Toms View of the World

Answer me this - what is “real” about taking a bunch of fame-seeking wannabes who’d probably never cross paths in real life, and subjecting them to living together in a house designed to provide a complete lack of privacy, whilst subjecting them to “tasks” - many of which require disruption to sleep patterns or extended “role playing”.

Apparently there’s something very much like that starting tonight on UK television…

As Satnav has become more pervasive and the mapping improves year on year, have you ever wondered how they actually create the map data you load onto your device.

Well, this excellent article on PocketGPSWorld explains all - suffice to say, there’s no substitute for getting out there in a van full of technology and driving…

another day, another phone call, another screw-up…

Today’s call to NTL/Virgin Media to find out what happened on Saturday revealed that my TV Box had been reconnected (again) rather than being picked up. I’ve rescheduled the pickup (again) and have had to go through the whole “disconnections” process again - so hopefully, this time, they’ll get it right.

I don’t hold out much hope that they will…

Anyone know how I go about finding out if the BT line to the house can be reactivated, and what broadband speeds I could expect over ADSL?

If you can read this, the site migration to the new hosting is complete.

Thanks to Tom at NCS for the hosting!

Well, it’s about time they screwed up again (it’s been a while since the last few screw ups - see here, here, here) - today they were supposed to come and collect the box they were supposed to have switched off back when the whole “Sky thing” happened - of course, they didn’t, they just put a credit on my account equal to the cost of the TV service.

No doubt this is how they’ve been claiming very few customers have left over the Sky channels fiasco - customers who’ve asked for partial disconnections (I’m keeping the phone and net with them) haven’t been disconnected at all.

Anyway, today they were supposed to come and get the TV box (between 8am and 1pm) - of course, they didn’t turn up - no phone call, nothing.

At around 3:30pm, I spent about an hour all told on the phone trying to get through to someone who had a working computer on his/her desk and was able to answer the question “where is the engineer who is coming to get my box? - he should have been here hours ago”.

Needless to say, I failed dismally. Even if the poor guy in the call centre’s PC was working, he couldn’t get any details of engineer appoinments for the day, so I was left having wasted the entire day waiting around with no information as to when the engineer would actually bother showing up.

If ADSL was available here at a decent speed, I wouldn’t have to continue dealing with the utterly useless NTL/Virgin Media.

I’m now on the hunt for a new hosting provider to host tvotw.co.uk - the reason being, DIYHost.co.uk may be very very cheap, but their approach to customer service leaves a lot to be desired… not only is it very difficult to contact them even when the problem is at their end, but today, I got an email from them…

It turns out that reading further, they’ve figured out that some sites on their servers are using their large filestore quotas to store files on. Files NOT RELATED to their website. Files, in fact, which may contain COPYRIGHTED MATERIAL.

So, rather than email the site owners in question, they’re EMAILING EVERYONE, with an email which uses SHOUTING to REMIND customers of the terms and conditions, and inform them that if they DON’T REMOVE THE FILES their account may be SUSPENDED.

I am not doing so, but they can’t be bothered to figure out which customers are in breach of the T&C’s before they send the threatening emails…

Can anyone recommend their webhost? - I need a 10Gb transfer allowance, 500Mb disk space and MySQL/PHP support so I can run Wordpress on it, and ideally ImageMagick.

Today I actually watched the whole programme of the F1 GP, rather than coming in late for just the race - and F1 Coverage from ITV has taken a turn for the worse - with a segment that can only be called “Cooking with Heikki Kovalainen”…

I want to watch F1 - I don’t want to watch a driver preparing a meal for his girlfriend… (and no, I couldn’t find the recipe on the website…)