420
Posted: Fri 21 April, 2006 Filed under: Thoughts, Weirdness Leave a comment »The number of the beast is no longer 666 – It’s now 420.
Brilliant stuff.
Carphone Whorehouse
Posted: Fri 21 April, 2006 Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, General 1 Comment »Herself has a mobile phone on O2 through Carphone Warehouse – up ’til recently she’s had a Samsung D500, but then about a fortnight ago upgraded to the flashy new one with iMode and 3G stuff on it. All well and good.
However, because it’s a 3G phone, she needs a 3G-capable SIM-card. Not previously having had a 3G-capable phone, the SIM wasn’t a 3G one either. However, the upgrade twunts at Craphone Whorehouse didn’t bother mentioning this. At all. Not once.
Last weekend we spent a good half an hour on the phone to their customer “services” department, explaining six times to six different people that we needed an upgraded SIM card. Oh, we don’t deal with that, I’ll put you through to someone else. Not once did person a explain to person b what the problem was, or why we were calling, or why they were putting us through, so we had to explain it – and go through the ID procedures – six fucking times.
Eventually, I ended up getting through to the right person. Who had to authorise sending out the SIM card with her manager. Supposedly they normally have a cost attached to them, but because this was an upgrade, we wouldn’t have to pay, so she needed the manager to provide a code to reduce the price to zero.
The card arrived last night. I put it in the phone…
“Unregistered SIM”
So today Herself is going to call Craphone Whorehouse (again) and try to get them to register the fucking SIM card that they sent out in the first place, already knowing we’d been stuffed about once. I’m currently not optimistic about getting a resolution to this one just yet…
Successful
Posted: Thu 20 April, 2006 Filed under: Own Business, Thoughts Leave a comment »Regular readers may recall that in November 2004 I did a couple of nights work doing sone photography stuff for a local (well, local at the time) charity. At the same time, I created their website, and the photos were used on both the website and their annual report and publicity material.
Since then I’ve stayed in touch, and recently they asked me to update some of the content on the site, and also to do a report on how well used the website has been in the last year or so.
I did the report last night, and I have to say, I’m pretty pleased with the results. Since January ’05 when the site went live, they’ve had 14,500 visitors, and the website has served just over 30,000 page views. The charity itself is pretty pleased with those results too – it’s a good figure for the first year, and hopefully will keep on expanding as time goes on.
Misnomer
Posted: Wed 19 April, 2006 Filed under: News, Thoughts 2 Comments »I’m just going to say one thing about this story.
It’s not, as the media were portraying it this morning, a “double suicide”. The boy was 12, with a mental age of 7. Not really an age where you think “I know, I’ll take my mum and chuck myself off Humber Bridge”.
It’s murder-suicide. Simple as that. The boy didn’t choose to chuck himself off, he was chucked off. That’s murder. End of.
Point Pleasant
Posted: Wed 19 April, 2006 Filed under: Domestic, Reviews(ish), Thoughts 1 Comment »Over Easter, we watched the DVD set of Point Pleasant. The story behind this was kind of interesting, in that it started showing on UK TV fairly soon after the US screenings, and then because the US viewing figures for it were abysmal, they pulled the series. Which meant that the last five episodes or so never made it onto UK TV either.
However, the DVD set included those unscreened episodes, and we wanted to know how it all ended, so we got the set through ScreenSelect before Easter.
Overall, it was a pretty good series – although quite why the makers ever thought it would be popular in the US is quite beyond me. “Beautiful” (in the American sense) girl who turns out to be the AntiChrist. Smalltown America. Teenagers having problems. And sex. To top it off, there was a healthy dose of sarcastic humour, plenty of religion – both “good” and “bad”, along with the interesting turn that the Catholic priests had blown things out of all proportion, and were actually encouraging sins in the guise of “saving the world”, and a whole load of other stuff that most of Middle America would deem “unwholesome”, it’s no shock at all that they hated it.
However, the last half of the last episode was nothing but unutterable shite – no closure, and obviously leaving things open for a second series. To me that’s disappointing – why can’t we get a series that is written with the sole goal of being a one-off? Now that’d be more fun – a story curve based over, say, 10 or 12 episodes, but that closes itself off properly. Yeah, you could still perhaps make another series, but for God’s sake, just make one that’s self-contained instead of leaving everything up in the air in case the viewers like it and the opportunity to make a second series comes up. (Take note, J.J.Abrams, you weasel)