto eFax to cancel my account I signed up for. They have no automatic account cancellation, you have to talk to support staff. On a chat system that doesn’t work on my desktop. I tried it in both Firefox and Internet Explorer. So I went onto sales chat to see if they could help me. But the guy didn’t seem to understand that it wouldn’t work.

Chat Information Please wait for a site operator to respond.You are currently number 1 of 1 in the queue. Thank you for your patience.
Chat Information You are now chatting with ‘Rick S’
Rick S: Welcome to the sales team! How can I assist you today?
Chris: Hi. I wish to cancel my account. Also your other chat system doesn’t have any way to input messages.
Rick S: I am sorry to hear that you wish to leave us. We have a special support team to assist you with the cancellation process.
Rick S: https://www.efax.com/en/efax/twa/page/chat
Rick S: https://www.efax.com/en/efax/twa/page/chat
Rick S: Please use the following webpage to get Chat support for cancelation.
Chris: I would but it doesn’t appear to be compatible with Firefox. Or Internet Explorer. Which makes it a little difficult to use.
Rick S: “://www.efax.com/en/efax/twa/page/chat
Rick S: Please click on the red button which states “”start chart now””
Rick S: And you can initiate the chat now.”
Chris: I did, that brings up a frame at the bottom. On the left it says “this is your current page” and on right is messages from your support staff. But there’s no input box to type anything in.
Rick S: http:////www.efax.com/en/efax/twa/page/chat
Rick S: Please try the above link for cancellation.
Rick S: Thank you for contacting Online Sales Support, I hope you found our session helpful.
Rick S: Good bye and have a nice day!
Chat Information Chat session has been terminated by the site operator.

The nerve. Just after I say there was nowhere to type in he posts in the URL, repeats what he said above then ends the chat session before I even have chance to respond. He obviously gor scared and ran off.

So I switched ovet to my laptop where I managed to get the chat system working in Internet Explorer and got chatting to the sales staff. That conversation when something like this (I added the bold highlighting around the words to point stuff out, they weren’t in the chat session)…

Welcome to chat.
The session has been accepted.

{Victor R.} Hello, Chris. Welcome to j2 Global online support. I am Victor, your Online Live Support Representative. How are you doing today?
{Chris} Hi. I wish to cancel my eFax account.
{Victor R.} I’m sorry to hear that you wish to cancel your fax account. Could you please provide me the Fax number and the PIN associated with your account for verification?
{Chris} 441668681798, pin: ****
{Victor R.} Thank you for the information, please give me a moment while I quickly check your account in our records. In the meanwhile, may I ask why you are canceling your fax account?
Are you unhappy with any aspect of our service in particular?
{Chris} No, I just don’t send or receive faxes so it’s rather redundant.
{Victor R.} I have checked your account. Our records indicate that you have signed up for a 30 day free trial account. Please note that you will not be charged any monthly fee for the 30 day period. You can make the optimum use of this account during this period to check out all the services provided and evaluate your faxing needs.
{Victor R.} We would very much like you to give our service a try at least during the trial period and let us know how did you find our service. There is absolutely no need for you to continue if you do not wish to, at the end of the free trial period. With valuable feedback from our customers we would be able to better our services if need be, wherever required. This is the reason why we are providing a free month’s service, plus the ability to send few pages of fax for free.
{Victor R.} At the end of one month, you can decide whether you want to continue with the service or not. If you decide to continue, you will be charged the regular monthly rate. If not, you can always come back and cancel your account.
{Chris} No I’ll cancel now thanks. Like I said, I don’t send or receive any faxes.
{Victor R.} Chris, we understand that you do not make much use of our services currently. We realize that paying GBP 7.50 after the 30 day trial as the monthly fee, in such situations is a waste for you. But, we really value your continued association with us. For customers like you where you have less usage we have a new plan on offer at this moment.
You can keep this account at a nominal rate of GBP 7.50 (Non-refundable) for the next 3 months instead of paying GBP 7.50 every month.
If however, you still feel that you do not have any use for our services by the end of the three months period, in this case you need to just contact us once and let us know your decision that whether you wish to continue or not and we will process your request immediately.
{Chris} Well it’s not that I don’t make much use of my account, it’s that I don’t make any use of my account. I don’t send or receive any faxes. So I would like to cancel now please.
{Victor R.} Okay. I will cancel your account immediately.
{Victor R.} Is there any thing else, I can assist you with?
{Chris} No, that’s it thanks.
{Victor R.} We are sorry that you have decided to leave eFax, but if your faxing needs do change in the future, we would be more than happy to have you back. Thank you for being with us and for using our service.
{Victor R.} Thank you for contacting j2 Global online support. Bye and have a great day!
Take care!

Well my sleep has been interupted again, this time by a fire alarm. False alarm again, someone used the break glass by the door in the common room apparently. Myself and Theaks both agreed the fire alarm needs to be re-worked to something that’s more of someone constently prodding you rather than the loud, in your face type attitude it has currently.

Ok seriously like I woke up 15 minutes ago to find blood everywhere. I was in the middle of a nose bleed and it ended up all over my hands, legs, bedding, this is not cool. Wgite bedding was not a good choice when it comes to thinking about what colour it will be when it has blood stains on.

Aggh, I swear this site is unusably bad! I mean, people who say they spent all their time on it and all their friends are on it – how does it not drive you mental? All I did was click a link to a message sent to me and what do I get? The “an unexpected error has occured – it’s been forwarded to the techie group thing” message.

Just checking out Rocket Boom. It was mentioned in the SitePoint Tribune as they are selling advertising on it via eBay. it’s a daily video blog but to be honest, it’s boring. It has some actual news but a lot of it’s just crap – and that’s coming from a buy who writes celebrity blogs!

Hmm, you know, I should probably get some coursework done.

I’m re-assessing my sites situation though. I’m not sure how well xmeltrut.com is working out. I know 18 months on is probably a slow uptake on that but I’m not sure where I can see the network going now.

I have been spending a lot of time thinking about Particle Soft however. Particle Wiki 1.0.2 is on it’s way once the testing is finished and a public beta of Particle Gallery is soon to be released too. I want to work on Particle Blogger also, I think a 2.0 for that would be great.

It’s total BS. They’ve hardly shown anything and we’re 20 minutes in. They spent most of the time in re-cap videos which is just silly as we’ve just watched it on Channel 4 – like without a gap of one ending and the other beginning.

The rest of the time is taken up by the presenter narrating about what is going on.

…no, I know, I’m no superman.

Scrubs rocks, it’s well known. Michelle doesn’t like it but she is from Jersey. She thinks it’s a real country but it clearly isn’t – the Play.com returns address is listed as Jersey, United Kingdom.

Nothing but happened today. Went to a Film Making Soc meeting. Fergus was ill so Trev took the meeting. He’s a far more entertaining group leader, interesting possibility.