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March 28, 2005

Nildram++

Despite being bought out by Pipex, it seems Nildram (who provide my ADSL line) still have some clues about them.

I rang earlier to get my password reset, because somehow in the years since I last bought a new router, I've managed to forget it. Bear in mind this is on a bank holiday, and the time was around 6.30pm, so I didn't expect much joy. The first guy I spoke to gave me a reference number, and told me someone would call me back "probably within 15 minutes" on either my recorded contact number (which turned out to be a number I no longer use), or if I preferred, on the number the ADSL was provisioned to. This suited me fine.

So I went back to what I was doing, and, when half an hour had passed, rang again to see what the score was. I gave the guy who answered my ticket number from the previous call, he quickly got up to speed with what was going on, asked me to hang up, and called me back. I told him what new password I wanted, he told me to give it up to an hour to propagate through the system, and all was once more right with the world.

So, they dealt with my problem promptly, even on a bank holiday evening. They took sensible steps to verify who I was (I had to confirm my name and address, as well as being called on the line they provided the ADSL down), before resetting my password, and they let me choose the password, without objecting to (or even sounding surprised by) the fact it was a random alphanumeric string straight out of pwgen. Rock.

Actually, I suppose it's quite sad that I was impressed by this, but I've had crap responses from other customer service departments recently, so was pleasantly surprised. I've actually been waiting for Nildram to screw up, so I have some motivation to switch my provider to Black Cat, but they've certainly not done so today. Anyway, having all my hosted services on a machine on a separate network to my ADSL link is probably no bad thing :)

Posted by James at 19:09 | Comments (0)
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March 27, 2005

8 people I've never met

Woohoo! We won! 8 people I've never met connected with an institution that threw me out almost 2 years ago rowed a few miles up the Thames quicker than 8 more people I've never met!

Truly this is a day for much jubilation. Go blues! Whichever shade I mean! Yeah!

Posted by James at 18:10 | Comments (3)
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March 25, 2005

For sale, one comatose body

Via Dan Gillmor, is this possibly the world's coolest living will?

If I am rendered comatose and determined to be in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) for a period longer than one month and if no imminent cure is forthcoming, I do not wish to be kept alive by artificial means including but not limited to nourishment, hydration, etc.

However....

If, due to the absurd political state of affairs in this country, my persistent vegetative state and impending unplugging can be parlayed into some sort of political leverage, I wholly endorse using my predicament in whatever way possible for the purposes of passing legislation favorable to my general political and ethical outlook.

The poster then lists the specific causes they're willing to support by living, and for how long. I think I need to start reading more of craigslist :)

Posted by James at 15:51 | Comments (1)
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March 23, 2005

From the "pointless limitations" department...

Why do manufacturers of high tech gadgets insist on imposing arbitrary limits on their functionality, for no discernable reason? I'm not talking about limiting the amount of memory in a device to lower the cost, or anything, but about limitations that someone had to go out of their way to add to the devices' firmware...

A few weeks ago, my housemate Chris had a great idea — rather than spend valuable beer money on a cool ringtone for his phobile moan, he recorded the introduction and theme tune to "The A-Team" directly from the TV, using his phone's mic. Excellent.

When I tried to do something similar, I found that while my T610 (allegedly a decent handset) has the ability to record up to 30 seconds of audio and store it in some suitable format, it is not then able to make this file into a ringtone. Sigh. It clearly has all the requisite bits of hardware and software, but for some reason Sony-Ericsson have elected not to allow their customers to do this; I can only assume the mobile networks like the revenue stream from people buying ringtones, and lean on the manufacturers to leave out features like this.

Meanwhile, clc seems to have found just as pointless a limitation of his iPod — one which doesn't even merit a cynical explanation like the one above.

I guess all hardware really does suck. Oh, except my new iAudio M3 :-)

Posted by James at 03:55 | Comments (0)
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March 20, 2005

Sipping my Wrath

There is a bar in Nottingham which sells 7 cocktails, named after the 7 deadly sins. As I sat sipping my Wrath earlier this evening, I decided I quite liked the look of Envy, that some of my friends were drinking; I liked it enough that I went and got myself one.

Which is almost as good as the chav girl next to me at the bar ordering "5 Gluttonies"...

Posted by James at 03:14 | Comments (2)
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March 01, 2005

Budget laptops

My laptop, emerald, is dying. The screen isn't very well connected to the graphics card any more, the case is flaky, the keyboard ropey, and the battery completely useless. It's going to get replaced. Luckily, I have in the region of £700 kicking around ready to spend on a replacement...

An iBook, through the Apple Higher Education Store, will cost me £681 with a 60GB drive, 12" screen, 256MB RAM and bluetooth module, plus I'd want to some extra memory (£27 from Crucial for 256MB extra). But I'm wary about buying into the whole Apple thing, and so I'm wondering if there's anything in the current x86 world that would serve me as well.

So my dear readers, the question is this: where can I get an x86 laptop for no more than £700, which won't fall apart within 2 years, is designed to be portable rather than a mostly-static "desktop replacement", and will happily run an OS other Windows? Built in wireless stuff would be nice, too, although I imagine that's standard these days...

Answers on a comment :)

Posted by James at 17:14 | Comments (9)
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