Monday Morons

Happy March. And just where have the last two months gone? Scary.

BT put me on “incoming calls only” yesterday. Nice of ’em – no warning, no messing, try to make a call, and get told that it’s been diverted to BT, and that I should call them in office hours. Yup, Monday – Saturday. Hardly guaranteed to put me in a good mood for calling them this morning. As any reader with half an IQ point will know, I don’t handle incompetence well. So I call them today.

“a) Why was my phone cut off on a Sunday, when I can’t speak to the department at all ’til Monday?
b)Why was it cut off at all?
c) Why wasn’t I warned about it, or told what the keff was going on?

Answer a)
“Our system didn’t realise it was a leap year, so it thought it was cutting you off today”
(I’m virtually speechless, but still manage a brisk “And how is that my problem?“

Answer b)
You haven’t paid your bill.
What bill?
The one you received in December.
I say again, what bill?
Well you must have received it – our system says we sent it.
Does your system check with the postman? Or send it recorded?
No
So how do you ‘know’ I’ve received it?
Well, our system says we sent it.

Answer c) We sent out a notification.
Is that the same system that sends out the bills?
Yes.
Got news – I didn’t get the reminder either, you know, for the bill I haven’t paid because I haven’t received it.
You must have received it. We sent it out.

And then they’ll wonder why people get rude on the phone to customer services. I didn’t get rude, I should point out – just queried the competence of an organisation that says “you must’ve received it, we sent it out”, but won’t accept the same reason in return when told “well you must’ve received my cheque, I posted it to you”.

Musical Madness (or Insania, if you prefer)

Christ, it never rains but pours. First of all, Peter bloody Andre is back at Number One with the truly awful “Mysterious Girl”, and then comes news that Paul McCartney is to release a sequel to his rancid Frog Chorus film from a few years back. I think I’m just going to give up now.

The McCartney sequel, Tropic Island Hum, “stars” a Liverpudlian squirrel – called Wirral. I despair. Got any spare razor blades?

Blimey

Wow, Blogrolling has been sold – to Tucows. It’ll be interesting to see what works out.

It’s amazing, the things you can find in Asda

There’s something slightly distasteful about the story of the couple who got married in Asda. Fair enough, it’s where they met, and all that gubbins – but somehow it just makes me think “Yick!”

Supposedly the Asda in York is the first supermarket to be approved for holding full wedding ceremonies, rather than just blessings, but I seriously hope that not many others (if any at all) do the same thing. In a world where consumerism has already become rife, the idea of being married in a supermarket is – well, apt I suppose. But still deeply distasteful, to me at least.

Bestseller

Yesterday, I got a copy of Market Forces, the new book by Richard Morgan. It’s been released early (it was supposed to be released on 4th March), and the edition I have is a first-edition hardback. So – and this kind of intrigues me, to be honest – how come the cover can say “his bestselling new novel” ? Obviously it’s not yet a bestseller, because it’s been published for a whole three days – and that doesn’t take into account the additional fact that still most people don’t know anything about Morgan’s novels. Are the publishers prescient?

Self Improvement

You know, sometimes it’s possible to go up in the world without even trying. I’ve just started doing an OU foundation course to set me up for the degree course from autumn this year, but that involves some effort.

However, you can set yourself up as a Reverend with virtually no effort whatsoever. The Universal Life Church allows you to become an ordained minister of the church – online. No expense, no twelve years in the seminary, no effort. You can now refer to me as Reverend Lyle. *Grin*

Independence

Recently, I’ve been working for a client, developing a load of client management stuff in PHP. To-do lists, client history and tracking, contact management, payment gubbins, the whole nine yards. And all written by me – no copyright issues, even with Open Source modules. I can honestly say that – at risk of trumpet blowing – I’m seriously bloody pleased with myself, considering I didn’t really know anything but the basics of PHP this time last year.

In fact, the only potentially dark cloud on this particular horizon was the need to do email notifications of the various happenings within the system. I’ve never written a PHP mail script (and hadn’t written a mail script in that level of detail before at all) so I went with the “easy” option of using formmail.php – yes, a module written by someone else. Shocking.

What was more shocking was that the module was an utter sack of shit. It caused me more problems than enough – and particularly when trying to customise it to my requirements. An absolute nightmare. So instead today I’ve spent some time writing a basic mail script that does what I needed it to – MIME types, priority flags, cc:s and bcc:s, and that doesn’t fuck up. I’m sure that it could be written better, or more securely, but at the end of the day it works, and it’s secure enough for my current purposes.

I’m too independent for my own good, I suppose. I don’t like using other people’s code where I can possibly avoid doing so. Yes, the learning curve can be cliff-like in its steepness on occasion, but seeing the working end result is still hugely satisfying. I’m seriously pleased with the entire load of code – and you can bet I’ll be writing more as time goes on.