frogcake.net

I always thought Alistair Darling looked like a Thunderbird, but today realised who those eyebrows really reminded me of: Sam the Eagle from the Muppets.

Paul Graham has written an interesting essay on great cities and the messages they give out and why it is that a city should have such an effect on a person and their ambitions.

No matter how determined you are, it’s hard not to be influenced by the people around you. It’s not so much that you do whatever a city expects of you, but that you get discouraged when no one around you cares about the same things you do.

I’ve seen a few cities now and each one has its own distinct soul that can’t help but subtly affect you when surrounded by it. Apparently the message Paul gets from London is: “one should be more aristocratic”. I’m not sure I agree with him. Then again, thinking back to when I first arrived here, maybe I did notice a more class-based society.

Maybe I’ve just tuned that message out as background noise.

MoD sends Skynet satellite into orbit

Seriously. Don’t they know what happens at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th?

I just found another good reason to like Zen ADSL. I logged into my customer portal and discovered that I can change the reverse mapping of my static IP address through a simple form on their website.

I’ve been using Zen for years now and I can’t see myself changing in the near future. Certainly not to Virgin Media who, incidentally, phoned me a couple of days after I lodged my complaint with the CISAS and offered to refund the money they owed me straight away. Of course it could take up to twenty-one days to receive the cheque…

Guy Kawasaki blogs about how he was charged by AT&T for a DSL service he never ordered and had to go through customer service hell to try and get it canceled. His experience sounds familiar.

The iPhone is released in the States today and the only network it is available on is crappy AT&T. My mobile contract with T-Mobile is up for renewal soon and I’m holding off upgrading my phone until I hear about the iPhone release in the UK. But if for some reason it turns out it is only available on a Virgin contract then you can bet I won’t be touching it no matter how cool it is.

By the way, having had no response from Virgin Media about the £25 they owe me for a service they never provided I have filed a complaint with the Communications & Internet Services Adjudication Scheme. Maybe they have the secret Virgin Media customer service number that connects you to someone who has a clue.

Apple have just released minor updates to the MacBook range. I only bought my MacBook a month ago so I guess I’m a little annoyed that I just missed the update but the upgrade isn’t really that significant; a slightly faster CPU and a bigger hard drive, basically.

This guy, on the other hand, is not taking it so well:

Good work Apple. Idiots.

As someone waiting to buy their first Mac I am FURIOUS with Apple and their continued raping of MB buyers.

The MBs are the line of computers that will benefit most from SR and Apple do THIS? I actually cannot believe it. They are absolute bastards.

Oookaay. Repeat after me: calm blue ocean, calm blue ocean, calm blue ocean…

Macs are like that, though. Kind of like a Harley. People either love them or hate them. I guess I’m part of the Cult of Mac now, although I know it’s just a computer.

Bike helmet crushed, but head fine

I like this quote:

I didn’t see it coming, but I sure felt it roll over my head. It feels really strange to have a truck run over your head.

After five years, I have decided to consign the old site design to the archives and move frogcake.net over to Wordpress.

The old site worked ok but it wasn’t the easiest to update with new articles or pictures and until yesterday the RSS feed was updated manually by hand! It was as I was incorporating a new RSS class into my site that I realised it was time to either rewrite a whole chunk of code, or move the site across to a more professionally built product.

It was interesting looking back over the last eight years’ worth of posts and seeing how my attitudes (and writing style) have changed.

Back in the summer of 1999 we were a couple of young Aussies just off the boat. I seemed constantly surprised by the scale and cost of everything and I remember we were literally down to our last £50 when we both managed to get jobs (we used to share a ready-meal to save money).

Over the years we’ve been to most parts of the British Isles and a fair chunk of Western Europe as well. We’ve been to the west coast of Ireland and the north coast of Scotland. We’ve seen castles in Wales and the Pyramids in Egypt. We’ve strolled through Central Park and cruised down the Grand Canal in a gondola.

We’ve seen Mozart at the Coliseum, Strauss at the Royal Opera House and Beethoven at Glyndebourne. We’ve been to the Last Night of the Proms and seen the Medici Quartet play in the Reform Club on Pall Mall.

I’ve conducted concerts in St Pauls’ Covent Garden and Kathryn has sung in the choir at the Royal Hospital. We’ve recorded Beethoven with the Corinthian Chamber Orchestra and sung Rachmaninov with Collegium Musicum of London.

We got married, became British citizens, I got an MSc and Kathryn works for an architecture practice that has had more influence on the London skyline in the 20th century than any other.

We are both a bit older and wiser now but London is still an amazing, fascinating place to live. Looking back on what we have achieved, having arrived in the UK with not much more than a couple of suitcases, I’m actually rather proud.

Andrew’s been blogging about service lately and it made me think of an experience I had recently.

My BT line is rubbish so I thought I would try cable. NTL had a deal where I could get broadband and a phone for £25 a month so I thought I would give them a go. My problems started when I tried to arrange installation on their website; it was only February so naturally they hadn’t updated their website to allow bookings to be made in 2007. I tried selecting 2006 from the drop-down but that wouldn’t validate as it wouldn’t let me make bookings in the past. So to get around their broken website (I wanted to sign up online because there was a £25 discount) I used a cool Firefox extension called Tamper Data to intercept the posted form and manually change the date to 2007.

Naturally NTL ignored my installation request so I ended up arranging installation over the phone when I chased them up the following week. They said they would still give me the £25 online discount but they had a weird way of processing this. They needed to charge me the £25 immediately and then this would be refunded on my first statement. OK, whatever. So they charged me £25 and fixed an installation date.

Five minutes later, they called me back saying that actually they couldn’t provide a phone service to my address, only broadband and TV. Since the whole point of this was to get rid of BT I said I wanted to cancel. Ok, he said, he would refund the £25 but this could take up to fourteen days. Great.

When I realised that during this time Virgin Media had bought NTL I knew I was going to have a fun time trying to get my money back. I called NTL/Virgin after fourteen days without a refund and of course (once I got through the horrible phone system) the person I spoke to had no idea about anything. She took my details again and said it would be about fourteen days for the refund department to process it. Fourteen days later, I called again with the exact same result…

About a week after the second follow-up call I received a letter from Virgin payment processing asking for a copy of my bank statement showing the £25. I sent this off a couple of weeks ago and am yet to hear back or receive my refund.

The whole thing is ridiculous, I was charged £25 for a service that I never received and that £25 was meant to be an online discount in the first place!

I had a totally different customer service experience the other week when I bought a MacBook. I won’t go into how nice the machine is but the way the Apple Store works is really cool. I told one of the assistants I was interested in buying a MacBook and he then spent some time asking me about how I was going to use it, what I was looking for and he showed me some stuff on one of the MacBooks they have set up all over the store. He clearly knew his products and he seemed genuinely interested in helping me make the right choice.

Once that choice had been made, he went to request the machine and came back with a handheld that read my credit card. He gave me my receipt and then went to fetch my new MacBook. I didn’t have to queue at a counter or anything. It was really cool.

Some stores just get customer service. They understand that if you provide excellent service you don’t need to be the cheapest. HMV understands that while you might be able to buy DVDs cheaper at Tesco you’re not going to be able to talk to the girl behind the checkout about film recommendations. Apple understands that while you can buy a cheaper laptop elsewhere, they can charge more for beautiful equipment sold by knowledgeable staff in a pleasant atmosphere. I’m sticking with my ISP Zen because although Virgin Media can sell me broadband for a cheaper monthly price they lock you into a twelve month contract and their service is shit.

I’m back

Hmmm, where to start??? Most of you who I know will already have received an e-mail from me breifly explaining my absence. So much has happened since the last update in August (!) We have been to Venice Ireland and Scotland. We have moved house, I have started conducting lessons and Kathryn siniging lessons.

The aforementioned e-mail also contained my new postal address and phone numbers. If you don’t have them e-mail me. Also I have updated the streetmap link to reflect our new address.

In case you don’t know my computer broke and is only now fixed(?) Here is David’s guide to buying a laptop computer. It’s easy; there are only two points to remember:

1) Don’t buy a Compaq

2) Don’t buy anything from Microworld on Tottenham Court Rd

Follow my advice and you can’t go wrong.

I must sleep now, but rest assured I will update the site again within the next few days…

Before you go make sure you look at the photo of the week as it is new. Apart from that there isn’t much new stuff on the site. Yet…