These are the Twitters I sent over the last 24 hours...
- 12:28 Wondering whether the howling noise is the wind or a neighbour having a good time #
Over the last weekend, I have observed the following people on the tube:
- One short naturally bald and slightly older man, and one tall shaved-bald younger man. I'm assuming they were together because they got off the tube train together.
- One woman with dyed blonde hair that failed to hide the grey roots (thus looking like a female member of Status Quo), talking animated and enthusiastically about something. And her companion, one of those mid-30s women trying to look like a teenage boy complete with plastic shellsuit top, and lesbian-savvy black T-shirt failing to hide a reasonable amount of boobage, nodding sagely as if taking in all the information. But she was probably thinking 'Shut the hell up, I just want to kiss you'. Or something.
- Two women on the tube, dressed in a bizarre set of costumes. One woman, who was naturally well-endowed had augmented it with a ridiculous set of falsies, and her companion was a very thin, frail blonde woman. And they both carried light sabres. Asked them about it, apparently there was an anime/sci-fi convention nearby.
Which was handy information, as later on, waiting for another tube train, one arrived and expunged a veritable busload of young women, all in various anime/sci-fi costumes. Which is unusual.
Dodge This!
Originally uploaded by NA.dir
Finally, I have finished painting my living room (a combo of dark red and violet white!), and thought must now go towards how to decorate it.
I want to put up one movie-related poster or photo frame, and when I stumbled across a canvas print of the Dodge This! moment from The Matrix, I thought I'd found my ideal print.
But then zuzula counselled against this for the following reasons:
- The Matrix is soooo 1999. (Well, not her exact words, but it was about a decade ago)
- That picture is going to put off any women from stripping in my living room. Given that there are enough reasons for women not to strip off in my living room, adding extra obstacles to their path is not a good idea.
I didn't buy it in the end because £25 for an unofficial canvas print is a wee bit extortionate. But is that image *really* going to put off women? Is the Matrix really that dead and buried now? Admittedly, the sequels were quite terrible, but I still think the original film stands up as almost a perfect combination of science fiction, cod psychology and computer effects.
Of course, other movie posters are also available. But I do want to avoid the cliche of sticking up a poster from Blade Runner or Betty Blue, so need to think of alternatives. Maybe Kill Bill. Or maybe the one of Angelina Jolie in Wanted, but that really *will* put women off from stripping in my living room.
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!)
( More... )
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...
