almost witty

Finally, I have broadband again! Some person at the exchange finally flicked the right switch with prompting from an engineer who came out to see me, and now I can browse the Internet in full colour with images! (Amazing how many banking sites won't work with text-only browsers...)

Of course, watch it fall over again later tonight, knowing my luck... since my main phone won't work now and my Sky's a bit dodgy...

Maybe it's just me, but amidst the applause (and the odd tear - that hasn't happened in a long time!) in the latest Doctor Who episode, The Doctor's Daughter, did I spot a few echoes of what used to go on with ye olde Doctor Who? To whit...

(SPOILERS AHEAD!)

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For the last 8 months or so, I was a customer with BT Broadband, and was very happy with their service and recommended it to other people, including my tenant in my London flat.

When it came for me to move back into my London flat, on 23 March, I told BT I was going to move into my London flat on 19 April.

Since then, BT seem totally unable to provide a service that was available to my tenant the day before I moved in. I have had three weeks of endless going back and forth between tech support staff who claim that everything on the exchange is fine, so it must be a local problem (although how they can tell that since they're based in India, I don't know!). There has been someone from customer service "following" my query, but that person seems utterly unable to do anything except make countless apologies.

On 2 May, I was promised that an engineer would come out to my flat and examine the set-up. I took the afternoon off to await the engineer - he NEVER arrived. I called the Faults service, only to be told that he was never meant to come to my flat, and was instead checking it out at the exchange. Where everything is, apparently, fine. So I called the "specialist" customer service manager who's meant to be supervising my case - I was on hold for two hours before I gave up.

On 7 May, an engineer FINALLY came out to my place. Except he was a line faults engineer, not a broadband engineer. He couldn't find a fault, so he called in his broadband engineer colleague. He made a few tests, muttered under his breath something about a code 716 again, and agreed that the fault was with the exchange. He promised that the fault would be rectified tonight. Needless to say, it hasn't.

To add insult to injury, I have apparently been charged £39.51 for stopping my BT Broadband service before the minimum contract was up - when the only reason it was stopped was because I was moving, and was fully intending to use BT Broadband's services in my new place.

So I wrote to various customer complaint areas within BT, including the email address for their CEO (allegedly- I very much doubt it is, but they do keep up the pretence to the point of having an auto-responder, and someone calling me back saying he was from the CEO's office) and "high-level customer complaints".

The next day, I was told by one of the customer complaints teams that the engineers had reported the fault was with my equipment - which was totally not what the engineers told me. Then they said that a "transaction engineer" was coming to the exchange, and it should all work tonight. Which, patently, it hasn't. :(

and now BT are saying that the problem *must* be something to do with my home equipment, and want to send out another engineer. Despite the fact I've plugged in two seperate routers, and of course two engineers came out the day before to fix it.

British Telecom must be the only company where you can have three people from an elevated customer services team "looking" over my problem, and still be unable to come up with any resolution!

By any stretch of the imagination, Stephen Fry is one of the very few people who totally understands and gets the digital revolution (tm), and also has the eyes and ears of most of the population. More importantly, people like him and he is inherently likeable.

So it's interesting that in a recent speech on the future of the BBC, he apparently declared that:
- the BBC should not be ghettoized
- he regularly breaks the digital lock on the BBC's iPlayer
- the very existence of the iPlayer is making a lot of enemies for the BBC

It would be very interesting to find out whether he thinks the iPlayer lock should be beefed up (thus perpetuating the digital arms race), or whether he (as a rights provider of some considerable length) would be prepared to let his content loose online. Or whether it should be shut down entirely.

Pretty much on a whim, I thought I'd pop along to the practice session for a London softball team. After all, I played rounders when I was 11. How hard can it be?

So after finding the practice venue (on a gloriously sunny day in Hyde Park), I discovered that there were:

a. actually rules to softball
b. weird bits of technology and kit (eg the oversized glove)
c. requirements of being able to catch and throw a ball
d. I never got to bat. Once.

There were also quite a few Americans on the team. Which actually became an advantage when in the outfield, since their voices would carry far more than the equivalent British person.

Then it's off to the pub afterwards, where it turns out that the team is sponsored by the Masons, but the team captain takes pains to reassure everyone that the Masons are mainly a charitable organisation who do lots of good work in the community. Oh, and despite the fact he sounds American, he's actually an European man who went to an international finishing school in Switzerland, is dating an American woman, and is in fact a potential Conservative parliamentary candidate in a very Tory part of London. Other softball players hail from Los Angeles, Dublin and Scandinavia. I mean, really, just how much more international can you get?

Towards the end of the evening, I am reassured that I am utterly crap right now, but if I stick at it, I will improve to the point when I'm quite average within four to five games. For which, I have to pay a 30 quid subscription fee...

Peter Marshall spotted Ken Livingstone on the Tube Originally uploaded by Annie Mole

Sure, it may be a PR stunt to show the Mayor of London using the same transport as the rest of us without any apparent bodyguards, minders, PR flunkies or anything else ... but I've yet to see pics of Boris or Paddick or even Sian Berry of the Green Party using the Tube.

Hell, I distinctly remember reading a quote from that august journal The Metro where she defended taking a taxi to a meeting on the grounds that half-full buses were more polluting than taxis. Sure, but buses still have to run...

Oh yes, that's not to forget the cheerleaders hovering outside the workplace the other day exhorting us to vote for K-E-N...

It's local elections week in the UK, where people can exercise their democratic right to be totally disinterested at the prospect of voting for local councillors on an ego run while not actually doing that much beyond strutting around committee meetings and the like.

But here in the nation's Capital, things run a little differently. The election here is for the Mayor of London, and it's currently a run between the incumbent mayor, former arch-left-winger Ken Livingstone, and a bumbling TV personality/editor turned politican Boris Johnson for the Tories. Oh, Brian Paddick, a gay policeman for the Lib Dems, who is definitely the duller out of the three. Typical Lib Dems, you manage to pick the most famous policeman in London outside of "Shoot him!" Blair, and you still manage to find a boring one.

Anyway, I cycled to work today, and through the mists of smoke'n'sweat coming from my head, I thought I could see a bunch of cheerleaders outside the workplace. I thought it must be an illusion. But no, there were three cheerleaders with Union Jack pom-poms, white T-shirts and skirts, all exhorting us to vote for Ken. Or K-E-N. The candidate who used to be a figurehead for the "Loony Left" arch-left-wing councils of the mid-80s, banning magazines which featured scantily-clad models.

I can't wait to see what Boris comes up. Although I also dread to think what Paddick will emerge with...

The move down from Manchester to London went off relatively smoothly thanks to help from a lot of friends of mine (THANK YOU!), and two men from Zimbabwe with a van. Although being trapped for two hours in a white Transit van navigating the motorways of this great nation listening to African gospel music is a tad surreal. Although it definitely beats listening to American gospel music for an hour afterwards.

The only major hitch and hurdle so far has been with my broadband supply. A week after I've moved in, and three weeks after I told BT that I wanted broadband in my new place, they have singularly failed to supply it, citing all sorts of daft problems (including at one point that I was apparently a business customer and would have to call a totally different helpline). Until recently, I'd always recommended BT to anyone who asked, simply because the service seemed rocket-proof. Not any more.

You'd think it wouldn't be hard to supply a broadband service to a flat that had had it the week before from the previous tenant, but apparently it's beyond the realms of science to begin with. Not to mention they'd also managed to switch my phone off at some point! For this reason alone, BT make THE LIST.

So, alas, blog/email semi-silence will have to carry on until I get my broadband back. Not that I'm addicted or anything, oh no. I could give up any time... anytime...

The first and last time I bumped into Ashley Highfield (former head new media honcho at the BBC), it was early on a Wednesday morning and I was a wee bit hungover.

So when I meandered over to my designated table for a day of brainstorming, I was a little astonished to find Ashley Highfield sitting there, prodding around with some digital device or whatever. I said Hello, and mentioned that I indirectly worked for him at BBC Wales as a content producer. He grunted, said Hello, and then made his excuses and left.

Fast-forward about half a decade, and I'm back at the BBC, in the heart of the Media Village. I don't work indirectly for Highfield at all any more, but he must have seen me lurking around the corridors of power, because less than two weeks later, his resignation has been announced...

If you'd like other fascinating stories about how I indirectly caused Kurt Cobain's suicide and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's death, please ask. ;-)

(This is a very tongue-in-cheek post, brought to you in a desperate attempt to see if opportunistic blogging will raise viewing figures. Just, y'know, to see...)

When Plaxo was first announced to the world, it was an online address book and a way of sharing contact information with friends, family and colleagues. The idea was that you could update your contact details on their system, and people who were also registered with Plaxo would get your updated details. Conversely, if they changed their contact details, you'd also get your database updated. But you could also get Plaxo to send emails containing your address details to non-registered people, so at least they'd also get your contact details.

Over the years, Plaxo has kept redefining itself to the point where now it's aspiring to be a version of FriendFeed, but presented as a hideous mixture of Facebook and LinkedIn, with none of the business formality of LinkedIn, and yet not as friendly as Facebook. Which I've obediently done, up to now.

I've recently changed jobs (again!) and about to move house (again!). So Plaxo would be ideal as a one-time way to tell all my friends, family etc. of my new contact details, and it's worked reasonably well before. But despite an hour of looking around the website, I just cannot find a way to tell people my contact details. It just doesn't seem to work, especially for non-Plaxo people.

Changing a website to the point when you can't use it for its original intended purpose is just the height of stupidity. Without that functionality, Plaxo is now totally indistinguishable from the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn, FriendFeed et. al.

Why, Plaxo? Why?

PS: if you do want my new real-world contact details, shout...